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I sat on my little stool in the room off her bedroom that smelled like lavender and talcum powder. I saw myself sitting there as if I were a figure in a drawing—a precise, detailed sketch of Mama and me.
Then the pain came swelling up through my chest, through my neck, and up into my brain.
Another flash of light.
And once again, nothing.
Chapter 69
MORNING COMES TO A MAN hanging from a rope as it comes to a man sleeping in his bed—the chatter of birds, a faint breeze, the bark of a dog.
Then comes the pain again.
So much blood had clotted on my eyelids and eyelashes that I couldn’t open them.
I breathed in short sharp intakes of air. The fingers of my right hand wedged into the rope had kept open just enough of a passage for a trickle of air down my windpipe. It had kept me alive. Or maybe somebody had spared me. Maybe the one who said I was too tall? Maybe someone I knew?
The rest of my body was pure pain: so intense, so complete, that the pain now seemed like my normal state.
“Look, Roy, ain’t no colored man. That man white.”
The voice of a child.
“Dang,” said another voice. “Look like they done painted him red all over.”
A dog barked.
“Worms!” the first boy yelled.
I could only imagine what kind of horrible creatures were crawling on my skin.
“Worms!”
I felt something licking my foot. Then it barked.
“Worms! Get away from him, he dirty!”
Ahhh. Worms was the dog.
It was so hot. I should surely be dead by now. I think the pain radiating from my knees was keeping me alive. It wasn’t that I had a will to survive.
I thought of stories from the war, wounds so horrible or amputations so unbearable that men begged their comrades to shoot them, to put them away. If I could speak, I would ask these boys to fetch a gun and shoot me in the head.
I felt something sharp poking my stomach. I must have flinched or jumped a little, and gave out a groan. The boys shrieked in terror.
“Oh, Jesus, the man alive!”
“Run!”
I heard them running as fast as they could, running away from the monster. I heard Worms barking as he ran after them.
I wanted to tell them to please come back and cut me down. Oh, how I wanted to lie on the ground just once more before I died.
That was not to be. I couldn’t just hang here like this, waiting to die. The best I could hope for was to hasten it along.
I began wriggling my dead hand, trying to get it out from between the rope and my neck.
Part Four
