Another abrupt shift. Mr. Simmons again, rope in his hands once more, and the cold light of an early dawn on his face. He was at the center of a crowd, sharing an open space with the same black man he had hit — the cut on the cheek now crusted over, but other wounds framing it, closing one eye, and the man himself on his knees, wrists tied behind him. Simmons slipped a noose over the man’s head. “Now, nigger,” he said. “Teach you to burn people’s property.”
The black man’s voice, not high this time, but faint, hoarse, a voice of no hope: “Mr. Simmons, I never did.”
“Do it,” Simmons said.
Another man in the crowd struck a horse on the flank, and the animal bolted forward, jerking the black man into the air. Alan heard a muffled crack, heard the gargling of saliva (blood?) in the throat, saw the jerks and spasms of the body, smelled the sudden stench of death.
A change of scene. The ruins of the stable now, blackened earth, heaps of ash, and half-burned timbers, with the body of Jim Bascom tossed on a mound of charred wood. The eyes were open, the whites gone deep red; a blackened tongue protruded from the mouth. A white man splashed liquid over the body, stepped back, flung a match. Flames caught, smoke boiled. The wood started to burn. The black man’s clothing was already afire, his hair smoldering.
And then it moved.
It lurched almost to its knees, tumbled sideways, rolled off the pyre. A man in the crowd screamed, his voice like a woman’s — “Great God Amighty!” — and the crowd scattered. The corpse, facedown in a muddy puddle, lay still. Beyond it the pyramid of wood burned harmlessly.
The voice came in Alan’s head: This happened right where you sit.
What made him move?
Maybe I did. Maybe there is a way around death, after all. Maybe I have the secret of eternal life.
Who are you?
A papery laugh, the sound of wind in dry leaves, and the receding voice: That would be... telling...
Don’t leave me alone in the dark!
Oh, child. You have much to see yet. So much to see. Much evil. See what wickedness really goes on in this town. See how those you thought were good hold secret sins close, close! Oh, see it all. Then, child, then, decide if you want to claim your inheritance, to take your place among the people of this place — or whether you want to be mine....
6
Ludie Estes had taken twenty dollars from Mr. Jefferson’s envelope this Saturday evening. “You be goin’ off next year this time,” she said to Michael. “You be goin’ to learn at that college so far away.”
“I hope so, Granny-Ma.” He handled the car with assurance, taking the most direct route back home, keeping them in the white section of town for the absolute minimum of time.
“I been thinkin’ all day about that poor man they hung so long back,” Ludie said. “He come to my mind, some way.”
“There’s white people all over would hang us if they could do it and not get caught, Granny-Ma.”
“His wife so pitiful. Here what I taken in mind to do: you drive me out to the cemetery behind of Marsh Hollow Church.”
“Right now, Granny-Ma?”
“I want to see Jim Bascom grave. For his spirit been atroublin’ my thought.”
Michael Estes took a quick sideways look. “I got to do this, ain’t I?” he asked.
“If you a good grandson, you ought to do it.”
Michael laughed, a rich, dark sound. “One thing they never gonna teach me at college, is how to get round you, old lady.”
“I ain’t so old I feebleminded,” Ludie said.
Michael shrugged and turned the car left on Tower Street instead of continuing south. “That’s three-four miles out of town.”
“They wouldn’t let him be buried no closer. Did I say they burnt him?”
“Yeah. You told me that.”
“Only they say he got up, dead as he was, and walked through the fire. Walk through the fire and the tempest, Lord, walk plumb through the fire.”
“Then he must not’ve been dead, Granny-Ma.”
“I never forget his wife, she cryin’ and weepin’ and they just take him on. Take him on and hang him. They white men livin’ in this town today that back then tied the ropes on his hands and feet, white men that set the fire the Lord let him get up and walk free from, dead though he be. Then his wife move away off somewheres with the children.”
Michael grunted and concentrated on his driving. It was late afternoon, nearly five, and he had a bit of traffic to contend with, heaviest toward the railroad tracks, along Produce Row, a lane of shacky three-sided booths where farmers brought their produce in season. Corn and apples, a few pumpkins already, baskets of green beans, tomatoes, piles of cabbage there now: and, Michael reflected, not a one of the booths would sell him or Ludie an ounce of goods. Blacks had to go to the old barn off Thomson Mill Road, where the black farmers of the county brought their offerings. It was as if some imagined contamination of different flesh lingered, as if the touch of a black hand spoiled vegetables for white consumption.
They jolted and clattered across the railroad tracks, went out past the feed mills (an ungodly stench: they rolled the windows up as tight as possible), over a narrow concrete bridge, and then through a pine wood. On the other side of the woods was a straggling black community, gray houses, bare grassless lawns, hands of children waving in pink-palmed greeting as they drove past.
And then the little country church, square and white, with a skeletal steeple, open on all sides but at least roofed over, and a reclaimed train bell hanging in it. The parking lot at the side of the church was unpaved. Michael parked the car, got out, and opened the door for Ludie. She groaned up from her seat and started toward the graveyard in the half-bent attitude she had to hold for long minutes before her protesting back would allow her to straighten.
“It over there toward the woods,” she said. “Off kinda by itself.”
She picked her way carefully through rudely marked graves, some with thin marble tombstones, most with simple wooden markers or uncarved chunks of white quartz. Mason jars, most of them brown-fogged with dust, held sprigs and sprays of dead flowers on the low mounds. One grave had been completely outlined in marbles, aggies and cat’s-eyes, cloudies and shiners.
“Here,” she said, stopping at a grave that was indeed apart from the others, separated from its nearest neighbor by a good fifteen feet. It had a headstone, pitted and blackened with years, but the carving was still readable: JAMES MAXWELL BASCOM, 1893–1922. HE THAT KINDLED THE FIRE SHALL SURELY MAKE RESTITUTION.
“It’s all sunk in,” Michael said, looking at the grave. It sagged below the surface of the surrounding earth, a shallow, smooth-surfaced, oval depression of red clay still shiny from the rains of the last few days.
“Jim Bascom,” Ludie said softly. “Where you go, Jim Bascom? Why ain’t you in your grave?”
“Granny-Ma — ”
“Hush, Michael. I ain’t crazy. Listen for him to answer me.”
Michael looked wildly around. They were at the dark edge of the woods, and the sun was low, and the church and his car were a hundred yards away.
He had the sick feeling that someone, something, just might answer Ludie’s question.
7
The screen was a lurid carnival of sin. Alan, no longer in the theater, no longer really anywhere, felt a strange kind of detached nausea.
It was a curious feeling, for he really seemed to himself to be now nothing more than perceiving eyes, bodiless, lidless, unblinking, fixed on the images before him on the screen. This is how God sees us, he thought helplessly. This is what we are, helpless and naked, hopeless and raging. Despite his disembodied state, the spectacle literally sickened him. Alan saw a crazy flashing catalog of all types of wrong, done by all those he knew so well: teachers, ministers, policemen, friends of his father, schoolmates. And each hugged wickedness tight like a forbidden lover, each one made it part of himself or herself.
Alan had once turned over a huge rock, th
e way ten-year-old boys will, just to see if he could move the weight. Beneath it he found squirming, crawling horror, gelid gray brown-spotted eggs of some creature stirring vaguely with almost-born life (but already looking as if death had laid a rotting hand on them), blind white grubs of unknown insects pulsing frantically, writhing maggots seeking any shade from the sun, a flat tan-colored scurrying scorpion carrying its curved sting right over its head. Alan had recoiled in horror from the damp black patch of earth, revolted by what he had revealed.
Alan felt the same way now, as if he alone were privy to all the darkest secrets of the town, and they were all like the concealed, light-hating life under the rock, all of it cold and stinking already of decomposition. On the screen that was more than a screen, antic human bodies writhed naked, human tongues told lies of stunning malice, human smiles of welcome tightened to grimaces of hatred as faces turned aside.
Still, bad as the surreal movie was, the blackness was worse. It happened several times: the images would leap more and more frantically, more feverishly, until they seemed to burst apart in a fiery, soundless explosion of light, leaving him alone in void and darkness, unconnected, with an awful feeling of falling, of dropping mile by mile down a pit that went on without end forever, with not even wind to whistle past his ears. Each time, before he struck the unfathomable bottom, light burst on him again as some new scene unfolded, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.
But finally, after what seemed years, at the end of one of these intervals, he saw a black woman in a white room.
Never had he seen a room more literally white: she stood facing him in a bare glaring cubicle of a room, illuminated with harsh light from nowhere, a bone-colored room just too small for comfort, with walls too close together, a ceiling that lowered just an inch more than he could bear it. He felt as if outside those walls, and hardly excluded by them, tons of earth lay, ready to crush, to pour in, to annihilate.
The black woman stood docile and naked.
She wasn’t really black. Reese Donalds might have called her a high yaller: a trim thin woman, skin the color of coffee mixed half and half with milk, hair black and close-trimmed to her head, nose snub and cheeks high, nipples brown as milk chocolate, dark triangle of hair at the confluence of thighs and belly. Her long-fingered hands dangled loosely by her sides, her feet rested flat on the white floor, and her brown eyes were as empty as the room.
Her lips moved, and the sound came a bare instant later, as if somehow her voice was out of synchronization. “Alan. He is very strong.” Each word fell somehow heavily, like lead pellets released one by one.
Alan discovered that he had a body again, was standing in his white nylon shirt (clammy patches of sweat under his arms against his ribs) and his black trousers in that oppressive room, not five paces from the naked woman. He could not look away. Two years ago he had begun to dream at night of the mysterious female bodies beneath skirts and blouses, and for the past year or so he had fantasized about them almost every night while stimulating himself to the breathless burst of relief. Here was an attractive body casually, almost elegantly displayed, breasts tilted, stomach smooth, legs strongly muscled. He felt the first stirring of desire and with it a growing embarrassment.
“You can have me,” she promised. “I will give you kisses.” The pink tip of her tongue showed, curled, touched her upper lip, receded. The corners of her mouth stretched wide in a soulless smile. “All the things you dreamed of doing. He will give me to you.”
“Who?” Alan asked, surprised that his voice came out at all, surprised at how flat it sounded, at the empty-house echo that vibrated fractionally at the end of the monosyllable.
“The master.” She took a single slow step forward, right leg swinging out a little, coming back to the left and down, toes touching the floor, flattening, the ball of the foot taking weight, then the heel. She extended her hands, nails down, palms up, reaching out to him. “You can be useful to him.”
“Who?” Alan’s voice was thick, pleading almost.
The ghastly mockery of a smile had never left her face. If anything, it widened a bit. “He doesn’t change us. He takes away the troublesome part, the part that thinks. What’s left is what you are, what we all are. What we most want to do. That is his gift to us. He gives us freedom.”
“Who?”
The hands dropped and dangled, puppet arms no longer lifted by strings. Alan had the fleeting impression of great weariness, coming not from the woman before him but from somewhere far away. “Freedom. To do anything you want, to anyone you want. And live forever.” The smile stretched too wide, became the rictus of a corpse.
His brief erection had wilted. The woman’s eyes were dead, whatever the lips murmured. Alan took a quick step away, found his back against a bare, blank wall. There were no doors, no windows, in this white place a thousand miles under the ground. “No,” he said.
The woman swayed a bit on her feet. The smile seemed only a bit more human, and the voice purred low, insinuatingly: “It’s what you want. It doesn’t have to be me. Would you like the little girl? He says he will give you the little girl. Would you like to love her? To hurt her? She will be yours.”
“No, no — ”
Again the strange waver. The chin came down, and the woman looked at him from beneath straight brows. “You know your father killed your mother.”
Alan reacted against the words, not their dull, dead tone: “He didn’t!”
“Oh, but he did. You saw that he did. He lies awake at night telling himself that he did. Your father knows that he could have saved her life. Like an animal he lusted, knowing that one more child would end her, and despite his knowledge he planted in her womb the seed that killed her.”
Alan put his hands over his ears, but try as he might he could not close his eyes. If he could have collapsed to the floor he would have done it, but some force held him on his unsteady legs.
His clamped hands did no good at all, for the cool, insinuating voice came through: “Your mother wants you to kill him. She hates him. Her soul is still alive, you know. Alive and burning, burning. He sent her to hell, Alan. She wants you to kill him for her.”
He shook his head.
“Do you think it will hurt him to die? It doesn’t hurt at all, Alan. It feels good. The knife is cool, sliding in, so cool. It makes a wet sound.”
Through clenched teeth Alan tried to say a prayer, a psalm, anything. He could only grind out, “The Lord is my shepherd” before he forgot what came next, so he said it again, and again.
The woman laughed. Her voice, unlike his, stirred no echo. “Only sheep need a shepherd, Alan. Men need...this.” Her cupped palms stroked her body, breasts and thighs, with a soft sliding rustle. “Would you like to do this for me, Alan?”
He shook his head, weeping.
She laughed, a lower sound, from deep within her, chesty, but not loud. “Live forever, Alan. Like me. Nothing can kill me now. I’m dead already, and I live forever. All the suffering, all the sorrow is over. Look. Look at my secrets.” She pinched the flesh of her right breast and pulled, and with a wet, sucking sound the breast tore loose from her torso. With the other hand she grasped the skin of her abdomen and pulled, like a woman opening a coat, and her pink and purple intestines spilled out of a growing rent, glistening. Alan felt hot bile gush in the back of his throat.
“Now,” she said, smiling. “Don’t you want me? Don’t you think I’m pretty?” She took another step toward him, her entrails dangling to her knees, swaying with her steps. Her laugh was low, feral.
Unbidden, a memory came to Alan: Mr. Tate, Miss Lewis, and himself, pledging love, saying a prayer. Though he made no sound or movement, the woman stopped her advance, the expression on her face dazed, then angry. “Your friends,” she said, and a colder edge was in the voice now. “I forgot your friends. They shall be mine, too, boy. They shall all dance to my tune.”
Alan closed his eyes. He could at least close his eyes now. When he opened th
em again, the woman was whole, wounds gone or concealed, but she had retreated from him, was against the white wall, lips snarling away from white teeth. “Puppet,” Alan said, his voice a rasp. “You’re a puppet.”
Now there was nothing of a woman’s sound at all about the voice, just a breathy, malicious quality, not male, not female. “I shall kill you very slowly, I think. How does a year of dying sound? Or ten thousand years? They are the same to me.”
“Love,” Alan said. He wanted to say more, but the monosyllable was all he could force out.
There was a quick hiss of breath, then a low and mocking chuckle. “You will be mine,” the woman said. Then she melted into the white wall.
Alan stared stupidly for a long time before he realized he was sitting in the second seat from the aisle in the fifth row of the ShadowShow, staring at the blank white screen. He looked at Diane beside him.
She turned toward him a face eloquent of wrenching misery. “You, too?” he whispered. He touched her arm with tentative fingers.
She jerked her arm away from him as if he had put a red-hot poker against her flesh. People were rising, shuffling, leaving, already filling the aisle.
“We have to go,” Alan said, panic unraveling his voice. His shirt was cold against him where he had sweated. “Let’s get out of here.”
Diane stood, with disconnected, jerky movements, and he followed her up the aisle, out into the lobby. Mr. Badon stood beside the ticket booth. As they passed, he smiled and nodded at Alan.
For an instant Alan froze, transported momentarily back to the bare white room. The smile and the woman’s smile were the same, a dead expression.
Now Alan thought he knew the answer to his repeated question: Who? Who? Who?
The man the woman had talked about, the “master,” the puppeteer, was Mr. Athaniel Badon.
Diane went outside, Alan at her heels. “Dad will be waiting at the store,” Alan said, his voice rattling in his throat.
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