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JACOB JUST KEPT walking toward me.
Finally, my face hovered inches from his, so close I could smell whiskey and bacon grease on his breath. His face was covered with stubble, the skin on his nose peppered with gin blossoms.
I lashed out and grabbed his gun hand and twisted it hard until the weapon dropped. Jacob had always been smaller, but he could whip me at least half the time when we were boys. He was wiry and strong, and not afraid to fight dirty. I remembered the venom he could turn on our enemies when we got together in a schoolyard scrap.
“Goddamn you, Ben!” he yelled. Then I saw he had a knife. I took his arm and held it with all my strength. It felt as if we stayed that way for hours, grappling, neither of us gaining an advantage, the razor edge suspended between us. My arms ached.
I looked Jacob in the eye. “Jacob!” I yelled at him. “It’s me, goddamn it! It’s Ben!”
But his eyes were bulging with rage, one hand now gripping my throat, the other inching closer with the blade. If he killed me here, amid all this noise and insanity, no one would ever know it was Jacob who’d done the deed. I would just be Ben Corbett, another victim in another senseless attack in a small town.
And then I knew that was not how it was going to happen. I was not going to die here, at the hand of Jacob Gill. That knowledge gave me strength, just enough to jerk his arm sideways and break his hold on the knife.
I kicked Jacob hard and wrenched the knife away. I got on him, kneeling on his chest with the blade an inch from his neck. I could have slit his throat right then, but instead I poked the knife into his Adam’s apple, hard enough to draw blood. Jacob’s eyes widened. God, I knew those eyes.
“You gonna kill me, Ben?” he said.
I flung the knife away and heard it crash into the bushes beside the smokehouse. Then I got up. There were no words for this. So I turned and walked away from the man who had once been my best friend in the world.
Chapter 136
WHILE I WAS FIGHTING JACOB, the rest of the fracas had begun to die down.
I watched Sam Sanders, owner of the general store, jump off his horse and run away into the darkness. I saw two other White Raiders flee in his wake, one of them limping badly.
“We’ll come back for you, niggers,” one yelled as he ran.
“You ain’t won. You just think you won,” another called.
A flurry of hoofbeats, and the Raiders were gone.
Colored people were scattered all over the yard, nursing wounds. Four white men lay trussed up in the dirt in front of Abraham’s house. I remembered Abraham talking about the earth running red with blood—and I saw blood, tiny rivers of it, here on his home ground.
On the porch near the tied-up men, Aunt Henry was dressing the leg wound of Lincoln Alexander Stephens, another of the original White Raiders who’d come calling tonight. Aunt Henry would take care of anyone, I reflected, regardless of race, creed, or degree of idiocy.
There seemed to be only one fatality—Leander Purneau, who lay flat on his back in the mud across the road from Abraham’s house. I wouldn’t miss him for a second.
Cousin Ricky told the captured Raiders he could kill them. Or he could tar and feather them. Or he could do what he was going to do: drive them into town and leave them, tied up, for the citizens of Eudora to find in the morning. “Tell ’em what we did to you,” he said. “Tell ’em there’s as many of us in the Quarters as there is of you in town. Don’t come out here again, not unless you’re invited. Which ain’t likely.”
Richard Nottingham brought his flat-wagon out of the woods. Brown hands helped him lift Leander Purneau’s body up into the bed. Nottingham’s shoulder was bandaged.
The battle was over. Eudora Quarters had won—at least for one night. It would not help me or the people of the Quarters to shoot one more bullet. It was finished.
And if I needed more proof, from around the house came Jacob Gill, his shirtfront stained red with blood from where I’d nicked his throat. He walked between two colored men to the wagon and climbed in the back without looking at me. So be it.
“Mr. Corbett!” I looked up. It was Ricky, standing at the front door.
“Come on back in,” he said. “Abraham has passed.”
At the door, Ricky put his hand on my shoulder. “You all right?”
“I am.”
Moody glanced up as we came in, then went back to reading from the Bible:
“And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingly power.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, this day you shall be with me in Paradise.’ ”
Moody closed the Bible. She looked up and our eyes met.
