Those Across the River

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 hobos 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 night? 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.”

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 shoot 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.