BOOK THREE
Bam! it went, bam! in his head like a pile driver sinking cypress logs into heavy Aufuskie bay mud for the new highway bridge, the actual driver and the other in his head almost the same but not quite—this other bam! that went on in his head some days until it seemed anchored not in memory but in his soul, bam! of doors closing and days ending and of time itself like a heavy hammer banging down hard on his head. He lay dreaming on his bunk in Acheron State Prison infirmary, bunk you could call it that was nothing but a few sticks of cypress wood bound together with grass rope and covered with a pile of cotton matting that he lay on, sick, the doctor said, with malaria—ague, cold plague—the red dog, they called it in the barracks—lying on his back with a headache like the sound of those pile drivers, the ones inside his head and the ones outside, lay thinking of the cold black waters of the river he had escaped into last winter and gotten maybe two chilled miles farther down before he was fished out with a mullet net by the sheriff of Alderson county, cast naked onto the raw bank and beaten across the back with a rope until he couldn’t get to his feet when ordered to. He lay dreaming of the white piano in the Emporium his mother used to nod off to in the big red parlor after a long night’s work, and slept for forty hours in the grassrope bunk, waking only to sip a little water from the tin cup Milo had placed beside his bed. Dreaming of the big snake that had lived with him and the mosquitoes that bit him and the deer flies stabbing his chest and tiny gnats settling into his ears and supping at the corners of his eyes, making themselves at home, but even in the dream he did not mind any of these creatures because he was dreaming of a white bed in a big house that opened along one side onto an airport where planes with big round propellors landed and took off and sailed away with him riding in the forward cockpit in a shiny leather helmet and a yellow silk scarf that trailed behind like a running streak engraved on the blue sky, flying to the sound of piano music.
1
“Well, what else can you call it,” Billy Gammon, young lawyer, says to his colleague, assistant and investigator Baco Bates, “what do you think of when you consider it, this prison—not theory now for these wandering boys, but fact? General erasure comes to mind, among other terms, bottomless pit, universal solvent, comprehensive alimentary chute, maw of hell. I know there are others. Barathrum. Into which everything they have is thrown—hopes, plans, memories of Mama mashing scuppernongs for the juice, of riding in a little square-nosed boat through the lily pads, of cutting the fool in church—you name it—memories of festiveness and of sobering up on well water and of usefulness and of that early unfortunate marriage to the sweetest girl you ever saw . . . you name it . . . everything’s got to go.”
He stops to look out the big picture window of the Shawl House restaurant across the square where the young men, known far and wide as the KO Boys, are just now passing hidden from view inside a big black panel van on their way the two blocks from the county jail to the courthouse. “Think of it,” Billy says, drunk at eight thirty in the morning, hardly ever undrunk these days and what of it, he would say, smiling at you as if you are his best friend once removed and the easiest person to believe in he has seen in a while, “think of the singular and well nigh mythological power of prison, Baco, of how no matter how strong or seemingly permanent that hard little flint representation, icy diamond of hopefulness or chagrin might be, that soul, I mean, you throw it through the doors of a prison and it is gone forever, dissolved into the dust and grease and sweat and the long black mordancy of that place. It makes me shudder just to think about it.”
The panel van, traveling as slowly as a hearse, rounds the corner at Cooper street, passing the Red Rooster café where several of the older men in the community sit at the back table having breakfast, the shadows of the sycamores passing soft hands over the top and sides of the van from which, if you are a small boy sneaked away from school to watch this, you would not have heard a single sound emanating, as if the truck carried not eight negro youths to what you could call their job, calling, life’s work really, or fate, over at the gray granite stone courthouse, but a load of silent ghosts.
“Jesus, Mohammed, old Confucius—you name it, Baco—truest of true loves, filial pieties of all kinds and duration, that time you stole granddaddy’s watch and sold it for passage to the Orient—”
“That wadn’t me,” Baco, a tall, bony man so skinny you thought he might crack in a big enough wind, fold in two, break apart and blow in sections away, says. “I stole a jewelry box, but I didn’t steal nary watch.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Billy says. “It could be a watch or a pair of patent leather dancing shoes or a celluloid collar you picked up off the street that had a bloodstain on it that was a clue to solving the crime of the century, or a crust of, I don’t know, of grease picked off the axle of the tumbrel carrying Marie Antoinette to the guillotine—it passes through that prison gate and disappears, gone to oblivion. Forever lost. Those boys’ lives and everything they got inside em, good or bad, is forever lost.”
As usual he has spoken too much. Baco looks with pity at him. He looks at Billy in the face, in his own face a mix of aggravation and fondness, and says, “You gon show up over there?”
“I suppose I might,” Billy says. “Sometimes I feel like I could stick my hand inside those gates and it would just disappear. I’d draw back a stump. Or I could walk right on in and I’d draw back . . . nothing. It gives me a curious relief to let my mind circulate among such thoughts.”
These are the early days of the trial, and it is time to get moving. A big man with an untrained shock of hair the color of iron rust, he hoists himself up and begins to make his way to the courthouse.
He knew nothing about working on a farm but they said that’s all right boy we will teach you. They handed him a hoe and sent him into the fields. He learned the short clipped swing and chopped cotton for twelve hours a day and returned to the barracks so tired he hardly cared about eating. “I’ll sleep this one out,” he said to Marcus Millens, and Marcus just smiled a weary smile and turned to his rack. In dreams he wandered in a wide plain that he was sure one day he would get to the other side of but in the dream never did. In the morning when it was cool he felt like a man come to a new life not this one. He scribbled in his notebook sometimes but often he forgot to. He liked to stand up in the middle of the field and let the breeze play off him. Scatterings of birds passed over and he liked to send something of himself along with them, a word or a thought. It was a way to hook himself to the living world, the world that wasn’t chained down in a prison. I will be loose from here by and by, he said. He had a curious smile sometimes that the other convicts remarked on. One or two tried to beat it off of him but they weren’t successful. He didn’t know he had the smile until they made it clear. I guess I got some feeling even I don’t know about. And he believed this after a while. He would get caught up in the smells. The crotty smell of the dirt and the limber woody smell of the cotton plants, the sweet stink of bug poison, the smell of his own body and the smells that sailed over the fields, little pickets of smells, of turnips and spicy wild berries and once in a while the smell of some creature, blood even, as if down the way some ferret or quail had met its end. The prison world was one of elimination and spareness and he tried to press against this. Sometimes by holding his own wrist and just staring at the ground he thought he could get loose, or smelling his shit that he dropped behind a bush he could approach another world, but even his surging, side-stepping thoughts became thoughts of this world and his shit smelled of the field peas and sidemeat they fed him here. Still there were times, seconds like an ace in the hole, that stirred another existence in him, some ghost of times that had not been in this world but were familiar. He felt sometimes as if he was on the edge of something great. He liked to listen to the sound the wind made. Clouds like separate countries drifted from their absent worlds. He could smell Arabia or the Mongol steppes. He walked to the truck dragging his hoe to make signs in the dirt that might on their own mean something. He thought about the people he knew but this was hard on him and he tried not to do it. Cotton flowers were separately yellow or white as if there was a disagreement among them. The world was full of parts that barely fit and only fit for a little while. People turned aside, became memories or ghosts. In a split cotton boll the gray seeds lay twined in white fur. Everything would some day be far from here. He liked to taste the elements in the water he drank.
Baco is the one who’d accompany Billy down to the Shawl House where the big girl, Lucille Blaine, is staying, and according to the ruling of the judge—or close to it—she has to talk with him present at her deposition about what happened in the hours between four in the afternoon and six thirty o’clock on September 8, 1931, but of course she doesn’t want to talk or if she does what she has to say is that those nigras, especially that one, that main one who is so talkative, that Delvin Walker, he is the one who did the most damage to her, the one who was first—and last—on the scene, he is the one ripped up her secret self like he was tearing flesh off the inner bones of her body . . .
“Lord,” she says, “that pinched little monster wouldn’t quit til I could smell the blood from my own body burning in my nose. Such pain as no human woman should have to experience was my pain”—pain for life possibly, Dr. Kates said in the deposition—“and still that black beast whanged away at me like I was the satisfaction to his Hell’s own fires . . .”
He has all this down in his notes, and more, and Billy has read it and laughed, turned the page around on the big wood table so it faced Baco and, laughing, said, “Maybe she would be happier on the Elizabethan stage than here among us,” pointing at her words that as she had spoken them were soaked, weighted with a malice that he wished sometimes he could get across to those reading them.
But why worry about that, he thinks, because she is right here in front of them now, in the hot courtroom, testifying as to what happened on that hot day when the leaves on the tulip trees were just starting to speckle with fall. “Yeah,” she is saying, this Lucille who must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds (let’s see, two hundred and fifty-eight to be exact, according to Dr. Kates’s report), “oh yeah, that one over there was the first, and then the other with the big eye was next, and another, and then after that I kinder lost track, but I do remember those other three and maybe that last one too, the one, if he’s the one who walks with a limp.
“He stutters, too,” she turns to the judge and says. “I recollect that quite clearly. You fffffff-fat bbbb-bitch, that’s what he called me. He had a little old pecker like . . .”
And the judge, who looks half asleep, is taking notes as she says this—he’s not asleep, it’s just been his manner since grade school, Judge Montclair Harris—and raises his white head that still shows the nap mark mashed on the back and says, “That’s rich enough on the verbiage, thank you, dear.”
And Lucille looks at him as if she has caught him too in a lie and sits back satisfied as she always seems to be, and is these days, for the first time in her life, satisfied and abounding and content with herself and with life on this wretched earth that stinks in her nostrils like burning feathers off the peacocks on her granddaddy’s farm that her daddy shot out of hatred for his own daddy when he was drunk and burned their beautiful feathers in a yard fire—a world that every day attempts to reconvince her she is no good and shouldn’t have been the hell born anyway. What a sad world, a little voice under her breastbone says. The lower part of her face twitches. What a sad, ruined world. Some nights she sits in one of the big floral chairs in her room over at the hotel with her legs crossed like a man, rubbing the hem of her shift between her fingers, and cries until she thinks her heart will break. Well. It already is broken—that was accomplished years ago when her daddy shot the peacocks and bent her over his knee after she cried and beat her until her bottom broke. She will never forget that, by God, or none of the other beatings either and his was just the first.
Rising sometimes from the handsome oakwood chair as she speaks, she speaks all afternoon and well into the next day about how these eight boys, “and others too, I might mention, boys who must have flown away from that train on wings because I don’t see them here—yall couldn’t catch em?—how these eight and them, them two I mean in particular, raped me like stabbing knives into my most private parts and wouldn’t quit until I bled like that’s all they wanted me for was the bleedin’.”
Her hard plain broad face like a piece of cold raw field raised up, half molded and animated, and a bitterness in her eyes the world has distilled there, hatred whipped up stiff in her, durable as henge stone.
“Like I said, it was them two . . . and then them others.”
But Baco knows she is lying even if he doesn’t especially care one way or the other and has no love for nigras that is sure, inconstant loafers, vexatious to one like him who can be depended on in the worst conditions, hurricane or fire, etc., to do what he is supposed to do. Let em learn to get the job done first, he thinks. But this too isn’t accurate and he knows it. He was brought up in the care of a negro man who could repair watches or stoves or automobiles or any form of working device, and he was the most intensified man he has ever known, Harwell Sims over to Taxus county, where Baco is from. There were others, smart and dumb; it was mixed as everything is. And besides, as Billy says, anybody’d move slow when backbreaking work is all he is ever headed to.
This is beside the point because Baco is still the one who stood in the hotel room behind the lawyers with the fat girl who seemed as if her blood had been drained out and replaced with shop poison and then she’d been set back on her feet and propelled by this streaming toxicant into the world to bring havoc to these eight boys. Well, you couldn’t do much about any of it. She had a way of speaking so filled with spite that you knew it was the spite itself she loved, the making of it and the stacking of it as high as she could get it, like a wall between her and what hurt her, stuff she didn’t talk about despite the ugliness she had no trouble revealing. And it didn’t matter because in a way everything she said was true. She had been defiled. All her life really. And she was a white woman who claimed that eight colored boys had raped her, and of course the doctor said somebody—some somebody—had recently enjoyed her favors. She also had a second on her motion. Hazel Fran. A scrawny duplicitous girl unable to read or write, a scatterbrained person hardly more capable than a child, if a child could have been as distracted and meager and without connection to human sociability as Hazel was. She clung to Lucille like a monkey to its mama. But he could see in her eyes the gray color of road dust that she was not telling the truth. Like a daunted child, it hurt her to lie. So he talked to her in a mild way, offering her bits of ginger candy from a little paper sack and speaking offhandedly of Jesus who was of course keeping a merciful eye on the proceedings, and he could tell she picked up on it. She liked the candy. But she too claimed that these boys had committed sexual battery. With thumb and two fingers she pulled down hard on her long nose like she wanted to pull it off, squeezing it at the end, and said, “You bet they went at it. Like some devil was gaining on them every second. It burned like fire.”
The red dog has him by the throat and swims him deep into the dark waters and it is as if the sides and boundaries of his body flop open and pour out his being like hot syrup, mingling it with the juices of the world until he experiences his spirit thinning out to a film and himself at the same time bobbing and cuffed by foul breeze and without the ability to gather himself. Plus a headache like an infernal hammering. In thick serpentine dreams he flies to Chattanooga and lies in the shed chuckling at the Ghost as the Ghost feeds iron filings to Old Bob the lead horse, listening to Mr. O talk about his boyhood escapades as a gandy dancer in a Birmingham yard. Then a jump to a recount of the misery of Mr. O’s actual Klaudio jailhouse visit. How, accompanied by insults and taunts and by somebody smearing yellow plum jelly from a jelly and butter sandwich on the back of his suit coat, he entered the narrow room where Delvin sat shackled at a scratched and spit-sticky table. How he strode with a full resolve of dignity up to the table as if he was about to walk right through it to embrace Delvin, but before he was all the way there his strength gave out and he stumbled and staggered against the heavy table, crying out Delvin’s name, and then stood slumped and overcome until Delvin despite the guards yelling at him and his own shackled state climbed over the table and on the other side pressed his body against his benefactor’s, nudging him and poking at him with the edge of his wrist until the guards beat him down to his knees, picked him up and flung him back over the table into the big square chair he had leapt out of.
“God help us,” Mr. Oliver said over and over and sobbed. “God help us.” Tears running down his face like water.
In his delirium Delvin cries out these words. God help us. But no God does. As the professor said, the gods are gone from the earth.
The malaria is a sickness that even the dead must feel. His head in a vise. A pain like needles coming up out of the backs of his eyes. Even the sweetest smells become the stink of shit. A freeze inside and out, chilling the mettle out of you, clamped so hard you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. You lie under old running claws, and shiver, your bones stabbing hard-frozen flesh until you know your bones will any minute snap. You cry for blankets, for the house to be burned down on top of you, for your body to be thrown into the mouth of a spewing volcano—or would if you could cry out, if you weren’t so frazzled. You’re so cold every whimper’s iced. And then it turns hot again. Fire claims everything. And nothing fits.
At this time he would confess any crime. Any deepest secret or falsity that could be shoveled into the light. But nobody asks. There is nothing he could reveal or explain that matters in the least to any of them. Let the shine rave. The disease ran him over like a pulpwood truck. His head crushed on the stones. His bones cracked open and hot lead poured into the marrow. Day after day the same, the rank peculiarities, the ugly sporting propositions, the malicious conversations played out interminably in his head until he tries with all his sapped might to give back whatever they want. I have stolen and killed. I have raped and degraded. He confesses himself hoarse or would have if he was actually speaking. Sorting the wind was all it is. A seepage.
Anyway, it is too late for spurious confessions. He is already gaveled.
Slowly the dog moves through him. Out the high screened windows he can see the shadows of live oak leaves shifting in the breeze. He hears the shouts of the men. The world, tapping, hawking and shuffling, returns. He hears voices he recognizes, familiar convict voices explaining or evading or shifting the dices. He hears the rats moving around underneath the floor at night and arguing amongst themselves. Gradually his dreams become less filthy. Less often he hears the sound of horses running down the hard road. Less often he hears the big black scorpions sharpening their claws in the dust.
Finally he is able to get up and shuffle around. First thing he staggers over to Conrad’s bunk and stands looking into the wasted gray face. He feels his heart pour out of his body. And over there Little Buster, twentysome now and the property of Danny Crakes, Little Buster, thirteen years old when they were dragged off the train in Klaudio, a rapist without a hair on his balls. Danny Crakes with his bodyguards Roscoe and Bluebelle stood over Little Buster’s bed weeping noisy tears. “Hey, he aint going to die,” Delvin, in between chills, raised up on his bed and said. He didn’t know whether he was or not but he couldn’t help himself speaking out against those malefactious tears. It was a sign he was getting better. Danny Crakes didn’t even bother to look at him. Bluebelle, huge, with a head like a torpedo, shot him a glance through tear-webbed lashes. He shook an incidental fist. A former africano cotton-bale-lifting champion, he could hardly raise his hands above his head. Crakes, though he was not a Catholic or known to practice any form of religion, licked his finger and made the sign of the cross on Little Buster’s forehead. He later made his bodyguards memorize a short prayer of his own devising and with him prompting the words he made them recite it in whispery voices to the sleeping boy.
Little Buster had not understood what was happening to the eight KO Boys. He knew they were jerked from the train, but he didn’t know what for and had no idea what was coming. “That is to say,” Delvin had told Gammon, “beyond the common understanding that they are in a country run by white folks for white folks, so nigger get out of the way.” Fire flashed in Gammon’s eyes and subsided. How fast that fire subsided was a gauge you measured the next blow by. Something bad was coming for the colored man caught napping—who didn’t know that? “Tell me what really happened,” Gammon said.
Delvin looks over at the boy, at his narrow forehead with the slightly raised ridge running down it, at the eyes that are black as shoe polish—and helplessly friendly back then when he first saw him on the train sucking on a lemon as he sat on a flatcar—at the soft mouth, still untorn. And now he is a surly galboy with nothing to hold on to except these brutes. They say DC uses these boys and when he is tired of them drowns them with his own hands in the swamp.
And the sick days wobble by, right on to the last one. Sunlight streams through the high windows, painting the old brown walls a rich dark color unlike themselves. Delvin walks all the way to the porch and sits down on a milk crate. Tomorrow they will put him back to work hauling water to the cotton fields. A breeze blows the florid, analgesic smell of the fields to him. The smell of cotton lathered with the smells of the big garden over behind the dining hall and the smell of the chicken house and the croaky smell of the hogs in their pen under the apple trees and the pasture smells of bunchgrass, pigweed and sorrel, and the smell of pine and the drifty, dry sharp smell of corn accented with mule manure and human shit—the mix so pungent he feels sometimes as if he could drown himself in the reek of it as under an ether and sleep the rest of his life away. The smell is stronger now after the sickness. His shoulders ache. And his hands, where he gripped the hardwood sides of his bed, are bent and achy in the joints.
Soldier Murphy comes up beside him and the two of them shift to seats on the plank bench set against the wall and look out into the sunlight strained by screen wire. It is hard to look at the light. Escaper, he is picking his way across the big field and into the swamp where from an old deep pool he would raise the submerged bateau from where it lay on the bottom, weighted with chunks of hoarded limestone quarried from the big white hole over at Talcotville and hauled by mule to build the warden’s house. He left a stash of pea meal, matches and a length of coiled rope wrapped in oilcloth, stowed in a croakersack and buried under a pecan tree. He hoped the raccoons hadn’t dug it up. These provisions like a hunter’s hope in the books of his youth, like the boat now, long gone. But not the hope. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Oliver in Chattanooga Tennessee or Mr. Marcus Garvey in Harlem New York or Mr. Alexander Crumwell in Chicago Illinois or Mr. WEB Du Bois in Princeton New Jersey and ask one or all of them to help us. We are caught here in a net not of our own devising. And signed his name and given his address. That was the message he stuck in a syrup bottle plugged with a cob and threw in the river—stuck in several. No one wrote or came, and the captains won’t let him write common letters. What you doing claiming you can write? Well, sir, I can. He hardly knows what to call these people. It is as if they flew down from space and scooped up africanos and carried them back to this alien planet. He’d had only two or three conversations with a white man in his life before this happened, these space creatures, moon men.
The smell of the fields blows up against the screen and spreads its sweet tonnage over him. Running after something is about as happy as things get in this place. There is always, as Ralph had pointed out, some of that. Even if it is only stew beans and a chunk of hard cornbread. He knew from the first that they were done for. It is like a disease, like polio or a sudden cancer that you don’t know when it is going to catch you but you know it will, like the red dog. One day you wake up with it sitting like a fat ugly dog on your chest. Yet even in the dark of that first night in Klaudio with Little Buster crying and Rollie Gregory moaning from where they had beat him across the backs of his legs with a plowline and some of the others making hurt noises in their sleep—night (you could tell) in the black room because they had shoved what they thought was supper (cold peas and cornbread) in to them—he felt something crank down in him, some new figuration of time that he sank into, and after the first scarifying moments when he thrashed, fighting the suffocation of it, he relaxed and began to breathe.
It was like breathing air without time in it.
Far off down the dark lanes of that first night in dreams he saw Celia standing in a trashy field, cartons and tin cans and pieces of rusted equipment around her, Celia looking lost. He called to her, but she couldn’t hear him; his voice wasn’t strong enough. He wished with all his might that he hadn’t left her letters on that low wall in Chattanooga. An emptiness then blowing through him, hollowing him. A dustiness and a picture in his mind, a memory really, of furniture and family items strewn around an old house he came on once standing in the middle of a cotton field. The knee-high cotton surrounded the house, running right up to the porch and windows, and the house deserted. He climbed the steps and looked in. Inside everything was still there, the clothes and the filigreed spread on the bed and an upright piano with its face broken in against the wall. All covered with dust. Undisturbed for how long—you couldn’t tell. He didn’t go in, though he saw a basket and a little box like a jewelry box sitting on a dresser that he could use—didn’t because he sensed he was not supposed to disturb the dust. In his chest then too a hollowness. Now he saw his old life drying and flaking away. He had to make himself stop. But when he stopped, the crackling, stinky blackness returned. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips until he saw stars, white stars and flashes of purple light and little quivery yellow dashes. Around him that night in the dark the moaning the crying the calling out as if from eroded patches in black space.
You could say they hadn’t quit on themselves. They were still breathing. It wasn’t because they were strong or brave. Certainly not noble. They would have sold each other out. Carl tried. Rollie tried. But they had nothing to offer. The white man didn’t even need confes sions. It was as if the method was the only thing that mattered. Get that right. And they had nothing to do with that. They hadn’t quit because there wadn’t any way to and there wadn’t anything to quit in a universe of endless effort. No quit, boys. Unless you just slacked down until you died. But even that wadn’t allowed. Carl—after he tried the other—had tried that, tried rolling up against the wall and not moving, not eating, not drinking, but with a work-gloved hand they slapped him in the face until he changed his mind. Come on back to us, boy. Then they slapped him because of the trouble he’d caused them.
And here I sit, he thinks, feeling the hard board infirmary porch seat against the bottom of his spine, resting before a journey. He laughs a little and looks across the yard at Milo Macraw, his young boy, the one who sleeps beside him at night, and a tenderness enters him, surprising him as it does sometimes, making him stop, say, under the big sycamore with half its limbs lightning-shrunk, and look up into the living branches in a kind of wonderment. Milo wants to go with him all the time. After the last escape they put him, put Delvin, in the Bake House, threw him in among the ants and ground wasps and the doodlebugs and hoppergrasses and the big black scorpions clacking their swords. He lay among them thinking of the creatures that lived so close to the earth they felt the vibration of every step and smelled every smell and sensed in the cold or heat seeping into the grains of sand what was coming and going in this world, like they had to know, like this knowledge was so important to them that, like the professor said, they had evolved—evoluted he’d called it before he met the professor—until they were able to crouch so low to the ground they missed nothing. And he wondered: What do they need all this information for? Were they waiting for some hint of something? The coming of some Bug Redeemer?
He lay among them flat on the earth studying what it was like in the bug universe, and he was lying there when the big cottonmouth slid over his belly and curled up on his chest. Its tongue flicked his chin and then it flicked his lips, and then it flicked his eyes he’d squeezed shut and he could feel the snake’s cold breath and he knew it was drinking from the little balls of sweat at the corners. With its tiny delicate tongue it licked his ears clean and his nose and the corners of his eyes and his lips, and he could feel the snake’s heart beating like the covered drum of a distant tribe, speaking in the dark of the world of light. He could smell the odor of the snake like the smell of garbage and he lay still in the dark with the weight of the snake on him because the smell told him the snake was afraid. It was hard to breathe and he thought well I am being suffocated by a damn poison snake and then he felt the snake’s breath in his mouth, the slow, you couldn’t call it pulsation, but a slithering of expelled breath from the snake’s broad nostrils making a regular susurration coming into his own mouth.
For how many days he couldn’t be sure he lived with the snake lying upon his body. Sometimes it left him but soon enough it returned. During the periods of its absence he found no need to get up and piss or shit or even to teethe the hard cornbread or take a sip of water. Once they opened the door to look in on him, but seeing the big olive-colored, cross-hatched snake coiled on his chest the guard, a small muscular man named William Burden, cried out “Help me, Jesus!” and slammed the door shut, leaving him from then on undisturbed. He heard the LT say to let him go until they smelled him begin to rot. But he didn’t rot.
He drifted on a sea of time. And one day the snake slipped away and didn’t return, but Delvin didn’t notice.
When they came eventually for his body he was asleep on the floor, alone except for the bugs, and on that Sunday afternoon in October he was dreaming of riding up front in the professor’s van through the north Mississippi countryside where the leaves of hickory trees lay like yellow footprints on the red clay road and somewhere up ahead, but not yet, the Fall of Man was walking back into history. The sky was coral blue and the clouds were outlined in black ink that made them stand out.
The guards banged on the tin sides of the shed to scare the snake, but they were too late.
“Look at this crafty nigger with a grin on his face,” he heard the guard Jim Karnes say to another guard as they carried him out of the Bake House. He was sick near to death with malaria. They dumped him on the little porch outside the infirmary and left him for the medico to find.
Well, I’m better now, he thinks, watching Milo raise his long leg slightly to scratch along his thigh, better than I was.