Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

“They never let me alone all night. They was laughin when they carried me back. I don’t know if they can die, Mr. Nichols, but I hope so, cause I have to kill em. I think they took my soul outta me and I’m goin to hell no matter what I do. So I might as well kill em.”

Saul got himself together after that, at least from the outside. He had regurgitated it and settled on a plan, and I knew that plan. Deciding to kill somebody or something can be strong medicine for a while, but it burns. And it doesn’t stop after it’s all over.

I didn’t know what the boy had seen. Not believing him would have been best, but you can’t counterfeit reactions like his. It doesn’t mean he hadn’t hallucinated, but I wasn’t sure he had, either; my parameters of belief were becoming more and more negotiable, and they weren’t nearly done stretching.

The three of us walked quietly to the river.

When we got there we realized the raft was on the wrong side so Lester cursed and took his shoes off and waded in holding his rifle over his head. Then Saul went in, with me close behind him; I feared Saul might wilt and let the waters take him downriver.

It was soon after that we saw the new posse coming towards us. Only six this time. Buster looked so ashamed I thought he might cry.

The nine of us limped home and when we got to Whitbrow, nobody was waiting for us.

AT THE CANARY House, I found Dora sleeping in her clothes on the couch. When she heard I was staying out all night she had tried to keep vigil, but hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. I leaned to her, and just when I was about to brush the hair at her temples with my fingertips, she woke and drilled her eyes through me. She had been prepared for something bad to enter the house, perhaps Estel Blake holding some item of mine and asking, “Did this belong to your husband?”

She sat up and grabbed me. The force of her embrace pressed from me the paternal feeling I had watching her sleep. It was like an Old Testament widow clutching her dead husband’s brother. Her new husband.

“You have to get me out of here, Frankie,” she said.

“You want to go up to bed?”

“No. Out of Whitbrow. We should go.”

“Dora, I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. I saw things that I don’t have the strength to talk about. Let’s get some sleep.”

“No, Frank. This is the time to talk about it. We have to go. I feel it in my bones.”

“Go to what? To Johnny’s house again? Do you want to stand in a soup line? It might come to that.”

“Anything but this.”

“What about school?”

“There isn’t going to be any more school.”

“What about my book?”

“You aren’t going to write it. You would have already. Something in you, the part of you I love the most, knows the world doesn’t need it. Another bloody general. Another corrupt, petty feudal lord.”

“That’s your opinion. You don’t like history. Most women don’t.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“I will write it.”

“You don’t mean it. You’re saying that because you think you have to. When are you going to write it?”

“When this is over.”

“ This. What is this ? When is this over?”

“I have to see it through.”

“You’re going to get killed.”

“No.”

“You’re going to get me killed.”

“Never.”

“Fine. Just you, then. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are they going to put a statue of you up by the pump well? Orville Francis Nichols, Yankee, who died that we’uns may live. ”

“You’re being small.”

“Is this your chance to die in the war like you should have?”

“Stop.”

“You don’t owe him that.”

“I said let’s stop.”

“He wouldn’t want it. Dan, right?”

“I don’t like you talking about him. I don’t like you using him to get your way.”

“ My way?”

“You want us to run out on these people. Something has to be done about them . The ones in the woods. They’re so vicious.”

“I saw.”

“I saw more. They’re so bad .”

“We don’t really live here, Frankie. Have you noticed? We don’t go to church with them. You go to that store and play checkers and listen to their conversations like you were looking at them through a glass, the same way you would at a pub in London or a café in France. But you don’t live here any more than you lived in France. And things are just as bad here as they were there, aren’t they?”

“Actually,” I said, genuinely surprised by my answer, “they’re not.”

“Not yet.”

“And what you said about not going to church with them. That’s not entirely true. We go to their funerals.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“And we go to their town hall. Have you forgotten that?”

She was silent.

“This is happening because of the pig ritual. We voted to stop it. We came into town and you stood in front of them and spoke your reasonable, logical words. And I believed that what you said was right. And together we put our finger on the scale, and the scale tipped. Maybe it would have anyway. But we own it now.”

She nodded a little, looking dazed.

“I suppose I see that,” she said quietly. “But that’s a principle. I don’t care that much about principles. I don’t want to find dead people in schoolhouses and wait around on the sofa wondering if you’ll be carried home and laid out on the table for me so one of those good ole boys can tip his hat and say, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ I want to have your babies, Frank. Big, healthy babies with your patient eyes and fine little wisps of hair just your chestnut brown, and I don’t even like babies.”

“Dora…” I said softly, and reached out to stroke her hair. She pulled away a little.

“I know I can’t have that. I don’t need you to tell me I can’t have that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“But I want to make love to you as if I could. As if every time you put your seed in me it might just take anyway. I want to lay with you every night and every day I want to work a job where I feel I’m doing some good. To hell with principles. I do the best I can and if it isn’t enough I cut my losses. Sometimes you can’t win and you have to change your plan. That’s smart, isn’t it? Aren’t we smart people?”

I chewed on this for a moment.

“Alright,” I said.

“Alright, what?”

“We’ll go. I’ll ring the movers in Chicago and get them to come down. And I’ll ring Johnny and let him know he’s going to have guests again.”

She sobbed and gripped me tight again, saying, “Frankie, thank you, thank you, my love, thank you.”

I NAPPED BRIEFLY on the couch but did not fully sleep. Dreams like muddy fish drew close, then darted off, and I was glad to let them go.

Where are your pants, my friend?

I thought about how good the boy had been at throwing stones. Did he hunt birds that way? He threw the first stone when I had pointed the camera.

But I did take that picture. It had been waiting in the guts of the camera for me to remember it and to have the courage to develop it.

I quit trying to sleep now and went to the little darkroom I had made for myself in the closet under the stairs.

It was nearly two when the picture came out. Blurry but identifiable. Just beginning to crouch for the stone, his right arm drawn across his body. Farther away than I remembered. Some part of me had hoped the image wouldn’t come in. That I had dreamed it. But it wasn’t so.

I would go to see Martin Cranmer the next day and I would ask him who the boy in the picture was, or what. And if I got no real answer I would not speak to the man again.