Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

Yes, it looked as if it might fit.

When she brought it to the butcher’s shop up front, Hal said, smiling, “You sure you want that? Bad luck to wear a widow’s dress that ain’t kin.”

“And why would a Christian man like you sell bad luck?”

“Worse luck not to pay the ice man. And ain’t you already married?”

He winked.

She said, winking back, “I get married every year.”

I FOUND OUT about this later, of course. Dora kept the dress hidden from me until the day of our wedding. She folded it neatly into a suitcase and went to change in the ladies’ room of the courthouse where other women came and went, some of them smiling at her; but she remembered one woman stared at her in the mirror while she fixed her hair. Dora in her white dress and lace. The courthouse was not a place for virgin brides. She stared back so hard the other woman left without even shaking her head the way she had planned to.

My fiery love.

When I saw Eudora floating towards me in the lobby of the courthouse I thought of Actaeon and how he must have felt to see the goddess Artemis naked in her bath, all light and the petals of every white flower on the water. Every face in the courthouse turned to see her where she passed. It seemed for one drunk moment that the gentlemen might begin to applaud and they must have felt it, too, because that was what they did. It started with a mustachioed youth getting his shoes shined in a wrought iron chair and it was mimicked by the black boy shining; then two suited men, probably lawyers, took it up, clapping around the hats they held in their hands; then a farmer put his hat in his teeth so he could clap more freely. It was genuine and good and when Eudora got to me, she was blushing hard behind the little bunch of flowers she held to her mouth and her eyes were wet and shining.

Several of the men waved at me and one yelled “Congratulations!” and another “Good luck!” and I waved back smiling and I walked with my bride into the courthouse.

We did it.

We said the words and did it.

When we left, we all but ran to the car through the warmth of the afternoon. Her suitcase came open and we squatted to gather up Dora’s clothes from the morning, and since our faces came close together we stayed there frog style and kissed as though we had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

When I got behind the wheel of the car and started it, it occurred to me that the moment of the applause when I saw my wife coming towards me was the best moment of my life, that there never had been nor would be a better one. I wanted to slow everything down. I wanted to remember every lake-grey- and shallows-green-eyed glance she threw at me, pregnant as they were with what had happened before and what we had now won through to. I wanted a camera when she climbed out of the car in her wedding dress to change in the washroom of the filling station.

As I drove home, I looked at her so often in the bronze light of late afternoon that she chided me to keep my eyes on the road, but she was laughing.

It was good.

I have never forgotten how good that day was.

THE NOISE BEGAN around eleven that night.

My new wife and I were talking in low tones, too excited to sleep, but spent from our last union, while the candle sputtered and made shadows. The breeze from the window was cool now so Dora had unpacked our blanket for the first time in that house. I remember looking once past the curtains and marveling at how beautifully the full moon threw light over the leaves outside. The view from our window looked like a picture-show view.

When the screams came even I heard them. Neither one of us moved for a second.

They came again. Two women. The word help .

I sat up in bed.

“Was that the Noble place?”

She nodded, wide-eyed. Gripping my arm and holding. I removed her hand and threw off the damp sheets. I put my pants on and took my holster, belt and service pistol from the drawer of the bedside table. While my wife had prepared for bed, I had readied things because Cranmer’s words had echoed in my head, and because I remembered what Saul had said about the moon.

So I’d seen that the doors and windows were locked and I had loaded the clip with the silver-tipped lead custom-made for me in the mill town.

Now I held that pistol and my sweat was on the grip because I sensed I would shoot it soon and my life would hang on how I shot.

And maybe Dora’s life, too.

“Stay here!” I shouted at her.

And I ran down the stairs barefoot and shirtless, almost tripping, out into the movie-house night.

The moon and the wind were strong and the trees made dazzling shadows. My bladder, while not full, would have felt better empty. I ran hard, hardly noticing the stones I later found had bruised and cut my feet. The screams had stopped, but I still heard noises. I was about to see something bad.

The lights were on.

The front door was standing open.

It was bad.

Ursula Noble sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen holding one arm between her legs. Everything around her was knocked over or spilled or torn up and she had gotten the tablecloth off the table and had it wrapped around that arm and blood was all over the cloth and all over her. All over her legs and face and I suddenly knew that she would die.

Her father was lying on the floor of the common room and he did not move.

She was crying and I went to her and pulled her arm from between her legs and saw that her hand was gone. I used a long wooden spoon from the floor and part of the tablecloth to make a tourniquet as best I could remember how. I did this barely looking at her, mechanically, just to get through it. Watching both doors, afraid of what might come through one of them. My sweat in my eyes despite the cold air. My hands shaking.

I heard the youngest crying in a back room.

When the tourniquet was on I went and found little Sadie sitting in the bedroom and crying with deep lungs. She looked unharmed.

I ran back into the kitchen, stepping over the father. I could see the man was breathing. A stain in the shape of a clover darkened the wallpaper. Everything upset and broken. It was too much. I went to Ursie and took her face in my hands.

“Where’s your mother?”

She was sobbing too hard to make a sentence.

“Shook her” and “outside” were all I could understand. Her drool on my thumb. I stood up and she knew I was leaving and she opened her eyes as wide as they would go and tried to keep me there with her one hand but I tore away. I took the pistol from where I had set it on the floor and left, a saltshaker rolling under my foot spilling me so I hit my shoulder hard on the way out, but never fell down. I had the impression the father was moving now, slowly rubbing his stick-like legs on the floor trying to come to, but I rushed out the door now and did not look back.

A shiver went through me and raised gooseflesh on my left side as I went out into the cold air and silver light again. A streak of blood on the front porch hooked left, betraying the direction in which the mother had been dragged. There was a bobby pin in it. I took care to step around it all and walked to the left side of the house. Softly and quietly now, straining to see in the patchwork of moon-shadow.

The woods were thin and I saw motion in a clearing sixty or seventy yards away. My lips began to move as I whispered please please please although I did not know what I was asking for or whom I was asking. I crouched behind a tree.

I could see two of them.

Pulling at her the way dogs would fight over a rabbit.

Like wolves but not wolves.

Bigger.

Using their forepaws in a mockery of hands.