Love and Lament Read Online Free PDF

talk with his family. At the deaf-and-dumb school in Raleigh, if he used his hands to talk he had to sit on them; if he used them again that day the teacher rapped him on the knuckles with a ruler, or tied his hands behind his back. He was sent home halfway through the term for hitting a baseball through a window and refusing to say “I’m sorry.”
    Siler studied Mary Bet’s lips, held her jaw and made her repeat the question. She pointed to the well, then to the chicken coop. She dropped her arms and pouted. You couldn’t ask a roundabout question of Siler—you had to say what you meant. His eyes brightened, then narrowed as he studied her. He nodded, “Yah.” He put bird-beak fingers at his mouth, crooked a finger down, then touched W fingers to his lip. “Birds need water.”
    Though she had just begun to learn her own alphabet, she knew what he meant. His whole face explained that it was a stupid question, that of course they needed fresh water, every single day.
    It was the next spring when the hanging of Shackleford Davies took place on Gallows Hill in Williamsboro. It also happened to be a market day and so Mary Bet was allowed to ride the thirteen miles over to the county seat—starting at six in the morning got them there just past nine. The frost on the ground had melted by the time they arrived, but they still needed coats and sweaters and bonnets.
    When they got there, carriages were already parked solid half a mile west of the courthouse. Cicero found a colored boy to mind the horse, then they began walking, the crowd getting thicker as they approached. They took their time, Cicero limping along with his peg leg and walking stick. The courthouse looked to a small girl like a castle, its cupola rising in three layers from the roof; but its pillars and pediments sent a sterner message than the turrets and arches of fairy tales—justice was the center of the county, not silly romance. And today there was punishment and revenge in the air, and the excitement frightened her.
    They began walking north. Throngs three and four people deep lined the wooden sidewalks along the two blocks of downtown and spilled into the road. Mary Bet asked her father to lift her up on his shoulders so she could see, but he was crippled and she knew better than to ask.
    Then shouts arose and people said he was coming. Mary Bet worked her way through the sea of legs until she was at the edge of the street, and she could hear iron wheel rims grinding, hoofbeats drumming closer. And right then came two men mounted on big black horses, one of the men wearing a metal star on his jacket, and behind them a cart pulled by a mule. In the cart sat a man in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. His face was shaded so that Mary Bet could not see his eyes, but he seemed to be squinting into the sunless sky. She shivered when he looked in her direction. It was the Devil again, Mary Bet felt certain. But then she was not so sure, because his hands were bound togetherin his lap. She watched him as he swayed, perched on a long yellow pine box.
    Some people yelled out mean things, but most watched and talked and laughed, as if they were at a parade. Mary Bet felt a shivering tingle run all the way from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Maybe he was the Devil, and he wouldn’t die from the hanging. People said he’d come from the west, from Tennessee, where he’d been a preacher, and he’d gotten a job on a farm up near Silkton. But he wouldn’t do what the farmer asked him to, and when the farmer told him to leave, he took a hand ax and chased him out to a field. Then he chopped him until he was dead.
    Mary Bet could see this man wasn’t the same as the preacher in the road, because he had lighter hair and he was shorter and thicker. But the Devil could change shape, and it could be that he was after her for killing the crow. Now she was back with her family and they were caught up in the crowd as it followed the bad man’s