The town was full of spectators. Sports and the bedeviled, thrillseekers, the estranged and crippled, common people, farmers drifted in on market days, old men riding in weathered wagons and children walking along beside, women in poke bonnets carrying tied-up packages by the string, aficionados of death row, reporters, profiteers, the falsely cunning and bereft. Some few of the africano women tried to bring them gifts. Food in wicker hampers or stacked in plates tied with a cotton cloth. Men wanted to look at them and the deputies brought a few of them back to the cell, white men, most of whom tried to look casual or tough — or maybe they were tough — leaning against one of the stone posts thumbing their galluses and leering. Some were calm, others stiff. Some had been walking around for weeks with a numbness on their skin, with a burning in closed places, with a sorrow so old and ugly they took a doctor’s pills to make it subside and stood on the back porch tossing bits of skillet bread to the dog or waked after midnight and went out in the dewy grass and called a name they hadn’t spoken since they were youngsters, parents of children who shuddered at their prayers and were losing weight and husbands of women who locked themselves in their rooms and sat on the bed fiddling with their rings — they had come here to see the living dead. More than one with his face like it was shellacked. Most sweating, some angry, some laughing. Most able to go on with their lives, even the man on a crutch the varnish was worn off of, or the fat man in a striped shirt eating a tamale from a piece of waxed paper. The fat man wiped his mouth with his bare wrist, leaving a streak of red juice on his cheek. A bouncy little man couldn’t stop grinning. A preacher dwelt in pentecostal gloom. Most — even those troubled in their spirit — were appreciative, relieved of the burden of chasing down these miscreants, of handling their black flesh or staring into their eyes in the last moments of their freedom, of being the ones sweating and running to catch up; they enjoyed now the blood surge that grew in strength as they walked the crooked jailhouse corridors toward the cell. Some experienced this episode as nothing more than a rectifying revenge — and Delvin thought, That is what it is: revenge by murder, and he had turned away and gotten sick in the slop bucket. They don’t know me, he thought. And behind him, outside the bars, hearts ticking, breath entering lungs and blood circulating through bodies, deep into the indwellings of the brain, clattering and banging out the news: Not me, not this time — not me.
Carl’s mother had come and Bonette’s and Little Buster’s, but they weren’t allowed back to the cell. The prisoners could hear people calling to them from the street. At night the voices were clear even in the heavy air. Men saying, We going to hang yu, jigs. We gon get yu tucked into hell. Gon slip up there and cut yu up. Burn yu. Women called too. Ha ha, they said, ha ha ha. A deputy would have to go out and tell them to be quiet. You run back in, Horton, and play with yo coons, somebody yelled and the crowd laughed. They were marginal folk, long dispossessed of love for themselves, mostly. Cunning but not smart. They wrapped themselves in the ragged tails of night. Somebody broke into song. Crooked hymn singing. From a hymnal nobody in the cell had ever read. The voices quoted scriptures of damnation and pestilence. None with green pastures in them. None with still waters. New scriptures, hot off the presses. Lo, from this place you will exit burning. Oh ye of the jig rind crisping. Yo body become ashes cast on the wind. Where you will dwell forever.
