“Said a funny thing then.
“ ‘Sing, locusts. Just keep singin.’ ”
MOST OF THE activity at the Falmouth place had died away.
It was getting on towards evening and the women had begun to find their men and take them home, leaving only a few to keep vigil with Miles and Edna.
Estel was glad not to have a big crowd around when they brought the Negro behind the Falmouth property to the knocked-down locust tree. They showed him the pit under the tree although the remains of the boy had already been removed. The captive showed no interest in the tree or the pit.
They led him to the hog pen and the hogs did not like him. The men from Morgan watched his face to see if he would maybe break down and confess, weeping in that lamentable darkie way so they could at least hang him knowing for sure they had the right man. But he did not do this. He never broke. He used his silence to keep them in doubt, and, although they knew this, the doubt bothered some of them.
It bothered Estel.
What did it matter to the boys from Morgan if they were wrong?
Hanging the wrong man, if it was a black man, would cost Morgan nothing. But it just might cost Whitbrow another day like today, and Estel could not take another one.
I imagine Miles Falmouth stood bent over his cane. His unshaven face looked raw and old although he was just forty. Estel said he shook when he saw the captive. Edna Falmouth held him around his soft, beaten shoulders. They stood there together and Miles shook.
“I’ve seen this’n in town, though it’s been a while. He’s one of them squatters. He killed my boy.”
Estel looked at Miles.
“You sure about it, Miles? Cain’t be wrong on somethin like this.”
Miles was sure.
“Hang this sumbitch or I’ll shoot him.”
Estel felt sick again.
O Lord Sweet Lord honey and milk are under Thy tongue, my love is like a goat that stands on Mount Gilead, and why did I seek this post?
NOW ESTEL BROUGHT out a cigar, a cheap one by the smell, but that didn’t stop me from taking a drag of it when he extended it towards me cherry first, like some cornpone Prometheus offering man the first glowing brand.
“But the dogs were sure?” I said.
A lynching. By God, I was sitting on my own porch in Georgia asking an officer of the law about what I was now sure would turn into the lynching of the black man. The one who wanted a pickle. The one who stared at Dora in the square. How did I get here?
“I asked Lester if them dogs was ever wrong an he said no. I never seen it, he said. I leaned down to him real quiet, like I’m leanin down to you, and I said, would you hang a man over what them dogs say? Is it enough, Lester? And he didn’t say nothing, so I said, you gotta help me.
“Lester closed his eyes and said, them dogs ain’t wrong, but I ain’t gonna sleep so good knowin a fella swung cause I said so. So I’m sayin I don’t know.
“Now I saw that the boys from Morgan had got them a crate and some rope from Miles, and the nigger was watchin all this knowin what it was for but not lookin like he gave a rat’s ass. What was he thinkin? An innocent man should a been screamin for his life, but then a guilty man usually made noise, too. Not that I know from hangins. Neither did Big Joe. He didn’t know how to make a noose, so after a minute he gave up tryin and his man Alfred strung it. Then they took the cuffs off him and tied his hands with rope so nobody’d know the Law’d done it.
“Well, Blake, let’s get on it, Joe said. I couldn’t make my feet move. I said I didn’t know about this no more. Miles screamed that is him, and I mean screamed it. What is this shit? Joe said. Did you see the way them dogs done?
“What are you gonna do? I said, Put the dog’s paw on the Good Book an make it swear? That’s why they ain’t gonna be no trial, he said, but we all know this is the one done it, an if you ain’t got the backbone to follow through, then the hell with you. I didn’t say nothin, so he kept on, callin me a damn fool, sayin why don’t I go back to my hardware store an polish my shovels.
“So I did leave.
“I walked all the way back to town an nobody who saw me comin stopped me to ask what happened. I locked myself in the store and cried til it felt like there was nothing left a me but peel. I know they hung that boy. And I know something went bad wrong. And they ain’t never gonna tell me what. An they ain’t comin back.”
I SAW THE men from Morgan leave.
Eudora and I had been sitting, holding each other on a bench in the town square. The sun was almost down now and the frogs and locusts took up their nightly chorus, but it was not a serenade. There was no love in it. It sounded terribly neutral. It was a sound that would go on unaffected by human grief or joy and, while it was possible to hear God in it, it was equally possible to hear His absence. The boy’s funeral would be tomorrow. No waiting around in this kind of heat. And there would be no school.
We had bumped around town all day, now at the drugstore, now at Pastor Lyndon’s house, now at the general store. She had pulled me home to make love around dinnertime, but we had not lain together long before we dressed again and came to the town square to escape the silence of the house. But it was quiet here, too, except for the locusts, and now the frogs, joining together in their agnostic hymn.
Just before we left the bench, realizing now the futility of paddling at the growing horde of mosquitoes, we saw the sheriff from Morgan and his men come up from behind us. They went around us, crossing the square towards their waiting vehicles. They walked with small steps and the ones who carried shotguns carried them like yokes. The sheriff, the one they called Big Joe, croaked “Evening” at Eudora and he would have removed his hat if he had not already been holding it. Most of them carried their hats.
The sky glowed red and orange in the west when the men started their cars. How small and pale their faces looked behind the glass. Delicacies in a gourmet butcher shop.
The color of pâté.
I never saw them again, even when things got worse.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DORA COULD NOT stand still. She paced the bedroom in her nightgown, running her hands through her hair while I sat propped up in bed.
Estel had left an hour before, staggering off down the road a little lighter for the actual poison he had ingested and the figurative poison he had disgorged; Dora had been percolating the whole time since. Now it bubbled up and out of her.
“Maybe it was the right man, but it makes me sick that they had no trial. Nothing. Somebody points a finger and that’s it.”
“I know,” I said.
“He was such a sweet boy, too. Tyson, I mean. Oh my God, my God, I just want to pull my skin off every time I think about his poor, sweet, freckled face. He wasn’t one of mine, but I met him. Did you know him, Frankie?”
“He played baseball with us that first weekend.”
“He had freckles,” she said simply, and then something else too low for me to hear.
I asked her what.
“I said I hate it here.”
THE DREAM DID not come until almost morning.
It started in the trench.
I was slogging through ankle-deep mud in the earthworks at the head of a column of soldiers. Ochre mud. Milky. Sky the color of pewter. When the column stopped marching I found that I was in a place where the trench was shallow and I could look across the mud and wire wilderness that lay between the allied defenses and those of the Germans. Barbed wire coiled out laterally to both horizons, and I could feel rather than see the Huns crouched in their trenches, slateeyed behind machine guns, gloved fingers sweating at the triggers.