Under the parachute, the girl who thought of lightning is thinking of her grandfather, who is the only person she knows to have died—his heart had been good but turned bad—and her own chest hurts, and she wonders if it is her heart turning inside her. A boy begins to shake. His teeth are chattering and he puts a finger between them because the teacher said not to make a sound. He has never thought of himself as truly separate from his mother, and yet he is sure that at her desk in the office in the city she does not know what is happening to him and cannot feel his fear. In the years to come, he will think of this over and over, of how she did not know.
The boy’s brother is breathing fast behind the mask, and the boy knows that he shot the girl and the woman. The tip of the gun was warm, but the boy cannot make sense of it or of why he is following his brother, crossing the field at the same angle he does every afternoon. From the door to the locker room, the gym teacher watches the two boys—they are both boys, he can see that now—as they walk up the hill toward the woods. There is a dead girl on the pavement and on the steps of the trailer a woman moans, and when the boys are far enough away the gym teacher runs to the woman. It is the ESL teacher, and he puts his fingers to her neck and says, Please, please, please. Under the parachute the girl counts, her lips careful with the numbers: eighty-eight, eighty-nine. The silk is so hot that it begins to stick to them, to foreheads and noses and knees.
At the top of the hill, where there is the tree with the peeling bark and where the path to the boy’s home begins, there is a cross stuck in the ground. It is two pieces of a yardstick that the boy recognizes because his mother used it to stir a can of paint—one end is the blue of their kitchen—and now it has been broken in two and nailed together. The boy’s brother stops at the cross and says, “They’ll ask you why.” Every word comes out like a splinter, like he is in pain, and the boy says, “Are you crying?”
The gym teacher hears sirens, faint as wind chimes, as he puts his mouth to the woman’s and exhales.
“Listen to me,” the boy’s brother says, and he gets down on his knees. “They’re going to ask you why.”
His brother’s glasses are fogged. The ski hat is their mother’s. It is the one she wears when she shovels snow and it smells of a dog, though they’ve never had one, and he does not know how to square these ordinary things with the way his brother is shaking—not gently, but wildly—as he pulls the gun over his shoulder and points it at him.
“Are you going to shoot me?” the boy says.
The girl counting reaches one hundred and stops, because her fear has dissolved, is a memory now. The gym teacher puts his fingers to the woman’s neck again, and this time there is nothing. Another girl hears the sirens and thinks of her dog and the way he howls with his throat arched whenever he hears a siren and of how he will be howling now, in her house, which is nearby, pacing the halls and filling the empty rooms with that sound.
The boy begins to cry. Not because he is afraid of being shot—he cannot think what that might feel like, though he has seen it in games and on TV, though he has seen the holes burned through the paper targets at the range—but because he is afraid that his brother hates him, has always hated him. That must have been why, one time, his brother held his palm open and ran the blade of a knife across it.
The gym teacher looks up the hill and he sees that the boys are the same height—the boy with the gun is kneeling—and he sees where the gun is pointed, and he gets up and begins to run across the soccer field. The seventeen are safe, under the parachute, but already he knows that it won’t matter against this one, that that is not how the scales work.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” the boy’s brother says, “because I’m not crazy. You tell them that. That I’m not crazy.”
The boy nods, but he will not tell anyone what his brother said, not his mother, not his father, not ever. He will insist that his brother was silent, that his brother was crazy, and he will dream of the girl with the cloud-shaped birthmark. With the gun, the boy’s brother motions for him to turn toward the tree with the peeling bark, and the boy turns. He is facing the path that leads home and he has timed himself on this path too. In two minutes and seven seconds he can be home, where his mother is pulling clothes from the dryer. She straightens, hearing the sirens, and it takes her a moment to unravel the sound, to register how many and how close, and she thinks there must be a fire—it has been a dry summer, a dry fall—and she goes to the window and looks toward the school. The boy can’t tell if the sirens are getting closer. They seem to be carried on the wind, like they are coming from the trees, and even though he knows this isn’t so, he looks up at the leaves that are red and brown and thrashing.
The gym teacher is halfway across the soccer field, and in two months, when the school reopens, his wife will walk from goal to goal for hours, eyes on the grass, looking for the gleam of a bullet in the dirt. Under the parachute, the children think of lightning and tunnels. They think of the gym teacher who said he’d come back and of mothers and fathers and of the sound of the man’s voice when he said, “Let’s go,” and how you are never supposed to go. Later, when the policeman finds them, when he pulls up the parachute and tells them they are safe, he will not be able to forget it: how still the children were, how silent, how they didn’t move a muscle.
The boy looks from the trees to the school. The gym teacher is running across the field, and he is old and slow, and from this high on the hill it seems like he is barely moving. The gym teacher’s heart is battering at his lungs, his chest is burning, and the boy only watches him for a second, but it is too long—his brother turns toward the field. The sirens are everywhere now. His brother is breathing in the way that means you’re hurt. The gym teacher is across the field, and he is afraid, but with his next breath his fear goes, and he does not know why, because the gun is aimed at him now, but he thinks of a morning years ago, when his son got a shoelace caught in the mower, and the gym teacher cut the lace with a pocket knife and watched the panic roll out of his son’s eyes, and an hour later, in the hospital, he will die, whispering to his wife about a knife through cotton.
The boy hears the shot. He begins to run, and the leaves slide under his sneakers and he keeps his eyes on the path because there is a root up ahead that tripped him once, walking home, and his knee had bled, and his brother had looked at him and kissed his knee and said, “What’s the point in crying?” The boy leaps over the root. He is running fast enough that the trees blur around him, and the gym teacher feels the hot rip of the bullet, and up on the hill there is another shot.
TOM FRANKLIN
Christians
FROM Murder under the Oaks
1887
IT WAS AUGUST, so she had to bury him quick. Soon she would be able to smell him, a thing she didn’t know if she could endure—not the live, biting odor he brought in from a day in the fields but a mixture of turned earth and rot, an odor she associated with decaying possum and coon carcasses, the bowl of a turtle she’d overturned as a girl and then tumbled away from, vomiting at the soup of maggots pulsing inside.
It was late afternoon. He lay on his back on the porch, covered by a sheet stained across the torso with blood, the sheet mapped with flies and more coming, as many flies as she’d seen gathered in one place, a revival of them, death calling like the Holy Spirit. In her left hand she held his hat, which the two men had thrown to the ground after they’d rolled him off the wagon and left him in the dirt.
She hadn’t wailed at the sight. Hadn’t flung herself on the body or swiped her fingernails at their implacable faces as they watched, the two of them, one young, one old. She hadn’t even put her hand over her mouth.
They told her they’d kept his gun. Said they meant to give it to the sheriff. Said, Like father, like son.
“Leave,” is all she’d said.
And she herself had dragged him up the steps, holding him under his arms. She herself had draped him with their spare bed sheet and turned her rocking
chair east to face him and sat rocking and gazing past him—past the corpse of him and its continents of flies—to the outreaching cotton so stark and white in the sun she could barely look at it, cotton she’d have to pick herself now that her son was dead.
Sheriff Waite came. He got down off his horse and left the reins hanging and stood in the yard. He studied the drag marks, the stained dirt. His green eyes followed the marks and paused at the blood on the plank steps and the gritty line of blood smeared across the porch. He watched the boy under the sheet for nearly a minute before he moved his eyes—it seemed such an effort for him to look at country folks—to her face. In the past she’d always had trouble meeting town men’s eyes, the lust there or the judgment (or both), but now she sat rocking and staring back at him as though she understood a secret about him not even his wife knew. His hand went toward his nose, an unconscious gesture, but he must’ve considered it disrespectful for he lowered the hand and cleared his throat.
“Missus Freemont.”
“It was that Glaine Bolton,” she said. “Him and Marcus Eady.”
Waite stepped closer to the porch. Behind him his tall handsome horse had sweat tracks down through the dust caked on its coat. It wiggled its long head and blinked and sighed at the heat, flicked the skin of its back and the saddle and the rifle in its scabbard.
“I know,” Waite said. “They already come talked to me. Caught me over at Coffeeville.” He moved his hand again, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “How I was able to get here so quick.”
She folded her arms despite the heat, nestled her sweating breasts between them.
“They give me his pistol,” Waite said.
She waited, and his face became all lines as he got himself ready to say it out loud. That there would be no justice. Not the kind she wanted, anyway.
Since it was so easy to look at him now, she did it, reckoning him in his late forties. If she hadn’t been so brimming with hate, she’d have still considered him fine-looking, even all these years later. His shirt fit well at the shoulders, his pants snug at the hips. He was skinnier than before. One thing she noticed was that his fingers weren’t scarred from cotton, where nail met skin, the way hers and her son’s were. Had been.
“You see,” Waite began, “it’s pretty generally known where your boy was going.” He flapped a hand at her son. “When they stopped him.”
“ ‘Stopped him’? That’s what you call what they done?”
“Yes’m.”
She waited.
“He was going to shoot Glaine’s daddy.”
She waited. She realized she’d quit rocking and pushed at the porch boards with her bare feet until she was moving again, whisper of wind on the back of her neck, beneath her bun of brown hair. She heard her breath going in and out of her nose.
Waite suddenly took off his hat and began to examine the brim, the leather band sweated through, then turned it over and looked into the dark crown shaped by his head. “Way I hear it,” he said, “is your boy and Travis Bolton had some words at the Coffeeville Methodist last week. I wasn’t there, see. I’d been serving a warrant down in Jackson.” When Waite came forward she heard his holster creak. He set a foot on the bottom step, careful not to touch the blood, and bent at the waist and rested his elbows on his knee. “But I got me a long memory, Missus Freemont. And the thing I told you back then, well, it still stands.”
Bess had a long memory too.
She’d been sixteen years younger. Sixteen years younger and almost asleep when that other wagon, the first one, had rattled up outside. She rose from where she’d been kneeling before the hearth, half in prayer, half for warmth. Another cold December day had passed, she remembered, rain coming, or snow. It was dark out, windy at intervals, the rocking chair on the porch tapping against the front wall. A pair of sweet potatoes on the rocks before her all the food they had left.
A horse nickered. She pulled her shawl around her shoulders and held it at her throat. Clay, not two years old then, had been asleep under a quilt on the floor beside her. Now he got up.
“Stay here, boy,” she told him, resting a hand on top of his head. He wore a tattered shirt and pants given by church women from the last county they’d lived in, just over a week before. Barefooted, he stood shivering with his back to the fire, hands behind him, the way his father liked to stand.
On the porch, she pulled the latch closed behind her and peered into the weakly starred night. Movement. Then a lantern raised and a man in a duster coat and derby hat seemed to form out of the fabric of darkness. He wore a beard and spectacles that reflected the light he held above him.
“Would you tell me your name, miss?” he asked her.
She said it, her knuckles cold at her throat. She heard the door open behind her and stepped in front of it to shield Clay.
“This is my land you’re on,” the man said, “and that’s one of my tenant houses y’all are camped out in.”
Bess felt relief. He’s only here about the property.
“My husband,” she said. “He ain’t home.”
“Miss,” the man said, “I believe I know that.”
Fear again. She came forward on the porch, boards loose beneath her feet, and stopped on the first step. The horse shook its head and stamped against the cold. “Easy,” the man whispered. He set the brake and stepped from the seat into the back of the wagon, holding the lantern aloft. He bent and began pushing something heavy. Bess came down the first step. Behind her, Clay slipped out the door.
The man climbed from the tailgate of the wagon and took a few steps toward her. He was shorter than she was, even with his hat and in his boots. Now she could see his eyes.
“My name is Mister Bolton,” he said. “Could you walk over here, miss?”
She seemed unable to move. The dirt was cold, her toes numb. He waited a moment, gazing past her at Clay. Then he looked down, shaking his head. He came toward her and she recoiled as if he might hit her, but he only placed a gloved hand on her back and pushed her forward, not roughly but firmly. They went that way to the wagon, where she looked in and, in the light of his lantern, saw her husband.
E. J. was dead. He was dead. His jacket opened and his shirtfront red with blood. His fingers were squeezed into fists and his head thrown back, mouth open. His hair covered his eyes.
“He was stealing from me,” Bolton said. “I seen somebody down in my smokehouse and thought it was a nigger. I yelled at him to stop but he took off running.”
“Stealing what?” she whispered.
“A ham,” Bolton said.
Bess’s knees began to give way; she grasped the wagon edge. Her shawl fell off and she stood in her thin dress. Bolton steadied her, his arm going around her shoulders. He set the lantern on the floor of the wagon, by E. J.’s boot.
“I am sorry, miss,” Bolton said, a hand now at each of her shoulders. “I wish . . .”
Clay had appeared behind her, hugging himself, his toes curling in the dirt.
“Go on in, boy,” she told him. “Now.”
He didn’t move.
“Do like your momma says,” Bolton ordered, and Clay turned and ran up the stairs and went inside, pulling the door to.
Bolton led Bess back to the porch and she slumped on the steps. He retrieved her shawl and hung it across her shoulders.
“My own blame fault,” he said. “I knew y’all was out here. Just ain’t had time to come see you. Run you off.”
No longer able to hold back, Bess was sobbing into her hands, which smelled of smoke. Some fraction of her, she knew, was glad E. J. was gone, glad he’d no longer pull them from place to place, only to be threatened off at gunpoint by some landowner again and again. No more of the sudden rages or the beatings he gave her or Clay or some bystander. But, she thought, for all his violence, there were the nights he got only half drunk and they slept enmeshed in one another’s limbs, her gown up high where she’d pulled it and his long johns around one ankle. His quiet snoring. Th
e marvelous lightness between her legs and the mattress wet beneath them. There were those nights. And there was the boy, her darling son, who needed a stern hand, a father, even if what he got was one like E. J., prone to temper and meanness when he drank too much whiskey. Where would they go now, she asked herself, the two of them?
“Miss?” Bolton tugged at his beard.
She looked up. It had begun to rain, cold drops on her face, in her eyes.
“You want me to leave him here?” Bolton asked her. “I don’t know what else to do with him. I’ll go fetch the sheriff directly. He’ll ride out tomorrow, I expect.”
“Yeah,” Bess said. She blinked. “Would you wait . . . ?” She looked toward the window where Clay’s face ducked out of sight.
“Go on ahead,” he said.
Inside, she told the boy to take his quilt into the next room and wait for her.
When she came out, Bolton was wrestling E. J. to the edge of the wagon. Bess helped him and together they dragged him up the steps.
“You want to leave him on the porch?” Bolton huffed. “He’ll keep better.”
“No,” she said. “Inside.”
He looked doubtful but helped her pull him into the house. They rolled him over on a torn sheet on the floor by the hearth. In the soft flickering firelight, her husband seemed somehow even more dead, a ghost, the way the shadows moved on his still features, his flat nose, the dark hollows under his eyes that Clay would likely have as well. She pushed his hair back. She touched his lower jaw and closed his mouth. Tried to remember the last thing he’d said to her when he left that afternoon. His mouth had slowly fallen back open, and she put one of the sweet potatoes under his chin as a prop.
Bolton was gazing around the room, still wearing his gloves, hands on his hips. Abruptly he walked across the floor and went outside, closing the door behind him. When he came back in, she jumped up and stared at him.
In one arm he held a bundle.