“I have to see it through.”
“You’re going to get killed.”
“No.”
“You’re going to get me killed.”
“Never.”
“Fine. Just you, then. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are they going to put a statue of you up by the pump well? Orville Francis Nichols, Yankee, who died that we’uns may live.”
“You’re being small.”
“Is this your chance to die in the war like you should have?”
“Stop.”
“You don’t owe him that.”
“I said let’s stop.”
“He wouldn’t want it. Dan, right?”
“I don’t like you talking about him. I don’t like you using him to get your way.”
“My way?”
“You want us to run out on these people. Something has to be done about them. The ones in the woods. They’re so vicious.”
“I saw.”
“I saw more. They’re so bad.”
“We don’t really live here, Frankie. Have you noticed? We don’t go to church with them. You go to that store and play checkers and listen to their conversations like you were looking at them through a glass, the same way you would at a pub in London or a café in France. But you don’t live here any more than you lived in France. And things are just as bad here as they were there, aren’t they?”
“Actually,” I said, genuinely surprised by my answer, “they’re not.”
“Not yet.”
“And what you said about not going to church with them. That’s not entirely true. We go to their funerals.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“And we go to their town hall. Have you forgotten that?”
She was silent.
“This is happening because of the pig ritual. We voted to stop it. We came into town and you stood in front of them and spoke your reasonable, logical words. And I believed that what you said was right. And together we put our finger on the scale, and the scale tipped. Maybe it would have anyway. But we own it now.”
She nodded a little, looking dazed.
“I suppose I see that,” she said quietly. “But that’s a principle. I don’t care that much about principles. I don’t want to find dead people in schoolhouses and wait around on the sofa wondering if you’ll be carried home and laid out on the table for me so one of those good ole boys can tip his hat and say, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ I want to have your babies, Frank. Big, healthy babies with your patient eyes and fine little wisps of hair just your chestnut brown, and I don’t even like babies.”
“Dora…” I said softly, and reached out to stroke her hair. She pulled away a little.
“I know I can’t have that. I don’t need you to tell me I can’t have that.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“But I want to make love to you as if I could. As if every time you put your seed in me it might just take anyway. I want to lay with you every night and every day I want to work a job where I feel I’m doing some good. To hell with principles. I do the best I can and if it isn’t enough I cut my losses. Sometimes you can’t win and you have to change your plan. That’s smart, isn’t it? Aren’t we smart people?”
I chewed on this for a moment.
“Alright,” I said.
“Alright, what?”
“We’ll go. I’ll ring the movers in Chicago and get them to come down. And I’ll ring Johnny and let him know he’s going to have guests again.”
She sobbed and gripped me tight again, saying, “Frankie, thank you, thank you, my love, thank you.”
I NAPPED BRIEFLY on the couch but did not fully sleep. Dreams like muddy fish drew close, then darted off, and I was glad to let them go.
Where are your pants, my friend?
I thought about how good the boy had been at throwing stones. Did he hunt birds that way? He threw the first stone when I had pointed the camera.
But I did take that picture. It had been waiting in the guts of the camera for me to remember it and to have the courage to develop it.
I quit trying to sleep now and went to the little darkroom I had made for myself in the closet under the stairs.
It was nearly two when the picture came out. Blurry but identifiable. Just beginning to crouch for the stone, his right arm drawn across his body. Farther away than I remembered. Some part of me had hoped the image wouldn’t come in. That I had dreamed it. But it wasn’t so.
I would go to see Martin Cranmer the next day and I would ask him who the boy in the picture was, or what. And if I got no real answer I would not speak to the man again.
I rang the movers that afternoon and found that they couldn’t get a truck down to Georgia for a week. Dora was crushed, but a week didn’t seem so long to me, especially since we would need time to pack.
“Let’s use our time wisely,” I said. “Let’s go to the courthouse and ‘git hitched’ the weekend before they come.”
“Really, Frank?”
“Really.”
“No, I mean are you really asking me that standing up?”
I dropped to one knee.
“Marry me, Eudora. Give me the deed to that lovely little property below your navel, and let us live in sin no more.”
“Yes,” she said. “Gladly. After which you’ll get me the hell out of here?”
“I promise.”
She spat in her hand, I spat in mine and we shook on it.
Dora and I ate a big dinner that night. We laughed easily. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty. To hell with star-crossed Whitbrow, we seemed to be saying.
Let it bury its own dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THERE’S NOTHING IN it for me. Explaining that boy to you.”
Martin had only glanced at the photograph before putting it back down on the table. He drank from a bottle of gin.
“That is a curious statement,” I said.
“Then here’s one that makes clear sense. I mostly drink clear booze because the rest of it looks like it’s already been through a gentleman.”
So saying, Martin got up from the table and went to the workdesk where he finished pulling the skin from a rabbit he intended to have for his lunch. Smoke from the fire outside came in the window and the smell promised good roasting. Martin poked a stick through the animal in a way it might have found embarrassing as well as uncomfortable if it still cared about earthly matters. We went outside to the fire and Martin braced the spitted rabbit aloft over the fire using two Y-shaped branches planted in the ground.
“Wish you’d been here yesterday. I trapped some doves. Not much more meat than the heel of your hand on any one of them, but I had six and could have gotten by on three.”
“I was already engaged yesterday taking care of the Gordeau boy. He thinks he spent a night at the Devil’s underground spa.”
“Did he see it?”
We had both been standing with our arms folded the way men do when they watch a fire or especially something cooking on a fire, but now I turned my head and looked at Martin.
“See what?” I said. “The spa?”
Martin looked inscrutably at the fire for a moment before he spoke.
“Anything interesting.”
“Something specific and interesting? An it rather than a who?”
“You missed out on a fine career as a detective. It almost doesn’t sound like you’re interrogating me.”
“And you almost sound like you don’t know what’s going on past the river.”
“A check to the king! Black castles. Would you like a smoke?”
I took one of Martin’s strong cigarettes and lit it with a twig. “So are you going to kick me off your ancestral lands again if I keep asking questions like ‘Who is that boy?’ ”