Those Across the River

CHAPTER SIX

IN THE LAST minutes of daylight, Dora and I drove the Model A into town and parked it not far from where the main road had been closed off by tables. We kicked up a little dust as we went by, and people stared at us, but more because cars were such a rare species out here than because we put grit in the lemonade. Tables had also been set up on the patchy lawn in front of the courthouse, and, as the last of the sunlight bled away, I noticed an eclectic mix of lanterns hung from lines strung between trees. As soon as it was fully dark, musicians started in with fiddle, guitar and triangle. Teenagers and younger marrieds took to a wooden dancing platform I hadn’t even noticed on the lawn and danced, but soon couples of all ages crowded on.

I watched the dancing long enough to see that they favored a sort of two-step, then I pulled Eudora up and we danced until we were soaked. We made a good impression, and soon we were off the floor and talking with groups of our new neighbors, who were mostly interested in telling us about our other new neighbors.

I excused myself from one such group, wiping my brow with a handkerchief and dabbing ineffectually at my shirtfront. I walked past empty plates that had briefly held sandwiches and fried tomatoes, past a plate of grey-looking sausages with a quartet of flies buzzing around them, and then I wandered near a plate of salted fish. I inspected them to see if any one of them looked better than its fellows. None did. A small boy walked over, looking first at the fish and then up at me.

“No, you go ahead,” I said. The boy took them all. A woman marched into view and glared at the boy until he replaced all but one.

“That one, too,” she said. He put it back. Then she grabbed a hank of his hair and led him off into the darkness from which they had both emerged, saying “Ain’t no Jesus here to make more of em. You better learn that sometimes people’s jest bein polite. Don’t you think that man was about to get him a fish afore he saw you lookin at em like a underfed dog?”

“No, Mama, he was makin a face.”

“I don’t care. You take more’n one a anything off a plate again an I’ll…”

I turned away so my worst ear was towards them, cutting off the rest. When I turned, I found that a man had come up quite close to me.

“Looks like one little brave’s getting summoned off to powwow,” the man said, adding, “Have a drink, Mr. Nichols.”

I recognized him; someone had pointed him out to me as the town’s taxidermist.

He held out a glass of what looked like watered-down lemonade, and I took it. When it got near my face, however, the smell of grain alcohol rushed at me like something that had been too long in a cage. I drank gratefully, taking a good look now at the short, tough-looking man in front of me.

“My name’s Cranmer, Martin Cranmer, taxidermist, but you already know that. I saw some of the old chickens pointing and whispering. Doubtless you’ve also learned about my cannibalism and ties to the communist party.”

Young John Brown, I thought suddenly, struck less by the man’s hooked nose than by the drilling grey eyes that hinted at some denomination of madness. A lush but forbidding dark beard mostly hid Cranmer’s mouth and stood out in contrast to his suit, which was cream-colored, short at the wrists and crotch, and so ill-fitting generally that it might have been sent mail-order two sizes small and not returned out of indifference. It also looked innocent of professional attempts to clean it; stains on the sleeves were subtle but numerous, some of them likely dating back to Hoover.

“Thanks for the drink,” I said, wiping my mouth with the heel of my hand. “Brother, you don’t know how long it’s been. Alright, only about ten days, but it feels like ten months.”

“I have a still. It’s a big secret I like to tell everybody.” Cranmer didn’t have the drawl everybody else in town had. He actually said I like, not Ah lahk. What was that accent? Midwestern?

“Did you get some squirrel?” Martin asked, indicating a plate with several small, roasted carcasses on them.

“Not yet.”

“Well, it might not look like much, but I peppered the little sons of bitches into a stupor, and it’s a damn sight fresher than what the butcher brought. It would kill him to give away something he could sell. I think he’s part Jew. Nothing against the Jews, except they like their money and they killed Jesus, but if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have anything to sing about on Sundays.”

I laughed.

Martin continued.

“I wanted to say hello earlier but you and the young lady were having a fine old time dancing. I was sure the fiddle player would wear out before you two did. Of course, Sully only has one testicle, and it’s natural to assume a fellow in that condition would have diminished stamina, although that’s not necessarily true. Sully’s still burning up that fiddle. They say he cut one off to stay out of the war. He should have done what I did and hid in the woods. Anyway, that’s immaterial. All I meant to say is, it’s good to see people really enjoy each other.”

“Have you met my wife?” I said.

Did Cranmer raise his left eyebrow just a little?

“Later,” he said. “It looks like she’s occupied.”

Eudora was standing with Ursie and her parents, moving her hands as she spoke. She sensed my gaze and smiled brightly at me without interrupting her speech.

“Quite a bond between you two,” Martin said. “Shines, it really does. I like that.”

“Are you a married man?”

“What do you think?”

“I think a wife wouldn’t let you keep that beard.”

“Good! An honest man. Me, too. Honesty’s why I like hookers. Have to ride a fuck-all long way on my bicycle for that, though.”

“I haven’t done that since the war,” I said.

“What, ride a bicycle?”

“That either.”

Martin chuckled, then took a tin of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, lighting two of them and passing one to me as if it were sacred. He had rolled them himself, and the tobacco was so strong my throat would hurt all night from it.

“Thank God some new meat showed up in town. Not your lady. I mean you. I mean conversation. Quite honestly, you’re the only reason I put on this ape suit and pedaled out here.”

“I’m flattered.”

“They say you’re educated. A professor of history. Me, I’m self-educated. I like books. I like to talk about books. No offense, but most of the God-fearing folk around here have trouble reading a can of soup. I mean, they’ll whip your biscuits in a game of checkers at the general store, and most of them can quote Genesis and Exodus alright, but chess is right out. The most political they ever got was when half of them wrote letters to Sears and Roebuck when they switched the catalog to glossy paper.”

“Why did they care?”

“Because they had to go back to wiping their asses with corn.”

I laughed.

“So does a self-educated man find satisfaction in the preservation of dead animals?”

“Satisfaction? Not exactly. But when I make a good mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let thus and such critter be dead, and I said, ‘Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.’ Are you a devout man, Mr. Nichols?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Excellent. We might be friends. But we won’t hunt together.”

“I don’t hunt.”

“I know.”

“Excuse me?”

“You make a lot of noise and you don’t see or hear too well. Don’t be offended. You’re a fine dancer. I dance like you hunt.”

“You figured all this out tonight?”

“Not tonight. Yesterday. I was setting a trap near the Wheeler house, you know, the place that burned down. There’s a rabbit warren nearby. Anyway, there you came with Lester, stepping on every twig and dried leaf you could find like the whole world was your friend, taking pictures with that little camera. Look close when you bring those pictures out; I’m probably in one of them.”

Cranmer told me how to get to his cabin and left me with a standing invitation to play chess. He did not speak to anybody else, although he nodded at Lester Gordeau and made a troll face at a towheaded boy who stared at him too long. And then he clambered onto a bicycle and pedaled off into the night. I pictured Martin walking the bike through the rough terrain of the forest in his mismeasured suit, but the image did not make me laugh. No image of Martin Cranmer in the woods seemed improbable. He looked like he had been carved from the hardest tree in them.