James PATTERSON - Alex Cross’s Trial

I groaned. I think they were lifting me – hands under my armpits, digging into my flesh, cutting into me, dragging me off to one side.

A thud – something hurting my back. Then I felt the damp ground under me.

A crack – something landed hard on my left knee. I guessed that knee was shattered too.

“This rope is all greasy. I can’t get aholt of it.”

“That’s nigger grease.”

I felt the coarse hemp rope coming down over my face, dragging over my nose, tightening against my neck.

And I thought: Oh, God! They’re hanging me!

Then I flew up into the air, like an angel – an angel whose head was exploding with terrible pain.

I could not see anything. I thought my eardrums had burst from the pressure in my skull.

But they hadn’t tied the noose right. Maybe the one who thought I was too tall was inexperienced. The rope was cutting under my jaw, but it had not gone tight. I got my hand up, somehow worked my fingers between the rope and my neck. I dangled and kicked as if I could kick my way out of the noose. They are hanging you, boy, was the chant that went through my head, over and over, like a song, an executioner’s song.

Crack! I felt a sting on my back. Was it a bullwhip? A buggy whip? A willow branch?

“He’s done. Or he will be,” the voice said. “We can go. Let’s get out of here.”

The air smelled of woodsmoke. Were they going to burn me? Was I going to go up in flames now?

That heat grew and grew. I struggled to see through the blood. It sure is hot up here. Maybe I’m already in hell. Maybe the devil has come and got me.

“We better get out of here, J.T.,” said the voice.

“Not yet.”

“Listen to me. They’re still awake over in the Quarters. They’re angry.”

“Let ’em come out here,” the other man said.

“They’ll be looking for Corbett. He’s just like one of them.” “Yeah, he is. Just like a nigger. Wonder how that is?”

I heard the crack of a branch. The voices began to fade. The heat that had burned me alive began to fade away. Then I was alone. There were iron hands around my neck, squeezing and squeezing. No air. No breath. No way to breathe.

Oh, God. My mouth was so dry.

And then I was gone from the world.

A FEW MOMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Then I blacked out again.

Awake.

Asleep.

Awake.

The wakeful times were a nightmare of confusion.

Terrible pain. There was something snapping at my feet, something with fierce sharp claws. Raccoons? Possums? A rabid fox? I didn’t know if I was still alive.

I was surely dead for a while, then the bugs woke me with their biting, sucking my blood, little no-see-ums biting my neck and arms, mosquitoes big as bats sucking the blood from my veins, and then rats jumped onto my legs and ran up and down my body, squeaking, snapping at my privates.

Then a flash of light, so bright I saw the spackle of blood outlined on my swollen eyelids.

Was I dead? Was I in a different world? In my delirium I heard something. Maybe the angels singing. Or was it a dog barking–

Another flash, so bright it nearly shook me.

The pain in my skull increased. I felt the blood pumping through a vein in my forehead. I imagined it bursting, the blood running in a stream down my leg.

I tried to make a fist. My fingers are gone!

Oh my God. Maybe not. I couldn’t feel anything on that side.

I couldn’t taste the air.

I could only feel my tongue swelling up in my mouth, choking me. And my fingers were gone.

In my overheated brain I saw Mama at her desk, in that flowing white gown she wore under her housecoat. The violet inkstand, the silver pen. Mama smiled at me. “I think you’ll like this poem, Ben. It’s about you, baby.”

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.

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.

“MY NAME IS HENRY.”

I could barely hear.

“Can you hear me? I said my name’s Henry.”

I could barely see.

I could, however, tell that the person speaking to me was a woman . An ancient, bent-over colored woman.

“ Henry . My name is Henry, ” she said. “You in there, Mist’ Corbett?”

Most of her teeth were missing, producing a kind of whistly lisp as she leaned closer and spoke to me.

“Come on now, eat this,” she said. She held out a spoonful of something. I opened my mouth. She stuck it in. God, it was delicious: black-eyed peas cooked to death, mashed to a paste.

While moving the food around my sore, battered mouth, my tongue discovered the gaping hole on the left side where two teeth had been.

“Where am I?” I croaked.

“Abraham house,” Henry said. She poised another spoonful in front of my mouth.

I will never forget the taste of those peas. They remain to this day the single most wonderful food I have ever encountered.

I heard a familiar voice: “Now would you look at Mr. Corbett, settin’ up and eatin’ baby food all by himself.” Moody came around from the head of the narrow cot where I lay, at the center of their parlor, in exactly the spot where Hiram’s coffin had been.