Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  When it was time for bed, I left a candle burning in a glass bowl and I set my pistol on the nightstand. Dora slept quickly. I watched her breathing for several hours before I, too, succumbed and entered yet another troubled sleep.

  I DREAMED ABOUT the trench fight, only this time when the German boy ate my fingers sitting in the mud with me, he then ate my hand up to the wrist, got up and left me in the mud. Soon stretcher bearers fetched me, all suited up in gas masks, and hauled me to Chicago, on Halstead, I think, near a manhole that was also like the door to an oven. It was Hell. They wanted me to jump in since it was against the rules for them to push me. I refused. They explained that they had no place else to go and they were quite willing to wait. I remember the fire reflected in the eye plates of the mask. I remember the heat from the open hole.

  It was from this stalemate that I awakened and found the sheets damp.

  Dora was as hot as a brazier.

  “Dora?”

  She moved her face back and forth a little. I held my hand to her forehead and frowned.

  “Eudora.”

  She made a small noise in her throat and then opened her eyes halfway.

  I gave her water to drink. I made her take aspirin. Three of them. I put damp towels on her head and neck and she warmed them up so fast I spent half an hour doing nothing but wringing and replacing and fetching more cool water in a pan. Through all of this, she watched me with moist, cloudy eyes. Moonlight lit her face and she looked so beautiful I was afraid she was about to die, like in some painting of a saint’s death.

  “Honey, how are you feeling?”

  “Foggy. Froggy. Not good. Heel itches.”

  I sat up and watched over her while she slept the night through. When I finally began dozing, it was not yet light, but somebody’s roosters had started anyway.

  That morning I sent for Dr. McElroy, who put a thermometer in her mouth, then hissed when he read it. He offered to ring the hospital to tell them she was coming, but she sat up in bed and refused.

  “Mrs. Nichols, your temperature is so high I’m surprised you’re lucid.”

  “I heard what was said about that hospital. I’m not going.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Bad. But not as if I’m going to die.”

  “Light-headed.”

  “Yes. Exactly what was my temperature?”

  “Maybe I got a bad reading. I’m going to take it again.”

  He did.

  “Well?”

  He paused before he spoke.

  “You may not feel that poorly, but I believe that you may die.”

  “Then I’m not going to do it in a hospital.”

  “That hospital being what it is, I am disinclined to argue. I’ll do what I can for you and pray about the rest. Let me change the dressing and get a look at that heel. With this much fever, I’m sure it’s gone septic.”

  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, b
ut 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.”

  I nodded.

  “We are goin back out there, but this time we got dogs. And we will find them.”

  I felt my heart beat faster.

  “Do you know what’s out there?” I said.

  “Do you?”

  “Have you got time to talk?”

  “I’ll make time.”

  I told him.

  I told him everything. The boy in the woods. What Saul Gordeau had seen (most of that, anyway). What happened at the Nobles’. How the silver in my gun had wounded one and chased off another. I told him how I killed a monster on my stair at night and in the morning pried up a man.

  I knew I was breaking covenant with Martin, but after the attack on my wife I was ready to betray any number of taxidermists to strike out at them. The man-wolves. Ursie with the tablecloth on what was left of her arm. If Martin felt squeamish about harming his “lepers” across the river, I did not.

  When I was through, Buster nodded, sorting through it all in the no-man’s-land between belief and disbelief.

  “I’ll come with you into the woods on one condition,” I said.

  “I’m listenin.”

  “Someone’s got to go to the mill town, and I mean tomorrow, and get bullets made for every gun we take with us.”

  “Silver?”

  “Silver.”

  “Ain’t no way we can take that much time fore we go out there. Besides which, won’t nobody else believe this.”

  “You do.”

  He nodded slowly, looking at his boots.

  Then he shook my hand and left.

  It turned out he went straight to Pastor Lyndon’s house and asked him for the big, silver collection plate he had used so long to pay for the damned things’ dinner.

  WHILE THE NEW sheriff went to the mill town to have bullets cast for the posse and in the days before those bullets would be ready, Whitbrow settled again into the spell of waiting it had learned so well these past months.

  Stores and houses were put up for sale as refugees continued to limp away from the hurt town, but nobody came to buy. Some didn’t wait for buyers. Those who left went as far away from Whitbrow as their money would take them. Some to Morgan, but more to the mill town. One family to Nashville. Several to Atlanta. All of them were glad when they got on the road. Poverty and hunger were not as bad as what they left behind, and when they got where they were going, I doubt they talked about Whitbrow.

  Sarah Woodruff left her father’s house on a clear night when the stars raged overhead, taking one change of clothes and a sack of books she could not abandon. Charley Wade saw her walking out of town with the boy who talked about the army; she walked with him all the way to the bus station in Morgan. Like my mother, she got out of this place; I hope she did a better job getting it out of her.

  EUDORA BEGAN TO sleepwalk on the same night that Sarah ran off. The same starry, cool night.

  I woke up when I realized my wife was not in her bed. I ran a hand over the plain of warmth her body had left and I rolled over and smelled her scent on the pillow. Her new scent, alive with beeswax and trees. I lay diagonally across the bed, stomach-down, feeling the beginnings of an erection and meaning to ambush her with it when she returned from what I presumed to be a trip to the outhouse. I began to drowse again and then sprang awake when I realized it had been a very long time and she was not back. I rolled over.

  “Dora?”

  I sat up in bed and unraveled my feet from the top sheet. A glance at the clock told me it was three in the morning.

  I swung my legs over and stood up nude in the cool room, trying to feel rather than hear her.

  She was not upstairs.

  “Eudora?”

  I had a premonition that I was rehearsing for something unpleasant, that I would find her this time but that eventually I would be left alone in this or some other house. I went out of the room and stood at the top of the stairwell, reminded of the view from behind the cannon. It was then that I saw her, standing where I had first seen the monster, at that hairpin angle where the common room led to the kitchen. The light from stars and a crescent moon outside were so weak I had to strain to make her out. She just stood there, naked like me.

  I walked down the stairs, squinting at her.

  “Honey, what are you doing?”

  I got close to her and saw that she was not awake. Her eyes looked through me and she swayed as if she were trying to find her land-legs. Her lips moved gently. A hand twitched.

  Was it bad to wake a sleepwalker?

  I seemed to remember hearing that. So I sat on the overstuffed sofa watching her. Until she moved again. Into the kitchen. She put water in the teapot and set it on the stove even though there was no fire. Stood swaying in the kitchen. Then she went to the back door and tried to open it but could not figure out the latch. She walked back to the spot I found her in, and I was tempted to speak to her but did not interfere with her until I saw her go to the front door and unlatch it successfully. It swung open, letting a chilly breeze in, and she walked slowly onto the porch.

  I called her name and went to her then, putting an a
rm around her. She responded by moving her face towards me, but did not wake up. I steered her around and directed her back inside, latching the door. I guided her back up the stairs one by one and when I put her in bed I tucked the top sheet around her so tightly I would feel it if she got up.

  By and by I slept.

  Just before dawn she made love to me drunkenly, the strength in her legs pressing at my hips while she rode me. I thought she might break the bed again. I was not sure she knew who I was.

  After, I watched her sleep while daylight bled into the sky.

  For the first time I was afraid of her.

  IN THE MORNING I wanted to hear music, so I went to where I had moved the gramophone for easy loading into the moving van, not far from the front door. I ran my fingers over the walnut casing to see if it had been nicked or gouged by the shrapnel that had coned down from the stairwell when the cannon went off. The wood was cool and smooth to my touch. The old Aeolian Vocalion. My father’s last birthday present to me. I imagined my father’s spirit as a falcon mantling over the gramophone to protect it from the shrapnel. A sleepy, slurring falcon with reading glasses on. I chuckled and opened the hood. Touched the brass arm holding the needle. The little brass arrow of the volunome. The guts of the thing.

  I thought of France and all its smashed houses, the litter inside them. Everything made to be enjoyed for a little while and then broken. One day this, too, fractured like pot shards under a city.

  I put a record on the turntable and then fitted the brass crank into its port and turned it. I was rewarded with the slow, sweet jazz a colleague had sent me from Berlin. A woman chided her faithless lover in German, sending goose bumps up my left side. This song always moved me. German usually sounded like a chisel to me, but this woman turned it into a paintbrush.

  Dora walked barefoot down the stairs.

  “I’m sorry. It’s loud, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I’m glad it woke me. It’s nearly noon. Honestly, I seem to be sleeping my life away.”