Ginny Gall полностью

Baco is the one who’d accompany Billy down to the Shawl House where the big girl, Lucille Blaine, is staying, and according to the ruling of the judge — or close to it — she has to talk with him present at her deposition about what happened in the hours between four in the afternoon and six thirty o’clock on September 8, 1931, but of course she doesn’t want to talk or if she does what she has to say is that those nigras, especially that one, that main one who is so talkative, that Delvin Walker, he is the one who did the most damage to her, the one who was first — and last — on the scene, he is the one ripped up her secret self like he was tearing flesh off the inner bones of her body. .

“Lord,” she says, “that pinched little monster wouldn’t quit til I could smell the blood from my own body burning in my nose. Such pain as no human woman should have to experience was my pain”—pain for life possibly, Dr. Kates said in the deposition—“and still that black beast whanged away at me like I was the satisfaction to his Hell’s own fires. .”

He has all this down in his notes, and more, and Billy has read it and laughed, turned the page around on the big wood table so it faced Baco and, laughing, said, “Maybe she would be happier on the Elizabethan stage than here among us,” pointing at her words that as she had spoken them were soaked, weighted with a malice that he wished sometimes he could get across to those reading them.

But why worry about that, he thinks, because she is right here in front of them now, in the hot courtroom, testifying as to what happened on that hot day when the leaves on the tulip trees were just starting to speckle with fall. “Yeah,” she is saying, this Lucille who must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds (let’s see, two hundred and fifty-eight to be exact, according to Dr. Kates’s report), “oh yeah, that one over there was the first, and then the other with the big eye was next, and another, and then after that I kinder lost track, but I do remember those other three and maybe that last one too, the one, if he’s the one who walks with a limp.

“He stutters, too,” she turns to the judge and says. “I recollect that quite clearly. You fffffff-fat bbbb-bitch, that’s what he called me. He had a little old pecker like. .”

And the judge, who looks half asleep, is taking notes as she says this — he’s not asleep, it’s just been his manner since grade school, Judge Montclair Harris — and raises his white head that still shows the nap mark mashed on the back and says, “That’s rich enough on the verbiage, thank you, dear.”

And Lucille looks at him as if she has caught him too in a lie and sits back satisfied as she always seems to be, and is these days, for the first time in her life, satisfied and abounding and content with herself and with life on this wretched earth that stinks in her nostrils like burning feathers off the peacocks on her granddaddy’s farm that her daddy shot out of hatred for his own daddy when he was drunk and burned their beautiful feathers in a yard fire — a world that every day attempts to reconvince her she is no good and shouldn’t have been the hell born anyway. What a sad world, a little voice under her breastbone says. The lower part of her face twitches. What a sad, ruined world. Some nights she sits in one of the big floral chairs in her room over at the hotel with her legs crossed like a man, rubbing the hem of her shift between her fingers, and cries until she thinks her heart will break. Well. It already is broken — that was accomplished years ago when her daddy shot the peacocks and bent her over his knee after she cried and beat her until her bottom broke. She will never forget that, by God, or none of the other beatings either and his was just the first.

Rising sometimes from the handsome oakwood chair as she speaks, she speaks all afternoon and well into the next day about how these eight boys, “and others too, I might mention, boys who must have flown away from that train on wings because I don’t see them here — yall couldn’t catch em? — how these eight and them, them two I mean in particular, raped me like stabbing knives into my most private parts and wouldn’t quit until I bled like that’s all they wanted me for was the bleedin’.”

Her hard plain broad face like a piece of cold raw field raised up, half molded and animated, and a bitterness in her eyes the world has distilled there, hatred whipped up stiff in her, durable as henge stone.

“Like I said, it was them two. . and then them others.”