A Killing in This Town by Olympia Vernon

Author:Olympia Vernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2006-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

chapter eighteen

The rain made him cold.

Gill Mender had run through it, trembling.

Five years he had lived in the abandoned house: everything in one room.

The rain spun around him and he knew how a part of the spinning he was when it came to him: Curtis Willow. Come out, nigger.

He had said it, his very own mouth: Curtis’s head was dirty, the debris of the dragging woven into it, the skull cracked as if the blade of a shovel had gone down into it and a man, any man, had stuck his foot on the edge of it and pushed down on it, so he would go ahead and do his swelling where he was, that way the blood’d burst right out of him and onto the ground. But they—the Bullock Klansmen—made him do it.

Come here, son, they said. Push down on it.

No, sir. Gill whispered. Don’t make me.

But Hurry Bullock snatched him out of his begging and lit a match where the head was and made him put his foot on the shovel and jump down on it. That was how his eye popped out: the pressure of the blade pushed his brains forward—near the nostril—not enough room in the socket.

When a nigger’s head bursts, the earth takes him inward, into her bosom, and she washes the blood out of his hair, straightens his foot out, and she cannot bear to see him as she found him, all broken up like that, and patches his head together. Mud.

The large and blurry window, adjacent to Gill’s standing, held the smear of his fingerprint, and as he stood in the room, alone and without, he recalled the energy of the house after the dragging: his father had walked up behind him, patted him on the shoulder of his right arm. A mixture of rain and dirt had run down the sodden sleeve of his robe, onto the brink of his index finger, the floor.

What had he done? The howling of Curtis Willow drifted down his throat. He swallowed, his hand up to the window. Rain-dirt.

Good boy, son, whispered his father.

Not only his father but all of the Klansmen were in the one-room house: Hoover Pickens and the Bullocks—the husband of the widow—stood around him with an air of diversion about them. Even his mother.

Hear how that nigger called out? said one of the men. We put him down. We put him down.

Their laughter rose with expansion, darted throughout their conversation like the arrogance of light in the wrong eye: The nigger, the nigger, hear how he called out? they yelled. For mercy.

No one had noticed: a brown recluse spider crawled atop the hood of the widow’s husband. Gill had seen it—a thing of powerful solidarity—leap down from a singular, webbed line and onto his Klan suit.

Dead nigger now, he yelled.

Among the words Dead nigger now, the brown recluse crept upon him, near the skull, as if both line and activity carried the same result. He laughed and his throat held it. The spider paused.

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