Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

“So what,” said the sheet, “can you tell us about this fellow here?”

“Will it make a difference?”

“May it might.”

The two others pushed the second captive to the ground in front of Andrew, while another brought the kerosene lamp closer. One of the men pulled the hood from him, while another held the lamp up.

Andrew squinted. There was something wrong with the light, or maybe his vision had been fouled by the blow to his head, or maybe he was just losing his sanity in the course of staring down his own death. The man’s face didn’t seem right. It had an odd bend to it at the forehead, and the mouth seemed too wide, and the eyes…

The eyes couldn’t have been that black. They seemed like they were all pupil, no iris. Eyes didn’t work that way.

That wasn’t the end of the strangeness, though. The hair sprang like winter-dead branches from his scalp and he was true, boneyard white. If the Klansmen were looking for their ghost to frighten even an educated Negro, they’d hit near the mark with this one. Andrew had seen queer things in Paris—pictures of hunchbacks and feeble men and women; dwarfs and giants—even photographs of old John Merrick, the Elephant Man of London.

But there had been nothing quite like this face.

Andrew blinked, and looked again, and swallowed hard and painful as he looked.

It must have been the scrambling of his brains, because when he looked again, the face seemed to have changed.

It was suddenly very beautiful, fine-featured; the face of a pale-skinned girl, black hair floating above her head like she was underwater. Her lips were not wide, but puckered into a rosebud aperture, from which the lovely whistling music came. And he blinked again, and when his eyes opened, they pulled the captive away.

“Recognize him?” said Robert Vernon, who by now had pulled his own sheet aside. “You recognize him, nigger. You do. You brung him here. And he did that thing to Maryanne. Fuckin’ rapist, and you brung him.”

“I—I’m not seeing right,” said Andrew. He felt as though he was spilling out of himself; he heard his voice hitch, in that weak, begging way. “You hit me on the head and I can’t see right.” And he added, hating himself: “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” said Robert. “That’s right, you’re sorry.”

“Tell us,” said the tall man. “No point playing stupid. We know you been keeping this freak under guard. Robert found him a week ago.”

Robert nodded. “In the quarantine,” he said. “Livin’ like a king. The cause of all our woes an’ livin’ like a king.”

“In quarantine,” said Andrew.

The quarantine was a barn-board outbuilding almost as big as the hospital itself, that he had only visited once—the day he’d arrived and Dr. Bergstrom was showing him around the whole compound. He’d never been inside, because there’d never been any need.

“Nobody,” Andrew said, “is in quarantine.”

“Callin’ me a liar, nigger?” said Robert.

Andrew swallowed and took a breath. If he kept himself just so, the pain wasn’t too bad. He kept his breathing right, the fear could be pushed away. So he did and he did.

“Look,” he said. “I’m telling you what I know. That quarantine’s been empty since autumn.”

“Before you were here,” said Robert.

“Before I was here.” Andrew said. “I’m sorry. I’ve never seen anybody in there. And I’ve surely never seen—that. You think he raped Maryanne? Or—cut her?”

The tall sheet made a throat-cutting motion to one of the others. “That’s enough,” he said. “He doesn’t recognize him either. Let’s get on.”

With that, the hood fell back over the head of the poor fellow and they hauled him back to the tree.

It was a maple, and over one thick branch that extended out and swooped down to nearly touch the ground, someone had slung two lengths of noose-tied rope.

The sheets went to work. Robert wrapped his arms around the man’s legs and with a cracking sound from his own bad knees, lifted as another took the poor victim by his shoulders, and a third helped guide his neck to the noose while the last two held the other end of the rope where it crossed the tree branch. Andrew thought there would be more of a fight, but the fellow had an odd calm to him as the rope went over his head, and pushed down over the sack and around his neck. There was a stillness, a terrible quiet, as the men stood there, holding their captive aloft, delicate, like they might be thinking about the right and wrong of what they were doing.

It didn’t last long, that moment.

Robert Vernon let go of the legs and the others let go of the arms, and the maple branch bent somewhat as the rope went tight. The two on the rope’s other end hauled the rope over the branch, and the lynched man rose in the night.