Those Across the River (2 page)

I LEFT HER in the kitchen and, in the living room, nearly ran into the larger man who was cradling my cannon in his arms. It wasn’t really a cannon, per se; rather a sort of oversized shotgun first used on the deck of an eighteenth-century ship, and then bastardized into a crude Confederate field piece in the States’ War. They put grapeshot in it and sawed through men and horses at close range. A clever carpenter had even mounted it on a small wheeled carriage so a mule could pull it. I shot it off on the Fourth of July sometimes. I didn’t mind loud noises so long as I was the one making them.

“. . . war, Mr. Nichols?” was what I heard the driver say. As was my habit, I answered the question he seemed most likely to have asked. When your hearing goes, you’ll learn that trick, too.

“Yes, I was,” I said. “Infantry. Thirty-third.”

“Oh no, sir, I asked was you
goin
to war with this here cannon. But I done served, too. They wouldn’t let me near no gun, but they thought I’d make a good enough stevedore. Guess the only time I ever sat by and let someone else do the unloadin was the day I was born.”

I laughed with him even though he’d probably said that a thousand times before. Stevedore. He was probably in Brest when I shipped in on the
Mount Vernon
, just another black face we all ignored on our way to glory while Uncle Sam made all the Sambos into pack mules. A rotten deal, I thought at the time.

“Where you want this? And that tub a powder?”

“In the study upstairs, please.”

All the naughty masculine things went in the study. If it exploded, fired a projectile, had a sharp edge or contained more alcohol than wine, it went in the study. If it was made of wood or leather or was more than fifty years old without any sort of lace or floral design, it went in the study. Typewriter. Globe. Books. Binoculars. Drambuie. I was going to love that goddamn room.

 

 

 

OUR DINNER GUESTS weren’t used to being invited to sit at white tables. At first they were reticent, especially the little man, but it was clear they were hungry. The big man—was his name John? James? I think it was James—ate two plates of corned beef and tinned beans and drank the last of our beer. I was glad to give it to someone who was so pleased with it. I ate the beans, but just bullied the beef around on my plate.

“Since when don’t you like meat?” Dora said.

“I prefer the beans.”

It wasn’t worth telling her about, but I couldn’t stomach corned beef since I had to choke back so many tins of that in France. “Old Charley” we called it; the same goddamn thing every day, and then whistles blowing and mud and mud and mud. Everything associated with that time had a pall over it, even seventeen years later.

After the men left—after their warm thank-you-ma’ams and good-luck-to-yas and their awkward backing out of the gravelly drive, bound again for Chicago—(Was I the slightest bit sad I was not going, too? Even before everything improbable and worse fell on us? Did my guts tickle just a little for my city on the lake?)—Dora grabbed me above an elbow and hauled me up to christen the bed.

It was a squeaky old bastard of a four-poster, but there was no one to hear us. Our closest neighbors would have heard nothing short of a scream. Halfway through it she pushed me off her so she could open a window and let the trapped heat out of the room, but I took her where she knelt and dripped sweat on her back, and she panted out that window,
like a greyhound bitch
as the French say. And then she smoked a cigarette, blowing smoke into the leaves of the elm tree that grew just outside, unmindful that the sheet she wrapped around herself only covered one of her small, thick-nippled breasts.

I
WENT FOR a walk. The tree shadows stretched long and fingerlike on the dirt road that led into Whitbrow as the last light of the day spilled from the west. The few houses that lined the road were really little better than shacks, but even they looked worthy of portraiture with that amber glow washing over their pine-board and tin. Sometimes a dog would bark. Sometimes a face would appear and then recede behind the mosquito screen of a window. Once, a bony hand struck a match whose jab of flame then twinned itself on the wick of an oil lamp.

A barn owl sat on a branch pretty high up and turned its head to watch me. It noiselessly flew off into the deeper woods. Maybe I was so handsome it just had to tell somebody.

Even at twilight this place was hot. This wasn’t my first time in the South; Camp Logan in Texas had been hotter, but I had also been drilling in full kit and crawling and shooting on the range. On the other hand, I was nineteen, and that makes a difference. On this first day in Whitbrow I was thirty-six and starting to feel it. I had always been trim, but lately I had gotten just a little thicker around the waist. The sweat from my back was beginning to sop my shirt and trickled tentatively down the crack of my backside.
Look away, Dixieland.

I was hungry.

I had little hope of finding anything open in this burg, but there was light coming from the general store. It sat just off the main square, up on blocks like the houses, asymmetrical in build—almost a trapezoid—and leprous with flaking white paint. A single kerosene lamp, wild with moths, backlit a sign that the failing light outside still allowed me to read: CLOSED. PLEASE CALL AGAIN! Sign or no sign, people were moving around in there. I put my face up to the greasy front window and saw some men bent over a checkers game, and another man hovering over them. He was missing an arm.

One of the checker players, a very fat man, noticed me and came to the door, the top corner of which struck a small, tattletale bell when opened.

“You must be Dottie McComb’s kin,” said the big man, who seemed to float like a zeppelin in his apron.

“That’s right. Orville Francis Nichols, but Frank’s just as good.”

I gave the fat man my hand and knew when I saw him swallow it in his that he intended to give me one of those unfair, porterhouse steak squeezes around the fingers that doesn’t allow a proper grip in return. I was right, but I made a point of not wincing.

“Paul,” he said.

“A pleasure, sir. Are you all closed up, then?”

“Yeah, but it don’t matter when the boys are over.”

Two very old boys looked at him from mismatched chairs and nodded in acknowledgment. A younger, round, tough-looking fellow sat near the iron stove, which had sand around its base.

“Mind if I look around?”

“Suit yourself,” he said, holding the door open for me while I brushed past his belly on the way in.

The shelves were mostly bare. Hard times here like everywhere else. Molasses. Lard. Rice. Eggs. Flour. A few cheeses. The tobacco shelf was well stocked, though, with Prince Albert and Red Man and bags of roll-your-own from local farms. A stack of straw hats on the counter leaned towards a jar teeming with pickles. Tongs sat in a green puddle on a plate.

On a shelf behind the register, a stuffed badger rearing up to do battle with an unseen foe neighbored with a serene-looking stuffed bobcat. Next to them, a stuffed dog had somehow been manipulated so it looked as if he were seated cross-legged on a stump, playing a small banjo. A deer’s head stared above everything as if omnipotent. All had penciled-in price tags hanging from them.

“Sir, I don’t see any wine here,” I said.

“Don’t see none cause I don’t sell none. Like to, but cain’t. You in a dry county.”

One of the old boys said, “Been a dry county ever since that tent revival come in nineteen and twelve, before the proheebishun. Snake handlin and all that. Paul remembers.”

“Yeah, Paul. Why dint you git in there and grab you a rattler?”

“Too fat. They’d a caught on me.”

“Not if you had enough Jesus in you.”

“I ain’t never had enough Jesus I wanted to grab no rattler.”

“Say,” the one-armed man said to me. “Ain’t your wife that pretty new teacher takin Dottie’s place over to the school?”

“You know damn well she is. You the one tole me,” Paul said.

“Don’t hurt none to ask. Just makin conversation.”

The first old boy said, “You want wine, Mr. Teacher’s Husband, you want to go on to the mill town in Caffery County. We in Morgan County here. All we drink is the blood of the Redeemer.”

“Didn’t the good book say the Lord turned water into wine?” I said.

“Yessir. Wedding at Cana. Round here we don’t turn no water into wine. Just corn into shine.”

The tough-looking man, who had been silent the whole time, looked up at Paul and said, “You gonna move a checker?”

 

 

 

ON THE WALK home I thought about how light the sack felt without a bottle of burgundy in it. Just pears, cheese, bread, eggs and coffee for the morning. No sugar. Dora would be sad about that with her sweet tooth, but not as sad as I would be without wine to help me sleep. I had a taste for it ever since I was a boy, when Father let John and me drink a glass each at the table. Mother had already died by then trying to push out a dead daughter, and Father dove headfirst into a bottle. He had good taste in booze, though, and the money to acquire it; the hutch was always full of wines from France with their mysterious labels. The more alluring bottles, though, held strange liquor and cordials, amber colored and ruby and clear. These were forbidden. They were part of the grown-up world, along with pipe tobacco and mustache trimmers and the gun above the hall mirror that I couldn’t reach without a chair. But Papa wasn’t a mean drunk; just a sad, sleepy one. He didn’t hit much.

The one time John got the fist instead of the belt was when he stole the hutch key and got into the Grand Marnier, adding water to even out the bottle. He was shit-faced by the time Papa got home from the Cicero racetrack with his friends in nice suits. They laughed their asses off, but my father didn’t laugh. He just set about busting John a good one in the mouth, knocking him down. I didn’t have any booze; I knew better. But because I was older I still got the belt for not putting a stop to it. Hard, too. We always got it worse when Father had guests. Like they had some running contest to see who was best at whipping his kid’s ass. Come to think of it, that was the last time he ever hit me at all. This was a year before I went overseas, where I would one day recognize a bottle of Grand Marnier and drink it from the mouth of a plain-faced whore in the sixth arrondissement in Paris. I got no whipping that time, neither with belt nor solution of Mercury, but a buddy of mine in the next room was less lucky when we had to pull our britches down for short-arm inspection.

I looked up at the sky. Just enough cobalt blue lingered behind the western trees so you couldn’t call it full dark.

“My Lord Jesus drinketh wine,” I said aloud to nobody. “Quite a lot of wine. He hath a port wine nose. He walketh drunkenly with me as I march home.
Left . . . Left . . . Left, right, left.
Keep up, Jesus.”

 

 

 

THE LOCUSTS SANG hard as I walked up the path and into the Canary House. I knew by the darkness of the house that Dora would still be sleeping. I went upstairs as quietly as I could, but when I entered the bedroom she woke at the sound of a creaking floorboard and sat up, the curve of her shoulders and the crown of her head faintly outlined in the near absence of light. She gasped and swallowed before she said, “Frank.”

I recognized the pause.

She had nearly said “Stephen.”

That had been her husband, tenured professor and world-class stuffed shirt Stephen Chambers.

The first time I saw Eudora socially was at a U of M faculty luncheon where she and her spouse shared a table with a poet and two Japanese exchange students. That’s where the pretending started, with a game of stolen glances while one of the girls tried, in wobbly English, to describe the intricacies of the tea ceremony.

That girl was plainly nursing an infatuation with the poet, a carefully coiffed but metrically disappointing former protégé of Robert Frost whose work was most enthusiastically received by nonnative English readers. Meanwhile, Professor Chambers trotted Dora before his colleagues like an expensive racehorse, too impressed with himself to see that she knew it. And hated it.

She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.

We were in love before the salads came.

That had been four years ago.

The affair had lasted two.

Her first husband’s name was finally dying.

As was mine, I suppose.

Dora was barren.

 

 

 

NEAR MIDNIGHT, DORA was sitting up in bed reading
Madame Bovary
by the light of three candles burning on the nightstand. The air was damp and still. The flames barely moved. I sat up with pillows bunched behind me, eating a pear with a knife. A small plate sat balanced on my belly, wobbling gently as I breathed.