Those Across the River

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.

I stood in the back holding Dora and looking at that awful little box that held a boy in it. It was covered in wildflowers that the girls of the town had gathered and plaited into a wreath. That the flowers looked too much like the ones the pigs had worn was a truth nobody needed to speak aloud.

MILES FALMOUTH SHOT his pigs that night.

Just leaned on his cane and shot every one of them, hogs, sows and piglets. Nobody tried to stop him or ask him why. When the squealing and the gunshots were done, he looked at the faces of the several neighbors who had come and said, “Y’all can take what you want. Cut em. Smoke em. Make cracklins, I don’t care. Just don’t bring none of it round here. I got no more use for them sumbitches.”

His wife and the girls stayed with the neighbors that night.

And the next night, too.

NEWS OF THE shooting of the pigs did not reach Dora and me until later because we got up and drove away. Not for good. Just for the day. We did not pack the car.

I proposed the trip while I brewed coffee in the kitchen and heated water for oatmeal.

“And exactly where are we driving?”

“North. As far north as we can go and still make it back by dark. I want to get this town off us for a couple of hours. Maybe if we do that we can make a firewall between what just happened and the rest of the year. God, I just want to wash it off.”

She came up and hugged me from behind, kissing the back of my neck and saying, “Yes. Thank you, yes.”

So we got in the car with the clothes we wore and a little money and an old wine bottle filled with water and we drove out of town pulling a cape of dust behind us. We drove north with no map and stayed on the highway past the intersection that would have led us to the mill town.

Not far past there we were nearly hit by an ice truck. It had been swerving and going twenty miles an hour so I went past it with my hand on the horn ready to blow it if the truck lumbered over at us, which of course it did. I laid on the horn and the very old man behind the wheel of the truck guided its bulk back onto his side of the road without ever losing his expression of bewilderment. He never even looked at us. It wasn’t in me to yell or make an uncivilized gesture at the old bird, so I just waved a little as I passed.

I felt Dora’s small hand on my thigh. She leaned close and smelled my neck. “You smell like soap,” she said, then rested her head on my shoulder. For just that little while there wasn’t any other place I wanted be, and life was sweet and foreign like the taste of a mango.

It came to be two o’clock, the time at which we agreed to turn around, and I pushed it another fifteen minutes, doing nearly sixty where the road was good enough. But at last I stopped, as if an unseen leash had pulled taut. We came to a filling station and the attendant pumped gas and checked the oil and the water and found it easy to talk me into buying a bag of pecans.

We turned around then and I headed for a pretty, shaded place I remembered from the way up and we sat on the grass and ate, not saying much. The engine ticked under the hot bonnet. When we kissed, it was not like a married couple about to make love, but like teenagers not sure if they should go any further. We decided without speaking not to spend that heat, but to bottle it and take it home with us, so we petted awhile longer before I let her back into the car.

I turned the car around on the shoulder so we could look north one last time while the birds chirped and the hot wind blew and sometimes cars moved by us in one direction or another. Beyond the horizon lay the Northern trees, whose leaves were ready to redden, and the Northern fields, preparing to go tawny and brown, and somewhere even farther the factories that made snow checked their tooling and their rosters, knowing it would not be so very long now.