Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

I rang the movers that afternoon and found that they couldn’t get a truck down to Georgia for a week. Dora was crushed, but a week didn’t seem so long to me, especially since we would need time to pack.

“Let’s use our time wisely,” I said. “Let’s go to the courthouse and ‘git hitched’ the weekend before they come.”

“Really, Frank?”

“Really.”

“No, I mean are you really asking me that standing up?”

I dropped to one knee.

“Marry me, Eudora. Give me the deed to that lovely little property below your navel, and let us live in sin no more.”

“Yes,” she said. “Gladly. After which you’ll get me the hell out of here?”

“I promise.”

She spat in her hand, I spat in mine and we shook on it.

Dora and I ate a big dinner that night. We laughed easily. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty. To hell with star-crossed Whitbrow, we seemed to be saying.

Let it bury its own dead.

THERE’S NOTHING IN it for me. Explaining that boy to you.”

Martin had only glanced at the photograph before putting it back down on the table. He drank from a bottle of gin.

“That is a curious statement,” I said.

“Then here’s one that makes clear sense. I mostly drink clear booze because the rest of it looks like it’s already been through a gentleman.”

So saying, Martin got up from the table and went to the workdesk where he finished pulling the skin from a rabbit he intended to have for his lunch. Smoke from the fire outside came in the window and the smell promised good roasting. Martin poked a stick through the animal in a way it might have found embarrassing as well as uncomfortable if it still cared about earthly matters. We went outside to the fire and Martin braced the spitted rabbit aloft over the fire using two Y-shaped branches planted in the ground.

“Wish you’d been here yesterday. I trapped some doves. Not much more meat than the heel of your hand on any one of them, but I had six and could have gotten by on three.”

“I was already engaged yesterday taking care of the Gordeau boy. He thinks he spent a night at the Devil’s underground spa.”

“Did he see it?”

We had both been standing with our arms folded the way men do when they watch a fire or especially something cooking on a fire, but now I turned my head and looked at Martin.

“See what?” I said. “The spa?”

Martin looked inscrutably at the fire for a moment before he spoke.

“Anything interesting.”

“Something specific and interesting? An it rather than a who ?”

“You missed out on a fine career as a detective. It almost doesn’t sound like you’re interrogating me.”

“And you almost sound like you don’t know what’s going on past the river.”

“A check to the king! Black castles. Would you like a smoke?”

I took one of Martin’s strong cigarettes and lit it with a twig. “So are you going to kick me off your ancestral lands again if I keep asking questions like ‘Who is that boy?’ ”

“No.”

“Who is that boy?”

“They’re not ancestral. I picked this place for its vast, quiet woodlands. But now they’re not so vast and sure as hell not quiet and I’m thinking about pushing on.”

“Funny, so am I.”

“Brother, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Martin went back into his house and fetched out the gin, spritzing a little on the rabbit so the fire sizzled.

“There’s a fight coming and I don’t want to pick sides. It’s that simple.”

“A fight between what and what?” I said.

“Let’s go inside.”

Martin shut the door and drew the iron bolt. He sat down at the table and looked up at the stuffed beaver and then at me.

“Between the easy to believe and the difficult to believe.”

I waited.

“I like you, Mr. Nichols. Otherwise I’d have nothing to say. Every word out of my mouth is like a piece of glass I’ll have to pick out of my supper later. Or maybe everything I don’t say is going to hang over my bed later if something bad happens to you.”

“Who is that boy?”

“He’s a leper.”

“A leper?”

“That’s right. Or it’s close enough. He’s sick, and so are a few others.”

“You can speak plain English to me.”

“No, I can’t. They wouldn’t like that.”

“Then speak to me in parables.”

“They’re sick and their illness makes them hurtful.”

“Ah, the parable of the hurtful lepers.”

“They prefer to hurt animals.”

“Swine before pearls?”

“That’s it. That’s it exactly. But some horses’ asses decided to stop what had been a convenient if expensive compromise with… well, with the improbable. And if you think the poor folk of Whit-brow couldn’t afford to send the pigs over the river anymore, I promise you they can’t afford what’s happening now. If the situation doesn’t right itself soon I’m going to have to give this little patch of land back to the weeds.”

He drank. I winced at the amount of alcohol that went into the taxidermist’s mouth, but when he passed the bottle I drank, too.

“Why won’t you just tell me?”

“Have you noticed where I live? Geographically? Or maybe cartographically, I don’t know. Anyway, mine is the closest inhabited dwelling to the river. I am between the river and the town.”

“Jesus. You’re saying you have contact with them.”

“They’re sick, I told you. There are fevers in those woods and fevers make people do things that are not polite.”

“Whatever they are, they’re dangerous and they should be gotten rid of.”

“Someone with the Spanish influenza would be just as dangerous. But you don’t shoot sick people. You contain them.”

I reached for the bottle and Martin slid its cool glass into my hand.

“Besides,” Martin continued, “it’s not that easy.”

“For God’s sake, will you tell me what they are?”

“No.”

“You infuriate me. You do it on purpose.”

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t like.”

“Alright.”

“Conditionally.”

“What’s your condition?”

“Well, currently I seem to be enjoying the condition of a stool pigeon.”

“What don’t they like, Martin?”

“My condition.”

“Jesus bloody Jesus, I see why you live alone.”

“My condition is that you will not share what I tell you with anyone else in town. Because if you did, they might attempt to molest our sick friends. And if they were not wholly successful, the surviving… lepers would know where the good people of Whitbrow got their information. And they might come across the river to discuss this with me.”

“So why tell me at all?”

“The very question I ask myself. And I answer that I would hate to see harm befall you. And I answer that everything is going to hell anyway. And I answer that I would hate to see pretty… what’s-her-name?”

“My wife?”

“Sure.”

“Eudora.”

“I would hate to see pretty Eudora come to grief. It looks like you two have a good thing and you’re both thinkers and your mission is to pollute the world with thinking children.”

I did my best not to react to that.

“Swear on her legs,” he said.

“What?”

“Swear on her exquisite gams—and I am nothing but proper and respectful when I call them exquisite. Swear on them that you will not spread the information I am about to give you to the good folk of Whitbrow, but that you will only use such information in extremis to protect yourself and those legs.”

“I do so swear.”

“Silver. They have a reaction.”