Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  Aside from the Chicago moving-men, I had not seen a colored in or near Whitbrow.

  Jesus, he was big and strong-looking.

  That was my first thought. My second was what a good subject for photography he would make; the structure of his face was handsome and symmetrical, and his broad shoulders and thin waist suggested an impressive athleticism. He would have to stand with new clothes, though; the ones he wore were none too clean.

  He did not enter the store the way black men often entered white establishments. He did not look down, nor did he state his business by way of asking permission to approach: “Sir, I’s comin to ask if you got any cornmeal and how much it coss.“ In fact, he did not speak at all at first. He just glided in with the light bouncing off the carefully shaved dome of his head, and he went to the goods he wanted as if he had stocked the shelves himself.

  He bought salt, coffee and sugar. And a pickle.

  “Anything else?” Paul asked, trying to sound neither hostile nor overly friendly.

  I expected the man to shake his head, but he spoke. Everyone was looking at him, but he seemed to notice only Paul.

  “No, sir. These shall be sufficient. If I think of anything else, I shall return for it.”

  What was that accent? Caribbean? West Indies?

  And then he paid.

  As he made his way out, he did something queer; he stopped, holding the door open, and sniffed the air on the porch. And then he looked at me. Not long enough to draw anyone’s attention but mine.

  He left then, letting the door bang good and hard as he went.

  If the flies had in fact arrived with him, they decided to stay.

  “How do you like that?” Miles said, once the man was out of earshot. “Nigger said sufficient. And Paul jes reached in an jerked him out a pickle like he was gonna get mad if he didn’t get his pickle fast enough.”

  “His money’s good,” Paul said, coming to stand in the doorway, wiping his hands with a rag.

  “Well, hell if I’d feed him, jes reach in and feed him. If you got to take his money, hand him over the tongs and let him get his own damn pickle.”

  Paul said, “Yeah, and if I’d a done that, you’d a said, ‘I cain’t believe you let that nigger touch your tongs.’ Made me put out two pair a tongs. Ain’t no pleasin you about a nigger. Like I said, his money’s good as yours.”

  “Damn right his money’s good,” Gordeau said. “Less I miss my guess, that’s the same one used to bring coins and jewels in to Harry fore he closed up. Old stuff, old watches and shit, God knows where from. I don’t think he’s been around since that year we got all them grasshoppers.”

  Buster Simms, who liked boxing and who had won some money at bare-knuckle fights in the mill town before love opened his huge fists, said he thought the man must be a visiting colored fighter.

  “Nah,” Miles said. “He’s one of them sharecroppers working Dwight Newsome’s land, up near Chalk Ridge. Either that or he’s a squatter livin out in them woods pass the river.”

  “Ain’t no Chalk Ridge nigger built like that,” Old Man Gordeau said. “They all got the pee-lagra. Look like scarecrows and cain’t hardly lift their heads. Don’t think he’s no squatter neither.”

  “Wait, I know that ole boy,” one-armed Mike said.

  “Here it comes,” said Paul.

  “Yeah, he keeps roosters for a gang man outta Chicago. And they say he got him a white woman.”

  “With a white woman and everything. I love it,” Buster said.

  “Yeah. And he don’t stay with her but in the winter cause he cain’t be bothered with no wife come rooster season.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Paul said.

  “Frank here’s born in Chicago,” Gordeau said. “Did you know that, Mike? Could be he knows your gangster.”

  “I am the gangster,” Frank said, “but they closed down my speakeasy so I had to make like a bird and fly south.”

  “When you gonna fight your roosters?” Mike said.

  “Quiet as a church mouse all day, but once he gets started he don’t shut up,” said Paul.

  “On second thought,” I said, spying Dora across the town square, “I am the rooster. And if you gentlemen will excuse me, I see a French hen I have some business with.”

  I INTERCEPTED EUDORA as she crossed the town square. She was just about to reprove me for something, probably being away from my typewriter, but I kissed her so hard she forgot whatever it was. The sound of good-natured whistles from the porch of the general store cut us short, and we both giggled like kids.

  We sat on the benches near the tea roses, and Dora told me about her day with the Nobles, how Arthur Noble showed her the pecan orchards he harvested to sell in the mill town and at his service station. She told me how Ursie bounced at her heels all day, manhandling her new kitten. She had wanted a cat for some time and, owing to a worsening mouse problem, Arthur had finally relaxed his opposition to the idea. Four days ago he had found a little grey kitten in a box with three dead siblings and brought the live one home. Having met Arthur briefly, I voiced my unworthy suspicion that he found four living cats but didn’t want that many underfoot. Dora pinched me.

  I was about to mention the Negro who came into the general store, but what was there to tell? A well-mannered colored man had come to the general store to buy salt, and when he left, the Southern gentlemen had mocked him and told stories about him.

  At just that moment I saw him come out of Estel Blake’s hardware shop with a spool of wire around his shoulder and the bag from the general store in his hand. He was chewing the last of his pickle. He crossed the square lawn diagonally, making right for us.

  He was staring at Dora.

  He stopped in front of us.

  His nostrils widened as he took in our scent.

  He kept staring at Dora.

  Unbidden, the word nigger rose up in my head and almost pushed its way into my mouth. The barbarous impulse to spit that word at him and animalize him with it was so strong that tamping it down paralyzed me. For several long seconds all I could do was stare at him while he stared at Dora and she stared at the ground.

  “I believe you are making the lady uncomfortable,” I said, although neither of us was convinced by the undercurrent of menace I tried to inject. I was flatly no match for this powerfully built man.

  He bowed cordially then.

  “Beggin your pardon, marse,” he said, and turned lithely away from us, walking off down the road that led east. Dora’s nose wrinkled in distaste.

  But she did watch him go.

  I thought about him all the way home.

  Was there an accent to his speech? It was faint.

  He didn’t sound like a Georgia black; that much was sure.

  When I got home, I went back down to the musty, spidery cellar amongst the reeking boxes of my aunt’s that might be full of trash or treasure. I sat in front of the typewriter for some time without hitting a key. I just stared at the dirty window without seeing it, thinking about the pregnant days before the States’ War, the days when everyone knew what was coming, but not how hungry it was, how long it would stay.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT WAS LATE August when I went to interview Bessie Wilcox at the Sunny Rest nursing home just outside the mill town. I hated the euphemistic names they hung on nursing homes, as if old folks were small children who didn’t know what was in store for them. If I opened one I’d call it Yelling All Night Manor or Chafing Acres. Granted, I might not attract many tenants, but they would be realists.

  Sunny Rest, while not as bad as some of the desperately overcrowded and perpetually uric facilities I had seen on Chicago’s South Side, distinguished itself with a kind of hopeless torpor that had also spread to the staff, which on this hot afternoon consisted of a scarecrowish, twitchy white woman with her hair lacquered unbecomingly to her head and a pillow-bosomed colored lady who seemed half-asleep.

  I asked them if I might speak to Mrs. Wilcox on the pretext that I was he
r nephew. They were accommodating enough.

  I winked at Mrs. Wilcox, and she nodded from her bed and motioned Dora and me to sit down. The old folks waiting to die in these places would say the Devil was their nephew for the chance to talk to somebody new.

  Her blue eyes blinked a lot behind her dirty glasses.

  “You ain’t my nephew. I got three livin. Two of em’s in Atlanty and the last one’s in the can. Tell me who you are, though.”

  “Frank Nichols. Dottie McComb was my aunt.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You here for the money? Cuz I ain’t got none. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “That’s good. You’re a good boy. I’d a never let Henry borrow that money if I’d knowed about the boll weevils; lost everything any damn way. Would you reach me some tea?”

  She motioned towards a sweating, chipped pitcher on the nightstand and a cup with a blue flower on it.

  Dora beat me to her feet and poured the cup full. Bessie took it, and got a lot of it on her chin and down her front when she drank. I saw Dora look around for a towel, but there wasn’t one.

  “Mrs. Wilcox, I’m actually here because I’m writing a book about the war, and I was hoping to ask you some questions.”

  “What’s she for?” she said, indicating Dora.

  “Taking notes.”

  “Huh.”

  “What do you remember about the States’ War?”

  “So you must be Katherine’s.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Prettiest child I ever saw.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was just a little girl durin that war. A little barefoot girl.”

  “Anything you remember would help.”

  “I wish my girls had been pretty like that, but Henry, he wasn’t much to look at. After a pretty man breaks your heart, you’re happy for a plain man. You gonna break this one’s heart?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, I reckon not,” she said, looking at Dora for the first time. “Reckon she’s gonna break yours.”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said.

  “Yep. She will. She got them crazy, two-daddy eyes on her.”

  Dora bowed her head and wrinkled her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “Mr. Gordeau said you were born in 1854. Is that right?”

  “December. Almost a Christmas baby, but my mama prayed on it so I wouldn’t be.”

  “Do you remember Lucien Savoyard? Did you ever meet him?”

  “Mr. Savoyard? Everybody met him. He was a gentleman, like they don’t make no more. He sat a good horse, all rich in his blue and silver waistcoat, prettiest cloth I ever saw. I remember askin my mama would the angels wear gowns made a that? It was silk. First time I ever saw silk. He let me touch it.”

  I looked over at Dora to make sure she was getting this. Her pencil flew.

  “You look like your mama in the head. In your long, pretty head. But you got them soft eyes like she did. Like you’d let a lot of bad happen to you afore you’d stand up.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I ain’t. So you’re Katherine’s?”

  I nodded.

  “Who’s she?” she asked, pointing arthritic fingers at Dora.

  “I’m his wife,” she said. “Do you remember the Savoyard Plantation?”

  “Course I do. Mama rode me by it on the mule once or twice, and I even got to go in one time. Just before the war. He threw a big Christmas party and opened his house up to all them from Whitbrow and Morgan wanted to come. He had put up these painted angels from France and all these glass icicles that caught the firelight. All the grown-ups were dancin. He danced once with my mama and that was fine, but when he danced with her again, Pappy made us go home. I didn’t want to go. All them candles and ornaments and peppermint candies. The house nigger had oil on his face to make it shine. It was a magic night.”

  “Did they have a lot of slaves?” Dora said.

  “Lord, yes. Always comin and goin. Always different ones.”

  “How did you feel about that?” said Dora.

  “They was lucky. They was rich. We didn’t have no slaves. My daddy was a pateroller afore he volunteered.”

  “Pateroller?” I said.

  “Used to ride the roads lookin for coloreds without a pass from they master.”

  “I mean how did you feel about slavery?” Dora said.

  I shot her a look, but she shot one back.

  “Wasn’t no way to feel about it, that’s just how it was. That was slave days. Now, some of it was done right and some of it was done wrong.”

  “Who did it right?” Dora said. “I mean were there actually people who owned other people and did it right?”

  “You make me tired,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “I don’t much like you.”

  “Shall I leave?”

  “No, sugar, you just keep sittin there like the world owes you somethin. And reach me some more sweet tea.”

  Dora didn’t move this time, so I did it. Mrs. Wilcox got more on the chin, so I got up and got a towel from the sleepy black woman. When I came back, Dora was walking towards me with pursed lips. She handed me the notebook and pencil.

  “She called me a whore. I’ll be in the car.”

  “Do you want us to leave?”

  “No. She really is a splendid resource. But I might punch her if I stay.”

  I kissed her cheek and took the notebook. She strutted out of the Sunny Rest nursing home, giving me a warm look over her shoulder to let me know she was all right. A dazed-looking little bald man in a wheelchair waved a purplish claw at her in farewell, though she didn’t see.

  Mrs. Wilcox spoke for another half an hour after Dora left. She sang more songs to the faded glory of the Savoyards and what a shame it was the Yankees won. She told me that when the slaves killed him, the pastor told his congregation to weep like the Israelites wept for Zion.

  When she ran out of things to say, Mrs. Wilcox looked at me like she didn’t know who I was, and called for the twitchy white woman, saying I wasn’t her nephew and she wanted me thrown out. I played it cool, assuring the woman that I was, but that my aunt got confused sometimes. She nodded and went over to the old woman, who was thrashing her head back against her pillow.

  It was time to go, and then some.

  But I didn’t make it out the door.

  A very thin, very old man two beds away motioned me over. He had cancer on his face that was hard to look at, and huge spectacles that made his watery, yellowish eyes look like owl’s eyes. He pulled my ear close to his face, but I turned my head so my better ear was closer.

  “Don’t you believe them horsefeathers about Savvy-yard,” he said.

  “No?” I said.

  “No. He’s in hell. And I’m goin soon.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I ran his dogs on runaways afore I seen enough to quit. Then I’se fifteen. Old enough to join the militia. But the things I done. I helped take the skin off ’n one nigger who ran away twice, and stretched his hide between two poles, like a jackrabbit, with his face still on it. Had a wheel to spin the niggers on till they lost they minds. But he didn’t run dogs on his slaves when he hunted. He went out by himself. I saw him once, comin back naked. And they never came back. That place is haunted, young man.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Do you like the banjo?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Reach me my banjo an I’ll play you a song. It’s under the bed.”

  I looked under the bed, but there was no banjo. Just the feet of the twitchy white woman getting closer.

  “I reckon this is your uncle?” she said, giving me the angry eye.

  “Don’t you fuss at him,” the old man said. “This is my nephew. Now, get me my banjo, you witch. You evil witch. I want to play something pretty.”

  WHEN I GOT out to the car, I found that Eudora had put the top down. Her white legs were on display and her bare feet were o
n the dashboard. The smell of nail polish hit me. Her toenails were brick red and she had cotton between her toes.

  “If I’m going to be a whore, I should look the part,” she said. “Mind if I dry these out while you drive?”

  I threw my head back and laughed.

  Jesus Christ, I was in love.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IT WAS ON the first or second day of September that the vagrants came to town. Two men, one white and one black, accompanying a mannish woman who smoked a pipe and wore her hair up under a man’s hat, established themselves on the benches in the middle of the town’s square. The white man held a sign that read NEED WORK while the black man held his head down so the brim of his hat kept shade on his face and the woman smoked her pipe. The white man had a huge mustache that would have sat well on a cowboy’s face. Nobody approached the town square for several hours, which was normal in the hot part of the day when the sun stooped and whipped the tea roses unmercifully, so around two o’clock they shuffled over to Harvey’s Drug Emporium and ordered an ice cream.

  That’s where I was sitting, reading a collection of James Joyce, procrastinating again and glad to be out of the dank basement.

  They were a penny short of the cost, so I slid one over to them.

  Funny how specific the memory is; I still remember the sound of that penny going ssshhhkkk across the counter. They all nodded their heads and the white man thanked me. Harvey found it in his heart to scoop an extra half scoop on top since it was clear they meant to share it.

  What struck me about the way they ate the ice cream was that they had a system; each took a level spoonful to be fair to the others, and their attack was almost choreographed. I suspected then that these were rail-riders, and that they had learned their table manners in those hobo camps I had heard about where men, women, blacks, whites, dogs and Chinamen all slept together and ate out of the same pot. I was fascinated.

  “How are you makin it?” Harvey asked them.

  “We makin it alright,” the white man said. “Be makin it better with some work. We can all three of us chop cotton, split wood, fix a roof. You know somebody needs a hand?”