It was a dream — small, indistinct — to both of them just then, the words like dream words they were not so much making up as snatching from the air, a happiness overtaking them like a sweet scent riding on the warm dry wind. The breeze touched their faces and felt to each like the gentle fingers of the other. Ellen blushed. Billy saw the color filling her cheeks just under the smooth raised bone as a sign sent especially for him. Each sensed what the other experienced. The woman — usually private, unembellished, strict with herself — bent slightly toward him, and he slid slightly sideways as if angling for a quieter, more private spot, both of them understanding. They walked quietly along beside each other. At the door of the Shawl House, the only hotel in town and, like so many of the hotels in these rural county seats, a monumental affair, built in this case of rough granite, its windows recessed like the windows of a medieval castle, they stopped. The confederate battle flag billowed beside the state flag above the front entrance; no federal flag flew anywhere in this town, not even in front of the post office.
He smiled at her — calm, complicitous — and she smiled back, so faintly that she could have denied it in any court, and he caught it. Despite this, he felt at their parting a mournfulness like the fading of a fine day, but he knew too this was a parting that contained a promise. He put his hand over his heart. It was a gesture, a gimmick, but he could feel his heart knocking.
“Yes,” he said to the question both of them held in mind.
She smiled, a gentling smile, the way a girl would smile at a pony. “Yes,” she said, “I guess. .”
And turned and pushed through the big glass, brassfooted doors held open for her by an africano man in a forest-green embraided suit.
Crossing the square back to the little office they had rented in the Cotton Exchange building, his thoughts like birds returning crankily to the rookery of the trial, he considered that all they could do in this so-called legal case was present a clean recitation — that’s all it was really — of the events: a line of execution — sure, execution — for those boys to hold on to, all eight of them headed straight to the hangman’s noose. Most those boys could hope for was for Billy and crew to get them life sentences at Burning Mountain.
That evening in the jail with Harris and Pullen and all eight of the boys lined up on the long bench across from them, fielding questions, some of them without reason or any connection whatsoever to the situation at hand, Gammon experienced again the exhilaration of his afternoon walk. I need something to buoy me up, he thought, but she is better than something. Ellen. Don’t call the woman you love she. One of the boys was asking when he could go home. “I’m wore out sitting in this place,” he said, Arthur Bony Bates, a boy of fifteen with a pudgy, smooth-skinned dark face and slow, cloudy eyes.
“We are working on that, my boy,” Lopellier Harris — called Larry — said affably.
“I’ll say I slapped one of those white boys, and I
“It’s violating those two women they got us on the hook for,” Delvin Walker said. He was a smallish, very dark-skinned boy, eighteen, the case file said, with broad shoulders and a quick, lively look in his hazel eyes.
“I didn’t violate nobody,” Butter Beecham said, a man in his twenties, a laborer for life, unable to read and write. “Nobody,” Butter reiterated.
“All right,” Larry Harris said.
Davis Pullen looked toward the windows that were painted over with whitewash. During the day, light came through the wash, but at night they were dull and blank. Under the table he made two fists on his knees — made them and slowly let them go. The dog lines in his face deepened.
Harris carefully questioned each boy. He had arrived from New York by train three days ago and had hit the ground running, as Davis put it. “Running straight into a brick wall,” he’d added, cackling. The facts as the boys experienced them were straightforward and dire. One of those white boys, identified as Carl Willis, had stepped on the hand of Delvin Walker, and from this incident a fight had started.
“Did you hit him?” Harris asked.
“Eventually I did,” Delvin said. He wore a look of profound sadness. He knew what this was, this court assembly.
“Eventually?”
“He kicked me and nearly knocked me off the hopper.”
