Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  The dogs picked up the scent again and pulled them deeper into the forest, baying constantly. Lester had never seen them so disturbed.

  They pressed on past the gouged pine trees and kept going for nearly an hour before they saw him.

  The dogs went right to him.

  He was picking blackberries.

  It was a big, muscular black man with a closely shaven head. He had a bucket half full of blackberries and his mouth and fingers were stained from eating them. His shirt was stained, too. He saw their guns and dogs and, because he felt he was expected to, he raised his hands.

  The dogs were barking and howling now. They had their man. Gordeau trusted the dogs so much that their reaction to the blackberry eater was tantamount to a conviction in state court.

  “That’s him,” he said.

  The boys from Morgan started in immediately, asking him the questions that fit the circumstances. His name. His whereabouts last night. He would not speak. They cuffed his hands. One of them carried his bucket of blackberries and ate from it as they walked.

  “Why don’t you talk, boy?”

  “Maybe he’s a deaf-an-dumb.”

  “Hey, are you a deaf-mute? If you are, say somethin.”

  “Well if he is, how can he say somethin?”

  “I was makin a joke, a funny joke. He couldn’t hear my question, neither, if’n he was a deaf-mute, see? That’s funny.”

  “Oh, he can hear us okay. He hears every word we’s sayin.”

  Lester Gordeau would later say he knew the man was no mute, and no idiot either. He thought that he had seen him in town before, though maybe not since he was a little boy. He remembered that in school he had learned about old-time sailing ships and how much work it was to pull those ropes and climb up all over the sails. When he saw the black man those ten or twelve years ago he thought he looked strong enough to be an old-time sailor. Walking behind him now, far behind him because the dogs still bayed after him, Lester thought that he still looked strong enough to pull sailor’s ropes. He remembered being glad for the guns the lawmen wore.

  Estel walked next to the man, looking at him intently. He was trying to look straight through the man’s skull and into his brain to see if it contained the memory of the Falmouth boy. Tyson Falmouth looking up into this man’s eyes. He’s going to hurt me. I’m too small. Did it happen that way?

  “Look at me,” Estel said.

  He did. Eyes so brown they were almost black. Intelligent eyes. He knew what was going to happen to him. The Negro looked forward again. Did he recognize him? Yes. He had sold something from the hardware store to a bald colored a few weeks ago. What was it?

  He couldn’t recollect.

  But he remembered that face.

  It was him.

  “Why did you kill that kid?”

  But it was over. The man had no words for any of them, and the next time Estel tried to meet his gaze by moving in front of him, the man looked right through him.

  “Answer the man,” the sheriff from Morgan said. When the captive did not answer, but only marched forward and looked ahead with that passive look like paintings of Jesus, the sheriff from Morgan poked him stiffly in the ribs with the barrel of his shotgun. The man winced but said nothing. That was how the abuse began.

  When they got to the river, three lawmen went across. Then Gordeau and the dogs with Estel pulling the rope. Then two lawmen transported the prisoner, one of them pulling while the other kept his revolver cocked under the black man’s chin. They mistrusted his silence and felt that he would surprise them if he could.

  They were right about that, of course, but they could not guess how.

  “IT WAS LONG about five in the evening when we got to Cranmer’s place the second time,” Estel said.

  “I beat on his door, but he didn’t come out til I yelled, Goddamnit, I know you’re in there and I ain’t goin away. He opened the door buttonin up his shirt, with a big yawn on his face, and said you caught me nappin. Said he was dreamin of Mexican señoritas and we was a rude subsitute. I said I was just wonderin if this was a friend of your’n. Dogs seem to think he was here last night. He and the nigger looked at each other and he said, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I paid good money for this specimen, he said specimen, an it up an run away on me first chance it got. And then some more bullshit about thanks for returnin my rightful property and would we be good enough to help him tie it to a tree for a proper whippin, but I’d had enough.

  “I grabbed hold of his greasy ass beard and yanked him out into the yard, just meanin to shake him up, but that’s not how the Morgan boys saw it. They thought I rung the soup triangle on Cranmer’s ass. The meanest one, Alfred, he kicked Martin in the leg real hard, and the others moved in. But it wasn’t gonna be easy. Martin yanked my thumb to get me off ’n his beard, and damn near broke it. Quick as a snake he jumped over and socked Alfred so hard in the guts he went down on all fours and hacked like a dog. One of them slow moments happened then, where you see everythin at once. The rest of them was movin at him, and I seen his eyes cut at a axe in a treestump. My hand started movin towards my holster an he saw that, too, an didn’t go for it. In that split second, the boys was on him, and they tangled his arms up from behind so all he could do was kick. But he did kick.

  “His feet was bare, but he stomped his heel down on the foot a the fella behind him and then kicked up with both feet. Big Joe caught a toe in his eye and his hat come off his head. Then the man with Cranmer’s arms and him both fell. All the rest come on him then, kicked the shit out of him, kicked him so bad the dogs was whimperin. The nigger was watchin it all like it had nothing to do with him. He could a run, but didn’t. I do believe they would a kicked that man to death if I hadn’t a jumped in sayin easy, easy, he ain’t the one done it, you’re gonna kill him. When they backed off, I looked down at him where he was still holdin his arms around his ribs and grindin his teeth, and I said I told you your smart-ass mouth was gonna get you in Dutch. I will be back.

  “Big Joe asked Alfred if he wanted one last lick, but he was wheezing too hard, so Joe took the lick. As we left, I saw Martin look at the axe again, and I wondered if he was sorry he didn’t use it.

  “Said a funny thing then.

  “ ‘Sing, locusts. Just keep singin.’ ”

  MOST OF THE activity at the Falmouth place had died away.

  It was getting on towards evening and the women had begun to find their men and take them home, leaving only a few to keep vigil with Miles and Edna.

  Estel was glad not to have a big crowd around when they brought the Negro behind the Falmouth property to the knocked-down locust tree. They showed him the pit under the tree although the remains of the boy had already been removed. The captive showed no interest in the tree or the pit.

  They led him to the hog pen and the hogs did not like him. The men from Morgan watched his face to see if he would maybe break down and confess, weeping in that lamentable darkie way so they could at least hang him knowing for sure they had the right man. But he did not do this. He never broke. He used his silence to keep them in doubt, and, although they knew this, the doubt bothered some of them.

  It bothered Estel.

  What did it matter to the boys from Morgan if they were wrong?

  Hanging the wrong man, if it was a black man, would cost Morgan nothing. But it just might cost Whitbrow another day like today, and Estel could not take another one.

  I imagine Miles Falmouth stood bent over his cane. His unshaven face looked raw and old although he was just forty. Estel said he shook when he saw the captive. Edna Falmouth held him around his soft, beaten shoulders. They stood there together and Miles shook.

  “I’ve seen this’n in town, though it’s been a while. He’s one of them squatters. He killed my boy.”

  Estel looked at Miles.

  “You sure about it, Miles? Cain’t be wrong on somethin like this.”

  Miles was sure.

  “Hang this sumbitch or I’ll shoo
t him.”

  Estel felt sick again.

  O Lord Sweet Lord honey and milk are under Thy tongue, my love is like a goat that stands on Mount Gilead, and why did I seek this post?

  NOW ESTEL BROUGHT out a cigar, a cheap one by the smell, but that didn’t stop me from taking a drag of it when he extended it towards me cherry first, like some cornpone Prometheus offering man the first glowing brand.

  “But the dogs were sure?” I said.

  A lynching. By God, I was sitting on my own porch in Georgia asking an officer of the law about what I was now sure would turn into the lynching of the black man. The one who wanted a pickle. The one who stared at Dora in the square. How did I get here?

  “I asked Lester if them dogs was ever wrong an he said no. I never seen it, he said. I leaned down to him real quiet, like I’m leanin down to you, and I said, would you hang a man over what them dogs say? Is it enough, Lester? And he didn’t say nothing, so I said, you gotta help me.

  “Lester closed his eyes and said, them dogs ain’t wrong, but I ain’t gonna sleep so good knowin a fella swung cause I said so. So I’m sayin I don’t know.

  “Now I saw that the boys from Morgan had got them a crate and some rope from Miles, and the nigger was watchin all this knowin what it was for but not lookin like he gave a rat’s ass. What was he thinkin? An innocent man should a been screamin for his life, but then a guilty man usually made noise, too. Not that I know from hangins. Neither did Big Joe. He didn’t know how to make a noose, so after a minute he gave up tryin and his man Alfred strung it. Then they took the cuffs off him and tied his hands with rope so nobody’d know the Law’d done it.

  “Well, Blake, let’s get on it, Joe said. I couldn’t make my feet move. I said I didn’t know about this no more. Miles screamed that is him, and I mean screamed it. What is this shit? Joe said. Did you see the way them dogs done?

  “What are you gonna do? I said, Put the dog’s paw on the Good Book an make it swear? That’s why they ain’t gonna be no trial, he said, but we all know this is the one done it, an if you ain’t got the backbone to follow through, then the hell with you. I didn’t say nothin, so he kept on, callin me a damn fool, sayin why don’t I go back to my hardware store an polish my shovels.

  “So I did leave.

  “I walked all the way back to town an nobody who saw me comin stopped me to ask what happened. I locked myself in the store and cried til it felt like there was nothing left a me but peel. I know they hung that boy. And I know something went bad wrong. And they ain’t never gonna tell me what. An they ain’t comin back.”

  I SAW THE men from Morgan leave.

  Eudora and I had been sitting, holding each other on a bench in the town square. The sun was almost down now and the frogs and locusts took up their nightly chorus, but it was not a serenade. There was no love in it. It sounded terribly neutral. It was a sound that would go on unaffected by human grief or joy and, while it was possible to hear God in it, it was equally possible to hear His absence. The boy’s funeral would be tomorrow. No waiting around in this kind of heat. And there would be no school.

  We had bumped around town all day, now at the drugstore, now at Pastor Lyndon’s house, now at the general store. She had pulled me home to make love around dinnertime, but we had not lain together long before we dressed again and came to the town square to escape the silence of the house. But it was quiet here, too, except for the locusts, and now the frogs, joining together in their agnostic hymn.

  Just before we left the bench, realizing now the futility of paddling at the growing horde of mosquitoes, we saw the sheriff from Morgan and his men come up from behind us. They went around us, crossing the square towards their waiting vehicles. They walked with small steps and the ones who carried shotguns carried them like yokes. The sheriff, the one they called Big Joe, croaked “Evening” at Eudora and he would have removed his hat if he had not already been holding it. Most of them carried their hats.

  The sky glowed red and orange in the west when the men started their cars. How small and pale their faces looked behind the glass. Delicacies in a gourmet butcher shop.

  The color of pâté.

  I never saw them again, even when things got worse.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DORA COULD NOT stand still. She paced the bedroom in her nightgown, running her hands through her hair while I sat propped up in bed.

  Estel had left an hour before, staggering off down the road a little lighter for the actual poison he had ingested and the figurative poison he had disgorged; Dora had been percolating the whole time since. Now it bubbled up and out of her.

  “Maybe it was the right man, but it makes me sick that they had no trial. Nothing. Somebody points a finger and that’s it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “He was such a sweet boy, too. Tyson, I mean. Oh my God, my God, I just want to pull my skin off every time I think about his poor, sweet, freckled face. He wasn’t one of mine, but I met him. Did you know him, Frankie?”

  “He played baseball with us that first weekend.”

  “He had freckles,” she said simply, and then something else too low for me to hear.

  I asked her what.

  “I said I hate it here.”

  THE DREAM DID not come until almost morning.

  It started in the trench.

  I was slogging through ankle-deep mud in the earthworks at the head of a column of soldiers. Ochre mud. Milky. Sky the color of pewter. When the column stopped marching I found that I was in a place where the trench was shallow and I could look across the mud and wire wilderness that lay between the allied defenses and those of the Germans. Barbed wire coiled out laterally to both horizons, and I could feel rather than see the Huns crouched in their trenches, slateeyed behind machine guns, gloved fingers sweating at the triggers.

  I noticed a figure caught on the wire almost exactly in the middle of no-man’s-land, but too far out for me to tell what uniform it wore; all I could see was the whiteness of its face as it struggled to free itself. I clambered up the loose wall of the trench meaning to free the trapped soldier, and the other men clutched at my coat and trousers to stop me. They slowed me down, but I pulled their hands open and kicked at them until at last I was able to hoist my knee and hips up and scoot, sliming myself with mud. I got to my feet and began walking towards the figure pinned on the wire. The silence bewildered me. Why were the Huns not firing?

  I knew they were there, their breath steaming in the cold over their weapons, ready to send a rosary of lead that could make whole companies kneel. Ready to shred me like cheap pork with just one throaty pop from an anti-tank gun. But it did not come. I saw now that the squirming figure was German. It wore the grey. I saw the point on the helmet, outdated now, just the kind of thing you saw on posters, and the proud boots, somehow black despite the deep mud. The figure stopped struggling when it saw me approach and reclined in the coils of the wire as if on a couch. When I came to the first loops of wire I stepped through them. They caught at my clothes but could not hold me fast. I stepped decisively, and kept stepping, unmindful of the wire that nipped at me. The French and British always said the Yanks had a talent for getting through wire, and this was how it was done.

  Now I could see the face of the German. I had thought that it would be the face of the boy from the trench fight, that this would be my chance to save him, that I would pull him free and carry him back to the German line on my shoulders, and the Huns would be so moved by my gallantry that they would cheer me, pass me their tin flasks of brandy and schnapps to drink from, shake my hand, pat my shoulders. Their greatest gift, of course, would be not to shoot me through the back as I left.

  The dream remade itself then. It was not the German boy trapped on the wire; it was not a boy at all. It was Dora’s face beneath the helmet. Dora’s mismatched eyes. I was upon her now, standing over her. She tilted back her head so the helmet fell off, freeing her bob of honey-colored hair. The redness of her mouth beckoned like
a pomegranate and I tasted it.

  The chill in the damp air receded and it became a warm dream, all kissing; I kissed the woman on the wire and snuggled in with her so I was trapped, too, hopelessly so, but it did not matter. All that mattered was the warmth and wetness of the kissing, the contact of our mouths, that the war might in fact end with this kiss, the feel of her tongue, her long tongue that pointed delicately, I loved to watch her lick stamps, taste ice cream, catch a drop of coffee running down the side of the cup, her mouth on mine in our different uniforms, bring the Kaiser to see it, bring Pershing on a stretcher, God and Jesus, her perfect tongue and Gabriel in the clouds above it all with a horn, a ram’s horn tipped with gold, the music of the Hebrews, the kind that cracked Jericho, so now the horn sounded and the seams of the clouds split and lilies fell in a damp and lovely snow until everything was covered.

  When I woke, the woman I called my wife had me in her mouth, had held me so for some time now. How like a Sphinx in her nightgown. Her hand working below her lips. Her eyes flashed up at me and the clouds split. And everything fell in a slow hail of petals.

  TYSON FALMOUTH’S FUNERAL was well attended despite oppressive heat. Many in town had talked about going in order to show Miles and the remainder of his family that they were not alone in their loss.

  But that family was alone.

  They would be alone no matter who came or how much food was brought to the house afterwards. The father of a dead son, when that son had no brothers, must stand alone with his surname dying in his mind. The mother of a dead son must stand alone even among her sisters with the memory of that child’s birth and the wasted milk of his nursing.

  I saw Tyson’s sisters trying to understand what had happened; all three were younger than their brother. The oldest of these was in a sort of trance and wore a blank face. The next one furrowed her brow with an expression of grim effort, as if by some precocious act of concentration she might understand the nature of death and unravel it; that she might shout Eureka and wake Tyson from within his closed casket. The youngest girl seemed the least troubled because, I suspect, her understanding was not mature enough to embrace the event. She seemed impatient with the droning words of the pastor and the pale faces of her parents, and perhaps with everything that would happen between now and the moment when her brother would stop hiding and come back.