The boys cheered zestfully.
'Owen Gann! Don't you go getting lost again. You and me and the Kleron are volunteering to set that fire. If that's all right by you?' Farron's tone was almost openly jeering. There was less and less need, as the moment of his assassination approached, to keep up appearances.
Somewhere Gann had heard that of all deaths the most excruciating was to be burned alive. Despite that the evening was by no means cool, he shivered as he stooped to pick up the two gasoline cans.
'Here comes the bus,' announced the Kleron.
The church doors opened. The demonstrators filed in. When the door closed upon the last of them, Owen, Farron, and the Kleron moved forward through the darkness to the strains of Hark! From the Tombs a Doleful Sound.
After the hymn the Negro minister stood up and preached and like all the sermons Alice had ever heard it was very dull. If she'd been in her own church on Gwynn River Falls Drive or in the chapel at school, at least there would have been something pretty to look at, but the decorations in this church were simply silly. Right above the main altar, where the tabernacle should have been, there was a doll wearing a sleazy gold dress and a spiky gold-foil halo. It was meant to be Baby Jesus, she supposed.
She watched the minister, who was wearing a red robe like one of the Klansmen at the bus station. He had bushy white hair, pruned close on the sides of his head but thick on top like a lamb's fleece. He was talking about St. Paul.
And do you suppose it was easy for him to turn the other cheek? Paul, who used to go around persecuting Christians? It was easy for Jesus, you say, to love His enemies, because He had a loving nature. But the rest of the world isn't like that. The rest of the world is human and weak, and if you turn the other cheek, chances are you'll just get hit again. Wiiat's Jesus saying anyhow? Does He want us to sell ourselves back into slavery?
There was a subdued murmur of pious No's about the church, but somebody whispered quite clearly into Alice's ear: 'That's exactly it!'
Alice turned to confront the whisperer, a black girl somewhat older than herself, with braces on her teeth. Alice was rather shocked, since at St. Arnobia's it was thought very bad form ever to discuss anything that Reverend Burbury said. She held
up a finger to her lips. The girl with braces stuck out her tongue.
When Jesus went into the Temple of Jerusalem and drove out the money-changers, how did He do it? With soldiers and police dogs? With tanks and tear gas? No—with a little switch. Those money-changers were afraid of Him, not because of that switch, but because in their hearts they knew their own guilt and shame.
The girl with braces hissed at Alice: 'Aunt Jemima!' Alice retaliated with, 'Atheist!'
'That's right,' said the girl, with a proud tilt of her head. 'I am an atheist.'
Alice was utterly confounded and no little bit impressed. She'd never met an atheist before. 'Are you really?"
The girl nodded. 'Really.' Then, topping it: 'And I'm a Communist too.'
Now let's look at what St. Paul really had to say about this business of loving our enemies. Let's turn to Romans, chapter 12, verses 19 and 20. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath
'But you can't be a Communist! You're too little.'
'This is a democracy, and I can be anything I like. I don't always follow the party-line but I'm a lot less deviationist than my parents. They're Trotskyites. I'll bet you don't even know what that means.'
Alice shook her head, smitten with admiration.
'My name is Tildy,' the girl said, 'but I'm going to have it changed when I'm older. It's a finky name. I'm going to be called Ivan, and that's what you should call me if you want to be friends. What's your name?'
Alice hesitated. It was important what name you gave to a new friend. 'Would it be all right if my name was Dinah?'
'Sure. But it isn't a very revolutionary name, is it?'
St. Paul doesn't promise some far-off, by-and-by heaven, does he? He says coals of fire are going to be heaped on our enemy's head. Coals of fiery shame and guilt, and when he's burned long enough under those coals, he'll be cleansed, the way the lips of Isaiah were cleansed. He's going to die—when he sees that other cheek turned to him, our enemy's going to die inside himself, roasted on the coals of his own guilt, but out of that fire is going to come a new friend. It will be a long time before white men and black are truly friends, but that time will come. That time must come. We will make that time come.
There was a burst of sound, like ragged applause, and the window above the flimsy wood altar collapsed, knocking over the doll in the gold dress.
'Get down!' roared the minister.
'Get down!' Bessy yelled, yanking Alice from her seat on the pew to the floor. But most of the other people in the church ignored the minister's command and were thronging around the windows and the door, trying to see what was happening.
'Dear me,' said Alice. 'What in the world is going on?'
'They're shooting at us, comrade,' Tildy replied. She had crawled under the pew with Alice. 'A bunch of piggy ofay bastards are shooting at us. Coals of fire! If we heaped coals of fire on their heads, they'd just use them to set one of their crosses burning.'
'What does ofay mean?'
'Jesus, where you been all your life, Dinah? Ofay means white. White people are anack-narisms, that's what I say. They're throwbacks to the ape. It's a fact. They'll disappear from the face of the earth some day. The man of the future is black. I'm an African Nationalist, and when I grow up I'm going to join the Black Muslims.'
Alice, for the moment, was rather glad she was black. Then another explosion rocked the church and she wished, with much more force, that she were any other colour at all.
The fat Klansman stood in the shadow of a tree. The only light was a muted flicker from a street lamp filtered through rustling leaves; it was not possible, therefore, to see what colour his silk robe was, except that it was not white like the majority of Klansmen's.
This is the Grand Dragon,' said Roderick's captor, pushing him forward to that august presence.
'What am I supposed to do—bow down and kiss his feet?' Roderick asked, out of humour.
'I found him in the middle of the park, Brother Dragon, aiming this little revolver at the niggers.' He handed the gun to the Grand Dragon who pocketed it indifferently.
'I wouldn't have thought the Klan would concern itself over a nigger or two being shot down,' Roderick said sarcastically.
'We do if it's us who have to take the blame,' the Grand Dragon replied. 'Sam, you can leave us alone together. He knows which side of this shotgun he's standing on—he won't make any trouble.' When Sam had left, the Grand Dragon went on: 'By the sound of your voice, I'd say you were a Northerner.'
Roderick made no reply, for there was something ... something about the man's voice ...
'Sounds to me like you're a Yankee agitator. One of Martin Luther Coon's boys, I'll lay odds. And you probably got a card in your wallet says you belong to the National Association for the Advancement of Coons and Piccaninnies.'
'Probably,' Roderick said scornfully.
'Let's have a look-see. Stay standing where you are and throw it to me.'
'Rather an indirect way of picking pockets, isn't it?' Roderick said, tossing his wallet to the Grand Dragon.
The Klansman set aside the shotgun and raising his hoodwink looked through Roderick's wallet with a pen torch.
'Roderick Raleigh,' he read from a driver's licence. He took the money out and tossed the empty husk back to Roderick. Then, coming a few steps closer he aimed the beam of the torchlight at Roderick's face.
At first he was dazzled, but soon he was able to see, dim in the backwash of light, the fat weary face of the Grand Dragon, all pouches and jowls. The grape-cluster lips were puckered in a fleering smile, just as Roderick had always remembered them.
'Donald Bogan,' he whispered. 'You.'
The torchlight went out, and in the intenser darkness that
followed Donald Bogan hooted like an owl. 'Well, Roderick, my brother, long time no see. Can't say I haven't been hearing about you though. Matter of fact, one of the reasons we're out here tonight is because that Nigger-boy Bittle made off with you and your daughter. We're revenging you, brother. That's what it said in the newspaper, anyhow. Of course, Nigger-boy Bittle will never tell anybody different. He's paid the price for his deed already. You wouldn't know how that happened, would you, Roderick my brother?'
Roderick cleared his throat, to no better purpose than to punctuate the awkward silence.
'Remember, Roderick, that night in the fraternity house? Good old Kappa Kappa Kappa—those were our golden days. Remember that night that you'd just got done reading Crime and Punishment for Humanities 1-2-3, and we were shooting the breeze about whether it was possible to kill a person just for the hell of it and not feel guilty afterwards? I remember that night very well, Roderick, because it was one of the few times you and I were in agreement about anything. Do you remember?' 'I remember,' said Roderick.
'Well, how about it, Hot Rod? Do you feel guilty or not?'
'Not in the least,' Roderick said aloofly. 1 don't know what you're talking about.'
'Like hell you don't! You're going to make me a rich man, you horse's ass! Where you got that million dollars hid? You got a car around here? Is it there?'
'As I've been sensible enough to hide it elsewhere, you're welcome to look in my car. Don't worry, Bogan—I'll cut you in. I always have, haven't I?'
'Cut me in! Why you stupid asshole, you're going to give it to me. All of it.'
'That will be as it will be. A strange thing, Bogan, but as it happens I was asking after you only the other day. I'd been under the impression, for some reason, that you were dead.'
'Might as well have been. Dad cut me out of his will—not on account of that fiasco at the cathouse but for something serious that happened later on, and afterwards he told people I was dead. He probably believes I am by now. It's been eight years. Eight rotten years. But you—you haven't had it so bad from what I gather. Marrying that Duquesne bitch
'And being cut out of her father's will. Oh, I've done very well!'
Bogan chuckled.'I heard about that, too. Serves you right.' He bent down to retrieve the shotgun he propped against the tree trunk. 'But we've got the rest of our lives to reminisce in. Just now we should be shooting niggers, right? Right! You wouldn't like to join our little turkey hunt?'
Roderick realised that Bogan was holding out the shotgun to him. Was it going to be as easy as that? He accepted it, with sincere thanks.
'Mind you don't take a shot at me, now.' Then the dumb bastard deliberately turned his back. Didn't Bogan realise how many years he as fantasied such a scene as this? Had his position as a leader of the Klan in some way given him delusions of invulnerability? Only outright madness could explain such folly.
'First thing we do,' Bogan explained, as he moved in a crouch towards the African Church, 'is shoot in the windows.
That's just to throw a scare into them. Aim high, 'cos some of the boys are going to be gathered round the church setting up Act Two. Raleigh? You with me, Raleigh?' 'Absolutely,' Roderick said. 'Don't drag-ass, or they'll start without us.' The first volley of shot splintered the July night and the windows of the African Church. Roderick stepped forward quickly, pressed the gun against the back of Bogan's head and pulled the trigger.
Bogan laughed. 'Oh, you dumb bastard, I knew you'd try that. You didn't think I'd hand you a loaded gun.'
Roderick swung at Bogan's head with the shotgun but the fat man moved faster than a fat man should. The gun barrel came down harmlessly against his shoulder. Then, quite unaccountably, Roderick's lungs collapsed and the dark Mendelssohnian scene swam before his eyes. Again Bogan's fist dug into his stomach and seemed to stop only after reaching the interior of his ribcage. Bogan was laughing. Roderick kneed him viciously—at least his intentions were vicious—but Bogan's laughter continued without a pause:
'You poor dumb bastard, Raleigh. A fellow like you is just made to be torn apart.' But this rhetoric made Bogan careless, and the side-hand blow that he had intended for Roderick's throat, the blow that would have driven him.to his knees, ready to be kicked, glanced off the side of his head clumsily. Considering his inexperience in these matters, Roderick acted in a manner that even Nietzsche would have been compelled to admire. Though it had been above a decade since Roderick's one and only judo lesson, his hip block worked. The heap of bones and fat that was Donald Bogan flopped, fishlike and breathless, at Roderick's feet, and Roderick's feet lashed out in alternation at that heap of bones and fat and blood. He was rewarded by the solid gnashing sound of heel against bone, Bogan's responsive cry, a prayer beseeching more pain, a prayer Roderick answered, answered with supererogation, kicking the corpse till, out of breath, he could kick no more.
He found the shells for the shotgun in Bogan's shirt pocket. He let him keep the gun and the money he had taken, for when the police found Bogan's mangled body (he would be supposed, surely, the just victim of a Negro's rage) it would be evident immediately that he, Donald Bogan, Roderick's immemorial enemy, had been the master-mind of Alice's kidnapping. There had always been superficial points of resemblance between Bogan and Roderick so that if, by some mischance, there should prove to have been witnesses to Roderick's conduct today (if, for instance, that young highway policeman who'd stopped him should remember his face), it might be plausibly argued that the witness had seen not Roderick but Bogan.
God, Roderick thought, helps those who help themselves.
Roderick helped himself to the Grand Dragon's robe and hoodwink. Wearing these, he need fear no witnesses for anything he might have to do tonight.
'Drenched, you say? The front steps too?' asked Farron Stroud.
Owen Gann replied by dropping the emptied gasoline can to the grass.
'Then it looks like we're about ready to have ourselves a little weenie roast. Got a book of matches, Kleron?'
With the over-emphatic miming of an unskilled actor, the Kleron searched his pockets. 'Damned if I do, Farron!'
Then it seems you'll have to do us that service, Brother Gann.' All day Farron had been bearing down heavily on that 'Brother' like someone who has just discovered a new word and wants to decorate every sentence with it. 'I'll have to give the signal for the boys to shoot in the windows, 'cos it's beginning to look like something's holding up the Grand Dragon. When you hear the guns go off drop a lit match to that pile of tinder. Any questions, Brother?'
Bile, not questions, rose to Owen's mouth. Reluctantly, but with a feeling that he was performing an action for which his whole life had been a preparation, he took the matches from his shirt pocket. Strange, that he, of all these Klansmen, should be the one to light this holocaust. An irony that Farron Stroud, beneath his hoodwink, was undoubtedly enjoying as well.
Farron whistled and shotguns replied to his melody. After the echoes had died the Kleron had still not fired, though his rifle was aimed now at Gann's chest. He was not to be allowed his punishment until he had committed the crime that was demanded of him.
He struck a match against the side of the box and dropped it, flaming, into the gasoline-drenched tinder. The flames at once leaped to chest height and he stepped back.
'Just stay right there, Brother,' Farron called out. If you back away from that fire any more, the Kleron here has orders to shoot you. We'd like to see you burn though.'
There were many things he might have done but he did none of them. He realised that his bleating over the phone earlier had been more than a joke, that even then he'd been preparing himself for such a moment—or such a moment for himself.
He would have preferred, abstractedly, a martyrdom by fire —such a martyrdom as he had himself kindled for those inside the church—but his flesh, assaulted by the mounting flames, flinched, and he retreated that single step that Farron had warned against. The Kleron's aim could not fail at this range. A second fire
ringed his heart and swept up the mesh of his nerves to the brain there to be extinguished in an utter and instant dark.
Against all expectation, he awoke. He was lying on his back, the whole of his field of vision occupied by the solid sheet of flame that the church had become. Through the roaring a few individual cries and screams could be heard and Owen knew a moment of relief. He was certain that no one had been killed by the fire. Had anyone died he, who would have borne the guilt, would not have been allowed to go on living, for he had faith in a Providence that governs events with strict accountancy.
Belatedly he realised that the pillar of fire on his left was no part of the general conflagration, but instead Farron Stroud in his red silk robe. Farron held up his hoodwink in order better to view the fire. The customary cruelty of his lips was slackened; the lower lip drooped in a smile of sated happiness.
No longer disposed towards a non-violent, violent death (should he dispute with Providence?), Gann reached for the automatic he kept in his shoulder holster. The Kleron's bullet had made of the gun a tangle of steel little better than shrapnel. Inside its holster, the gun had saved his life; now, in his hand, it might cost him no less; for by his gesture in drawing it from under his robe he had betrayed to Farron that he was other than a dead man.
Suddenly the air about them was filled with traceries of coloured flame. The fire had reached the store of fireworks in the basement of the church, and such of the explosives as were self-propelling had been set off, to escape through the basement windows. On green flare flew directly at Farron, tangled in the
folds of his silk robe and exploded into fountains of green light. Farron threw up his arms and became for a moment a flaming cross.
Roderick had hoped they would all burn up inside the church, but whoever the damn fool had been who'd spread the gasoline around it had neglected the wooden steps and the whole congregation had escaped, Bessy with the child in tow among the first. Roderick's second hope had been that the Klansmen would use their shotguns on the mob of Negroes. It was just the sort of outrageous action Klansmen seemed to be doing all the time—but not, as luck would have it, tonight.
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