T. Boyle - The Women

The roar was in his ears as John pushed him into the cab and the cab hurtled through the streets, and it was there still as they pulled up to the curb and John jerked open the door and led him out of the cramped automotive interior and into the marble vault of Union Station. He held to his son’s arm through the crush of people and across the floor to the ticket window, his throat dry, his legs stripped of muscle and bone alike so that he could barely stand upright. And here were the reporters, their faces rabid and their mouths working—“Mr. Wright! Mr. Wright!”—and John shouldering past them and through the door and onto the platform where the local would haul them over the rails for five agonizing hours before the station in Spring Green rose up like a gravestone beyond the windows. And couldn’t they hurry? Couldn’t they call it an emergency and cancel all the other stops? Rush on through, red flags flapping and whistle shrieking as if the president himself were on board?

He shut his eyes and heard the roar. And it was a merciful thing because the roar drowned out the shouts of the newsboys who were there now and who would change faces and jackets and hats and mob every station stop along the way to hawk the very latest up-to-date special edition: Murder at Taliesin, read all about it!; Taliesin Burning to the Ground, Seven Slain, Seven Slain, Seven Slain! It was John who kept them off and John who took the conductor aside and arranged for a private compartment, John who spotted poor Edwin Cheney standing there stricken in a circle of reporters and spirited him into the compartment before they could work their beaks in him and their talons too. Five hours. Five hours on that train staring at Ed Cheney’s shoes while Ed Cheney stared at his. Five hours. Seven slain.

He didn’t pray. He hadn’t prayed since he was a boy. But each minute of that journey was a slow crawl to Calvary and the moment when they’d stretch him on the Christ tree and drive the nails in, and all the while he imagined the worst and hoped for the best, and maybe this was prayer, maybe this was what prayer was after all. What he didn’t know was that Mamah was dead, her corpse so incinerated as to be unrecognizable. What he didn’t know was that John Cheney was dead too and that Martha, with her graceful limbs and her mother’s ready smile, was writhing under the wet towels they’d laid over her, her hair and eyebrows gone and her skin fried like sidemeat in a pan, or that she would die by the time he got there. He didn’t know that Brunker was dead, didn’t know that Lindblom would soon follow him or that Brodelle was already gone. And he didn’t know that Billy Weston, concussed, burned and bleeding from the scalp, had grappled with the Barbadian and chased him off before running to Reider for help and then come back to unfurl the garden hose and play it on the fire while the victims lay there stretched out on the paving stones of the courtyard like so many sacks of grain. Burned-up grain. Rotten grain. Grain fit only to turn into the earth. Or that Ernest, the very make and model of his father, lay there among them, unconscious and dying from his wounds while one of the neighbor women tended him and Billy struggled with the hose, numb to everything but the infernal scorching heat on his face.

Then it was night. The dead were laid out on the porch at Tan-y-deri, the stink of incineration riding the air till it overwhelmed everything, till there was no use for the organ of smell except to admit it. There were no mosquitoes. No fireflies. Even the lake seemed dead save for the faint traces of movement there where the firemen and the neighbors had formed a bucket brigade to quench the coals. He couldn’t look at Mamah — there was no use in that. It was shock enough to see the form of her, laid out in her twisted sheets, and the blood-color there like rust stains.

People thrust things at him, his sister fussing over him, black coffee, a plate of food, but he didn’t want any of it. He wanted to lash out, wanted revenge, wanted to meet violence with violence. If he could have laid hands on Carleton, he swore he’d tear him apart, just as if he were some beast in the jungle. They’d found the man at five-thirty that evening, hidden in the furnace where the fire wouldn’t touch him and he’d tried to kill himself by swallowing acid, the burns of it there like long pale fingers clawing at his lips and spots of it scorched through his shirt. By then, all of Taliesin was an armed camp, people beating the woods, searching the cornfield stalk by stalk, the sheriff loosing his hounds and shouts and alarums going up everywhere.

They were going to lynch him, that was what Andrew Porter had said, the noose already dangling from the limb of one of the oaks in the courtyard and all the farmers in high color and itching at the triggers of their.22s and shotguns and deer rifles, but the sheriff stood against them, and he and his deputy dragged the Negro out and handcuffed him and spirited him off to the Dodgeville jail, a mob of men chasing the car and cursing him all the way down the hill. He was there now, in a jail cell, unable to speak or to give any reason for what he’d done, for this hate and mayhem and devastation that had laid everything to ruin and grievously injured the souls of so many good people, because his vocal apparatus was destroyed and he wouldn’t take up a pen to write a word though the sheriff stood over him and the reporters clustered three deep on the courthouse steps. Frank never did get to see him, and that was just as well, because it would have been like staring into the face of the devil himself — that sooty abandoned face, that blackness without surface or limit — but at some point they ushered the wife into the room and he looked up from the chair he was sunk in and saw her standing there before him. 177

There was a sheriff’s deputy in the hall. Boards creaked. Footsteps echoed on the stairs. The coroner was there, the undertaker, the house alive with comings and goings, doors creaking shut and open again, voices drifting from room to room. They were nervous — Jennie was nervous, Andrew, the servants, the whole community — and they would have a scapegoat, a black scapegoat, and here she was.

What he saw was a very young woman, a girl not much older than his own daughters. If he’d noticed her before, when he’d hired her or glanced up to see her flitting in and out of the kitchen or hurrying across the courtyard with a basketful of tomatoes and greens from the garden, it was only in passing. She worked for him. She was doing her job. Mamah praised her. And, of course, he had other things on his mind. She was an employee and you only noticed employees — really looked at them — when they were late to work or drunk or sleeping on the job. When they stole. When they murdered people.

The lamps were low. A moth sailed lazily across the room. But for John — who’d never before laid eyes on Taliesin because his mother, in her jealousy and her rage, wouldn’t hear of it — they were alone. The girl stood just inside the door where the deputy had left her and soon she’d be in the jailhouse too, because she was the Negro’s wife, a Negro herself, and everybody in the county knew they’d plotted this horror together. Her dress was plain. She was thin. And her face, when she lifted her chin to show it to him, was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, smudged with traces of dirt where she’d wiped back the tears, and the socket of her right eye seemed to be bruised, as if someone had taken a poke at her, but for all that she was beautiful. Beautiful in her simplicity and her innocence. He saw that right away — she’d had nothing to do with this. It was the husband, the husband alone.

John had stood when she’d been led into the room. He was leaning against the near wall, his arms folded across his chest, shifting his weight from foot to foot in a spasm of nervous energy. He was his father’s protector now and the tug of that responsibility jerked at him and jerked again. “Well,” he said, “what have you got to say for yourself?”