Shakespeares Champion Page 0,43

decapitated. "Her head came off," I said, and closed my eyes again.

When I opened them some time later, he was gone.

I hardly woke up when Carrie stitched on me, and it was a surprise to find myself in the X-ray room. Other than these travels, I was out in the hall all night, which was fine. All the rooms were filled with the more seriously injured. And I could tell by the constant flow of ambulance personnel that some people were being sent to Montrose or Little Rock.

Carrie came by and shook me awake every so often to check my eyes, and the nurses took my pulse and blood pressure, and I wanted most of all to be left alone. Hospitals are not places for being left alone.

The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight. I could see a pale watery morning through the glass doors of the emergency room. A man in a suit was standing by my gurney. He was looking down at me. He, too, was looking a little squeamish. I was really tired of people looking at me that way.

"How do you feel, Miss Bard?" he asked, and I could hear him, though his voice was oddly beelike.

"I don't know. I don't know what happened to me."

"A bomb went off," he said. "In Golgotha Church."

"Right." I accepted that as the truth, but it was the first time I had thought of the word bomb. Bomb, man-made. Someone had actually done that on purpose.

"I'm John Bellingham. I'm with the FBI." He showed me some identification, but my brain was too scrambled for it to make sense.

I absorbed that, trying to make sense of it. I thought that since Claude and the sheriff were down, the FBI had been called in to keep the peace. Then I cleared up a little. Church bombing. Civil rights. FBI.

"OK."

"Can you describe what happened last night?"

"The church blew up as we were leaving."

"Why did you attend the meeting, Miss Bard?"

"I didn't like the blue sheets."

He looked at me as if I were insane.

"Blue sheets..."

"The papers," I said, beginning to be angry. "The blue sheets of paper they were putting under everyone's windshield wipers."

"Are you a civil rights activist, Miss Bard?"

"No."

"You have friends in the black community?"

I wondered if Raphael would consider himself my friend. I decided, yes.

"Raphael Roundtree," I said carefully.

He seemed to be writing that down.

"Can you find out if he's okay?" I asked. "And Claude, is Claude alive?"

"Claude ..."

"The police chief," I said. I couldn't remember Claude's last name, and that made me feel very odd.

"Yes, he's alive. Can you describe in your own words what happened in the church?"

I said slowly, "The meeting went long. I looked at my watch. It was eight-fifteen when I was leaving, walking down the aisle."

He definitely wrote that down.

"Do you still have your watch on?" he asked.

"You can look and see," I said indifferently. I didn't want to move. He pulled the sheet down and looked at my arm.

"It's here," he said. He pulled out his handkerchief, wet it with his tongue, and scrubbed at my wrist. I realized he was cleaning the watch face. "Sorry," he apologized, and when he pocketed the handkerchief again I could see it was stained.

He bent over me, trying to read the watch without shifting me.

"Hey, it's still ticking along," he said cheerfully. He checked it against his own watch. "And right on time. So, it was eight-fifteen, and you were leaving ... ?"

"The woman next to me was about to say something," I said. "And then her head wasn't there."

He looked serious and subdued, but he had no idea what it had been like: though when I thought about it, I had little idea myself. I could not remember exactly ... I could see the shiny edge of the collection plate. So I told John Bellingham about the collection plate. I recalled Lanette Glass speaking to me, and I mentioned that, and I remembered helping the man up, and I knew I'd journeyed across the church to find Claude. But I refused to recall what I'd seen on that journey, and to this day I do not want to remember.

I told John Bellingham about finding Claude, about leading Todd to him.

"Was it you that moved the fixture off his legs?" the agent asked.

"I believe so," I said slowly.

"You're one strong lady." He asked me more questions, lots more, about whom I'd seen, white people in particular of course, and where I'd been sitting... ta