by Стивен Кинг
There is beauty here, and peace. Devore’ s right to say this is a world I never knew. It’s “Beautiful,” I said, pulling myself back with an effort. “Yes, I see that. But what’s your point?”
“My point?” Devote looked almost comically surprised. “She thought she could walk there like everyone else, that’s the fucking point! She thought she could walk there like a white gal! Her and her big teeth and her big tits and her snotty looks. She thought she was something special, but we taught her different. She tried to walk me down and when she couldn’t do that she put her filthy hands on me and tumped me over.
But that was all right; we taught her her manners. Didn’t we, boys?”
They growled agreement, but I thought some of them—young Harry Auster, for one—looked sick.
“We taught her her place,” Devore said. “We taught her she wasn’t nothing but a nigger. This is the word he uses over and over again when they are in the woods that summer, the summer of1901, the summer that Sara and the Red-bps become the musical act to see in this part of the world. She and her brother and their whole nigger family have been invited to Warrington ’ s to play J$r the summer people,’ they have been rid on champagne and ersters. . or so says Jared Devore to his little school of devotedllowers as they eat their own plain lunches of bread and meat and salted cucumbers out of lard-buckets given to them by their mothers (none of the young men are married, although Oren Peebles is engaged).
It it isn’t her growing renown that upsetsjared Devore. It isn’t the fact that she has been to Warrington’s; it don’t cross his eyes none that she and that brother of hers have actually sat down and eaten with white j$1ks, taken bread join the same bowl as them with their blacknigger fingers. The jolks at Warrington’s are flatlanders, after all, and Devore tells the silent, attentive young men that he’s heard that in places like New Irk and Chicago white women sometimes even fuck blackniggers. Naw! Harry Auster says, looking around nervously, as if he expected a w white women to come tripping through the woods way out here on Bowie Ridge. No white woman’d fuck a nigger! Shoot a pickle! Devore only gives him a look, the kind that says When you’re my age. Besides, he doesn’t care what goes on in New York and Chicago; he saw all the flatland he wanted to during the Civil War… and, he will tell you, he never jsught that war to free the damned slaves. They can keep slaves down there in the land of cotton until the end of the eternity, as far asjared Lancelot Devore is concerned. No, he J$ught in the war to teach those cracker sons of bitches south of Mason and Dixon that you don’t pull out of the game just because you don’t like some of the rules. He went down to scratch the scab off the end of old Johnny Reb’s nose.
Tried to leave the United States of America, they had/The Lord/ No, he doesn’t care about slaves and he doesn’t care about the land of cotton and he doesn’t care about blackniggers who sing dirty songs and then get treated to champagne and ersters (]ared always says oysters in just that sarcastic way) in payment jor their smut. He doesn’t care about anything so long as they keep in their place and let him keep in his. But she won’t do it. The uppity bitch will not do it. She has been warned to stay off The Street, but she will not listen. She goes anyway, walking along in her white dress just as if there was a white person inside it, sometimes with her son, who has a blacknigger African name and no daddy—his daddy probably just spent the one night with his mommy in a haystack somewhere down Alabama and now she walks around with the get of that just as bold as a brass monkey. She walks The Street as if she has a right to be there, even though not a soul will talk to her-“But that’s not true, is it?” I asked Devore. “That’s what really stuck in old great-granddaddy’s craw, wasn’t it? They did talk to her. She had a way about her—that laugh, maybe.
Men talked to her about crops and the women showed off their babies. In fact they gave her their babies to hold and when she laughed down at them, they laughed back up at her. The girls asked her advice about boys. The boys… they just looked. But how they looked, huh? They filled up their eyes, and I expect most of them thought about her when they went out to the privy and filled up their palms.” Devore glowered.
He was aging in front of me, the lines drawing themselves deeper and deeper into his face; he was becoming the man who had knocked me into the lake because he couldn’t bear to be crossed. And as he grew older he began to fade. “That was what Jared hated most of all, wasn’t it? That they didn’t turn aside, didn’t turn away. She walked on The Street and no one treated her like a nigger. They treated her like a neighbor.” I was in the zone, deeper in than I’d ever been, down where the town’s unconscious seemed to run like a buried river. I could drink from that river while I was in the zone, could fill my mouth and throat and belly with its cold minerally taste. All that summer Devote had talked to them. They were more than his crew, they were his boys: Fred and Harry and Ben and Oren and George Armbruster and Draper Finney, who would break his neck and drown the next summer trying to dive into Eades Quarry while he was drunk. Only it was the sort of accident that’s kind of on purpose. Draper Finney drank a lot between July of I 90 I and August of 1902, because it was the only way he could sleep. The only way he could get the hand out of his mind, that hand sticking straight out of the water, clenching and unclenching until you wanted to scream Won’t it stop, won’t it ever stop doing that. All summer long Jared Devore filled their ears with nigger bitch and uppity bitch. All summer long he told them about their responsibility as men, their duty to keep the community pure, and how they must see what others didn’t and do what others wouldn’t. It was a Sunday afternoon in August, a time when traffic along The Street dropped steeply. Later on, by five or so, things would begin to pick up again, and from six to sunset the broad path along the lake would be thronged. But three in the afternoon was Low tide. The Methodists were back in session over in Harlow for their afternoon Song Service; at Warrington’s the assembled company of vacationing flat-landers was sitting down to a heavy mid-afternoon Sabbath meal of roast chicken or ham; all over the township families were addressing their own Sunday dinners. Those who had already finished were snoozing through the heat of the day—in a hammock, wherever possible. Sara liked this quiet time. Loved it, really. She had spent a great deal of her life on carny midways and in smoky gin-joints, shouting out her songs in order to be heard above the voices of redfaced, unruly drunks, and while part of her loved the excitement and unpredictability of that life, part of her loved the serenity of this one, too. The peace of these walks. She wasn’t getting any younger, after all; she had a kid who had now left purt near all his babyhood behind him. On that particular Sunday she must have thought The Street almost too quiet. She walked a mile south from the meadow without seeing a soul even Kito was gone by then, having stopped off to pick berries. It was as if the whole township were deserted. She knows there’s an Eastern Star supper in Kashwakamak, of course, has even contributed a mushroom pie to it because she has made friends of some of the Eastern Star ladies. They’ll all be down there getting ready. What she doesn’t know is that today is also Dedication Day jr the new Grace Baptist Church, the first real church ever to be built on the TR. A slug of locals have gone, heathen as well as Baptist. Faintly, jqom the other side of the lake, she can hear the Methodists singing. The sound is sweet and faint and beautiful,’ distance and echo has tuned every sour voice. She isn’t aware of the men—most of them very young men, the kind who under ordinary circumstances dare only look at her from the corners of their eyes—until the oldest one among them speaks. “llnow, a black whore in a white dress and a red belt! Damn if that ain’t just a little too much colorjet lakeside.
What’s wrong with you, whore? Can’t you take a hint?” She turns toward him, ajaid but not showing it. She has lived thirty-six years on this earth, has known what a man has and where he wants to put it since she was eleven, and she understands that when men are together like this and full of redeye (she can smell it), they give up thinkingjr themselves and turn into a pack of dogs. If yo
u show fiar they will fall on you like dogs and likely tear you apart like dogs. Also, they have been layingjr her. There can be no other explanation jr them turning up like this. “What hint is that, sugar?” she asks, standing her ground. Where is everyone? Where can they all be? God damn! Across the lake, the Methodists have moved on to”?just and Obey,” a droner if there ever was one. “That you ain’t got no business walking where the white Jblks walk,” Harry Auster says. His adolescent voice breaks into a kind of mouse-squeak on the last word and she laughs. She knows how unwise that is, but she can’t help it—she’s never been able to help her laughter, any more than she’s ever been able to help the way men like this look at her breasts and bottom. Blame it on God. “Why, I walk where I do,” she says. “I was told this was common ground, ain’t nobody got a right to keep me out. Ain’t nobody has. You seen em doin it?”
“IOU see us now,” George Armbruster says, trying to sound tough. Sara looks at him with a species of kindly contempt that makes George shrivel up inside. His cheeks glow hot red. “Son,” she says, “you only come out now because the decent folks is all somewheres else. Why do you want to let this old filla tell you what to do? Act decent and let a lady walk.” I see it all. As Devore fades and fades, at last becoming nothing but eyes under a blue cap in the rainy afternoon (through him I can see the shattered remains of my swimming float washing against the embankment), I see it all. I see her as she starts jrward, walking straight at Devore. If she stands here jawing with them, something bad is going to happen. She Jels it, and she never questions her tidings. And if she walks at any of the others, ole massa’ll bore in on her from the side, pulling the rest after. Ole massa in the little ole blue cap is the wheeldog, the one she must face down. She can do it, too. He’s strong, strong enough to make these boys one creature, his creature, at least jr the time being, but he doesn’t have herjrce, her determination, her energy. In a way she welcomes this conjontation.
Reg has warned her to be careful, not to move too fast or try to make real friends until the rednecks (only Reggie calls them “the bull gators”) show themselves—how many and how crazy—but she goes her own course, trusts her own deep instincts. And here they are, only seven of em, and really just the one bull gator.
I’m stronger than you, ole massa, she thinks, walking toward him. She fixes her eyes on his and will not let them drop,’ his are the ones that drop, his the mouth that quivers uncertainly at one corner, his the tongue that comes out as quick as a lizard’s tongue to wet the lips, and all that’s good… but even better is when he falls back a step. When he does that the rest of them cluster in two groups of three, and there it is, her way through. Faint and sweet are the Methodists, faithy music carrying across the lake’s still surface. A droner of a hymn, yes, but sweet across the miles.
When we walk with the Lord in the light of His word, what a glory He sheds on our way…
I’m stronger than you, sugar, she sends, I’m meaner than you, you may be the bull gator but I’m the queen bee and if you don’t want me stingin on you, you best clear me the rest of my path.
“I3u bitch,” he says, but his voice is weak; he is already thinking this isn’t the day, there’s something about her he didn’t quite see until he saw her right up close, some blacknigger hougan he didn’t Jel until now, better wait br another day, better- Then he trips over a root or a rock (perhaps it’s the very rock behind which she will finally come to rest)
and falls down. His cap falls off, showing the big old bald spot on top of his head. His pants split all the way up the seam. And Sara makes a crucial mistake. Perhaps she underestimates Jared Devore’s own very considerable personal jrce, or perhaps she just cannot help herself—the sound of his britches ripping is like a loud fart. In any case she laughs that raucous, smoke-broken laugh which is her trademark. And her laugh becomes her doom.
Devore doesn’t think. He simply gives her the leather from where he lies, big]bet in pegged loggers’ boots shooting out like pistons. He hits her where she is thinnest and most vulnerable, in the ankles. She hollers in shockedpain as the left one breaks,’ she goes down in a tumble, losing her furled parasol out of one hand. She draws in breath to scream again and Jared says from where he is lying, “Don’t let her! Dassn’t let her holler!”
Ben Merrill falls on top of her full-length, all one hundred and ninety pounds of him. The breath she has drawn to scream with whooshes out in a gusty, almost silent sigh instead. Ben, who has never even danced with a woman, let alone lain on top of one like this, is instantly excited by the el of her struggling beneath him. He wriggles against her, laughing, and when she rakes her nails down his cheek he barely J%is it. The way it seems to him, he’s all cock and a yard long. When she tries to roll over and get out from under that way, he rolls with her, lets her be on top, and he is totally surprised when she drives her J3rehead down on his. He sees stars, but he is eighteen years old, as strong as he will ever be, and he loses neither consciousness nor his erection.
Oren Peebles tears away the back of her dress, laughing. “Pig-pile!” he cries in a breathy little whisper, and drops on top of her. Now he is dry-humping her topside and Ben is dry-humping just as enthusiastically from underneath, dry-humping like a billygoat even with the blood pouring down the sides of his head j%m the split in the center of his brow, and she knows that if she can’t scream she is lost. If she can scream and if Kito hears, he’ll run and get help, run and get Reg- But bejre she can try again, ole massa is squatting beside her and showing her a long-bladed knij. “Make a sound and I’ll cut your nose off,” he says, and that’s when she gives up. They have brought her down after all, partly because she laughed at the wrong time, mostly out of pure buggardly bad luck. Now they will not be stopped, and best that Kito should stay away—please God keep him back where he was, it was a good patch of berries, one that should keep him occupied an hour or more. He loves berry-picking, and it won’t take these men an hour. Harry Auster yanks her hair back, tears her dress off one shoulder, and begins to sucker on her neck.
Ole massa the only one not at her. Old massa standing back, looking both ways along The Street, his eyes slitted and wary; old massa look like a mangy timber-wolf done eaten a whole generation of chickenhouse chickens while managing to avoid every trap and snare. “Hey Irish, quit on her a minute,” he tells Harry, then widens his wise gaze to the others. “Get her in the puckies, you damn jols. Get her in there deep.”
They don’t. They can’t. They are too eager to have her. They arm-yank her behind the Jrehead of gray rock and call it good. She doesn’t pray easily but she prays now. She prays r them to let her live. She prays]r Kito to stay clear, to keep filling his bucket slow by eating every third handful. She prays that if he does take a notion to catch up with her, he will see what’s happening and run the other way as fast as he can, run silent and get Reg. “Stick this in your mouth,” George Armbruster pants. ’?lnd don’t you bite me, you bitch.” They take her top and bottom, back and front, two and three at a time. They take her where anybody coming along can’t help but see them, and ole massa stands off a little, looking first at the panting young men grouped around her, kneeling with their trousers down and their thighs scratched from the bushes they are kneeling in, then he peers up and down the path with his wild and wary eyes. Incredibly, one of them—it is Fred Dean—says “Sorry, ma’am” after he’s shot his load Jeh like halfway up to east bejeezus. It’s as if he accidentally kicked her in the shin while crossing his legs. And it doesn’t end. There’s come down her throat, come running down the crack of her ass, the young one has bitten the blood right out of her leso breast, and it doesn’t end. They are young, and by the time the last one has finished, the first one, oh God, the first one is ready again. Across the river the Methodists are now singing “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine” and as ole massa approaches her she thinks, It’s almost over, woman, he the last, hold on hold steady and it be over. He looks at the skinny redhead and the one who keeps squinching his eye up
and tossing his head and tells them to watch the path, he’s going to take his turn now that she’s broke in. He unbuckles his belt, he unbuttons his flies, he pushes down his underwear—dirty black at the knees and dirty yellow at the crotch-and as he drops a knee on either side of her she sees that ole massa’ s little massa is just as floppy as a snake with its neck broke and bejre she can stop it, that raucous laugh bursts all unexpected from her again—even lying here covered with the hot jelly spend of her rapists, she can’t help but see the funny side. “Shut up/” Devore growls at her, and smashes the heel of one hard hand across her face, breaking her cheekbone and her nose. “Shut up that howling/”
“Reckon it might get stif-/br if it was one of your boys layin here with his rosy red ass stuck up in the air, sugar?” she asks, and then, For the last time, Sara laughs.
49o Devore draws his hand back to hit her again, his naked loins lying against her naked loins, his penis a flaccid worm between them. But here he can bring the hand down a child’s voice cries, “Ma/What they doin to you, Ma? Git off my mama, you bastards/” She sits up in spite of Devore’s weight, her laughter dying, her wide eyes searching Kito out and finding him, a slim young boy of eight standing on The Street, dressed in overalls and a straw hat and brand-new canvas shoes, carrying a tin bucket in one hand. His lips are blue with juice. His eyes are wide with confusion and fright. “Run, Kito!” she screams. “Run away h—”
Red fire explodes in her head,’ she swoons back into the bushes, hearing ole massa from a great distance: “Get him. Dassn’t let him ramble, now.”
Then she’s going down a long dark slope, she’s lost in a Ghost House corridor that leads only deeper and deeper into its own convoluted bowels,’ from that deep falling place she hears him, she hears, her darling one, he is screaming. I heard him screaming as I knelt by the gray rock with my carry-bag beside me and no idea how I’d gotten to where I was—I certainly had no memory of walking here. I was crying in shock and horror and pity. Was she crazy? Well, no wonder. No fucking wonder. The rain was steady but no longer apocalyptic. I stared at my fishy-white hands on the gray rock for a few seconds, then looked around. Devore and the others were gone. The ripe and gassy stench of decay filled my nose—it was like a physical assault. I fumbled in the carry-bag, found the Stenomask Rommie and George had given me as a joke, and slipped it over my mouth and nose with fingers that felt numb and distant. I breathed shallowly and tentatively. Better. Not a lot, but enough to keep from fleeing, which was undoubtedly what she wanted.