The Reapers

Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had installed an expensive and complicated alarm system when it had taken over the ownership of the building, and Mrs. Bondarchuk understood the workings of that system intimately. Mrs. Bondarchuk did not know it but, in her way, she was as essential to the security and peace of mind of the two men who lived above her as the guns that they occasionally carried in the course of their work. She was the Cerberus at the gates of their underworld.

Now, as she lay in her bed and listened to “Swedish Rhapsody” on the little CD player that Mr. Angel and Mr. Louis had given her for Christmas that year (Mrs. Bondarchuk preferred to go to bed late and wake up late: she had never been a morning person); she heard them enter, heard the soft weeping of the alarm before they silenced it with the code, and then a final single beep as the door closed and they reset the system.

“Night, night, Mrs. Bondarchuk,” called Mr. Angel from the hallway.

She did not reply, but merely smiled as she stopped the music and turned off her light. They were home, and she always slept better when they were around.

For some reason that she could not quite fathom, they made her feel very safe indeed.

That night, Louis lay awake while Angel slept. He thought about his past, and the hidden nature of the world. He thought about lives taken and lives lost, about his momma and the women who had raised him. He thought about Bliss. He followed the threads in the patterns of his life, pausing where they overlapped, where one co

And then he closed his eyes, and waited for the Burning Man to come.

It was a small town, a sundown town. That term meant something for the boy and those like him. True, there was no longer a sign advertising that fact at the town limits, which counted as progress in some small way, although there might just as well have been, since most everyone beyond the age of seven could recall where it had stood, just below the gate to Virgil Jellicote’s farm. Old Virgil had made sure that the sign wasn’t obscured by dirt or, as had once occurred during the period of unrest that followed the killing of Errol Rich, by the judicious application of some black paint, so that the sign was transformed from “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town” to “White Folks, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town.” Old Virgil had been mightily troubled by that act of vandalism; other people, too, and not all of them white. What was done to Errol Rich was wrong, but riling the cops and the town council by screwing with their beloved sign was just plain dumb, although when the police came asking who might have been responsible for the damage, they were greeted only with silence. Being dumb wasn’t a crime, not yet, and the law had plenty of other ways in which it could punish people of color without another being added to the list.

The town wasn’t even unusual in its overt exclusion of the black population. It was one of thousands of such towns across the United States, and even whole counties had turned sundown when their county seat did. Half of all the towns in Oregon, Ohio, Indiana, the Cumber-lands, and the Ozarks were, at one point, sundown towns. God help the black man who found himself in, say, Jonesboro, Illinois, after dark, or nearby A

The thing about the boy’s hometown was that it was a pretty place. It was clean, and there wasn’t much cussing, not in public. Main Street belonged on a postcard, and the flowers growing in its pots were always appropriate to the season. It was small, though. In fact, it was so small that it barely qualified as a town by any reasonable reckoning, but no- body in those parts referred to anywhere as a village. The place in which you lived was a town or it was nothing at all. There was something substantial about a town. A town meant neighbors, and laws, and order on the streets. A town meant sidewalks, and barbershops, and church on Sundays. To call somewhere a town was to recognize a certain standard of living, of behavior. Sure, folk might go off the rails now and again, but what was important was that everyone knew where those rails were. All derailments were purely temporary. That train kept on ru

But, for the boy, it had never really been a town, not for him. True, it had all the characteristics of a town, however small a space they might have occupied. There were stores, and a movie theater, and a couple of churches, although none for the Catholics, who had to drive eight miles east to Maylersville or twelve miles south to Ludlow if they wanted to worship their own misguided version of the Lord. There were houses, too, with well-kept front lawns and white picket fences and sprinklers that hissed unthreateningly on hot summer days. There were lawyers, and doctors, and florists, and undertakers. If you looked at it the right way, the town had everything necessary to ensure a perfectly adequate degree of service for those who chose to call it home.

The problem, as the boy saw it, was that all of those people were white. The town was built for white people and run by white people. The people behind the counters of the stores were white, and the people on the other side of the counters were mostly white, too. The lawyers were white and the cops were white and the florists were white. Black people could be seen in town, but they were always moving: carrying, delivering, lifting, hauling. Only white people were allowed to stand still. Black people did what they had to do, then left. After nightfall, there were only white folk on the streets.

It wasn’t that anyone was cruel to the coloreds as a rule, or vicious, or intemperate in ma

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instintively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His momma hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.