Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

“Hush with that. Somebody put a bullwhip to you, you make a bad face, too.”

I WAS WITH sharecroppers, poor tenant farmers who were working another man’s land for barely enough to survive. He could kick them off anytime he wanted. They bought their mules, tools and tankage from him at very unfriendly prices. He made them grow corn, cotton and tobacco, and the corn went right up to the door. No room for their own garden, but my benefactor, Miss Matilda, grew a few things in the pine trees near the road. When the crops were big they broke even and when they were small they went further into debt. Eventually the landowner would evict them, seize their tools and livestock and sell them to the next bunch foolish enough to move in. God bless America. We had abolished slavery and reinvented serfdom.

I spent the next two days on my stomach, except for trips to the privy, helped there and back again by different members of the family. Miss Matilda had five grown sons, four daughters and so many grandchildren that I couldn’t keep track and I was impressed that she could. Despite their lack of shoes, monotonous diet (almost nothing but corn and lard) and dew sores, the children were lively and game. Horace was my most loyal companion; I guess he had adjusted his position on the quality of my face. He would share with me from a big bag of white clay I was supposed to eat; it tasted gritty and foul to me, but the boy loved it. All of them ate it. They seemed to crave it. It wasn’t chalk, but it was just that white; I wonder if deposits of the stuff had been responsible for the town’s name.

Horace sat on the side of my bed, which was really just an elevated plank and a sack stuffed with corn husks, while I told him stories like “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” We had a fine old time. But what he really wanted was a ride in my car.

Apparently the car was in good shape. I had blacked out and driven it into a ditch, but Matilda’s son, who had driven the landlord’s farm truck, used a mule to get it out, then started it with no problem. He moved it back behind the shacks where it couldn’t be seen from the road.

I promised Horace I would give him a ride.

Three days after I came to, Miss Matilda helped me walk five shacks down where her daughter Samma lived; Samma’s husband was dead, and, in the name of Christian charity, she had given her bed to the dying white woman who, as it turned out, had decided not to die.

“She woke up at all?” Miss Matilda asked Samma.

“Say a word sometime, then go back asleep. Mostly say ‘Frank.’ S’pose that be you.”

“At your service,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you in my service now.”

“We in Jesus’ service, girl. Don’t let me hear you talking small again.”

“Yes’m.”

Dora moved her head side to side, then lay still again.

“Samma, go see to Horace an leave me alone with Mr. Frank.”

Samma obliged. Miss Matilda moved over to a spool table and picked something out of a bowl. She brought it over for me to look at. It was a slightly misshapen silver slug.

“What you gonna tell me about this?” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Don’t play no ‘what you want to know’ with me. My boy Egger brought you and that woman lookin like two dead cats out of that car, and you got better like I thought you might. But I was sure she was goin to Jesus. Now I ain’t so sure it Jesus she was goin to. She pushed this outta her. It came outta her lady parts, and now she’s getting better fast. I ain’t never seen nothing like this. But I heard about it.”

“What did you hear?”

“She a Look-a-roo. Look just like us but change into a boogey when the moon come, and nothing kill em but silver. They tell that story to scare babies outta they fussin. But she is one. Whitbrow had bad trouble these days, like when the Look-a-roo was comin roun after the State War takin chilluns. Now you come outta there all beat up and shot up. Mister, you go ahead an tell me I’m wrong, if you can do it without lyin.”

There was nothing to be done. There was no lie to be told and no more running to do. I just nodded.

“I’m a keep this silver,” she said.

“Okay.”

“They say the Look-a-roo come here to punish Massa for havin slaves, and that’s why it stick on Whitbrow but leave us alone. But that moon’s comin up brighter every night and I don’t want her nowhere near us when it big. You promise me you git her outta here and leave us be. We got the Lord right here in Chalk Ridge and don’t deserve no more trouble than we got.”

No, I agreed. They didn’t.

Dora woke up that night.

Two days later we left, with a gallon of hosstail tea and a bag of corn bread. I had a good, homemade shirt and a tattered coat. Dora got one of Samma’s two homemade Sunday dresses, and Miss Matilda nearly had to beat her to get it from her. Miss Matilda was too proud to take money, but Samma wasn’t. I called her over to the car and gave her a hundred and twenty dollars, and her eyes just about fell out of her head; that was two months’ worth of teaching pay, and almost the last of the money my aunt had left us.

Now Samma’s eyes narrowed.

“Man who got this much got a lot more besides. You’d a died, we’d a got it all. Give me twenty more.”

I did.

“Hmph,” she said, and hid it.

Before we left, I had a promise to keep. Horace and his younger brothers, sisters, cousins and friends, everyone who was too young to be in the field, all piled on and into the Ford. The sun was rising red and pretty in the east. I drove in slow, wide circles in a field, raising a cloud of dust, careful not to spill any of my squealing freight. There were little hands on my arm, little hands leaving smudges on the glass. I saw a bunch of crows picking around and steered for them as one girl with her hair in lots of little red ribbons screamed, “Git them crows! Git them crows!” and laughed good, high laughter. The last weeks had been awfully short of good moments, but that was one.

That was definitely all right.

WE DROVE NORTH.

I hugged the steering wheel to keep my back off the seat.

She seemed nearly well.

We didn’t speak much.

We had plenty not to talk about.

I had no plan beyond getting as far north as I could before the moon rose full that night. I thought, quite reasonably, I believe, that more conventional issues like how to deal with infidelity that may or may not have been voluntary could wait until after I knew if the full moon would, in fact, change my wife into a murderous beast.

Are you still my wife?

If you can stand it.

Northern Tennessee was vivid and cool. The abundant trees on the hills had mostly gone red or brown or butterscotch, or that rare warm yellow that looked gold when the light came through it. Sometimes the wind would knock loose a shower of leaves that would cascade over the road like a premonition of snow and Dora would smile and squeeze my leg. If only our days in Whitbrow could be shaken off and scattered like that.

I stopped at a filling station just over the Kentucky border on US 27 so Dora could use a telephone. She wanted to call her father and tell him we were coming for a visit before we cut west to Chicago. Her family’s hatred for me was as unreasonable and unassailable as their illusion that Eudora had been the picture of wifely devotion before I came along and bewildered her. Small potatoes, now. I would gladly suffer their bald references to her legitimate husband and I would grinningly eat the beef stew her mother made on Sundays, knowing she had dipped less meat for me than for anyone else at the table, if only she and I could leave this gruesome summer behind us. Perhaps the father could hold the daughter down with his disapproving gaze and dare the curse out of her. Perhaps the father and son-in-law would mount a ladder to the moon and carve just enough out of it so no one could call it full again.