Alex Cross's Trial

the least bit feisty or defiant. She looked downtrodden. Defeated. The heartbreak of Hiram’s death had drained all the anger from her.

    I put my hand on her shoulder again. This time she reached up and patted my hand.

    “I’ve been going to funerals since I was a baby,” she said. “This one is different. Ain’t no ‘peaceable joy’ around here.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “We used to burying the old folks,” she said. “You know—after they lived a whole life. After they married and had their own kids, maybe even their grandkids. But lately, all these funerals for the young ones. And Hiram… I mean, Hiram…”

    Moody began to cry.

    “He weren’t nothing but a baby himself,” she said.

    I felt tears coming to my own eyes.

    “Here.” I thrust the pie under her nose. “Eat some of this. You need to eat.”

    It was useless advice, I knew, but it was what I remembered my father saying to people at funerals. Eat, eat… Now I understood why he’d said it: he just couldn’t think of anything else to say.

    Moody took the plate from my hand.

    Chapter 66

    MOODY WAS RIGHT. No “peaceable joy” came into Abraham Cross’s house that day.

    The bottle of moonshine was gradually consumed. The ham was whittled away until nothing but a knuckly bone was left on the plate. The pies shrank, shrank some more, then disappeared entirely. The afternoon lingered and finally turned into nighttime, with ten thousand cicadas singing in the dark.

    I shook hands with Abraham. Moody gave me a quick little hug. I made my way through the remaining mourners, out the front door.

    Fifty yards from the house, in front of the fig tree where I had parked the bicycle, stood three large white men. I couldn’t make out details of their faces in that shadowy street, but I knew where I’d seen them: these were the same men who’d been standing with Scooter that afternoon at the Mt. Zion church when he took his photographs.

    One of them spoke. “You looking for some trouble, Corbett?”

    I didn’t answer.

    Looking back on it, I guess one man must have been smoking a pipe. I saw him move and smack something hard against the trunk of the fig. Sparks flew in a shower to the ground.

    “We asked you a question,” said the man in the middle. “Serious question.”

    “Abraham! Moody!” I yelled.

    I don’t know if they heard me. If they did, I don’t know whether they came out of the house. In less time than it took for me to get my arms up, the three men were on me.

    Kicked in the head. In the face. I tasted blood. I fell face-down on the ground, hard. A knee went into my stomach, fists whaling at me all over. Someone stomping on the side of my rib cage. I could not get my breath. Something tore into my neck. It felt like fire.

    “Looks like you found it— trouble! ” a man grunted, and drew back to get a better angle for kicking me. He delivered a stunning blow to my knee. I heard a cracking crunch and felt a wild sear of pain and thought he had shattered my right kneecap.

    That was the last thing I remembered for a while.

    Chapter 67

    THE NEXT THING I was aware of—voices.

    “You gotta use a higher branch. He’s tall.”

    Something was in my eyes. Blood . I was blind from all the blood.

    “Use that next branch, that one yonder,” said a second man. “That’s what we used when we hung that big nigger from Tylertown.”

    “He wasn’t tall as this one. I can’t hardly see up this high.”

    “Hell he wadn’t. I had to skinny up the tree to put the rope way over.”

    Every inch of my body was experiencing a different kind of pain: sharp pain, dull pain, pain that throbbed with a massive pounding, pain that burned with a white-hot roar.

    I thought, It’s amazing how much pain you can feel and still not be dead.

    “This nigger-lover is tall,” the second man said, “but that ’un from Tylertown, he had to be six-foot-six if he was a inch.”

    I groaned. I think they were lifting me—hands under my armpits, digging into my flesh, cutting into me, dragging me off to one side.

    A thud—something hurting my back. Then I felt the damp ground under me.

    A crack—something landed hard on my left knee. I guessed that knee was shattered too.

    “This rope is all greasy. I can’t get aholt of it.”

    “That’s nigger grease.”

    I felt the coarse hemp rope coming down over my face, dragging over my nose, tightening against my neck.

    And I thought: Oh, God! They’re hanging me!

    Then I flew up into the air, like an angel—an angel whose head was exploding