Those Across the River

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.