Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

TYSON FALMOUTH’S FUNERAL was well attended despite oppressive heat. Many in town had talked about going in order to show Miles and the remainder of his family that they were not alone in their loss.

But that family was alone.

They would be alone no matter who came or how much food was brought to the house afterwards. The father of a dead son, when that son had no brothers, must stand alone with his surname dying in his mind. The mother of a dead son must stand alone even among her sisters with the memory of that child’s birth and the wasted milk of his nursing.

I saw Tyson’s sisters trying to understand what had happened; all three were younger than their brother. The oldest of these was in a sort of trance and wore a blank face. The next one furrowed her brow with an expression of grim effort, as if by some precocious act of concentration she might understand the nature of death and unravel it; that she might shout Eureka and wake Tyson from within his closed casket. The youngest girl seemed the least troubled because, I suspect, her understanding was not mature enough to embrace the event. She seemed impatient with the droning words of the pastor and the pale faces of her parents, and perhaps with everything that would happen between now and the moment when her brother would stop hiding and come back.

I stood in the back holding Dora and looking at that awful little box that held a boy in it. It was covered in wildflowers that the girls of the town had gathered and plaited into a wreath. That the flowers looked too much like the ones the pigs had worn was a truth nobody needed to speak aloud.

MILES FALMOUTH SHOT his pigs that night.

Just leaned on his cane and shot every one of them, hogs, sows and piglets. Nobody tried to stop him or ask him why. When the squealing and the gunshots were done, he looked at the faces of the several neighbors who had come and said, “Y’all can take what you want. Cut em. Smoke em. Make cracklins, I don’t care. Just don’t bring none of it round here. I got no more use for them sumbitches.”

His wife and the girls stayed with the neighbors that night.

And the next night, too.

NEWS OF THE shooting of the pigs did not reach Dora and me until later because we got up and drove away. Not for good. Just for the day. We did not pack the car.

I proposed the trip while I brewed coffee in the kitchen and heated water for oatmeal.

“And exactly where are we driving?”

“North. As far north as we can go and still make it back by dark. I want to get this town off us for a couple of hours. Maybe if we do that we can make a firewall between what just happened and the rest of the year. God, I just want to wash it off.”

She came up and hugged me from behind, kissing the back of my neck and saying, “Yes. Thank you, yes.”

So we got in the car with the clothes we wore and a little money and an old wine bottle filled with water and we drove out of town pulling a cape of dust behind us. We drove north with no map and stayed on the highway past the intersection that would have led us to the mill town.

Not far past there we were nearly hit by an ice truck. It had been swerving and going twenty miles an hour so I went past it with my hand on the horn ready to blow it if the truck lumbered over at us, which of course it did. I laid on the horn and the very old man behind the wheel of the truck guided its bulk back onto his side of the road without ever losing his expression of bewilderment. He never even looked at us. It wasn’t in me to yell or make an uncivilized gesture at the old bird, so I just waved a little as I passed.

I felt Dora’s small hand on my thigh. She leaned close and smelled my neck. “You smell like soap,” she said, then rested her head on my shoulder. For just that little while there wasn’t any other place I wanted be, and life was sweet and foreign like the taste of a mango.

It came to be two o’clock, the time at which we agreed to turn around, and I pushed it another fifteen minutes, doing nearly sixty where the road was good enough. But at last I stopped, as if an unseen leash had pulled taut. We came to a filling station and the attendant pumped gas and checked the oil and the water and found it easy to talk me into buying a bag of pecans.

We turned around then and I headed for a pretty, shaded place I remembered from the way up and we sat on the grass and ate, not saying much. The engine ticked under the hot bonnet. When we kissed, it was not like a married couple about to make love, but like teenagers not sure if they should go any further. We decided without speaking not to spend that heat, but to bottle it and take it home with us, so we petted awhile longer before I let her back into the car.

I turned the car around on the shoulder so we could look north one last time while the birds chirped and the hot wind blew and sometimes cars moved by us in one direction or another. Beyond the horizon lay the Northern trees, whose leaves were ready to redden, and the Northern fields, preparing to go tawny and brown, and somewhere even farther the factories that made snow checked their tooling and their rosters, knowing it would not be so very long now.

IT WAS NEAR the end of September that Estel Blake’s shovels were stolen. The thieves made off with some picks, too, as well as some kerosene and a few score yards of rope; but the notable thing was that they took all five shiny new shovels Estel had in stock at the hardware store that served as anteroom to the sheriff ’s office.

This was better, though, Estel said. Theft was better than what August brought. Even when the theft made little sense. The thieves did not open the cash drawer, nor did they force the door into the sheriff’s office where Estel’s Colt .32 revolver hung in its belt; the money one could get for that fine gun would buy a lot of shovels.

“What were they going to do,” Estel wondered aloud at the general store, “build a canal? Go on a treasure hunt?”

At least the locks weren’t damaged. This was because he almost never locked his window. Even in hard times, Whitbrow was not the sort of place where one had to lock one’s neighbors out. Still, it was apparent that the ease with which he had been robbed stung him.

Worse, something about this seemed ominous to him, made him wonder if it was connected with the Falmouth boy’s death. Soon he was pressing his hand under his breastbone like his stomach was full of sour, hot water as he considered the possibility that the boys from Morgan had strung up the wrong man. Within half an hour he was sure a band of squatters had crept in here as quietly as weasels, confident they could bash the brains out of anyone unlucky enough to discover them.

“O Lord hear me, I pray they hung the right man,” he said, as if half a dozen of us weren’t sitting around him on the porch.

“Hear me in this, my Sweet Lord,” he said again, then moved off towards the farms nearest the square to see if anything had been seen or heard the night before.

WHEN I GOT back home from my daily job of sitting around the general store pretending to be soaking up local color for a book I was too scared to do the real research for, I found Ursie Noble sitting on my porch next to my wife. They were chitchatting, so I refilled their lemonade glasses and joined them.

I noticed the girl’s thick, Native American hair again, and the way she very consciously struggled to keep her legs in ladylike positions while she shifted around on her chair, now crossing them awkwardly at the knee, now tucking them up beside her where they didn’t fit under her hip because of her mannish boots. Ursie thirstily drank what had to be her second or third glass of lemonade, then thanked me, keeping eye contact for just that second too long. But how would I have known that had I not done the same thing? Jesus God! I laughed a little at myself and noticed I was sweating.