Those Across the River Read Free

difference. On this first day in Whitbrow I was thirty-six and starting to feel it. I had always been trim, but lately I had gotten just a little thicker around the waist. The sweat from my back was beginning to sop my shirt and trickled tentatively down the crack of my backside. Look away, Dixieland.
    I was hungry.
    I had little hope of finding anything open in this burg, but there was light coming from the general store. It sat just off the main square, up on blocks like the houses, asymmetrical in build—almost a trapezoid—and leprous with flaking white paint. A single kerosene lamp, wild with moths, backlit a sign that the failing light outside still allowed me to read: CLOSED. PLEASE CALL AGAIN! Sign or no sign, people were moving around in there. I put my face up to the greasy front window and saw some men bent over a checkers game, and another man hovering over them. He was missing an arm.
    One of the checker players, a very fat man, noticed me and came to the door, the top corner of which struck a small, tattletale bell when opened.
    “You must be Dottie McComb’s kin,” said the big man, who seemed to float like a zeppelin in his apron.
    “That’s right. Orville Francis Nichols, but Frank’s just as good.”
    I gave the fat man my hand and knew when I saw him swallow it in his that he intended to give me one of those unfair, porterhouse steak squeezes around the fingers that doesn’t allow a proper grip in return. I was right, but I made a point of not wincing.
    “Paul,” he said.
    “A pleasure, sir. Are you all closed up, then?”
    “Yeah, but it don’t matter when the boys are over.”
    Two very old boys looked at him from mismatched chairs and nodded in acknowledgment. A younger, round, tough-looking fellow sat near the iron stove, which had sand around its base.
    “Mind if I look around?”
    “Suit yourself,” he said, holding the door open for me while I brushed past his belly on the way in.
    The shelves were mostly bare. Hard times here like everywhere else. Molasses. Lard. Rice. Eggs. Flour. A few cheeses. The tobacco shelf was well stocked, though, with Prince Albert and Red Man and bags of roll-your-own from local farms. A stack of straw hats on the counter leaned towards a jar teeming with pickles. Tongs sat in a green puddle on a plate.
    On a shelf behind the register, a stuffed badger rearing up to do battle with an unseen foe neighbored with a serene-looking stuffed bobcat. Next to them, a stuffed dog had somehow been manipulated so it looked as if he were seated cross-legged on a stump, playing a small banjo. A deer’s head stared above everything as if omnipotent. All had penciled-in price tags hanging from them.
    “Sir, I don’t see any wine here,” I said.
    “Don’t see none cause I don’t sell none. Like to, but cain’t. You in a dry county.”
    One of the old boys said, “Been a dry county ever since that tent revival come in nineteen and twelve, before the proheebishun. Snake handlin and all that. Paul remembers.”
    “Yeah, Paul. Why dint you git in there and grab you a rattler?”
    “Too fat. They’d a caught on me.”
    “Not if you had enough Jesus in you.”
    “I ain’t never had enough Jesus I wanted to grab no rattler.”
    “Say,” the one-armed man said to me. “Ain’t your wife that pretty new teacher takin Dottie’s place over to the school?”
    “You know damn well she is. You the one tole me,” Paul said.
    “Don’t hurt none to ask. Just makin conversation.”
    The first old boy said, “You want wine, Mr. Teacher’s Husband, you want to go on to the mill town in Caffery County. We in Morgan County here. All we drink is the blood of the Redeemer.”
    “Didn’t the good book say the Lord turned water into wine?” I said.
    “Yessir. Wedding at Cana. Round here we don’t turn no water into wine. Just corn into shine.”
    The tough-looking man, who had been silent the whole time, looked up at Paul and said, “You gonna move a