There’s a dog barking at the edge of the onion field as he and his father work the rows, pulling up the bulbs whose tops have dried. Willie’s got a sack full of them, not just white ones but purple, brown, green, even blue. His father is a few rows away, bending, standing, bending, standing. It’s sunny, not a cloud overhead, but his father is as wet as if he’d just come from the bayou, his shirt stuck fast to his skin, britches dripping, and when Willie looks down at himself, he sees that he’s wet, too; his sleeves are soaked, and droplets shimmer on his shackles.
Willie! His father’s voice carries across the rows of onion grass. Willie!
He looks up. His father’s holding an onion red as blood and big as a basketball, unlike anything Willie’s ever seen. His father takes his hat off and waves it at Willie, and as he’s holding it in the air an eagle swoops in from overhead and takes it from his hand. Willie lifts his own hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and as he watches the bird soar away, giant talons clutched around the hat brim, he begins to understand that he is dreaming.
He leaves his eyes closed as the dream recedes, stranding him again in grim reality. He holds on to the image of his father, of the onion field, but he can feel the hard cot beneath him, hear the water dripping from the pipe in the corner of his cell, smell the putrid sludge leaking from the base of the seatless toilet. As there was in his dream, there is the sound of a barking dog, always a barking dog.
He opens his eyes and sees the day’s last rays falling slatted through the window bars and onto the concrete walls. He hadn’t meant to sleep. But these days sleep comes when it comes, and always it brings dreams. Sometimes his dreams are nightmares: seared flesh, scorched hair, lethal currents zinging through his body. But mostly he dreams about little things, like having a splinter underneath his thumbnail, or drawing circles in the dirt with bare toes, or the way you feel you’re going to fall when you’re running backward to catch a ball coming down against a blinding sun, little details that make sleep feel more like living than wakefulness does. Wakefulness is merely existing. Wakefulness is waiting to die, and waiting for what is happening to seem real.
None of any of it has seemed real, from the moment he first saw Grace, elbow deep in a mixing bowl with flour across her face, a perfect crescent of white just beneath her cheekbone—this image of her is one that for weeks he turned over and over in his mind as he scrubbed tins crusted with cake and bowls sticky with the sweet streaks of batter, or as he walked home from his shift, so lost in his own mind that when he got home he couldn’t remember getting there. After that moment, he found himself in a world defined by Grace, a world in which everything seemed a dream: the rush of an accidental touch in the kitchen, the conversations that they held with their eyes, the slight weight of her body above his own, the heady thrill, the terror. And then dream turned nightmare: her father’s raging face in the doorway, his own blind sprint home through the predawn streets, the deputies and lynch mob arriving shortly after, both at once, cursing and yelling and pounding on the door. Sometimes Willie wishes the mob had gotten to him first.
He rises from his cot and looks out the window. The sun is nearing the horizon, a smoldering globe, sunk low enough that the tin roofs of the clapboard houses around the parish courthouse, which all day glint in the sun, lie in shadow, though the spire of St. Peter’s still rises skyward into light. It’s the last of the sun he will ever see. The notion is so strange that it doesn’t bother Willie the way he knows it should, the same way he figures shock at first staves off the pain of a broken bone.
After some minutes he is aware of footsteps coming down the hallway, and the sound of jingling keys. Willie breathes deeply, turns from the window, and sits down on the edge of his cot. The sun glows in his vision. The footsteps near.
Sheriff Grazer appears at his cell door, accompanied by a man in brown garb identical to Willie’s own. The man waits just behind Grazer, looking at Willie nervously as the sheriff fits the keys into the lock. In his hands the prisoner holds a bowl with a straightedge razor, scissors, brush, and soap.
Grazer swings the cell door open and ushers the inmate inside.
“Evenin’, Willie,” the prisoner says.
Willie nods, lifting a hand to touch his cheeks, his hair.
Grazer brings a folding chair in from the hallway. “Burl come to clean your head, boy,” he says, arranging the chair in the middle of Willie’s small cell.
“Sorry, Willie,” Burl says, laying the brush, soap, and scissors down on the cot. He’s small and wiry, old enough to be gray at the temples but still youthful in body. He looks at Willie regretfully, the whites of his eyes rheumy yellow. Willie nods once, a sign of reassurance or forgiveness. Burl turns to fill the bowl at the sink.
“Have a seat,” Grazer says, gesturing Willie toward the chair. Willie rises from the cot. As he sits down on the folding chair he thinks of Maud Clover’s barbershop in St. Martinville, how the white men would kick back there for hours under smocks like tents, trading tales with Maud as the barber clipped around their ears or drew his straightedge razor across their sudsy necks. On his way home as a kid some afternoons Willie would stop and talk to Little Maud outside, his eye always only half on Little Maud as, transfixed, he watched through the window the barber’s blade slide across a field of stubble, the thrilling balance of pressure as the razor’s indentation moved along the flesh, skating precisely along the line between gentle and firm.
Willie feels Burl drag a wet washcloth across his head. He blinks, returning to his cell; so often does he vanish into thought.
“Sure is a nice evenin’,” the inmate says, behind him. “I reckon it’s getting cooler.”
“Oh, we ain’t done with the heat,” Grazer says. He’s leaning up against the wall of the cell in front of Willie, his big arms crossed. “I reckon next week’ll be worse than last.”
“That right,” Burl says.
Willie looks at his hands, touches a cracked spot near the knuckle that has been bothering him some. He thinks how little the weather matters. It will be hotter or cooler next week without him. It’s another odd thought. He picks at the spot near his knuckle, draws blood, and thinks of the wound how little it matters, either.
“Well,” Burl mutters. He rubs soap into Willie’s hair. “That OK, Willie?”
Willie shuts his eyes; the feel of Burl’s knobby fingers on his skull is like sinking, worn out, into sleep. “That’s fine,” he says. It’s been some time since he’s felt this kind of human touch.
“Got to be clean to see the Lord,” Burl murmurs.
Grazer makes a sound: a snort, a scoff. Willie opens his eyes. “You gotta be bald, boy,” Grazer says, and he’s looking straight at Willie, the side of his mouth up high, “so the electricity can pass right though that thick skull. Ain’t got nothing to do with the Lord.”
Burl drags the razor across Willie’s head. “I reckon you’ll be clean, too, Willie,” he says quietly. He wipes the razor on a towel, and again Willie shuts his eyes.