Those Across the River

CHAPTER TWO

I WENT FOR a walk. The tree shadows stretched long and fingerlike on the dirt road that led into Whitbrow as the last light of the day spilled from the west. The few houses that lined the road were really little better than shacks, but even they looked worthy of portraiture with that amber glow washing over their pine-board and tin. Sometimes a dog would bark. Sometimes a face would appear and then recede behind the mosquito screen of a window. Once, a bony hand struck a match whose jab of flame then twinned itself on the wick of an oil lamp.

A barn owl sat on a branch pretty high up and turned its head to watch me. It noiselessly flew off into the deeper woods. Maybe I was so handsome it just had to tell somebody.

Even at twilight this place was hot. This wasn’t my first time in the South; Camp Logan in Texas had been hotter, but I had also been drilling in full kit and crawling and shooting on the range. On the other hand, I was nineteen, and that makes a difference. On this first day in Whitbrow I was thirty-six and starting to feel it. I had always been trim, but lately I had gotten just a little thicker around the waist. The sweat from my back was beginning to sop my shirt and trickled tentatively down the crack of my backside. Look away, Dixieland.

I was hungry.

I had little hope of finding anything open in this burg, but there was light coming from the general store. It sat just off the main square, up on blocks like the houses, asymmetrical in build—almost a trapezoid—and leprous with flaking white paint. A single kerosene lamp, wild with moths, backlit a sign that the failing light outside still allowed me to read: CLOSED. PLEASE CALL AGAIN! Sign or no sign, people were moving around in there. I put my face up to the greasy front window and saw some men bent over a checkers game, and another man hovering over them. He was missing an arm.

One of the checker players, a very fat man, noticed me and came to the door, the top corner of which struck a small, tattletale bell when opened.

“You must be Dottie McComb’s kin,” said the big man, who seemed to float like a zeppelin in his apron.

“That’s right. Orville Francis Nichols, but Frank’s just as good.”

I gave the fat man my hand and knew when I saw him swallow it in his that he intended to give me one of those unfair, porterhouse steak squeezes around the fingers that doesn’t allow a proper grip in return. I was right, but I made a point of not wincing.

“Paul,” he said.

“A pleasure, sir. Are you all closed up, then?”

“Yeah, but it don’t matter when the boys are over.”

Two very old boys looked at him from mismatched chairs and nodded in acknowledgment. A younger, round, tough-looking fellow sat near the iron stove, which had sand around its base.

“Mind if I look around?”

“Suit yourself,” he said, holding the door open for me while I brushed past his belly on the way in.

The shelves were mostly bare. Hard times here like everywhere else. Molasses. Lard. Rice. Eggs. Flour. A few cheeses. The tobacco shelf was well stocked, though, with Prince Albert and Red Man and bags of roll-your-own from local farms. A stack of straw hats on the counter leaned towards a jar teeming with pickles. Tongs sat in a green puddle on a plate.

On a shelf behind the register, a stuffed badger rearing up to do battle with an unseen foe neighbored with a serene-looking stuffed bobcat. Next to them, a stuffed dog had somehow been manipulated so it looked as if he were seated cross-legged on a stump, playing a small banjo. A deer’s head stared above everything as if omnipotent. All had penciled-in price tags hanging from them.

“Sir, I don’t see any wine here,” I said.

“Don’t see none cause I don’t sell none. Like to, but cain’t. You in a dry county.”

One of the old boys said, “Been a dry county ever since that tent revival come in nineteen and twelve, before the proheebishun. Snake handlin and all that. Paul remembers.”

“Yeah, Paul. Why dint you git in there and grab you a rattler?”

“Too fat. They’d a caught on me.”

“Not if you had enough Jesus in you.”

“I ain’t never had enough Jesus I wanted to grab no rattler.”

“Say,” the one-armed man said to me. “Ain’t your wife that pretty new teacher takin Dottie’s place over to the school?”

“You know damn well she is. You the one tole me,” Paul said.

“Don’t hurt none to ask. Just makin conversation.”

The first old boy said, “You want wine, Mr. Teacher’s Husband, you want to go on to the mill town in Caffery County. We in Morgan County here. All we drink is the blood of the Redeemer.”

“Didn’t the good book say the Lord turned water into wine?” I said.

“Yessir. Wedding at Cana. Round here we don’t turn no water into wine. Just corn into shine.”

The tough-looking man, who had been silent the whole time, looked up at Paul and said, “You gonna move a checker?”

ON THE WALK home I thought about how light the sack felt without a bottle of burgundy in it. Just pears, cheese, bread, eggs and coffee for the morning. No sugar. Dora would be sad about that with her sweet tooth, but not as sad as I would be without wine to help me sleep. I had a taste for it ever since I was a boy, when Father let John and me drink a glass each at the table. Mother had already died by then trying to push out a dead daughter, and Father dove headfirst into a bottle. He had good taste in booze, though, and the money to acquire it; the hutch was always full of wines from France with their mysterious labels. The more alluring bottles, though, held strange liquor and cordials, amber colored and ruby and clear. These were forbidden. They were part of the grown-up world, along with pipe tobacco and mustache trimmers and the gun above the hall mirror that I couldn’t reach without a chair. But Papa wasn’t a mean drunk; just a sad, sleepy one. He didn’t hit much.

The one time John got the fist instead of the belt was when he stole the hutch key and got into the Grand Marnier, adding water to even out the bottle. He was shit-faced by the time Papa got home from the Cicero racetrack with his friends in nice suits. They laughed their asses off, but my father didn’t laugh. He just set about busting John a good one in the mouth, knocking him down. I didn’t have any booze; I knew better. But because I was older I still got the belt for not putting a stop to it. Hard, too. We always got it worse when Father had guests. Like they had some running contest to see who was best at whipping his kid’s ass. Come to think of it, that was the last time he ever hit me at all. This was a year before I went overseas, where I would one day recognize a bottle of Grand Marnier and drink it from the mouth of a plain-faced whore in the sixth arrondissement in Paris. I got no whipping that time, neither with belt nor solution of Mercury, but a buddy of mine in the next room was less lucky when we had to pull our britches down for short-arm inspection.

I looked up at the sky. Just enough cobalt blue lingered behind the western trees so you couldn’t call it full dark.

“My Lord Jesus drinketh wine,” I said aloud to nobody. “Quite a lot of wine. He hath a port wine nose. He walketh drunkenly with me as I march home. Left… Left… Left, right, left. Keep up, Jesus.”

THE LOCUSTS SANG hard as I walked up the path and into the Canary House. I knew by the darkness of the house that Dora would still be sleeping. I went upstairs as quietly as I could, but when I entered the bedroom she woke at the sound of a creaking floorboard and sat up, the curve of her shoulders and the crown of her head faintly outlined in the near absence of light. She gasped and swallowed before she said, “Frank.”

I recognized the pause.

She had nearly said “Stephen.”

That had been her husband, tenured professor and world-class stuffed shirt Stephen Chambers.

The first time I saw Eudora socially was at a U of M faculty luncheon where she and her spouse shared a table with a poet and two Japanese exchange students. That’s where the pretending started, with a game of stolen glances while one of the girls tried, in wobbly English, to describe the intricacies of the tea ceremony.

That girl was plainly nursing an infatuation with the poet, a carefully coiffed but metrically disappointing former protégé of Robert Frost whose work was most enthusiastically received by nonnative English readers. Meanwhile, Professor Chambers trotted Dora before his colleagues like an expensive racehorse, too impressed with himself to see that she knew it. And hated it.

She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.

We were in love before the salads came.

That had been four years ago.

The affair had lasted two.

Her first husband’s name was finally dying.

As was mine, I suppose.

Dora was barren.

NEAR MIDNIGHT, DORA was sitting up in bed reading Madame Bovary by the light of three candles burning on the nightstand. The air was damp and still. The flames barely moved. I sat up with pillows bunched behind me, eating a pear with a knife. A small plate sat balanced on my belly, wobbling gently as I breathed.

“That’s no good for your eyes,” I said.

“You’re the one who needs glasses.”

I cut a slice of pear and lipped it off the knife. Dora allowed herself a sideways glance just in time to see a fat drop of juice miss the plate and fall into the sparse hair on my chest. She blinked and cut her eyes back to the book.

“It’s better in French, you know,” I said.

“I’m sure it is for those of us who speak French.”

“Although some people find the content objectionable. Not the sort of thing that promotes marital fidelity.”

“We’ll have to take our chances,” she said. “Are you going to let me read?”

“Of course, of course.”

I took another bite of pear. She cut her eyes to watch me eat again. I swallowed, then said, “Have you gotten to the part where she poisons herself with arsenic and dies in agony?”

She closed the book.

“Orville Francis Nichols, you are a first-class son of a bitch.”

“And how you’ve learned to swear. That book is eroding your morals.”

“You have no idea,” she said, taking the pear, knife and plate from me. She cut a moon-shaped sliver and set it on her inner thigh. I raised an eyebrow. She pointed at me with the knife, then pointed at the sliver. I bent to her and ate it.

“Slower, you fiend,” she said, placing the next piece higher. I ate it. Slowly. She placed the next piece even higher. Then another. She had to move her nightgown to place the last one.

LATER, WHEN THE pear was gone and the book was on the floor, Eudora knelt over me, backlit by the candles. I was on my stomach. From the corner of my eye, she looked so powerful and beautiful in that posture that it occurred to me she might be a Sphinx.

“I like it that you let me touch your back now,” she said, and I felt her finger lightly trace the scars. Then she kissed each one. Then my left ear. She lay down on top of me now and dug my left hand from under the pillow, kissing the nub where the pinky should have been. “I wish I could make it all better,” she said.

“You do.”

“You need a shave!” She giggled, rubbing her cheek on mine. “All these little white ones like grains of sugar make you look like old man Moses. Lucky for you, your hair’s still brown. You look young and juicy when you shave.”

Now she reared up over me, straddling my back.

How like a Sphinx in her nightgown.

“It is a man,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“A man goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening.”

“Ah, but you didn’t wait for my question. Now I shall eat you by the gates of Thebes.”

“I’m game.”

“But I really do have a question.”

“Okay.”

“Are you happy? I know we’re getting on well. We always get on well. But are you… content?”

“Alright, this sounds serious. Get off me so I can see you.”

She flopped down beside me and I got my spectacles from the nightstand. One of the candles guttered behind her. I tried to see her eyes in the poor light.

“Yes,” I said. “Unreservedly happy.”

“It’s just that we’ve been running ever since Ann Arbor. I feel like Adam and Eve, thrown out of the Garden of Eden, just barely making it. Sponging off your brother in Chicago. Now you come into this house and that’s swell, really it is, and I have work… but something’s wrong.”

“Are you ashamed of me because I haven’t been working?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. Everybody’s got it tough now.”

“Are you afraid I won’t write?”

“Maybe I’m afraid that you will.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your great-grandfather, the one who owned the plantation near here.”

“Lucien Savoyard.”

“Yes. I don’t like him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Not if you write a book about him.”

“There are books about Napoleon, and he’s still dead.”

“But not completely. And I’m not sure a man who killed his own slaves for sport deserves that kind of resurrection. Even if he was a general.”

“Brigadier general.”

“I beg his pardon.”

“Then don’t think of it as a book about him. It is, of course, but it’s also about the slaves who rose up against him.”

“And killed him.”

“Yes. As he deserved.”

“With hammers and axes and homemade spears. It’s all so brutal. Only men care about these things.”

“I disagree. And it wasn’t just the men who overthrew him, at least according to the Union soldiers who spoke to the slaves when it was all done. The women took up weapons the same as the men. All of them rushed the house.”

“I would have, too, considering what he was doing. But then I wouldn’t talk about it. Or read about anything like that. Violence like that is private, don’t you think? You don’t like to talk about France.”

“No.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“There’s something to be learned here.”

“And not France? Why don’t you write about France?”

“I can’t. Someone else will, later.”

“I see. You’ll write theirs and someone who’s in diapers now will write yours.”

“It sounds silly when you put it like that.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I understand a little.”

“Think about it… A Confederate military man who refuses to free his slaves and fights off a Union detachment, only to die at the hands of a blacksmith and half-starved field hands. I think the title will really make people want to read it.”

“The Last Plantation.”

“Yes.”

“It’s good. You’ll be the boy-king of States’ War historians.”

“Yes! By God, you get it!” I laughed.

“And get a fresh start at a new university. I know how much a book will help you with that. I’m just so sorry I spoiled everything for you.”

“Dora.”

“If you’d never met me, you’d still be in Ann Arbor.”

“Lonely.”

“But a professor.”

“Cold.”

“With nice coats and firewood.”

“And some dull wife.”

“Who could give you babies.”

“I’m indifferent to babies, and they sense it. They cry at me in protest. This isn’t helping.”

“No, it’s selfish. Poor whore-of-Babylon me.”

“You’re not from Babylon.”

“I know you liked it better before. And I ruined it. I ruined your career.”

“We don’t need to talk about it, Dora-Dora. Tabula rasa, remember? Everything shiny and new. I lost one job and I took one licking. If you and I stay together, I paid cheap.”

“I don’t know if we’re done paying,” she said.

She closed her eyes and I imagined the film she was playing in her head.

BLACK AND WHITE. Jerky. A silent picture. Organist at the side. Stephen Chambers, professor of British literature, steps into the office of O. F. Nichols, professor of American history, a short walk from his own office in Angell Hall. He flings the door open. The adulteress, surprised, takes a step back from the desk of her lover. Stares at her husband. Does he know? Why else would he be here?

“STEPHEN…” in white letters on a black screen.

The husband, a shorter man than me, is breathing hard through his nostrils. Dora’s mouth opens now.

White letters, black screen: “HE KNOWS.”

Organ music. Stephen raises his pointed finger, his mouth a hole beneath his neat mustache.

“THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE IN THE HIGHER CIRCLES OF LEARNING.”

I stand up. My height goads the smaller man, who leaps around the desk as if he were playing tennis.

“NO, STEPHEN!” from Dora.

The husband strikes the lover, knocks my glasses off, strikes me again and knocks me awkwardly to the floor. Keeps striking. The lover does not raise his hands. My hands. My tie hangs over one shoulder like a tongue. Dora speaks. Please remember the white letters on the black screen.

“STEPHEN… IT IS MY FAULT!”

The camera takes my perspective now, looking up at my attacker, teeth bared under the civilized mustache, wild eyes enhanced by eyeliner, too much powder on the face.

“I WILL KILL YOU!”

My nose breaks. I have time to wonder if I have lost a tooth. The adulteress rises up behind her husband now and begins to strike him hard with the heel of her pump, and this is funny. This is so funny I laugh hard with blood on my teeth. Again and again the cuckold’s small fists flash. The shoe rises and falls. I laugh. Other professors appear at the door, assemble themselves into a totem pole of surprise; the one on top has his hands on his cheeks, his mouth a huge oval.

“STOP THEM!”

They pull the smaller man off. His hands are too badly broken for him to unmake his fists. He looks at the camera, holding his ruined hands up as evidence.

“DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?”

The organist turns to look, too.

“EUDORA… TABULA RASA.”

She opened her eyes.