A white man outside streaks past, a blur. They shoot at him, but he reaches the lowest part of the east overhang of the roof, carrying a small can and bamboo fishing poles bound together, topped with torn-up cotton stuffing from Eli McCullen’s saddle blanket, the one he uses for his mule. Why is it here instead of in Eli’s storage shed in Smithfield Quarter?
The man throws kerosene on the wooden part of the roof.
“They setting the roof afire,” McCully yells. The white man touches the tip of the torch fashioned from Eli’s mule blanket to the waiting kerosene, throws the torch farther up on the roof for good measure, and flees down toward Red River, disappearing from view. The shingles covering the eaves ignite.
Israel smells it catch. McCully runs to the side window closest to the flames and twists his big body through, trying to punch off the burning shingles with his hands. A hail of bullets erupts, focused on that single window.
“Keep it going, boys,” Israel hears from outside.
“Put the fire out,” McCully calls to the others inside. “Don’t let it take hold. Shoot back.”
Spenser, Eli, and several other colored men discharge rounds to give McCully cover, but the opposing gunfire only intensifies.
“They gonna burn us alive,” one of the colored men screams.
McCully peels off his jacket to serve as a strangling rag, then tries again to reach out of the window to the burning eaves. There is an avalanche of gunfire from outside. The fire is no longer explosive, flame to fuel, but it has passed beyond tentative and now blazes greedily, skipping from one spot to another on the roof.
“We done for, ’less we get that fire out,” McCully says. He thrusts his upper body out through the window, getting one arm free enough to flap the jacket against the blaze on the roof.
McCully’s body twitches with the impact of the first bullet at the shoulder, but still he raises the cloth to take another swing at the flames. He is a tall man, and the reach of his arms is great. He shifts the jacket to his other hand and tries again to stifle the burning material on the roof, but the kerosene has primed the wood, hastening the flames’ spread. The next two bullets catch him in the chest and throat. They come from different angles but hit at almost the same instant. The impact opens McCully’s body.
“Bring the coon down, boys,” someone outside yells.
Spenser McCullen struggles to pull his father back inside the courthouse, and despite his wounded leg, Israel Smith flings himself across the room toward the east courthouse window to help.
Chapter
16
Aslick patch on the floor almost sends Israel Smith slamming into the casement, but he regains his footing, keeps himself from falling. Bits of McCully’s wine-dark blood pool on the floorboard planks.
McCully drapes, partway in and partway out the window, arms outstretched along the burning roof, his broad body an easy target drawing heavy gunfire. Israel grabs hold of McCully around the waist and yanks downward, hard. A bullet hurtles past his face and lands somewhere inside the courthouse, but Israel holds on, helping to drag McCully’s body through the river of blood on the sill.
Together, Israel and Spenser maneuver McCully away from the window, toward the center of the room, and lay him on his back. Blood spurts pulselike from an opening at the side of the big man’s neck, but with progressively diminishing force, creating new plum-colored puddles on the floor. Random bullets smack the side of the building around the window, embedding themselves in the wood and brick, and then the pace of shooting slows.
“Come on now, Papa,” Spenser says, shaking the unmoving man lightly. He lifts McCully’s head and cradles it in his lap, oblivious to the spreading red drenching his trousers. “Come on.”
Several men gather around McCully, but they quickly understand what his son cannot, and they are quiet, creating a circle of stillness in the chaos of the courthouse. Israel stands over the body.
“Spenser, your daddy gone,” he says.
“No,” says Spenser. He rocks as he kneels, his father’s head a heavy weight in his lap.
Israel leaves Spenser hunched over his father’s body and limps away from the clutch of men. McCully’s Enfield stands propped against the wall, and Israel lifts the weighty rifle in his hands. The long barrel and barrel bands have blackened to an intense, hypnotic deep blue. Some of the other men have chosen to polish the barrels of their Enfields until they gleam, but McCully didn’t tamper with the cool certainty of that blue-black.
Men jostle and shove in every room of the courthouse, some arguing, others cursing, a few wordless. No one takes particular notice of Israel. He lifts the blue-barreled weapon, steadies it on the sill of the blood-smudged window, and eases back on the trigger. There is a click, a dull scraping of metal against metal.
The cartridge pouch still hangs from McCully’s rope belt, where Spenser slumps, dazed, next to his father on the floor. Israel retrieves the pouch and hangs it from his own belt. There aren’t many cartridges left. He returns to the window and loads the Enfield, the taste of gunpowder acrid to his tongue when he bites away the paper wrapping. He slams the cartridge home so violently he jams his thumb, pain radiating all the way up his arm, but this time he yanks hard at the trigger and the gun fires. The recoil is stronger than he expects, the barrel jerking upward for a long moment before thudding back to the sill. The bullet is high and wide. Through the open window, Israel smells kerosene and gunpowder both, strong enough to catch in his throat and force a cough. He stuffs powder, reloads, and fires twice more.
After the effort of those three shots, Israel is spent. Just that quickly, in less than two minutes. He has no desire to shoot the rifle again. All he wants is to be done with this place and to get back to his cabin, and to Lucy and his children.
The smoke from the fire on the roof begins to overrun the inside of the courthouse, and Israel feels the air heat up inside the stuffy rooms. It is as if they are inside a wasp’s nest newly smoked and knocked from the eaves, all frantic motion and activity, without a leader. Except for the occasional popping of a gun outside, the firing has stopped; Israel knows there has been yet another turning point. The colored men of Colfax have nothing to do other than to vacate the building that will, given enough time, burn over their heads. The white men outside can afford to be patient and wait.
Squatting stock-still over the supine body of McCully, Spenser looks bewildered, oblivious to the bedlam around him. Israel flashes on Noby, on whether his son will also be forced to face a future without his father. He hopes Sam Tademy managed to get the women and children to safety.
“Time to get out of here,” Israel says to Spenser, laying a hand on the young man’s shoulder.
Spenser doesn’t respond, instead pushing with gentle, tentative fingers at the shredded skin of his father’s face, as if he can rearrange the crushed bones underneath or coerce his father to pay attention and draw air into his lungs again.
“Rip up your shirt, boy,” Israel says.
Spenser stops his mapping on his father’s face and stares blankly at Israel.
“For a flag.” Israel forces his voice lower, more authoritative. “Rip up your shirt.”
Spenser drops his hands to his sides, away from his father, but other than that, he still doesn’t move.
Israel stoops to help him to his feet. “Get up, son.”
This time Spenser obeys, a limp softness to him. Israel leads him a few steps away from his father’s body.
“A flag. We need us a white flag,” Israel says. “We got to give up.”
Spenser takes off his shirt and hands it to Israel, his movements slow. The material is blotchy with McCully’s blood. The front is soaked through, and even the back is speckled with dark red clots. Israel chooses the sleeve most free of McCully’s blood and rips it through from the seam. He leaves Spenser and hobbles to the window, waving the cloth back and forth frantically, as if his fervor can ward off danger, change the course of fate. He waves the white flag of truce un
til the smoke makes it hard to breathe, then he leaves the window to rejoin Spenser.
“The roof gonna give,” Israel says. “You and me, we going out together.”
Men wave light-colored pocket rags or pieces of clothing from each window. A few wield white pieces of paper they’ve rippped from the books in the courthouse.
“Don’t shoot,” an anonymous colored man yells to those outside.
Others take up the refrain, yelling out of the windows, “We give up. We coming out. No weapons.”
Spenser seems to come awake all at once, his eyes black and feverish.
“Don’t trust them.” Spenser pulls at Israel’s jacket sleeve. “Stay here. You’ll see.”
He grabs the ripped shirtsleeve from Israel’s hand and rushes toward the front door. Israel follows, elbowing his way through the throng of men pressed near the door, but the passage is tight with the undecided, men afraid to step outside yet unwilling to stay inside the burning building. Israel can’t push more than midway through the jostling crowd, falling farther and farther behind Spenser as the young man shoves aside anyone in his way. Spenser elbows one old man at least thirty years his senior, knocking him to the floor. He thrusts open the doors to the courthouse and walks boldly out into the light of the afternoon, holding the limp white sleeve high above his head.
“We surrender,” Spenser shouts.
Once Spenser commits, others stream outside behind him, following in the young man’s wake, stopping only briefly to fill their lungs with desperate gulps of the clearer, cooler air.
Israel is propelled forward in the pack rushing to get out of the burning building, unable to control his own movements. He is all the way to the front doorway when he hears Spenser speak. There is a hesitation, a pause, not silence but an eerie quiet filled with the rush of footsteps and the panting breath of men in between action. Israel hears a single gunshot, and he is close enough to see Spenser drop. All of the men closest to him stop for just an instant, as if suspended, until the air around them is filled with the sound and smell of bullets. There are dozens of shots, picking the colored men of Colfax off one by one as they stumble through the front doors of the courthouse. Colored men so anxious to exit one minute before now reverse direction, tripping over one another as they try to reenter the burning building. Israel is carried backward in the wave until he finds himself on the floor, knocked on his back in one of the courthouse rooms, like a baby put to crib. He struggles back to his feet and, from the east window, sees colored men run jaggedly across the fields toward the river. Most don’t get far before a piece of metal in the back or leg slows them down. Those who are able, continue to run or crawl. Often it takes two or three hits before they fall and stay down.
The rooms in the courthouse warm steadily from the flames. The only choices for the colored men of Colfax are fire, smoke, or lead. Several men dive through the courthouse windows at either side of the building rather than go through the front door and the waiting onslaught of bullets, but they seldom get more than a few feet before being cut down.
Israel can’t run for long with his leg wound, and surrender is certain death. He gathers up the three men closest to him.
“I know a place,” he whispers. None of the men question him. They just follow.
Israel leads them to the back of the courthouse, to the supply room Lucy cleaned in the early days of the siege. The room is farthest away from where the fire was set, and there isn’t as much smoke as in the front of the building. Israel shimmies aside the trunk covering the crawl space entrance and pulls up two loose floorboards with his hands. The other men pry up two more planks so they can lower themselves down into the space, one at a time. Warren Bullitt, a burly man from Aloha whom Israel barely knows, shoves Israel to the side and scrambles into the opening headfirst.
“No need for that,” Israel protests, but already more men have materialized as if from nowhere, ready to jockey for one of the coveted spaces. Israel knows he can’t control whatever happens. All he can do is make sure he is one of the ones to use his own hiding place. “Set the floorboards back after the last man,” he says, and squeezes down headmost into the dark hole, illuminated only dimly by a shaft of light through mismatched sidewall boards.
He crawls through one tangle of dense cobwebs after another, closing his eyes. He can’t avoid inhaling the sticky netting full of dead bugs and live spiders, and the webs plug his nostrils and plaster themselves across his damp face. His only consolation is that Warren Bullitt must have gotten worse. The dirt is musty-damp and reeks of mold, but Israel inches forward on all fours until he can go no farther, until he bumps into Warren.
“Dead end,” Warren says.
A fifth man wiggles into the hole, and then a sixth, until there is no more room to move, and still a seventh man forces his way in. All of the men in the hole are wringing wet and squeezed up against one another. Israel presses tighter against Warren Bullitt, forced from the other side, and he twists his body to try to create more space. Warren doesn’t move an inch, his big frame like a wall of brick.
“Go deeper,” Israel says.
“No more room, Brother,” says Warren.
Israel starts to cramp from the awkwardness of holding his body at such an unnatural angle. The men above-floor struggle to get the planks back into place over their heads, but there are too many underground.
“On our backs,” says Israel. “Hug your chest.”
They make a human chain under the floor, side by side, flat on their backs on the damp ground, gaining precious inches by wrapping their arms across their chests as if they are laid out in coffins. Up above, they replace the floorboards, blocking out the light. The men underground stare upward, mummified, unable to distinguish whether the oppressive heat that forces them to shut their eyes to keep out the stinging sweat comes from themselves, their neighbors, or the flames bearing down on them.
A rat comes so close to Israel’s face that he can hear the whistle in its breathing, and when he opens his eyes, he sees the red-glared pinpricks of the rodent’s flashing eyes. Israel purposefully breathes louder himself, as if to convince the creature that he is bigger and dangerous to tangle with, and for the hundredth time, he wishes himself out of this place, but there is no access to the outside from under the courthouse. There is nothing to do but lie still and wait.
It is likely they will burn to death in this underground grave. The best they can hope for is that the white men, victorious, will put out the fire to save their building before the flames reach the buried men, and they might go undiscovered until after the bloodlust passes. It isn’t a great plan, but it is all the seven men have. The pains shooting down Israel’s leg have quieted enough to allow him to lie immobile in this mummy box. The fear he has borne all his life has come to carry him home. Instead of panicking, he is calm in the face of death, but Israel wants to live. He wants to see Lucy again. He wants a chance to be a better father to his sons. He wants to rub his cheek scar, the question mark that is his life, but he cannot move. He wonders whether he has chosen the right path in life. Go along to get along.
Has his work with Noby been wrong? He has tried to tame him, to teach the boy to go quiet and look the other way for his own survival. If he could say one thing to Noby now from his underground tomb, it would be “Son, don’t never let nobody put their hands on you.” It is a tricky balance to be a colored man, keeping both body and spirit alive when the choices you make to preserve the one so often threaten to kill the other.
The seven men lie still, breathing in the close, dank air mixed with smoke and gunpowder and fear-sweat, and wait for a miracle.
Israel doesn’t know how long they have been beneath the floorboards, soaked through from both the heat and their own fear, but gunfire becomes sporadic and infrequent. He guesses an hour, but it could easily be much longer or much shorter. Crawling things that Israel can’t identify bore into his skin, biting and slithering, stirred up by the heat and smoke.
“Least we
not burnt up,” whispers Warren Bullitt next to him. The smoke has thinned and the temperature has stopped rising. From under the floorboards, they hear the white men on water brigade call to one another outside, dousing the fire.
“I druther die here than go out to those white men,” Warren says.
Israel shushes him and they go back to stillness. The sickening odors of sulfur and burning hair make Israel want to bolt their self-made tomb. He hears the clump and drag of boots over their heads as men walk into the supply room.
“Come up out of there,” a white voice says.
None of the colored men move.
The planks creak as the floorboards are pulled up, and a harsh, blinding light streams into the dark hole. To his right, Israel feels Warren quietly scoot farther back into the dark, dank crawl hole. Israel tries not to focus on the fact that Warren has hoarded a few inches of extra space all along. He concentrates on his own body. His muscles are beyond his command, his arms stiff across his chest as if frozen in place. He left the gun above in the courthouse, but he couldn’t have used it if it had been in his hand, loaded and ready. They are packed in like summer pickles in a brine jar, and only after the white man yanks out the first one of them nearest the loose floorboard can they even manage to roll a few inches to the right or left.
One by one, sore and dehydrated, the men under the floorboards inch to the opening and emerge to the small audience of white men, unfolding their aching limbs as they try to restore feeling to their bodies. Israel is the last to come out, dragging his game leg behind him, careful not to glance backward into the hole to see if Warren intends to follow.
“There’s another,” a white man says.
“Drag him out.”
“I’m not going in after him,” the first man says.
“Fire down under, then,” says the other.
The colored men from the hiding hole stand, silent prisoners, and watch as the white man fires two pistol shots into the dark space. They hear Warren scream.