Darkling beetles have been burrowing, it’s been that hot and dry. Far out in left field, Gabe watches one emerge from the dirt near his feet, the hard black body shuddering itself free of the earth, the spindly legs tap-tapping at the ground as the creature begins to make its slow way toward the road. Gabe wonders where the beetle is going, or if the beetle even knows. Lately he’s been wondering this kind of thing. It’s like the dog across the street, rooting by the trash in the church alley. He’s looking for food, probably, but Gabe wonders if the dog knows what he’ll do afterward, or if beetles and dogs and squirrels and birds just do what they do while they’re doing it, no thought to the past or what comes next.
“Livingstone!”
Gabe looks across the baseball field toward home plate, where the other boys have gathered in the dusk. Kevin Saunders is waving at him. “You comin’?”
Gabe squints at Kevin across the field, and then up at the sky as if for an answer: is he coming? A red-tailed hawk soars above the piney tree line, and Gabe finds himself wondering about the hawk, too.
“Livingstone!”
He looks back at Kevin.
“You comin’ or you gonna stand there all night?”
I’m gonna stand here all night, Gabe thinks, but he starts to cross the field, jogging as slowly as he might otherwise walk, his eyes on his feet as they scuff across the ground. He can hear the voices of the other boys as he approaches, snippets of conversation: Cold Cokes at the pharmacy … Old lady Peterson’s veranda … Rope swing at the bayou. He hears Chub Larson talking about his mama’s brisket, and the Kane twins still arguing over an out. Buddy Cunningham’s voice is loudest. Buddy Cunningham’s country, but he comes in for games, walking the four miles each way from the land his daddy farms. And My daddy, Buddy’s saying, My daddy, come midnight my daddy’s going to go to St. Martinville to watch that nigger fry!
Gabe looks up abruptly, but Buddy’s proclamation goes unnoticed. Most of what Buddy says goes unnoticed, the bulk of it uttered just so he might be heard.
It’s only later, once a pack of them has reached the main part of town and set up with sodas in the square, that Buddy brings it up again. Chub Larson has gone home, and the Belty brothers, also country, have hitched a ride on Abe Dougie’s wagon as far out as the sand pits, anyway. Most of the younger kids, except Berle Williams, who has no rules, have gone home, too. But Kevin, Buddy, the Kane twins, Rud Scott, Caliber, and Gabe, they’re all lingering, easing comfortably into the lull of a weekend. Gabe lies on his back in the grass, staring up at the glowing sky through the sprawling branches of a live oak. He watches the day fade, only half listening to the other boys, who are talking about the fire that burned down Hattie LeMay’s house. The Kane twins swear it was an accident, Caliber says arson, and Rud Scott’s talking about Jewish lightning, when Buddy says, loudly, “You know, I think I may just go with my daddy.”
Gabe shuts his eyes. Rud Scott stops in mid-sentence. There’s a pause, in which Gabe can hear Rud loudly slurp the dregs of his Coke before responding to the interruption. “And what in the hell does that have to do with the price of eggs, Cunningham?”
There’s another pause. “Y’all weren’t talking about eggs,” Buddy says, finally. Gabe opens his eyes. One squirrel is chasing another in the branches overhead, rustling through the brittle resurrection fern.
“It’s a saying, Cunningham.”
“Well y’all can say all the sayings you want and while you do that I’m a go with my daddy and watch that nigger fry.”
No one responds. Gabe hears the sound of a car engine approach, drive clockwise around the square, and fade in the other direction.
It’s Kevin who speaks next. “Whatta you talking about, Cunningham?”
“Nigger over in St. Martinville,” Buddy says. “He done raped a banker’s daughter. That’s what my daddy says. They bringin’ an electrical chair over from Angola to fry him up.”
“Ain’t no such kind of chair,” Bill Kane scoffs.
“Is so! And my daddy—”
“It was a baker’s daughter, not a banker’s daughter. Grace Sutcliffe. And the boy who raped her cleaned the dishes.” This is Caliber, at fourteen the oldest of the boys. Gabe looks at him sharply; the older boy is looking directly at him. Gabe feels his face start to burn, and he looks away, willing Caliber to say nothing more. “Except some folks in St. Martinville say it wasn’t rape at all.”
Buddy Cunningham scoffs. “Well, then, what was it?” he demands.
Caliber shrugs in the mysterious way that he has. “Baker’s in the Klan,” he says. “He’d call it rape no matter what it was.”
Buddy snorts. “Well, whatever it was,” he says, “my daddy’s goin’. And I’m a go with him.”
“Ain’t no such kind of chair!” Bill Kane says again. “Is there?”
“Gruesome Gertie,” Caliber says gravely. “That’s what they call it.”
Gabe stares at the branches overhead, which transform in his mind into a grisly scaffolding, a postcard his father once showed him of a human harvest dangling.
For some time, no one speaks. And then Rud Scott clears his throat. “Well,” he says. “My pa bets his life that it was Jewish lightning.”