After dinner, Polly retreats to his old office with the paper, as he often does. He tips his chair back and puts his feet up on his desk. The news is grim: a time bomb exploded at the post office in Naples, killing over one hundred people; the USS S-44 was shelled and sunk by the Japanese off Uomi Saki; ninety-seven American civilians on Wake Island were executed by the Japanese and buried in a mass grave.
He doesn’t read much beyond the headlines; a few articles he skims. Lately it’s been hard to concentrate on anything; he’s felt as if his mind were split into two reels, one attending to the business of life, and the other in vague and constant thought about Willie Jones. He starts to skim an article on the record losing streak of the Philadelphia Athletics, but a paragraph in he gives up, puts the paper down. He can’t do it. Not tonight.
Polly’s office is diagonally across the patio from the kitchen and directly underneath Gabe’s bedroom, so most nights after dinner he can both see Nell in the kitchen and hear Gabe overhead. He has always liked that sense of triangulation, the sense that the three of them, though apart, are still connected. He turns around to look out the window behind him; sure enough, Nell is there, drawing at the kitchen table. She sits on the edge of her seat, bent low over the paper. Though he can’t see them from here, he can imagine the row of pencils lined up on the table, the dish of shavings, her silvered fingertips. As Polly watches his wife, he listens to sounds of his son: the occasional creak of floorboards overhead, muffled music. Gabe. Polly can still see the look on the boy’s face as they were walking home, the confusion as he considered the outcome of legal justice in the case of Willie Jones. Polly has had to steel himself against criticism by some for Willie’s sentence. But Gabe—his disapproval, so innocently logical, is crushing.
Slowly, he turns back to his desk and pulls open the topmost drawer. Inside is a postcard that he’s kept with him for nearly thirty years, since his father gave it to him as a sort of souvenir—one he didn’t want, but one he has held on to nonetheless. He finds the postcard beneath a box of envelopes and takes it from the drawer. It is worn at the edges, the image on the front grainy and old. In the foreground is a gathered crowd, the white faces luminous in the camera’s flash, stark against the black night sky. Some are laughing, some appear to be in mid-speech, some seem bothered, and some look blank. The women in the crowd wear flowered, short-sleeved housedresses; their hair is fastened with barrettes. The men wear ties and slacks, their shirtsleeves rolled up. Many are wearing boater hats or fedoras, and several have cigarettes in hand. Most appear oblivious to the carnage overhead, where two young black men hang in bloodied clothing from the branches of a live oak.
Polly can remember how heavily they seemed to hang there, and how their bodies gently twisted, as if there were a breeze. One of the men wore pants, belt, and shoes. His shirt had been ripped open, and though they aren’t apparent in the photograph, Polly remembers the oozing wounds across his chest, the buzzing flies. The other man was barefoot, his shirt tattered, and a sheet was tied around his waist. Polly doesn’t know what happened to his shoes, or his pants; by the time he and his father had arrived, the two men had been dead for hours.
They stood at the edge of the crowd, his father’s hands on Polly’s shoulders. Polly remembers wanting to shut his eyes, but staring nonetheless, fearful of his father’s disapproval. He’s not sure what horrified him more, the casual nature of the crowd, or the men hanging from the tree. It wasn’t for another year that his father saw the postcard in a gas station store, on a rack with other postcards depicting cartoon alligators and Main Street, Lafayette. He stares at the postcard now, remembering, and he wonders which is worse, to be lynched or to be shocked to death in an electric chair. There was a time when he was sure there was difference, but now that he’s had a hand in it, he wonders if it really matters in the end what kind of justice it is—mob or legal—when the end result is death.
He puts the postcard down and sits back in his chair. He looks up at the wooden planks above his head, and he clings to the thin thread of the melody overhead as a reminder of the silence there might be if he hadn’t done what he had to do.