Those Across the River (4 page)

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.

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.

R
IVER’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.

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.

D
EAR MISTER AND Missus Nichols,’” Dora read aloud from a note in her hand. She was standing in the doorway to the bedroom where I had slept in yet again. “‘Welcome to Whitbrow. I hope that you will attend the Social tonight so you can meet your neighbors who want to meet you. Signed, your neighbor, Ursula Noble.’”

“Who is she?” I said, sitting up and involuntarily making what I recognized as an old man noise as I did. I was sore from baseball.

“Not a Greek, but bearing gifts all the same,” she said, setting a basket beside me. I blinked at it uncomprehendingly, then looked in it the way a little boy might examine a defunct wasp’s nest. No wasps, but two chicken eggs, a few horehound candies and a generous offering of wildflowers tied together with a blade of tall grass.

“She’s the eldest daughter of the neighbors, a short walk up the road away from town. It’s the only other house as nice as this one. Her dad owns the barbershop and that last filling station we passed just before we got off the highway. Ursie. Cute name. She fell all over herself introducing herself to me in town while you were being a Chicago Cub.”

“Is she going to be one of yours?”

“Yes. She’s fourteen. Doesn’t write so badly, even if she leaves out the occasional silent g.”

“Hmm,” I said, trying to decide if this was going to be some drab church function.

“I want to go,” Dora said.

“Really?”

“Sure. What else are we going to do?”