A Killing in This Town

by Olympia Vernon

  The nigger’s dead.

  The nightmare flung Gill out of it.

  The burning house, the nigger’s dead, the swollen head swam a line throughout his hair, sooty. He emerged from the bed—the body had lain there, full and alive in its dreaming—he was still breathing, a sudden gratuity.

  In rotation, the sound of his mother’s whispering beneath the covers, his waking, spun him around collectively: he pointed toward the window and down at his foot. The circumference of his standing pushed him forward, as if a drowning had taken place of which he had been a witness and could only now part his lips.

  The single step forward, the sudden immobility of how far and little he had reached, struck his rib like the iron pedal of a piano. The tune swirled around him and down his throat and he began to manipulate the echo of the thing he’d heard, his hand traveled downward to the strict pattern of his shirt. He had offset the tune, the isolated rhythm of the winding murmur.

  With his being dead, it was no wonder he saw the men come for him, the wheelbarrow sounding throughout the woods. This was the tune he’d heard. The men had come for him. He lay corpsed and frozen with rigor mortis and they stood, each in his own number, and picked him up by the shoulder, put him in the wheelbarrow.

  The sun had come down upon him, his face and head swollen, and they laughed around him, a gurgling sound to imitate the final blow of the world. They had come for the tiny bird in the woods, whoever could have heard it to begin with, when it was born as if never to be heard by anyone at all? They paused for a moment, looked at the anatomy of the eye, how it’d come out so good from the head, and one of them, a blur, reached into the wheelbarrow and squinted. Ripe, he said.

  And plucked it.

  The illusion Gill had succumbed to, the men surrounding him with laughter, sent him scavenging about the room. He was not a nigger. Not in the wheelbarrow. Not apart of the laughter of men. He was one of the men. It was he who said it, Ripe.

  The echo dispersed: Curtis Willow. Come out yonder.

  The moon led him away from the house. He paused, balanced his foot on the ground, the tune in his head. When the gurgling found him—the sound of it pitiful—he ran from the house and upon the earth and through the trees until he reached Sonny Willow: through the open window, he saw her.

  She was naked.

  Curtis? she asked.

  She turned to the window, Gill Mender exposed.

  The pulse of the moon shone on his throat and he backed away, away from the window, the thing he had come to do.

  But he had not at all moved.

  Sonny Willow’s arm had risen from the window and trapped him at the shoulder: Been wait’n.

  The tune had come to a halt.

  Sonny Willow, now in her gown, opened the door of the house.

  A lantern had been lit in the room, the belly of the globe drew them inward, one to another. The expansion of silence—the breathing of the two bodies—clung with the pale diversion of vertebrae.

  Sonny Willow could have touched him: he had run in her dreams, barefoot and white—the dead odor of a gardenia—and turned with laughter, his tiny hand lifted above his head.

  The enemy, the bones she had pictured, shook within her slumber, a hum that slept behind her eye, and the boy, she could never catch him, eluded her and left her near the foot of the maple tree.

  She remembered the crescendo of the voices: they had come from the esophagus, the battered murmur of the lung.

  Her hand rose above the globe of the lantern: her finger on the base of Gill’s throat, she calculated the length of the bone, the age and species of the seasons, and retrieved her hand into the bosom of the wet gown.

  What he look like? she asked.

  Bloody.

  Tell it to me like it done to ’m, she said.

  They: when he said they, Sonny Willow’s hand pointed toward him and he arranged the duty of the line to fit his responsibility. We—after we called ’m out, we took ’m through the trees and the pulley … some’n caught ‘m and Hurry Bullock said to keep running. So we … we brought ’m to the end of the line. His eye come out.

  Sonny Willow paused.

  Gill’s telling of the murder, what they’d done to Curtis, exposed his vulnerability. Without pity, she could take the lantern, come down upon his telling of it and set him ablaze. His eye come out drew her bones forward, and for the first time, she could not refer to Curtis in her head. She had forgotten, just now, the definitive detail of the pupil upon waking, the shape of the globe in his face.

  His eye come out. The announcement struck her: when Curtis walked through the trees in the morning time, she never turned in her standing, only envisioned the face, the symmetry of the bones, and now, the news of the happening tilted her head aside, as if she yet stood at the foot of the maple.

  She signaled for Gill to quiet.

  In her solitude, the naked vocabulary of her thinking, she asked: Why not take me? Her hands drawn together, she winced upward, away from the globe of the lantern in the comparison of a man befallen to a blade.

  Gill stood from his chair.

  Ma’am, ma’am, did they bring ’m to you?

  Her hand opened, a stir of unbound reciprocity. Hurry Bullock had done it to her Curtis and soon, soon to Earl Thomas.

  They would ground him into powder.

  And now, the Hurry and Bullock Curtis had spelled upon the palm of her hand evoked within her a constellation, a discovery of her own anthropology.

  It was hers, belonged to her, and no one—man nor beast—could claim it.

  They brought the bones, she whispered.

  Where’d you put ’em? asked Gill.

  Her eye lit in the stirring of the globe: The maple.

  In the morning, she would bind a cross together, a single nail to confine the wood, now that she knew the entire happening, the recantation of the whispering bones, the blood.

  chapter twenty-four

  The widow’s hair—bound by a ribbon—had come loose this evening.

  The upper torso, her shoulders, in the face of the mirror.

  She had begun to hum.

  The fabric of the ribbon hung from her fingers. No one was here now. No one had rung the bell. She looked upon the ribbon and, in her carelessness, dropped it on the floor.

  The humming, the interruption of quiet, drew upon the things of the room. A note she could not remember paused in her head: she looked at the ribbon with uncommon decency, a peculiar nerve trapped in her eye.

  She vanished altogether from the mirror and started from the beginning of the line, but it would not hold. Her hand went up to her head: she had returned to the suffocating line only to forget, again, the continuation of her humming.

  A pulsating vein rose from the crux of her blouse, upward into the settling jugular. It had run so quickly—immediate and rushing—into her position. No one had mocked her. No one heard the corpse of the tune. But she stood this way, as if everyone had heard it and mocked her: a carpenter had walked into the room, slapped her face, and she took it, but this, this she could not take.

  She swung her head around—the line would not come out—and the odor of what she had succumbed to sifted throughout her dirty hair and down her eardrum. The mocking, she could not stand it. She yelled out, screamed.

  But no one was in the world.

  She was alone in the fabric store.

  And she was as dirty as she had been when she entered the train station.

  She hurried toward the piano and began to play. The keys panged in the echo of the room and the note … what was it? What key? She could not recall the flame of the key, as she could not the note, but she played on. It would come.

  It would come soon.

  If ever God was abundant in her thinking, it was now, at the piano. Perhaps, if she sang it aloud, the key would strike the cord and she’d fix it the way things ought to be fixed, the way sick men lie in their beds—a pistol to the back of the head.

  Down below her, the r
ibbon lay as she had dropped it: her wrists shifted from the keys. She made a fist, one hand in the air, and came down on the piano, cursing the tune with a whisper.

  It was no wonder she had not heard the bell.

  It rang again upon the lighted piano, the keys yet trembling with urgency.

  D. D. Pickens had been standing there all the while: she had peered behind the counter and seen the untamed hair of the widow, the wrists bellowing out from the piano.

  In her queer predicament, she interrupted: Anybody there?

  Someone was there and she well knew it.

  The widow had not responded. Her hand rose toward the jugular and she pressed down on the vein, as if to quiet the restlessness of her sudden, ecliptic transition.

  D. D. Pickens was inconsistent. Of course she had woken from her dreaming, stood at the cracked fissure of her window, and recalled to memory the question from her own Hoover Pickens: What do you want?

  This evening she had neither pondered nor weighed the naïveté of her response. She had solely asked him to Look at it.

  Now only the lighted star remained.

  The wind of the piano placed a tremor upon the widow. She stood at the counter, her arms at her waist in some vibratory momentum. She grew uncomfortable in the blouse and patted her throat near the neckline.

  It had come to her why the tune had vanished this evening: her name was embroidered into a lone patch of yellow fabric that clung to her collar by the arm of a straight pin. The silent note struck her face, and with her index finger, she tugged the pin loose, the yellow patch on the counter.

  And so it was written: Quill.

  D. D. Pickens spoke: I come for the news.

  The widow turned to the mailboxes. Pickens, she murmured.

  She returned to the counter with two envelopes and laid them before D. D. Pickens as if she had never come here. She opened a cigar box adjacent to the two envelopes and stuck her finger in it.

  D. D. Pickens came to a halt: a spider had begun to crawl on the bed of the widow’s fingertip and up toward the elbow.

  The widow’s head leaned aside. Her hair sloped outward from the bone of her shoulder and hung in the wing of her serenity. She disappeared from the counter and drew the fabric up to her hip.

  The spider trampled upward as her hair fell upon the keys of the piano. She had risen from the crowded laughter of her dementia.

  Her foot reached the pedal. The tune had come out of her humming now, the forgotten and indelible line of the season sprung forth into her memory.

  Suddenly, the nail above the piano seemed so sturdy in D. D. Pickens’s mind, pleading it was: she forced her eye into it, the blunt head of the instrument leaking through the pupil, a fine red line of blood traveling through the lobe and down toward her gut, like dye, and into the pouch of her vagina. It had come out in her mind and she spread her legs apart, as if she waited for it to drip onto the blur of the wooden floor beneath her.

  The tune of the widow shook her, the mockingbird bone hollering out for attention, and she was, at once, near the window, dripping and wet, Hoover Pickens behind her, his penis pushing the fine red line up again into her vagina, and had asked, and the asking plunged into her memory: What do you want?

  Grace had given her something she didn’t deserve. It sat up in her stomach, a stone. The tune of the widow mocked her and her arms went up to her eye, her stomach, as if she expected the weight of a bird to come out in the fine red line: she stood by a maple and a wind would come, push her down, and she would have to … take to her death.

  The tune had come to a pause.

  The spider disappeared beneath the collar of the widow’s blouse and up toward the cranium. She began to laugh and quiver in the blouse, her head forward upon the keys. Her hair trembled wildly and she looked at D. D. Pickens—her legs yet apart—and commenced to playing again, the spider weaving a hole in her skull.

  chapter twenty-five

  Hoover Pickens had never seen it as now.

  Adam walked Blade up to the breakfast porch: he was fully dressed in the Klan suit and hood, his hands on the reins of the horse, as he dictated the arch of the ribbed muscle, a full step forward, the hooves kicking up the dust behind him.

  Another step backward, a pause.

  Blade breathed through the full nostril of the commandment: his belly hung low from the saddle, Adam’s foot on the lung of his breathing.

  Hoover Pickens stood on the breakfast porch: the contours of the wide-brimmed hat lived in his hand, the sunlit beam of the earth traveled down the surface of his wrist and onto the buffalo hide.

  Not since Adam’s fall from Hurry’s training horse had he seen this. He opened his mouth and let the sun in it: he was so clean right now—a clean man—and when he’d let the sun in, he swallowed the heat and the roaring of the hooves on the earth.

  He dropped the wide-brimmed hat and walked toward Blade. The night of Curtis Willow’s death had befallen him, and he saw in his full eye the nigger step down from the porch and, too, Sonny holding her gut near the maple.

  The crowing of the wheelbarrow, the corpse—how they had beaten him, the bloated kidney, the organs pushing the belly out—and now, now that Blade had come again to rouse the slumber, the heavy sleep, he could not contain it. His arm went up to his face, up to the eye, and he turned from the horse and Adam, as if by turning he could remember it fully.

  He paused, a grin.

  Nearly thirteen years ago now, the pastor had come to show him something, early morning, and he had slapped his face. The nerve of that nigger to reach out to him.

  Earl Thomas was dead.

  And he well knew it.

  A vertical line struck the center of his face, a vein: he should have done it long ago. So close. Had anyone in the world known how patient he was—to hold such a thing, an encounter—in his head and body for so long a time that it seemed now all the more reason to kill?

  It was no wonder the kite had come down.

  To take … to disturb the free … it was owed to him. For he had no fathers or grandfathers ligning the flight of stairs in his house. He was the beginning.

  The father.

  A threaded seam of evaporation was woven into Hoover Pickens. It hummed in the womb—a piano—and upon his birth, the music, the tune descended from the bone and into the sterile wind of a cloud.

  A pang shook him: he held his ribs.

  Son, you done it, he said, his free hand on the belly of the horse. He’s done new.

  Adam kicked Blade in the ribs: the horse trotted around his father. The course of the pattern vibrated in the dust.

  Adam kept it within, the interrogation of the man who disturbed the axis of his vocabulary: You let Mr. Hurry shoot ’m, he thought. Look what he done.

  He pulled the reins of the horse and paused.

  His father was a part of the dust now. He had knelt down, his hand up to his belly, the other on the earth. The sudden pause of the trotting held him diametrically inward, the scope of the 360-degree pattern seeping throughout the heated and porous sweat of his position.

  Blade emerged from the pause and again encircled him.

  An extraordinary moan dispersed from Adam’s lips. The two holes cut into the Klan hood, the synonymous gaze of the eye, reflected a term of embarrassment.

  Not for his father but for the thing he had become. His father had always been this, this coward in the dust, he who could not hold a pang in his stomach while standing, as he could not hold it lying down.

  Hoover Pickens was a foreigner.

  It was the scent of Midnight that Adam remembered.

  He had come to tears beneath the hooded Klan suit.

  Adam had overheard his mother tell it to Lenora Bullock: the morning of his conception, his father had pushed her tangled hair from behind and into the sunlit window, and when he pulled out, a whisper, the semen blurting, an explosive, unbearable plea from the vagina, unheard and battered.

  Lenora Bullock, in the polarity of her lang
uage, grinned and responded, looking down at the pie she’d brought that evening: all the time it took.

  Adam was a part of the vagina, the cracked fissure of the window, the woman who had traveled through the clouded wood and brought Midnight to save him.

  Hoover Pickens’s head plummeted forth. The distance of the earth and sun crept into his kneeling as the dust spun around him: he lay there on the verge of metamorphosis. He could not, at will, digest the pang in his stomach with the good, the trotting of the horse and Adam. A private instability, a moan of bewilderment, trembled in the tomb of his lung and he turned on his side, the silhouette of a throbbing uterus.

  Midnight’s head shone through Adam’s open window. He lifted his chin above the horizontal plane of the sill. A pink cloud drifted into the obscurity of his pupil. The blood clot caused by the bullet was dispersing.

  Adam looked down at his father:

  And whosoever shall fall on this stone

  It shall grind him to powder.

  Adam gathered the reins collectively and struck the ribbed muscle.

  Blade sparred in the dust.

  Ya! yelled Adam. Ya. Ya. Ya.

  And thus altogether disappeared.

  chapter twenty-six

  It was nighttime.

  A dew of perplexity drifted among the free and automatic white men: they had positioned the wheelbarrow—its head askew—in the wooded forest, until the creatures of the earth grew irritable, sick of their laughter, and hummed to one note, one striking crescendo, and ran them out of it.

  Now the free and automatic white men stood in the mouth of Hoover Pickens’s barn.

  The moon had encroached upon them the insoluble mannerism of agony.

  Hurry Bullock was polluted: a bottle of whiskey lay beneath his shoe. He had begun to weave from his standing place, his head downward and a part of something, something pitiful.

  Gill Mender and Hoover Pickens spoke around him, and the voices—the two men at once—spurted in the blood of the moon. They were a collective blur.