Ben nodded slowly, but said nothing. He could hear the jukeboxes humming noisily in the night air, loud, pulsing, rhythmic, as if they were being played to warn off an approaching danger.
‘I used to think about doing something else,’ Thompson went on, ‘but by the time I got to thinking real serious about that, I was near to forty, with three kids and a big car payment.’ He hit the brake suddenly to avoid a small dog, and the coffin slid forward and bumped loudly against the cab of the truck. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Thompson said quickly. ‘Didn’t want to hit that dog, though.’
The truck moved steadily down Fourth Avenue, then out beyond it, to where more and more vacant lots lined the increasingly bumpy and untended streets.
‘They ought to get a crew out here,’ Thompson said. He peered to the right. ‘There it is,’ he said.
Gracehill Cemetery rested on a small, rounded hill near the far southwest corner of the city. Small unpaved roads snaked windingly among the small gray stones, slowly curling upward toward the crest of the hill. All along the gently sloping banks, tombstones jutted out of the ground in broken clusters, their bases covered by the unmown grass. The mounds of dirt which stretched out from them were decorated by clumps of plastic-flowers rooted in dirt-filled tin cans and quart jars. Here and there a plywood cross leaned unsteadily toward the earth, or a plain brown stone lifted from it, jagged, nameless, accompanied by a small one at the foot of the mound.
‘It’s supposed to be right around here,’ Thompson said matter-of-factly. He craned his neck out the window, his eyes searching through the ever-deepening brush.
The grave had been dug in a slender trench between two others, and when Thompson finally spotted it, he wheeled the truck over, then backed it in, as if preparing to dump the coffin like a load of sand.
‘Okay,’ he said as he turned off the engine.
Ben got out and walked to the back of the truck. The two youths had already lowered the tailgate and pushed the coffin to the edge of it. They now stood above it, their eyes lifted up over the hill, toward the distant twinkling lights of the city.
‘Okay, now,’ Thompson said. ‘We’ll just lower it down real slow. Don’t drop her.’
Within a few minutes, the coffin was in the ground, and Thompson walked to the head of the grave and bowed his head. The two young men bowed theirs as well, while Ben slumped back on a large stone and sank his hands in his pockets.
‘Dearest and most gracious God,’ Thompson began, ‘we commend to your care the soul of your servant …’ He stopped and glanced up at Ben. ‘What’s this child’s name?’ he asked.
‘Martha Wellman,’ Ben told him.
Thompson lowered his head again. ‘We commend to your care the soul of your servant, Martha Wellman.’ He folded his hands together gracefully. ‘We know that she was your child, that her soul was saved long before it was even clothed in flesh. For the grace of Jesus Christ is a gift which cannot be refused.’
Ben’s eyes drifted over to the two black youths. They stood on either side of the grave, their heads bowed reverently, their lips pressed tightly together. Behind them, the nightbound city glittered silently. Ben’s eyes drifted down toward the grave, then back up again. The city lay utterly quiet in the darkness, a grid of streets lit by what seemed in the distance a thousand tiny fires. He wondered how many streets the girl had come to know, which ones she had liked, feared, the last one she’d walked down before she died.
King had not yet begun to speak when Ben arrived once again at the Sixteenth Baptist Church, but the crowds were already singing and clapping as they filled the streets which fronted the church.
Ben got out of his car and stood beside it, leaning on the hood, his pen and notebook already in his hand. From his position he could see a group of black leaders standing on the small porch at the side of the church. They were talking quietly and fanning themselves with paper fans from A. G. Gaston’s Funeral Home. Just beyond them, Breedlove and Daniels were squatting together in front of a bush, and even from several yards away, Ben could see that they had both taken out their own pens and notebooks.
Just as the day before, the crowd suddenly grew quiet, and then King’s voice rang out.
‘Today was D-Day in Birmingham,’ he cried, his voice already at that high pitch which it had achieved the day before. ‘But there will be many more D-Days in Birmingham. There will be Double D-Days in Birmingham until we have won our freedom.’
Daniels was writing furiously in his notebook, when Ben looked up, but Breedlove had vanished. For a moment he looked for him, a pale white face in a sea of black, but it was as if he had disintegrated where he squatted, dissolved into the warm evening air.
‘The eyes of the nation are on Birmingham,’ King intoned, and the crowd cheered wildly. ‘The eyes of the world are on Birmingham.’ The cheers grew louder and more ecstatic. The eyes of God are on Birmingham.’ A wave of trembling jubilation lifted the crowd inside the church, then swept out over the people surrounding it, passing back and forth over them again and again like the flow of wildly eddying waters.
Ben’s pen scurried across the page, the point burrowing into the white paper, scarring it as he wrote.
‘So don’t get tired,’ King cried.
‘No!’ the crowd screamed in return.
‘Don’t get bitter.’
‘No!’
King’s deep, sonorous laughter settled over the crowd. Then, suddenly, his voice rose out of it like a lick of fire.
‘Are you tired?’ he shouted.
‘No!’
‘Are you bitter?’
‘No!’
‘Then go out and go out and go out again,’ King cried. ‘And let justice flow down from the mountainside.’
‘Yes!’
‘Let justice flow down from Red Mountain.’
‘Yes, Lord!’
‘Let justice rise like the mighty waters.’
‘Amen! Amen!’
‘Until it is high in the streets of the city.’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘O Lord, let justice flow down upon Birmingham like a mighty stream.’
The furious cheers of the people seemed to be even greater than the day before, and as Ben brought his pen to rest and glanced around him, he realized that they had reached such a deafening pitch that they now drowned out everything, as if their thunderous roar came like an immense and shuddering wave from the deep core of the earth.
TEN
Kelly Ryan was slumped behind the single gun-metal gray desk of the Property Room, and he did not move as Ben approached him. His small green eyes peered expressionlessly forward, and his lips remained tightly closed. He wore a plain blue shirt, open at the collar, and with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow, so that he looked more like a farmhand than a policeman.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,’ Ben said as he stepped up to the desk.
Ryan nodded slowly. ‘They had me on special duty.’
‘Doing what?’
Ryan said nothing, but his thin lips jerked down slightly.
‘Doing what, Kelly?’ Ben repeated.
‘All those girls they brought in today,’ Ryan said. ‘They’re doing VD checks on them.’
Ben felt the air grow cold around him.
Ryan looked at him pointedly. ‘Were you in the park?’
‘Yes.’
‘Must have been really something down there today.’
‘It was,’ Ben said. ‘Where were you?’
