Those Across the River Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

CHAPTER FOUR
    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