Scooter frowned. “Like I said, I just wanted to commemorate the event.”
I turned to leave, but Scooter wasn’t quite finished talking.
“Hey, Ben, how’s about I take one of you against this ocean of colored folks.”
I spun around at him. “Put your damn camera away. Go back to Eudora, where you belong. Leave these folks alone.”
I noticed two little black boys listening to our conversation. As I turned to leave, Scooter spoke to them.
“Hey, little boys, I’ll give you each a nickel to let me take your picture.” He held out his hand with two nickels in it.
I pulled nickels out of my own pocket and handed one each to the boys. “Y’all run on,” I said.
They did.
And I went to join Hiram’s funeral procession.
Chapter 65
ABRAHAM HANDED ME a huge slice of chess pie. It was a southern funeral favorite because it could be made quickly, using ingredients most people kept on hand—milk, eggs, sugar, butter.
Abraham’s house was overflowing with dishes and platters and baskets of food, and mourners eating as much as they could.
A question swam into my mind. How did Scooter Willems know Moody? I distinctly recalled him calling her by name, as if they were old friends. Were they? And how could that be?
I excused myself and threaded my way through the crowded little parlor, through the overpopulated kitchen, out the back door. I saw Moody sitting in the yard on an old tree stump, glaring at the ground.
“Moody,” I said.
She did not acknowledge me.
I reached out to touch her shoulder. “Moody.”
She pushed my hand away. “Don’t put your white hand on my black shoulder,” she said.
I drew back and put my hands in my pockets.
“Do you know Scooter Willems?” I asked.
She lifted her head and looked at me. “Who?”
“’Scooter Willems. That photographer from outside the church.”
“I never seen that man in my life. He ain’t nothin’ but a buzzard, pickin’ the meat off of dead people’s bones.”
“If you’ve never seen him, how did he know your name?”
“I don’t know.”
Moody looked into my eyes. For the first time since we’d met, she didn’t look the least bit feisty or defiant. She looked downtrodden. Defeated. The heartbreak of Hiram’s death had drained all the anger from her.
I put my hand on her shoulder again. This time she reached up and patted my hand.
“I’ve been going to funerals since I was a baby,” she said. “This one is different. Ain’t no ‘peaceable joy’ around here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We used to burying the old folks,” she said. “You know—after they lived a whole life. After they married and had their own kids, maybe even their grandkids. But lately, all these funerals for the young ones. And Hiram… I mean, Hiram…”
Moody began to cry.
“He weren’t nothing but a baby himself,” she said.
I felt tears coming to my own eyes.
“Here.” I thrust the pie under her nose. “Eat some of this. You need to eat.”
It was useless advice, I knew, but it was what I remembered my father saying to people at funerals. Eat, eat… Now I understood why he’d said it: he just couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Moody took the plate from my hand.
Chapter 66
MOODY WAS RIGHT. No “peaceable joy” came into Abraham Cross’s house that day.
The bottle of moonshine was gradually consumed. The ham was whittled away until nothing but a knuckly bone was left on the plate. The pies shrank, shrank some more, then disappeared entirely. The afternoon lingered and finally turned into nighttime, with ten thousand cicadas singing in the dark.
I shook hands with Abraham. Moody gave me a quick little hug. I made my way through the remaining mourners, out the front door.
Fifty yards from the house, in front of the fig tree where I had parked the bicycle, stood three large white men. I couldn’t make out details of their faces in that shadowy street, but I knew where I’d seen them: these were the same men who’d been standing with Scooter that afternoon at the Mt. Zion church when he took his photographs.
One of them spoke. “You looking for some trouble, Corbett?”
I didn’t answer.
Looking back on it, I guess one man must have been smoking a pipe. I saw him move and smack something hard against the trunk of the fig. Sparks flew in a shower to the ground.
“We asked you a question,” said the man in the middle. “Serious question.”
“Abraham! Moody!” I yelled.
I don’t know if they heard me. If they did, I don’t know whether they came out of the house. In less time than it took for me to get my arms up, the three men were on me.
Kicked in the head. In the face. I tasted blood. I fell face-down on the ground, hard. A knee went into my stomach, fists whaling at me all over. Someone stomping on the side of my rib cage. I could not get my breath. Something tore into my neck. It felt like fire.
“Looks like you found it—trouble!” a man grunted, and drew back to get a better angle for kicking me. He delivered a stunning blow to my knee. I heard a cracking crunch and felt a wild sear of pain and thought he had shattered my right kneecap.
That was the last thing I remembered for a while.
Chapter 67
THE NEXT THING I was aware of—voices.
“You gotta use a higher branch. He’s tall.”
Something was in my eyes. Blood. I was blind from all the blood.
“Use that next branch, that one yonder,” said a second man. “That’s what we used when we hung that big nigger from Tylertown.”
“He wasn’t tall as this one. I can’t hardly see up this high.”
“Hell he wadn’t. I had to skinny up the tree to put the rope way over.”
Every inch of my body was experiencing a different kind of pain: sharp pain, dull pain, pain that throbbed with a massive pounding, pain that burned with a white-hot roar.
I thought, It’s amazing how much pain you can feel and still not be dead.
“This nigger-lover is tall,” the second man said, “but that ’un from Tylertown, he had to be six-foot-six if he was a inch.”
I groaned. I think they were lifting me—hands under my armpits, digging into my flesh, cutting into me, dragging me off to one side.
A thud—something hurting my back. Then I felt the damp ground under me.
A crack—something landed hard on my left knee. I guessed that knee was shattered too.
“This rope is all greasy. I can’t get aholt of it.”
“That’s nigger grease.”
I felt the coarse hemp rope coming down over my face, dragging over my nose, tightening against my neck.
And I thought: Oh, God! They’re hanging me!
Then I flew up into the air, like an angel—an angel whose head was exploding with terrible pain.
I could not see anything. I thought my eardrums had burst from the pressure in my skull.
But they hadn’t tied the noose right. Maybe the one who thought I was too tall was inexperienced. The rope was cutting under my jaw, but it had not gone tight. I got my hand up, somehow worked my fingers between the rope and my neck. I dangled and kicked as if I could kick my way out of the noose. They are hanging you, boy, was the chant that went through my head, over and over, like a song, an executioner’s song.
Crack! I felt a sting on my back. Was it a bullwhip? A buggy whip? A willow branch?
“He’s done. Or he will be,” the voice said. “We can go. Let’s get out of here.”
The air smelled of woodsmoke. Were they going to burn me? Was I going to go up in flames now?
That heat grew and grew. I struggled to see through the blood. It sure is hot up here. Maybe I’m already in hell. Maybe the devil has come and got me.
??
?We better get out of here, J.T.,” said the voice.
“Not yet.”
“Listen to me. They’re still awake over in the Quarters. They’re angry.”
“Let ’em come out here,” the other man said.
“They’ll be looking for Corbett. He’s just like one of them.” “Yeah, he is. Just like a nigger. Wonder how that is?”
I heard the crack of a branch. The voices began to fade. The heat that had burned me alive began to fade away. Then I was alone. There were iron hands around my neck, squeezing and squeezing. No air. No breath. No way to breathe.
Oh, God. My mouth was so dry.
And then I was gone from the world.
Chapter 68
A FEW MOMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Then I blacked out again.
Awake.
Asleep.
Awake.
The wakeful times were a nightmare of confusion.
Terrible pain. There was something snapping at my feet, something with fierce sharp claws. Raccoons? Possums? A rabid fox? I didn’t know if I was still alive.
I was surely dead for a while, then the bugs woke me with their biting, sucking my blood, little no-see-ums biting my neck and arms, mosquitoes big as bats sucking the blood from my veins, and then rats jumped onto my legs and ran up and down my body, squeaking, snapping at my privates.
Then a flash of light, so bright I saw the spackle of blood outlined on my swollen eyelids.
Was I dead? Was I in a different world? In my delirium I heard something. Maybe the angels singing. Or was it a dog barking—
Another flash, so bright it nearly shook me.
The pain in my skull increased. I felt the blood pumping through a vein in my forehead. I imagined it bursting, the blood running in a stream down my leg.
I tried to make a fist. My fingers are gone!
Oh my God. Maybe not. I couldn’t feel anything on that side.
I couldn’t taste the air.
I could only feel my tongue swelling up in my mouth, choking me. And my fingers were gone.
In my overheated brain I saw Mama at her desk, in that flowing white gown she wore under her housecoat. The violet inkstand, the silver pen. Mama smiled at me. “I think you’ll like this poem, Ben. It’s about you, baby.”
I sat on my little stool in the room off her bedroom that smelled like lavender and talcum powder. I saw myself sitting there as if I were a figure in a drawing—a precise, detailed sketch of Mama and me.
Then the pain came swelling up through my chest, through my neck, and up into my brain.
Another flash of light.
And once again, nothing.
Chapter 69
MORNING COMES TO A MAN hanging from a rope as it comes to a man sleeping in his bed—the chatter of birds, a faint breeze, the bark of a dog.
Then comes the pain again.
So much blood had clotted on my eyelids and eyelashes that I couldn’t open them.
I breathed in short sharp intakes of air. The fingers of my right hand wedged into the rope had kept open just enough of a passage for a trickle of air down my windpipe. It had kept me alive. Or maybe somebody had spared me. Maybe the one who said I was too tall? Maybe someone I knew?
The rest of my body was pure pain: so intense, so complete, that the pain now seemed like my normal state.
“Look, Roy, ain’t no colored man. That man white.”
The voice of a child.
“Dang,” said another voice. “Look like they done painted him red all over.”
A dog barked.
“Worms!” the first boy yelled.
I could only imagine what kind of horrible creatures were crawling on my skin.
“Worms!”
I felt something licking my foot. Then it barked.
“Worms! Get away from him, he dirty!”
Ahhh. Worms was the dog.
It was so hot. I should surely be dead by now. I think the pain radiating from my knees was keeping me alive. It wasn’t that I had a will to survive.
I thought of stories from the war, wounds so horrible or amputations so unbearable that men begged their comrades to shoot them, to put them away. If I could speak, I would ask these boys to fetch a gun and shoot me in the head.
I felt something sharp poking my stomach. I must have flinched or jumped a little, and gave out a groan. The boys shrieked in terror.
“Oh, Jesus, the man alive!”
“Run!”
I heard them running as fast as they could, running away from the monster. I heard Worms barking as he ran after them.
I wanted to tell them to please come back and cut me down. Oh, how I wanted to lie on the ground just once more before I died.
That was not to be. I couldn’t just hang here like this, waiting to die. The best I could hope for was to hasten it along.
I began wriggling my dead hand, trying to get it out from between the rope and my neck.
Part Four
“MY NAME IS HENRY”
Chapter 70
“MY NAME IS HENRY.”
I could barely hear.
“Can you hear me? I said my name’s Henry.”
I could barely see.
I could, however, tell that the person speaking to me was a woman. An ancient, bent-over colored woman.
“Henry. My name is Henry,” she said. “You in there, Mist’ Corbett?”
Most of her teeth were missing, producing a kind of whistly lisp as she leaned closer and spoke to me.
“Come on now, eat this,” she said. She held out a spoonful of something. I opened my mouth. She stuck it in. God, it was delicious: black-eyed peas cooked to death, mashed to a paste.
While moving the food around my sore, battered mouth, my tongue discovered the gaping hole on the left side where two teeth had been.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
“Abraham house,” Henry said. She poised another spoonful in front of my mouth.
I will never forget the taste of those peas. They remain to this day the single most wonderful food I have ever encountered.
I heard a familiar voice: “Now would you look at Mr. Corbett, settin’ up and eatin’ baby food all by himself.” Moody came around from the head of the narrow cot where I lay, at the center of their parlor, in exactly the spot where Hiram’s coffin had been.
Perhaps I was still in the midst of my delirium, but I thought she looked happy that I was alive and awake.
“This is Aunt Henry who been looking after you,” she said.
“Henry?” I asked.
“Don’t you be calling me Henrietta,” she said.
Moody sat on the little footstool beside my bed. “You been through a pretty rough time, Mr. Corbett,” she said. “When they cut you down, we just knew you was dead. But Papaw felt a pulse on your arm. So he run and got Aunt Henry. She’s the one with the healing touch.”
“Don’t make him talk now, child,” Aunt Henry said. “He still wore out.” Every time I opened my mouth she stuck in more of the black-eyed-pea mush that was bringing me back to life, a spoonful at a time.
“She been pouring soup in you with a funnel,” Moody said. “She done washed you and powdered you, shaved your face. When your fever went up, she sent me to the icehouse for ice to put in your bed. When the cut places started to scab, she put salt water on ’em so they wouldn’t scar.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Eight days since they cut you down,” she said.
I felt the dull pounding ache in both knees. I remembered how those men had kicked my feet out from under me, then gone after my knees with the toes of their boots.
“Did they break my knees?”
Aunt Henry frowned. “Near ’bout,” she said. “But you got you some hard knees. All battered up and cut up. But ain’t broke.”
“That’s good.” I managed a weak smile.
“It is good,” Aunt Henry said. “Soon as you finish this here peas, you gonna have one more little nap, and then we gonna see if
we can get you walkin’.”
Moody said, “You’d best get him up running, Aunt Henry.”
I shifted onto my side. “What do you mean?”
“The ones that hanged you gonna find you,” Moody said. “Then they gonna hang you again.”
Chapter 71
AUNT HENRY WAS RIGHT. My knees weren’t broken. But they certainly were not happy when called upon to do their job.
Armed with wobbly wooden crutches and a short glass of whiskey, I went for a late-afternoon stroll between Moody and Abraham. My body ached in a hundred different places, all tied together by the pain in my knees. When I bent my leg to take a step, the knee shot a white-hot arrow of pain to my hip. My neck was still raw from the rope, and the mangled fingers of my right hand were twisted and so blackish blue they might yet go gangrenous and have to come off. The sweat rolled down my back, into the swollen whip welts, stinging like fire ants.
But I kept on, hobbling down the muddy board walkway. I knew I was damned lucky to have survived, with no broken bones. My pain was nothing. It would be gone in a few days, or weeks at the worst. I could deal with that.
But inside, I felt another, more disturbing pain. I had been beaten and left for dead. I had disappeared from the world, and hardly anyone had come looking for me. I mattered to virtually no one. Meg. Elizabeth. My father. My daughters. Jacob, my childhood best friend. The entire town of Eudora. I had mostly been forgotten. A few people from town had come, good, kind folks. L. J. Stringer had actually visited a few times. But my own father hadn’t come once.
“Abraham,” I said. “Could I ask a favor?”
“Ask it,” he said.
“Can you stop by Maybelle’s and see if she’s got any letters for me?”
He shook his head. “I went by this morning. Nothing there.” Then he added, “Nothing for you from the White House, either.”
I kept on, but the pressure of the crutches under my arms was getting to be too much to bear. Everything from my neck down was one big aching mass of bruises.