He drives north out of town. The highway that leads to St. Martinville runs generally parallel to Bayou Teche, though if Polly didn’t know it, he’d never guess there was a wide and slowly swirling waterway a few hundred yards away. He drives quickly, staring thoughtless and transfixed at the gray ribbon of concrete passing beneath his hood, and he’s unsure, when he arrives at St. Martinville some twenty minutes later, whether the drive has felt more like seconds or hours.
Polly leaves his car several blocks away from the courthouse and approaches on foot, wanting to move. There are others walking in the same direction; one or two of them at first, then more and more as they converge on the square and finally join a swelling crowd, which has spilled from the courthouse green and all around the jail into the streets.
Polly pauses across the way. He takes his hat off, wipes the perspiration from his brow. Before him, the horde seems a single living thing: murmuring, shifting, breathing. He notices a small child at the edge of the crowd, attached to her father’s hand, being pulled in, swallowed up. He imagines what it must be like from her vantage point: the legs and skirts and belt buckles, the courthouse lights shining down through the trees, the volleying voices over her head. Polly wonders if the little girl is afraid. He thinks of Gabe’s question earlier tonight—Does it hurt?—and then thinks of the sudden leap and thud, the gooseflesh and swell, the slump and wafting smoke, the things for which tonight he is responsible.