Behind him would race six others, and the first boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance; the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.
And then out of one house into another, into seventeen houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard, these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!
Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert, a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home.
Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly beatings.
By the year’s end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun.
June 2003 Way In The Middle Of The Air
“Did you hear about it?”
“About what?”
“The niggers, the niggers!”
“What about ‘em?”
“Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?”
“What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?”
“They can, they will, they are.”
“Just a couple?”
“Every single one here in the South!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“I got to see that. I don’t believe it. Where they going—Africa?”
A silence.
“Mars.”
“You mean the planet Mars?”
“That’s right.”
The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch. Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the hot dust of noon.
“They can’t leave, they can’t do that.”
“They’re doing it, anyways.”
“Where’d you hear this?”
“It’s everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come through.”
Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life.
Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily. “I wondered what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an hour ago. He ain’t come back from Mrs. Bordman’s yet. You think that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?”
The men snorted.
“All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don’t take stealing from no one, by God.”
“Listen!”
The men collided irritably with each other, turning.
Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses, it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls.
And from the mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside, as the river, the long and endless river, took itself from old channels into a new one.
From various and uncountable tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the parts of this river had joined, become one mother current, and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking, caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark grandfathers in oak frames—the river flowing it on while the men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to mend the levee, their hands empty.
Samuel Teece wouldn’t believe it. “Why, hell, where’d they get the transportation? How they goin’ to get to Mars?”
“Rockets,” said Grandpa Quartermain.
“All the damn-fool things. Where’d they get rockets?”
“Saved their money and built them.”
“I never heard about it.”
“Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets all themselves, don’t know where—in Africa, maybe.”
“Could they do that?” demanded Samuel Teece, pacing about the porch. “Ain’t there a law?”
“It ain’t as if they’re declarin’ war,” said Grandpa quietly.
“Where do they get off, God damn it, workin’ in secret, plottin’?” shouted Teece.
“Schedule is for all this town’s niggers to gather out by Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o’clock, pick ‘em up, take ‘em to Mars.”
“Telephone the governor, call out the militia,” cried Teece. “They should’ve given notice!”
“Here comes your woman, Teece.”
The men turned again.
As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers. Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors, vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind her.
“It’s Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!”
“I’m not comin’ home for no damn darkie!”
“She’s leaving. What’ll I do without her?”
“Fetch for yourself, maybe. I won’t get down on my knees to stop her.”
“But she’s like a family member,” Mrs. Teece moaned.
“Don’t shout! I won’t have you blubberin’ in public this way about no goddamn—“
His wife’s small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes. “I kept telling her, ‘Lucinda,’ I said, ‘you stay on and I raise your pay, and you get two nights off a week, if you want,’ but she just looked set!
I never seen her so set, and I said, ‘Don’t you love me, Lucinda?’ and she said yes, but she had to go because that’s the way it was, is all. She cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table and then she went to the parlor door and—and stood there with two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said, ‘Good-by, Mrs. Teece.’ And she went out the door. And there was her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat it. It’s still there now, I know; last time I looked it was getting cold.”
Teece almost struck her. “God damn it, Mrs. Teece, you get the hell home. Standin’ there makin’ a sight of yourself!”
“But, Pa … ”
He strode away into the hot dimness of the store. He came back out a few seconds later with a silver pistol in his hand.
His wife was gone.
The river flowed black between the buildings, with a rustle and a creak and a constant whispering shuffle. It was a very quiet thing, with a great certainty to it; no laughter, no wildness, just a steady, decided, and ceaseless flow.
Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. “If one of ‘em so much as laughs, by Christ, I’ll kill ‘em.”
The men waited.
The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon.
“Looks like you goin’ to have to hoe your own turnips, Sam,” Grandpa chuckled.
“I’m not bad at shootin’ white folks neither.” Teece didn’t look at Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut up his mouth.
“Hold on there!” Samuel Teece leaped off the porch. He reached up and seized the reins of a horse ridden by a tall Negro man. “You, Belter, come down off there!”
“Yes, sir.” Belter slid down.
Teece looked him over. “Now, just what you think you’re doin’?”
“Well, Mr. Teece … ”
“I reckon you think you’re goin’, just like that song—what’s the words? ‘Way up in the middle of the air’; ain’t that it?”
“Yes, sir.” The Negro waited.
“You recollect you owe me fifty dollars, Belter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You tryin’ to sneak out? By God, I’ll horsewhip you!”
“All the excitement, and it slipped my mind, sir.”
“It slipped his mind.” Teece gave a vicious wink at his men on the hardware porch. “God damn, mister, you know what you’re goin’ to do?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re stayin’ here to work out that fifty bucks, or my name ain’t Samuel W. Teece.” He turned again to smile confidently at the men in the shade.
Belter looked at the river going along the street, that dark river flowing and flowing between the shops, the dark river on wheels and horses and in dusty shoes, the dark river from which he had been snatched on his journey. He began to shiver. “Let me go, Mr. Teece. I’ll send your money from up there, I promise!”
“Listen, Belter.” Teece grasped the man’s suspenders like two harp strings, playing them now and again, contemptuously, snorting at the sky, pointing one bony finger straight at God. “Belter, you know anything about what’s up there?”
“What they tells me.”
“What they tells him! Christ! Hear that? What they tells him!” He swung the man’s weight by his suspenders, idly, ever so casual, flicking a finger in the black face. “Belter, you fly up and up like a July Fourth rocket, and bang! There you are, cinders, spread all over space. Them crackpot scientists, they don’t know
