Those Across the River (9 page)

“I know they haven’t,” she said. “Do you know that the teacher of the lower grades makes a present of a bar of soap to her best pupil every month, and the kids fight over it. A bar of soap.”

She looked out the window at a freckled old man who stopped on the sidewalk to look up at the sky, which was still holding forth the prospect of rain. He held his hat to his head to keep a gust of wind from blowing it off.

“Lots of kids with bare feet, too,” she said. “It seems they could buy an awful lot of shoes for the price of a healthy sow. Why do they do it, Frank? The Chase, they call it. Looks like they’re chasing money they can’t spare off into the wilderness. They must have just herds of wild pigs running around those woods.”

“I don’t know why they do it. Why do people build cathedrals, or flagellate themselves or throw salt over their shoulder? Maybe it makes the corn grow greener.”

“So you approve?”

“I’m not saying I approve or disapprove. I’m just saying it’s not our place to judge them.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“So don’t like it.”

“So don’t like it,”
she said, parroting me, stirring a piece of meat around in its gravy.

“Dora, we’re here to have a gay time. In the big city. Let’s not quarrel.”

“Well,” she said, her eyes shining with good humor, “what we’re actually here for is to see if we’re going to expire from a horrid social disease. But while we’re in town, it wouldn’t hurt for us to see the picture show. And try not to quarrel.”

 

 

 

WE SAW A matinee, a pirate epic full of booming cannons that made me edgy. After the show we stopped for bottles of wine and bourbon before we got in the car and headed home. She rested her head on my shoulder, but the air was heavy between us. I wanted to peek into that lovely head and know what she was thinking, even if it hurt me. Even if she was remembering a time before she knew me and thinking that was better.

M
ARTIN CRANMER SAT across from me, absently brushing the wooden cheeks and mane of the knight he had captured. He had made that knight with his own hands, along with all the other pieces, the chessboard, the table it sat on, and the chairs beneath us. He had built his crude little house from scratch, from the hickory beams to the pine shingles. All of this was very humbling to a man like me who had trouble hanging a painting without mashing his thumb.

I could tell from the kingly way he jutted his chin up while waiting for my move that he felt good about the game; he had taken a pawn unanswered, then made me double up my pawns in another exchange. The knight he was so affectionately grooming had been hedged in and taken at the cost of two pawns. But the time he had spent getting up on matériel was going to cost him; I had castled my king away safely in the corner, and now both rooks had found open pathways to the center of the board, pointing into Martin’s splayed forces like a brace of cannon.

“Suddenly I don’t feel so cocksure,” Martin said, striking a match on the rough surface of his table and lighting a potent, home-rolled cigarette. He offered a second one to me, but I shook my head and pulled a civilized little Chesterfield from the cigarette holder in my trouser pocket. I could not remember having sat in a room so heavily impregnated with smoke, nor having met anyone so thickly cured with tobacco as this taxidermist.

I moved my queen, forking Martin’s rook and the bishop Martin had left undefended in the earlier bloodletting. He moved the knight out to protect the rook from the queen’s diagonal attack, so she slid laterally and captured the bishop.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Martin said, standing up and gesturing with open hands as if to show a stuffed beaver on the bookshelf what a tale of woe was unfolding on the board. He paced for a moment and sat back down. His eyes remained nailed to the chessboard as he took another swallow from the jar of white lightning sitting on the corner of the table. It was not yet noon.

Martin did not speak again for the next series of moves, not until his king was checkmated, smothered behind its own pawns by rook and bishop. He stood up and paced again, looking at the beaver, then offered his hand to me.

“Fine playing. It’s been a while since I’ve been beat, but that’s not saying much around here.”

“I thought I was in trouble at the start. You really came out swinging.”

“Yeah, I came out swinging, but then I stepped on my filberts. Or you stepped on them. Anyway, they got stepped on. Fine playing. Now, if we talk about it anymore I’m going to get in a bad mood.”

“Fine by me. What would you like to talk about?”

Martin sat down and leaned forward in his seat, pointing his hawkish nose at me. It looked like quite a weapon above that beard.

“How about what a man of your smarts plans to do out here in the middle of the wilderness. Other than sit around your new house all day in your skivvies waiting to get your first hemorrhoid.”

“Too late.”

He chuckled like a can full of gravel and then raised his jar of moonshine in a silent toast.

“They say you’re going to write some book. That true?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the book about?”

“Brigadier General Lucien ‘Luke’ Savoyard, commander of the 18th Georgia Cavalry. Owner of the plantation that has been reclaimed by Megiddo Woods.”

He scowled and tugged at his beard as if testing to see if it were real. Then he laughed and shook his head disbelievingly.

“What do you want to write about that fucker for?”

“Because he makes people react like you just did. And because he’s my great-grandfather.”

“I know. But if I were you, I wouldn’t go telling people that.”

“Why?”

“People have long memories around here.”

“What I’m really interested in is how the slaves rose up and killed him after the Union troops failed to dislodge him.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“It sounds like you might. I’d be grateful for whatever you could tell me.”

“All I know is hearsay.”

“That gives me someplace to start.”

“Just rumors and gossip and bullshit. I won’t insult your intelligence. But really, how did a reasonable fellow like you take an interest in a piece of . . . in a man like your great-granddaddy?”

“I love history. Maybe it’s like your interest in taxidermy. God pronounces a critter dead and I say I can still make him play the banjo.”

He laughed hard and his eyes shone with camaraderie. He filled my glass. I spoke again.

“Savoyard was always verboten. Forbidden fruit. My daddy’s family was Illinois Yankee through and through. His father fought with Sherman. His grandfather was a banker who funded abolitionists. So he falls in love with this haunted young Southern belle and marries her. Now he learns her granddaddy was a Confederate cavalry officer, and worse: a slave speculator with an unparalleled reputation for cruelty.”

“That’s fair to say about Savoyard. Yep.”

“Mother wasn’t to talk about her family to me. And she didn’t. But when I got to college, I started digging it up for myself. My father’s secrecy about the Confederates on the other side of my family tree is almost certainly responsible for my decision to be a history major. I wrote my thesis on minor engagements peripheral to Sherman’s march, and touched on the action at the plantation then.”

“ ‘Peripheral to Sherman’s march.’ Christ, it’s sweet to hear a man use big words that aren’t Bible names. So you were in France?”

“I was.”

“Did you lose anybody?”

“My best friend, Dan. We were getting shelled at a place called Nine Elms trench. The Krauts really had our number that day. They gave us two hours’ worth. I had never been in anything like that before and I was starting to fall apart, what with all the noise and shaking and dirt raining everywhere. But especially from not knowing where the next one was going. Then it happened. One landed almost in our laps. The concussion blew Danny against the side of the trench so hard his pants came half off and a big loop of his guts came out his back door.”

“Jesus. That’ll fuck somebody up in a hurry.”

“Yeah. He was done.”

“I meant you.”

“He just wanted his glasses on. I was so dazed I helped him try to find them, because that seemed like the most important thing. So we were both on all fours trying to pick up little sticks and hot pieces of shell, but my hands were shaking too badly, and there were no glasses anyway. He really thought everything would be okay if he could just find his goddamned glasses.”

“What about your glasses?”

“What? Why?”

“Must have knocked your glasses off, too.”

“I had spares. I always have spares.”

“Prudent.”

“I went to see his mother after the war.”

“How did that go?”

“Like hell. She brought out a tray of coffee and cookies and was very polite, but every time she looked at me I felt her thinking that I should be in the ground instead of her baby. That I was tougher and could have protected him if I’d tried harder. Nobody ate the cookies. I thanked her for the coffee and left, because there was no way to make things okay. One of the hardest and truest things a grown-up learns is that sometimes it’s not okay.”

“I’m surprised all of that didn’t cure your romantic streak.”

“Well, I went to university after the war and got really absorbed in the States’ War. That war seemed different. Like the way it should have been.”

Martin laughed then, finishing off his moonshine and getting up to fetch another jar.

“You’re not interested in the slave uprising at all. You like Savoyard. You
like
the fucker, think you shouldn’t, then like him even more. Like some weak-kneed schoolgirl mooning at the town criminal.”

“Maybe. Maybe I envy him for having gotten to ride a horse and fight with a saber and dally with the ladies. Childish things like that. But I can never condone his cruelty. His . . . perversity.”

“You’re disgusted with Savoyard the torturer but infatuated with Savoyard the cavalry officer.”

“Yes.”

“Seems like you got taught a lesson and wouldn’t learn it.”

“How so?”

“Most people who’ve been shot at don’t want to hear about people getting shot at. Dressing it all up in different uniforms shouldn’t make a difference.”

“What do you know about it? You weren’t in the AEF, were you? You said you hid in the woods.”

“I didn’t have to go to France to know France was a sack of shit. It’s always a sack of shit. And I’m not blaming you for going.”

“
Blaming
me?”

“But you ought to know better now. You ought to leave your general alone. Might not like what you find.”

A tortured half minute ticked by.

“You’re full of secrets, aren’t you?”

His nostrils flared.

“Something else on your mind, Mr. Nichols?”

I think I flared my nostrils, too.

“Shit, just say it,” he said.

“What went on the other night?”

“Goddamnit, I knew you were going to ask me that.”

“Of course I was going to ask you that. It was very discouraging behavior from someone I was beginning to take a liking to.”

“That’s sweet.”

“You didn’t smell like booze. What gave?”

“Why don’t you tell me a story, Mr. Nichols. You looked a little green around the gills. What was wrong with
you
?”

“I saw something I wanted to tell you about.”

“So tell.”

“Now I’m not so sure I saw it.”

“That’s probably better.”

“What?”

“Some things it’s better not to be sure about. Would you agree with that?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “In general.”

“Suppose I were to tell you that something which is outside of your realm of understanding goes on in those woods across the river. Suppose I get specific. You then have no choice but to think that I have boiled my brain. Now suppose I tell you that nothing unusual at all is going on in those woods. You will then remember the way I acted the other night and you will have no choice but to suppose that I have boiled my brain.”

“If you dodged checkmates like you dodged questions, you’d be a match for Capablanca.”

“I tell you in all seriousness that I have nothing to say that will satisfy you. If you saw something bad past the river, don’t cross the river.”

“Do you cross the river, Martin?”

“And if you don’t like the way I acted on the night of the full moon, stay away from me then. And stay home. Think of those woods as a beautiful woman. Fine to play around with most of the month. But on certain days, go if you want, but don’t wear your best shirt. That’s all I have to say on the subject.”

“Alright. Thank you for the game, but I should get back.”

“That’s fine, too.”

I stood up and smoothed my clothes out, looking for my hat. I found it.

“Don’t forget your camera,” Martin said, smiling impenetrably.

I picked that up, too.

My angry exit wasn’t working out at all.

On my way out the door, I paused for a moment when another piece of Martin’s handiwork caught my eye. It was a carved wooden diorama featuring a scale model of Miller’s General Store, complete with tiny checkerboard and a shot glass for a pickle jar. All the regulars were stuffed mice. An overstuffed mouse in an apron was clearly Paul Miller. A strong-looking mouse in overalls represented a fellow named Buster Simms, whom I would get to know soon. There was a one-armed mouse, too.

“Don’t bother looking,” he said. “You’re not in it. Not yet.”

I
N THE WEEK that followed, things went along just fine.