Those Across the River

CHAPTER THREE

BY AND BY I slept.

And, alas, I dreamed.

Not of the trench fight; that was the worst.

And not of Metzger’s death, which was nearly as bad.

But I did dream of the trench.

Something about a gas attack, and I couldn’t find my mask. But there was a dead guy half in the mud gripping his mask in his hands, and I couldn’t get it loose. I was holding my breath and jerking at it, and pulling at his fingers, but they were like iron, even though his head was lolling. He was being stubborn. I was going to die. I woke up gasping.

But I hadn’t yelled; Dora was still sleeping.

Morning?

Yes, morning.

It was dark, but the roosters were going at it.

Goddamn roosters.

How did I end up in Georgia?

I stuffed the pillow over my eyes and ears and just lay there for a long time, still mad at the dead guy who wouldn’t let me have his mask.

WHEN I WOKE up the second time, I smelled bacon.

My stomach pulled me downstairs to investigate, and there was Eudora frying up breakfast; now that I was good and close I could hear the sizzle. I slipped my arms around her waist from behind while she slid three fried eggs onto a plate that already held bacon.

“Whose bacon is this?” I said.

“Roosevelt’s bacon. What a question. And he stood up straight and chopped the wood for the stove, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank the president.”

“Really, where did it come from?”

“Pigs, of course.”

“You’ve been to town.”

“What else was a girl supposed to do with her morning while her gentleman-friend slept? Moving all that furniture must have worn you out. It’s nearly noon.”

“I didn’t see any bacon at the store.”

“Neither did I. So I inquired. What a funny little town. Do you know, the butcher’s shop is also the secondhand shop? Dresses and the like, all in the back part of the building. You can get nylons and pork chops all in the same trip. And not just pork chops. Game, too. They really like to know who they’re eating around here; mostly everything still had a head on it.”

I remembered my dream from last night and stopped chewing for a moment. Movement caught my eye and I watched a spider make his way across the ceiling towards the top of a cabinet. Dora looked up, too.

“Are you going to kill that for me?”

“It eats the bugs.”

“It is a bug.”

“I’m feeling magnanimous.”

“I’m not. I’m a fascist,” she said, knocking the spider down with a broom and stepping on it.

“Maybe that fellow had a mother. Did you think about that?”

“He should have written more.”

I chuckled.

“Speaking of writing, are you going to drop Johnny a note and let him know we’re in safe?” she said.

She was fond of my little brother. So was I. So was everyone. I might have gotten the height in the family, but he was the charmer; and deadly with the ladies. Many nights Dora lay next to me in our narrow, borrowed bed, giggling because she said she could hear Johnny making some little bird coo upstairs. He was like the Prince of Chicago, bartending at the Drake.

“I’ll write him a few lines today.”

“He didn’t want us to come here, Frankie.”

“The bacon is really good.”

“Did he?”

“Is there pepper?”

“On the counter.”

I fetched the pepper.

“Did he?”

“No,” I said.

And he wasn’t the only one.

Dear Orville Francis,

My name is Dorothy Mccomb, older sister to your mother, Katherine, I doubt whether you have heard much of me owing to the troubles your mother had with our father who was ----- to her, and owing also to her desire to leave this town and never to return, and cannot say as I blame her and envied her for her strength in cutting herself loose from Whitbrow which is and shall always be bloodied, though they leave us be for now.

I would have left you alone, but i am sick with the cancer, it is in my stomach and the medicine stopped helping; but do not fear for me as I have made my peace and have not long to suffer, my husband and our two children, one drowned, one had his heart outside him, born dead, have gone before me,

Soon you will be contacted by my attorney mister Stowe. He will have you to Atlanta for a reading of my last will and testament which names you Orville franknichols as the heir to my house and possessions and some little money that I have saved back, your brother john jacky/ will get the larger share of the money, since the house is yours, which you MUST SELL

Although I know nothing of your character, i can only assume that you are a good man if anything of my sister passed to you & for that reason i ask you to sell this house and to remain where you are, or in some other place. mister Stowe will see to the sale; although you must not expect to have what a house of this qualitie might fetch in another town I have it painted and fixed up so that it might lure another, but not you frank NNichols frank please do not make this your home you might think that a man of your worldliness would go stale in such a place as this frank but that is not what will happen, if you come, there is bad blood here, and it is against you (YOu) for no fault of your own & you will not have time to go stale in whitbrow. this place will smell out I fear what is in you and claim you, for its own, it, will, hug, your, bones, into, the, woods, & you will wish you had never

Katherine in a precious letter to me said she called you frankie

will you allow me frankie for a moment to imagine you as any child i never had the fortune to know frankie frankie by that sweet name.

your auntmy stomach hurts and i must stop

hopes to meet meet you in canaans land

dorothy mccomb

dottie

whom godofabraham soon fetches home

kiss you akiss where you stay wisely in the north

away from them.

That was the typed letter I got in February. It had this handwritten note paper-clipped to it:

Had I received this missive in Ann Arbor when I was teaching and everything was ducky, I would have certainly taken my estranged aunt’s advice and stayed away. An unusual thing happens, though, when a man has been long enough without work; he gets superstitious. After months of polite rejections from universities who already had a full history department (or claimed to; Dora’s husband had pull at campuses from here to the Philippines) and further months scraping together a few bits between tutoring and day labor, I was ready to look for auguries in pigeon droppings. Dora was making out all right as a hostess at the Drake, and we had a roof over our heads thanks to Johnny, but what’s that old saw? “Narrow is the stair and hard is the bread in another man’s house,” especially when it’s your little brother. I think that’s Dante. Or Petrarch. One of those hoary old Guineas. Dora’s ex would know.

Suffice it to say that the letter arrived in the mailbox with the force of prophecy; one more letter followed, in which a Mrs. Muncie informed me that my Eudora would be offered a job teaching at Whitbrow’s school, as my aunt once had, provided “Mrs. Nichols” could supply a teaching certificate. She could, I explained, although under the name Chambers because of a “paperwork error.”

I determined at once that we should go to Georgia, live rent-free in the warmth and fresh air, and get our feet under us again. Eudora was reticent. She would have preferred to do as my aunt had suggested, but she agreed that our other options were pretty skinny; we were both educators, but she was inexperienced and I was disgraced. Moreover, everyone in the Midwest who had a job was holding on to it with white knuckles. There were so many hard-up professors and teachers in Chicago that I couldn’t get full-time work in anything better than a cannery (that lasted two weeks), and her teaching certificate wasn’t worth a cup of coffee.

This way, she would have a job, we would have a home, and I would have a project that just might unlock a prosperous future for us both.

That is why and how, in the summer of 1935, we settled into our rural castle.

And, oh what a kingdom it overlooked.