Those Across the River Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    A cloud of flies, and flies for his eyes.
    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.

CHAPTER FIVE
    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?”
     
     
     
    AROUND NOON WE walked down the road into the village of Whitbrow. It was another brilliant August day. The sun shone powerfully on the shops downtown, replicating itself in their windows (where there were windows) and on the windscreens and headlamps of the very few cars. The breeze blew like a draft from a steelworks. She swung my hand playfully while we took one lap around the town square, which consisted of an ancient pump well and a small garden