Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

Round here we don’t turn no water into wine. Just corn into shine.”

Mother had already died by then trying to push out a dead daughter, and Father dove headfirst into a bottle. He had good taste in booze, though, and the money to acquire it; the hutch was always full of wines from France with their mysterious labels.

She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before. We were in love before the salads came. That had been four years ago. The affair had lasted two. Her first husband’s name was finally dying. As was mine, I suppose. Dora was barren.

I lost one job and I took one licking. If you and I stay together, I paid cheap.”

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.

If good posture was the measure, Pastor Lyndon had Spirit all right. He held himself painfully erect like a proper little soldier for the Holy Host.

He looked around at the congregation for a moment, giving them all time to stop talking to one another as his gaze lit on each of them. The gaze reminded the young ones he had married them and the old ones that he would speak over their caskets soon. It was a good trick.

The Book of Revelations read like fairy-tale poetry next to this harsh prose.

He chuckled like a can full of gravel

whose hands looked big and strong enough to twist a horseshoe straight.

Everything was round in Buster’s life. In the summer he sold melons. Pumpkins in the fall.

“So my point is that something, or someone, or something who is someone is making a meal of those swine. And if you stop sending them, do you think it is possible that your pig-eater, or pig-eaters, might decide to come to town for supper?”

It had been a great mercy that Miles’ back wouldn’t let him walk the last hundred yards or so. Nobody should ever see that his boy was eaten.

Then they took the cuffs off him and tied his hands with rope so nobody’d know the Law’d done it.

The father of a dead son, when that son had no brothers, must stand alone with his surname dying in his mind.

It was covered in wildflowers that the girls of the town had gathered and plaited into a wreath. That the flowers looked too much like the ones the pigs had worn was a truth nobody needed to speak aloud.

I heard the knock coming from the front door downstairs and I knew it was bad news. Bad news knocks hard.

He spat and watched it fall from his mouth. I had the curious idea that this was what he did instead of crying.

He removed his hat, and for the first time I noticed how unflatteringly he was going bald; how much older and weaker he looked without his hat.

I shook with Buster and Buster’s hand closed around mine like the larger of two nesting dolls.

my parameters of belief were becoming more and more negotiable, and they weren’t nearly done stretching.

German usually sounded like a chisel to me, but this woman turned it into a paintbrush.

I was sure the dogs knew more about what was in the woods than we did; they had read libraries in the musk and saliva and hair left at the murder scene,

They hadn’t been angels looking for honest men; they had been devils making maps.

God bless America. We had abolished slavery and reinvented serfdom.

We didn’t speak much. We had plenty not to talk about.