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.
CHAPTER THIRTY
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.
Anything.
The wind blew up, showering the car with leaves as I paid the attendant for pumping his gas. He was a man my age with a deep scar that changed the shape of his chin. Everything and everyone was damaged. I gave him an extra nic
kel as a tip.
“Thanks, young man. God bless.”
The attendant did not recognize me as a peer because Dora had made me shave my grizzled beard last night. My face felt naked in the cold wind.
I went around the corner of the building, past a table where a slightly cross-eyed girl was selling Indian artifacts I suspect she made herself, to find Dora.
She sat against the wall next to the pay phone with coins spread next to her as if they were seed for birds to come and feed on.
“I love that awful coat on you,” she said, looking at me with moist eyes.
“Did you call? Are you alright?”
She shook her head.
“Are you cold?”
“That nice young girl changed a dollar for me, but I hurt myself. Frankie, I can’t touch the coins. Just the pennies.”
“Eudora.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“Do you want me to dial?”
She was crying now, shaking her head.
“It’s all real.”
“It was for them. Maybe not for you. Maybe not away from there.”
“My jaw hurts. My joints.”
“You were shot.”
The Indian artifacts girl had good ears. She turned around at that and I glared at her until she faced the road again.
“They said it would hurt. That it would take a long time the first time and that it would hurt.”
I helped her up.
“They said the longer I lived the easier it would get, until I could do it whenever I wanted. That I could even choose not to when the moon was full. Like Martin. Poor Martin. He never changed anymore, never wanted to. Just got sick when the moon came. But that took years and years.”
“Just give me a minute to think. Please. Do you want me to help you dial your father?”
“We can’t go there. I can’t.”
“Let’s at least get to Lexington.”
“I won’t make it that far. It’s soon. I’m so scared.”
I held her against me while sobs shook her frame, her hands small and white against my lapel. A man in a fishing cap came around the corner to use the telephone but thought better of it and went away.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t think I would be able to open a strong door. A strong, locked door. We never saw them do that.”
She looked up at me with heartbreaking love in her eyes. She always said it was unfair that I was so tall; that I was framed by sky when she looked up at me but that she always had the ground as a backdrop.
“What are you saying, then? Lock you up?”
I felt her nod against my sharecropper’s coat.
“Where?”
“I don’t know, Frankie. Find us a place. Lock me up tight and don’t look in no matter what you hear.”
“This won’t happen. Not to you.”
“Then we’ll have a good laugh in the morning, won’t we?”
THE SYCAMORE TOURIST Village was the one that fit the bill. The property was just south of Somerset, Kentucky, offering SOLITARY CABINS, NEW FLUSH TOILETS!!! and DAILY BUSSES TO BEAUTIFUL CUMBERLAND FALLS. I checked in under the name Zachary Taylor, at which the clerk did not raise either of his caterpillarish eyebrows. I asked to be away from neighbors.
“Why’s that?” he said.
I didn’t say anything so now he looked up at me.
“Well . . . we’re newlyweds,” I finally offered.
He chuckled and nodded his head at that.
“You kids want a radio? Five-dollar deposit.”
I paid him. He filled out a slip and handed it to me, along with the door key on a carved wooden sycamore leaf that bore a number. I handed it to Dora.
He went in the back room and came back with a badly scratched and cigarette-burned tombstone RCA radio.
“Is that a six or a nine?” Dora said, examining the key.
“Nine. Stem goes down. I keep meanin to underline em. Yer next neighbor’s in five, but sometimes they come late, so no promises.”
WE COULD SEE our breath as we walked from the car to cabin nine. The smell of autumn was heavy here with its undertones of smoke and rot. I set the radio down just outside the cabin and Dora handed me the key. We looked at each other as I fit the key in the door, but then I let the key hang and took both of her hands in mine. I looked down at the stump of my little finger, the badly healing ring finger. The ring was still on. Hers was, too. She took a deep breath in and out. Everything was going to be different soon, and we both knew it. I looked up again and let myself swim for a moment in her gorgeous, mismatched eyes, letting where we had just been and what we were now headed towards fall away. For just that moment she was my true wife and I was in love with her and the door was not yet open.
THE CABIN ITSELF was almost perfect; the separate bathroom had a sturdy door with a real lock on it. The only drawback was a window in the bathroom, above the clawfoot tub. It didn’t look big enough for one of them to get through, but it was hard to be sure. On closer examination, it proved to be painted shut. Yes, this just might do.
She shuddered.
“Oh, that’s bad. That feels really bad. The light’s getting weak,” she said.
“I can’t believe I’m about to lock my wife in the toilet.”
She hugged herself cross-armed and paced the floor.
“God it hurts. Would you draw a bath for me, Frankie?”
“Hot or cold?”
“Hot for the joints, cold for the skin. I don’t know. You pick. Hot. Please. No, cold. The skin’s getting worse than the bones.”
“Dora, I should get you a doctor.”
“You know better. Hurry, Frank. God it itches.”
She took Samma’s dress off so roughly that one button popped off and rolled across the wooden floor.
I started the bath.
“Where’s your gun?” she said.
“In the car.”
“Make sure you get it.”
“No,” I said, turning the spigots on.
“Frankie, if I get out you have to shoot me. You have to.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“You’ve seen what they do.”
“I know.”
“I want to do those things, too. Somewhere deep in me, but it’s rising. I want to hurt. I want to eat something that’s still alive. And if I do, I can’t go back. I’ll like it too much.”
She went into the bathroom then and I locked the door behind her.
“Don’t open it, no matter what you hear. Promise me!”
Not completely her voice. A hint too low.
I pulled the key out and looked through the hole. Her eye met mine.
“You can’t look at me like this. You can’t let me out. Even if I tell you to. It won’t be me. Promise!”
“I won’t open it.”
“Swear it!”
“I swear.”
“Go away.”
I left.
I went into the bedroom.
I thought I heard groaning.
I heard water splashing in the tub, or maybe the memory of that sound from before my ears were hurt. I felt insane.
I paced the room, jamming my hands in my pockets, thinking how like some grotesque of an expectant father I was. I went to the east window of the cabin and parted the curtain to survey the horizon. No sign of the moon yet, although the sky had gone pink and lavender where the sun’s last gasp lit the clouds from below. I could barely make out the individual shapes of trees. How the last yellow leaves clung here and there as if an artist had used a fine brush to hang them. A hint of Naples yellow against all that grey and umber.
I opened the window and let the cold air jolt me. I watched the tree line where I thought the moon would rise and I waited for it. As a child I had loved to go to the docks and watch it rise as if born from the waters of Lake Michigan. My brother had always claimed he could see it move, but I would correct him, explaining that one could almost see it move. Before I lost my r
eligion, I thought of God that way. A presence one could nearly but not quite verify.
“Eudora?”
No answer.
I turned my gaze back to the window. A rosy glow appeared through a stand of sycamores and I knew I would see it soon. It would crest through the trees red and lovely, older than love, neither cruel nor kind.
“Eudora?”
My fingers tightened on the sill and my breath came faster, pluming out into the cold air. There would be frost on the ground in the morning.
It came.
Just the lip of it, glowing through the branches.
She screamed.
“Dora!”
She screamed again.
The scream broke the word in me, my given word not to look. The part in me that responded to that sound was older and stronger than the part that made promises, even stronger than the fear of injury and death. I ran to the bathroom door and fumbled for the key. Dropped it three times before I got the key in, but I didn’t turn it.
I heard another noise then, so deep and threatening it stopped my hand. I felt the sound as much as heard it, felt it in the fingertips that rested against the doorjamb and in the ones that held the key.
I pulled the key out.
I looked through the keyhole.
I never should have done that.
She was in the tub.
She was halfway through it.
Her body had become long and canine. Her breasts were still hers, and they had multiplied. Her skin kept splitting and re-forming itself, so blood and tissue dropped from her. The worst part was her face. Because it was still her face, only her mouth was full of horrid, sharp, outsized teeth.
How like a Sphinx.
Then she spoke, only it wasn’t her voice at all.
She could barely speak through those teeth.
She panted between the words.
“You let me out . . . You let me out NOW.”
I mouthed the word “no” but no voice came out of me.
She looked into the keyhole.
Blood was welling in her eyes.
Still a woman’s face on a monstrous body.
“I hate you. Everything. You’re afraid I liked . . . I liked. Let me out and I’ll tell you . . . about it. You let me out . . . you sorry fuck. You sorry, sad FUCK.”
Those Across the River Page 23