They were approaching the junction at Kollersburg. The train slowed. He got to his feet, danced a slow little step to get the feeling back in his legs. He climbed down through the trap into the car. The women were shouting again. Crows squawking. You get scared to the point you can’t turn it off. At the edge of their group a large man with blood crusted on his knuckles. He had a dazed look. Delvin thought he would like to speak to this man, but the train was coming to a stop. He heard angry voices above the clattering and squealing of metal. Shouts. Men were running. The sound of horses. The train creaking to a stop.
He saw four white men race past the door, men carrying shotguns, one in a bow tie and a brown vest — like a lawyer, he thought, or a doctor — but he was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. And then the runners saw the men on the train and stopped and wheeled in a fury of shouts and spit popping from their lips and cried for
“You get down or by God and Jesus we will shoot you where you stand.”
He knew what was happening, he saw it, but something off to the side, a lingering presence, said this is not so. Above the men’s heads a lone blue jay sailed along, dipping and rising. What was the matter with that bird?
“Oh, don’t let them kill me,” the skinny, wrenched girl yelled from back in the boxcar gloom.
Both doors filled with guns, leveled on them, on the boys, men, of color. You had a front gun row, a second, third and gallery of guns, safeties off. The ones who had participated in lynchings knew what to do, but the ones who had never seen a mob before also, instinctively, knew as well. It was as if they had been here many times. As if this furious clumping together, this scarifying, claiming vengeance or redemption, was as natural as sunlight.
Wading through the mob came the sheriff and his deputies, men in khaki carrying shotguns all of the same make and model, Colt Busters, 12 gauge pump-action, loaded with double-aught buckshot. They walked without looking to the side or with any waywardness, as if they were marching to their destinies and they understood and welcomed it.
A sharp, dingy despair cut across Delvin’s mind. He knew as if it was tattooed on the palm of his hand what was coming. But he couldn’t believe it. From among the ruck of eight africano boys left in the car — one of them barely thirteen — he gaped at the irreversible future taking shape under a richly blue September sky. The afternoon heat was like hot syrup stuffing every crevice, heat so strong it was nauseating.
“Come on out of there, boys,” the sheriff said in his heavy, florid voice, Sheriff Benny Capers, born in 1880 in the Capers Park community over near Marksonville. As that Babylonian king called to Daniel in the lions’ den, the sheriff called to them.
“Wonder Where Is Old Daniel” was sometimes sung at funerals. Where was old Mr. Oliver? Where was Celia? Where was his mother?
Delvin’s body had become almost too heavy to move, but he wasn’t quite in his body, even as he experienced it doddering toward the door. How natural it was to do what he was told! How far there was to go! He was heavy but he floated. A line of tiny red ants flowed steadily along the joining of the wall to the floor. Where you going, ants? Where you come from?
The posse had dogs out there too, so he saw as he reached the door, already shuffling like a man in irons — dogs: curs and shaggy varmint-catchers and mongrel farm dogs had joined the party, yapping and snarling. Somebody close by had already shit his pants.
They made them jump. Stepped back so the boys jumped onto the hard yellow clay. Delvin banged his right knee but he wouldn’t feel it for hours. Not until the culprits, the lazy fools and black hooligans, had exited and been grabbed and rope-tied and hooded with flour sacks did they call for the women to come out. One by one the defiled were lifted carefully, almost delicately, down, the men trying their best not to injure these destroyed ladies any further. The big one still shouting.
The africano boys — some stoical, some dumbly distant, some crying under the hoods that smelled of biscuits, one yelling
