Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

When he had the heel unwrapped, Dr. McElroy held it in one hand and blinked at it. He picked up Dora’s other foot and looked at it. Then he blinked at the first heel again.

“Did I dress the right heel? Of course I did. Where the hell is it?”

“What, Doctor?”

“The wound.”

THE MOVERS CAME that day. I had forgotten all about them. Instead of the broad-faced jovial black man and his smaller colleague, the company sent two humorless white men.

“We’ve had some bad luck,” I said.

Neither of them spoke.

“My wife is taken ill. She can’t be moved. We’ll need to reschedule.”

“You should have called.”

“I know. I’ve been upset.”

“Sorry about your luck.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Then he handed me the bill for the move that hadn’t happened.

I took it and got my checkbook.

“Is John still working for your company?”

“John?”

“Or maybe James.”

“Jimmy? Big, black guy?”

“Yes.”

“In jail.”

“What…”

“I dunno, mister. I don’t really know the guy.”

“Hit his wife with a crowbar,” the other guy said. “Paralyzed her.”

I wrote the check.

I WAS ONLY peripherally aware of the events that occurred in Whitbrow during the next few days, the days of Eudora’s fevers. I did not go out to see what was barking when Old Man Gordeau used his new dogs to find what was left of Mrs. Noble, nor did I attend her funeral. I saw a mule-drawn cart full of furniture bump its way up the road, but I did not care who was leaving. My wife was my only business.

She stayed mostly in bed at first, weak and glowing like a coal, sleeping sometimes eighteen hours in a day. It was getting cooler. I saw to the opening and closing of the bedroom windows to keep her from stifling at midday or catching chills at night. When a hailstorm hit and raked the leaves and knocked shingles from the roof, I sat with her and read to her while she drank the tea I’d brewed. I took walks near the house and kept her room full of flowers. My best find was a patch of sunflowers near the end of their season, and when she saw me enter the room with a bundle of them, her smile turned my insides into a powder that shifted in me the way dunes shift.

At first she did not eat and it was all I could do to keep tea or water moving through her, but then her appetite came back, slowly at first and then with a startling urgency. I went to the general store and the butcher’s almost every day. She drank water by the pitcher. She craved organ meat so I fried chicken livers and gizzards or beef liver when I could get it. She asked for soup with beef joints for stock, and she gnawed on these when the bowl was empty. Hal the butcher saw so much of me that he asked me if I were breeding greyhounds.

Dora got stronger.

She took longer and longer walks during which I held her elbow. Although no sign remained of the bite on her heel, she complained of pain in that foot and leg reaching all the way to her hip.

Her color got better. At first she glowed with a feverish beauty that recalled the consumptive women of romantic literature, but that beauty soon lost its fragile quality and became a glow of unapologetic vigor. Her fever and pain persisted and she had dreams that made her thrash and clutch the sheets and moan. But when she awakened, her vibrancy put off my worry.

“What were you dreaming, love?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why not?”

She sobbed once, both laughing and crying.

“Because I was killing you in it, silly.”

IT WAS FROM Anna Muncie that I learned about Ursie.

Five days after the attack she died of the same rolling fevers that punished Eudora. Dr. McElroy had gone to visit her and the doctors there told him that she was gone and that they had never seen anything like it. Not just the persistent fevers, they said, but the wound itself. They had never seen a hand try to grow back from a stump before. They showed him the little fingers, like an infant’s fingers with their tiny nails, sprouting from her wrist. An X-ray revealed fine hand-bones knitting at the end of the radius. She pushed her IV needles out, too. The punctures kept closing up.

The director of the hospital was a religious man and, after she was dead, he saw that she was cremated along with her records.

SHERIFF BLAKE DID leave town.

Buster Simms told me about it.

One-armed Mike had called on Sheriff Blake the second Monday after the attack and found his house standing open. He called his name and knocked for a long time but he so hated to enter anybody’s house without permission that he left and got an ice cream at Harvey’s.

He went back afterwards.

It had been more than half an hour and the door was still open.

Mike had a bad feeling. He stood on the porch and said “Estel?” another three or four times before setting a shaky foot over the threshold.

Everything was so still in the house. Leaves had blown in. Not many, but enough to crackle under his step. When he went into the kitchen he saw Estel’s pistol and holster and badge sitting on the table, as well as a note:

MIGHT BE BACK

BUT GET A NEW SHERIFF

THE LORD HAS TURNED HIS FACE FROM US

AND I AM NO GOOD

Mike stood there a long time just staring at the note. He thought about where the sheriff might have gone. He checked the whole house starting with the bedrooms, and he squinted as he entered each one because he was afraid the sheriff might have hung himself. He had not. At least not here.

The house was a mess. Estel had been eating his meals in the bedroom for the last few days and the dirty plates were stacked in one corner. Flies buzzed around these. Dirty clothes lay about nonsensically. He had stepped out of several pairs of pants and just left them. The mirror had been struck and cracks webbed out from its center.

Mike went downstairs and sat on the porch.

The sheriff had been his best friend, and now he was gone.

He had to tell someone.

But whom?

In the end, he told everybody he could find.

WHEN OLD MAN Gordeau saw the note Estel had left, he knew the town was in no shape to elect a new sheriff, so he decided on Buster as the best man to take over as acting sheriff, a temporary post. As mayor of Whitbrow, Gordeau had financial and civic duties, and had final say on big issues. It was always the sheriff, however, who took matters in hand. The mayor might be the source of the town’s wisdom, but the sheriff had to be its strength. Its daddy. The one who held the belt.

“Buster,” Gordeau had said when he went to recruit the big man, “you’re as big as a damn bear and cain’t nobody from here to Atlanta lick you.”

“A man’s size ain’t gonna matter against them things.”

“You’re missin the point. If people think whatever’s out there has to get through your thick hide first, they’re gonna feel better about stayin, and maybe fightin. Long as you do somethin.”

“Like what?”

“Well, seems to me that now we got dogs again, we ought a go back in them woods and hunt.”

Buster told me about these events in the course of his visit with me the next day, as he scoured Whitbrow for men with enough spit in them to go into the woods again. It was a thin harvest.

When he came to my door, he had his hat in his hands so the wind toyed with his thick halo of hair.

“Mr. Nichols, I know I got no right to ask favors of you after I went with those that left you and Lester in the woods. But I am askin a favor. A big one.”

“About what happened across the river, I want you to know…”

Buster stopped me by waving his hand.

“You’re a good man and you’re gonna say somethin generous about it, but I done what I done. And nothin you say’s gonna change the fact that I run out on you, and that don’t sit well with me.”