he was too weak.
He was scared. So many thought he was so brave, but he knew bravery to be a kind of fraud. He was alone and terrified that now, at the end, he would disgrace himself. Even with the noose around his neck he had not been particularly scared, for he'd been anesthetized from fear by rage.
He had just wanted to kill those crackers who were lynching him.
But now, again, his strength was meaningless and without an enemy to focus on, his rage deserted him and he felt defeated. It hardly seemed worth it.
He hated that, and possibly it was the warden's shrewdness that saw how this would plague him. In fact, he saw that that was the point of the coffin: it was for strong, active men, that is, violent Negro felons, who were so full of hatred they felt no fear. It was superbly designed to crush them so totally?both in the exact meaning of that phrase but also in the larger, more philosophical kind of way?that their minds gave up, and they were broken. It was an expression of the ultimate power of what the Negroes call 'the Man,' meaning the white boss, who was so all-powerful he could not allow a single threat, even in the form of a petty theft, to his rule. But even knowing that did not stop it from working so well.
He yearned to straighten up. He tried not to think of it, or of water, or of the pleasures of a good stretch, or of the simple dog's freedom to roll over and scratch your own butt, and these things, now denied, seemed more valuable than gold or diamonds or, possibly, even love.
Pain was everywhere, in places he hadn't known he had. His lower back itself ached tragically, for the tightness of the coffin held it at a wrong angle, against the concrete, and muscles unused to that tension soon rebelled. His elbows were rubbed raw, and so were his heels. His ass itched because of the foulness there, and that seemingly minor irritation tunneled deep into his brain and was possibly the worst thing, for it made him ashamed of being alive, and made him hate himself for his filth.
He tried not to give in to self-pity, but there was nobody to hide it from. He tried not to give in to rage at, of all people, Sam, for his stupidity, good-hearted though it might have been, in swearing him to a vow of not killing, and thereby dooming him, at the expense of Sam's own sense of morality. Sam got to feel moral; Earl got to die alone, paralyzed, in the suffocating heat, with ants and spiders eating him, and his wild and crazed yearning for the simple freedom of moving his head or turning his neck.
It grew and grew and grew, this big thing, this weight. He felt an urge to scream.
Tell them, he thought.
Tell them you're nobody; you're an Arkansas cop who came looking after his buddy, a man he owed much to, your boy's godfather. You meant no harm. They could just let you go and it would all be over.
Yes, and then they'll kill you and bury you and that's all there is.
You'll never be heard from again. You'll be nothingness, and that's what got Earl through it: he refused to be nothing. On that issue alone he could fight them.
I will not be nothing.
I will fight you, even from the coffin.
He closed his eyes, but he could not sleep. He itched, he ached, he shat, he stank, he was lunch for something and dinner for something else and he could not move his face or his head or his shoulder and he didn't know how he'd get through it.
Sam recalled what he had learned of Thebes before his trip, remembering the decline in the town and the unrepaired road that cut the place off from casual visitors and dried up economic prospects. At the Fort Smith Public Library, he looked up the WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, and there refreshed himself on the subject of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) and Thebes County. It was listed on Tour 15, which drew travelers, however few of them there may have been, down into the southeastern corner from Waynesboro to Moss Point. It was the shortest tour in the whole damn book over a 'remote backwoods section about which little has been written [where] economic and social development have been slower, perhaps, than in any part of the State.'
He looked up the Mississippi state guidebook and went to 'penal system' in the index. There was a whole batch of numbers behind the subheading 'Parchman Farms,' the big complex in the Delta, but for Thebes there was only one page number, on which it was stated merely that the prison was founded in 1927 on the old Bonverite Plantation as a satellite of the Parchman Farms, as a place to segregate particularly violent Negro convicts. No visiting hours or amenities were cited.
That at least gave Sam two clues to work with, the old Bonverite Plantation and the year 1927. For this work, he decided he had to go to Jackson, Mississippi's capital, loath though he was to reinsert him self into that state's unwelcoming climate. But after once again checking the circulars in the Blue Eye police department (where he was still highly regarded and where everyone assumed he'd be prosecuting attorney again after the next election), he learned that no 'wanted' bulletins had been sent out with his name on them, and so he went ahead, with his wife's sullenness, his children's indifference and Connie Long acre's blessings.
The trip there, by train and bus, was uneventful, though made livelier by far by what had been missing from the first part of his last trip, which is Mississippi hospitality. Everywhere he went it seemed he met people willing to help him with his business, to make calls and arrangements for him, to do what had to be done. His first appointment was with a Mrs. James Beaufueillet ('That would be '-fwewyay,' son')
Ridgeway III, who turned out to be the state's youngest living Confederate widow, in that her late husband, whom she had married when he was sixty and she twenty, had run at the Yankee position with Pickett and his fellows, and carried a ball in his lungs ever since that day, Lord only knows how he survived it in the first place. Mrs. Ridgeway III, formidable in her own way as the German panzers Sam had blown to hell and gone that snowy day in Belgium, was custodian of the memories, as a fellow prosecutor in Jackson told him. That is, she knew the social history of the old Mississippi, and it would be she who would verse him on the Bonverite Plantation.
Now in her seventies, she still had a belle's beauty amplified by theatrical makeup applied with a professional's precision, an elegant and completely perfect coiffure, and a manicure of uncommon beauty. She was a production still. She had those high, fine, sparrow bones of good breeding; she still wore dark, as if in mourning, though of course James Beaufueillet had died back in 1923 and she had married twice again afterward, each time acquiring a yet more sizable estate. She had therefore buried three husbands, given birth to eleven children, buried a few of them, been through the wars of'98, '17-'18, '41-'45 and now this Korea thing. She served him lemonade; they sat on the screened porch of her house in North Jackson, in the center of the antebellum district, where old porticoed mansions spoke of days past but not dead, while outside, amid the cars, surreys and two-wheeled dump carts driven by white-haired Negroes were seen on the streets.
There was only one problem: she could not be hurried.
She would take her own sweet goddamned slow-as-molasses time.
'Now they were a family,' she began, her eyes locked firmly on that past, as if it were still within touch of her beautiful old hands, so slim, so elegant. 'Timber family. The first Bonverite man was George, and he arrived in the eighteen forties, from Louisiana, I'd guess, the French in him, and he was an empire builder. Yes, sir, Mr. Vincent, where others saw gold beneath the trees where it never was, it was George Bonverite who saw the gold in the trees, where in fact it hid.
But to timber you must have a mill, so George decreed a mill out of nothingness onto the Yaxahatchee, built with Negro slave labor and strictly applied discipline, and after building began to cut and ship the wood. Where the capital came from originally I don't care to know, and perhaps you would be wise to avoid investigating. If he was from Louisiana, gambling had to be involved, and duelin' and women, for the Bonverites, as it turned out, always had a taste for the women, their own and anybody else's with a comely set of ankles, dimpled knees and buttocks like buttered apples.'
Sam took a deep breath.
She laughed.
'What a pleasure it is in this day and age,' she said, 'to discover a man I can still shock. These young men, they've been through the war and everything, so they've not had the time for a moral education. You have, sir, and I do approve, though as an old gal who's outlived them all, I may now and then give you two fingers of truth.'
'Ma'am, I shall try and get through it without calling for my vapors.'
Hurry on with it, old Circe!
'Oh, sir, you are a fine rascal, I can tell. Anyway, back to George Bonverite…'
And so the story crawled through the generations begat by begat, scandal and duel by scandal and duel as George and his heirs timbered in ever wider circles to feed the growing appetite of the state and the shipbuilders of
