And All Our Wounds Forgiven (14 page)

“That man would still be alive if he hadn’t let me stay in his house. That man would still be alive if not for me!” Bobby finally blurted.

“He’s not going to be the last one to die,” Cal told him. “You have to get used to it. The price of freedom is death.”

That was not what he wanted to hear, not now, but he did not know what else to say, did not know even what he wanted to hear, and finally, he shook his head and wandered from the kitchen toward the front of the house and, surprised, found Andrea sitting quietly on the sofa, the house now empty of those intelligences feeding on themselves, and she looked up at him and after a moment, she opened her arms and he went and as she held him, he sobbed and knew that Cal was deaf to his own pain, because the cry of a people was easier to respond to than the tears from one pair of eyes, and for the first time, Bobby wondered what he was doing and why.

He stayed drunk for three days after Mr. Montgomery was killed and wanted to leave Shiloh before he got somebody else killed. The evening of the funeral Mrs. Montgomery, still dressed in black, said, “Son, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. We got to let the white folks know they better buy all the bullets they can find, ‘cause they gon’ have to use ‘em on all us to stop us from getting our freedom.”

He stayed and did everything he knew to force somebody to use one of those bullets — talked back to highway patrolmen, cursed the sheriff, dared plantation owners to shoot him, and he almost succeeded the night a shotgun blast covered him with glass as he lay sleeping, or the first time he took someone to the courthouse to register to vote and a mob beat him into unconsciousness.

People thought he was courageous, but courage was quiet and cautious, rooted in respect for one’s mortality and the grief of those who would mourn you.

One morning at breakfast Mrs. Montgomery said, “Robert, don’t you know that Charlie Montgomery will be mighty disappointed in you if you get yourself killed for nothing. Son, don’t nobody blame you for what happened to Charlie. Nobody ’cepting you. Charlie knowed what he was doing, knowed the chance he was taking. When the Lawd thinks your dying will help folks more than your living, He’ll let you know.”

Bobby did not feel absolved of responsibility for finding who had killed Mr. Montgomery, however. He had a feeling everybody in Shiloh knew except him, even Mrs. Montgomery, but no one would say and he could not be seen asking. So he waited until after midnight before getting in his car and driving the intricate network of the county’s back roads that linked plantation to plantation. He drove slowly to minimize the noise of the car’s engine and without headlights because any movement after midnight was suspicious. He stopped at shack after shack, knocked on doors until someone awoke and called out, “Who?” through the door, and hearing his name they knew his business. “Ain’t nobody here seen nothing. Don’t nobody here know nothing.”

That’s how it was for five nights but on the sixth, a door opened and there stood a small, bald-headed man as black as wet tree bark in a floor-length nightshirt . “I was dar,” he said simply. “I seen. I know.”

That was Ezekiel Whitson. He spoke an almost primitive English, as if he did not trust language or because he respected it so much he wanted to be careful not to abuse or misuse it. He invited Robert into the one-room cabin where he lived alone and did not light the kerosene lamp. Instead he guided Robert to a table in the middle of the room and helped him into a chair while he took the other across from him.

“Cholly would come by cotton gin a couple times a week. No reason ‘cept sit and talk to us’n. Talk freedom talk. Don’t care what buckra hear, don’t hear. Talk freedom must act free. Cholly want us’n vote. Mistah Jeb. Cholly go to his truck to go from there. Mistah Jeb go to his truck and get he shotgun. He walk toward Cholly. When he get close all he say was ‘Cholly.’ Cholly turn. Mistah Jeb let go with both barrels. Cholly dead ‘fo he hit the dust. Mistah Jeb put he shotgun back in he truck. Don’t nobody say nothing. Buckra they stand quiet on they side of the gin shed. Niggers stand quiet on they side of the gin shed. Don’t nobody know what to do ‘cepting Junior who run to find you. You come. Sheriff come. We go.”

Bobby left Shiloh that same night and drove to Nashville. He didn’t trust calling the Justice Department from Mrs. Montgomery’s phone, so he used Cal’s. But the JD said they couldn’t protect Ezekiel Whitson and they weren’t even sure there was enough evidence to file charges against Jeb Lincoln, who would have every white man testifying that they had seen him at the opposite end of the county and what was one old colored man’s word against so many whites but Bobby didn’t care. “None of that matters,” he said heatedly to the dispassionate voice of the Justice Department lawyer. “If you don’t give Ezekiel Whitson FBI protection, he is going to be killed because he spoke with me about what he saw.”

The voice at the other end of the line sighed. “I understand the pressure you people who work in those places must feel, but really, this is the United States. People don’t get lynched anymore.”

“You dumb muthafucka! Charlie Montgomery got lynched two months ago.”

There was silence from the other end of the phone. Finally, “I’m sorry,” the voice said with genuine feeling. “I’m sorry.”

On Christmas Eve a loud explosion rocked the countryside around Shiloh. Robert was awake instantly, and because he slept in his clothes, he had his socks and shoes on and was out the door before the reverberations ceased echoing across the sky.

Few flames were needed to consume a tiny man in a tiny house, and when Robert arrived the fire had almost burned itself out. He could see the body as black as charred wood, This was the first bombing and Robert would learn that, depending on how close to the explosion the victim had been, generally the body remained intact, which was surprising considering the noise a bomb made.

The bomb that killed Ezekiel had been placed outside. Given the paucity of fire it had not been that well-made. Well, it had killed its target. How much better made was it supposed to have been?

In Shiloh silence was a form of communication, the heaviness of it bespeaking shame, the tension in it melting bowels into water, its heat scorching brows and burning armpits. Colored and white were imprisoned in the silence of knowledge unspoken, conspiring to keep alive a reality that would never be the same, not now, not since Death had come to live among them. No one spoke of what everyone knew. They simply waited to see who Death would take next.

Robert wanted out. Fuck civil rights! Fuck freedom! Fuck John Calvin Marshall! He was 20 years old. He was too young to be holding people’s brains in his hand. He should be seeing how many pussies he could stick his dick into.

But he was supposed to have enough courage for all of them, to pry the fingers of fear from around their throats and teach them how to breathe. He could not do that if he was choking.

After a while, he could only get up in the mornings if he had spent the night at Ella’s, a little juke joint on the edge of the cotton field off Highway 51. It was nothing more than a large room with a few tables, a counter, a jukebox and two pinball machines. You could get beer and if you went out back, moonshine. He always went out back. He was there every night, a bottle of moonshine in his back pocket, two dollars in nickels in his shirt pocket, and he drank and played the pinball machine. He narrowed all his attention to the metal orb beneath the glass as if by doing so, that orb would take the place of the one going in its trough around the sun. He watched the metal ball bounce off the sides and inevitably toward the flippers, which he flicked precisely to send the ball back toward the top of the machine. He didn’t care how many points he made or how many games he won. He just shoved nickel after nickel in the machine until the noise of the ricocheting ball and the flashing lights, the bells and buzzers and moonshine had anesthetized him and some woman would protect him with her unadorned beauty.

But there was no protection, especially that afternoon in February of 1962 when he was driving along Highway 51, not going anywhere, just driving, not thinking about anything, especially not thinking, and when he finally noticed the flashing red light in his rearview mirror, he wondered how long it had been there and why.

“Bobby,” the sheriff said simply, leaning down to stare at him.

“Sheriff Simpson,” Robert said in quiet acknowledgement.

Zebadiah Simpson was not the stereotype of the southern sheriff. His stomach did not hang over his belt. Not only wasn’t he fat, if anything he was underweight. He was five-six at most, and on first glance, the pleasantness of his facial expression made one wonder why he was in law enforcement. He had never been anything but polite since Bobby had come to Shiloh and even seemed sympathetic to civil rights. “I don’t make the laws. I simply enforce them, the ones I like and the ones I don’t.”

Bobby remembered those words after Charlie Montgomery’s death and wanted to ask the sheriff if he enforced the laws against murder but, hell, in Mississippi killing a nigger really didn’t qualify as murder. That was more on the order of pest control or rubbish removal. You could only accuse somebody of murder if they killed a human being, and although nobody had quite figured where niggers fit, you had to be a goddam Yankee to call ‘em human.

“Why don’t we go over to my office in Gillam and talk, Bobby?”

Not a day would pass when he did not wish he had refused and invited Death. Sheriff Simpson was more dangerous than other sheriffs because he eschewed beatings and murders. There was a stillness in his blue eyes that hinted at an intelligence notable for a subtlety of malevolence. Where other sheriffs would have sought to destroy the bodies of those who threatened them, Zebadiah Simpson knew he needed only damage the soul. That was why he had left Charlie Montgomery to lie in the dust for two hours. That was why he never acknowledged the bombing of Ezekiel Whitson. His indifference unsettled Bobby far more than rage would have.

Gillam was the county seat ten miles south of Shiloh. Like many small southern towns it was built around a square at the center of which stood the county courthouse. In the basement of the courthouse was the jail and sheriff’s office.

The office was a small room behind and to the right of the reception area. Bobby assumed the cells were behind the steel door at the end of the corridor past the sheriff’s office, where he now sat staring at the large Confederate flag tacked to the wall behind the sheriff’s desk.

“I want to be up front with you,” the sheriff began with quiet earnestness. “If I was colored, I’d be doing what you and the others are doing. We both know that segregation is a stupid system and that it is not going to last the decade. I can hear you thinking that if that’s how I feel, why don’t I arrest Jeb Lincoln for shooting Charlie Montgomery and for putting that bomb outside that old nigra’s shack? I reckon if I thought it would do any good, I would. But, think about it. Let’s say I arrest Jeb. You don’t think any jury in Mississippi would convict him, do you? So, what would I accomplish? Well, I’d probably have to move out of the state for daring to arrest a white man for killing a nigra. You understand what I’m saying.”

Bobby shook his head. “Right is right and wrong is wrong, sheriff.”

The sheriff smiled. “That’s why I tell Jeb that you’re going to win. You believe you have right on your side. You can’t beat anybody who feels that way, and that’s especially so if you kill them. Somebody who dies for what they believe in impresses the hell out of people. I told Jeb the worst thing he could do was kill you. Hell, if you were to get killed, you’d never die.”

The sheriff got up and motioned for Bobby to follow him. He walked down the corridor, unlocked the steel door, and moved to the side for Bobby to enter first.

Bobby entered a corridor lined on each side with jail cells. The sheriff locked the door behind them and sauntered easily down the corridor.

“There were five happy men this morning when I unlocked these cells and told them they could go. I told ‘em I was having a party here this afternoon.” He looked over his shoulder at Bobby and smiled. “Don’t you worry none. I ain’t going to kill you. In fact, I’m not going to leave a mark on you. But I guarantee you when I get done, you’ll never forget me.”

At the end of the corridor Bobby saw two Negroes whom he recognized from Shiloh — June Boy, a big fieldhand whom he had seen at Ella’s, and Wylie, who had a scar that ran from his ear halfway to his throat.

“I’m a muthafucking genius, Bobby,” the sheriff said as he nodded to the two Negroes. They took Robert by the arms and pulled him into the last cell where they threw him onto a blanket on the floor and held him down, one at his chest, the other at his legs.

The sheriff kneeled beside Bobby, undid his belt buckle and pulled his pants and underpants down to his ankles. Robert closed his eyes as he felt the sheriff’s surprisingly soft hands take hold of his penis and tenderly stroke it until it, because it was it, became stiff and rigid and the sheriff reached in his pocket and taking out his pocket knife, opened it and began gently stroking the head of Robert’s penis with the sharp edge of the knife blade and Robert opened his eyes and stared intently at the paint peeling from the ceiling, hoping that by doing so he could subvert his body but the excitement rose in him and despite himself, his body twitched involuntarily as the sheriff continued stroking his penis with the knife blade, lightly, barely touching the skin so that the penis hungered for the next touch as the blade went from the head down the trunk of the penis, farther and farther down until it came to the base and then slowly back up, again and again and again until the orgasm came and it was more intense than any he had ever had with a woman and his will and determination not to scream his pleasure were not enough and the release was total and complete, his aspirated screams echoing off the stone walls of the jail cell, his body arching as the semen spurted out and down his rigid penis like milky tears and Sheriff Simpson looked up at Wylie and asked, “You want to lick him clean?” and Wylie said, “Yassuh,” and leaning over Robert, began licking and sucking on his penis, licking and sucking until another orgasm came, this one spreading down into Bobby’s groin and thighs and up into his abdomen and chest and Robert cried because there was nothing in this godawful world like the purifying grace of an orgasm and the penis didn’t give a shit about the stimulation and they left him there on the floor, limp, exhausted, sexually satisfied and intent on his own death.