chapter eighteen
The rain made him cold.
Gill Mender had run through it, trembling.
Five years he had lived in the abandoned house: everything in one room.
The rain spun around him and he knew how a part of the spinning he was when it came to him: Curtis Willow. Come out, nigger.
He had said it, his very own mouth: Curtis’s head was dirty, the debris of the dragging woven into it, the skull cracked as if the blade of a shovel had gone down into it and a man, any man, had stuck his foot on the edge of it and pushed down on it, so he would go ahead and do his swelling where he was, that way the blood’d burst right out of him and onto the ground. But they—the Bullock Klansmen—made him do it.
Come here, son, they said. Push down on it.
No, sir. Gill whispered. Don’t make me.
But Hurry Bullock snatched him out of his begging and lit a match where the head was and made him put his foot on the shovel and jump down on it. That was how his eye popped out: the pressure of the blade pushed his brains forward—near the nostril—not enough room in the socket.
When a nigger’s head bursts, the earth takes him inward, into her bosom, and she washes the blood out of his hair, straightens his foot out, and she cannot bear to see him as she found him, all broken up like that, and patches his head together. Mud.
The large and blurry window, adjacent to Gill’s standing, held the smear of his fingerprint, and as he stood in the room, alone and without, he recalled the energy of the house after the dragging: his father had walked up behind him, patted him on the shoulder of his right arm. A mixture of rain and dirt had run down the sodden sleeve of his robe, onto the brink of his index finger, the floor.
What had he done? The howling of Curtis Willow drifted down his throat. He swallowed, his hand up to the window. Rain-dirt.
Good boy, son, whispered his father.
Not only his father but all of the Klansmen were in the one-room house: Hoover Pickens and the Bullocks—the husband of the widow—stood around him with an air of diversion about them. Even his mother.
Hear how that nigger called out? said one of the men. We put him down. We put him down.
Their laughter rose with expansion, darted throughout their conversation like the arrogance of light in the wrong eye: The nigger, the nigger, hear how he called out? they yelled. For mercy.
No one had noticed: a brown recluse spider crawled atop the hood of the widow’s husband. Gill had seen it—a thing of powerful solidarity—leap down from a singular, webbed line and onto his Klan suit.
Dead nigger now, he yelled.
Among the words Dead nigger now, the brown recluse crept upon him, near the skull, as if both line and activity carried the same result. He laughed and his throat held it. The spider paused.
Jungle blood, said Hurry Bullock.
Again the laughter consumed them.
He hollered, that one, said the widow’s husband. A kite.
They held on to the master Klansman’s tale, the grandfather of Hurry and Salem Bullock: an embroidered kite had flown above his house like a bird, stirred by wind and earth. It had begun to whistle. The sound, how it drew him to anger—a nigger to a white woman—a nigger’s head was what he imagined as he reached for his gun. Shot it down.
Gill’s father stood from his chair. Wild and on purpose, he brought his shoulders forward and, with imitation, opened his mouth, ape-like. The primordial sound hung in the echo of the pregnant house. Each of them yelling, Jungle blood, jungle blood.
We put him down. We put him down.
None of them was aware. The noise, the yelling out, moved the spider out of position, upward and onto the spine of the widow’s husband, up to the cranium. It sat there a moment upon the yellow hairs of his head.
The pouch of the spider’s belly, woven from some sort of restlessness, seemed at once deflated, the poison rushing through.
The widow’s husband halted in his laughter as his finger traveled upward to the skull. His head had begun to itch. The spider disappeared beyond the hairs of his head, and Gill saw that it departed, as it had come, down the fabric of the hood and onto the singular webbed line strung from the tiny opening in the ceiling.
I taught ’m good, said Hurry Bullock.
Gill stood at the center of the table. They gazed upon him.
His mother, in her obscure manner, reached into her pocket. Prior to the dragging, her letter had come from the Vital Life Office. Her father had been found. Somewhere in Tennessee.
She, too, bore the stain of a birthmark: it lay hidden beneath the bulb of her breast, the agonizing age of primacy.
She had shared the news with only Gill’s father: how could she take Gill with them, the predicament of her own weight a germ to carry?
So much happens when two people lie down together. They whisper, one to another, among themselves, as if the secret of their morbidity will spill out, rise from the cloud of their breathing and into the next bed where the boy sleeps, his eardrum battered with it all the while.
Their love was impenetrable.
For Gill knew: he had never fully been included.
Of course he had heard them. They would leave in the early morning, abandon him while he slumbered. His mother would kiss him on the mouth, so as to leave him with the scent of her milk. And journey with his father to the train station for Tennessee.
Indeed, she knelt down beside his bed the following morning, his father behind her, and kissed him. After the closing of the door, he ran to the window, watched them go.
The sour odor of the men, his father, yet lingered. He looked down at his misshapen hands. He would do this at night, too. The moon lighted upon them, a course of interdependency. Man and evolution.
Midnight had begun to bark.
Gill opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. He had drawn a map for Adam. I want to show you something, he commented. They had been sitting amid the Pickenses when he said it. Adam’s hand went up to his face, a grin seeped through.
Adam ran through the downpour of the forest, Midnight following, until Gill bade him to safety.
You done come, said Gill. Follow me.
They disappeared behind the house—both the hue of milk spewing out—and up toward the barn: with distinct and utter separation, it was atop the hill.
The doors had been barred with a single wooden board.
Wait here, yelled Gill.
He returned with a hammer and pried it loose.
The rain blew down upon him and he looked out, out into the woods with desperation: he could have lain in it right now, he thought, opened his mouth, and let it through.
Midnight and Adam were inside the barn now.
Gill, the last to go through, closed the door behind them and walked toward a lantern, struck a match that had lain beside it, and, at once, lit the wick.
There seemed a fog throughout the entire place, the flame rising upward, up toward the haystacks, bale by bale, that shifted above them, all out of line and link with symmetry: Gill had placed them this way out of purpose, pulled them away from the land of an adjacent field, only the moon-face above him.
Midnight panted and, in this light, his head a crowbar, turned sideways. For a short while, his belly protruded outward, away from the earth, as if at any moment he’d come undone, a tug of the tail, a strand to unweave.
Gill stood apart from Adam, his weight supported by the heel of his foot.
Adam looked down at the lantern: it hung from Gill’s hand, had set the bones of the wrist into an equation, a dangerous independence, so that he pictured it, the fumes spreading throughout, up to the shoulder, the entire head ablaze.
Midnight stretched his hind legs, a yawn came from him, and he lay down on a lone bale of hay, his tongue bellowing out.
Gill stepped forward and paused: I gotta show you some’n.
Adam followed him.
Gill remembered, in his naive and candid footsteps, how he had trailed Hurry B
ullock, how he had wanted to pull Hurry Bullock’s pistol out of his pocket, put it up to his head, near the temple, and … he envisioned it, a tiny hole traveling through one side of the head and coming out, a blow to the skull: in his childish and weary mind, he had assumed it would look like a red dot above the ear, shift the head a little and he’d fall to the ground, look like he’d been sleeping all the time.
Gill reached out behind him, passing the lantern to Adam. Hold it, he whispered.
They had come to a vast wooden gate in the barn: a horse approached.
If Adam had ever seen such a creature, such a testimony of strength and moment, he could not think of it. The horse breathed from the nostrils, a stirring of the eye away from him and Gill and back toward them. A pink cloud lived around the globe of his pupils. He was pale in color, bone-white.
Adam walked up toward him, his hand over the horse’s face. He had not yet touched him before Gill interrupted: How come you don’t ride none? he asked.
Used to, whispered Adam.
How come you don’t now?
Fell, said Adam, the horse stirring in its steps.
Go ahead, said Gill. Touch ’m.
Adam walked beside the horse, his hand on the belly. The sincerity of the creature’s breathing, the pausing of the gut, drew him to breathe and pause in the same obedient pattern.
What’s his name? asked Adam.
Blade.
Gill’s response hung in the fog around them. Adam, asked Gill, you fell one time? You fell one time ’n’ you quit?
Adam nodded.
Then you ain’t been taught? asked Gill.
Yeah, whispered Adam. I done been taught.
By who?
Mr. Hurry, said Adam.
The name hung in Gill’s head, and he held his ribs together as it occurred to him what he must do and what the boy, Adam, must do to save them both.
He could not bear to think of it: Adam’s round head seemed altogether vulnerable to the language, the men who’d sit at his table in their Klan suits and Klan talk and mimic, laugh about a thing so pitiful as murder and jungle blood, and his mother, D. D. Pickens, with her unreachable polarity, would just stand there—with the rest of them—and leave him sobbing in the window, only the stain of a kiss holding him together.
Adam, he whispered. There’s something you gotta do.
Gill whirled in his standing. He wanted to sit down, but there was nothing there to catch him. Adam, you’ve gotta take to Blade. He’s gotta catch wind o’ your scent. There’s something … There’s something you gotta do.
The final blow of the sentence he had murmured seemed to spin him out of natural proportion, and he hoped his gut would keep and the laughter of the Bullocks and Hoover Pickens, his mother’s abandonment, would leave his heart tidy and without restlessness. But he knew none of that would ever happen, not as long as he had not corrected the horrible thing he had done, the calling out of Curtis Willow.
It was as if he had invited it, Come in, Come in, but he had not at all invited the words. They had come without invitation and stung him, a swarm of bees, in his liver and his full mind, and he realized how the accordion player must have felt without his music there to keep him safe. The raging sound of the last tune consumed him, the accidental hurling of the instrument crushed by the machine, the accordion player wailing behind it. He had come so close, held it for a temporary and depleted time, before the silence of the muted tune struck him—defeated—and the moisture drifted apart from the eyelid and so suddenly did it strike him, a widow.
Adam’s hand rested on the muscle of the horse’s rib. He paused: What’s I gotta do, Gill?
But Gill had gone from the gate, away from the horse and Adam.
Adam left the horse and walked through the fog of the barn.
Gill’s figure appeared. He was sitting on a haystack, his head between his knees.
His hand disappeared from his position: he had reached for his eardrum to muzzle it, the words and their degradation, and his arm went down behind him: he had not realized it then. This was the forced position of Curtis Willow, his arms tied behind him where he could not even reach out of the morbidity of his screaming to grab hold of his face, the pain, the pain seeping through.
Gill, asked Adam. What’s I gotta do?
Gill reached out his hand and whispered and hoped Adam would hear it this one time, so the agony of holding himself in one piece would not leak out: You gotta take to Blade. You gotta ride ’m like you belong to ’m.
Adam paused.
Blade’s sick and I’m sick and you’ve got some sick comin’ to you … and I … I get a fever so just keepin’ it, he said.
Midnight rose from his side. He ran up to and away from Adam, and when he saw it, he gnashed his teeth together and up toward it—Adam, too, saw it—there hung above Gill’s discomfort, a Klan suit.
It had announced itself through the fog, bloody.
It looked and was shaped like his own. Lenora Bullock’s doing, a darner needle. The pale-turned-bloody fabric shifted in the air of the barn, strung from the hook of a pulley.
Gill, he murmured, Midnight at his side. I’ll take to ’m.
Gill rose out of his perplexity and joined him, both returning to the stall where a singular and sporadic drop of rain had crawled through the loose seam of the rooftop and down onto the pink cloud of Blade’s round and indelible eye.
chapter nineteen
Three days now, the rain had gone on so.
Emma New had come out of the Thomas house. Lung wind pushed her lips apart. She let her hair down to plait it: her fingers had gone up, up to her head, where she discovered a webbed line strung from the center. She stepped right into it, a web.
She took it between the space of her tiny hand. She left her fingers apart until the buzzing, a blowfly, perched itself upon the line that had now become a limb of rest.
A blowfly. The insect of the dead. The lavender head, the bulging eye. The buzzing, the buzzing of Curtis Willow. After they took Curtis Willow up into the wheelbarrow, the insects perched on the blood and buzzed, buzzed throughout the forest and over the crumbling houses with a malevolent, linguistic sputtering that rang in the eardrum like the mechanical and crooked line of a stitch.
Earl Thomas had been in the room, watching her, listening to the buzzing insect: the sound rummaged throughout the house, the walls, and he wondered why had she sat there on the edge of the bed for so long a time when all it took was a motion of the fingers, a twitch of the limb, to abort the scene, the outburst she had created.
In conjunction with her precise and immobile composition, he had become erasable, drawn out by the error of an instrument—pencil lead—scribbled throughout the room without order. He was invisible.
Why not put it down? Move? he thought. And yet why hadn’t he stepped forward, out of the agony of his standing place? He only stood there, as if sabotaged, trapped into statehood. He, too, had made the buzzing important, some conscientious observer to the party, the loud and terrible sputtering that clung to his position as if daring, saying to him that he longed to hear it. Even with his own life in jeopardy.
They. They. They. They were at once riveting, and he saw Curtis Willow, imagined it, his head trembling from the tumultuous blow, the face struck and turned aside on the ground. They had done it, driven him by wheelbarrow through town, so everyone could see, the head woven into a beast.
Emma New did not move: Earl Thomas stepped forward and disturbed the limb, the insect buzzing out of place and turn, before fleeing the house and out, out into the night air, the moon.
Emma New was out on the porch now. Her hair slept on her shoulders: she had abandoned the plaiting of it and reached out toward the wooden column, the wind taking part in her breathing.
Earl Thomas stood behind her a short while and returned to the room, closing the door behind him. He had whispered bleakly, Come in out of the dark; but the light of the lantern had accompanied her. He had no more faith in his own W
ord to make any of his announcements true.
He watched her from the window. A sudden absorption, an inward and solitary feeling, crept into a prophecy. He should not have stepped forward, disturbed the solemnity of the limb, when, at this moment, he wanted it, the systematic hurrying of the noise, the insect, the dream, the parallel line of the buzzing that she had composed—he thought, This must be what it’s like. To be alone in the house. Alone without Emma New. Dead.
He wanted to go out onto the porch again, tell her, Come in out of the dark, come in out of the dark and let me … I don’t know. Take you up? Hold you? But he couldn’t. He had grown weary of thinking. Curtis Willow. Dead. Me. Dead.
His hand went up to the window and he wanted to include her in his gravity, his reaching out. But he could not draw her in. Emma New stood upon the world and was at the very base of the sphere, protruding out from her own axis, rotating in her gown, as if separation from him, the terrible thought of the dead, were the matters of her despondency.
He left the window.
And upon his absence, Emma New turned to face the cube from which he had looked out. Her hand surfaced the window, warm with the temperature of his breathing, and came down again: someone had crept up behind her, muzzled her mouth and throat.
She struggled, wanted to yell out to Earl Thomas, who had closed the door to the room and left her there. She reached for the lantern: the bitter light rose around her and the intruder and she spun, spun in his arms, until the glowing caught the flesh of his arm: she saw that he was pale.
Lord, she thought. They done come for ’m.
Suddenly, she stepped forward with her foot and brought it down upon the porch with a vernacular rumbling that shook the house.
Emma New?
Earl Thomas had come to a pause. He waited for it, a second rumbling.
Emma New had seemed so safe before.
Didn’t come to hurt, whispered the intruder. Be still.
The words Love him like he dead were now unrecognizable to Emma New, as if Sonny had never spoken them. The encounter bashed the line, the memory, the agony of it, and she wished she had never believed it. But now, too late a time, she saw Earl Thomas—in her frightening and tumultuous predicament—spun by the web of insect and beast, spun by the white men, the spit of the tongue, flung from the house like poison and out into the wooded forest, the globe of his eye, the vein beaten out of familiarity, the skull.
A Killing in This Town Page 8