TJ KNEW HOW TO HUNT THROUGH RUBBLE. HIS HANDS found the bricks, checked their perimeters—what could be disturbed, what could cause a landslide if it were disturbed. He heard the sound of the explosion over and over: the cracking and falling, the destruction of walls, the spew of bricks, the shattering of plaster and glass, but he cocked his ear to the whimpering. There was life. Where there was whimpering, that small sound under the exploding screams, that was the sound of the trapped. He lifted a chunk of plaster, heavy, sharp edged. He couldn’t see much. Already he was creating a pile in a bare spot, an accumulation of lifted objects. He could hear people digging frantically, perhaps covering up someone else as they tried to help. A cloud of dust scratched his eyes. Might as well close his eyes, dig by feel and sound. He believed the church had become a heap of rubble, but here was a broken table leg, a nice leg, turned and grooved, and the foot of it splintered off. Sometimes the dust would settle a moment, and he could see a great slide of debris, a child with blood on her face, yowling but attended by an adult biting his own lips.
He couldn’t stand that—not a hurt child. His mind flew to Korea, the child like a crisp of toast down in the ditch. Not that—and his mind leapt back to now, to his wife, how he had embraced her the very split second after the blast, how he had taken her soft body, safe, yes, safe, pliant and soft, her large breasts, her soft abdomen, there were her swelling buttocks—Agnes, her body melded with him in that moment; closer to him then than in the most perfect synchrony of dancing or the merging of coupling.
Though the church burst, they found themselves yet alive! Only that. Standing, before the pew where they had been sitting. Together and alive, in the sanctuary, full of shrieks and smoke. Survivors! As after gunfire in Korea, he sensed the safety of the place where he stood. His soft wife, all loving in his arms. His wife, his precious dream of what life was.
And then, in the surety of her safety, TJ had felt his duty to release her. He must help. There would be no collapse of earth under her feet, and now it was for him, as a soldier, to give aid. Yes, he would scavenge for life in the broken wreckage. People had died; he could not doubt that. And people would have survived; from the perimeter he traveled through zones of disaster toward the wounded and the dead.
He saw the injured moving in a dust cloud, their faces frozen in the distort of howl. Inside his trouser pocket, his finger closed on his clean handkerchief, folded into quarters, ready to be a compress against the gashed forearm. He took the young person’s hand and showed how to hold the press against the bleeding.
Through a gap in the roiling smoke he saw the out-of-doors. A wall had been blown away. This sliding debris under his moving feet was leading him downward.
Here was a deacon, his dark suit powdered white, thumping the back of a little girl doubled up in hysterical coughing. “Take her outside into the air,” TJ said.
(So, he realized, he must already have left Agnes, turned from her, already preoccupied with his next mission. How could he have left her? Only instinctively; it could not have been a decision. He would have released her and turned not decisively but instinctively, using his preinstructed body without further thought, as surely as he made a turn in dancing, or lifted a suitcase, his body having precalculated its probable weight, in the hotel lobby.)
TJ’s fingers were removing the paisley tie of the man standing beside him. At TJ’s feet lay a man with his head resting on three bricks still mortared together; his pant leg was torn away and the femoral blood surging out. TJ applied the paisley tie as a tourniquet. Beyond the torn leg, to the left of his focusing, there was a worse horror.
TJ’s gorge rose; skin had been charred, a small charred body. A child’s shoe. A shoe.
Now TJ screamed. Now his voice joined the chorus of grief, horror, grief, outrage.
Was this what they had caused when they had answered the call in August, marched on Washington? He had been a part of the multitude gathered around the reflecting pools, the rectangles reflecting the sky, King’s voice reflecting their hearts: “I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream when my four little children…not for the color of their skin but for the content of their character….”
I live a nightmare, I live a nightmare. Now he was bending, lifting with his back, not his legs, forgetting his training, bending, his hands becoming paws, digging like a dog.
But he had held Agnes. His softly yielding Agnes. Raised Catholic (“Hail Mary, full of grace,” that was what she said), and she had come to this Baptist place with him, after he went to Washington. Agnes had come to please him, because this church was a center for the struggle, because last May he had watched the children stream down the steps from this church speaking of nonviolence. Because he had to get into the heart of that idea before he killed somebody again. Killed somebody in his own country.
He knew what he could not face: the eyes of the parents of dead children. But he could dig. Dig with his bare hands. Dig for buried bone and blood-wet flesh.