At first, Gabe doesn’t know what is going on. The silence that follows the ceasing of the generator is short-lived; a murmur travels through the solemn crowd like a wave, and soon everyone is jabbering. Arms and fists begin to rise above the mass of heads, and a group in one corner of the green begins to chant a phrase that Gabe can’t make out. Someone calls his name, and he looks down.
“Livingstone!” Buddy is calling. “My pa says git down here!”
Buddy is directly at the base of the tree; Pope Crowley, Mr. Cunningham, Sutcliffe, and Amos Hicks are nearby, talking heatedly with a group of other men. One of them is Montgomery. Gabe’s hearing goes funny with fear; he doesn’t know exactly what he is afraid of, but the feeling is overwhelming. “Livingstone! You hear me?” Buddy is calling.
Gabe shakes his head.
“I said git down here!”
“No! Why? What’s going on?”
“You git down here and I’ll tell you!” The words are barely out of Buddy’s mouth before his father shoves him aside and hauls himself brusquely into the tree, his face rising toward Gabe like something out of a nightmare. He grabs Gabe roughly by the wrist and half carries, half drags him out of the tree; Gabe feels something in his shoulder snap, and he cries out.
“You’d a got down when you were asked I wouldn’t have had to pull you out,” Mr. Cunningham says, by way of apology. He is out of breath and sweating. “You all right?”
Gabe clutches his shoulder, which throbs with a pain unlike any he’s ever felt.
“Chair didn’t work,” Buddy announces.
Gabe looks at Buddy, astonished even through his agony.
“That’s right,” Mr. Cunningham says.
Pope Crowley and Montgomery and Amos Hicks and Sutcliffe have turned away from the circle of other men, and stand beside Mr. Cunningham. Their faces look huge to Gabe, so frightening that he nearly forgets his shoulder. “What now?” he asks weakly, looking from Buddy to his father and back to Buddy again, looking at Buddy almost beseechingly. Buddy—an ally if only in age.
“What now depends on whether or not yer daddy has his nigger-lovin way,” Montgomery says.
The world begins to whirl around Gabe, voices, bodies, heat, color, noise, as if he were at the center of a horrible gyre. He loses all sense of direction, of right or left, of up or down, and he feels himself begin to fall. Hands catch him before he hits the ground, a rough hand on either arm, and a shocking sear of pain shoots from his shoulder, and the last thing he hears is his own strangled yelp of a cry before everything fizzles out.