Come yonder, boy. He patted his hip, and Midnight’s head went down into the dirt, his leg forward and back again.
Come, boy.
Midnight trotted in an adjacent and wide turn, away from Hoover Pickens. He halted in a gaze of inquiry. His head up now.
Adam stood behind the screen door of the breakfast porch: What you want with ’m, Papa?
Hoover Pickens froze in his beckoning, his face toward Adam.
Salem’s sick, he said. Midnight’s gotta lay down with ’m.
What’s he gotta do, Papa? asked Adam. Make ’m well?
Salem’s coughing up blood, son.
Adam stepped onto the breakfast porch, the sun gone sour in the wind of his father’s vocabulary.
Hoover Pickens squatted in the dust, his knee forward, and leveled his hand in the heat toward the gaze of Midnight. The sun had reached his shoulder and climbed upon the bed of his full arm. He was suffocating.
Midnight’s gut shaped the ground, as if he had swallowed the killing at one time: of course, he had seen more than one killing—more than Curtis Willow—had lived long enough for the men to spill upon him their pitiful and horrid language. He had been called like this, asked to come here to this place, when D. D. Pickens knew, the world who made her, that he was not built to leak into their constitutions, their free-and-automatic-white-men speech; no one had tried, ever a time, to leave him be.
He barked at Hoover Pickens, his belly spewing out from the rib.
Son, said Hoover Pickens, go to ’m. Bring ’m yonder.
He had been asked to burn. His father was amid a rising flame, a sea of fire and heat: he had knelt into it there on the ground. It engulfed him and Adam could no longer see the head or the outstretched arm, the foot. A burning, naked swimmer.
He won’t come, Papa, he said. You see he won’t come.
Son, responded Hoover Pickens. Call ’m to.
Adam stepped into the flame, the heat, and signaled Midnight toward him.
And he came.
Now, said Hoover Pickens. Take ’m up. Bring ’m yonder.
Midnight panted in Adam’s arms, his head against the shoulder and bone he had saved at birth. Adam, in turn, looked down on him and gave him to his father.
Salem Bullock was sunken with sweat and fever. His entire body, his head, was wet and odorous, and the stench of his disparity fluttered in the nakedness of his eye: the global rim of his pupil scanned the things of the room and he coughed, the vibratory context of the loud, auditory sound traveled through the sunlit window and into the league of morning locusts.
The bruised esophagus. The terrible, aching lung. His finger moved beneath the covers—the left side, congruent with the heart—he begged for mercy. Someone should have come by now.
The lung pounded within him. A figurehead, slanted and impetuous, hung in suspension over the lung. He thrust his hand forward and moaned. Nothing moved. He had no power.
He tossed beneath the figurehead, bound to the tail of it, a kite lifting him in the wind of hurry and detail, and he tossed and in his tossing, a button—weak from his churning—broke loose from his shirt. How he moaned, wanted to yell out to the fleeting of his moaning and to the kite above him to put him down.
He coughed from his lung, his finger confined to the gap of the missing button. And he began to stir with a remarkable, sudden urge to take to the kite and lend his weight to it and go up there, the clouds, the thirst of his rousing, and be new.
But there was no kite.
There was only a missing button trapped beneath the clavicle.
The tail of the figurehead slipped out of his moaning, let him go.
Salem, said Hurry Bullock. He done caught ’m.
He had come up the steps of the house, past the aligned photos of his and Salem’s grandfathers, each to himself glorious in his formidable pose. The fingerprint of the widow’s dead husband was yet pressed into the eye of Salem and Hurry Bullock’s father: he had come to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, Him there? he asked. No, said Salem, pointing to the next father, the Wizard. Him.
Hurry Bullock shifted his foot in front of him. Nothing there, an invisible stain he pretended into view. He had shared the weight of his power with Salem, the two of them leaped into the dreams of their forefathers, two boys laughing and giggling in the heat and temperature of hedonism. It was unbearable to see him this way. He could only look down at his foot with inhibited dexterity.
Hurry, panted Salem Bullock. It’s done low.
Hoover Pickens had arrived, stood with the two men, Midnight in his arms.
I bring ’m to lay down, said Hoover Pickens.
Salem Bullock was exposed now, his arms beside him in a straight line. The sudden pang of the button trapped beneath the bone of his clavicle caused his shoulder to rotate with discomfort. A moan crept, stirred.
It belonged to neither the Bullocks nor Hoover Pickens, but to Midnight. He had grown restless in the quiet of the room: he kicked, his head had succumbed to a particular inclination in the arms of Hoover Pickens. He wanted to get down, run.
Calm down, boy. Calm down.
Midnight sparred against him. He knew this scent, had been born into the pitch of the murderers’ language and had swallowed it, all of the jungle bloods and niggers and the white men’s hatred. And now he was to save him?
The aptitude of duty plunged into his eardrums.
Hoover Pickens forced him upon the covers of the bed: he squirmed with entrapment. He was a part of the stench, the sweat of Salem Bullock’s rising lung, and he stumbled toward the organ and howled and barked at it, turned to face the two men who stood above him and down at Salem Bullock and then again at the space between the two standing men and struck out down the stairs and through the open door of the house.
Hurry Bullock followed him, a pistol on his hip, and fired … one, two, and the third shot knocked Midnight’s leg out from under him … a piercing howl and nothing more. He was bleeding. Wherever he was, he was hit.
Hurry Bullock stood in wait: Goody for ’m.
The howling ascended up the stairs of the house, Hoover Pickens stood near the window. The firing of the gun, the third shot, the bullet and bone. Adam. The happening—quick and irretrievable—spun him into humility.
It’s done low, whispered Salem Bullock.
Hoover Pickens abandoned him and traveled away from the house, past Hurry Bullock, the thing he had done crystallizing, and toward the trail of blood on the leaves.
Midnight would never come to Hoover Pickens, had never come.
Soon Hoover Pickens would look like, smell like, sour and obedient to the covers of his bed, Salem Bullock. He would beg for mercy, his hand over the throbbing organ that would turn him into a fine, rotted corpse.
When he approached the house, Adam met him.
Pa, what’s the matter? Adam asked. The Lord done give Mister Salem some’n he can’t handle?
Hoover Pickens knelt down before Adam, as he had to Midnight, and held his sobbing in the shadow of dirt below him. Son, he warned. It’s Midnight. He’s done shot.
The news, Adam stepped backward and away from his father. The sun danced in his hair and his weight, and his arms lifted from his thigh and in midair. Shock rose in his face, the mouth drained of reason.
Pa, Pa, shot, he’s done shot, huh, Pa?
Hoover Pickens draped his arms around him, but Adam pushed back and away from the shirt and peered into the woods. Who done it to ’m?
He wouldn’t lay down with Salem, said Hoover Pickens. He come out of it, pulled away. Hurry, Hurry took his pistol and fired a hit. Three o’ ’em and Midnight went down somewheres.
D. D. Pickens ran out of the house: Hoover?
Adam collapsed in the dirt, heaved into the crux of his arm, and everything at once was dark and heavy and he couldn’t breathe, the dust woven into his dilemma.
Hoover, repeated D. D. Pickens. What is it?
Hoover Pickens, perched beside Adam, answered her: Midnig
ht’s hit.
Adam abruptly rose from the dirt and ran through the woods until he caught wind of a trail of blood dotted upon the leaves. His head, bound to the dotted line, traced it and he ran up the hill … but the blood had run out.
Nothing there.
The following morning, D. D. Pickens discovered Midnight on the steps of the breakfast porch, his leg wrapped in gauze where the bullet had struck, pulled it out from under him.
chapter twenty-two
Dog and men don’t fit under the same covers: the doctor had come.
The sun poured down upon his hair. He towered about the porch and, for a moment, stepped away from Hoover and D. D. Pickens.
There, in the sentiments of the dust, lay a footprint. His—he looked at it, the sizable, narrowed arch of the setting, as if all he had ever been, now and coming, had lain there ahead of him, eclectic.
Seems they oughta: D. D. Pickens stood behind him. Her hand disappeared into the pocket of her gown, only her index finger jutted out.
The doctor stirred above the footprint. He lifted his face aside, his jawbone in a rude pause. The blur swam in his head, Hoover and D. D. Pickens: he had been here before, a boy, a dog, and entirely, the language of the people whose lives he had saved were each of the same bone and spirit … it was no matter, no one shaped the line to fit.
Midnight done used to one blood, ain’t he, Doctor? Hoover Pickens patted his foot on the bottom step of the house.
Could be, said the doctor.
But not really had the doctor said this. Just now he wondered what he’d been thinking when the arch of his foot made the pattern, how come it had shifted so … and there was another one, another step forward in the dust, sideways like the morphological isolation of a moan.
You go on, he thought, mixin’ dogs and men together. I’m done sick with it.
Doctor, said D. D. Pickens. He took to Adam. You seen how he took to ’m.
Her index finger had come out of the pocket of her gown and over her lips. The invisible, naked fumes reached her liver. The heat had simply drifted down her throat.
Although the doctor had not witnessed the happening, he stood in the circumference of Adam’s revelation—under the weight of the doctor’s thinking, Adam, bound by shock, had collapsed there beneath the footprint.
There in the dust lay the swirling remnant of Adam’s bloated hand, the moribund, terrific round head where the news hung in the domesticity of the backbone.
The doctor looked down upon it: he saw now the less narrow of the two footprints, one unbelonging to him lying on the ground, nude and bare-boned. The other, a stage of momentary confinement.
I said you seen how it took to ’m, repeated D. D. Pickens.
The doctor’s hand leaned in to his ribs. He wondered why at all she had not seen it. The stain. The tattoo. The boy had lain here and he was a part of the moan, the revelatory language of the news.
The doctor’s lips parted.
He had swallowed a parlor of dust.
Now, he remembered how the postmaster woke him: he was wet with fever. A complaint about people, the world, drifted through-out the house. The postmaster gazed invisibly from the eye of the stethoscope and he asked him to breathe, breathe again, and in the pausing character of the instrument, what remained of people, the world was a tiny grove of oxygen uprooted from the postmaster’s lungs, used and splattered, as if now that he wanted to live, the matter of his living was as dead and microscopic as the blow of its catastrophe.
The doctor had not saved. Not ever a time had he the breath and wind to lie down with the sick. He had only a mausoleum of footprints leading up to the houses, a stethoscope, gauze for a broken bone, and an inclination of which to test mortality. He was a ruse: it struck him inwardly and he seemed himself a part of the people, the world and language of the postmaster, the children he longed to save.
Hoover Pickens retrieved the elongated box the doctor had abandoned on the lopsided table and brought it forward. Doctor, he said. But the doctor was yet turned to him and D. D. Pickens, the sun left to weep in the false depiction of his standing. Here’s your help.
The doctor could not bear it now. Doctor, your help. He had come to this house and the other houses and heard and listened, but they had missed it altogether: his own darkness had seeped through. He was pitifully cold.
He looked down at the footprint as if it reflected the debilitating coldness of his solitude, and, with his shoe, smeared it.
Show ’m, mercy, he uttered.
Hoover and D. D. Pickens stood as he had left them, a long howl from up high.
Midnight had begun to stir.
chapter twenty-three
They rounded up their horses.
Pulled down their hoods.
Curtis Willow was a dead man.
It was dark out.
Gill was on the ground.
The men, his father, were on their horses.
Gill, said Hurry Bullock. Get up on your horse. You gotta do the talkin’, son.
Gill took to Blade and the men began to yell and their yelling was all mixed up with hate and the hate was cold.
We are white men, born unto the earth
And land, which is ours and belongs to us, as Free and automatic white men.
They got down to the burned before their properties part: Hoover Pickens raised his pulley in the air. The line changed the pressure in his face.
Hurry Bullock kicked his horse in the side and yelled for Gill to pull out up front, all the other free and automatic white men following.
The moon shone through the trees. The thought of the dragging made Gill sick: he thought he’d come down off his horse and onto the ground. But Blade didn’t notice that he was sick. The horse ran with him on it, the men behind him: the shouting stood in front of him in the darkness, ran in front of the horses, under the moon, through the trees, and guided the men toward the house.
Gill’s shoulders sloped to one side. The running, panting horse led him through the woods. There it was: the house of Curtis Willow.
The horses, the men, came to a halt, a lantern in the window.
Hurry Bullock rode up beside him: Call out to ’m, son, he said.
His father drew his horse on the other side of him: Say it wheres he can hear it.
Go on, son, yelled the widow’s husband.
Curtis Willow, said Gill. Come out yonder.
Hurry Bullock kicked his horse in the ribs and rode up to the porch: Curtis Willow! he yelled. Get out here, boy.
The curtain where the light had come from parted.
The door opened.
And whosever shall fall on this stone
shall be broken: but on whomsoever
it shall fall, it will grind him to
powder.
Sonny stood on the edge of the porch.
You know what we come for, gal, said Hoover Pickens.
Sonny walked up to Hurry Bullock’s horse: He comin’, she whispered. His shoes … he’s gotta get his shoes on first.
Hurry Bullock reared up on the horse, and the head of it struck Sonny’s face. She fell on the boards of the house. She sat up and swallowed the blow.
A scream was caught in her face, but she would not do her screaming now.
Curtis Willow, yelled Hoover Pickens.
Curtis Willow had come out of the house: Heavy, ain’t it? he moaned.
The widow’s husband threw a bottle through the window, the house burning.
Sonny abandoned the porch, ran out near the maple tree.
Curtis Willow walked away from the porch and between the free and automatic white men.
And took it.
Hoover Pickens jumped down off his horse, Midnight barking.
The other men jumped down off their horses.
Curtis Willow disappeared between the sheets. They kicked him, and amid the kicking, his face traveled eastward, near the maple tree. No more Sonny.
Sonny turned away from the burning house and the hoode
d men and held herself, one hand on the tree, the other on her stomach, as if everything she had eaten up till now would explode and set the world, the moon, ablaze with hurt.
But she never made a sound.
Neither did Curtis Willow.
She let it go.
Curtis Willow’s body curled up. The burning house lit up his shoes where he had shined them, so the moon, the world, could see the man he clung to.
They laughed collectively, shouted.
Curtis Willow—through the blood, the swollen head and face—looked up at the men, moaned: I’m already in your bones.
Nobody knew what the heavy was, if the hate was heavy or the world was heavy or the burning house. Whatever it was, he wasn’t afraid.
Hoover Pickens tugged at the pulley.
The men roped him.
They jumped on their horses.
Gill kicked Blade in the ribs.
Hurry Bullock yelled out: We got us a nigger.
We got us a nigger, they repeated.
Blade pulled Curtis Willow and his body swung on the rope and his body turned in the blue light and he groaned and said, See how heavy it is? And the horse pulled him, his body churning on the ground.
Between the laughter, Curtis Willow’s head hit a tree and the blood leaked from his face, wet on the earth. He groaned. His mouth had blood in it and he couldn’t swallow the blood and hurt at the same time. He was a part of the moon and the trees: his body turned with the rope, and in an effort to lift his head from the ground, his neck grew tired and his head went down and the moon caught it: the bone snapped.
A bloody head.
Gill was sick, but the horse took him with it: he wanted to stop now.
He was so weak.
Not only had the bone head snapped, but the fingers, the ligaments.
Broken, torn apart.
The body hung, the feet in the pulley, until the hip gave way and made a sound through the trees.
Take ’m on through, yelled the free and automatic white men.
The horses led, took the body on through the forest.
There was mud on his shoe.
The free and automatic white men laughed: We know it now, said Hurry Bullock.
A Killing in This Town Page 10
