Deputies, unable to conceal their disgust, march the boys through the jail and up the stone stairs to a windowless blind aerie at the top, unlock it with a flat brass key, and hustle them in to a complete blackness. Black on black, one says. They don’t bother to take the ropes off and they leave the negroes looped together by another knot-tied rope in the hot dark. A few of the men, blind and re-destined, are scared to untie the rope, but Delvin finds himself speaking up to say they will be better off without any ropes at all, mentioning this almost as an aside, the misery that has come on him during the roundup unabated, stinking and stuck against his brain, a fresh damp gray endlessness stretching in all directions, his voice inside it hollow, creaking, faltering as if the old familiar language is no longer his, never had been. Hoods still on, in the dark, nobody can see anything. Delvin carefully pulls a little slack and works his hood off; it is still too black to see. Two of the boys cry steadily. Two others start yelling when Delvin comes down the line unlooping the rope. They don’t want to be cut loose. Somebody elbows Delvin in the side, another jerks up a fist that catches him in the right temple, a lucky blow that knocks him silly on his feet. For a moment he is dancing among leaves in the street outside the funeral home. Celia twirls in a yellow dress under the big sweet gum trees. Two seconds later he is back in the cell. A monstrous, unavoidable despair reaches through time and blackness and finds him. He smells a stink he can’t entirely place — pork grease, shit, sweat, and something else, reptilian and indelible.

Man by man he goes on retrieving the rope, picking the knots loose and coiling the rope over his elbow and through his cupped left hand. The darkness, filled with heat and a mucosal moistness, presses on him. From the dark a voice that comes from no one says: We will smother you. He goes on, slowly, retrieving the raw manila rope.

BOOK THREE

~ ~ ~