“I really did not want to drive to Morgan today, you damn fool, I really did not. But you are under arrest for public drunkenness and indecency and maybe vandalism, too. We’ll sort that out when you dry out. You get a couple days in the hole. Probably a fine I know you cain’t pay. This is really a sorry business.”
“You have no idea,” Martin said, looking oddly sober for just that moment. “May I keep my garland?”
“Oh sure. You gonna pay for it, might as well enjoy it. Let’s take a ride.”
Some of those watching broke into applause when the sheriff led Cranmer away, but I did not join them. That’s when Martin noticed me in the crowd.
He winked.
I’m nearly sure he winked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHEN NIGHT CAME down on Whitbrow it came down hard. It came down like an army that had been waiting for the chance to sack and plunder the roost of its ancient foe. Sherman had found Atlanta. Troy had fallen. Rome was upon Carthage and the moon was its general. Forgive me for invoking these images retroactively, knowing as I do what would happen that night on the eastern edge of town; but I have the impression that even then I knew.
Something.
The moon came up, and since it was filtered by dust it took a color between red and pink, like the tissue of a lung or some other tender organ stretched postmortem before a candle. In time it dried and yellowed and then went titanium white, hanging higher and higher, seeming to see everything beneath it.
I watched it rise from the front yard of the Canary House. I watched it for better than an hour, smoking cigarettes one after the other, which I had not realized I was doing until I left and saw all the dead butts at my feet.
When I went to bed I could not sleep with all the light in the room, no matter how many times I shifted my position. I wondered in how many beds one spouse tossed or feigned sleep while another slept hard, as Dora was sleeping, beautifully illuminated by but unmindful of the greedy moon outside our window.
I wondered if the good pastor was trying to quicken a child in the belly of his mousy little wife, and I chuckled at that. Then I remembered Paul Miller’s widow, and wondered how she was making out sleeping on the edge of the valley her husband’s mass had undoubtedly pressed into their mattress. That was a mean thought, and not funny after all. I let it turn to sand and blow out of my head. But my mind would not be quieted.
When I finally did start to sleep, I was startled out of it when I realized that Dora had jerked in the bed. She had been lying on her stomach, but now arched up, listening.
How like a Sphinx.
“What was that?” she said.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Far away,” she said, and slept again quickly.
I knew she wouldn’t remember.
I knew, also, that war dreams were coming.
I woke up choking, and the woman who would soon be my wife woke up, too, and stroked my head until I knew there was no gas in the room.
I HEARD THE news the next day at the general store.
Friday the thirteenth.
A hard-luck day, all right.
Buster Simms walked in purposefully and took his hat from his head.
“Y’all heard yet?”
“Heard what?” Charley Wade, the carpenter, said.
“Falmouth boy’s killed. Somethin killed him.”
“What d’ya mean, ‘somethin’?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Old Man Gordeau said. He’ll be here presently. Sheriff went out to look at what’s left. Found him in the ruts of that old blowed-over locust tree not far from the Falmouths’.”
I remembered that kid. Tyson. He had played baseball with me that first weekend on the lot near the town square; brown-haired and freckled. Polite. Jerky but a fast runner.
Ten years old.
His head was a little too big for his body.
The details came in all day, from different mouths.
Knowing what I know now, it’s easy enough to put together.
Something was after his father’s pigs.
He wanted to be a big boy, so he took his father’s rifle and put on his father’s slippers and went out to see what it was.
And he never came back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS UPON the broad but soft shoulders of Sheriff Estel Blake that the weight of the next few days most squarely fell. Of course the family was to suffer immeasurably; but it was up to the sheriff to act. I believe he was a good man and that he tried faithfully to understand what was happening and to take prudent measures. In the end, however, he was no better prepared to protect his flock’s flesh than Pastor Lyndon was to protect its soul. What they were facing was just too big, and too old.
And too goddamned rotten.
It was Saul Gordeau who summoned Estel out to the Falmouth farm. He rode up on horseback like all hell was behind him and yelled into the open door of the hardware store, “Sheriff! They need you out to the Falmouths’. Now! Quick! It’s bad!”
I was on the porch beating one-armed Mike at checkers. I saw the sheriff walk out into the pale, overcast sunlight, blinking and cinching his belt under the roll of his belly. He had been napping. With some effort, he got on the horse behind Lester and they rode off, Estel’s holstered gun awkwardly slapping his thigh as they went.
Mike said, “Dang,” and closed his eyes hard, as if anticipating a blow. Then he got up and walked over to the hardware store, shutting the door Estel Blake had left open.
EARLIER THAT MORNING, Edna Falmouth had called her boy and three girls into the kitchen for breakfast but only the girls had come. Usually the smell of biscuits woke Tyson up without a summons. When he didn’t answer a third call, and his bed proved to be empty, Edna went out the back door yelling his name. She came back in fast, and woke Miles from his sickbed.
He got his cane and went out to see, and when he saw he yelled at his wife to stay inside, and to keep the girls inside, too.
No matter what.
At first Miles hoped maybe it wasn’t Tyson’s. He hoped maybe Tyson had shot whatever made all those tracks. There wasn’t a lot of it, but there was enough. Some on the posts of the hog pen. Some on the ground near the slippers.
But the slippers sunk him.
When people take their slippers off, they put them together.
This was one here and one there.
And the gun had all six rounds in it.
Something had knocked the boy out of his daddy’s shoes.
Miles limped off where no father wants to go: in the direction he knew his son had been dragged.
WHEN ESTEL BLAKE came back, it was clear that the sight of the dead boy had kicked the wind out of him, maybe for good.
A locust tree had fallen over, probably in the storm last spring, and the fan of its roots overshadowed the depression in which the tree had stood anchored since before most people in town were born. It was in this depression that Estel Blake found the mortal remains of Tyson Falmouth.
Gordeau’s dogs were on the way, but Miles was a good hunter, and by the time the sheriff caught up with him, he had followed the trail of blood and tracks and disturbed brush almost all the way to the locust tree. It had been a great mercy that Miles’s back wouldn’t let him walk the last hundred yards or so. Nobody should ever see that his boy was eaten.
But when?
And by what?
The tracks back at the Falmouth place, what was left of them after Miles and Edna walked all over them, had been animal tracks. Like wolf or dog, but bigger. And Estel was not sure, but he thought more than one of them had been around this tree making a meal of the boy. Whatever left those tracks could certainly have killed a ten-year-old without a fight, or maybe a thirty-year-old, for that matter.
Still, stray dogs, even very large ones, were more likely to be scavengers than killers. Maybe they found the boy already dead.
Miles Falmouth was sure it had been niggers.
Maybe one of the hob
os he had heard passed through town.
Maybe that big nigger that had come to the general store.
Probably from the woods across the river.
ESTEL DRANK WITH me the next night, the night before the funeral. Neither one of us planned it. He came over to ask if Eudora and I had heard or seen anything new, and then the three of us fell to talking. We were glad for the company. The school had closed temporarily, and I was too disgusted with everything to write about anything. In other words, this boy’s death had made us both useless. We had been sitting around the house reading, clearing our throats, not knowing where to sit or stand or when to move. I had played checkers in town until I saw black and red squares on the backs of my eyelids before I went to sleep.
Dora sensed that Estel and I wanted to talk man talk, and she left us on the porch, bringing out a bottle of bourbon for us to share. We shared it plenty. And Estel let loose.
“I CALLED THEM boys from Morgan, said we had a killin and I thought it might be someone holed up in the woods. I told em I think the boy surprised somebody while they was trying to get at them hogs. Mr. Falmouth had them penned up real tight what with a lock and wire over the top of them and all. I told em how it looked from the tracks like an animal drug him, something like a big wolf, and Big Joe—he’s the sheriff there—said they hadn’t been no wolves around here since the States’ War. Well, why don’t you come see, I said. But maybe I do hold with Miles Falmouth, that some bad customer, some drifter, come up on him. He would a got a round off at an animal. Joe said the boy was scared so maybe he missed, an I said, no shit he was scared, I was scared. I’m gonna be reading the Good Book to get myself to sleep every night. Only I cain’t pray. Not right. The words that keep comin ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus, just Why did I seek this post, Lord? I am heartfully sorry I sought this post. I water my couch with tears. My sore ran in the night and ceased not. Selah. All that Book of Psalms stuff. I don’t even know what Selah means.”
He took another drink of bourbon like it was weak tea.
“You know the worst thing, Mr. Nichols?”
“Frank.”
“I said I wanted whoever killed that boy in the ground. I didn’t want no trial, no lockup. Just wanted it done, in such a way that nobody had to talk about this no more. That’s what I said to Joe. And he took me at my word. And I think something real bad happened. But I wasn’t there when it did.”
I REMEMBERED SEEING the boys from Morgan arrive.
I was at the store, at my usual post at the far end of the porch.
There were lots of men there. The women had gone to the Falmouth place and offered to watch the girl children or do the cooking or slop the hogs, not because Edna needed these things but because there was nothing else to offer.
The men sat around the iron stove and talked with their low, buzzing voices about what to do. Everyone in town was desperate for something to do. The men didn’t know where to put their hands.
No music played. Peter Miller had removed what had been the communal radio to his own house. It was his now, as was the quiet store. He leaned with his knobby elbows on the counter, half listening to the grief of the men as if it had no bearing on him. I had the impression that his older brother’s death had also seemed far-off to him, as tiny as newsprint. Peter was nearing forty, and he had the noncommittal look of a man who was still waiting for his actual life to begin. He had still not met the better people who would eventually matter to him. He just leaned there with his narrow head turned away, like another feature of the counter that looked so sterile without the green water of the pickle jar.
“Lordy, here they come,” one-armed Mike said.
We all watched the cars from Morgan come around the corner as if from a great stillness. Even I heard the doors opening, one of them with a squeaky hinge, and then the abrupt pops as the doors closed.
The men came into view with their straw hats on and their shadows hugging tight on them since it was the middle of the day. Five of them following Estel, who came out of the hardware store and led the way across the town square. All of them looked bigger than him, or younger, or tougher. Two had shotguns. They walked with big steps like men about to do something. Their big strides carried them past the old pump and past the benches and the insulted rosebushes, and I wondered what mob or sea would not have parted to let them go by.
With their straw hats.
With their shadows tight and dark under them.
As they moved away on the other side of the square, finally looking less like giants, Martin Cranmer, who had ridden back from Morgan with them, walked in front of the window, just on the other side of the glass. He noticed the shapes looking out at him and he twitched his hand as if he were about to wave and then thought better of it. He passed with his head down and then he, too, receded off towards the woods where his home was.
THE YARD IN front of Miles Falmouth’s dirty little house was full of women. A few men, too, but we looked ignored and dispossessed. The connection between the women was humid. Languid. The hive had been broken into and honey had been stolen so they buzzed and crawled all over one another like drugged things. The men were not needed in the yard with talk of posses and guns and hangings, so we stuffed our hands in our pockets and orbited groups of women, or we leaned against the mossy trees and smoked.
People ate and drank and talked, but nobody laughed and nobody smiled, and only this distinguished the scene in Falmouth’s yard from a party. As I walked around the knots of women I heard things like “shame” and “awful” and “the Good Lord,” and then I saw Dora, and she came and draped herself against me, breathing in the smell of my chest and shirt. Her eyes were red from crying and her face was white and tired as if she had not slept, though it was only one o’clock.
I knew this face of hers. This was the face she wore through much of the divorce. How could things ever be right again? How could she face her students and tell them about fractions and the times table and Abraham Lincoln when there was a little boy chewed up under a tree? Only the sheriff had seen it and now the sheriff from Morgan and his men were looking at it, but the idea of it was planted there for all of us to keep forever. It didn’t matter if the boy had been handsomely freckled or quick to smile, or good at baseball or hunting squirrels; in Whitbrow’s memory his name would be henceforth married to the word murder. Not only would the boy never be a man; he would never leave the hole where the locust tree had been.
The dogs were baying behind the house like some bad engine coming to life and the lawmen were preparing to follow the dogs. Everyone knew the dogs would pull them into the woods, and they did.
The killer had come from the woods.
“I COULDN’T HARDLY stand them bastards from Morgan,” Estel said, owlishly drunk now.
Dora brought us sandwiches, giving me a look that said, As long as you know I’m just playing domestic for the sake of company; you’re going to make me a drink and tell me what’s going on as soon as this man leaves.
The sheriff continued.
“Joe was half decent, but them other’n was puffed up like too much shit in a sack. Hell, Joe, too. He run Miles and Edna through all the same questions I already asked em, makin Edna cry all over again, and worse, if that was possible. Didn’t get nothin new. And they all shot their mouths off while we were runnin them dogs, sayin I hope we get that nigger by supper, and talkin about what they was hopin to eat and kiddin about how bad each other’s wives cooked. When I didn’t fun with em, they started funnin after me and I told em to shut their damn mouths. Joe said don’t mind him, he knew that kid. Like it was some prize he was givin me.
“Well, them dogs had a scent, and they didn’t like it. Lester knows how to run a hound. But they took us windin all around, finally up the trail and then where do you think? Martin goddamn Cranmer’s house. Well, I banged on his door and he come out with no shirt on and scratchin that beard a his, stinkin like . . . Well, you know how he stinks. I said, you think you had a visitor last nig
ht? He says, how would I know, I was in the pokey. Good thing for you, I said, and I wonder if you knew that when you was tearin up them flowers. He said I ought not to be jawin with somebody I knew was innocent, that I was runnin them hounds so slow he could get away on a one-legged horse, so I said, you’re right, I ain’t got time for this. Normally I got a lot of patience with your smart mouth, but today I am not in the mood. I looked him dead in the eye and said, if I thought you knew something about who killed that boy and you weren’t tellin me, I’d come back here and burn your damn house down. And he knew I would, too. He took his ass back in his little hut and shut the door.”
The dogs wanted to cross the river.
It’s easy to imagine Lester holding the dogs while the other men boarded the raft and then settling them on it. Perhaps he spoke to the hounds, handsome reddish things with slightly looser skin on their faces than most dogs had, and called them by their names. He would have told them how well they were doing, how brave and good they were, and he would have let them take water from the river. Some, like his father, would have said Lester was the kind of man to spoil a dog, but Lester never saw dogs as property. They were friends of his, friends that liked to work and were grateful for instruction. Lester would talk sweetly to the dogs after his father whipped them. Lester would sneak a shirt-full of food to them and get whipped himself. If Lester had been a saint, his statue would have featured him kneeling, getting his hand licked through the slats of a fence, with one eye out for his father.
It took two trips to get all the dogs and men across. Estel said the men from Morgan never stopped “funnin.” On the other side of the river one of them slapped at a deerfly on the back of his friend, but it was too fast.
“What the hell was that for?”
“Deerfly. Would a bit you.”
“Well, it wouldn’t a slapped me.”
Those Across the River Page 11