Those Across the River

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IT WAS NEAR the end of September that Estel Blake’s shovels were stolen. The thieves made off with some picks, too, as well as some kerosene and a few score yards of rope; but the notable thing was that they took all five shiny new shovels Estel had in stock at the hardware store that served as anteroom to the sheriff ’s office.

This was better, though, Estel said. Theft was better than what August brought. Even when the theft made little sense. The thieves did not open the cash drawer, nor did they force the door into the sheriff’s office where Estel’s Colt .32 revolver hung in its belt; the money one could get for that fine gun would buy a lot of shovels.

“What were they going to do,” Estel wondered aloud at the general store, “build a canal? Go on a treasure hunt?”

At least the locks weren’t damaged. This was because he almost never locked his window. Even in hard times, Whitbrow was not the sort of place where one had to lock one’s neighbors out. Still, it was apparent that the ease with which he had been robbed stung him.

Worse, something about this seemed ominous to him, made him wonder if it was connected with the Falmouth boy’s death. Soon he was pressing his hand under his breastbone like his stomach was full of sour, hot water as he considered the possibility that the boys from Morgan had strung up the wrong man. Within half an hour he was sure a band of squatters had crept in here as quietly as weasels, confident they could bash the brains out of anyone unlucky enough to discover them.

“O Lord hear me, I pray they hung the right man,” he said, as if half a dozen of us weren’t sitting around him on the porch.

“Hear me in this, my Sweet Lord,” he said again, then moved off towards the farms nearest the square to see if anything had been seen or heard the night before.

WHEN I GOT back home from my daily job of sitting around the general store pretending to be soaking up local color for a book I was too scared to do the real research for, I found Ursie Noble sitting on my porch next to my wife. They were chitchatting, so I refilled their lemonade glasses and joined them.

I noticed the girl’s thick, Native American hair again, and the way she very consciously struggled to keep her legs in ladylike positions while she shifted around on her chair, now crossing them awkwardly at the knee, now tucking them up beside her where they didn’t fit under her hip because of her mannish boots. Ursie thirstily drank what had to be her second or third glass of lemonade, then thanked me, keeping eye contact for just that second too long. But how would I have known that had I not done the same thing? Jesus God! I laughed a little at myself and noticed I was sweating.

She’s fourteen, you jackass!

It was as if she remembered her posture at just that second, and tried to pretend a string was attached between the top of her head and the ceiling. She darted an eye at me again.

Son of a jackass! Grandson of.

A cloud of flies, and flies for his eyes.

“So how are things going with the book, Professor?” Dora said.

It was hard to tell if she was amused, vexed or oblivious. Scratch the last one; Dora was never oblivious. She was smiling just a little.

I tried to gloss past the subject of my largely unwritten white elephant, but Dora wasn’t having any; she focused her questions on the Confederate cavalry, provoking me into an impromptu lecture about which I felt very passionate until I could see that she had snared me into making myself boring to our young guest, who was now flicking around the flyswatter that had been sitting near her as if in mockery of the saber blows I had been describing.

“Have you ever seen a saber?” Dora asked Ursie.

“My great-granddaddy’s is hangin on the back wall of the fillin station,” Ursie said, now using the swatter to push her empty lemonade glass around on the table near her.

“Frank, why don’t you use that flyswatter to show Ursie how a Southern gentleman might strike from horseback with a saber?”

I was game. I got up and took the swatter, crouching a little as if astride a charger, pretending to trot. Both of them started chuckling. Then I lashed out in a deep, pretty lunge and swatted hard at a housefly, which had been resting near Dora. She shrieked and jumped marvelously (although the fly buzzed off without even a bent wing) and then both girls laughed hard, Dora so hard she got a cramp under her rib, which made Ursie laugh more.

“Can your daddy do that?” I asked, making big bug eyes at Ursie.

“Oh, Mr. Nichols,” Ursie said when she could talk. “You’re much faster than my paw with a swatter. He ain’t fast like that… Momma has to catch Sadie when she runs… Cause his belly’s big an his legs is skinny… Oh my God, I cain’t stop laughin.”

Of course, that was the moment her father chose to come up the walk. I doubted he had heard any of that, but he was a somber, serious man, and must not have thought much of a grown couple horsey-laughing with his child. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from braying again when I saw just how correct Ursie’s assessment of her father’s legs-to-belly ratio had been. With his knobby knees swimming in his trousers and his white belly pushing against the buttons of his shirt so one was open, he looked like Jack Sprat with a bun in the oven.

“Afternoon, Mr. and Missus Nichols. Hope you don’t mind if I interrupt. Now, Ursula, you get on back home. You know I got work and your mama needs help. You come back on Sunday if you feel like a visit. Sorry about that, folks; we got pests enough without this’n here drinkin up your drinks.”

“She’s been a perfect lady all day long,” Dora said, “and we’ll be glad to have her over on Sunday or any other day.”

Ursula went with her father, dragging her oversized boots in the dust as she walked, and she did not look back at us. She very consciously did not.

“SORRY I WAS flirting a little.”

“You both were.”

“You know I don’t mean anything by it, I hope?”

“No. I think you probably draw the line at college sophomores. I’m just glad I squeaked in.”

“You’re wicked.”

“Everyone’s wicked. I was worse than her at her age. It’s harmless enough. You’re the best-looking example of what a grown-up man might look like in this town. And I guess she’d like to strap on my long legs and take them for a spin, but she’ll find out pretty soon the boys will like her short legs just fine. Just the same, I don’t think I’ll want to make love tonight.”

“No?”

“I don’t think I will. I don’t entirely like the way I feel just now. I’m not even twenty-five yet. I’m not supposed to feel old. How do you do that to us? How does every one of you manage to do that to every one of us?”

After school the next day, Dora went to see Mr. Woodruff, the father of Sarah, her most promising student.

I went with her.

Sarah had not shown up again after the Falmouth boy was killed, which didn’t surprise Dora. Half of her students were still out, protecting the nest or being protected in it. Or just pulling up potatoes and okra because nobody cared about Manifest Destiny with Tyson’s skinny little ghost howling by the locust tree.

Eudora didn’t like this Woodruff man very much.

It had been he who told the class on the day that Tyson’s body was found. Just came in without knocking, barked out the news without a sliver of discretion, and took his girl off by the arm. And in that drawl so thick it sounded like he had been dropped on his head as an infant.

It would be hard to get Sarah back from such a man.

She had her lips pursed and a worry line on her brow when I knocked.

Mr. Woodruff looked at us as if he were a bear who couldn’t understand what a couple of deer were doing knocking at the entrance to his cave. The rain was coming hard, so he invited us off the dripping porch and inside. The porch with its puddles. The porch with its mosquitoes and mosquito hawks and moths and flying ants still crucified on the rusting screen, and gouges in the screen where part of it hung and made a lip. Perhaps the bugs had been left to warn others.

“How are you doing?” I said, offering him my hand, but quickly retiring it unshaken.

“I’ve come to talk to you about Sarah,” Dora offered.

He grunted.

When he finally saw that we weren’t going away, he let us into the house and we all sat in homemade chairs in the close space of the front room. The air was thick and hot and damp. Sarah looked up from the chicken she was plucking in the kitchen and peeked through the doorway, but she did not risk a hello. I guessed she never knew exactly when to speak in this house, but with her daddy it was good to err in favor of silence.

“Well, talk then,” he told Dora.

That drawl. He could have made a lullaby sound hostile.

“It’s just that Sarah is very badly missed in school. She has quite a lot of talent and she likes to learn. She…”

“She has a talent for gettin in trouble is what she has. More time she spends away from home, more trouble she gets in.”

Sarah kept plucking.

A horse whinnied somewhere out back.

Mrs. Woodruff appeared from another room and wordlessly poured a glass of tea, which she then brought to Dora. Just to Dora. No ice or sugar. Weak tea from the look of it; they were using their tea bags twice or more. I thought she might not have time to drink much before things with the father soured, but then I looked through the doorway to the kitchen and saw that Sarah was looking at Dora, grateful for any ally.

Yes, get me back in school, tell me about planets and clouds, and especially airplanes that fly all the way across the sea to France. I’ ll name the capitals of all the states right now if you will just take me by the hand out of this place.

“Mr. Woodruff, I assure you that she will get into no trouble while she’s under my watch. She’s such a good student. If you just let her finish…”

“What for? Ain’t no work.”

“Not now, but hard times come and go…”

“Ain’t been no hard times like these. These is the end times.”

“Maybe. But if not, and work picks up, you’ll be glad to have a daughter who can get herself hired anywhere she wants, and not just in a mill.”

“Please, Daddy,” Sarah said from the kitchen. Quietly. Barely as loud as the rain outside. Oh, God, to be shut up in the house with this man smoldering all day like a fire that might lick out.

He grunted.

“The other students would appreciate it, too. She’s so good at math she helps the others solve problems. Sarah really has a gift. She could be anything she wanted, a doctor, a journalist. She would have a good chance at winning a scholarship if you wanted to send her off to a women’s college…”

“Now, just hold on. I ain’t sendin her to no damn college while the other kids walk aroun bare of foot. They out back in the rain right now stickin their feet in the mud gettin ground itch is how much sense they got. We ain’t for college, and college ain’t for us. Besides which, I don’t know if you got your head out a your books to see, but we got bad news aroun here. Niggers is killin our kids. Comin right up an killin em on they own land. Now, I ain’t no cripple an I ain’t no woman an I ain’t no Yankee”—he looked at me for that—“and I ain’t scared to shoot the head off nobody comin aroun if I don’t know em. Sarah’s watched over here. Don’t seem she’s so watched over at that school with jus you, or gettin there, or comin back.”

“I understand your concern. But I promise you I won’t let anything happen to her. Or anyone get to her. They’d have to go through me first.”

That struck him as funny and he laughed in a gravelly little chuckle. It was the first appealing thing I had seen this man do.

“I know,” Dora said, “there’s not much of me to go through.”

“No, you ain’t much,” he agreed, still chuckling.

Everybody was quiet for a while, letting the rain do the talking, until at last Mr. Woodruff said, “Alright, damnit, you women gonna worry at me like a tick. Go on back, Sarah. But you, you gonna keep her outta trouble, you hear? I got your word?”

“Yes.”

“I do, now. I got your word.”

We stood up to leave, and I saw that I would be the one opening the door.

“Thanks for the hospitality,” I said, tipping my hat, for which Dora elbowed me soundly in the ribs once we were back outside in the warm rain.