Suddenly the smell of corn. Delvin looked out the door. They were passing a huge field of yellowing corn. Corn as far as he could see. The season rich with the sharp silky smell of it, rich already with the early yellows and reds. The tall sumac in the road ditches going red, the shaggy flowers like spires of imperial acknowledgment, the yellow goldenrod in big bunches thickly flowering so he wanted for a second to throw himself out onto it, soft bed of gold, and the smell of corn like a natural dust, ancient and soothing.
At Klaudio, just up the line, somebody jumped off the train — Cornell Butler, the papers said later — and ran to the police. Assault by negroes on white boys. And on two white girls. Rape? Yeah, yeah — something like that. You don’t even have to say it. A breeze picked lightly through the narrow leaves of a butternut tree just outside the sheriff’s office, as if looking for one special leaf.
The first accuser Butler was sweating and shaking, and he had the look about him of somebody who had suffered a great tragedy.
He looked heartbroke, the chief testified later. Just plain heartbroke.
It took one call to the stationmaster at Kollersburg. Then another to the Cumbly county sheriff. In a matter of minutes men in cars and pickups were on the road, racing to catch the train. A line of cars filled with outraged, murderous, bloody-minded, vengeful — and all the other dark indemnities — men. It wasn’t only the excitement. The men hurt in their hearts. Beat the boys and raped the women for christ’s sake.
Carrying guns and tobacco sticks and ax handles picked up at Burns’ Hardware on Harris street, they rushed toward Kollersburg. Some had experience with this sort of thing, a few were klansmen, others just attendees of lynchings and other routs and ambuscades, most were money-stretched citizens, hurled by this atrocity into sudden stumbling pellmell motion.
A breeze played in the tops of the long grove of red cedars just beyond the town limits they passed going as fast as they could, jangling and seething. Torn-looking bottom-heavy clouds were banked in the west. Art Luger ran over a something he later swore was a six-foot-long rattlesnake. Some men felt anguished with pain for the poor girls and for those ambushed boys, others felt only a satisfying urgency. Hard times had stiffened their souls.
In the boxcar things had quieted down. No one was hurt badly, though Coover Broadfoot, one of the negro men from C-town, had been struck just above the eye and was now getting a bad headache. Others had cuts, big pear- and plum-colored bruises, welts along the back and side. Davie Considine’s jaw — he was a white boy with, so the papers said, a dream to open a watch repair shop — where a negro boy (Bonette Collins) had whacked him with a piece of stovewood, ached. Several had stinging sensations where they’d been hit with limber pieces of bamboo, or numbness. Nobody was sure where the bamboo came from, but both colored and white now had it.
The girls were telling their story of how the nigra boys had overpowered them, over in an empty grain car — and some of them in this car—before yall got here, they said. They done their ugly business.
The fat one did the talking. She was a hurt woman, unloved, mocked, mistreated since birth, no feature in her face anything but forgettable except her mouth, full, creased at the edges as if relentlessly gnawed, able to hold a sneer for years and back it with energized profanity, a girl, young woman of twenty-two, the adrenaline gushed alternately through like rancid gouts of factuality soothing a terrifying emptiness until she had come to believe or for seconds at a time was sure she believed or what did it fucking matter she didn’t have to believe a single goddamn thing about these crapface shines, it was time to stop this, stop some goddamn thing, by God.
In the car, sitting across from Delvin, a big negro man in overalls with a red-and-white-check lining was grinning like he had found true happiness. A sharp red line ran along the part in a man’s hair. A man tried to reach way down his back and another man, trembling as he did so, scratched the place for him. Another kept stretching out his arm and pulling it back. His crew was mostly smiling and talking fast. They had won. A man called Butter gripped himself in both arms as he leaned against the back, honey-colored wall. Beside him a small boy pronounced the name Bonette over and over, or maybe he was saying bone it, holding up a thumb that had blood — maybe not his — on it. Another man kept shooting out his fist, punching air. Others held their heads and smiled out the open door at the world that had noticed none of this. They had beat the white boys at their own game. They had been quicker and stronger and they had more heart. They hadn’t backed down. It felt good to be who they were.
We feel like we could run up a mountain and dance on the top, Delvin thought. He pulled out his notebook and wrote: One man keeps shaking his hands and jumping up and down on his toes like a boxer, but his fingers were aching too much for him to continue.
All of a sudden he wanted to cry. He wasn’t the only one. Carl Crawford, Rollie Gregory — they looked like they wanted to cry too. Not for happiness. Some hard grief pressing down. He climbed up on top of the boxcar.
The train rolled along through grain fields, then woods, then clearings, then, out of nowhere — he’d seen this no place before — they passed the old country zoo outside Kollersburg. Under skimpy oak cages on stilts, chickenwire enclosures, sheds with open, wired-over doors. Animals, creatures from the woods, raccoons, porcupines, held prisoner inside. “Look a’yonder,” somebody said. Strange but familiar sharp-eyed creatures drawn up close so you could get a good look at them. Detainees, the unredeemable. Sun caught in the fur of a mangy bobcat, what fur there was, bristling the hairs, a peacock screamed and screamed again in the late daylight as if he didn’t care about anything but screaming, a bear — that must of been a bear — lay curled up like a dog, a camel bleated; and then they were gone.
The train rounded a long curve past a field of seeding sorghum. The dark gold knobby tops shook and gave in a nicking breeze. The train began to slow down. What’s that coming? Delvin thought. Not just the curve. Off across the grain field he could see the wind shake the tops of some beech trees, flicking the leaves over on their white sides, flicking them back. He wanted to leap up and jump off the train. Something said to, but he couldn’t make himself do it.
They were approaching the junction at Kollersburg. The train slowed. He got to his feet, danced a slow little step to get the feeling back in his legs. He climbed down through the trap into the car. The women were shouting again. Crows squawking. You get scared to the point you can’t turn it off. At the edge of their group a large man with blood crusted on his knuckles. He had a dazed look. Delvin thought he would like to speak to this man, but the train was coming to a stop. He heard angry voices above the clattering and squealing of metal. Shouts. Men were running. The sound of horses. The train creaking to a stop.
He saw four white men race past the door, men carrying shotguns, one in a bow tie and a brown vest — like a lawyer, he thought, or a doctor — but he was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. And then the runners saw the men on the train and stopped and wheeled in a fury of shouts and spit popping from their lips and cried for you niggers (they shrieked the word) to come down out of there, trotting beside the open door, not waiting for the train to fully stop before they were giving orders.