Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

And he never came back.

IT WAS UPON the broad but soft shoulders of Sheriff Estel Blake that the weight of the next few days most squarely fell. Of course the family was to suffer immeasurably; but it was up to the sheriff to act. I believe he was a good man and that he tried faithfully to understand what was happening and to take prudent measures. In the end, however, he was no better prepared to protect his flock’s flesh than Pastor Lyndon was to protect its soul. What they were facing was just too big, and too old.

And too goddamned rotten.

It was Saul Gordeau who summoned Estel out to the Falmouth farm. He rode up on horseback like all hell was behind him and yelled into the open door of the hardware store, “Sheriff! They need you out to the Falmouths’. Now! Quick! It’s bad!”

I was on the porch beating one-armed Mike at checkers. I saw the sheriff walk out into the pale, overcast sunlight, blinking and cinching his belt under the roll of his belly. He had been napping. With some effort, he got on the horse behind Lester and they rode off, Estel’s holstered gun awkwardly slapping his thigh as they went.

Mike said, “Dang,” and closed his eyes hard, as if anticipating a blow. Then he got up and walked over to the hardware store, shutting the door Estel Blake had left open.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, Edna Falmouth had called her boy and three girls into the kitchen for breakfast but only the girls had come. Usually the smell of biscuits woke Tyson up without a summons. When he didn’t answer a third call, and his bed proved to be empty, Edna went out the back door yelling his name. She came back in fast, and woke Miles from his sickbed.

He got his cane and went out to see, and when he saw he yelled at his wife to stay inside, and to keep the girls inside, too.

No matter what.

At first Miles hoped maybe it wasn’t Tyson’s. He hoped maybe Tyson had shot whatever made all those tracks. There wasn’t a lot of it, but there was enough. Some on the posts of the hog pen. Some on the ground near the slippers.

But the slippers sunk him.

When people take their slippers off, they put them together.

This was one here and one there.

And the gun had all six rounds in it.

Something had knocked the boy out of his daddy’s shoes.

Miles limped off where no father wants to go: in the direction he knew his son had been dragged.

WHEN ESTEL BLAKE came back, it was clear that the sight of the dead boy had kicked the wind out of him, maybe for good.

A locust tree had fallen over, probably in the storm last spring, and the fan of its roots overshadowed the depression in which the tree had stood anchored since before most people in town were born. It was in this depression that Estel Blake found the mortal remains of Tyson Falmouth.

Gordeau’s dogs were on the way, but Miles was a good hunter, and by the time the sheriff caught up with him, he had followed the trail of blood and tracks and disturbed brush almost all the way to the locust tree. It had been a great mercy that Miles’s back wouldn’t let him walk the last hundred yards or so. Nobody should ever see that his boy was eaten.

But when?

And by what?

The tracks back at the Falmouth place, what was left of them after Miles and Edna walked all over them, had been animal tracks. Like wolf or dog, but bigger. And Estel was not sure, but he thought more than one of them had been around this tree making a meal of the boy. Whatever left those tracks could certainly have killed a ten-year-old without a fight, or maybe a thirty-year-old, for that matter.

Still, stray dogs, even very large ones, were more likely to be scavengers than killers. Maybe they found the boy already dead.

Miles Falmouth was sure it had been niggers.

Maybe one of the hobos he had heard passed through town.

Maybe that big nigger that had come to the general store.

Probably from the woods across the river.

ESTEL DRANK WITH me the next night, the night before the funeral. Neither one of us planned it. He came over to ask if Eudora and I had heard or seen anything new, and then the three of us fell to talking. We were glad for the company. The school had closed temporarily, and I was too disgusted with everything to write about anything. In other words, this boy’s death had made us both useless. We had been sitting around the house reading, clearing our throats, not knowing where to sit or stand or when to move. I had played checkers in town until I saw black and red squares on the backs of my eyelids before I went to sleep.

Dora sensed that Estel and I wanted to talk man talk, and she left us on the porch, bringing out a bottle of bourbon for us to share. We shared it plenty. And Estel let loose.

“I CALLED THEM boys from Morgan, said we had a killin and I thought it might be someone holed up in the woods. I told em I think the boy surprised somebody while they was trying to get at them hogs. Mr. Falmouth had them penned up real tight what with a lock and wire over the top of them and all. I told em how it looked from the tracks like an animal drug him, something like a big wolf, and Big Joe—he’s the sheriff there—said they hadn’t been no wolves around here since the States’ War. Well, why don’t you come see, I said. But maybe I do hold with Miles Falmouth, that some bad customer, some drifter, come up on him. He would a got a round off at an animal. Joe said the boy was scared so maybe he missed, an I said, no shit he was scared, I was scared. I’m gonna be reading the Good Book to get myself to sleep every night. Only I cain’t pray. Not right. The words that keep comin ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus, just Why did I seek this post, Lord? I am heartfully sorry I sought this post. I water my couch with tears. My sore ran in the night and ceased not. Selah. All that Book of Psalms stuff. I don’t even know what Selah means.”

He took another drink of bourbon like it was weak tea.

“You know the worst thing, Mr. Nichols?”

“Frank.”

“I said I wanted whoever killed that boy in the ground. I didn’t want no trial, no lockup. Just wanted it done, in such a way that nobody had to talk about this no more. That’s what I said to Joe. And he took me at my word. And I think something real bad happened. But I wasn’t there when it did.”

I REMEMBERED SEEING the boys from Morgan arrive.

I was at the store, at my usual post at the far end of the porch.

There were lots of men there. The women had gone to the Falmouth place and offered to watch the girl children or do the cooking or slop the hogs, not because Edna needed these things but because there was nothing else to offer.

The men sat around the iron stove and talked with their low, buzzing voices about what to do. Everyone in town was desperate for something to do. The men didn’t know where to put their hands.

No music played. Peter Miller had removed what had been the communal radio to his own house. It was his now, as was the quiet store. He leaned with his knobby elbows on the counter, half listening to the grief of the men as if it had no bearing on him. I had the impression that his older brother’s death had also seemed far-off to him, as tiny as newsprint. Peter was nearing forty, and he had the noncommittal look of a man who was still waiting for his actual life to begin. He had still not met the better people who would eventually matter to him. He just leaned there with his narrow head turned away, like another feature of the counter that looked so sterile without the green water of the pickle jar.

“Lordy, here they come,” one-armed Mike said.

We all watched the cars from Morgan come around the corner as if from a great stillness. Even I heard the doors opening, one of them with a squeaky hinge, and then the abrupt pops as the doors closed.