Young John Brown, I thought suddenly, struck less by the man’s hooked nose than by the drilling grey eyes that hinted at some denomination of madness. A lush but forbidding dark beard mostly hid Cranmer’s mouth and stood out in contrast to his suit, which was cream-colored, short at the wrists and crotch, and so ill-fitting generally that it might have been sent mail-order two sizes small and not returned out of indifference. It also looked innocent of professional attempts to clean it; stains on the sleeves were subtle but numerous, some of them likely dating back to Hoover.
“Thanks for the drink,” I said, wiping my mouth with the heel of my hand. “Brother, you don’t know how long it’s been. Alright, only about ten days, but it feels like ten months.”
“I have a still. It’s a big secret I like to tell everybody.” Cranmer didn’t have the drawl everybody else in town had. He actually said I like, not Ah lahk. What was that accent? Midwestern?
“Did you get some squirrel?” Martin asked, indicating a plate with several small, roasted carcasses on them.
“Not yet.”
“Well, it might not look like much, but I peppered the little sons of bitches into a stupor, and it’s a damn sight fresher than what the butcher brought. It would kill him to give away something he could sell. I think he’s part Jew. Nothing against the Jews, except they like their money and they killed Jesus, but if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have anything to sing about on Sundays.”
I laughed.
Martin continued.
“I wanted to say hello earlier but you and the young lady were having a fine old time dancing. I was sure the fiddle player would wear out before you two did. Of course, Sully only has one testicle, and it’s natural to assume a fellow in that condition would have diminished stamina, although that’s not necessarily true. Sully’s still burning up that fiddle. They say he cut one off to stay out of the war. He should have done what I did and hid in the woods. Anyway, that’s immaterial. All I meant to say is, it’s good to see people really enjoy each other.”
“Have you met my wife?” I said.
Did Cranmer raise his left eyebrow just a little?
“Later,” he said. “It looks like she’s occupied.”
Eudora was standing with Ursie and her parents, moving her hands as she spoke. She sensed my gaze and smiled brightly at me without interrupting her speech.
“Quite a bond between you two,” Martin said. “Shines, it really does. I like that.”
“Are you a married man?”
“What do you think?”
“I think a wife wouldn’t let you keep that beard.”
“Good! An honest man. Me, too. Honesty’s why I like hookers. Have to ride a fuck-all long way on my bicycle for that, though.”
“I haven’t done that since the war,” I said.
“What, ride a bicycle?”
“That either.”
Martin chuckled, then took a tin of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, lighting two of them and passing one to me as if it were sacred. He had rolled them himself, and the tobacco was so strong my throat would hurt all night from it.
“Thank God some new meat showed up in town. Not your lady. I mean you. I mean conversation. Quite honestly, you’re the only reason I put on this ape suit and pedaled out here.”
“I’m flattered.”
“They say you’re educated. A professor of history. Me, I’m self-educated. I like books. I like to talk about books. No offense, but most of the God-fearing folk around here have trouble reading a can of soup. I mean, they’ll whip your biscuits in a game of checkers at the general store, and most of them can quote Genesis and Exodus alright, but chess is right out. The most political they ever got was when half of them wrote letters to Sears and Roebuck when they switched the catalog to glossy paper.”
“Why did they care?”
“Because they had to go back to wiping their asses with corn.”
I laughed.
“So does a self-educated man find satisfaction in the preservation of dead animals?”
“Satisfaction? Not exactly. But when I make a good mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let thus and such critter be dead, and I said, ‘Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.’ Are you a devout man, Mr. Nichols?”
“I can’t say that I am.”
“Excellent. We might be friends. But we won’t hunt together.”
“I don’t hunt.”
“I know.”
“Excuse me?”
“You make a lot of noise and you don’t see or hear too well. Don’t be offended. You’re a fine dancer. I dance like you hunt.”
“You figured all this out tonight?”
“Not tonight. Yesterday. I was setting a trap near the Wheeler house, you know, the place that burned down. There’s a rabbit warren nearby. Anyway, there you came with Lester, stepping on every twig and dried leaf you could find like the whole world was your friend, taking pictures with that little camera. Look close when you bring those pictures out; I’m probably in one of them.”
Cranmer told me how to get to his cabin and left me with a standing invitation to play chess. He did not speak to anybody else, although he nodded at Lester Gordeau and made a troll face at a towheaded boy who stared at him too long. And then he clambered onto a bicycle and pedaled off into the night. I pictured Martin walking the bike through the rough terrain of the forest in his mismeasured suit, but the image did not make me laugh. No image of Martin Cranmer in the woods seemed improbable. He looked like he had been carved from the hardest tree in them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EUDORA DIDN’T WANT me to go across the river on Wednesday.
“Those woods aren’t friendly,” she said. This as I laced up the hiking boots I had just oiled.
I played dumb.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it that pig business?”
“Partly, I suppose. It makes me wonder what else goes on around here.”
“I understand they tie a nude virgin to the back of a bull to celebrate the equinox.”
“Oh. Well, I needn’t worry about that.”
“Unless they ask you to be the bull. Stubborn thing.”
That was a mistake.
“Who’s stubborn, Orville Francis? No, I mean it. You’re going no matter what I say or do. If I hung myself on the front porch, you’d just leave out the kitchen door.”
“Now you’re talking nonsense,” I said. “We have no rope.”
She just sighed at that.
“Would you feel better if I took a pistol?”
“Worse.”
“May I take your little Brownie camera? I’ll get a picture of the bogeyman for you.”
“Fine. I don’t care what happens to you anymore; you’re too difficult. But have my camera home by dark.”
I left soon after that, but her disapproval kept eating at me all the way up to the river.
Why?
Because she’s right.
As I hiked along the path Lester had shown me, I mused about Dora and how she might be spending her day. If there had been anyone around to bet, I would have wagered my best pair of shoes that she was in the study nosing around in my affairs. Not that I minded. I had nothing to hide from her, and a woman who doesn’t snoop after her man is either highly moral or doesn’t care enough. Eudora Anne Chambers, née Morton, was not highly moral. Most probably she was leaning back in my leather chair with my photograph box open on her lap, sorting through pictures from before I met her. She did that a great deal. She was especially fond of pictures of my mother, whom she only knew through photographs.
My mother was uncommonly photogenic. Portraits from around the turn of the century usually made people come off stiff and dolllike because they had to hold their expression so long. Not so with Mother. She gave herself to the lens as if she knew she wouldn’t last, and so entrusted it with a disproportionate share of her being. She stares back from photographs as though trapped alive in them. The most striking one shows her in Atlanta just before she came to Chicago with the touring company; she was playing the title role in a translation of Racine’s Phaedra, looking very much the vengeful seductress with her high cheekbones and penetrating eyes. They were the eyes of a thirty-year-old. She was eighteen.