She sat without answering. She sat that way for almost a full minute, and then she did something which shocked me as badly as my sudden flow of tears must have shocked her. She reached out and shoved everything off the table with one wide sweep of her arm-plates, glasses, cups, silverware, the he bowl of
collards, the bowl of squash, the platter with the carved ham on it, the milk, the pitcher of cold tea. All off the table and onto the floor, ker-smash.
“Holy shit!” Dean cried, rocking back from the table so hard he damned near went over on his back.
Janice ignored him. It was Brutal and me she was looking at, mostly me. “Do you mean to kill him, you cowards?” she asked. “Do you mean to kill the man who saved Melinda Moores’s life, who tried to save those little girls, lives? Well, at least there will be one less black man in the world won’t there? You can console yourselves with that. One less nigger.”
She got up, looked at her chair, and kicked it into the wall. It rebounded and fell into the spilled squash. I took her wrist and she yanked it free.
“Don’t touch me”, she said. “Next week this time you’ll be a murderer, no better than that man Wharton, so don’t touch me.”
She went out onto the back stoop, put her apron up to her face, and began to sob into it. The four of us looked at each other. After a little bit I got on my feet and set about cleaning up the mess. Brutal joined me first, then Harry and Dean. When the place looked more or less shipshape again, they left. None of us said a word the whole time. There was really nothing left to say.
6.
That was my night off. I sat in the living room of our little house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, and watching the dark come up out of the ground to swallow the sky. Television is all right, I’ve nothing against it, but I don’t like how it turns you away from the rest of the world and toward nothing but its own glassy self. In that one way, at least, radio was better.
Janice came in, knelt beside the arm of my chair, and took my hand. For a little while neither of us said anything, just stayed that way, listening to Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge and watching the stars come out. It was all right with me.
“I’m so sorry I called you a coward”, she said. “I feel worse about that than anything I’ve ever said to you in our whole marriage.”
“Even the time when we went camping and you called me Old Stinky Sam?” I asked, and then we laughed and had a kiss or two and it was better again between us. She was so beautiful, my Janice, and I still dream of her. Old and tired of living as I am, I’ll dream that she walks into my room in this lonely, forgotten place where the hallways all smell of piss and old boiled cabbage, I dream she’s young and beautiful with her blue eyes and her fine high breasts that I couldn’t hardly keep my hands off of, and she’ll say, Why, honey, I wasn’t in that bus crash. You made a mistake, that’s all. Even now I dream that, and sometimes when I wake up and know it was a dream, I cry. I, who hardly ever cried at all when I was young.
“Does Hal know?” she asked at last.
“That John ‘s innocent? I don’t see how he can.”
“Can he help? Does he have any influence with Cribus?”
“Not a bit, honey
She nodded, as if she had expected this. “Then don’t tell him. If he can’t help, for God’s sake don’t tell him.”
“No.”
She looked up at me with steady eyes. “And you won’t call in sick that night. None of you will. You can’t.”
“No, we can’t. If we’re there, we can at least make it quick for him. We can do that much. It won’t be like Delacroix.” For a moment, mercifully brief, I saw the black silk mask burning away from Del’s face and revealing the cooked blobs of jelly which had been his eyes.