Ginny Gall (42 page)

It was no use. A silence like a gathering poison filled him.

The power that keeps the world spinning turned and stooped to him and the power behind this power bent down too and the others in the endless line and these powers looked at him and didn’t say anything or do anything and then they went on and he lay still.

“Ah me,” he whispered, “ah me.”

Judge said, Everything that happened to those boys happened for cause.

But Gammon said, That’s not true, Your Honor. We wouldn’t be back here arguing about it for the tenth time—

Fourth, the judge said.

Fourth time, Your Honor—if we were just lying.

Not just, the judge said. You’re also using up my life and my patience.

I’m sorry Your Honor feels that way. But there’ve been other judges. Not only you, Sir.

Because you wore them into early graves, the judge said and gazed bleakly out the window as if he saw death riding by on a horse out there.

Bulky pinches his toe but that doesn’t wake him and then Milo comes up close and blows softly into his face and Delvin smells his earthy breath and begins the long swim up from a grassy bottom and breaks the surface what seems hours later with his head aching and a dizziness in the quick of his eyes.

At first he doesn’t think he can move. He is too heavy to rise into the world. Milo squeezes his shoulder and the pressure begins to pump life into him.

“That’s fine,” he whispers, “I’m right on it.”

Halfway and leftover, crumpled and spread back out, sheared into pieces weighted with stone, concentrated as a chunk of quartz. He rolls over and falls from the bunk and is caught by the men, the escape artists, around him.

“I’m fit for it,” he whispers.

None but themselves are awake—there are seven of them—or only those like Dumpy Links who lies hours on his back looking up at the board underside of the barracks roof. Or Morcell Jackson who tortures himself with sexual memories of the common-law wife he strangled over in Hattiesburg. Maybe another couple kept awake by fear or rage. Cul Sampson who cries all night. None of these, according to the report, see anything. They know better than to ask Bulky if they can come, though Dumpy is on his feet naked and crouched down, ready to scurry out the door, before Bulky with a look sends him back.

It is a warm, moonless night. The Milky Way lies sloshed-over and frothing. They can see fine. They follow Bulky to the forge and wait while he crawls under the raised floor to get the rope. He comes out covered in dust and grinning.

“Fucking spiders all over me,” he whispers, and he is telling the truth. Milo brushes them off, little black widows that never really sleep. The men are all barefoot. The coiled rope as big as a sheep carcass thrown over his shoulder. “All right,” he whispers, his voice tight with the effort.

They head around the shed to the big sweet gum whose star-stretched shadow almost reaches the fence and crouch at its base. In the dimness a distant guard seems to move in slow motion along the side of the machine shop. Another, the bruiser, Jock Anglin, standing in the door of the guard shack, thrusts his potbelly into the night. He is just close enough for Delvin to make out the quart milk bottle in his left hand, horsemint tea he sips through the damp nights. Even this far away they can smell the citronella from the lit coil inside the shack. The oily, fruity aroma and then the smell of the river breezing up through the woods. They have no boat to travel that way (Delvin’s is long gone) and there are towns both up and downstream, heartless sheriff’s deputies patrolling. The laws promise the citizenry that there will be no trouble from villainous africanos and they mean it, sending men on patrols that take them into darkened alleys and along river branches
and into shadowy parks and down the sleeping or insomniac streets. Forty miles south the river becomes tidal, smelling of the Gulf and freedom, but that is a long way and scary in its own right.

Delvin shivers in the almost cool of the almost dark night. Off in the woods raccoons make thin yipping sounds, probably debating over a scrap of food. A widow bird lets loose its bit of vocal material. Crickets saw their instruments. The fence gleams like a silver net, ragged at the top with coils of rusty barbed wire that look like shriveled nests. How you going to work the rope? Delvin asked. The fence is fifteen feet high, eighteen maybe with the barbed wire. They kneel in the dark under the tree, waiting. The sickness sways in Delvin like an ancient fernery, heavy and moist. If he lets himself lean back, and let go, he will be asleep before he hits the ground. He wonders if his father is alive, imagines him getting up from a poker game maybe, out in Abilene or El Paso, a man who can speak Spanish and has a passel of half mexican children. Sometimes he pictures him in a straw boater, dancing on a stage in scuffed white shoes. His anger rises. He crabs forward to Bulky who crouches in the deepest shade by the bench peering out.

“How you plan to do this?” he says. His face is hot and the pain in his shoulders has increased. Milo beside him slaps softly at mosquitoes. Delvin feels a familiar despair. The malaria brings with it an evocation of many kinds of dumb woe and he is caught now in some of the dumbest. “Jesus damn christ,” he whispers.

Milo looks expectantly at him. This is a frolic for him, and Delvin can tell he is experiencing a run of freshened life.

Over at the pens the hogs snuffle and one lets out a short squeal. Bulky has the rope on his shoulder. He measures out half of it and bunches this up with the other half. The grass rope is lightweight, but Bulky has woven so much of it that the bundle is heavy. Delvin asks again what he is going to do but Bulky ignores him.

“Ah, nah,” Delvin says his voice not really audible. He is beginning to feel foolish, not just beginning; but what does it matter, they are already in a prison. He begins to chuckle, low, the sounds more like quiet coughing.

Bulky looks back at him, vexed. He is crouched low.

Milo lets his hand rest on Bulky’s shoulder. Delvin thinks he must have something already worked out with the smaller man. Bulky has moved farther forward, followed by Milo, until the two of them make a single block under the tree. Together they ease to the edge of the big tree’s midnight shade. Delvin thinks he can hear the chatter and clicking of the raccoons. Together Bulky and Milo rise.

Delvin says softly, “Yall don’t,” but Milo is on his feet running behind Bulky who has the rope looped out and his arm back to throw it. At the fence, holding to the ends of the rope, he throws it as a man would throw a big lifesaving ring. The coils unloose like a card trick. The body of the rope catches in the top of the wire among the barbed jumble and hangs. Bulky pulls down hard and the fence bends toward him. He and Milo stand right up against the wire pulling on the free ends of the rope. The big fence bends where the rope catches it. Bulky scampers up the two strands of rope with Milo right behind him.

Their bare toes hook in the wire as they go up.

Delvin drags himself up against the tree’s grooved bark. He knows he can’t make it. He is sick to his stomach.

The men reach the top and Bulky first and then Milo rolls over the rope covering the tangle of barbed wire and drops to the grass on other side. Bulky hits on his tailbone, Milo on his feet and knees; they are both in an instant up and running, Bulky with a limp. They are followed by two others and then two more moving fast after that, men scrambling and wavering like visions in the dim light.

A crumpling in Delvin’s chest is weighted with a sudden heavy-heartedness. Heavy-bodiedness. He shifts his leg, his aching hip, but his hand doesn’t leave the tree.

The first two suddenly free men run hard across the short space of open ground between the fence and the fields. They reach the sprawling, knee-high cotton and drop down into it. The others follow and Delvin can see their shapes moving like shadows through the cotton. Shouts break out from the camp. From the nearest tower shots are fired. The mixed reports of several guns. The siren begins to roll out its call, stretching and building up speed, louder and louder like it is climbing right up the side of the world.

Delvin throws himself down and presses his hands against his ears. His heart beats into his cupped palms. He pants. It is as if the rope still dangling from the mashed wire is attached to his body. It tugs at him, not in a steady surge but in looping fits, jerking him. He presses himself hopelessly into the damp ground and he knows this feeling as he knows the hard lifeless ground you try to become part of and make a life on in the lightless shacks and Bake Houses and reform sheds.

Armed men are out in the yard, each with something special to do. The guards shout orders at the prisoners who want to come out too. Cries rise from the barracks, yells, hoorahs and yips. The guards shout instructions at each other. Their precious stock is getting away. Some scurry about in undershirts and partly buttoned trousers, rifles or scatterguns or crankers in hand. Frank Miles runs from the guard shed in the red longhandles he wears in all seasons and Lonnie Batts skips as he runs, slapping at his chest.

Delvin can’t figure why so many are on duty and then he thinks he can and worries crazily about it. In a few minutes they will have the dogs working. Delvin can hear them baying over in their compound near the mule barn. He tries to get up but he can’t. He wants now to run for the rope but he knows he won’t do that. He turns on his side, grasps the trunk and pulls himself up, sitting, half lying with his back to the tree. Arnold Anderson, a short, round-faced guard from Tennessee, comes around the side of the big gum.

“Whoa,” he cries and raises his shotgun at him. “Here’s one of em got too scared to go,” he yells. He is laughing and sweating and jumpy with juice. Escapes scare most of the guards half to death. Going after these villains isn’t like hunting quail or rabbits. It is dangerous. Anderson waves the gun at Delvin.

“Get down on the ground, pancake.”

He knows Delvin by name but Delvin can see he isn’t going to know him right now. He slides to the ground and presses his face into the dirt. My home. He smells something sweet and his mind flies to a field of grain he and the professor’d passed one late afternoon in Arkansas when the sun looked like it was sinking right down into the yellow
wheat. He is sleepy. He wishes he could lie with his face in the dirt and sleep his life away.

They had to put them on the stand because there was nothing else to do. The two doctors said the women had been raped (at least they’d had sexual relations, Your Honor) and four of the white boys who’d been in the fight said they’d seen the negroes with the women and the women said they’d been held down and raped and nobody, white or colored, stood up and said the boys didn’t do it and God wasn’t up to testifying on this one so of course they had to put them on the stand.

Two of them couldn’t follow the simplest question.

They don’t even goddamn know they’re being tried for anything, Pullen said. He had just gotten a haircut and his hair gleamed like the procedure included a fresh shellacking and he smelled of a musky scalp rub. He laughed when he said this. They were sitting in the front room of their hotel office with the supper dishes stacked around them on the big cypresswood table covered with a stained white tablecloth.

You’re correct there, Davis, Gammon said. He had taken to calling Pullen by his first name though he knew he didn’t like it.

Four of the boys wouldn’t have much to say except they didn’t do it.

Hell, Pullen said picking with his fingernail at the rind of beef fat that still had the blue slaughterhouse stamp on it, half of em can’t even remember what it is they are charged with.

Well, long as you can remember, Davis, Billy Gammon said.

Har, har, Pullen gusted, a look of malevolence in his large narrowed gray eyes.

They had to put
all
of them on the stand, there was no way around it. Every dogged man has to have his day. Even Coover Broadfoot who offended everybody with his uppity manner and his buckteeth and his twitchy way and question asking.
What was that and what do you
mean by that and I wish you could tell me,
he said to the judge,
exactly what they mean by that.
The judge looked at him like somehow a big black creepycrawler had gotten into his witness chair and he wanted to reach over the high desk of righteousness and swat this idiotic fool right back to Africa, but all he said was Take your time there, boy, and get it just as right as you can. The judge was free to ask questions and he did, questions that generally made it hard for anybody to wonder which side he was on, but he didn’t really care, he knew what had to be done here and the truth was just whatever got dug deepest into, it didn’t matter what the lawyers or the witnesses or even the parties concerned thought. Dig deep enough and
everybody
was guilty. Only the law kept them all out of jail.

Well, boy, he said, you just let yourself settle down. Have a drink of water (from the glass with a little piece of paper gummed to it with the word
COLORED
printed in ink on it) and then sit back in that chair and take a deep breath, take two, and go on with your story.

That was what Broadfoot did, stuttering and biting his words, hurling the undeniable—so he appeared to think—facts around the room, into the faces of the jury made up of white men who wouldn’t have allowed him to set foot in their yards even if he offered to rake up all the pine straw for nothing. It was em
white
boys, he said, who jumped on em girls. If any colored boy got on em they’s way back in the line and it be purely because those women called em to do it. I wadn’t even close to any of that. I got a gal back in Eubanks, Tennessee, that I plan to marry as soon as I can get back to her. I wouldn’t have no other woman and I certainly wouldn’t want no white woman.

He went on and on placing himself and several others outside the range of these occurrences, sorting through the names and the events with the skill of one whose intelligence pressed him from all sides, sneering as he did so and panting and staring the jury in the face like he dared them not to believe him, dared them even to think he was guilty. By the time he got off the stand the jury, all twelve of the men who had never seen this young man before the trial, were happy they were not going to see him again after it was over.