Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EUDORA DIDN’T WANT me to go across the river on Wednesday.

  “Those woods aren’t friendly,” she said. This as I laced up the hiking boots I had just oiled.

  I played dumb.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it that pig business?”

  “Partly, I suppose. It makes me wonder what else goes on around here.”

  “I understand they tie a nude virgin to the back of a bull to celebrate the equinox.”

  “Oh. Well, I needn’t worry about that.”

  “Unless they ask you to be the bull. Stubborn thing.”

  That was a mistake.

  “Who’s stubborn, Orville Francis? No, I mean it. You’re going no matter what I say or do. If I hung myself on the front porch, you’d just leave out the kitchen door.”

  “Now you’re talking nonsense,” I said. “We have no rope.”

  She just sighed at that.

  “Would you feel better if I took a pistol?”

  “Worse.”

  “May I take your little Brownie camera? I’ll get a picture of the bogeyman for you.”

  “Fine. I don’t care what happens to you anymore; you’re too difficult. But have my camera home by dark.”

  I left soon after that, but her disapproval kept eating at me all the way up to the river.

  Why?

  Because she’s right.

  As I hiked along the path Lester had shown me, I mused about Dora and how she might be spending her day. If there had been anyone around to bet, I would have wagered my best pair of shoes that she was in the study nosing around in my affairs. Not that I minded. I had nothing to hide from her, and a woman who doesn’t snoop after her man is either highly moral or doesn’t care enough. Eudora Anne Chambers, née Morton, was not highly moral. Most probably she was leaning back in my leather chair with my photograph box open on her lap, sorting through pictures from before I met her. She did that a great deal. She was especially fond of pictures of my mother, whom she only knew through photographs.

  My mother was uncommonly photogenic. Portraits from around the turn of the century usually made people come off stiff and dolllike because they had to hold their expression so long. Not so with Mother. She gave herself to the lens as if she knew she wouldn’t last, and so entrusted it with a disproportionate share of her being. She stares back from photographs as though trapped alive in them. The most striking one shows her in Atlanta just before she came to Chicago with the touring company; she was playing the title role in a translation of Racine’s Phaedra, looking very much the vengeful seductress with her high cheekbones and penetrating eyes. They were the eyes of a thirty-year-old. She was eighteen.

  Piecing together things my father had said in front of me while booze loosened his tongue, I believe my maternal grandfather had taken liberties with her for quite some time. It was these liberties, I believe, which had provoked her to run away from Whitbrow to Atlanta at fifteen, where she found work first in vaudeville and then with a Shakespeare troupe. A discreet but inept medical procedure during her Atlanta years had likely been responsible for her later difficulty carrying children. In one photograph of her holding me in a lacy toddler’s gown, her face bears an expression that most would take to be ecstatic distraction, but which I think may have been bewilderment.

  There were a lot of pictures in that box that Eudora enjoyed mooning over. She liked my school pictures. In one of them, Dan Metzger, John Giangrande and I were posing on the basketball court at St. Ignatius. Dan was too husky for basketball and got dropped from the team shortly after, but in that photograph he looked as proud as he could be.

  Dan was one of the friendliest and sweetest guys I ever knew. He was always half a head taller than the other kids and naturally built to carry weight, but he was soft. The meaner kids knew it and, when they could catch him alone, circled him like wolves around a bison. This never lasted too long before his friends came to help him and it turned into a proper tussle. If it was at school, Father Patterson would come out with two yardsticks taped together and scatter us. Following a general round of spankings (Father Patterson favored the backs of the thighs), it was even money whether his tormenters would get lectured for bullying, Dan would get lectured for not standing up for himself, or I would get lectured for my “flawed moral silhouette.” For a Jesuit, Father Patterson was remarkably inconsistent; I think he believed Jesus was happy as long as everyone was beaten and anyone at all was rebuked.

  When the war broke out, Dan and I signed up for the Illinois National Guard together, along with our mutual buddy from St. Ignatius, John Giangrande, whom the Poles, Irish and well-bred Anglo-Saxons of St. Ignatius had christened “Guinea-Granny” because of his name and the tiny, wire-framed glasses that were always slipping down his nose. We all had glasses, but his looked like an old lady’s, and he was unmistakably Italian, so the name stuck for good. His friends respectfully dropped the “Guinea” part, but there was no shaking “Granny.” He was two years older than us, but small and weak. He hung out with us gladly, having been socially rejected by his peers. Uncle Sam didn’t reject him, though. When the army found out how good Granny was at chemistry, they yanked him out of the 33rd Prairie and shipped him off to the 1st Gas battalion at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

  Dan and I stayed in the 33rd and went through training together stateside, both at Camp Grant and Camp Logan. He had barely made weight when we joined, but by the time he got done training he was skinnier than me. We were on that reeking ship together all the way to Brest. In short, we were inseparable from fourth grade until the shelling at Nine Elms trench on the Somme, which was in July of 1918.

  We were so goddamned eager to go.

  We were so stupid.

  I MADE THE river around two.

  Unfortunately, the raft or ferry I had seen with Lester was nowhere in sight; I had wandered off of the crossing point. I looked upriver and then downriver, but couldn’t determine which was the right way to go.

  Gordeau had said the river wasn’t very deep, but looking at it didn’t help; the surface just reflected the hazy brass sky above it while pieces of moss and sticks floated by. He had mentioned water moccasins, and I could see that the bunches of reeds and lichen-covered rocks on both banks would provide ample hiding places for such.

  “To hell with it,” I said to nobody.

  I put the camera down, removed my shoes, tucked my socks in them and waded out to test the depth of the river. The bed was mostly soft underfoot, but the mud and clay were punctuated with rocks that proved slippery; I nearly fell twice before I got to the middle and determined that it wasn’t likely to get worse than hipdeep. I returned to the bank and, deciding it was too far for me to throw my shoes across, I tied the strings together and hung them around my neck. I carried the camera up over my head and crossed; about mid-river I got a case of the giggles when I imagined I was Saint Christopher holding the Holy Babe aloft.

  What’s your name, little fellow? My, but you are getting heavy. But I shall not drop you, for I am Holy.

  Lester Gordeau’s instructions had included a landmark called Madge-Eye Rock, which was as far as he had claimed to have ever gone in this direction.

  “When you git bout a mile an a half pass the river, keepin to the trail, you’ll come to a little spring called Madge-Eye Rock. Ain’t too big, but the water out of it is cold and good drinkin, sept that taste like it come out of a skillet. S’pose to be bad luck to drink out of it, or not to drink out of it, I cain’t recall. They’s all kind a stories bout them woods pass the river.”

  “Magi,” I said when I saw it, “as in Three Magi.”

  I had spent some time during my walk trying to puzzle out what a madge-eye could be, but now it was clear what the christener of the spring had seen; three separate but connected shelves of rock rose to chest level, each of them producing a small trickle of water that drained off into a sort of sink. Orang
e stains beneath the spigots and in the sink testified to large quantities of iron in the water, which I tasted when I cupped my hand beneath the central spigot and put it to my mouth.

  Cold.

  The source was deep.

  I had tasted water from such a well, years before, in England, where I had convalesced after my injury in France. My dad had pulled strings so I got a good long leave overseas before I came home for decommissioning.

  Everything in England was so tidy, though. America was the wild one now. The rock shelf wore a crown of ferns and moss, and, behind the spring, on the higher level, rocks jutting out from beneath the topsoil suggested a tail pointing deeper into the woods. It was pretty here.

  I filled my canteen.

  I pressed on another hundred yards. What I saw then did not precisely frighten me, but it made me uneasy. Pine trees had begun again to compete with their deciduous cousins, and two of them stood on opposite sides of the trail, like columns. Like some sort of gate.

  They had both been gouged.

  I mused that in colonial days the great pine forests of the South had been treasuries for resin, pitch, tar and turpentine, but that the British navy held American pitch in some contempt, for it was too hot and burned the ropes. I knew that sap was gathered by making slaves notch the trees on both sides and take from them until the trees died and could be burned to make tar.

  These two pines did not bear the marks of agriculture; they had been savaged. Just at the level of a grown man’s trouser pockets. No saw or axe had done this, but I was hard-pressed to say what had. I did not know if the gouges were intended to discourage further exploration, but looking at them gave me a curious feeling in my groin.

  I kept going.

  Soon after that I lost the trail and stumbled into a patch of nettles. They barbed the hell out of me, even through my pants, before I managed to peel myself free and continue on. I would have to stay more focused; I couldn’t afford to lose time if I intended to find the battlefield, which Lester said his daddy told him was a half mile north of the trail two or three miles past Magi Rock, “in some young birch and dogwoods where they mix up with pine.”

  I felt embarrassed about losing the trail. Martin Cranmer was right about my woodsmanship; I was a Chicago boy through and through, awkward and top-heavy in the woods. What’s more, it was no mean feat for me to even enter a forest after the Argonne. I had worked on that in Michigan, taking long walks alone in the woods near Ann Arbor, even if I had to get boozed up to do it; it wouldn’t have done for a grown man to spend the rest of his life getting the tremors every time he was surrounded by trees, afraid the next snapped twig would be followed by the bark of a machinegun nest opening up. By and by it had gotten better.

  I thought about Cranmer crouching in the trees near the burntdown house. Or was that a conceit on my part, imagining Martin had to crouch to avoid my notice? But then, Lester hadn’t seen him, either. Dora had not seemed to like Cranmer very much. Had she gotten an extra earful of gossip about him when she was in town?

  While I was musing on the war, Martin and Dora, I worked at removing a sticker that had gone deep into the heel of my hand. All I did was drive it deeper; I would have to dig for it later with whiskey and a pocketknife.

  When I looked up, I saw that I had lost the trail again.

  This time was worse because I had no idea how long it had been since I went astray. I turned around 180 degrees and marched with my eyes fixed on the forest floor, hoping I would recognize the trail again when I crossed it. A distressing amount of time passed before I noticed a recession and turned right, praying it would start to look path-like. It did.

  I stopped and crouched down on my heels for a moment to rest. I took a long, cool swig from my canteen, delighting in the taste of the iron. I thought back to my days in Glastonbury, England. Somerset County, where clotted cream on a scone was the culinary equivalent of a naked girl in a field of wildflowers.

  I had worked several weeks for the gardener at the Chalice Well. Less for the money than for an excuse to linger around that odd little town. The spigot in the well had been made in the shape of a lion’s head, and the water had been clean and cold and rusty, just like the water out of Magi Rock. There was a cat that used to nose my hand as I weeded or pruned, the cat the girl I was sleeping with called Bully because it bore the marks of so much fighting. My own wounds had still been fresh then, particularly those inside, but the waters of the well had helped to make me whole. I believe that. And I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something to the stories about that place. I met other veterans there, too; the Chalice Well called the walking wounded to it. I had been twenty then, and I had liked to imagine the waters of the spring below running over the bones of Arthur and Guinevere, bringing their strength to those who needed it. Twenty years old and through with God—whose ears I believed had numbed with too much prayer, or deafened from the noise of shelling—I had asked that place to heal me, and it had.

  Mostly.

  This forest was a place, too, the way Glastonbury had been a place.

  There was something powerful here, something beyond the reach of lightbulbs and combustion engines.

  It was soon after I got going again that I began to feel watched.

  I stopped.

  It was around five o’clock. The day’s heat had reached its zenith and was easing off at last. The shadows had just begun to stretch. The feeling that I was being supervised was so intense it made the back of my neck feel warm.

  I stopped and opened my mouth, which I often did to help my blighted hearing. I adjusted my glasses. I even tried to engage my nose. Nothing moved. I heard only the cruder noises; birdsong and the screeching of a squirrel warning its neighbors, whether about me or something else, I did not know. I smelled the stone-littered, black soil of the forest, how fecund it was. Trees in all their variety pushed sap, and summer flowers peddled their fragrances to the summer air; the drought that was parching half the state had not come to Whitbrow, as if the tops of these trees gouged the rain clouds and bled them out before they could save the farms over the county line.

  I started walking again, minding the diminished undergrowth that comprised the trail, but keeping part of my awareness on the forest around me.

  “Goddamnit, someone’s out there,” I mouthed. No one of my senses reported the presence; I simply knew I was not alone.

  Could it be one of the pigs?

  No. Pigs were not subtle. Pigs did not stalk.

  I would have to turn around soon if I wanted to be home by dark, but I was not ready to turn around yet. Some part of me craved confrontation with whatever was out there.

  Not far off to my right, crows called and took to their wings.

  There it is; we have something.

  “Salutations!” I called out.

  Was it Cranmer? I didn’t know the man well enough, after all, to know what sort of monkeyshines he was capable of.

  “Martin?”

  A tardy crow took off from the brush to join its fellows.

  Crows don’t spook easily.

  “It is I, Nanook of the North, and I come in peace,” I said.

  That was when I saw him.

  The boy stepped into view. A thin, pale mulatto just entering puberty. I knew this because the boy wasn’t wearing pants. Just a dirty shirt that stopped at his navel.

  “Hey there!” I said. “Are you alright?”

  The boy said nothing. Just stood there with one hand on a tree, looking intently at me.

  “Where are your pants, my friend?”

  Silence.

  “Fine, that’s fine,” I said, turning my gaze from the boy and continuing down the path. The boy kept his distance but kept pace with me. It was clear that he had not come forward because he had been discovered; it was simply time for me to see him.

  The two of us walked for a moment silently, the other keeping about twenty yards off the trail.

  I spoke.

  “We can play this
way if you like. You be the naked lad of the woods, and I will be the dressed man of the trail. Is it that you own no pants, or do you reject the idea of pants altogether? I can’t say I blame you. It is a hot day. Perhaps, if I had any sense, I would remove my pants and cool off a little. The thing is, I know I would feel embarrassed. But look at you; you don’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. I envy you that. Waving your pecker about in the breeze like a primal man, that’s first-class.”

  No effect.

  I stopped walking now, and so did the boy. I took a big, burlesque step to see if the one in the trees would mimic me, but the other stood still. Another clownish step, and a third, daring the apparition, but it did not move, not until I got fed up and started walking down the path again.

  The boy caught up to me easily and regained his measure.

  What in hell does he want?

  I remembered a French poilu who called one light-skinned mulatto gravedigger café au lait during those bleak days of the Meuse offensive, how I had laughed with the other soldier just to have someone to laugh with. Besides, café au lait would be shoveling dirt over our blanched faces soon enough. Café au lait. It occurred to me to shout that at the boy who was stalking me now, and I felt disgusted with myself. How easily the paint of civilization peels off with a little bad weather.

  “What do you want?” I said, walking. It was getting late. My guilt at the thought of using a racial slur gave way again to exasperation.

  “Just say something!”

  I tried to fight back my anger. What if the young man was a deaf-mute, or retarded? No. He had heard every word I said, and there was nothing dull about that gaze.

  I was never going to make it back if I didn’t turn around soon. I did not want to be out here in the dark, especially not with that boy. I didn’t want the boy near me anymore.

  “Get out of here!” I shouted. “What the hell are you looking at, anyway?”

  I stopped, and the other did, too. Yes, here it came. I was losing my temper.