Had he been asked this morning, if this hour was suitable and fit for him, the accordion player would have dreamed less of them, less of the hours and the time it took to wait, for so long a time, to have pleasure and be pleased by another person born miraculously—everything, even the accordion seller, was miraculous now—to him, to give and add, to replenish the thing he had lost and tumbled.
Certainly, the tumbling was his fault, he thought. He should have been more astute, more timely with his tunes, possessive of the instrument, the only sound in the world.
He lifted the accordion, tested a note, and placed the instrument on the seat from which he had begged, slept, picking up the bound journal, but the jotted line was strictly his and that of the man who mercied him.
The accordion seller nodded.
The doorbell rang again.
The accordion player had left the waiting area, vanishing altogether.
Now Adam stood before Sonny Willow.
He had come out of the woods, he and Gill, with the scent of running horses, soot.
Gill was at the ticket counter, Memphis, Tennessee, he said, and when they heard it—the mother of the nude child, the Thomases, and the accordion seller who had become an axis of growth and abandonment—looked at one another, each looking and glaring about, as if the news were an ill-adjustment to the outcome, the thing that had suddenly propelled them into a matter they could not hold.
Adam had come through, approached Sonny Willow and asked her to come here, Follow me, and she had moved her shoulder, stood from her chair, and followed him to the edge of the Mississippi, out behind the train station, where the mother of the nude child’s hair had been doused and wet, and said to her: Even when I said it in my head … Sonny hushed him and turned to the whistling, pregnant train, the light seeping through the wooded forest and brought her hand inward, to the fabric of her blouse.
As equally as her vocabulary, he, too, stood in the Garden, naked and without, and said to her, You are the woman and you are in it, and now take this part and eat of it and whatever it was that ground you into powder, it is ours and belongs to us: for at this moment she knew that she was the woman: she had taken it up, the mercy, and now that it was so powerful, stood above her rib and bone, she knew that she was chosen, that she could hold her lung-wind and yet breathe and be hers.
It was in her belly that Adam stood.
Adam dug into his pocket, retrieving the envelope Gill had stolen from his father’s barn, and handed it to Sonny: he had clung to the envelope, all this time clinging to it, ever since Emma New shared with him how she’d found Midnight, how frail and sick he was from the bullet, ever since he spat in Hurry Bullock’s face.
And so it was written: For Sonny.
The envelope, the whistling train, went down Sonny’s throat and she could only behold the final contents with the seamless, unwavering devastation of a remote and viable constitution … she had loved Curtis as though he were dead, even in her waiting near the window, even when she swallowed, and he knew it.
Perhaps she would never open it, she thought, she could take it down, into her belly where the other matters of the world grew naked, anthropologic, down into the dust of waiting.
It could be any of the things she had learned to live without.
She tucked the envelope in her blouse, knelt beside the edge of the Mississippi, and stuck her face in the waters of which Curtis Willow had bathed: of course, this was where he had been, the river had spun a web around him, had drawn and bound him, the poison rushing through.
Wherever he was, he was in one piece, altogether one with dust and earth, and now that her face was in it, she uttered some phrase, beneath the waters, something belonging to her and Curtis alone, her oxygen bellowed out from the Mississippi and drifted on the bed of the current, up toward the exaltation of the lighted moon. The river seeped through her parted mouth and she swallowed and knew that she was swallowing the grit of his vertebrae, his rib.
Gill joined Adam at the edge of the Mississippi: It’s time, he said.
The Thomases, the mother of the nude child, the accordion seller were all waiting to board the train. The Negro porter stood at the loading dock, he had come from behind the ticket counter and looked at Sonny, who was now in line, at the Thomases and the horizontal window of the waiting room: the boy who had touched him stood there.
If anyone, anyone had ever touched him like that, he could not pinpoint, say in his mind, who they were or mock with his eye the matter by which they had done it: but yes, a bird had woken him from a dream, flown down beside him—he could no longer remember where, up north, maybe—landed on the branch of his arm without restriction and the yelling, the niggers, the train talk let him go: the umbilical heat of dust and cloud had flung him out of it, the morbidity of two things, two reflections … he had not been the catalyst, had not introduced either of the two happenings, and now, as he looked at the boy who had touched him, he eased his hand from the railing, away from the horizontal window, and walked toward the boarding line.
The conductor stepped forward, took the mother of the nude child’s coupon, and, with expression, signaled to her how dirty she was: her wrist was outstretched. She wanted him to take it, to help her onto the train, but he looked at her as if to remark, That’s what you get, and busied himself with the accordion seller, whose fragility led him to abandon the train, people, and their audacities: the whirring of the machine, how the conductor reached out to him—he was at once muted, his lips mobile and ruse-like, a trick—he let go of the ticket, spawned and returning to the distance.
The Negro porter stood beside the conductor: Sonny, her face smeared from the waters of the Mississippi, approached the conductor, Emma New behind her; the conductor, a superlative nature about him, took up their tickets and pointed to their seating area.
Sonny ahead of her, Emma New was led down the aisle of the train by another Negro porter: his fingers were spread apart and he announced their coming to the others, those who waited and breathed near the closed window—they would have to share the district of air, the circulatory oxygen dispersing through the singular vent—in their exhalation, each shifted farther, more exclamatory in her sleep: with specificity, they paused and moaned equally, one wind, one discomfort, arriving simultaneously on the same nuclear pulse.
A woman, roused from her sleep with interruption, stared at Sonny, Emma New, through the moonlit space around her; someone, these two people, had been seated here, excavated and stirring with whispers: they had come to take up her air, she thought, her wind, with their whispers, their unsympathetic panting, their scattering about.
She sat erectly from her seat, looked out at the other sleepers, those who had come this far with a gratefulness about them. Didn’t they, the two women, know of the air they breathed? she thought. One line and hum? One muscle?
Emma New’s foot had begun to pat, the patting of it chilled her, the suddenly off-kilter tune that seemed without obligation to the climate of her ill-adjustment.
And she would just keep on patting her foot like that with no music, no keys, nothing to bring her out of it, thought the woman. She leaned forward and clipped her thumb and index fingers together in the pattern of shears, and signaled for the two women, the interrupters, to be quiet now and until she and the other sleepers reached Memphis, until the oxygen in this cart could break, be free.
Emma New’s patting had come to a halt. No music, no keys, only the hesitation, the cartilage in her bones burning. What if he don’t make it? she thought. What if Earl can’t get through? Her weight shifted with interrogation toward Sonny, but Sonny could not answer her now: she, too, was a part of the silent, whirring room, the envelope in her bosom rising without pattern through her blouse and full heart.
With no response to compare her shifting against, Emma New’s isolation had become a part of the line and hum, the circulatory breathing of the sleepers. She thought inwardly that the woman should have kept on clipping, clipped and clipped
until she no longer would have to think of Earl not getting through, until she drew a line down the center of her waiting, exposing the burning bones.
But then, for a moment of longevity, she thought of her own selfishness, Curtis Willow in the wheelbarrow, how they’d kicked him, beaten him, the worm crawling out.
Her head spun in her seating.
She was remote, unapart of the invisible tune, the key. She was as naked and bare as the shifting, the patting of her foot, and could not interpret fully her isolation; so bold and sparring it was in her mind—the images, Earl’s not yet coming through—that she withheld her breath from the sleepers, Sonny and the waiting, as if anyone would notice.
The woman who had done her clipping rose from her seat, the room filled with dark, suffocating people, and brought her index and thumb finger up to Emma New’s nostril, and clipped, clipped, as if to say, We don’t care, and returned to her slumber.
Earl Thomas had given his ticket to the conductor: he looked down at his feet and up, up to the Negro porter, thinking singularly, Now you, too, must, a single stitch binding them collectively to the invisible fabric of servitude.
The Negro porter, yet a part of the morbidity of two things, two reflections stared into the horizontal window, into the eyes of the boy who had touched him, at the conductor—this was the voice that frightened the bird—he spoke: New help, sir.
An order had come, new help, up north, passed along from the hands of the Negro porter to those of the conductor, delivered and brought forth with the irrevocable quality of privilege: with this, the conductor held the ticket, signaled for Earl Thomas to board the train, the redemptive symmetry of rib and bone lingering throughout.
Earl Thomas took his seat beside Emma New, whose hand was now up to the window, her palm pressed in the direction of Adam, Gill, in the distance: Sonny, the Thomases, each sitting near the window, peered at them, the thing they had done, upright and rooted from the gritty vertebrae of a corpse.
Adam turned, the train whistle blowing, as if an inexplicable, elusive thread were tied and drifted from his fingertip: he motioned upward to the bleeding moon, now that he had held it—the invisible kite, the bird—he could let it go.
There, blanketed by the earth, Gill watched, as the invisible kite floated upward, away from the thread of Adam’s immobility, up there with no bullet to evoke upon its drifting an irredeemable moaning of the bone.
The train whistled a second time.
The horses began to stir: now Gill was near the side of the train station, holding the reins. Blade reared and paused, reared with the company of the remaining horse. After the third whistle, the train disappearing, Gill settled Blade and released the reins of the second horse, sending it running throughout the suffocating womb of the wooded forest.
Gill looked out at Adam, how well he stood, saying alone, We have whispered, one to another, and won: not only had he held this, but the place he would go, wherever it was, it awaited him, and he would go with this blood and bone and wake in the morning with nothing stirring around him, only his isolation, the remarkable silence of breathing to consider.
He had begun to howl.
With this, he kicked Blade in the ribs, darting out, vanishing under the bleeding moon, until at once he was a part of the transparent, invisible thread.
Adam stood in the dust: he was drawn to it, the place of which he had fallen upon hearing the news, the shot that had taken Midnight’s leg out from under him: the consumptive attachment, the shape of catastrophe, drew him closer, and with his bare foot, he shifted the earth as his father had the rib of the dead.
He was extraordinary, nude.
Now that he had come into the world, he stood in his coming of age an announcement to the constitution of the men who’d deemed him the naked proprietor of a killing in this town.
A Killing in This Town Page 14
