The funeral was held a day and a half later at the tall narrow Jericho Holiness church fourteen miles outside the city near the old negro community of Middle Horse among the remnants of a neglected pecan orchard surrounded by mixed cotton fields and woods. But before this, lines of silent mourners trudged through the funeral home to pause before the white-painted pinewood box plumped with quilted blue satin complete with a blue satin pillow for the boy’s head. They’d been coming through since first light. CASEY DAVID HAROLD was etched into a round brass plate on the coffin lid. His mother sat in one of the plush red quilted armchairs in the little family room off to the side of the viewing room, moaning and gripping herself in her arms. Her husband, a heavyset, feckless man taken by drink, skittered around the room laughing in a strenuous false manner and shaking hands with everyone who came in. Behind his gay mask his eyes burned with a fever of grievous perplexity. An air of mortification and sorrow filled the room. A compressed vulcanizing barely contained energy swelled. And in some spots hope guttering.
“We’d have held the viewing out at our home in the country,” Mr. Harold told folks, “but it was just too small.”
The funeral expenses were being paid by Mr. W. B. Bickens, who had also offered his house for the viewing, but he was relieved when Mrs. Harold said no, she wanted the people of Chattanooga to get a look at what those white men had done to her child. (No white folks showed up at the funeral home.) Oliver had worked hard to bring the boy back to the look of health. Mrs. Harold had broken into the room a second time and ordered him to stop fixing her son’s face. At first Oliver had thought he misunderstood her, or he told himself he did. She said, “I don’t want you making a fool of my son.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said, “I won’t. . I couldn’t,” and let his hands drop to his sides.
“I don’t want you fancin’ him up.”
A sadness had filled Oliver’s body. The tips of his fingers were shriveled from the ingestants. He wiped his hands on a clean towel he took from a pile on the counter. The towels were usually kept in one of the cabinets, but this case was such a mess he had Culver bring them out. “I will—”
“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say what you will or you won’t. Just quit trying to replace my boy with somebody else. Put him back like them white mens left him.”
In the end it was a mix. Oliver could not bring himself to wound the boy’s half-restored face again. But he didn’t go further. The cuts were still apparent, the lip with its vertical gash like a field-dressed wound. He had wept in frustration and despair as he worked. In the end he was left with a weariness he hadn’t known he could experience and still walk around in. His legs hurt, and a hard pain had worked its way into his shoulders and roosted there.
The boy looked the victim of ugly drubbing and of haste and unrectified fear and sorriness. There were stitches in his forehead, and one eye was sunk into his head. Wads of putty like the clay we are made of. Everywhere in his face was the strange seriousness of underbone. His artificial hands of cotton in their white gloves looked like doll hands. Shame tinged Oliver, but he wanted to give the family what they wanted. He knew it would all work out in the ground.
In the parlor viewers recoiled trembling. Some fainted, others stared, many wept seamless tears and clutched their hands to their hearts, held each other, others passed by mutely, some stared avidly, feeding, some wanted to touch the body, even caress it, others squeezed their eyes shut. A photographer, a small broad-shouldered man smelling of ferrous sulphate, had come in and taken pictures. He had fumbled with his equipment. He dropped two plates, ruining them. A tiny ball of sweat collected by his ear and trailed slowly down his jaw. His eyes rapidly blinked. He sighed. His hands shook and then they steadied and he was able to take the pictures that ran two days later in the africano
Solomon Baker took off his glasses and rubbed them with a blue silk handkerchief.
“How much, Lord?” somebody said.
“How much longer, Lord?” somebody else said.
