Boys Life

watch the coffin go past-I realized what to me was a peculiar and scary thing. In those pictures, you can see black pools spreading. Maybe it was just the light, or the film, or something, but those pictures seemed to me to be filling up with darkness. Black shadows hang in the corners; they spread tendrils across men in suits and weeping women, and they connect cars and buildings and manicured lawns with long fingers of shadow. Faces are shrouded with darkness, and it has gathered around people’s shoes like ponds of tar. The darkness seems like a living thing in those pictures, something growing among the people like a virus and hungrily stretching right off the frame.
    Then, on another page, there was a photograph of a man on fire. He is baldheaded and Oriental, and he wears the flames like a cloak as he sits cross-legged in the street. His eyes are closed, and though the fire is eating up his face he is as serene as my dad listening to Roy Orbison on the radio. The caption said this had happened in a city called Saigon, and the Oriental man was a monk who poured gasoline on himself, sat down, and lit a match.
    And there was a third picture that haunts me yet. It shows a burned-out church, the stained-glass windows shattered and firemen picking through the ruins. A few black people are standing around, their expressions dull with shock. The trees in front of the church have no leaves on them, though the caption said this event happened on September fifteenth of 1963, before summer’s end. The caption said this was what was left of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, after somebody planted a bomb that went off as Sunday school was just letting out and four girls died in the blast.
    I looked out, across my hometown. I looked at the green hills and the blue sky, and the distant roofs of Bruton. Beside me, Rebel whimpered in a dog’s dream.
    I never knew what hate really was until I thought of somebody wrapping up a bomb and putting it in a church on a Sunday morning to kill little girls.
    I wasn’t feeling very well. My head, still lumpy from Gotha Branlin’s fist, was hurting. I went to my room and lay down, and there amid my monsters I fell asleep.
    This was early summer in Zephyr: an awakening to hazy morning heat, the sun gradually burning the haze off and the air getting so humid your shirt stuck to your skin by the time you’d walked to the mailbox and back. At noon the world seemed to pause on its axis, and not a bird dared to wing through the steaming blue. As afternoon rambled on, a few clouds rimmed with purple might build up from the northwest. You could sit on the porch, a glass of lemonade at your side and the radio tuned to a baseball game, and watch the clouds slowly roll toward you. After a while you might hear distant thunder, and a zigzag of lightning would make the radio crackle. It might shower for thirty minutes or so, but most times the clouds just marched past with a rumble and grunt and not a drop of rain. As evening cooled the earth, the cicadas droned in their hundreds from the woods and lightning bugs rose from the grass. They got up in the trees and blinked, and they lit up the branches like Christmas decorations here on the edge of July. The stars came out, and some phase of the moon. If I played my cards right, I could talk my folks into letting me stay up late, like until eleven or so, and I would sit in the front yard watching the lights of Zephyr go out. When enough lights were extinguished, the stars became much brighter. You could look up into the heart of the universe, and see the swirls of glowing stars. A soft breeze blew, bringing with it the sweet perfume of the earth, and the trees rustled quietly in its passage. It was very hard, at times like this, not to think that the world was as well-ordered and precise as the Cartwright ranch on “Bonanza,” or that in every house lived a “My Three Sons” family. I wished it were so, but I had seen pictures of a spreading dark, a burning man, and a bomb-wrecked church, and I was beginning to know the truth.
    I got to know Rocket better, when my folks would let me ride again. My mom told it to me straight: “You fall down and bust that lip open again, it’s back to Dr. Parrish’s and this time it’ll be fifteen or twenty stitches!” I knew better than to push my luck. I stayed close to the house, and I pedaled Rocket around as gingerly as riding one of those swaybacked ponies that plods in circles at the county