Once again she lifted her foot and came down on the porch of the house.
She wanted to yell out to the world: Run, all o’ you. Run.
A collective warning to the niggers, the jungle bloods, the men Earl Thomas’s age and those to come. Run, all o’ you. Run, they done come.
The door swung open.
Emma New had been swept from the window and away from the proximity of light. I ain’t come to hurt, he whispered.
Earl Thomas stood before the intruder. A full-blown wind had leaped into him just now. He had practiced the coming of them, the theys, but had become so tired, so weak at this moment.
He and the intruder stared silently upon each other.
Emma New, yet bound by mouth and throat, reached out for Earl Thomas, and he no longer saw the woman who seemed so safe in the world. The lantern lit up her face, her fingertips, and held her in it, the beam underneath her gown, up toward the hips: the trembling.
Earl Thomas came out of his quiet.
Take me, he said.
The intruder let go of Emma New, who was sobbing uncontrollably. Her hair, wet with commotion, clung to her head. Her face sank low into the pitch of Earl Thomas’s arm like a glossary.
Go inside, he whispered.
Emma New would not let go of him. Her face had not risen to light.
Go now, whispered Earl Thomas.
Emma New parted with him, until her sobbing disappeared into the fabric of the pillows.
The intruder lifted his empty hand from his pocket.
Sir, he whispered. Don’t mean no harm.
Earl Thomas picked up the lantern and brought it up to the intruder’s face.
What’s your name, son?
Gill.
What you due for? asked Earl Thomas.
Gill stepped toward the eye of the lantern and spoke: I done wrong in the world. I done wrong … and I … I come … I come to help.
You come to hope? said Earl Thomas. How I know it?
I’m him, whispered Gill.
He said this with such agony, such electricity, that the rim of his eyelid fell downward and the thought of what he had done drew the creatures of the universe into a roaring collision.
Earl Thomas lowered the lantern: Come in, son, he said.
Gill Mender sat at the table of the Thomas house and emptied the contents of his pockets before Earl Thomas. Among them was the letter to Lenora Bullock. He simply wanted trust.
The lantern whistled between the two men: the flame rose, in a separate society, upward and down again, a streak of burning kerosene running up the belly of the transparent globe.
The light bound Gill toward it, and all of it, everything that he had done, spewed out of him. It leaked forward and away from his feverish body, and he told it and kept to his telling until his stomach was empty.
It had run through him so very quickly. His head began to swell, as though he were burning as the lantern was burning, as the moon above him burned in rotation and his chin lowered out of Earl Thomas’s vision and he reached upward, over the globe of the lantern, his hand lit up and fascinating: he wanted to disappear, the blurred stench of a dirty gardenia.
Earl Thomas stood from his chair. He had heard the last of it. And Emma New had, too, heard it and was now sitting up from her pillow: a murmur eased from her lungs and into her throat, paralysis.
She lifted herself from the bed and slid her fingers beneath the mattress: the letter. Why did she want to give it to Gill now? Why was there a sense of far-reaching disclosure about her?
Her fingers drew upon the letters: To the Men of the Pauer Plant. Courtesy of the Pastor. She walked toward the lantern, the light, and placed it before Gill.
He spoke: I didn’t mean to—
She interrupted: Take it.
Earl Thomas was too full to notice. He spoke: What’s his name?
Nearly thirteen years ago the announcement had come that a boy had been born unto Hoover and D. D. Pickens, and now, as much as then, he knew that the pattern pointed to and looked at on the ground was his.
Gill stood, confused.
The boy come callin’ for me, said Earl Thomas.
A silence throughout, and then he spoke: Adam.
The name and where it had come from, the first and beginning, the Father, punctured the silence of the room and bled into the stitch of Earl Thomas’s rib and he held on to the edge of the table, the lantern wavering like a nude child.
His hand went up to his pounding heart, the chest within him, and he felt it growing tighter, the pounding, and wished it would go ahead, burst now, a river of blood around him, so they could grab hold of him and his bones, the wheelbarrow, take him up to Hurry Bullock’s morgue and … He looked up at Emma New.
She was of no response, her little hand traveled up toward the back of her head, her face, and up to her hair. She had begun to plait the hairs of her head. A remote grin lifted her cheek. Adam, she repeated, and disappeared.
Gill walked toward Earl Thomas: Please, mister. Sit down. More coming.
Earl Thomas looked down at the contents Gill had emptied from his pocket and returned to his chair.
There fell upon him a repository of events that soon, he hoped, would bring the buzzing, the burgeoning memory of Curtis Willow, to a halt.
Sonny … Sonny, said Earl Thomas, a moan behind him. Tell it to ’er.
Gill responded, I run up on ’er there in the woods and I … I just couldn’t, frozen.
Hurt, don’t it?
Yes, sir, said Gill. It hurt and when I run up on ’er like that, I knew it was her and I seen ’er and she seen me and she …
Gill stood over the lantern and the flame, the rising wind of it, lifted a strand of his hair, and the heat burned the pupil of his eye—he tilted his face, his finger belted on his eyelid and the contents of the room, Earl Thomas, the chair grew blurry and out of range—he had stood too close.
You scared, mister? asked Gill.
Not now, said Earl Thomas. Not that the Lord done come.
Gill’s hand abandoned his eyelid and he was without rhythm and ground there in the room. He had grown sicker than when he had come. The fever poured into him. With certainty, he was empty. Nothing left.
You good, son? asked Earl Thomas.
I gotta get home, mister.
Earl Thomas approached Gill: he was closer than he had ever been to another man, closer even than Curtis Willow, and his hand, in an effort to console him, rose from his hip and hovered over the blade of his shoulder.
But Gill interrupted, I don’t deserve it.
And closed the door of the house. Gone.
Emma New entered the room, picked up a metal cylinder from a distant drawer, and smothered the oxygen of the lantern: He done come now, Earl. Time for bed.
Stung by the visit, the encounter, Earl Thomas staged himself perfectly. His feet were turned outward, an invisible peace woven throughout the darkness. And yet he deviated without familiarity into the clouded leakage of the lantern, reached forward to Emma New, gasped, and followed her to sleep.
chapter twenty
A humming had taken place a short while ago. She forwarded the tune into expression, upright and away from the jawline. The piano. The music, it would come as she had hoped, and she would sit atop the wooden bench, her vertebrae adrift from her hip like the uncomfortable, sudden darting of snow.
The widow stood at the fabric counter. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a lavender coin purse. Her finger lay there awhile, near the embroidered pansy she had sewn into it. A singular, misplaced curve near the eye of the center drew her mouth into a perpendicular murmur. She wondered whatever had she been thinking to allow something so crooked to go so long a time in her pocket that it seemed to wage against the chiming of her own weight, bone.
The carpenter scanned her, wanted her to hurry. He had built a row of shelves behind the counter. The mailman was dead.
Ma’am, he urged. Ma’am, I best be going.
The widow’s finger disappeared into the mouth of the lavender coin purse. She gave him a nickel. Here, she said. Come back tomorrow.
The carpenter opened his hand, the nickel had been dropped into it. There was a coldness about what she had done. What had she not today that she would have tomorrow? He looked upon her. He could have slapped her face.
But timidity had befallen him. He wanted to ask for more than this, more to get him home to Pyke County to feed his children—three of them waiting—but he gazed out, away from the sunlit window and into the mouth of the lavender coin purse. There was more there, more she could have given him.
Ma’am, he whispered. I’ve gotta get home. I’ve gotta get to—
I can’t help it, she interrupted.
As much as he wanted to slap her face, she wanted to burst into compatible disgust. Upon his arrival, she had noticed the similar shape of his eye to that of her dead husband’s, the commutable rotation of his shoulder: her husband would enter the house, hang up his coat—winter—and lay her out, her hair dirty and rotted with the stench of the Bullocks and Hoover Pickens, the morgue.
If it were never going to happen, if tomorrow, he were to come and she’d hold this against him, her fiendish and sickening posture, he may as well do it now, at this moment, when it seemed he had nothing more to hold on to.
The carpenter took his hand, large and uncompensated, and slapped her face.
She clung to his shock. Her face had not moved from its position. Indeed, she felt it, a ringing blow to the eardrum. She broke with laughter and paused a dangerous pause: Lopsided, she whispered.
He stared upon her, his hand yet trembling from the debris, the powder of her face. Never had he seen a woman, his wife included, hold such a violent temperature. His hand was still numb from it. His tools were at his feet; he reached down and took them up, the nickel in his pocket, and abandoned her.
The carpenter had offset her jawbone. Her hand toward her mouth, she realized what he had done. The taste of blood and saliva. Her lip had begun to bleed.
She walked away from the counter, past the piano—second-hand—and toward a box of tissues that lay on a lone shelf, a nail jutted out. Her mouth opened. The bloody saliva leaked out from the edge of her lip onto her dress. She was alone in the fabric store. No one had rung the bell.
A single blade of tissue, crushed by the discourse, the arrangement of her fingers, caught the bloody saliva. Her lip began to swell. And she took it, every bit of the swelling, and with her mouth yet open, she hummed from her throat.
But the bell had rung.
Lenora Bullock stood at the counter now. A pin trapped her yellow hair. The bracelet. The earrings. Costume jewelry from the morgue.
They belonged to the widow: Lenora had been at the morgue visiting Hurry when the widow’s husband came through, a blow to the head: she reached over the corpse—a bulging envelope bearing the widow’s name—and said to Hurry, Look, vanity.
Her face and wrist puckered, she turned to the mirror above the jungle blood and adorned herself with it. She whispered something, No blood on it. And looked down at her dress, emerald, and a surge of wind emerged from her stomach.
She was relieved: his upper torso, his face, had been covered by the sheet.
The bullet, she had seen neither where it entered nor came out. The widow, everyone knew she had done it.
She stepped away from the mirror ablaze, something new and hers, something belonging to the widow: Revenge, she thought.
For the widow had seen Lenora Bullock at the train station, waiting for a man from Bullock, had seen how she pulled the lipstick out of her purse, put it up to her lips, and, out of malice, tapped her wrist, the red line going up the side of Lenora Bullock’s cheek, smeared.
Was Lenora Bullock not, too, dirty?
The bell in the fabric store rang again.
Had she known the widow’s first and born name, she still would not have called her to come. There was something in treating a person like he or she didn’t belong. Her hand, suspended over the echo of the bell, came down again until the tune lingered and hung in the fabric.
The widow arrived at the counter, blood on her lip.
Anything good? asked Lenora Bullock.
The widow looked at Lenora Bullock: she was no more important in her exclamatory voice—the shiver of a broken bone—than anyone else in the world.
Well? said Lenora Bullock.
The widow reached for the lone item in Lenora and Hurry Bullock’s mailbox: a Sears and Roebuck catalog.
It lay on the counter. Lenora Bullock took it up and flipped through the pages. Nothing in between. This was the only news.
Nothing from Vital Life? she asked.
The widow pointed to the row of boxes, a series of catalogs throughout.
We all got ’m, said the widow.
Lenora Bullock had just now paid attention to it, now that her letter had not come: the widow’s lip had swelled outward, and without precaution, Lenora Bullock leaned over the counter and pointed to the swollen tissue.
That’s what you get, she whispered.
The widow’s face held the comment.
A noise plunged from the back room.
Lenora Bullock trembled, her hand forward: What’s that yonder?
The widow, through the bulging lip, the tune, lied: My father.
Lenora Bullock, nothing from Vital Life, nothing with which to root her, stirred about and her hand clung to the yellow pin in her hair, the earrings, the bracelet, and she sputtered out of the fabric store like the irrevocable destitution of a carpenter.
Sonny had been standing beneath the limb of a tree when Lenora Bullock reached the center of the woods for home.
Lenora Bullock had come to a pause.
But Sonny, Sonny approached her. She stepped forward and into Lenora Bullock’s breathing: she breathed her air and wind.
The costume jewelry. The blow to the head. The rigor mortis. There was blood on Lenora Bullock, and it rose above the two women, the calculation of a red blur in the eye. And the rotting of the blur, the leaking bondage and murder it had caused, spilled throughout the woods and deviated—a sort of vindictiveness—from its territory and down again into the discomfort of Lenora Bullock.
Sonny circled her there in the woods, around and around again, until Lenora Bullock’s wrist went up to her mouth and the bracelet rummaged downward from her wrist and near the elbow. She was nude in her invisible speech. She had never been so close as now, close to the victim, the river of blood.
A bird flew above her and landed on a branch. For Lenora Bullock, in her perplexity, took it personally and inwardly: the bird had come to mock her, the vulnerability of her condition.
Sonny paused and looked ahead, beyond the pouch of Lenora Bullock’s exhalation. She done took and took and took from all that was not and never hers and all that was never her husband’s and the men, the men who took and took with him. None of it his and theirs, she thought.
Lenora Bullock, in her costume jewelry, released her hand from her mouth.
Sonny lifted her palm toward Lenora Bullock’s lips, the startling complacency of her face, the murderous bones beneath drew her hand to a close.
Sonny had begun to howl and the bird left the branch and down, down toward Lenora Bullock: she had now broken out, a full-blown run, and the pin that trapped her yellow hair could not hold in her head. The howling … she was unsteady there on the ground and tumbled into the earth, her face and hair dirty, as dirty as it was when Hurry Bullock found her at the train station.
The encounter grew round in her head.
Lenora Bullock, in her tumbling, thought of Curtis Willow: he had come from the river—naked and alarming—the emaciated, hungry stream of the Mississippi dripped down the lead of his penis. His head turned with detachment away from her, his fingers near the thighbone with an inevitable spleen of embarrassment: the contours of his face and body singularly paused, his breath withheld.
A strict, sta
ggering muscle pulsated in his face: his breath yet withheld, his eye wept and blended into the waters of the Mississippi.
He had simply gone for a swim.
With her bare hand, Lenora Bullock unbuttoned her blouse, the nipple erect and protruding, and touched him. The Mississippi dripped down her sternum, onto the flesh, and hung on the territory of her nipple.
Now she owned the interrogation, the full democracy of the muscular face, the penis: the birthmark, the thing she had claimed, resisted and pulled back, and she forced Curtis Willow’s involuntary hand into her mouth and swallowed the river.
She released his hand. His arm swung from the shoulder and he could smell the powder of Caucasia—a catastrophic, infinite mutation that led him to pause.
Lenora Bullock yelled out: Nigger, you’re dead.
Here, the silence, the paste of the nipple and breast, chilled him.
She wanted to be.
He wished more for Lenora Bullock’s freedom than she.
For the first time, he looked upon her. He lifted his hands to her blouse, gathered the fabric at the shoulder, and traced the socket of each button, bridging her self-esteem to a close.
She drifted with embarrassment, the rejection and exposure of what she had encountered, and ran through the woods, a fall ripping her skirt at the hemline.
She yelled out, screamed: A nigger, he whistled.
Now Sonny stood above her. Lenora took to her feet, the bird flying about, and ran until she reached her house and up the stairs: a cord of blood streamed from the remote and delicate bone of her ankle.
In her sobbing, the voice of D. D. Pickens seeped through: Leaves a stain.
She was so tired from the memory that she lay on the pillows of her bed and wished she were dead.
chapter twenty-one
Hoover Pickens walked out of the barn and toward Midnight.
A Killing in This Town Page 9