5
The funeral was held a day and a half later at the tall narrow Jericho Holiness church fourteen miles outside the city near the old negro community of Middle Horse among the remnants of a neglected pecan orchard surrounded by mixed cotton fields and woods. But before this, lines of silent mourners trudged through the funeral home to pause before the white-painted pinewood box plumped with quilted blue satin complete with a blue satin pillow for the boy’s head. They’d been coming through since first light. CASEY DAVID HAROLD was etched into a round brass plate on the coffin lid. His mother sat in one of the plush red quilted armchairs in the little family room off to the side of the viewing room, moaning and gripping herself in her arms. Her husband, a heavyset, feckless man taken by drink, skittered around the room laughing in a strenuous false manner and shaking hands with everyone who came in. Behind his gay mask his eyes burned with a fever of grievous perplexity. An air of mortification and sorrow filled the room. A compressed vulcanizing barely contained energy swelled. And in some spots hope guttering.
“We’d have held the viewing out at our home in the country,” Mr. Harold told folks, “but it was just too small.”
The funeral expenses were being paid by Mr. W. B. Bickens, who had also offered his house for the viewing, but he was relieved when Mrs. Harold said no, she wanted the people of Chattanooga to get a look at what those white men had done to her child. (No white folks showed up at the funeral home.) Oliver had worked hard to bring the boy back to the look of health. Mrs. Harold had broken into the room a second time and ordered him to stop fixing her son’s face. At first Oliver had thought he misunderstood her, or he told himself he did. She said, “I don’t want you making a fool of my son.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said, “I won’t . . . I couldn’t,” and let his hands drop to his sides.
“I don’t want you fancin’ him up.”
A sadness had filled Oliver’s body. The tips of his fingers were shriveled from the ingestants. He wiped his hands on a clean towel he took from a pile on the counter. The towels were usually kept in one of the cabinets, but this case was such a mess he had Culver bring them out. “I will—”
“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say what you will or you won’t. Just quit trying to replace my boy with somebody else. Put him back like them white mens left him.”
In the end it was a mix. Oliver could not bring himself to wound the boy’s half-restored face again. But he didn’t go further. The cuts were still apparent, the lip with its vertical gash like a field-dressed wound. He had wept in frustration and despair as he worked. In the end he was left with a weariness he hadn’t known he could experience and still walk around in. His legs hurt, and a hard pain had worked its way into his shoulders and roosted there.
The boy looked the victim of ugly drubbing and of haste and unrectified fear and sorriness. There were stitches in his forehead, and one eye was sunk into his head. Wads of putty like the clay we are made of. Everywhere in his face was the strange seriousness of underbone. His artificial hands of cotton in their white gloves looked like doll hands. Shame tinged Oliver, but he wanted to give the family what they wanted. He knew it would all work out in the ground.
In the parlor viewers recoiled trembling. Some fainted, others stared, many wept seamless tears and clutched their hands to their hearts, held each other, others passed by mutely, some stared avidly, feeding, some wanted to touch the body, even caress it, others squeezed their eyes shut. A photographer, a small broad-shouldered man smelling of ferrous sulphate, had come in and taken pictures. He had fumbled with his equipment. He dropped two plates, ruining them. A tiny ball of sweat collected by his ear and trailed slowly down his jaw. His eyes rapidly blinked. He sighed. His hands shook and then they steadied and he was able to take the pictures that ran two days later in the africano Mountain Star Weekly and appeared later in papers up north. Spikes, cascades, flushes of anger and sadness. Many felt new weights added to an old heaviness and it was part of life for them, understay and manacle, what you grew up with as a counterpoint to tenderness, murder on the other side of the door. My soul has been tipped into a deep well, somebody said.
Solomon Baker took off his glasses and rubbed them with a blue silk handkerchief.
“How much, Lord?” somebody said.
“How much longer, Lord?” somebody else said.
The people trooped by through the day, through the evening and deep into the petty hours of night. Into the buckled and slumped hours of false dawn. The yeasty realness of life was in their breasts, and even as they grieved many experienced themselves as held deeply in the weave of being and even smacked hard by grief were grateful. Others were simply glad it was not them. Oliver lay on the hardest of the two couches in his office, trying to rest. Delvin came in and without turning on the light lay down on the floor beside him. A night bird asked a question, waited, and asked the same question again, a question never answered on this earth, unless the earth itself was the answer. Oliver let his hand fall from the couch and seek the boy’s face that he touched so gently Delvin could barely feel it and then he groped for his hand. Delvin caught the older man’s fingers and he felt as if he was catching him as he sank into the sea; he gripped down hard and the older man spoke out and Delvin said he was sorry and then in a soft seep he was crying.
After a while Oliver said, “This is only the second time I have had to do this. Usually they take the poor fellow out to some hollow or country pasture and bury him without calling on my ministrations.” He blew his breath out and breathed it back deeply in. Delvin could smell the cigar on his breath. Oliver said, “When she came in the laboratory the last time—to tell me not to fix her boy—I thought I would explode. With frustration and regret. I was afraid I might strike that woman. Oh, I knew I wouldn’t, wouldn’t ever, but I felt so consternated.” He turned heavily—Delvin could smell his musky cologne, and the horsehair in the couch—and his wide face seemed to rest disembodied on the edge of the couch, like a face in one of the books he had read as a child, disembodied and filled with curiosity. He said, “For a second I thought I would strike that woman and walk out of the room and keep walking until I came to some other world to live in.” He looked in the dimness at Delvin with eyes that contained a shadowed mournfulness. “But there is no other world.” A crinkling, whispering sound then where Oliver’s silk robe rubbed against the couch. “I could walk for a thousand thousand years,” he said, “and not find any world but this one. Lord.” He patted the edge of the couch. “A mortician’s not supposed to feel like that.”
“What about Africa?” Delvin said.
“What’s that?”
“When you’re walking.”
“Walking—hunh.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Africa. That old bushy place? Those folks over there have forgot all about us. We wouldn’t fit in. Despite what old Marcus Garvey in his big hat and with the whole UNIM behind him says.”
“What about some empty place? Some place nobody stays in and nobody wants?”
“Only place like that is a place nobody can live in. Shoot, I’d go live on an iceberg in the Arctic ocean if I thought it could be done. But even there the white man would come and run us off. Wouldn’t want us mixing with the polar bears.”
“I don’t want to mix with them anyway,” Delvin said for the laugh in it, but he was thinking, Always the hard way’s the only way.
Oliver let loose a long rattling sigh and then silence fell again. The night bird inserted its ascending cry, only the final note a true question.
“I’ve known rivers,” Delvin said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
“That’s beautiful, boy. Did you make that up?”
Delvin didn’t say anything.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s strong and faithful, faithful to the truth.” Oliver raised himself. “You ought to say that at the funeral tomorrow. Or I mean today. This afternoon.”
“Oh, no,” Delvin said.
“I wish you would. I know it would be a piece that would be a great help to everybody.”
Though he wanted to claim the words as his own, and might have if he wasn’t spooked by Oliver’s proposal that he say the lines of Langston Hughes’s poem at the funeral, he admitted they were the great Harlem poet’s and not his. Oliver looked him in the eyes and smiled, knowing what the boy had almost done and not offended at all by that sort of humanness.
“You’re an uncommon young man,” he said, words that Delvin would recall often—sometimes derisively—in years to come.
“I might be,” he said, “but I don’t want to get up before those people and say anything at all.”
“I can’t make you, boy, but I would be happy to support you in saying them.”
They were both exhausted, and shortly after that, after the whippoorwill’s duty was passed on to a widow bird offering its own cranky cry, they fell asleep and would have slept right through the funeral if Polly, who had cried half the night, hadn’t kept calling from the door until they waked. Delvin, despite the occasion, experienced a jolt of happiness when he saw her standing in her fresh navy-blue dress in the doorway. He spoke to Mr. Oliver, who lay on his back on the long couch, thinking—so he said in a moment—about the net sack of oranges a white woman had given him one Christmas when her driver stopped her carriage in the middle of Valhalla street in Montgomery and called him to the door. Later three africano boys had taken the oranges from him.
They got up and moved quietly in the faint clattery silence of early morning.
The leaves of sweet gum trees made moving shadows on the walls of the church. Across the yard was the old church, a tiny square wooden building, hardly bigger than a cotton house, with a cocked steeple the size of an apple crate riding the roof. The old structure had become so infirm that it had been locked for years and would have been torn down except for the sentimental and historic value it had for the community. It had been recently whitewashed, thanks to Cordell Meeks, a parishioner whose cotton fields bordered the property, and this had made the congregation proud. The new church was an elaborated version of the old one, planed boards, a shingle roof and a tin steeple perched on the roof line like a squared and pointed hat. There were hitching posts for the mules and horses in front of the old church. A cleared space for cars in front of the new. Mostly folks came in wagons. Many sat now in their wagons, two hours before the service, patiently waiting. On the other side of the red dirt road sheriff’s deputies sat in two big black cars.
They pulled up and backed around to the door of the new church and several men stepped down from the wagons, blistered men, men of sorrows and men held in contempt, men in washed overalls and starched white shirts, men who didn’t know how to read or had never held in their hands any other book but the Bible, if that, men who took the long view that the Lord was waiting for them in heaven, these men, who Delvin was thinking of and had been thinking of now since last night when he watched the last of them come through the parlor of the Home and stop and stare down at the unrefabricated dead boy, the illuminated and beaten but not destroyed boy, standing in a moment of capacious silence that in itself stood for four hundred years of isolation among men—he had thought of these men who had hardly ever known an unbullied moment in their lives but who went on anyway, wondering what they believed in those nights in the country when the last lamp had been put out and they lay beside their narrow wives in the dark that was of a blackness impenetrable by human eyes as skeeters and fleas and flatbugs went about their cunning business, wondered if they thought of anything at all—these men helped unload the burden and carry it into the church.
Those who hadn’t gotten a chance to view the body in town got one now. There was rustling and whispering and fresh bursts of tears, and voices cried out, making hollow despairing sounds against rafters and roof. After a while an old man in shirtsleeves held off his wrists with black silk garters began to play a large nickel-plated accordion. “There Is a Balm in Gilead” was the first selection, and then Delvin didn’t pay attention because he was harried by nervousness concerning the poem he was supposed to recite. Mr. Oliver was busy with the family. Many cousins and uncles and aunties and brothers and sisters in the Sunday clothes they had worn just three days before at services in this building. A small black stove in the center of the floor was draped in blue cloth and a basket filled with daisies and meadow rue and daylilies set on top. The windows along the sides had been raised and Delvin could smell the dry, rusty scent of new cotton in the fields. A pale green damselfly, elegant and hesitating as it came, drifted in and floated over the assembling congregation. With the paddle fans taken from a box by the door, women fanned themselves vigorously. The fans had advertisements for the Constitution Funeral Home on one side and a color picture of a beautiful sloping tree-shaded field bordering a quiet river on the other.
The place grew warm, and the people, already exhausted, coming off little sleep and the work of their home lives, leaned back on the music for support of a weariness that never really left them.
Delvin, standing next to the open window through which a lazy green fly buzzed slowly back and forth, looked out. Beyond the little ragged graveyard, now rife with fresh flowers amid the undersized gravestones and ceramic urns and worked wire markers, was a big hickory-handled plow with ponderous coulter leaned against a pine tree. He wondered why it was there and wondered what it would be like to plow a field. Beyond the plow the great expanse of cotton hung heavy with hard green bolls.
Now the minister, a deeply black portly man in a black suit with vest and a soft gray tie, ascended the three plank steps to the altar and took a seat in one of the big cypresswood chairs behind and to the side of the pulpit. He was followed by a thin young man in a brown suit who sat down in a similar chair on the other side. The choir had come quietly as ghosts through a door at the side of the church and was now sitting in two short rows farther back on a low platform behind the ministers. They began softly to sing. The accordion that had been playing steadily, the rangy musician pumping, never stopping once to wipe the sweat running down both sides of his face, stopped. The choir sang about how it was going to cross over into campground. Out the big open windows the leaves of the sweet gum soughed and sighed and squared themselves and shook in the breeze that barely reached the floor of the church. Crickets sawed their legs. The bob-white cry of quail. Without Delvin realizing it the service had begun.
The minister gripped the pulpit, thanking everybody for coming and giving the title of a hymn, “Uncumbered Grace.” In a light sweet voice he began himself to sing a line that was picked up by the choir. The congregation sang the line back to them and so the hymn followed: a line sung by the minister and choir and repeated by the congregation. Then another hymn, this time “The Ship of Zion,” sung by everybody together.
As the last phrase died out the minister stepped to the side of the pulpit and kneeled. In his hands was a large white handkerchief stained rusty brown in places. The preacher raised the handkerchief in both hands and began to pray.
“This bit of cloth, Lord, was found in the pocket of the young man before us today. It is a handkerchief given to him by his auntie for his birthday this last May. Casey carried it with him everywhere and used it to wipe the sweat of life from his face. But night before last he didn’t get the chance to use it. Life had already been stolen from him before he could.”
The preacher, who had been twisting the handkerchief in his two hands, raised it again. Many in the crowd had lifted their eyes and were looking at the handkerchief. A rusty tail fluttering in the warm breeze. A woman gasped. Another groaned.
“Blood from this boy’s body stains this hankie, Lord. Casey didn’t have time and the occasion was not propitious for him to draw this square of cloth. Those who kindly cut him down found it in his one unburned pocket. Now this memento belongs to his mother. She will not wash the blood from it.”
He held the handkerchief in front of his face, and Delvin thought for a second that he was going to wash his own face in it. But he didn’t.
“Heavenly Father,” he said, his hands trembling slightly, making the handkerchief flutter, “you have sanctified this blood by your own sacrifice. You too lost a son. A son who washes us all in his own blood. You too grieved. As we here are grieving. This blood, as the blood of any child does, mingles with the blood of the Savior. We here are all sinners, Lord. Fools and strayers, wayward, bumbling folk. This young man whose body lies here before us is cleansed now of all that. He lives with you in heaven. Have mercy on us here, us strugglers and sinners, those left behind in this cold world. Forgive us our sins that we can’t keep from committing. Wash us, Lord, in the blood. Wash us in the blood of the lamb. Heal us, Lord. Hear us. We cry out to you in our grief.”
He lifted his head as cries of Amen and cries of Thank you, cries of Jesus is Lord filled the sanctuary. The minister got to his feet with the ponderousness of a large man and staggering slightly took his stand, entered the pilothouse of his pulpit. He grasped the front rail as a captain would grasp the wheel of his gale-tossed ship. His raised face seemed lashed by a windy force. He looked out over the congregation, in his deepset eyes a sad fondness.
“There is much I could say about this Casey today. When he was a boy of twelve I baptized him in the tank out behind the church. I watched him play at the edge of the fields and I watched that play turn gradually into the work of a man. He used to have a little one-shot rifle that he carried with him into the woods and he was a mighty hunter with it. I could tell you stories all day long, as many of you could tell stories to me.” He turned slightly so that he was half facing the young man sitting in the other cypresswood chair. “But I want to let this young gentleman up here beside me get up now and talk to you. He is the uncle of this boy, arrived last night from Nashville. Reverend Arthur Wayne is his name. He is a preacher himself and has asked to speak to you this afternoon.”
He turned fully, offering his hand to the slender man, who rose and took it. The minister pulled him fluidly and gently to him. Grasping the man’s elbow with one hand, his other behind the man’s back, he guided him to the pulpit and shuffled backwards to his seat. Delvin at first thought the man was blind. The way he sniffed the air and raised his eyes to the place where the wall joined the ceiling. But then he looked straight out into the congregation, and Delvin could tell he saw just fine. He had a large, hawkish face. He stared into the crowd, letting his eyes rest on this one or that. A silence grew heavier as it lasted and filled the sanctuary. People began to grow restless, and Delvin could sense the nervousness rising.
Reverend Arthur Wayne smacked his lips once, loudly. He threw back his head and laughed. The laugh made a high keening sound, the laugh of a madman. Many found the laugh painful to hear, many were disturbed by a mad-sounding laugh coming from a preacher and told themselves what they heard wasn’t so. Some experienced a stab of anger. Others were openly frightened. The man smacked his lips and laughed again, Rev Wayne. He swayed in the pulpit, rocking from one arm to the other and back. The older minister—his name was Oriel Munch—made a half move toward him but thought better and sank back into his chair. The young man caught the sides of the heavy rostrum. His dark-complected face shone with sweat. Some of the women wanted to go to him. He stared again into the depths of the congregation, and now many shrank from his eyes. They were afraid he would pick them out. Rev Wayne opened his mouth, show ing a fine row of upper teeth missing the dog tooth on the right side.
He bowed his head, perhaps in brief silent prayer, raised his face, and in a gentle, even voice said, “Devilment.” He smiled again, this time without opening his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, “devilment. That’s what brought you here.”
Beyond the open window, beyond the graveyard, a breeze tugged at the tops of the cotton. Delvin felt a prickliness, as if the breeze carried with it a tiny sting like nettles or a sticker bush. Something out there seemed to touch something inside him. A precision, unlifelike and false, that carried harm. A glint of sunlight on metal. He stepped carefully back—into safety, into the other world beside what was in fields and roads and common rivers.
“Devilment,” the preacher was saying. His voice was soothing and even this word, a shocker, soothed. “We can’t help but stare at it,” he said. “We are drawn to it. I want each of you to make sure you take a good look at the devilment lying here before you today. Not the devilment in this boy. There was never any devilment in him. Not any more than you could find in any prancy young fellow. No more than any of us had when we were his age. The devilment is the devilment that was worked upon his helpless body. His mama didn’t want the good Mr. Cornelius Oliver here to fix him up. Mr. Oliver is a magician with his chemicals and his cosmetics. He could clean up the devil himself, I guess.” (Oliver looked blandly back at him.) “But this boy’s mama didn’t want Mr. Oliver to fix this boy so he looked like a fresh youth resting after his happy run through the world.” He drummed his fingers on the edge of the rostrum. “Why you think she didn’t want him to rectify and embellish this boy? I’ll tell you. Because she wanted you to see what the devil had wrought. Here before you, in this holy place, before God and his mighty works, the mightiest work of His Holy Hand lies before you torn to pieces. Men did this to a boy.”
He shook his head. His long stiff dry crozzled hair swayed slightly. He raised his left hand and with drawn-together fingers wiped his face. The back of his hand was lacerated with white scars. Someone gasped. A moan went through the congregation. He again looked out. He looked straight out. “Are we children of God?” he asked.
Somebody answered yes, an old man with close-cropped gray hair, Hardy Purcell.
“Yes,” the young preacher said, “yes we are. We are all children of God. And it was children of God who did this in the dark of night to another child of God. They performed an act of devilment on their brother.” He pressed his forehead with the heel of his left hand, pressed hard as if pushing back against a pain there. “Now what would make a man—make men—do this?”
“The devil!” somebody cried, a large woman, Maggie Cagel, fanning herself rapidly with her paddle fan. The swish of fans could be heard throughout the room, like the sound of bee wings.
“Yes,” the young preacher said. “The devil. But what is the devil?”
“Tell us,” another said.
“The devil . . . and all of you know him . . . he’s inside each of you . . . is . . . trepidation. It’s dread, it’s consternation, it’s fright. Trepidation. That’s right. Misdoubts . . . and dismay . . . and recreancy. The bugaboo, the bogie, the hobgoblin. You all know that fellow, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You all been scared. Some of you—with good reason—maybe most of you, are scared all the time, scared out of your wits.
“O Lord.”
“But those men the other night. Those men carrying torches and kerosene and guns and knives and axes and a rope. Those men were afraid. They were scared to death. The devil had entered them and scoured out all the holiness. Or most all of it. He had scoured it out and refilled the hole with trepidation. What was it they were scared of? Were they scared of governments . . . or guns . . . or God?”
“No sir.”
“They weren’t scared of them, you are exactly right. They were scared of this child . . . whose broken body lies before us now. This boy who just a few days ago was walking along the road out here picking blue-eyed grass and singing a song to himself. They were scared that this little boy was going to take something from them that they couldn’t do without. What was that something?”
He leaned forward, a look of pain in his face. Nobody had answered.
“I’ll tell you. There’re many names for it. One of them . . . is strength. Another . . . is honor. Another is courage. Another’s goodness. Kindness. Mercy. Steadfastness.”
The room was quiet but for the faint buzzing and shuffling and clicking sounds of the living world. Rev Wayne looked around, fixed on this or another one. Then his eyes seemed to fix on them all.
“Those men were afraid that this boy, this sweet and generous child, was going to steal these properties from them. But these men were misinformed. This child wasn’t going to steal anything. They had it backwards. This child could only add to them. The good of one adds to the good of the many. But these men could not see this. Their scarediness had taken them over. They had become for this time . . . maybe for all time . . . the captives of this trepidation. Guarantors of the devil.”
He cupped his forehead briefly in the palm of his right hand, then held the hand before him and looked into the palm and let the hand drift to the pulpit.
“We have come here to pray for and bless and bury this child. And that we will do. We do it prayerfully with hearts weighed down by grief. But this child does not need our prayers. This child shares none of our grief. He is in heaven right now. He has been in heaven since the moment the blow that separated him from this world was struck. He is snug in the arms of the Lord. A blameless, emancipated child. It is these others who need our prayers. Those so consumed by their trepidations and frets that they were led to do evil deeds. Some of you want to flee this horror—hide yourselves. Others want to turn and seek vengeance against those who committed it. Others want justice. Others want simply to forget. But there is no hiding, there is no vengeance, there is no justice, there is no forgetting. There is only the Lord. That hatred we feel rising up like a streaming flame. That trepidity that makes us want to run into the woods and hide under the bushes. That misery. That grief like a block of stone laid upon our hearts. The sweat on our bodies, the aches, the faltering, the falling. There is only the Lord for that.”