Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

The rear door opened and Willie Burt pushed the two preachers inside. They brought with them a powerful mingled smell of cologne and gasoline smoke. Rev Munch, sweat-soaked in his clothes, a spray of grit like tiny black stars across his forehead, had his arm around Rev Wayne. The skinny young reverend wrenched himself loose, scrambled to the far side and pressed against the door with his eyes closed. His clothes twisted around his thin body, he seemed to be talking to himself. “Lord,” Rev Munch said, “what a struggle.”

Willie had run around the hearse, shoved Mr. O aside, gotten in under the wheel, and started the motor. Oliver told him to wait. They had to anyway because they were still blocked in.

Delvin got out of the car. Both churches burned elaborately. There was a well but no bucket, no stream, and no barrel of water standing by. Men ran to look at the blaze. No one seemed badly hurt. Several knelt praying before the fire. Lobbing prayers up into it, bombing away. The siren had ceased. Somebody, a short man in bright yellow suspenders, said shots had been fired back in the piney woods, but Delvin hadn’t heard them. He began to help move the stalled and tangled vehicles.

It took nearly an hour for everyone to be moved. The churches, large and small, had burned avidly, the big church burning more wildly than the little one, but gradually the fires subsided. A group of boys in sooty white shirts picked a broken-down Model T truck up and moved it out of the way of a farm wagon. They waved at Delvin to come help but he didn’t.

Oliver had gotten out and stood with both hands pressing his sides as if he was pumping himself up. A flight of distant birds, maybe a hundred out over the cotton field, veered suddenly as if they had just noticed the trouble and headed off north. Dust clouds hung over the road in both directions.

“We have unfinished business,” Mr. Oliver said to Delvin when he came around to him.

They all got out, moving in a new, weightier gravity. They helped the younger preacher out. He seemed overridden by his own deepset ailment. By now most people were gone. But a few remained. Among these was the family of the dead boy. They stood off to the side under some old, shaggy cedars near the cotton fields. The mother sat on a canvas camp chair somebody had provided. One of her living sons fanned her. They had carried the coffin with them under the trees. A few relatives stood around it, protecting it.

Before long the worst of the burning was over. The roof of the big church had swayed and collapsed with a huge growling noise, smothering much of the fire, and the fire in the other, the small one, seemed about to extinguish on its own. It smoldered and smoked and burned in patches. Now and then something popped in the fire, sending up a screen of sparks that quickly subsided. They could hear a baby crying.

The police cars had vanished. There were no signs of siren-turning or bomb-throwing white men anywhere.

Oliver directed Delvin and George to re-erect the collapsed funeral tent. The graveyard looked like the disestablished drift scene of a great passing wave. Flowers scattered everywhere. Chairs knocked over. A silver mouth harp lying by itself on the lip of the grave. Pages from some book or songsheet lay like leavings of another occasion entirely. The big green funeral tent was unburned but they had to skeet the red soil off it with a broom somebody produced. Several of the few people left were crying or wiping away tears that had mingled with smoke and dust; their hands were dirty. No one had come out of the woods to kill them. That was where the siren noise and the firebombs had come from. Those left stood by the coffin and among the cedars waiting while the church finished burning.

After a while the people felt safe enough to continue. Black broken beams fire-whittled to sticks poked out of the wreckage. The front of the church was streaked with soot but intact, as if the fire itself was prepared to leave it as a warning or memorial. The side walls had collapsed and burned in a series of combustions, some as small as campfires. A few sooty boards had fallen into the scorched grass, burning separately, like dropped torches. The sun off beyond the rise past the cotton fields was taking on the heft and fullness of day’s end, lolling in a vast orange net. To the southwest sundogs ran along through silky clots of cloud. The tops of some of the cotton plants were dusted with soot.

The bereaved family had brought a hamper of food and they passed items around from it. Nearly everyone got a piece — partial piece — of fried chicken and a wedge of cornbread.

When the people were finished eating, Rev Wayne gathered them at the gravesite and they completed the service. The only sound from the woods was the soft sough of breeze in the pines. The older preacher spoke as funeral ministers do of the misery on the earth, of the inevitability of grief. And of joy that comes just the same. Delvin wanted him to stop this time at the grief part. At funerals he often thought of his mother. He experienced a strange, exfoliating, shuddery feeling at the thought that she was still alive somewhere.

The singer — the skinny tall man (Delvin had seen him hoist himself into a moving wagon) — had fled, but at the end of the service those left behind sang his jubilee for him. In smoke-cracked, mournful, wheezy voices they sang, quietly, softly, as if in a secret language they wanted not only strangers but the trees and the air itself not to overhear. Delvin was not asked to recite the Hughes poem he had memorized, and this disappointed and relieved him.

The dead boy’s brothers pulled the planks from under the coffin and Elmer and several others lowered the box on ropes into the dry yellow earth.

“Let this soul cross over into campground,” the old preacher said.

Sometimes at funerals in these carefully discharged final moments there seemed to be a promised land after all. But for most of those standing on the sun-warmed, fire-heated pebbly ground, Delvin among them, not today. A sudden swell of grief overtook Delvin and he burst into tears. Tears like a sudden wind that shakes and releases a tree.

Before the first water was hardly out of him the wind had passed. Oliver pressed his hand. Delvin pressed back, glad to have somebody close who knew who he was, knew his name. He thought of the Ghost and wondered where he might be. A flock of crows raced westward as if they were trying to catch the dying sun. Close up he could smell the rich scent of the cedar trees. And he could smell the turned earth of the grave, a scent that always made him think of farming, of himself as part of a life of sowing seeds in a field, a promise or memory that was not even his, come back to him.

Those nearby, the poorly outfitted mournful members of the killed boy’s family, to speak of them, were crammed up with grief. It was nearly impossible to move in any part of their bodies. As if the organs themselves had solidified and the muscles and streaks of ligament and tissue hardened and, too, even the heretofore streaming blood congealed. They felt leathery and stiff and mired. When they did move, and they did, under the peeling sky with its bulging veils of smoke, it was as if a peculiar narcotized influence had taken them over, as if the hand raised to push back the air, the shoulder lifted in shuddering refusal, the lips licked to soothe the dry cracked skin, the twitch, the wave, the brush, were kineticized by some airy unregulated pointless dissipate energy. The world was a mist of shadows and smothering floods. They were drowning without dying. The mother was an empty corn shuck tossed into the corner of a rained-in house. No one would ever come back to look for such as her. She wanted to cry out, to scream, to yell for help — for anyone, anyone who might remember her, to find her — she had to go get her child — but her voice was too weak to carry. She was stricken with remorse. The father, for the only time in his life as a man, in a flicked on and off vision, saw himself as a small boy, a boy dumbly chasing a rusty windblown handkerchief into the dark under some trees. His face looked as if it had been bitten mercilessly by insects.