5
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.
And so it went.
Delvin, his turn come upon him, rose from his seat with his coarse white and blue jail trousers (he’d gone back to wearing the issue) sweat-sticking to his butt and the backs of his legs, swaying nearly to a faint, but able still, rising as man or creature swum continually for miles might rise from the depths of the swamp of being, gasping and looking wild-eyed around the place that was filled with townsfolk and reporters and maybe one or two people who had known him before this calamity flew upon him, or were drawn to him by his own behavior (he pondered this daily and hadn’t yet decided; some blamed him outright, Rollie Gregory among them). Was that the Ghost up in the balcony? The professor? Was that Celia? He stopped in his tracks, experiencing for only the second or third time in his life the sensation of his heart catching fire. His mind went blank. The four tall windows looked like paintings filled with blue. No black man with blue eyes. No Celia either. For a second he didn’t know where he was. He came to himself walking to the big wooden witness chair, a copy a guard had told him of the electric chair at Markusville. The judge was looking at him as if he knew him well and was sick and tired of his face. He could hear breathing behind him. It sounded like the bellows in the blacksmith shop over on Florida street in Chattanooga. He would never see that place again. His body felt brittle, waffled through by termites and other hurtbugs until he was eaten with holes and corridors and little bug byways and all dried up. He could hear himself creak as he sat down, or was that the chair about to collapse under him?
Pullen with an insubstantial flourish introduced him to the assembled and left him to himself. If Pullen didn’t ask questions or direct him, then the prosecution couldn’t either. He was alone with what he knew to be so.
He sat then in the trailing silence, waiting for some other voice besides his own to begin to speak. He needed to hear somebody else, some speaker he could respond to or hook up with in a call and shout. But there was no one. He leaned back in the chair. A half-scary man, they had taken the cuffs off but not the shackles. It was embarrass ing to have to walk in front of people wearing that gear. His escape attempt had made it harder on the others. The guards jostled and poked them, drew their armatures tighter. His fellow transgressors cursed him. He coughed, and a slipperiness went down his throat. He lifted his face and felt on his skin the burning of a blow, some hit from long ago, still afire.
He said, I never did a thing but what any man wouldn’t do.
He told of sitting on the steel crossbar under the hopper and reaching to steady himself when a man, a white boy, stepped on his hand. He had barked at him, barked, he said—“so quick I didn’t even know it was me—or him.” The white boy had cursed him for a nigger. One thing led to another and after a while in the empty boxcar that smelled of rotten peaches there had been a fight the colored boys clearly won. Yes, and on from there to his riding on top of a blue boxcar after the fight, sitting with a couple of boys as the train passed a little farm zoo under some big trees. The zoo had an old ratty camel in it and the camel had two humps and one of the humps was folded over and he had wondered if this was because it needed water to pump it back up. The zoo had donkeys and a bear, maybe it was a bear, and several raccoons and a fox or two panting in their cages under the big droopy trees, but then the train went on around this long bend headed toward Haverhill and he sat there wondering about the camel. About what life was for such a beast in a country with no sand dunes and all that. It wasn’t till the train stopped in Kollersburg and the deputies called them down and rounded everybody up that he realized anything was wrong. He had never seen those two white women before he saw them at the jail. He started to say he felt sorry for them, but at that moment it was an actual lie because right then he hated those women though he also pitied them and wondered what made them the way they were, and then he caught himself again for a liar because he knew very well what made them like that because it was the same thing that made anybody mean, just too many whippings, he had seen it with dogs and bindlestiffs and even children, and sure there were those with a natural brokenness inside them too and they were the ones who at seven years old set fire to the school and all, but what it was most of the time was from the meanness they’d suffered, which there was a sufficiency of in the world, and he had sat in his borrowed courtroom chair over there looking those women in the face and seen the print of the striking hand on their faces and recognized it and wanted to stand up then and say, I know about all this, it’s all right, but he didn’t, as he didn’t now, said no word at all about those women or what he knew, he simply stopped talking and let the communal breathing and a rustly little humid breeze fill up the silence, thinking where was I and what was I saying, oh Lord.
“Those sheriffs must have mistaken me for another person,” he said. “I promised myself to somebody else—a long time ago I did that.”
He scanned the balcony, but whoever might have been Celia was not there. A white boy with bronze ringlets leaned on the balcony rail picking his nose. A white woman in a smart red dress adjusted a yellow cloth flower on her shoulder. A white man in overalls fanned himself with a crushed straw hat. Jakes and Blarneys and cordial bug shifters. Too much going on to keep track of it all. Anything he might say was nothing to what he knew. The lawyers had told him to hang his story on a string of time. One occurrence after another until he was taken away by the sheriffs. They—the sheriffs at the train station—had sweated through their shirts, Delvin remembered. The stocks of their shotguns were slick with sweat. A colored boy in a bright red shirt sat on a wagon seat in front of a store. It was a hardware store and had a box of bright copper piping on the front porch; the boy had ducked down and hid behind the wagon seat. The high sheriff wore a black broadcloth suit and carried a scuffed derby in his hand. His knuckles too were scuffed. In the window of a white house across the dirt street a small white cake rested. I would like a piece of that cake, he had thought.
He wanted to tell them how scared he was, how scared he had been all along. We all been scared. We been scared to death over here for the last three hundred years. All day every day. Like when somebody you didn’t see jumps out a door at you.
He said, “I can’t tell you I have done wrong when I haven’t, not the wrong you all are accusing me of.”
His voice soft and plain, hardly a negro’s voice at all. Billy Gammon thought he sounded like a white man. And Pullen wondered for a furious second if the boy was mocking them. I’ll kill him myself, he thought.
“If I had violated either of those white women,” Delvin said, “I would have jumped off that train long before it got to Kollersburg. Any of us would. We were born knowing what the penalty for business such as that is. But we didn’t jump off. We didn’t run. Anybody who saw us when the train pulled into that town would know we didn’t suspect a thing. We were not guilty men. Not a one of us—”
He would have gone on, but he saw how they were looking at him. For a moment everything lost its name. He noticed a couple of yellowed leaves lying on the wooden floor between the judge’s bench and the defendants’ tables. The wind must have blown them in through the tall open windows. As he stared at the leaves—they were tulip poplar, black-speckled yellow—he realized he had forgotten the names of his fellow prisoners, and forgotten the names of the lawyers and the judge, of the women, and of everyone he knew or had known. That morning the light in the courtroom had been suffused with green, as if the sunlight coming through the windows had soaked up green from the trees and deposited it here, but now, in the late afternoon, the light in the courtroom was red, as if a storm was descending in the west and the sun had picked this up too and spread it around the room. He did not know who he was or what was happening here—everyone, everything, was strange—he only knew, and it was all he knew, where each of them was going, but this did not frighten him; it seemed only as it should be. A sweetness, a radiancy, filled him, and his weariness slipped away. I am . . . , he thought and then he couldn’t think, and it didn’t matter. Their eyes had glazed over. Or else they were looking at him like they were about to jump up and slap him. He wanted suddenly to reach out and pinch their noses. Chuck them under the chin, thump them on the chest. Come on, we just joking here, aint we? He felt a chill so strong the thin coiled hairs on his arms stood up. He saw himself loitering on the edge of a hobo creek tossing crabapples into the water. He looked up from the witness chair and saw for the first time a woman with deep black skin and a sharp pretty face. For a second like an eternity he knew this woman for his mama, come to fetch him out of this. But no, not his mama. That was just a dream.