Those Across the River (6 page)

“I have a still. It’s a big secret I like to tell everybody.” Cranmer didn’t have the drawl everybody else in town had. He actually said
I like
, not
Ah lahk
. What was that accent? Midwestern?

“Did you get some squirrel?” Martin asked, indicating a plate with several small, roasted carcasses on them.

“Not yet.”

“Well, it might not look like much, but I peppered the little sons of bitches into a stupor, and it’s a damn sight fresher than what the butcher brought. It would kill him to give away something he could sell. I think he’s part Jew. Nothing against the Jews, except they like their money and they killed Jesus, but if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have anything to sing about on Sundays.”

I laughed.

Martin continued.

“I wanted to say hello earlier but you and the young lady were having a fine old time dancing. I was sure the fiddle player would wear out before you two did. Of course, Sully only has one testicle, and it’s natural to assume a fellow in that condition would have diminished stamina, although that’s not necessarily true. Sully’s still burning up that fiddle. They say he cut one off to stay out of the war. He should have done what I did and hid in the woods. Anyway, that’s immaterial. All I meant to say is, it’s good to see people really enjoy each other.”

“Have you met my wife?” I said.

Did Cranmer raise his left eyebrow just a little?

“Later,” he said. “It looks like she’s occupied.”

Eudora was standing with Ursie and her parents, moving her hands as she spoke. She sensed my gaze and smiled brightly at me without interrupting her speech.

“Quite a bond between you two,” Martin said. “Shines, it really does. I like that.”

“Are you a married man?”

“What do you think?”

“I think a wife wouldn’t let you keep that beard.”

“Good! An honest man. Me, too. Honesty’s why I like hookers. Have to ride a fuck-all long way on my bicycle for that, though.”

“I haven’t done that since the war,” I said.

“What, ride a bicycle?”

“That either.”

Martin chuckled, then took a tin of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, lighting two of them and passing one to me as if it were sacred. He had rolled them himself, and the tobacco was so strong my throat would hurt all night from it.

“Thank God some new meat showed up in town. Not your lady. I mean you. I mean conversation. Quite honestly, you’re the only reason I put on this ape suit and pedaled out here.”

“I’m flattered.”

“They say you’re educated. A professor of history. Me, I’m self-educated. I like books. I like to talk about books. No offense, but most of the God-fearing folk around here have trouble reading a can of soup. I mean, they’ll whip your biscuits in a game of checkers at the general store, and most of them can quote Genesis and Exodus alright, but chess is right out. The most political they ever got was when half of them wrote letters to Sears and Roebuck when they switched the catalog to glossy paper.”

“Why did they care?”

“Because they had to go back to wiping their asses with corn.”

I laughed.

“So does a self-educated man find satisfaction in the preservation of dead animals?”

“Satisfaction? Not exactly. But when I make a good mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said,
Let thus and such critter be dead
, and I said, ‘Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.’ Are you a devout man, Mr. Nichols?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Excellent. We might be friends. But we won’t hunt together.”

“I don’t hunt.”

“I know.”

“Excuse me?”

“You make a lot of noise and you don’t see or hear too well. Don’t be offended. You’re a fine dancer. I dance like you hunt.”

“You figured all this out tonight?”

“Not tonight. Yesterday. I was setting a trap near the Wheeler house, you know, the place that burned down. There’s a rabbit warren nearby. Anyway, there you came with Lester, stepping on every twig and dried leaf you could find like the whole world was your friend, taking pictures with that little camera. Look close when you bring those pictures out; I’m probably in one of them.”

Cranmer told me how to get to his cabin and left me with a standing invitation to play chess. He did not speak to anybody else, although he nodded at Lester Gordeau and made a troll face at a towheaded boy who stared at him too long. And then he clambered onto a bicycle and pedaled off into the night. I pictured Martin walking the bike through the rough terrain of the forest in his mismeasured suit, but the image did not make me laugh. No image of Martin Cranmer in the woods seemed improbable. He looked like he had been carved from the hardest tree in them.

E
UDORA DIDN’T WANT me to go across the river on Wednesday.

“Those woods aren’t friendly,” she said. This as I laced up the hiking boots I had just oiled.

I played dumb.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it that pig business?”

“Partly, I suppose. It makes me wonder what else goes on around here.”

“I understand they tie a nude virgin to the back of a bull to celebrate the equinox.”

“Oh. Well, I needn’t worry about that.”

“Unless they ask you to be the bull. Stubborn thing.”

That was a mistake.

“Who’s stubborn, Orville Francis? No, I mean it. You’re going no matter what I say or do. If I hung myself on the front porch, you’d just leave out the kitchen door.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense,” I said. “We have no rope.”

She just sighed at that.

“Would you feel better if I took a pistol?”

“Worse.”

“May I take your little Brownie camera? I’ll get a picture of the bogeyman for you.”

“Fine. I don’t care what happens to you anymore; you’re too difficult. But have my camera home by dark.”

I left soon after that, but her disapproval kept eating at me all the way up to the river.

Why?

As I hiked along the path Lester had shown me, I mused about Dora and how she might be spending her day. If there had been anyone around to bet, I would have wagered my best pair of shoes that she was in the study nosing around in my affairs. Not that I minded. I had nothing to hide from her, and a woman who doesn’t snoop after her man is either highly moral or doesn’t care enough. Eudora Anne Chambers, née Morton, was not highly moral. Most probably she was leaning back in my leather chair with my photograph box open on her lap, sorting through pictures from before I met her. She did that a great deal. She was especially fond of pictures of my mother, whom she only knew through photographs.

My mother was uncommonly photogenic. Portraits from around the turn of the century usually made people come off stiff and dolllike because they had to hold their expression so long. Not so with Mother. She gave herself to the lens as if she knew she wouldn’t last, and so entrusted it with a disproportionate share of her being. She stares back from photographs as though trapped alive in them. The most striking one shows her in Atlanta just before she came to Chicago with the touring company; she was playing the title role in a translation of Racine’s
Phaedra
, looking very much the vengeful seductress with her high cheekbones and penetrating eyes. They were the eyes of a thirty-year-old. She was eighteen.

Piecing together things my father had said in front of me while booze loosened his tongue, I believe my maternal grandfather had taken liberties with her for quite some time. It was these liberties, I believe, which had provoked her to run away from Whitbrow to Atlanta at fifteen, where she found work first in vaudeville and then with a Shakespeare troupe. A discreet but inept medical procedure during her Atlanta years had likely been responsible for her later difficulty carrying children. In one photograph of her holding me in a lacy toddler’s gown, her face bears an expression that most would take to be ecstatic distraction, but which I think may have been bewilderment.

There were a lot of pictures in that box that Eudora enjoyed mooning over. She liked my school pictures. In one of them, Dan Metzger, John Giangrande and I were posing on the basketball court at St. Ignatius. Dan was too husky for basketball and got dropped from the team shortly after, but in that photograph he looked as proud as he could be.

Dan was one of the friendliest and sweetest guys I ever knew. He was always half a head taller than the other kids and naturally built to carry weight, but he was soft. The meaner kids knew it and, when they could catch him alone, circled him like wolves around a bison. This never lasted too long before his friends came to help him and it turned into a proper tussle. If it was at school, Father Patterson would come out with two yardsticks taped together and scatter us. Following a general round of spankings (Father Patterson favored the backs of the thighs), it was even money whether his tormenters would get lectured for bullying, Dan would get lectured for not standing up for himself, or I would get lectured for my “flawed moral silhouette.” For a Jesuit, Father Patterson was remarkably inconsistent; I think he believed Jesus was happy as long as everyone was beaten and anyone at all was rebuked.

When the war broke out, Dan and I signed up for the Illinois National Guard together, along with our mutual buddy from St. Ignatius, John Giangrande, whom the Poles, Irish and well-bred Anglo-Saxons of St. Ignatius had christened “Guinea-Granny” because of his name and the tiny, wire-framed glasses that were always slipping down his nose. We all had glasses, but his looked like an old lady’s, and he was unmistakably Italian, so the name stuck for good. His friends respectfully dropped the “Guinea” part, but there was no shaking “Granny.” He was two years older than us, but small and weak. He hung out with us gladly, having been socially rejected by his peers. Uncle Sam didn’t reject him, though. When the army found out how good Granny was at chemistry, they yanked him out of the 33rd Prairie and shipped him off to the 1st Gas battalion at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

Dan and I stayed in the 33rd and went through training together stateside, both at Camp Grant and Camp Logan. He had barely made weight when we joined, but by the time he got done training he was skinnier than me. We were on that reeking ship together all the way to Brest. In short, we were inseparable from fourth grade until the shelling at Nine Elms trench on the Somme, which was in July of 1918.

We were so goddamned eager to go.

We were so stupid.

 

 

 

I MADE THE river around two.

Unfortunately, the raft or ferry I had seen with Lester was nowhere in sight; I had wandered off of the crossing point. I looked upriver and then downriver, but couldn’t determine which was the right way to go.

Gordeau had said the river wasn’t very deep, but looking at it didn’t help; the surface just reflected the hazy brass sky above it while pieces of moss and sticks floated by. He had mentioned water moccasins, and I could see that the bunches of reeds and lichen-covered rocks on both banks would provide ample hiding places for such.

“To hell with it,” I said to nobody.

I put the camera down, removed my shoes, tucked my socks in them and waded out to test the depth of the river. The bed was mostly soft underfoot, but the mud and clay were punctuated with rocks that proved slippery; I nearly fell twice before I got to the middle and determined that it wasn’t likely to get worse than hipdeep. I returned to the bank and, deciding it was too far for me to throw my shoes across, I tied the strings together and hung them around my neck. I carried the camera up over my head and crossed; about mid-river I got a case of the giggles when I imagined I was Saint Christopher holding the Holy Babe aloft.

Lester Gordeau’s instructions had included a landmark called Madge-Eye Rock, which was as far as he had claimed to have ever gone in this direction.

“When you git bout a mile an a half pass the river, keepin to the trail, you’ll come to a little spring called Madge-Eye Rock. Ain’t too big, but the water out of it is cold and good drinkin, sept that taste like it come out of a skillet. S’pose to be bad luck to drink out of it, or not to drink out of it, I cain’t recall. They’s all kind a stories bout them woods pass the river.”

“Magi,” I said when I saw it, “as in Three Magi.”

I had spent some time during my walk trying to puzzle out what a madge-eye could be, but now it was clear what the christener of the spring had seen; three separate but connected shelves of rock rose to chest level, each of them producing a small trickle of water that drained off into a sort of sink. Orange stains beneath the spigots and in the sink testified to large quantities of iron in the water, which I tasted when I cupped my hand beneath the central spigot and put it to my mouth.

Cold.

The source was deep.

I had tasted water from such a well, years before, in England, where I had convalesced after my injury in France. My dad had pulled strings so I got a good long leave overseas before I came home for decommissioning.

Everything in England was so tidy, though. America was the wild one now. The rock shelf wore a crown of ferns and moss, and, behind the spring, on the higher level, rocks jutting out from beneath the topsoil suggested a tail pointing deeper into the woods. It was pretty here.

I filled my canteen.

I pressed on another hundred yards. What I saw then did not precisely frighten me, but it made me uneasy. Pine trees had begun again to compete with their deciduous cousins, and two of them stood on opposite sides of the trail, like columns. Like some sort of gate.