Thompson lowered his head again. ‘We commend to your care the soul of your servant, Martha Wellman.’ He folded his hands together gracefully. ‘We know that she was your child, that her soul was saved long before it was even clothed in flesh. For the grace of Jesus Christ is a gift which cannot be refused.’
Ben’s eyes drifted over to the two black youths. They stood on either side of the grave, their heads bowed reverently, their lips pressed tightly together. Behind them, the nightbound city glittered silently. Ben’s eyes drifted down toward the grave, then back up again. The city lay utterly quiet in the darkness, a grid of streets lit by what seemed in the distance a thousand tiny fires. He wondered how many streets the girl had come to know, which ones she had liked, feared, the last one she’d walked down before she died.
King had not yet begun to speak when Ben arrived once again at the Sixteenth Baptist Church, but the crowds were already singing and clapping as they filled the streets which fronted the church.
Ben got out of his car and stood beside it, leaning on the hood, his pen and notebook already in his hand. From his position he could see a group of black leaders standing on the small porch at the side of the church. They were talking quietly and fanning themselves with paper fans from A. G. Gaston’s Funeral Home. Just beyond them, Breedlove and Daniels were squatting together in front of a bush, and even from several yards away, Ben could see that they had both taken out their own pens and notebooks.
Just as the day before, the crowd suddenly grew quiet, and then King’s voice rang out.
‘Today was D-Day in Birmingham,’ he cried, his voice already at that high pitch which it had achieved the day before. ‘But there will be many more D-Days in Birmingham. There will be Double D-Days in Birmingham until we have won our freedom.’
Daniels was writing furiously in his notebook, when Ben looked up, but Breedlove had vanished. For a moment he looked for him, a pale white face in a sea of black, but it was as if he had disintegrated where he squatted, dissolved into the warm evening air.
‘The eyes of the nation are on Birmingham,’ King intoned, and the crowd cheered wildly. ‘The eyes of the world are on Birmingham.’ The cheers grew louder and more ecstatic. The eyes of God are on Birmingham.’ A wave of trembling jubilation lifted the crowd inside the church, then swept out over the people surrounding it, passing back and forth over them again and again like the flow of wildly eddying waters.
Ben’s pen scurried across the page, the point burrowing into the white paper, scarring it as he wrote.
‘So don’t get tired,’ King cried.
‘No!’ the crowd screamed in return.
‘Don’t get bitter.’
‘No!’
King’s deep, sonorous laughter settled over the crowd. Then, suddenly, his voice rose out of it like a lick of fire.
‘Are you tired?’ he shouted.
‘No!’
‘Are you bitter?’
‘No!’
‘Then go out and go out and go out again,’ King cried. ‘And let justice flow down from the mountainside.’
‘Yes!’
‘Let justice flow down from Red Mountain.’
‘Yes, Lord!’
‘Let justice rise like the mighty waters.’
‘Amen! Amen!’
‘Until it is high in the streets of the city.’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘O Lord, let justice flow down upon Birmingham like a mighty stream.’
The furious cheers of the people seemed to be even greater than the day before, and as Ben brought his pen to rest and glanced around him, he realized that they had reached such a deafening pitch that they now drowned out everything, as if their thunderous roar came like an immense and shuddering wave from the deep core of the earth.
TEN
Kelly Ryan was slumped behind the single gun-metal gray desk of the Property Room, and he did not move as Ben approached him. His small green eyes peered expressionlessly forward, and his lips remained tightly closed. He wore a plain blue shirt, open at the collar, and with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow, so that he looked more like a farmhand than a policeman.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,’ Ben said as he stepped up to the desk.
Ryan nodded slowly. ‘They had me on special duty.’
‘Doing what?’
Ryan said nothing, but his thin lips jerked down slightly.
‘Doing what, Kelly?’ Ben repeated.
‘All those girls they brought in today,’ Ryan said. ‘They’re doing VD checks on them.’
Ben felt the air grow cold around him.
Ryan looked at him pointedly. ‘Were you in the park?’
‘Yes.’
‘Must have been really something down there today.’
‘It was,’ Ben said. ‘Where were you?’
‘They kept me right here most of the time,’ Ryan said. He smiled thinly. ‘They had me running back and forth from the cells, bringing the girls upstairs.’ He drew in a long, weary breath. ‘Is there something you want from Property?’ he asked.
Ben’s eyes surveyed the rows of metal shelving which lined the walls behind Ryan’s desk. They were almost entirely empty.
‘Looks like they cleaned you out,’ he said.
‘Just the guns,’ Ryan told him.
‘Yeah, I know. I saw McCorkindale signing them out.’ Ben paused. ‘We buried a little girl in Gracehill this evening,’ he said. ‘They sent a man over from the Highway Department. Patterson was surprised it wasn’t you.’
‘Well, that’s because I do all the colored cemeteries.’
Ben leaned forward slightly. ‘Why’s that, Kelly?’
Ryan looked at him evenly. ‘You never struck me as the nosy type, Ben.’
Ben shrugged. ‘I was just wondering,’ he said.
‘Wondering about what, exactly?’
Ben did not answer.
‘Wondering why I get all the nigger work?’ Kelly asked. There was a bitter edge in his voice. ‘Is that what you were wondering?’
‘I guess.’
Ryan sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. Well, what have you heard?’
‘Nothing,’ Ben said lamely.
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Well, I know that you used to work Bearmatch.’
Ryan said nothing.
‘That little girl we buried,’ Ben added. ‘We found her in that old ballfield off Twenty-third Street.’
Ryan remained silent, but Ben could see something stirring behind his eyes.
‘And I thought you might be able to help me.’
Ryan turned away sharply. ‘I haven’t worked Bearmatch in two years. If you want to know something, go ask the Langleys. It’s strictly their beat now.’
‘I talked to them,’ Ben said. ‘They weren’t much help.’
Ryan said nothing. He kept his eyes averted slightly.
Ben continued to stand over him, staring down. He could feel an odd tumult building in Ryan’s mind, and for a moment he simply stood by silently and let it grow.
‘Bearmatch was my first assignment,’ Ryan said as he turned slowly toward Ben, his voice almost wistful as he continued, ‘I was fresh as a daisy.’ He started to go on, then stopped himself and drew his eyes quickly to the left, as if he were looking for a way out. ‘I feel old now,’ he added finally. ‘I don’t know why.’ He said nothing else.
Again, Ben waited, allowing the silence to lengthen slowly. When it seemed stretched to the limit, he broke it.
‘You want to have a drink with me?’ he asked.
Ryan’s eyes flashed toward him. ‘I haven’t had a drink with a cop since they took me off Bearmatch,’ he said.
Ben smiled quietly. ‘Want to have one now?’
Ryan looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why?’
‘A little girl,’ Ben told him softly. ‘A little colored girl.’
It was a small, honky-tonk bar, nestled among the raw metal clutter of two steel mills. Outside, the air quivered with the roar of the blast furnaces, but inside there was only the jukebox and the low murmur of the factory workers who lined the bar itself or gathered in loose clusters around tiny wooden tables.
Ben guided Ryan to a booth in the far back corner, ordered two beers, then offered him a cigarette.