One of the men presses the barrel of a revolver between the boy’s eyes.
“You wanna fuck this white girl?” he asks. “Iffen you do, now’s your chance.”
The boy gapes. The man cracks the boy across the cheek with the butt of his pistol and Aaron sees the skin peel back at once, as if chiseled. The boy does not lift a hand to protect himself. He does not seem to know that he has been hit.
“They all want it,” the sheriff says, “only when it’s been given to ’em free, they’re too scared to take it.”
“How ‘bout a kiss for the boy to get him started?” Horace says. “He’s so shy, ma’am, you gonna need to help. You come on now and do what I say, hear?”
“Don’t,” Aaron whispers. “Don’t do it.”
“You keep your lip buttoned.” The sheriff has his service revolver in Aaron’s midsection. “You let the girl do what she wants. Freedom now, boy, right? Maybe she’s got a thing for little fellas, likes to play games with them.”
A man approaches from behind the campfire’s flames, a barber’s razor across his raised palm.
“Take the little fucker’s pants down, Horace, and we’ll take care of his problem right here and now. Then he won’t have to worry ‘bout temptation all the rest of his life.”
Aaron sees Nicky sway, as if she may faint. He sees them lift the boy, jerk his pants down. The boy falls face forward toward the campfire, lurches along the ground as if having a seizure. The surface of the lake is absolutely still, a disc of dusty tin. The sheriff’s son grabs the razor from the other man and straddles the boy, turns to Aaron.
“You love this nigger so much, mister, whyn’t you come fight for his little pecker now? I givin’ you a chance to come try and take this razor from me so you can save the boy you love.” He laughs, turns to the other men. “Think the fish gonna bite for it if we put it on a hook after? Looks just like a nice fresh brown earthworm, don’t you think? Don’t it, Dad?”
“Too small, Horace. Fish is smarter than niggers.”
Aaron’s throat is dry. “Please don’t,” he says. He tries to recall the words they were taught. “You’ll only be sorry later. Can’t we talk this over? We won’t tell anybody about what you’ve done, but I think—”
“Who’s he gonna tell, Ben? You’re the law. Maybe he’s gonna tell you.”
“I got to warn you it’s against the law in the state of Mississippi for two people to fornicate in public places,” Ben says. “This here is public land, boy.”
“The nigger’s out cold, Ben. How about letting her do it with the big white fucker, give us a show—teach us all them tricks they been learnin’ the niggers in their schools?”
The men mumble, shuffle. Have they lost interest already? Aaron wonders: when their imaginations run dry—when words and taunts fade—will the need for violence still be there?
“You heard them,” Ben says. “You be a gentleman and you give the pretty girl here a kiss, then maybe we’ll let you go.” He grabs Aaron’s jaw and squeezes with such terrible pressure that Aaron believes the top of his head may pop off. Ben whispers, his eyes pitiless, his voice low: “You want to get out of here alive, you do what we ask, you hear? I’ll handle the rest.”
“She ain’t so pretty with all the blood swole up on her mouth, Dad.”
Ben’s voice is harsh: “You move, girl—”
Nicky is in front of him, her hands light on his shoulders, her lips against his. She is on tiptoes, and all the pressure of her wiry body is set against his mouth, a strip of air between them. He does not close his eyes. He hears the men holler, making jokes, urging him to cornpole her. He feels a lash on his cheek and knows it has drawn blood from Nicky too. Still, she does not pull away and the desperation of her passion startles him. Her tongue searches inside his mouth hungrily. Her lips are surprisingly warm, her tongue sweet with the salty taste of blood. Her blood? His own?
Aaron is pulled backwards violently. Somebody says that he is enjoying it too much. Nicky licks her chipped tooth. The sheriff’s son passes the razor in front of Nicky’s eyes and Aaron does not move.
“You stay where you are, boy,” the sheriff says, a hand on Aaron’s arm. He turns. “What you aim to do with that carrot peeler, Horace?”
“Cut me some bait,” Horace says. He jabs at Nicky’s waist. “Smells like rotten shrimp down there. Fish gonna like that, I bet.”
“No,” the sheriff says. “You got to be smart, Horace, like I always say. You know how many feds they got in Philadelphia and Meridien now, more coming? You kill a white girl, they gonna be down our necks before the sun comes up. Now, you got business with the poor colored boy, you finish that, none of us around to see. They don’t care so much about that.” He turns halfway toward Aaron. “Didn’t Jesus himself say, ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword’? Didn’t he now? So you tell me, if you’re a smart man: who brought the sword down here, who’s doing His work best—?”
Horace bends over the boy, razor high, and Aaron is aware of the hush, the sudden silence. He is afraid that he is going to retch, and he doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction. He sees a few men turn away, hears the sound of a car engine start up, measures his chances, tries to take into account what they might do afterwards to Nicky, to the boy. Horace hunches over, razor held sideways, as if he will slice backhanded. But he hesitates for a second—his other hand, directly above the boy’s groin, twitching a bit, as if afraid to touch the boy’s penis—and in that second, the sheriff reaches for the razor and Nicky begins to sing: “‘Amazing grace…how sweet the sound…/That saved a wretch like me—/I once was lost, but now I’m found…/Was blind, but now I see…‘”
Aaron feels his heart stop, then pound harder. A pulse beats in his neck. Nicky’s voice is not beautiful, yet it is surprisingly full and lusty, rasping a bit on the low notes, breaking slightly in the falling cadences. He imagines her in a long white robe, walking out into the water, being held by the minister, being dunked backwards. He sees her rise, hair dripping. They sang the song in Ohio, holding hands, and in the church in Meridien. The sheriff has stopped, his hand poised above his son’s hand. Does Nicky see him? A dog begins to howl, then another, and Nicky keeps singing, eyes closed. Aaron sees a man, to his right, squat down the way the Polish farmers do where Aaron lives, forearms on thighs for balance. The man removes his orange hunter’s cap. Horace’s eyes bulge even while his hands relax.
Aaron watches a man ruffle the fur on his dog’s neck. Doubtless what they were taught, again and again, in training sessions, is true: the same man who will horsewhip a Negro will be kind to wife and child and dog, and will perceive nothing contradictory in his behavior. Aaron watches Ben take the razor from Horace’s hand.
“Well,” Ben says. “All we said we was gonna do, remember, was to put the fear of God into these troublemakers, and I guess we done that. No need to bring trouble down on our necks too.”
Aaron watches his car slide by, pushed by three men. It rolls forward, glides into the lake, stops when the water is just below the level of the front windows.
A minute later they are alone, though Nicky does not seem to realize it.
“We’re okay,” Aaron says.
She reaches for his hand, then collapses against his chest, clutching at his back, beginning to sob. He smooths her hair, feels pinpoints of pain explode within his head and chest.
“We need to get the boy to a doctor. Us too.”
“I don’t think my jaw is broken—not really.”
Aaron listens to the boy’s heart race, feels the cold, damp skin. He takes his own shoes and socks off, rolls up his pants and walks into the lake. He reaches into the back seat, takes out a blanket, holds it above his head, wades back to land. He washes the boy’s forehead and face, dries him, then wraps him in the blanket and lifts him in his arms. The moon is gone. In darkness they begin to walk toward the road.
“It worked,” Nicky says. “Jesus Christ Almighty but it worked, Aaron. We’re still here. I w
as so scared, but…”
“It’s all right.”
“I imagined it happening like this a long time ago—what I’d do in a jam like this, when I was down to my final out—and I figured when you’d used up everything else, music would be the only answer, for…for it alone has charms to soothe the savage beast, right?”
Briefly, as they stumble together through the woods, she leans against him. He tells her again that everything is all right. He does not tell her that the sheriff had moved toward his son and taken the razor before she began to sing.
Much later, when they are back at Rose Morgan’s, their wounds stitched and treated by a young doctor called to the S.N.C.C. office, the boy taken to a county hospital, the incident reported by telephone to state police and federal agents, and after they have told the story to the others, Nicky goes with him to his room. He sits on the edge of his bed. She looks out the window.
“The one rule I forgot to mention,” she begins, “was that you shouldn’t ever go out after dark, only I just…”
“It’s okay. You did fine. We knew this might happen. It happens every day to somebody, so why not us? We’ll heal.” He is puzzled. “But it’s like a summer job for us, isn’t it? I mean, we go back to other lives when this is over—”
“You sure kiss good,” she says. “At least I can have the memory of that to warm me some long winter night.”
He sees that, despite her smile, she is trembling. He puts his arm around her.
“Would you like to sleep here tonight?”
She starts to speak, but her lips quiver. She bites down, winces, then nods.
“Come on,” he says. “It’s all right. This is the life we have, right? And not another—”
They lie down. He expects that he will not sleep until the sun rises. He turns onto his side, his eyes on the window, and she presses her body against his. Her arms are around his waist, her cheek against his back, her knees pressed against the hollows behind his knees, her feet cold against his ankles. She tells him that he should not be frightened, that she will try not to take advantage. He puts his hands on top of hers.
If things were different, Nicky asks—if they had different lives—she knows they don’t, but if things were different and they had met the way they have, but in some other time and place, does he think he might have fallen in love with her? Could he love a girl like her?
Yes.
That’s all she needs to know, she says. She burrows close to him, as close as she can get, rubs her damp nose back and forth against his shoulder. She talks softly, tells him that she likes to hold him this way so that he can’t see her face, so that he has to imagine it. He thinks of Ellen’s fingers, touching his face, reading it. He sees Ellen in her garden, bending down, reaching for flowers, and he suddenly sees his children—Carl and Larry—in that garden, sitting on the grass, waiting for Ellen to find them. He loved Gail and yet, in his memory, it is Ellen he sees most often. Why? Is it merely because, like her, he too is now cut off forever from seeing the world he once loved so dearly? Is it because, like her, when he wants to see this world, he must now imagine it into being? Perhaps. But he senses that even when he was living in his first life, his affinity with Ellen was as strange and deep as it was mysterious. The world was there for both of them, yet neither of them could live within it in the ordinary way he yearned to live in the world. His desire to imagine a life other than the one he had been given—a desire that he refused, back then, to acknowledge—must have been at least as strong as her need to imagine a world she could never see.
Nicky clings to him, talks about how frightened she was, and while she talks he thinks of Emilie, who would be almost ten years old by now, if she is alive, and he tries to imagine her smile. He sees himself squatting, letting her climb onto his back, grasp him around the neck, press her cheek against the nape of his neck. He sees Gail in the doorway and she leans back, hands on her stomach. She is pregnant again. Has she remarried? How often does she think of him? The last time he saw her she was the age Nicky is now. He imagines Gail passing in front of the window, her back arched. The window is a dark-blue mirror. He wants to press his palm against the small of Gail’s back, to hear her sigh with pleasure at the relief he can give to her in this way, and for a few minutes, before the world spins into blackness, he is comforted by imagining that Ellen sometimes wonders what became of him, and that Gail can see him here, with Nicky.
12
THEY DRIVE HOME, through the hills of Ashfield and Conway, and down across the flatter landscape of Hatfield, Lucius delighting in the light snowfall. It is the first snow he has ever seen, and he keeps his bare hand stuck out the side window so that he can catch the flakes, lick them from his palm. The road is slick and black, the wet flakes dissolving the instant they hit pavement. Aaron watches a lone car, a dozen yards ahead, skid sideways, fishtail, recover. He downshifts from third to second, keeps the van in second gear, listens to Lucius talk about what people back home would think, could they see him now.
“Instead of flowers,” he says, “I gonna bring some gal a snowball when I come courtin’ next time, don’t you think? She can keep it in her icebox.”
Aaron smiles, but his smile falters. He is never comfortable when Lucius talks this way—back-home talk—and he feels that Lucius uses talk like this to put distance between them.
“Can you close the window? We’ll both catch a chill. The sweat’s not dry on me yet.”
Lucius rolls the window up, puts his hands between his thighs to warm them, laughs easily, then pats Aaron on the shoulder in a way that lets Aaron know that Lucius senses what Aaron feels. Lucius talks naturally—his voice guttural, his inflection almost without southern accent—asking questions about snow: what makes it stick? what makes it melt? how deep can it get in how much time? what’s the worst snow Aaron has ever seen? what happens if the snow comes down mixed with rain….
The world is dim, all whites and grays except, in the patch of light illuminated by their headlights, the snow falling at a slant, a lemony-yellow. The fields stretch away to either side, cabbages and cornstalks visible here and there where they have not yet been plowed under. Thanksgiving is still ten days off. Aaron cannot remember snow having come this early, and he says so to Lucius. Lucius says that the cabbages, like soft babies’ bottoms, look as if they’ve been sprinkled with talcum. To their left, where the Connecticut River flows less than a hundred yards away, they see nothing but white—and the whiteness does not please Aaron. He cannot see the river, or the line of trees that borders it. He senses a wall of black behind the whiteness, pressing against it: a thin, hard veneer. Aaron loves the land when he can see across it, when there are wide horizons, endless vistas. His favorite time of year—between autumn and first snow, when the leaves fall from the trees little by little, slowly revealing the landscape beyond; when he can see the hills and green fields that have been hidden for half a year, even as the green itself begins to fade to browns and lavenders and yellows and golds—this is gone now. He feels as if he is driving under an enormous dome of snow, the dome moving along with him, the side walls remaining equidistant from his van. There are pinpoints of color here and there—a splash of orange on a billboard, a yellow porch light, a green highway sign, black shutters on an old farmhouse, silver mailboxes on dark posts. Is life like that—an endless haze of gray and white, without beginning or end, with here and there a flash of color, a spot of something that suggests the possibility of beauty? Can one enter these points of color—of light—and pass through to the other side, to some other world?
Aaron chides himself for such musings, yet finds that he is less irritable, less tense, for letting thoughts come this way. Until recently—he has been talking with Susan about this—he had never thought of himself as a man with imagination. He could draw well, of course. He could design houses and, his great pleasure, make beautiful architectural renderings of them—design sections or construction drawings, architectural elevations—but in doing so he fel
t for the most part that he was only setting down what was already there, or would be there, in the physical world. He was collaborating with clients, working to order, rendering the actual: what could, in fact, in the physical world, be constructed out of wood and metal and glass and cement. But to have thoughts beyond things physical—to consider the presence of things not visible in the world—this was something he couldn’t remember having done often. In the portraits he drew when he was a boy? In his drawings of apartment buildings and storefronts? Perhaps. For much as he wanted to render things as accurately as he could, he was aware that he was also trying to get at something else, that he was trying, somehow, to draw through the details to something more real, to some quality of the person or of the place that could not be expressed by things merely physical.
His mind drifts, whiteness swirling softly inside his brain like plaster dust caught in an updraft. A cluster of houses set back from the road, to the west—a dairy farm, a four-walled fortresslike layout of buildings, with a red and silver silo jutting upwards like a bullet—makes him think of the dark, close barn, the warm bodies of cows, the sweet, musky smell of silage. He imagines a cardinal passing in front of the car, from west to east—a streak of crimson that bleeds across the white landscape, coming from nowhere, disappearing forever. He looks sideways at Lucius, and he recalls the easy way his father would sit in the bedroom with him while he drew, and of how, when he would look up from his paper, he would never know how many minutes or hours had passed. Were those happy times? Was he ever, in the four small rooms of that apartment, happy—at ease in this world?
Lucius asks him what they will do for work—for money—when they are finished with the house they are building. They are down to minor items now—cabinets and countertops in the kitchen and bathroom, paneling in the study, moldings—and Aaron says he has a few small jobs—bookcases, kitchen renovations, taking out walls, putting in walls, finishing a family room—that should keep them busy through the end of January. Other things may come along. He has a contract for a new house in North Amherst, and they can start on that in mid-April, when the frost will be out of the ground.
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