The Thomas Berryman Number

Horn couldn’t hear or understand. He smiled. Looked elsewhere.

Black people were drinking lemonade. Grinning as though someone was taking wedding pictures. They slouched on one foot. Squinted under the sun. Wiped their foreheads with their sleeves and brown paper bags.

The noise made it easy for Horn to retire inside himself. Relax for a minute before his speech.

It was a long field of striped cotton. Four o’clock of a day that had begun in the dark. There was a party for some undiscoverable reason. Everybody was forgetting everything. His grandmother, however, was out walking in the bright sun. She avoided shadows like a fly.

A college boy pumped his hand with embarrassing enthusiasm. These younger men in the crowd, Horn was sure, had dreams of going up on fancy platforms like the one before him. He’d had those dreams at times. Dreams of having his important (at least sensible) words amplified a half a mile. Of getting the attention, eyes, of five thousand faces. Of wearing suits that made you look as good as you knew you could.

The m.c. tapped his thumb against the microphone. It coughed. “… eesha? …” he called off the mike.

Keesha? His little girl?

Horn smiled again. Waved to Charles Evers while his eyes were up on the platform. Evers smiled. He couldn’t hear, either. Slouched over a card-table chair, he looked like he was waiting for a train.

Jap Quarry shouted down from the stage. Encouragement. Baseball catcher

rah, rah.

Horn’s fingers were following a prickly restraining rope leading to the stairs of the platform. He was smiling at the faintly familiar receiving line. His wife pinched his elbow. Someone did.

Applause rose as he got closer to the stairs.

Then it fell. Sank. Faces and clothes flashed by him like laundry in a washer. Lights winked, one of them the sun.

Two strings of gun

pops

seemed to happen in another dimension of sound. There were five more

pops,

then four more. Then two more. There were flashbulbs that sounded like more shots, but looked more frightening than the actual shooting.

The master of ceremonies stood still, his mouth was gaping. He thought he was shot himself. His picture was taken.

Many people thought they’d been shot. Several had been.

Jap Quarry finally took charge of the microphone. He looked down at Horn, never once out at the crowd. The pauses between his sentences were lengthy. “A doctor is up here already.” “The sniper is a white man.” “Please clear back. Please

You

get back there, mister.”

Oona Quinn was up close. She’d seen Berryman.

“If you don’t give Jimmie air,” Quarry said, “he’ll die right here on us.”

The great craning of necks was followed by the spectacle of people running around with their arms spread out like wasps. Running, flapping wings.

Little girls hugged their mothers and were hugged right back. Old people held one another up from falling. Big men sat on the top of tractor trailers and cried on their shoetops.

One old social worker went onto her black stockings on the platform. She swayed, swayed—reciting “Thou art my good and faithful servant in whom I am well pleased.”

Oona Quinn watched a man’s bare, hairy leg for several minutes. She knew he was a policeman. Shot in the stomach by another policeman.

She saw Poole where he’d been shot down. A thin, curly-headed boy with no more nose or right eye. Frozen deranged. A broken straw hat was pulled down over his eyes like a gambler’s visor.

All along she’d watched Mrs. Horn.

They pulled her back from him. She had blood on her nose and cheek.

As she rose, Jimmie Horn slowly came into sight.

The bones in his forehead had been splintered, piercing out through the skin like miniature broken ribs. There was sweat all over his face, and the sweat beads looked like blisters. He was saying something in a soft voice that seemed unrecognizable to his wife.

Two pale hospital attendants ran with a feathery litter, then ran with him dead.

As he’d known he would from the beginning, Thomas Berryman had succeeded.

PART VII

The Thomas Berryman Number

Louisville, December 8

I’m sitting in the largest farmhouse bedroom, drinking Johnny Walker Scotch. Mostly I’m considering the final interview I had. But I’m also thinking that you never really know who lied to you along the way. Who led you down a wrong road. You just get someplace. This is it.

Institutional gray buildings had blended into foothills that were just about blue. They were smoke-colored. Negro men ran in a yard that was visible from the neighboring streets. They seemed to be practicing professional football drills. This impression struck me as illogical at first. Then slightly logical as I thought about it. I had come to the federal penitentiary at Louisville.