Bob steps over the railroad tracks with careful haste, like a man crossing an ice floe. He puts one foot on the crumbling steps and looks up and sees that there are people standing above him on the platform, people looking down at him, people waiting for him. They are black, three men and a woman. One man, dressed all in white with a scarlet sash around his waist, has positioned himself slightly ahead of the others and has folded his arms over his chest, like an impresario. The second is slight, wearing dark trousers and a white dress shirt, and looks downcast, like a prisoner whose confession has been extracted by torture. Behind him looms the third, a man tall as a column, sepulchral, tautly drawn to his full and amazing height and dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers and wearing sunglasses and a top hat. Holding lightly to his elegantly bent arm, like his consort, is a woman in a white frock, a very dark woman whom Bob recognizes at once. She’s the woman from the boat, saved from drowning to come back and move among the living and, when the white man presents himself, to name him to himself, that he may be judged. She’s the woman whose fate now is to say his fate to him, that he may live it out. It’s she who must endure the sight of the sign of his shame, the money clutched in his outstretched hands, and must hear him beg her to take it from him, “Please, take this from me, take the money, take it,” while bills fall like leaves from the pile in his hands, get grabbed back up from the ground and get thrust at her again and again, as he pleads, “Take it, please! Take the money!” And she’s the woman who must refuse to remove the sign of his shame, who must turn away from him now, and leading the three others, walk back through the door to the darkness beyond, leaving him alone out there, the money still in his hands, and behind him, waiting, the four young wolves who led him to this place.
Bob turns and faces them. The leader takes a single step forward and extends his hand, palm up, for the money. Bob shakes his head slowly from side to side. Then, crushing the bills together, he stuffs the money back into his pocket. All four wolves step carefully over the railroad tracks toward him. The leader, his right hand still extended toward Bob to receive the money from him, holds a short knife in his left. The other men hold knives also.
With a coarse shout that stops the four, Bob cries, “No! This money is mine!” And abruptly, like a boy in summer diving off a pier into a lake, he puts his hands before his face and steps forward, and at once the four men pounce on him, stabbing at him until he falls — spinning, arms and legs outstretched, spinning slowly as he falls, almost weightlessly, like a pale blossom in a storm of blossoms, filling the air with white, a delicate, slowly shifting drift through moonlight to the ground.
