'It was an accident.'
'It was the kind of accident that happens when a white man loses interest in the Negro woman who has borne him a son and seeks a younger, yellower gal. She fell down the stairs. She died in the servant's quarters, which you now call the Whipping House, though I believe if you check, you'll see that it's in flames and most of its occupants are dead.'
'Do you have any idea what harm you do? This isn't just a prison. We are doing a mission for the nation. We are helping America! We have a charge from the government. I am providing a place for our great crusade. You cannot just come in and?' 'Let's have a look at you,' said Davis. He lit a match, ignited the wick of a lamp, set the glass on it so that light filled the room. He saw that his brother was far too plump, that his hair had been dyed white, that he was somehow a different man. But he was the same man, too.
'Your journey must have been as remarkable as my own,' Davis said. 'No one here knows you as Cleon Bonverite. They just know you under whatever name you chose. They don't know you were born and raised here, that it was to be your inheritance. You left Thebes one man, and disappeared.
Years later you returned, this time as another man, who had been appointed warden of the prison our father decreed into existence. You managed to become its supervisor. That was some trick.'
'I had father's will and intelligence, just as you did. It wasn't easy.
I've had no other life. Thus I recovered my own family inheritance.
Thus Thebes survives, as Father wished.'
'No more. It's already ashes, and all it stands for. It ends tonight.
I swore I'd?'
'You were mixed. You should have been aborted at the start. You should not have been allowed! You have no right to live. Your mother's cunning whore ways got her swollen with the child that became you; so you are whore spawn. You think you deserve an entitlement; you do, the abortionist's scraper deep in the mother's belly, that's what you deserve. All our troubles in civilization are encompassed in mixing what cannot be mixed.'
'Lord, how you hate me still.'
'You should not exist! It's an atrocity! You combine the black man's rage and strength with the white man's cleverness and will, and you can bring nothing but tragedy and ruination into the world! You are not my brother. You are an abomination.'
'I am what my father made me, as are you, Cleon.'
'You burned him in his bed.'
'He killed my mother.'
'He did not kill your mother. Your father in his way loved your mother, which was his character flaw. He loved you, too, Davis, did you know that? Here's what you don't know, Davis: I killed your mother. I shoved her down the steps. She never saw me. I would have killed you, too, if you had not evaded me and burned Father that night.
Oh, Davis, I killed a nigger whore, you killed your own father, who loved you. Don't you see the evil in your ways?'
'Then I punish you for Father, too. And I mourn him now.'
'You are evil. You will bring it all down for nothing beyond your vanity. It is so wrong, Davis. It is so wrong.'
Davis fired twice, Cleon but once. Davis's shots were truer. His brother lay back, breathing heavily as the blood seeped through the nightclothes.
'You killed me,' said Cleon. 'But I killed you, too. You at least will be wiped off the earth.'
'Not quite,' coughed Davis. 'I have sons.'
If Cleon heard or not, Davis would never know. For Cleon settled in a stillness that could only be death. Davis examined his wound and concluded it was fatal, possibly not in the next ten seconds, but certainly in the next ten minutes. He had seen many gunshot wounds in his time in Chicago's best undertaking parlor for Negroes. He rose, limping and leaking, and went to the window to see what he had wrought.
He saw flame everywhere, rising in the night, the sky bright with the dance of fire. He had his mighty victory. He turned and went to the lamp he had lit. He looked about his father's old bedroom. It was much the same but for his dead brother. A great tide of tragedy overcame him.
Would it ever be over? Would we and they ever live together? He doubted it. He raised the lamp and threw it against the wall, where it broke, splattering flaming kerosene about. Quickly it spread against the old wood of the house.
He sat in the chair. The pain in his guts grew harsher, as did the heat in the room. When he could stand no more of each, he put the gun to his head and had a good laugh. This is what they came to. The Bon ve rites that long line stretching back over a hundred years, men who had fought the land and made a plantation and prospered and passed prosperity down generation to generation. But other things were passed down, too, the Bonverite curse, which was its tendency toward violence, its impatience, its fury.
And so finally the two brothers, so smart, so educated, so dedicated, so thrifty and industrious, so gifted in their own ways, ending up in the bedroom of the house where each had been born, though one upstairs and one down.
He laughed.
It was perfect.
It was everything he had dreamed of.
He pulled the trigger. earl found them like that as he raced through the burning house. Both gone, both together. Who were they? But the flames drove him out and took them both.
Elmer lobbed a Hopalong Cassidy firebomb onto the roof of the Store and watched it detonate with a pop and spew a bouquet of flame across the shingles, where each lick caught and started its own fire.
But he had no time to contemplate fire.
He ran onward, beyond the Whipping House to a larger building that was the guards' headquarters. Three men prone outside testified that the affray had started already. That was Bill's steady, quiet work.
Elmer was close to a door, and so, with a large.44 in each hand, he kicked it in, and found a corridor full of half-dressed men, most in a state of panic and confusion, some with weapons, others not. Elmer fired with each gun, the powerful, amplified.44 slugs finding targets in the hallway. It was a killing time.
The.44s didn't just hit a man, they thumped him good. They thumped him so hard he didn't fall, he was bowled to the ground. Moreover, the muzzle blast was so tremendous it too was like a force in the corridor, for if the bullets missed, the disorienting effect of all that blast took the fight out of a lot of the men.
But Elmer clicked empty on each cylinder, and knowing that he was now unarmed and would be so until thirty seconds worth of reloading work, he faded back, rotated around, and headed for cover behind a tree. That is when he was shot in the head.
It hurt mightily. He went down, disoriented, feeling the blood pour from the wound. Next thing a bullet hit next to him, pulling an angry gout of earth, and then another close by. He was being shot at from on top of the building. They had him cooked but good, and it didn't matter because he'd been shot in the brain.
But if he were shot in the brain, how could he think so clearly? He slid his hand under his hat and felt a bloody furrow atop his skull, pulsing with blood. It was a grazing wound.
Another shot tore into the earth, filling the air with dust. Them fellows were not the best shots.
Suddenly someone was next to him, pulling him upward, while nearby, someone very calmly fired, fired again, fired some more.
The girl pulled him upward.
'Mr. Kaye, you are too heavy to carry, sir.'
'Sally, watch yourself.'
'Now you come on and we'll get you looked at.'
She dragged him back to the trees under cover of the very fast fire that Bill Jennings laid over the top of them.
Then Bill faded, slipped around to the other side.
'I take it I am not hit bad,' said Elmer.
'Your head is as hard as a potbellied stove,' she said. He felt three or four fast pricks.
'Ouch! Girl, what are you??'
'Hold still. Knitting you up. You'll like to bleed out otherwise.
