Those Across the River

CHAPTER FOUR

RIVER’S FAR AS I’m goin today,” Lester said.

We had both hiked a good hour through the pine and red clay woods that aproned the town, but now we were up against a river with rock-shelf banks and lazy brown water that looked deep in the middle. A simple raft sat up on the rocks with a guide rope stretching across the river for pulling.

“Yer welcome to use the ferry so long as you cross back with it, too, and put it back up on them rocks. Nobody wants to go wadin this time a year for all the moccasins.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s very nice of you to show me around.”

I had met Lester the day before. It had seemed like good politics to get around to a few of the little stores bracketing the town square and introduce myself. Lester worked with his brother and a hired boy at Gordeau’s feed shop, which his father owned. The siblings were white-blond and lanky, and Lester was friendly as hell and curious about the wider world.

Lester had not only walked the several miles from town with me; he had even indulged me while I used my wife’s camera to take a few photographs of a burned-down house we passed on the trail. I was so excited about the prospect of photographing the plantation, should I ever find it, that I had fashioned a little darkroom under the stairs so I wouldn’t have to be bothered about sending film away.

The house wasn’t much to look at, but I had to wonder if the Union soldiers on their way to force emancipation on the Savoyard Plantation had stopped there to get water for their horses; perhaps someone sympathetic to the rebels had stared stony-eyed at them from the porch of this ruin, now only partially visible through brush and kudzu.

Lester had told me a little bit about what lay beyond the river, but since most of his directions used flora for landmarks, I wondered how much I would really be able to remember.

Now we stared across the slowly running water.

“I don’t mind stretchin my legs for old Dottie’s kin. She was my teacher fore I stopped goin. Other kids thought she was funny in the head, but I figure she was just lonesome.”

“And you think her grandfather’s plantation house is back in there somewhere?”

“Yeah, but not nowhere close. Further than I been back, and I wouldn’t guess there was nothin left of it anyhow. Them woods is deep and mean. Course, if they was two sticks standin together, they’d be all yer’n now, seein as yer the only Savvy-yard. You play baseball?”

“Not lately.”

“Shame. I know you’re an older fella, but you still look fit’s why I asked. Hell, my pop plays sometimes, an he’s older’n God’s baby shoes. We got games in the lot on Saturdays, dependin on the crops. If I shake my tail I can still make it back. You sure you don’t wanna come?”

“What do you mean mean?”

“Pardon?”

“When you say the woods are mean?”

“Just stories poppas tell to scare their kids. Haint stories.”

“Would you come with me if you didn’t have a game?”

“No sir, not today.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No sir, not tomorrow neither.”

I DID GO back to town with Lester, and I did play baseball.

I took a long look at the woods before I caught up with Lester’s retreating form, and for a moment I thought I might cross the river. It was funny how much thicker and darker the woods were just across that lazy body of water, as if a march by dogwoods and maples and live oak had been halted just at the banks and now the river was a frontier between them and their smaller, less robust cousins. But I’m skirting the real reason I didn’t cross the river. I didn’t go because the woods didn’t want me in them. And I didn’t want to go alone.

The baseball game was good. Lester invited me to play on the same team with his little brother, Saul, and their father, whom everybody just called Old Man. The brothers were impressive together, both with the same corn-silk hair and easy, fluid athleticism. Normans, I thought, still spreading their strong seed west. I recognized their dad as one of the old birds bent over the checkerboard at the general store that first night. He was checking me out good. Whomever the mayor was, this was Old Man Gordeau’s town.

Turns out he was the mayor.

The captain of the other team was a carpenter named Charley Wade, and his best hitter was a curly, unattractive redhead named Pete. Those were all the names that stuck that first Saturday. Most of the rest were high school age, but I daresay most were not in school. Farm kids drop out.

I tipped one ball up so the catcher should have had it, and I even slowed to a jog when I saw how well-planted he was. Incredibly, he dropped it, and I hustled to first base, which was an old flour sack half-full of sand. I scored the first run when Lester plastered one out of the lot; it crested over the sparse trees between the lot and the town square, and thumped against the side of the hardware store. The man who owned it was the sheriff. He came out and threw it back. Good arm on him despite his potbelly.

I walked home happy with dust and clay on my shoes and my hand still reeking of the mitt I borrowed.

I would try the woods another day.

That evening I chopped wood in the backyard while Dora cooked. I still had to wear gloves, but my city-boy hands were getting a little tougher. Every third or fourth heft I had to swab my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes, but I soon incorporated that into the rhythm. If I had known a good sea shanty I might have sung one.

My mind drifted to the Savoyard side of my family.

Had I really come from them?

It was as if they got weaker and more deranged with every generation. The one who fought with Napoleon sired the one who got rich in New Orleans. Who sired Lucien, my great-grandfather.

Heft, chop.

Heft, chop.

When his father died, Lucien came back from school overseas—though I have been unable to find out where—to inherit. No love lost. He didn’t even come to New Orleans, just handled everything through an intermediary and bought the land in Georgia to ride the cotton boom. And speculate in slaves.

Then he fought for the Confederacy.

Just after the war, he wouldn’t turn his slaves loose. The Federals tried to make him, but he got men from Whitbrow and Morgan to help him drive them off. The slaves revolted and murdered him, as well as his wife and overseers. And the dogs they used to chase them with. And the horses. They chopped them all up and put them in a common pit, and burned them. I imagine they would have sewn the earth with salt if it had occurred to them.

Heft, chop. Wipe.

Then Louis, my grandfather. Savoyard’s bastard. What people around here call a no-account, the closest thing Whitbrow had to a town drunk. He lived off the money Lucien had given his mother to leave him alone, and when that was gone, and the town had begun to talk about why his daughter Katherine had left at fifteen, he had the good taste to turn yellow and die of cirrhosis. He had no face in my mind’s eye, as if a cloud of flies had gathered where his face should have been. Perhaps I just couldn’t assign an identity to him knowing, or at least powerfully suspecting, what he had done to my mother. The faceless pedophile.

A cloud of flies, and flies for his eyes.

His other daughter, Dorothy, married well and prospered here in town. It was largely because of her reputation that I was not looked askance at, as I might have been had Louis been the last word on what a Savoyard was.

Heft, chop.

Heft, chop.

But to hell with that.

Heft, chop.

I was a Nichols.

Wipe.

I didn’t have to look south to see why I liked booze.

“Honey?” Dora said, smiling at me from the doorframe, her hair matted to her head. “Are you talking to yourself again?”

“Heavens, yes.”

“Well, finish your conversation and get washed up. There’s a chicken here that’s dying to meet you.”

She slipped back inside and let the screen door hit.

I took one last look at the pile of wood I had chopped, then put my axe down and retrieved my glasses from the tree stump where I had lain them. It really was a beautiful summer evening.

The light was peach colored through the trees towards the west.

The crickets were singing hard.

I got out a cigarette and had just opened the hood of my lighter when a mosquito whined in my ear.

I put the cigarette away and went inside.

I wasn’t used to them yet.