A Killing in This Town

by Olympia Vernon

Adam and Midnight, each breathing heavily, arrived from the forest.

  The sun had trapped the hour of Adam’s breathing: he squatted before Lenora Bullock, the dress-shadow and heat combined around him, as if she had all of a sudden drawn him into the exposed breast, the red smear going up the side of her jawbone.

  Mama says you’ve got something needs doing, he panted.

  She turned away for a moment. She could offer him lemonade fresh from the cooler, but not at such a time, when something employable and fascinating had come out of this: it was opportunity, the scent of his breathing, that caused her to face him again.

  An odor of derision whistled from his nostrils: she was inhaling the oxygen of a boy who belonged to two living people.

  She took it all in.

  Adam looked up at her from the dust. Miss Lenora? he asked.

  She leaned in her words: I need a darner needle. Go to the fabric store ’n’ tell the clerk that you come to get Lenora Bullock a darner needle. Tell her to pin it to your collar.

  Yes, ’m.

  Keep your hand up to your collar, so it’ll keep, she said.

  Yes, ’m.

  Midnight had done his panting and rose with Adam through the forest again.

  Lenora Bullock stood where they had left her, the dust of their sudden abandonment rising around her like the powdered wind of chiseled vertebrae.

  Adam left Midnight behind—he had found a bone—and marched up the steps of the fabric store: it was adjacent to the post office and echoed the brittle, dilapidated posture of a weeping drunkard.

  Good Adam. You’re hope, Adam. Take ’m down, Adam. The men pounded his shoulder with their vocabulary as he passed through the wooden door of the fabric store: he could tell by their breathing that they had brought the bird down.

  He walked up to the counter, rang the bell.

  The clerk had been playing a piano in the rear of the fabric store. Her fingers parted in separation from the keys, the final edge of a tune pausing.

  Now she appeared before Adam, her pink face stripped of accuracy; if she had known at all why she was alive, it would have lived in the activity of the muscle that rose throughout the pale ferocity of her standing place, turned her into salt.

  Miss Lenora Bullock sent me for a needle, said Adam. Says to pin it to my collar.

  What kind? asked the clerk.

  A darner.

  The clerk stood near a cashier’s drawer; the horizontal counter separated her from this boy who seemed, in her opinion, to have made the whole place sour.

  Of course she knew him, the son of D. D. and Hoover Pickens, the next boy to bloody up the woods with his calling: she’d have to witness it again, the wheelbarrow as it passed the window, the arm hanging out of it. A nigger’s corpse.

  She reached behind her. A wagon wheel of embroidered fabric, pansies, hung from a lead pipe attached to the ceiling. She had labeled each set of needles pinned to the material, until she saw it, the word she had herself written: DARNER.

  A metallic thimble covered her thumb as she thought to herself, some sort of method she had acquired: Lenora Bullock. DARNER. Klan.

  The meditation of her inward vocabulary halted, and she pulled a darner needle from a lavender pansy and gave it to Adam.

  She did not say Good boy, Adam, You’re hope, Adam, Take ’m down, Adam, but instead pinned the darner needle to his collar and laid her pink hand on the counter, as if to say: I’m done with you.

  By this time, the mail clerk, in the adjacent window of the post office, walked up to the square-shaped glass and flipped over a sign that read: OUT TO LUNCH.

  He was of shocking quality: a cancerous germ had eaten into the lower edge of his jawbone, and he kept his hand up to his face to hide his disfigurement.

  Chewing tobacco.

  He had, many times, wondered why he had stayed so long in public when he had to constantly bring his hand down to reach for the letters in their cubicles.

  He felt it: they whispered about his vulnerability. A freak.

  Adam had come out of the fabric store, Midnight beside him.

  The post office clerk took him by the shoulder, a white government envelope in his hands. He saw the darner needle in Adam’s collar.

  Going out to the Bullocks, I figure, he said, his hand up to his face.

  Yes, sir, said Adam.

  He looked away from the post office clerk with the low self-esteem of a boy with his own solitary burden to keep.

  This come for Lenora, said the post office clerk.

  Adam took the envelope and watched the dizzying limp of the post office clerk: the thing that disfigured him had passed through his intestines and into the unstable predictability of his footsteps.

  The post office clerk was of no use to the world: a horse trapped in barbed wire.

  Adam had found his way through the center of the forest when Midnight paused.

  Earl Thomas had fallen from this tree, his rib loose in his gut. What’s a matter, boy? asked Adam.

  Midnight stepped away from him and turned.

  What’s a matter, boy? asked Adam. Weak?

  Midnight howled, ran in a separate direction, and stopped, waiting for Adam to follow.

  Adam’s hand was on the darner needle now. It was yet pinned to his collar.

  He faced Midnight, his head sideways: trust.

  He followed Midnight through the forest, the sun peering above them.

  Midnight halted.

  There it was, the Thomas house, far away but visible from the opening: Emma New and Earl Thomas were on the porch of their house, her arm hitched around his full waist. His rib had begun to heal.

  Adam’s presence went unseen as he knelt down to the earth: he had seen the corpse lying stiff and naked in Hurry Bullock’s morgue. The swollen head, the castrated penis, how it all sat in his head right now and shaped itself into being.

  The corpse. Had it been the normal fitting, the normal calculation of a man its height, it would have looked like Earl Thomas, before the swelling, before the eye had come loose.

  It was no wonder the white envelope from the Vital Life Office slipped right out of his pocket and onto the ground.

  Adam trembled: a red-haired boy, turned man, had followed him from town. He had been in the post office before the clerk left for lunch, had seen the letters on the envelope from the Vital Life Office.

  A lady with a Q in her name had sent it.

  The follower reached down beside Adam and took up the letter.

  Hurry Bullock, he commented. He’s the one. The ringleader. I can’t even sleep these days.

  Midnight had not barked upon the stranger’s arrival: he knew him.

  Five years ago now that it happened.

  Curtis Willow. Dead.

  Midnight, in the language of his other world, remembered how the red-haired boy’s father had slapped him wildly: they made him hook Curtis to the pulley and drag him, drag him through the wooded forest, until the unbalanced terrain of the earth burned his vertebrae into grit.

  Come with me, whispered the stranger, the envelope in his pocket.

  Adam, a vast curiosity within him, walked quietly behind.

  They returned to the center of the forest.

  The stranger paused: Name’s Gill, he said. Ever heard o’ me?

  Adam shook his head.

  Gill towered above Adam with a confining strength, haunting in its exhibitory manner, that reeked of violent and disturbing synchronicity. His hands were large and powerful, as if memory had spun him into independence.

  Cowards, he said. They haven’t told you, have they?

  No.

  Gill had waited years for this meeting. He had found work on the railroad collecting the tickets of women like Lenora Bullock who landed in this town, grew into Klan wives and seamstresses. He hated them, their childlike save-me faces, how they stood before him with false arrogance—pretending someone was coming to get them, smudged and dirty.

  His father had gotten his mother f
rom the train station: he was a railroad baby, fresh and plucked from the sitting orphanage. He hated them, too: the mother for not stopping the whole thing, his father for pushing, pushing, pushing—all that they’d made him do.

  He turned his back to Adam and took a letter opener from his pocket, breaking the seal of the envelope: after reading the contents, he broke with laughter.

  Of course he knew, as did the whole town, that Lenora Bullock had waited her entire life for this moment: his foot leaped forward as if to pound the news of her father into the ground.

  He paused, facing Adam: Tell ’er you lost it.

  The lie drove a nail into Adam’s eardrum.

  The clerk’s got surgery, said Gill. Nobody to deliver the mail. If Adam had stood at the counter a moment longer, he would have heard the announcement from the post office clerk: It’s come back. I’m shutting down.

  It was this clerk, the only fit person in Bullock to stack the items of delivery, who gave the keys to the woman at the fabric store: she had agreed to pass the word out.

  The sign had been blurry, did not read OUT TO LUNCH, but OUT FOR A LONG TIME, before the post office clerk walked away from the womb of the town, his hand up to his lower mandible, and disappeared.

  You never saw me, said Gill.

  But he would return to the Pickens’s house, where he had not been since Curtis, and reestablish himself with the free and automatic white men.

  Lenora Bullock lifted the darner needle from Adam’s collar and poured him a glass of lemonade, his genetic breathing more potent and credible with thirst.

  chapter thirteen

  Nigger, come out yonder.

  There’s gonna be a killin’ in this town.

  Earl Thomas woke from the nightmare.

  How it dizzied him: the rotting carcass of his slumber lay down below—muddy—the head turned agape, the lips immobile, as if the final moan of his discomfort shook the cage of his larynx into a startling, full-blown expression of mercy.

  He was so heavy now: his shoulders, in contrast to the things in the room, echoed a terrible sort of symmetry. He sat up from the pillows and wondered for a moment how he had come to this place.

  Emma New was a blur. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a pair of iron shears. Lay down, she whispered. Easy.

  The sweat of his nightmare rose from the gauze of his ribs.

  Emma New, he repeated. Emma New … they.

  She lifted her finger to her lips.

  If he could tell her that he had seen the carcass. The round and bloody head had begun to swell. The peculiar setting of the feet, the pulley had upset the rotation of the ankle.

  The face, the face was what he could not see.

  But of course he knew it was his.

  Emma New, he pleaded. Let me tell it.

  She stopped her shearing of the gauze: Tell it to God, Earl Thomas, she said. Nothing I can do. Flesh.

  She held it inward, Sonny’s adopted line: Love him like he dead.

  A grin eased her, and she returned to the shearing of the gauze: Sister Harriet come by this morning, she whispered.

  He turned away from Emma New, interrupted.

  Emma New continued: Says it’s a pity to leave Baptists waitin’.

  He had not thought of the Baptists or his Sunday preaching. But it was God, God who entered his nightmares, whispered: I sent my only Son to take it. Now you, too, must.

  The line flew above him like the tail of a kite loosed from the limb of a giant bird.

  Was there ever such a thing in the world that he would be so set to the rhythm of agony within him that he seemed even more out of tune?

  It was all too shocking to hold, both lines—There’s gonna be a killin’ in this town and Now you, too, must—that they repeated themselves, one with victory, one with such repulsion, that the language of the two things, the two constitutions, rolled him into a bare and complex position on the pillows.

  There, said Emma New, pointing.

  A hummingbird fluttered in the window. The belly obtuse, as if it had swallowed the milk of a breast that hung in its species like the distant subtlety and chimera of illusion.

  Emma New had cut the gauze entirely and eased it out from under Earl Thomas’s rib. Look what the Lord done, she said.

  He caught his lung wind. It occurred to him how trapped he had been, a mummy. He breathed heavily, his hand on his gut.

  He had been let go of: the gauze had weighed him down in his sleep.

  He could run now, faster and quicker than the white men. He could keep running until the horses tired, until the boy—his There’s-gonna-be-a-killin’-in-this-town talk—would succumb to the sweat of his waking.

  His lung wind had begun to slow down.

  It again struck him: I sent my only Son to take it. Now you, too, must.

  He lay there for a time—Emma New bound to the obtuse belly of the hummingbird, the gown pulled down to her waist, her breasts exposed—and reached beside him.

  The rotting ink of the outdated letter was yet in his pocket. To the Men of the Pauer Plant, it read. Courtesy of the Pastor. It shook him as if he were a minute, undefined detail: a stroke of the wrist, a matter of swarming news, and send it out to the nigger in Bullock, Mississippi.

  They’re all the same.

  Now he remembered how the news had fascinated him: Hoover Pickens and the Bullocks, the free and automatic white men who worked in the factory, all of them were … dust.

  He looked over at Emma New, the fluttering hummingbird hidden behind her standing, her head aside with amazement.

  The house held their quiet.

  He could, at any moment, burst out into laughter, away from the house, the hummingbird in its thirst, and bid them dead: the white men, the needles metastasizing.

  But it was not his laughter that broke the quiet: it was Emma New’s.

  In her sweet and utter standing, her voice broke. How it lingered for a time near the window, the hummingbird and its flutter gone now.

  Emma New? whispered Earl Thomas.

  But she did not answer him, as he did not wake from his slumber when Hurry Bullock spat in her face. She was separate from world and bait. A sudden relief had overcome her—without explanation and pity.

  Surely he had heard the roaming horses at the window: he had seen Hurry Bullock spit in her face. That particular morning, he had done nothing and, in the falseness of his slumber, had asked himself inwardly: What have I done?

  He hoped she would turn: the hummingbird had taken all of it, nothing left.

  There stood in sky and earth a galaxy, an ornamental pattern of stars that surrounded themselves in Emma New’s profound laughter: the elements of her attention began to remark upon her a kind of redemptory setting of the bones. She had begun to move, her face up to the lighted globe, the moon running down the tongue. Like milk.

  Nothing would happen in this house that was not hers: the elements of earth and sky gathering about. Indeed, in her poise, she heard it.

  Swallow, it urged. Take it all down.

  Earl Thomas abandoned the rotting ink.

  He wondered, if this was what it was to be unbound—annihilated and let go of—then he would rather have the weight of the gauze, the mere suffocation of the lung, take part in his living.

  Emma New. What was happening to her? How had she come to this? The treatment of him, as though he were dead.

  He commented: Emma New, come to bed.

  And thus she turned, lifted the paralysis of her gown up to her breasts, and slid under the covers, the scent of milk and pansy adrift where Earl Thomas, in his Emma New abandonment, reached out and brought her in.

  His rib no longer throbbing but idle.

  chapter fourteen

  Sonny stood, like the dust of anthropology, in earth and heat.

  She had come to a point of immobility outside her house, the sun in her mouth.

  She had seen a boy from the window, running there in the woods.

  Her mout
h opened as if to conjoin the sighting with the conspiracy of earth and heat: the shape of Curtis grew into memory.

  Within her fell a pouch of diction, tongue-language, that rose from her stomach and into dust and cloud. Her voice, trembling and drumlike, shook with vibration, hurry.

  Nothing could stop this sound. Far-reaching it was, so that it ricocheted away from her bone and body, and over the Thomas house: Emma New heard it and paused in her work. Sonny. Sonny’s remembrance of the dead.

  The tune had crystallized in Sonny’s throat.

  Perhaps Curtis had found his way to her tongue-language. Perhaps it was the memory of Curtis that had found it: she felt him running, running through the forest, all fixed, and waited for the spirit to leap out behind her, hold her steady.

  The calling hung in her eardrums.

  They had come here, the white men, and taken her bones. They had come here, the white men, and taken him out from under breast and wing.

  This was what she felt like: a shot and dazed beast.

  She had found this tongue-language in her sleep—someone did not want it.

  She yelled out now, her hand up to her breast.

  Then she saw it, the rising figure.

  It was Gill.

  The circumference of their bodies, one to another, hung in their speechlessness.

  Sonny stepped forward. She wanted to say: Come here. Come to me.

  Gill stood, his mouth ajar, and turned away from her.

  The meeting, the earth around him, shook his face as he reached down for his gut and came to a shattering halt in the woods. The dragging of Curtis Willow crept behind him, near the shoulder blade: the oxygen of his territory was so suffocating that he eased his hand up to his face.

  He moaned in his posture, as if drowning.

  His lips parted, he began to breathe: his finger had left a streak of dirt on his cheek, and in the momentary division from his moaning, he had begun to smear it.

  He set afoot, away from Sonny, who had long disappeared, and out into the opening where the sun had formed a blade over the Bullock house.

  Lenora Bullock’s mouth appeared, to some degree, as if it had been gouged of redemption. She stood in the diluted eye of a vertical mirror, her hand up to her thigh, her hip.