Yeah, added Salem Pickens, like a kite.
Hurry Bullock saw Adam in the high window of the Pickens house.
Adam rested his hand near the green and withered curtain of his bedroom: he looked at the men below. They were, at once, unfascinating, invisibly perplexed.
He envisioned a river of blood.
His father’s face was as unkind and empty as the hate that lived in it.
Now, his hand was out of view, the curtain closed.
That’s our hope so high, said Hurry.
Surely, said Hoover Pickens, Not long. Thirteen.
Now Hoover Pickens thought of the days following Earl Thomas’s visit to the Pauer Plant, how all the workers had come through the woods, their heads bent low in some uncertain cause, until their laughter halted: the doors of the Pauer Plant had been padlocked.
Boys, said Salem, we done shut down.
It went unseen, the code that drew him and the other factory workers together at the hemming line, drew them near and forced the stitch of ink between their painful and linear bodies.
With thirty years of factory work between them, each man, each in his own fragility, turned to the others and paused. The matter of their uncertainty, the laughter they had only just shared, broke in a marriage of silence, burden.
Hoover Pickens whispered, I’m going home.
Invisibly, he had spoken, too, to Earl Thomas. For it was Earl Thomas who had brought such darkness over the place, such wind and air that it seemed all of them could no longer breathe.
Just then the barn door opened and the horses began to collide with the inexhaustible running of Midnight, who broke with a haunting speed between them and howled.
The horses, in their animal language, began to scatter.
Salem Bullock howled in a tone of rebellion and disappeared through the woods, Hurry trailing behind him where the dust spun Hoover Pickens out of position, bearing the solitary, invisible crux of his vulnerability.
chapter four
Adam Pickens’s face was a rapid and bellowing blaze: his round head carried it for as long as it took. It was his figure that spared him: he was a slow and steady curve, leaning forward into the bone. His vertebrae had begun to tilt.
His yellow hair was singed with drought: he came down the stairs of the house. The wind was pregnant. The unspeakable terrain of the morning had spat him out.
D.D. had found her place near the stove, a large ceramic bowl before her. She spun the wet flour: the silver ladle brought forth the sound of rain.
Adam, she uttered.
He did not respond, but sat still at the kitchen table. He was bewildered by an intolerable noise: a hummingbird had come into the house this early morning. He wondered how it breathed and balanced, how it had acquired some nature about it that lay unconfined and systematic.
D.D. continued to spin the flour, as it would take some greater noise to disturb the matter of her duty. A flying creature, this thing that lived with permanency, rose and hung above her.
Adam spoke, as he had when a line trickled down the side of his ripe eardrum.
Mama, what’s the difference between a nigger and a bird?
The silver ladle came to a halt.
I don’t know.
A nigger. A bird, whispered Adam. It don’t sound right. Even when you say it in your head.
The silver ladle had brought the sound of rain into the house and no one, not even D. D. Pickens, could tame it. The shape, the pattern of its mocking, wove into her face a ravine.
A nigger. A bird, said Adam. I looked it up in the word book. All words. No pictures.
He paused.
D. D. Pickens thought of his birth and how the doctor had pulled him out: she could tell by the positioning of his feet that wisdom was what had brought him into the world.
Midnight came to the door, his head sideways, and flattened his belly on the breakfast porch.
When a bird falls to the ground, asked Adam, where’s it go?
D.D. shook her head and had become aware of the wandering hummingbird.
Adam continued, Heaven, Mama? Heaven’s where it goes?
That’s up to God, she moaned.
I done asked God, said Adam. He never said.
He’s busy, son.
What’s He busy doin’? Adam asked.
God’s got savin’ to do, Adam. D.D. continued her stirring, as if the rain hadn’t come down equally enough to measure the content of speech and blood in the air and send it crashing down, away from this house and the inquisitive odor around her. D.D. turned and faced Adam, both trapped in the temperature of their hot and varied language: Grace.
But Mama, said Adam. You say grace is when God gives you something you don’t deserve.
D.D. was amid the bellowing blaze of Adam: she wished she had never spoken of God in this house, when her vocabulary had grown so lynched in the boy’s mind that nothing could bring him down.
Adam, she whispered. You done come through.
Now the memory of her mind and heart fluttered with the pace of the hummingbird: Adam had come from her vagina, like thread through a needle, come into the bursting world wet and with wisdom, and nothing, not even the sound of rain the ladle made, would keep him mute.
You done come through, she repeated, but by this time, Adam had closed the screen door and was lying on the breakfast porch in the precise and paralyzing posture of a blade.
chapter five
Sonny woke from her bed nude.
Her thumb had begun to pound. She had slept on her belly, her hand beneath her breasts where she had crushed the thumb bone into the remaining territory of her full hand.
A throbbing pain accompanied the movement.
No flexibility.
She seemed a terrifying excursion: Curtis was a blurring relic in this house, a tornado that had come and spun its divinity into the shape of a debilitating dream.
She had only now regained her appetite: her exposed and heavy gut had begun to bring forth a rhythm to her belly. Hunger.
A silent and daring term of forgiveness lay in her dark and golden face. It covered her full head and crowded any expression of pity.
They had come, the white men, as they had roamed in her sleep, to devour, to hate what had not been, ever, the enemy.
They had come to take, to steal her Curtis from his slumber, with a tenacity that trembled upon the earth a certain uncharmed innocence: a stunning season, all sour.
She stood in her weight, her fallen arms at her sides: from the shoulder, she was ill-proportioned, as if she had come out headfirst and been pulled out of the womb in a hurried, fixated rush.
Her hair, plaited and clean, devoured the gleam and steadiness of her face. It was thick and heavy, crawled down the edge of her collarbone: a powerful, rigid announcement.
She closed her eyes and waited for Curtis to come this morning. He was of the earth now, and at any minute he’d come walking through the terror of the woods and hold her gleaming.
This was where she stood and waited: near the bed of this square and empty room.
A whisper crept into her eardrum: the white men had called Curtis from the house. But before the happening, he had turned and whispered, as he had each morning: “Now I know why the Garden of Eden was so beautiful. There was a woman in the middle of it.”
She felt him, Curtis, standing behind her nude and poised body. He had come from the woods, past the maple tree, to tell it to her again and again for as long as she lived in this house and longed to hear it.
She burst into a laughter that belonged to no enemy. It shook her belly and she wanted so badly for him to touch her with his living and full hand that was no longer dead and swollen from the pulley. She formed it in her mind, the living hand, and imagined it enveloping her from the bone: it was as remarkable as she had pictured it.
It was no dream.
Sonny had seen the white boy run through the space of the woods. He was coming of age, the symptoms of history trailing behind hi
m.
She was in blue, a wailing shape to the fabric that held no courtesy.
Her heart, as calm as it had been in the early morning, pounded with vigor: it was unexpected, the traveling boy.
She ran to the edge of the plotted earth, ran with her bare and protruding feet to the opening in the woods: the boy had escaped her, his yellow hair divided by the bark of a thousand trees.
She had not run far from the house before the dust caught her.
Trapped there, as the round eye of a hog: she panted into the wailing and dotted blue of her dress. She had not figured in her mind how immobile she was at that moment.
Sonny had not removed herself from the dust: she lay trembling and crooked in the blue wailing fabric, a coldness of the shoulder—she turned, her face and clavicle apart of the same splendor.
She breathed outward and into the bed of her moaning.
The boy she had seen was coming of age in Bullock, Mississippi: he would soon have to call a man from his house and drag him, drag him until he loses an eye, until a caterpillar crawls out.
She sat up from the ground.
The boy was gone now.
She took up the blue, could only think: They will grind him into powder.
The voice of Earl Thomas rang through the loudspeakers of Bullock. This was when Sonny remembered that it was Sunday and had not calculated the missing element of her journey. No time with God, not since Curtis.
The night before the dragging, the Thomases had come up the road a piece. Emma New had brought pie: it singed throughout her careful and meditative footing an honest and decent odor.
The men were out on the porch: they had whispered, one to another, before Curtis Willow turned away, pointed to a pattern on the ground, as if to comment invisibly: That there’s the free.
Curtis Willow could lie down in the river, take upon himself the blood he carried, the bones that were his and belonged to no other man in the world.
He wanted to leave this town, take Sonny and her things—the things they owned—on the train to Memphis, leave this town and the Hurry Bullocks: but he had seen a man his size and build at the train station beg for work in exchange for a ticket, how the conductor had cursed him, struck him about the face, until at last the Negro sifted through the emaciated darkness where his hand had begun to quiver.
Again Curtis Willow turned and pointed to the pattern on the ground and then to Earl Thomas and asked with transparency: Where’s your free?
The question rotated in Earl Thomas’s head.
Not now, Curtis, he thought. Not now.
He, too, wanted to take Emma New and her things, take her up, and this town, the Bullocks, they would burn. The weighted question hung upon him: what he knew of God, of the flesh, shook him terribly.
Curtis Willow, his hand on the surface of the wind, broke the sphere of the pattern, crushed and visible on the ground, and faced the window of the house, the moon and Earl Thomas: I’m going home, he whispered.
Sonny and Emma New were standing near the curtain when he said it.
At this moment, Sonny knew.
Tomorrow he would go down to the river.
* * *
It was midnight when the Thomases left for home. Shortly thereafter, Sonny lit a lantern next to the bed and stretched out her hand to Curtis: Hurry Bullock.
For this was how she learned the power of her vocabulary.
Curtis sat up from the bed and grabbed her finger. He referred to bones when he taught her the straight letters. When he taught her the curved ones, it was buffalo.
Hurry: two horizontal columns, invisibly aligned, had been drawn in the palm of Sonny Willow’s hand with his fingertip, a line at the center. An upward turn, the two R’s, the final letter of the first name, Y, a woman on the edge of a mountain.
A whisper erupted throughout the lighted room. The emergence of oxygen from Sonny’s womb hung in the transparency of the globe, a moan. In her exhalation, she pushed the word out from her ribs.
And so it was done.
The final line, Bullock.
Heavy, ain’t it? whispered Curtis.
She drew her hand inward, to her bosom: she could yet feel the shape of the Hurry and Bullock with completion, as if she had been burned by the spine of the lantern, as if the thing that had been drawn upon her hand was at once gasping from its invisible and glowing lung. Her hand up to the lantern, she closed it, her fist centered above the rising flame, the mountain cloud that she had reached up there where God, too, heard it.
chapter six
Lenora Bullock had taken to her chair out on the porch: she added no more a face to the setting than the little pink carnation that lay faded and beaten at her side. This was what she used to stir the heat around her, when she was too slow and lazy about going inside the house to retrieve the paper fan.
No later than twelve’o’clock was she here, sitting, waiting for the mail to come from the post office: she was a she bastard. If there was ever a record that she was the wanted child of any couple, it had yet to come.
No news from Jackson. She had written letters over the years, addressed to the same person, a woman with a tiny Q in her name.
My name is Lenora T. J. Bullock, she wrote. I am the daughter of two people. One man. One woman. The woman I no longer care for. I’m trying to find my daddy, before your tea gets cold. Dignified, L.B.
A profound weeping of her structure—no pink carnation, a pansy—tore through the definition of her weighted face. From petal to seed, the Homo sapien, the fixed and angular strategy of her bones failed to resist the crutch of her burdened, ill-fated history.
Her eye. Her tiny, irregular mouth. Her bones. All of them had come from someplace that peered through a sparse and withered gene within her: a momentary vein, displaced and rude, had risen in the crux of her arm.
As now, she was brave and patted it with her index finger, so the voice of its temperature would die in her eardrum.
A birthmark, the shape of Belgium, sat on the left side of her cheek: it had come from her mother. She was sure of it.
When Hurry Bullock had taken her in, her pores were dirty, her face smeared with the grit of waiting: she was incredulous, the odorous dependence of a maternal stain.
For all the she bastards bore the tattoo of their mothers: they had been pushed from the vagina, out into the world, their lungs pulsating from the blow. The blood spatter, the inability of their faces to resist the stain, drew upon them the territory of their illbelonging, the aboriginal separation of maternalism.
Lenora Bullock’s face was clean when he said it, the indissoluble birthmark peering out: It’s your birthmark come from her, L.T., said Hurry. A trick.
Now Lenora Bullock had found her sitting place behind the wheel of the sewing machine. Adam would be here soon. She was the Klan seamstress. It was Lenora who bought the white fabric in town and Lenora who fitted the boys for the ceremony of thirteen.
Had she any news—a letter, perhaps—from the woman with a Q in her name, she wondered if she ever would have met Hurry Bullock—a train depot, she had not eaten all day, weak from the ride when he found her—or found a place in the world to commit herself to.
They were both wavering with revelation: Hurry, born into a confusing, forced sort of privilege, and herself, unable to measure the genealogy that seemed to paralyze the thread of her feeble hair: it had begun to turn into a pale gloom.
Lenora turned from her sitting and looked out at the pink carnation—the first flower she had ever held—the first anything given her that was permanent.
For she had burned the birth certificate: she smothered her birthmark.
If only in her mind.
Adam emerged from the woods, Midnight behind him.
Lenora stood fully from her sitting chair and walked out to the edge of the porch to bring him in. He followed her back inside the house, where the warm scent of the sewing machine rose throughout the devastating heat and collapsed.
You’re right e
arly, she said, pouring him a glass of lemonade.
Although she had addressed Adam, it had come to her, the name of the office where she sent the letters: Vital Life.
He could not help but notice her awkward position, as if she preferred the gaze upon her to come from behind—the birthmark on the left side of her cheek had begun to pound in the heat.
She placed the lemonade in front of him and turned toward the narrow border of the kitchen door, signaling for him to stand against it.
A silence fell between them: Adam wondered if she had swallowed a needle.
But rarely did he talk to Lenora Bullock: the whole town knew where her mind was.
She parted the horizontal line in her lips for a moment: as she measured Adam’s growing bones, excitement rose inside her; a peculiar fascination with her own measuring pushed the wind from her gut.
The mark of Adam’s growth had been made on the border with a fine no. 2 pencil she had brought home from the post office.
She reached inside a wooden toolbox that lay on the kitchen table: the reflex of irritation showed on her face. She had discovered a hole where a darner needle had slipped through.
It was this darner needle, minute and familiar, that she had used to stitch the fabric of the boy who had called Curtis from his nest. At this moment—and perhaps never again—it entered her mind: the force of the catastrophe, how she had gone to town the evening the corpse arrived at Hurry’s lab, the stench of his mutilated and porous body, the eye from the socket, the head all bloated and dirty.
It had begun here at the Bullock house.
A darner needle.
She stalled for a moment, her head spinning with the loss and impact of the instrument, how now she must find it, so the events, the horrific picture of a new dragging, a new boy to measure, must come to rest in her path.
Adam reached out to touch her, as if he would tuck whatever it was that upset her back into its place. He had begun to wonder what was the matter.
A Killing in This Town Page 2