Ginny Gall (12 page)

A tall gaunt man stepped forward and began to sing the jubilee song “Before I’d Be A Slave.” “O freedom . . . ,” he began.

From the corner of his eye Delvin saw a bright shawl of fire shoot incredibly high over the roof from in back of the church. Before the fire became a thought, he heard the thunderous explosion and was pushed against Mr. Oliver’s broad belly.

People screamed.

A siren somewhere off in the woods behind the church began to wail.

Another explosion, black and lithely red, hit the retired church across the yard, seeming to lift and set it momentarily back on the ground before it split apart and collapsed into burning boards and shingles.

The people, until this moment weighed down and nearly immobile, were suddenly roused. They cried out. Many ran crying and screaming into the fields and toward the road that was empty now of the police cars that had trailed them to this site.

A green glass bottle flew through the air, landed beside the side wall of the main church and exploded in fire.

Delvin, shaky but still upright, crouched under the open awning. The coffin perched on narrow boards above the grave. The older preacher, Rev Munch, lay in collapse across a couple of wooden folding chairs. Some people back in the crowd thought he’d been shot and this was how that story started. The younger preacher, partially recovered from his struggle, knelt beside the coffin. At the explosions he had winced and leaned away as if blown by their wind and looked up with an anguishing face and gone back to his praying. The singer held tightly to one of the brass tent poles.

The siren that had provided a back noise to the occurrence keened higher and faster, rushing until its noise became a wheezing sound like a giant trying to scream through a madness.

More fireballs, sputtering like sparklers, rained down.

Delvin and Oliver and Willie Burt helped the clerics and the singer and those knocked to the ground by the suddenness and noise to get up and get away from the grave.

Some people were crawling on their hands and knees. Others ran full out. Others, dazed or in shock, stood doing nothing.

A man with a smoking back ran by. A woman stumbled along fanning herself with a punctured derby. Little girls screamed.

There was nothing to do but leave the coffin where it was.

Fire caught in both church buildings, rose thickly from the remains of the old church and licked around the corners of the new structure

Delvin’s group joined the crowd fleeing. The dozen automobiles and trucks had created a traffic jam. Those in wagons attempted to get their mules and horses into action, but these animals were generally so frightened they couldn’t be controlled. Several broke loose and at least three rigs were hauled off across the cotton field bouncing and knocking through the thick knee-high bushes. Others rigs were trapped, tangled, forced back on themselves, animals driven to their knees under whipped reins, shying, kicking, knocking people to the ground, dragging them. Two horses, riderless, made it to the road
and were pulled up by quick-acting mourners who grabbed their flaring reins. A little boy was grazed in the forehead by a mule kick and knocked out, but was otherwise unhurt. Many were thrown off their feet and Sunday clothes were ruined and bruises and scrapes were applied everywhere. Some lost their shoes. The hearse was deeply dented on the passenger side by the kick of a mule.

Many people ran away down the eastward slanting road. Others headed through the fields back toward the settlement.

Oliver had gotten in the hearse and had been trying to start it when the mule kicked the door. “Get in,” he cried, not realizing what it was.

Just then Delvin tried the passenger door, but he couldn’t open it. Oliver turned his head and looked at him. The boy was far away, speaking without sound. Then he was close and Oliver could hear him shouting.
Reach this way!
The boy grinned crazily at him. Oliver grinned back.

Delvin tried the back door and this one worked. He climbed in and then crawled through the interior window space into the front seat. He hugged Oliver and in the hug Oliver could feel his life—that had been leaving him, leaving without his even knowing it—reviving in his body; it was as if the boy’s life poured into him. They grasped each other and held on for dear life and then as if a cue was taken by both they let go and looked each other in the eye. Both knew inexpressibly a great thing.

Oliver began to feel his life moving again at its natural speed. He started to cry—small, singular tears, each carrying a little bouquet of humility and gratitude. Delvin kept patting him as, mouth open, he stared out the window.

They sat side by side watching the clash and bang in the world around them. A young man trailing a long blue scarf ran by. A hugely fat woman in a large funnel hat stumped past waving one white glove. A man swung a wooden crutch at a woman who was shouting at him. A small boy climbed onto the hood of the hearse and stood waving a checkerboard bandana as if signaling and then jumped off and disappeared into the crowd, no one, as far as Delvin
could tell, having responded to the signal. A skinny man clapped his hands, threw back his head and hollered. Everybody hollered. Curls of smoke licked at the web-footed sweet gum leaves. Somebody was singing, some woman, at the top of her lungs. What firepower, Delvin thought, and it was about the woman not the fire he thought this. But the fire—able to take care of itself—was a circus of color all around. It raged and kicked with great blossoming fusillades like a flotilla of gunships firing cannons. Splashes and rents and gouts of flame. All handy combustibles in terrible trouble. A singing, whizzing noise. Up above everything, Delvin could see patches of blue sky, unshakeable, mute. Something in him pulsed and seemed to surge toward the sky. He felt a hugeness inside him as if he had broken open. An agitation came with this, a sense of things lopped off and falling, the old fearfulness careening through. He shuddered and drew his chest in. Then, as if a wave had passed through and gone on, a quiet filled him. He felt a rocking motion, a calm and a rectitude in himself, a shyness. Sunshine picked among the flames, distilling light. A sense of ease came on him, and it seemed natural and right that this was so. He would recall this feeling later in his life, but not for a while. He leaned back, or seemed to, as a swirl of smoke, black and tinged green, rolled past the grit-speckled windshield. He was back suddenly in the car.

The rear door opened and Willie Burt pushed the two preachers inside. They brought with them a powerful mingled smell of cologne and gasoline smoke. Rev Munch, sweat-soaked in his clothes, a spray of grit like tiny black stars across his forehead, had his arm around Rev Wayne. The skinny young reverend wrenched himself loose, scrambled to the far side and pressed against the door with his eyes closed. His clothes twisted around his thin body, he seemed to be talking to himself. “Lord,” Rev Munch said, “what a struggle.”

Willie had run around the hearse, shoved Mr. O aside, gotten in under the wheel, and started the motor. Oliver told him to wait. They had to anyway because they were still blocked in.

Delvin got out of the car. Both churches burned elaborately.
There was a well but no bucket, no stream, and no barrel of water standing by. Men ran to look at the blaze. No one seemed badly hurt. Several knelt praying before the fire. Lobbing prayers up into it, bombing away. The siren had ceased. Somebody, a short man in bright yellow suspenders, said shots had been fired back in the piney woods, but Delvin hadn’t heard them. He began to help move the stalled and tangled vehicles.

It took nearly an hour for everyone to be moved. The churches, large and small, had burned avidly, the big church burning more wildly than the little one, but gradually the fires subsided. A group of boys in sooty white shirts picked a broken-down Model T truck up and moved it out of the way of a farm wagon. They waved at Delvin to come help but he didn’t.

Oliver had gotten out and stood with both hands pressing his sides as if he was pumping himself up. A flight of distant birds, maybe a hundred out over the cotton field, veered suddenly as if they had just noticed the trouble and headed off north. Dust clouds hung over the road in both directions.

“We have unfinished business,” Mr. Oliver said to Delvin when he came around to him.

They all got out, moving in a new, weightier gravity. They helped the younger preacher out. He seemed overridden by his own deepset ailment. By now most people were gone. But a few remained. Among these was the family of the dead boy. They stood off to the side under some old, shaggy cedars near the cotton fields. The mother sat on a canvas camp chair somebody had provided. One of her living sons fanned her. They had carried the coffin with them under the trees. A few relatives stood around it, protecting it.

Before long the worst of the burning was over. The roof of the big church had swayed and collapsed with a huge growling noise, smothering much of the fire, and the fire in the other, the small one, seemed about to extinguish on its own. It smoldered and smoked
and burned in patches. Now and then something popped in the fire, sending up a screen of sparks that quickly subsided. They could hear a baby crying.

The police cars had vanished. There were no signs of siren-turning or bomb-throwing white men anywhere.

Oliver directed Delvin and George to re-erect the collapsed funeral tent. The graveyard looked like the disestablished drift scene of a great passing wave. Flowers scattered everywhere. Chairs knocked over. A silver mouth harp lying by itself on the lip of the grave. Pages from some book or songsheet lay like leavings of another occasion entirely. The big green funeral tent was unburned but they had to skeet the red soil off it with a broom somebody produced. Several of the few people left were crying or wiping away tears that had mingled with smoke and dust; their hands were dirty. No one had come out of the woods to kill them. That was where the siren noise and the firebombs had come from. Those left stood by the coffin and among the cedars waiting while the church finished burning.

After a while the people felt safe enough to continue. Black broken beams fire-whittled to sticks poked out of the wreckage. The front of the church was streaked with soot but intact, as if the fire itself was prepared to leave it as a warning or memorial. The side walls had collapsed and burned in a series of combustions, some as small as campfires. A few sooty boards had fallen into the scorched grass, burning separately, like dropped torches. The sun off beyond the rise past the cotton fields was taking on the heft and fullness of day’s end, lolling in a vast orange net. To the southwest sundogs ran along through silky clots of cloud. The tops of some of the cotton plants were dusted with soot.

The bereaved family had brought a hamper of food and they passed items around from it. Nearly everyone got a piece—partial piece—of fried chicken and a wedge of cornbread.

When the people were finished eating, Rev Wayne gathered them at the gravesite and they completed the service. The only sound from the woods was the soft sough of breeze in the pines. The older preacher spoke as funeral ministers do of the misery on the earth, of
the inevitability of grief. And of joy that comes just the same. Delvin wanted him to stop this time at the grief part. At funerals he often thought of his mother. He experienced a strange, exfoliating, shuddery feeling at the thought that she was still alive somewhere.

The singer—the skinny tall man (Delvin had seen him hoist himself into a moving wagon)—had fled, but at the end of the service those left behind sang his jubilee for him. In smoke-cracked, mournful, wheezy voices they sang, quietly, softly, as if in a secret language they wanted not only strangers but the trees and the air itself not to overhear. Delvin was not asked to recite the Hughes poem he had memorized, and this disappointed and relieved him.

The dead boy’s brothers pulled the planks from under the coffin and Elmer and several others lowered the box on ropes into the dry yellow earth.

“Let this soul cross over into campground,” the old preacher said.

Sometimes at funerals in these carefully discharged final moments there seemed to be a promised land after all. But for most of those standing on the sun-warmed, fire-heated pebbly ground, Delvin among them, not today. A sudden swell of grief overtook Delvin and he burst into tears. Tears like a sudden wind that shakes and releases a tree.

Before the first water was hardly out of him the wind had passed. Oliver pressed his hand. Delvin pressed back, glad to have somebody close who knew who he was, knew his name. He thought of the Ghost and wondered where he might be. A flock of crows raced westward as if they were trying to catch the dying sun. Close up he could smell the rich scent of the cedar trees. And he could smell the turned earth of the grave, a scent that always made him think of farming, of himself as part of a life of sowing seeds in a field, a promise or memory that was not even his, come back to him.

Those nearby, the poorly outfitted mournful members of the killed boy’s family, to speak of them, were crammed up with grief. It was nearly impossible to move in any part of their bodies. As if the organs themselves had solidified and the muscles and streaks of
ligament and tissue hardened and, too, even the heretofore streaming blood congealed. They felt leathery and stiff and mired. When they did move, and they did, under the peeling sky with its bulging veils of smoke, it was as if a peculiar narcotized influence had taken them over, as if the hand raised to push back the air, the shoulder lifted in shuddering refusal, the lips licked to soothe the dry cracked skin, the twitch, the wave, the brush, were kineticized by some airy unregulated pointless dissipate energy. The world was a mist of shadows and smothering floods. They were drowning without dying. The mother was an empty corn shuck tossed into the corner of a rained-in house. No one would ever come back to look for such as her. She wanted to cry out, to scream, to yell for help—for anyone, anyone who might remember her, to find her—she had to go get her child—but her voice was too weak to carry. She was stricken with remorse. The father, for the only time in his life as a man, in a flicked on and off vision, saw himself as a small boy, a boy dumbly chasing a rusty windblown handkerchief into the dark under some trees. His face looked as if it had been bitten mercilessly by insects.