A Killing in This Town

by Olympia Vernon

  Her nose began to bleed.

  The blood fell onto her gown, the floor.

  Earl Thomas had begun to stir. She ran out of the room and into the face of a horizontal and dirty mirror that hung over a vanity table near the kitchen sink: of all the places to put it. She thought herself religious. And there, streaming and bulbous in her nostril, was the incredible scent of blood.

  A tiny napkin lay beside her. She brought it up to her face: the blood came out in her breathing. All stained now.

  The sound of the horses took her out of place and position: the Bullocks, Hoover Pickens, had come to a halt near the maple tree.

  Perhaps it was her brave and utter tiredness that caused her to bring her finger up to her face, over the edge of her lips, as if to say: Be quiet. My husband is sleeping.

  The bare weight of the white men’s bodies moaned until earth and rain were mute.

  Hurry Bullock brought his horse up to the window. Emma New turned for a moment; Earl Thomas had not woken from his slumber. And with her finger yet pressed on her lips, she met both man and horse there.

  Hurry Bullock, his depressing and round figure, was so confined in her head that she dropped the napkin at her feet. She looked down upon it.

  And with her head bowed, he spat in her face.

  The others, Hoover Pickens and Salem Bullock, raised their horses. Nigger was what they said. Nigger. And took to their horses, the laughter of Hurry Bullock leading them back to the cave.

  Emma New? said Earl Thomas.

  Why had he only now waked? She had gone through all the symptoms of misery there while he was sleeping. A nosebleed. The spit of Hurry Bullock that had turned her face into a drum.

  Emma New?

  Even in his slumber, under the restraint of the elixir she had given him, he should have woken with the horses, the sound of white men. He should have come to, she thought, out of protection, when I took such a blow to keep him safe.

  She had not turned from the window: she took it. The spit. The white men and their horses. She looked down at her feet again. The napkin lay like the rustling tune of a wheelbarrow.

  Sleep, she uttered. A chain pulled out o’ the Mississippi.

  Earl Thomas lay in bed, wondering if pus was in his rib, and knew that he could not ask her to turn when the frequency of her breathing, the calm arrow of a woman’s lung wind, had caused her to take it.

  chapter ten

  Emma New rose from the porcelain bathtub, naked and wet.

  She would be sick by morning: her housecoat had not even been removed.

  The weaving cloud of a lantern led her away from the Thomas house.

  She journeyed, past limb and tree, to Sonny’s. The moon was pregnant: a carelessness had begun to jut out from its glowing, as if it had been drawn there, tied to a string, a kite.

  Perhaps it had reached into her gown—where the breast was—and wondered how women like her, the Emma News of the forest, could at all succumb to misery when the presence of common sense should have moved them to another town.

  But of course Emma New, throughout her begging Earl Thomas to leave this place, had seen the nerve of his temple hold in his face when he moaned: God sent me to take it.

  She paused in her walk. The body of Emma New purred from the bone: the pure nature of the buzzing leaned her forward like a porcelain cup.

  She balanced the leaning buzz in her round head. With her hand up to her breast, she felt a grand, haunting memory. The buzz had landed.

  The lantern began to wheeze, low kerosene.

  The kerosene descended into a whisper in her hand.

  She measured the circumference of the whisper to that of her breast and stretched out her hand, as if air and night would guide her to Sonny’s house. She thought a door had opened, a woman—no one else but Sonny at this hour—must’ve walked out of it.

  She yelled: Sonny?

  One step into this rich and pitiful darkness she had found herself in. One giant step and she would’ve known how silly she had been to call out for a ghost.

  For no one had opened a door.

  Not Sonny. Not the house she had left behind. And not the Pickens’s house.

  Everyone was dreaming of rain.

  She alone was left: the wooded forest had gone to sleep.

  She was out here, at this distant hour, with her hands stretched out like an outdated and vigorous purpose that lies exposed to earth and the elements and comes out sour.

  The crickets had begun to chirp and rotate: their rambling fits of chatter sat still in her face and she shook it, she shook her face, and stepped forward.

  She imagined the sound of the dragging, Curtis calling out to Sonny and the white men and their horses … the pulley was what she imagined, really, how drawn it was to the hind leg … her depiction stained her reasoning, turned it into something dirty.

  Sonny? she yelled.

  She could’ve collapsed in her calling until Sonny heard it in her sleep—Sonny?—and stepped out from her porch.

  Emma New had begun to run now, run, run past tree and limb to the opening in the woods.

  Sonny?

  Here, Emma New, said Sonny. Here.

  Sonny had not reached for her gown. She was yet naked, as she had been in her slumber: her breasts like the belly of a hummingbird, narrow and downward in motion.

  Curtis had been called from the house around this hour, midnight: she had worn a battered, strict gown with a dirty gardenia on it. And now, when she slept, she slept naked, so no one—not even the white men—could cause her to suffer.

  Emma New sat on the edge of Sonny’s bed, breathing wildly.

  Sonny lay beside her from behind, the punctured gap of her cellulite exposed.

  Emma New, she whispered. Why you not sleep with the rest o’ the world?

  Emma New, embarrassed in her insomnia, had abandoned the lantern at the steps and was now apart of a witty daze that strung its rude district around her battered breathing.

  Sonny, she panted, I dream.

  What you dream of, Emma New? asked Sonny.

  It moans, whispered Emma New. I can’t shake it. I can’t shake it, Sonny.

  Sonny turned her head to the window: Curtis would come in the morning and stand behind her and whisper something sweet like There was a woman in it and all this weak woman-talk would slide down her shoulder and burn.

  Did he holler? asked Emma New.

  No.

  Did he beg for mercy? asked Emma New.

  From God.

  What you do when you heard it?

  Sonny turned to her pillow as if she wanted to taste her disturbed sleep. I … she added … I don’t remember quite. I think I put my hands together and grinned. God had done touched ’m.

  Emma New had caught her lung wind and paused in her sudden and trampled questioning.

  Sonny, said Emma New, he broke a rib.

  The best part, replied Sonny.

  But she wanted to say: A rib is what he broke? A rib done give ’m by God, made to heal and be? The only bone they can’t take. Complimentary.

  Sorrow had gone so far down, down there where things break and get easy: Sonny remembered the night she woke up—the matters of her face dispersed—the night she realized Curtis was not in the house: a hanging was what they would do.

  He had been out in moon-air, up in the forest tree, when he asked the moon for it, God who lived in the moon, to get him and Sonny to Memphis: he knew men there who worked on the railroad. He could find work, buy Sonny a new gown.

  But the moon was awake only in his eye, and it was the moon who had not at all heard him.

  A bird come this mornin’, said Sonny. You couldn’t tell it from the sky who brought it. All the time free.

  She thought of Curtis.

  Nothing left, she whispered. Bones.

  Emma New, her shoulder heavy and wet, had begun to weep.

  Love him like he dead, said Sonny.

  Sonny stood away from the bed, Emma New trembling.r />
  The space around them became a thing of spirit to Sonny, as she had already done her crying. She had already done her weak woman-talk. She had done it near the window where God and Curtis heard it.

  She reached out to Emma New: Come, she whispered.

  Emma New stood to her feet: she and Sonny walked over to the open window.

  The stars had begun to emerge, a planet within them, an entire universe, when Sonny took Emma New’s index finger and pointed to the galaxy of milk surrounding the slumber of men and horses and rib: Love him like he dead.

  Emma New traveled through the woods again, the kerosene from Sonny’s lantern guiding her without hurry back to the house of her restlessness where Earl Thomas awaited her, his rib glowing.

  chapter eleven

  A dead nigger had lain frozen in Hurry Bullock’s morgue: a tiny hole in the throat. The yellow eye of morbidity. The skull was crushed: a caterpillar crawled out of his head.

  Hoover Pickens and Salem Bullock surrounded the corpse.

  Hurry Bullock had given them a substance, greaselike, that lay beneath their nostrils to guard them from the rotting head, the bare positioning of the brain: the matter was exposed now, a blow to the cranium.

  The room was morbid, the unbearable arrangement of chemicals: everything began with a consonant: J for jungle. JB for jungle blood. JP for jungle piss.

  The shelves were disproportionate to Hurry Bullock’s height. He reached up high on the shelf for the tools that he’d used to privately puncture an already dead lung, a penis. The bones of the throat.

  In the morning time, only Hurry Bullock and the corpse occupied the room—in some grand and striking matrimony—as if he could not help that it was so close.

  There lived within him an accuracy for violent and devastating behavior: he knew where to let the JP out, how to take what piss was left of the corpse and drain it from the penis. The jungle blood ran down the sewerage, through towns like Bullock and Pyke County, Mississippi: the stench, he wanted it to linger in the permanent body of wind and earth, so the niggers, so God could take it down, down through the nostril and swallow his power.

  Where’d they catch ’m? asked Hoover Pickens.

  In the river, said Hurry Bullock.

  He drowned, yelled Salem Bullock, whose laughter rose through the morbid room with a determination that so struck the irredeemable structure of his body that it caused his foot to lean forward.

  They all held their bellies, the Bullocks and Hoover Pickens, laughing this way with their disastrous and haunting gills, as the corpse lay before them: the swollen gene of some mother’s donation to the world had become a blunt and horrible ruse.

  There lived an entire fascination for the tongs that Hurry Bullock plunged into the lung of the corpse—not dead enough—that the screams and laughter and niggers and He drowned caused the oxygen of the room to confine itself to the corpse, as if the corpse itself had begun to breathe.

  How they laughed and turned their faces to the dead, laughed in circulation: none of them thought of it—the pins could come loose from the dead man’s hips—he could rise in his deadness, his upper body erect and plausible.

  A drowning. A drowning had done it. He had gone down in the river and had his lung punctured, his earlobe dismantled, leg broken, and the face, no one could tell his age, and of course, the eye, a drowning had done that, too.

  Turn ’m over, said Salem Bullock.

  Hoover Pickens said, Yeah, Hurry, turn ’m over. We wanna see it.

  They longed to witness the vertebrae: a man was dragged through the woods, the ground ripped through his shirt, bare skin on earth, and came down on the spine like a welding tool.

  Hurry Bullock, white-gloved, caught the stiffness of the corpse and moved the body onto its stomach. There it was, the chiseled and boned vertebrae of the jungle bone.

  That was what they called it.

  In a collective degree of expansion, their shoulder blades began to rotate.

  Jungle blood, whispered Hurry Bullock.

  Why had the corpse terrified them so? They could not imagine entrapment, waking up in the morning with a nigger’s bones. The symptoms of Darwinism, apes and Homo sapiens, hung above the constitution. Put there by their fathers and grandfathers and those before them like an unattainable guide to the redemptive peace of hate.

  Hatred had lived so inevitably—an inward and satisfactory progress—within their systematic bodies that it swiveled like a heavy and sour plate struck down on the breakfast porch.

  Within measure, the room embodied them and the rustic scent of the corpse began to rise through the greaselike air beneath their nostrils and Hoover Pickens breathed it all in, the stench of the corpse, and leaned over from the gut and vomited.

  It had risen up from his acidic stomach, and as it streamed out of him, he hoped no one had seen it, the food that had rotted in his stomach from the heat.

  Salem Bullock stood behind him and patted him on the shoulder.

  Hoover Pickens lifted his hand to the sour oxygen of his mouth and turned away from the corpse and went out of the room where he could breathe. He walked out of the morgue and could hear them, the Bullocks, laughing and saying it again, over and over they said it: Weak.

  They had seen it come out of him, the vomit, how fragile his stomach was. This alone concerned him.

  The Bullocks joined him in the night air.

  That’s what happens when you mix jungle blood with the pure, said Salem Bullock. Wet.

  Better you than Adam, said Hurry Bullock.

  Hoover Pickens never told it. But Adam had done his vomiting: he had delivered the contents of Curtis Willow’s pocket to him. He could smell the sour odor on Adam’s breath, the contour of his stomach bellowing, his gut empty.

  The boy who had called Curtis from his house hadn’t at all vomited, at least there was no word of it. A boy was to hold it, all therein, and take it, take it like a man and member of the free and automatic men.

  Hoover Pickens had not told Adam how he would have to call the next nigger from his house, drag him on the ground until the bloody corpse lay in the woods, the head trembling on the edge of a wheelbarrow in the morning time.

  Hurry Bullock looked down at his foot. An object had begun to shine in the moon glow. He reached for it, dust-fingered. A dime.

  He dropped it in his pocket and shook it until the vibration struck his thigh. Night, boys, he said, before disappearing back into the morgue.

  Hoover Pickens did not respond.

  He walked over to his horse and jumped on top of it.

  Hurry Bullock stood near the window and watched as Hoover Pickens kicked his horse in the ribs, yelled out—Ya!—in the direction of the forest, a trail of vomit behind him.

  chapter twelve

  A white dress, tied at the shoulders, covered Lenora Bullock’s body with the delicate and wilted quality of a crooked vein. Her hand went up to her face, as if to signal to the sun’s interrogation to leave her alone.

  She had traveled away from the porch and now stood in the dust.

  Hurry Bullock was out in his own barn this afternoon: he had not asked for her intrusion—she had come to his bedside each morning—a poke to the side.

  Wake up, Hurry, she’d say. Time for breakfast.

  He had thought of opportunity: at once his hand could rise, make contact with her eye, and send her spurring down the steps of the house.

  No one would care. An orphan.

  And her Wake up, Hurrys, her Time for breakfasts—her rude and barbaric vocabulary—would swivel in her elongated head, right behind the eye, and pin her down.

  A dirty gardenia.

  Lenora Bullock yet quivered from it: Before his trip to the barn, he had come out of the house, shaken his head at the dress, and pulled the strap loose until her right breast fell out.

  That’s what you get, he whispered. Bastard.

  There were moments when he wished he’d left her at the train station: he should’ve known that s
he was an orphan. Her birthmark had a smudge of red on it where her hand was so out of focus that the lipstick traveled up the side of her jawbone. Perhaps it was because she looked so pitiful, an unprofessional clown, that he brought her home.

  He would no sooner admit his loneliness when he found her than he would the ticking lung that lifted him out of bed this morning and made him cough.

  She had only just now bridged herself together: the letter had not come from the Vital Life Office yet. She wished it’d hurry.

  How brave she had been, the sun of this afternoon pelting down on her solidity, as it motioned in front of her dress-shadow: she had spent hours sewing it, her first daring creation, to draw some kind of attention.

  She raised her arms: they were outstretched and balanced about her, as if she wanted to prove to the world her vulnerability. But there, in the dress-shadow, her fingers paused in movement.

  Gravity.

  She was already home, already the wife of Hurry Bullock who’d found her at the train station. Her carelessness was as bound to her spirit as the profound displacement of the darner needle.

  She brought her arms to her hips and leaned downward. The expression of her face, she could put her finger up to her head, pretend that it had entered through the eardrum, and everyone would notice, everyone would pay attention. She’d be in the dust.

  She’d be dead.

  Soon Adam and Midnight would emerge from the wooded forest.

  She had sent word to D. D. Pickens. Send Adam, she said. I’ve got an errand needs tending to.

  Hurry Bullock stood in the barn’s opening: Comp’ny? he asked.

  Lenora Bullock, wife of Hurry Bullock and seamstress, fell into the debate of a momentary grin: Adam, she replied.

  She stood in the unknown history of her bones: how ungrateful and cunning she was that she would remark upon his questioning with such arrogance when he could have easily done it this morning, slapped her face.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and disappeared.