Blood
on the teeth
is an expression I heard once. Once the animal has blood on
its teeth it never loses that taste. Craves it. Lives for it.
The
running gang behind us became crazy.
What
had been a jog in our direction became a chase, and even as they chased us I
felt stones whipping by my head, heard the sounds as they hit the sidewalk or
the wooden front of a store.
Somewhere
a window smashed.
I
looked at Nathan. His eyes were wide with fear, the left side of his face
covered with blood, and somewhere within me I found a reserve of passion and
strength and stamina because I took off like a rocket and for a moment left
Nathan behind.
How
long we ran I can't remember, but suddenly there was someone ahead of us, and
in a flash we were past them and I heard them shouting.
I
slowed, came to a stop, Nathan alongside me, and when we turned we saw something
that I would never forget.
Mrs.
Chantry stood in the middle of the street, resolute, immovable.
Above
her head she held a heavy-looking stick, and when she spoke it seemed like her voice
came right up out of the earth and filled the street and every building along
it.
'You
stop right there!' she hollered.
I
looked at Nathan.
Rock
and a hard place, his eyes said.
The
running gang behind us came to a staggered and surprised halt, bumping into one
another, each jostling to see who was standing in their way.
'You
boys stop right there! You see what you've done? You see what's happening here?
Get back where you came from or I'll turn you into the lizards that you are!'
Mrs.
Chantry's voice was commanding, like marshalling the forces in some
Union-Confederate engagement.
And
the gang of teenagers behind us was shocked.
Stunned.
Silent.
And
then they went.
No
question.
No
hesitation.
One
after the other they went, caterwauling down the street like a pack of whipped
dogs.
Even
at sixteen or seventeen you still remembered the stories well enough, the
eating of the husband, the gateway to Hell that lay right behind her porch
door.
I
remember Larry James' face in that moment. He glanced back towards us before he
turned at the end of the street. He didn't know whether to feel angry he'd been
cheated of the kill, or sympathetic because we had encountered what appeared to
be a far worse fate.
And
then
she
turned.
I saw
myself at eleven years old, saw myself standing right there on her path with a
fish in my hands, wrapped in a piece of linen that once held a baked ham
sandwich, a baked ham sandwich just like the one Nathan Verney and I had shared
a million years before.
And
that moment seemed like yesterday, like an hour ago, like the fleeting second
that had just passed by.
Possibly
the last second of my life.
And
then she spoke, and all I recall now is the sense of warmth in her tone, the
timbre, the depth.
'You
know, boys,' she started. 'I really did eat the fish.'
We
were there for nigh on two hours.
Mrs.
Chantry cleaned Nathan's face, she dressed it, put some gauze over it and held
it with some tape.
She
had homemade lemonade, some kind of dry cookie that tasted of nutmeg and sweet
cherry and something else indescribable that made you want two or three more.
Her
house did not have walls daubed with blood. She did not have the skull of her
husband on the mantel over the fire. She had all her teeth, they were white,
not black, and she smelled faintly of violets and peppermint.
She
even showed us a picture of her husband, and when we told her of the stories we'd
heard as children she told us she had in fact started most of the rumors.
'Get
to my age,' she said, 'and you require a little peace and quiet. It was never
the intention to frighten a soul, least of all a child, but you know how people
are. They take something and they embellish it, they twist it and exaggerate
it, and when you hear that same tale come back it's twice as high and three
times as wide, and you barely recognize it. That was all that happened, and now
I'm kinda regretful folks took to such things in the first place.'
She
smiled at Nathan.
'Like
you,' she said. 'You saw something today that you were gonna have to deal with
one time or other. You understand what I mean, right?'
'Dumb
as milk white folks is what you mean,' Nathan said.
Mrs.
Chantry smiled. 'Dumb-ass white folks, sure enough.'
'Trailer
trash,' Nathan went on. 'All up and marryin' their sisters and eating three-day
old leftovers out of a cooking pan.'
'Nathan,'
I hissed, and he looked at me with this wide- eyed innocence.
Mrs.
Chantry raised her hand. 'Ain't so far from the truth, Daniel.'
She
turned and looked at Nathan. 'I know your daddy,' she went on. 'I know he knows
all about what's happening in Alabama and Georgia. Never suspected it would do
anything other than infect the whole country after a while. Figure there'll be
a lot more shooting and rioting and marching and hollering before people come
to their senses, you know?'
She
looked at me and smiled. She turned once again to Nathan.
'You
seem to have yourself a good friend here, Nathan Verney. Seems to me a white
boy who'll stand up for a negro in this time is a man of spirit and backbone.'
She
laughed, a tumbling infectious sound.
'But
then you pair were always in a heap of trouble all by yourselves, weren't you?'
Nathan
smiled, the first time since the street. 'Wouldn't have been a pair, and
wouldn't have been anywhere near as much trouble on my own,' he said, and I
laughed with him, and for just a little while what had happened didn't matter.
Seemed
to me we were laughing at the world from the gateway to Hell, and that was the
funniest thing of all.
Later,
after we left, left with an open invitation to return, Nathan walked with me
towards the Lake. We always went this way, side by side, step for step, and
then where the path separated fifty yards from the water's edge we would go our
respective ways.
'We'll
see this thing through together, Nathan,' I said.
He
didn't reply. He knew what I meant.
He
paused at the end of the path and turned towards me.
He
held out his hand.
I
took his hand, and for an eternity we stood there without a word.
'Your
choice, Danny Ford,' he eventually said.
'No
choice, Nathan Verney,' I remember saying.
And
then we went our different ways, back to our own homes, and later I sat at the
window of my room and watched that slow Carolina blue skyline melt soundlessly
into Lake Marion.
At
sixteen years old it was not my job to understand why.
That's
what I believed.
The
reason I ran with Nathan was because I was scared, because I had been unable to
defend myself, because he had stepped in to protect me and I owed him the same.
Eleven
years since the day we'd shared a sandwich by the Lake.
A
little more than half of that again and Nathan Verney would be dead.
But
that was the future, an unknown, and just as JFK would fall within the year, we
had no idea of what was coming.
We
lived for the present, a little for the past, but most of all it seemed we
lived for one another.
And
that, out of everything that was to come, was possibly the hardest thing of
all.
Back
in Sumter, the year or so I spent there before being transferred to Death Row,
I met a man called Robert Schembri. It was August of 1972, and by the time our
paths coincided Robert was nearly seventy, and he walked with a stoop and a
limp and the air of someone beaten. Beaten, however, he was not, for Robert
Schembri possessed a spirit of unparalleled indomitability. Apparently he
served thirteen years straight in solitary, a narrow cell, eight feet by eight,
a metal-framed bed, a hole in the ground, fifty minutes of daylight every
seventy-two hours. He went down there because of his stories, and his stories
were wild and impossible and strangely fascinating. Folks were upset by his
stories, the claims he made, the theories he presented, and though anyone in
their right mind would have considered him far from the brightest light in the harbor,
my experience of Robert Schembri remains lucid and clear. Schembri was a
dangerously intelligent man.
I was
the only person he ever told the reason for his imprisonment. Why I was chosen
I never knew, for Schembri died of a heart attack, one of those special Federal
Penitentiary kind of seizures, a month before I was transferred out of General
Populace. And he was the one who gave me some kind of understanding of what had
happened to me and, more importantly, why. It was he who'd warned me of a man
called West, a man who walked the walk and talked the talk, and ran D-Block as
if he was the last American God. I had not known at that time that Mr. West
would figure so prominently in the latter years of my life, and had I known I
would have paid a great deal more attention to what Robert Schembri told me of
him. But I did not, and at the time it seemed unimportant, and Schembri had a
way of making it clear what you should listen to and what you shouldn't.
What
he did tell me took place over three days. We only ever met at meals, and after
the first day I remember standing there in the line, craning my neck, looking
at face after face after face, searching him out amidst the confusion of
people. My trial and the subsequent months of legal and judicial wrangling were
drawn out and complex. But that was another story, another story altogether.
Until the case was concluded and the death sentence levied I was there with the
rest of the innocents.
I
found Robert Schembri in the corner of the hall, back and to the left.
Apparently he always sat alone. People avoided him like a disease, a
bio-hazard. Seems he'd sat alone for all the years he'd been there, and but for
the few hours I shared with him he would sit alone for the rest of his life.
He
possessed a strange manner. The way he would look at me I felt invisible, but
that sensation did not disturb me, merely made me feel I was there to listen,
to be a receipt point for whatever came tumbling from his lips. Schembri
described himself as a channel from the gods. What that meant didn't matter.
'Tell
ya something, kid,' he started. He said that each time he began.
Tell ya
something.
'It
was a premeditated act, all of it. The Killing of the King. It was necessary as
the second part of the trilogy. They had three goals to bring about the
complete decay of matter, the total dissolution of society.'
Schembri
smiled sardonically.
'Tell
me you don't see society falling to pieces, going all to hell in a handbasket.'
'I
see it,' I replied.
He
nodded. 'What happened to you is a symptom of the disease.'
'A
symptom? A symptom of what?' I leaned forward.
'All
the shit and shenanigans you got yourself into down here.' He smiled wryly and
winked. 'I know a little of this and a little of that, you see.'
I
shook my head. 'You know about what happened to me?'
Schembri
waved my question away. 'Got a question for you,' he said. 'You know why they
killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy?'