“What happened to him?”
“He worked over at the gin for Mr. Purneau,” Abraham said. “Last Saturday he got drunk like he always does after he gets his pay. He was walkin’ home and somehow he got hold of a gun. Don’t know if he brung it with him, I never knowed Jimmy to carry a gun. Anyway he popped it off right there a couple of times on Commerce Street, down at the end there by the depot. He didn’t hit anybody, but a couple of men saw him. They brought him here.”
“We can’t leave him up there,” I said.
“Well sir, we have to,” said Abraham.
“Why is that?”
“Because they told the people came to cut Jimmy down they wanted him left here as a warning for the others.?
??
“You afraid to cut him down, Abraham? This man needs to be buried.”
“We got no way to carry him.”
“Across the mule’s back,” I said. “I can walk it, or I can ride with you.”
“I’m an old man, Mr. Corbett. I can’t climb that tree.”
“Well, I can, but I don’t have a knife,” I said.
Abraham produced an excellent bowie knife with a bone handle.
It was only when I was directly under Jimmy Patton’s body that I saw someone had severed his fingers and toes. Where his digits should have been there were bloody stumps.
I made quick work of climbing the cherry tree.
“Yes, sir,” Abraham said. “Sometime they cut off pieces. To take for souvenirs. And sometimes they sell ’em, you know. At the general store. At the barber shop. Ten cent for a nigger toe. Twenty-five cent for a nigger thumb.”
I waved my hand at the ugly explosion of blood on the front of Jimmy Patton’s trousers.
“That’s right,” said Abraham. “Sometimes they don’t stop at fingers and toes.”
I felt light-headed and nauseated again. “Just—just stop talking for a minute, would you, Abraham?”
I sawed at the rope with a knife for what seemed like an hour. Jimmy Patton finally fell to the ground with a sickening thud.
Somehow I managed to climb down that tree. Somehow I got the Indian blanket out from under Abraham’s saddle and wrapped it around the dead man. With Abraham’s help I got Jimmy onto the mule. His body was so stiff from rigor mortis that I had to balance him just so, like a pine log.
“We better get out of here,” Abraham said. “Somebody watching us for sure.”
“Where? I don’t see anybody.”
“I don’t see ’em,” he said, “but I know they watching us, just the same.”
We made it back through the peach orchard, onto the road, all the way back to town without meeting a soul. I walked the mule by its rope, hoping it would help to be out front. But there was nowhere to walk without breathing in the smell of Jimmy Patton’s decomposing flesh, the coppery smell of his blood.
“I’m ready to write that report, Abraham,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I imagine you are.”
Chapter 52
SUDDENLY IT WAS SUNDAY, and I was back in a world I recognized. I didn’t admit to myself why I felt so lighthearted. I splashed my face with lilac water and clipped a fresh collar to my shirt, but it wasn’t until I was standing at the bright yellow door of Elizabeth Begley’s white mansion that I admitted what had made me so happy yet apprehensive: the prospect of seeing her again.
The door swung open even before I could knock. At a house so grand, I naturally expected to be greeted by a servant, but instead I found the door opened by its owner, Elizabeth’s husband, a short, bald man with an amiable smile. “You must be the famous Benjamin Corbett of Washington, attorney at law,” he said.