A Killing in This Town

by Olympia Vernon

  Adam, she whispered. Sunday … Sunday’ll fit me.

  She began to say, Not now, son. Some other time. It’s memory I can’t forget.

  But he had felt the words in her energy and ran through the door of the lopsided house, past the flaw of the pink carnation, where Midnight awaited him.

  Lenora Bullock stood near the window, looking out, her hand up to the birthmark bearing the resemblance of a singular, disjointed gene.

  chapter seven

  Earl Thomas was in the center of the forest.

  He had come to this place out of paranoia, a misplacement of thought and mind: he had been night-sleeping, his twitching eye moving rapidly beneath the lid, where he had fallen into a slumber that was too momentary to hold. And, by morning, had journeyed away from Emma New and the maple tree—the fat and ugly bird that hummed a bit, replacing the order of his dream.

  The galloping horses, men had woken him.

  He stood, the killing tree above him, fractured in a terrible gaze: the blood of Curtis was of dust and bone now. The bitter, unbearable happening shook with the blue note of a mourning lyric.

  Right about here, he figured, was where they popped his eye out, the skull weak and tired from the pulley: Curtis had been bound at the feet, the pressure of his spine drawn downward where the neck—the weight of his head—grew into a profound mass of responsibility.

  Earl Thomas stuck his thumb in the belly of the earth. He measured the symptoms of drought and dirt. His finger, up from the earth, followed a white line in the sky: abandoned by a buzzing machine.

  Earl Thomas was made of clay and he knew it. He brought his hands up to his face. The singed dirt of his fingertip left a powdered stain on his cheek.

  He stationed his foot on the root of the tree, the other on its round belly, and grabbed hold of a limb that propelled him as he climbed, climbed to the second limb and the one thereafter: he looked down to where his thumb had gone into the earth’s center.

  Why had he come here this morning? Perhaps, in some utter defiance, he wanted to prepare himself for a killing in this town. He was the next bone, the next body, the energy of horses and men binding him at the foot, his head too heavy to ban the pulley from the raging muscle of his torso.

  He had pictured it, Curtis, a man his size and weight, a man his age and stature, succumbing to the blue note: Earl Thomas had presided over funerals, the black widow humming to the mourning and waged lyric, stricken by a stone to the head, heart.

  He was up high now. The limb bore the signature of his position: he had begun to breathe from there, one hand on his thigh. Earth and sky had collided.

  If Curtis had come from this part to hold Sonny in the morning time, he had not at all heard the panting of the ghost. The scent overtook him: the odor of the corpse.

  The bloody, bloody stench of what it was to live and breathe as he was. Nigger blood was what they called it. Nigger blood hooked to the pulley and hurried through the world, as if the world must forget, simply, that men like him had ever at all breathed in this place.

  He thought it in his mind: Emma New, the black widow, sobbing on the pew of Sweet Home Baptist Church, the distinct pattern of her breathing forcing the veil into a bland curtain. It was the mouth that quivered.

  Not only this but the ballad was what he heard: the weaving announcement of the closed casket where the scent of the iron pulley could not take to oxygen. The released foot, in full detachment from the killing, held in his memory.

  He did not see it, had not gone far enough into the ground below him. The darner needle had slipped out from the hem of Lenora Bullock’s skirt. This was where she had lost it—she had gone to Hurry, had been sowing the folds of the white, when she pinned it to the fabric of her skirt. It had simply come undone.

  A rushing event was upon him. A running four-footed animal coming toward him. It rumbled throughout the forest with a trampling that braced him there on the branch. He was too high to come down now.

  He awaited the animal as he wondered just how dangerous it was for him to climb so high in the tree this morning.

  He closed his eyes, his heart pounding in what he now realized was nigger blood, if it was a white man who accompanied the haunting sound.

  Just then the animal came to a stop in the woods.

  It was Midnight, dark and silent, who found him in his position.

  But now the pounding of Earl Thomas’s heart had caused him to lose his balance on the branch. He came crashing back to where his thumb had gone into the earth. The rib, the bone, cracked.

  Midnight stood at a distance.

  He stirred a moment and leaned toward Earl Thomas, his hind legs holding the blunt of his curiosity, and licked his face. For he had seen Earl Thomas and Emma New: he had followed the scent of the apple pie.

  He and Earl Thomas were alone in the woods. Earl Thomas moaned, the pain of the rib throbbing in his gut. He brought his hand up to Midnight, and Midnight licked it.

  Earl Thomas did not know it, but this gesture, his hand up to the animal’s wet breathing, stirred Midnight’s nostalgia: the scent of Emma New’s apple pie, fresh from the morning, lay in the palm of Earl Thomas’s hand.

  Earl Thomas moaned again as Midnight struck out into a sharp and more passionate run through the forest. The animal panted with hurry throughout the wooded forest until he came to the opening where Emma New stood on the steps of the Thomas house, folding a sheet.

  Midnight panted.

  Emma New abandoned the sheet of her folding. What is it, boy? she asked.

  Midnight barked wildly, turned toward the forest, then back to Emma New. He started for the woods again and returned to face Emma New, his face a cloud of danger.

  What is it? she repeated.

  Midnight returned to the opening, his tail wagging ferociously out of context.

  Emma New ran inside the house and returned with a square-shaped medicine box: she simply believed him.

  Midnight broke through the hot and torrid heat of Mississippi, Emma New behind him. Show me to ’m, she yelled.

  She ran, with full strength, to the center of the earth: Midnight had begun to breathe in his trepidation, until he led her to Earl Thomas’s broken rib.

  She yelled throughout the silent forest, Earl!

  Earl Thomas lay on his spine, his finger drawn to his side, as if to show her the matter of his hurt without speech.

  Emma New knelt beside him, no thought of her tiredness, and lifted the fabric of his shirt. She felt it, the broken rib: it moved in his belly.

  Emma New, said Earl Thomas. Emma New, they’re gonna …

  Hush, now, she whispered.

  She pulled his arms out of the shirt and reached in the wooden box for the bundled gauze: she dismantled it. As it lay flat on the bed of her arm, she beckoned for Earl Thomas to try, as much as he had life in him, to straighten his back.

  He grunted, slowly lifting the spine, as she drew the gauze around him, tightening the rib, with hope, back into its position: it would heal. The marrow was a long stitch. It would set the rib, reshape itself into the original placement of Earl Thomas’s anatomy.

  She was sure of it.

  She helped him from the ground, his arm about her neck: Help me, she beckoned. Give me you.

  Earl Thomas stepped out with his foot. She looked out to where Midnight’s lungs had caught a steady wind: he stood for a moment, his eyes no longer filled with hurry, and walked for home.

  She wished she had a bone to give him, and although it was no place for it, she looked down into the box she had carried with her free hand. There was nothing, nothing to give him.

  Mercy, she whispered. Mercy.

  chapter eight

  We are white men, born unto the earth

  And land, which is ours and belongs to us, as

  Free and automatic white men.

  All niggers must be obedient.

  They are not a part of the human thread,

  But are animals and must be dragged fromr />
  Their properties and stricken from the

  Blood of the nation.

  The same thing goes for hypocrites.

  Hoover Pickens’s hair was wet.

  The heat had drowned it.

  There, above the words of the Klan’s declaration, was a loose board on the third tier of the barn. It had fallen out of position: he measured it with his eye and stepped down from the ladder.

  He walked toward the door that caged the tools and felt a roaring patch of hurt in his ribs: he lifted his shirt and found his breathing. The left lung had begun to throb.

  Both he and Earl Thomas, at this moment, were in vivid synchronicity. But Hoover Pickens was unaware of this: a disjointed moan erupted from his parted lips.

  He was obtuse: the heaving lung pushed his belly out a bit, as if, in some sort of sickening stimulation, he had become incredible.

  Hoover, yelled D.D., time for supper.

  She was on the steps of the house. An invisible clone of heat rose around her.

  Hoover? she whispered, her round head on the column of the breakfast porch.

  No sign of him.

  Midnight lay behind her, awaiting Adam. The energy of his silence, what he had seen in the woods—the solid stone of rescue—created a murmur within his heart.

  He was no longer familiar with the scent of D. D. Pickens. She had not comforted him since taking him in her arms to save Adam. She was ungrateful, dead.

  D. D. Pickens, for the first time, felt the bitter gaze of this animal: a rotten and ill-fated disregard for the oxygen that allowed them, in unison, to breathe this air and temperature as hot and merciful as it was.

  She went to touch him, her quiet hand above him: he snarled at her, as if to say in the language of creature and earth, It’s come too late in the world.

  Adam stood at the bottom of the stairs. He had seen the happening and walked toward the screen door where D. D. Pickens stood in full dress. He thought it in his mind, but it had not come out of him, the question: What have you done?

  D. D. Pickens brought her hand to her hip and, in some awareness of detail, moved away from Midnight.

  The hair of Midnight’s spine was in disarray, straight up it stood, until D. D. Pickens was forever gone this evening. She closed the door of her bedroom.

  When Midnight heard it, he returned to his original position, his warm belly on the bed of the breakfast porch: Adam had disappeared into the mouth of the barn.

  Adam had only vaguely heard of what the other boy had done to Curtis: he was in the high window of the house when Salem and Hurry Bullock described the swollen torso, the bloated head.

  It was no wonder that when Adam’s father sent him to Hurry Bullock’s lab the morning after the dragging, he vomited at the sight of the corpse: Curtis’s body lay on a wooden gurney. The head had a hole it, and Hurry Pickens had stuck a pipe into it that had begun to whistle. It went straight from the back of the head through the hole in his eye. A whistling, pitiful sound that Adam could not hold in his stomach.

  At once, the food he had eaten before coming was strewn from his esophagus and onto the cold, cold floor.

  He recalled that evening: his father had sent him for the package of things. It was customary for the Klan of Bullock, Mississippi, to save the contents of a nigger’s pockets.

  His father wanted him to see it: the nigger blood and bone, the duty that awaited him. The power. The masterful work of the free and automatic white men.

  Adam had run from Hurry Bullock’s lab, the contents trembling in his little hand, only to find his father standing on the breakfast porch: an overt grin leaned into his face.

  Adam dropped the package in front of him and ran up the stairs of the house, up to his room where the stench of his stomach had begun to levitate above the space he had collapsed into.

  Now Adam stood in the barn’s opening.

  It was Sunday. Lenora Bullock had fitted him early this morning: free from memory and the darner needle, she had returned to the unremorseful place in her heart. And it was, indeed, Lenora Bullock who could not confine the whisper. She had been waiting on her letter from the Vital Life Office when she said it.

  The line had been forwarded from her lips: You’ve got a killin’ to do.

  The news plagued Adam: he watched as his father rose from his hammering on the third tier and asked what brought him here.

  As it was with Adam, he spoke: Miss Lenora says I gotta killin’ to do.

  Salem Bullock was out running the horses.

  Hoover Pickens and Adam, alone, were in the stable.

  She’s good ’n’ human, ain’t she? Hoover Pickens sent the hurling phlegm of a cough into the barn dust.

  Adam saw it, blood: How long’re you gonna live, Pa?

  Long enough to do some mercy, said Hoover Pickens.

  Who’s gotta ask for it?

  Hoover Pickens had replaced the wooden board of the third tier and was now near the tier’s edge: A nigger’s gotta ask for it. That’s who.

  How come he can’t just go straight to the Lord ’n’ get it? asked Adam.

  The question struck Hoover Pickens in the lung from which he had coughed: the leaking organ forced a gap in his behavior.

  Midnight howled from the breakfast porch.

  Son, urged Hoover Pickens. A nigger … A nigger’s gotta …

  Before this line could consume both boy and man, Adam looked down at the phlegm that had come from his father’s lungs and interrupted: Pa, he said. There’s blood in it.

  Hoover Pickens turned away from the tier’s edge: Yes, son, he said. Blood.

  The pulsating line struck the invisible, perplexed earth between them.

  Adam’s head had begun to hurt, the world.

  Hoover Pickens stepped down from the ladder to the ground floor of the barn where Salem Bullock was returning: he reached out to Adam.

  But Adam had walked back toward the house: he had discovered the debilitating ode of obedience, of constitution, entrapment.

  chapter nine

  The sky woke with rain.

  Emma New was nebulous and distorted in her thinking this morning. At once she was indistinguishable from the earth. A feathered bird.

  Mended by rib and gut, she was in the center of the Thomas house: she stood in her position, her vertebrae moving forward.

  Earl Thomas was asleep.

  Emma New stood above him. His breathing was in this room. If ever he had lived in his freedom, it was at this moment.

  It was protection she could not give him.

  So alive he was at this moment that she closed her eyes and hollered as loud and disquietly, in her mind, as to give no attention to herself, but to sound.

  Come out yonder, they’d say. Come out yonder.

  For when Curtis Willow looked at the ground, pointed, she thought of the news, nearly thirteen years ago: a son had been born unto Hoover Pickens and he would rise up and drag the nigger who’d come up to the Pauer Plant; the boy who’d do the dragging had to be his and come from him, so the nigger’d know—after all these years—what a frivolous thing he’d done.

  Soon Earl Thomas would point here or there, and it would be his ground and earth. And he would turn, face her: Emma New, he’d say, I’m going home.

  How she’d begged him to leave this town, take her up to Memphis—something about God, he moaned—God and duty. The arrangement of the line, the narrow and intimate words burned in her throat. And although it was temporary, God, God burned, too.

  She recalled asking him all those years ago: What do you think they’ll do? as she stared at the letter. Read it, see how short they hope is, ’n’ kill us all? Or see how dead they is ’n’ live?

  Her questioning was not isolated: in her rhetoric, she spoke not only to Earl Thomas but to the government. Those who had sent the letter were somewhere, slumbering, and in their slumber, she stood invisibly at their feet, said: He’s my blood, bone. If they dead, let Him tell it.

  She remembered, too, Earl�
��s looking down at the letter, his panting, his confusion.

  The pattern on the ground was his.

  Now Emma New paused in the room, Earl yet sleeping.

  Perhaps if she’d asked Sonny how they’d done Curtis, how they’d called Curtis from the house, she’d know by now how to handle … death. But she would never ask Sonny, she’d only bake her a pie in the oven or pull a dress over her bones to protect herself from it: lung wind was what she called it.

  The age and hope of a nigger were less than redeeming, especially now, when it seemed Earl Thomas was more alive than they imagined him.

  A broken rib. A fall from a tree. If this was all it was, she could live in his safety. She had tools for such things: a broken rib, a fall from a tree.

  A dragging. Curtis. She had not asked Sonny, but she well knew how it had happened. Curtis had been in the woods, an undistilled moment between white woman and nigger: Lenora Bullock had run to her house, her dress all torn up … That nigger. Curtis Willow had done it.

  Even a whistle. A whistle had come from the nigger’s lips and he left me there, half-naked and hungry. You oughta take ’m to the Mississippi, drown him, said Lenora Bullock.

  Sonny had run through the woods, come for Emma New, her face ripped of lung wind: she had hollered there on the steps of the Thomas house only a short while before her limbs came to a pause.

  Curtis was dead.

  A wheelbarrow. Curtis’s bloated head. The body stiff and naked where even his penis had begun to swell.

  They had wheeled him through town, daylight, and into Hurry Bullock’s office: they threw him together, chiseled him into grit. Sonny, she got the bones.

  Emma New was without privacy: she had begun to shiver.

  The thought of it: a wheelbarrow.

  Only her head kept still: she had drawn her mouth to a close.

  She turned, with hurry, away from Earl Thomas’s slumber: his odorous body, blood on the trees.

  The rain had stopped, and she alone was alive in the house.

  She had no power.

  A rotten tree, a root, had been carved into her belly. Earl Thomas, Curtis, hung from it. The stench of rigor mortis. She was no good without it. Memory.