His feet are not touching the ground—he is flying, weightless, pure spirit. He can feel the wind rushing past his ears.

The world ends in a thunderclap, the river explodes behind his eyes.

They untangle the heap of bodies and lay them in a row, heads toward the river. Somebody fetches a sharp, double-bladed ax. One man places a rock-maple block under each neck in turn. Another swings the ax—thwack. In this manner, they collect six Negro heads to be raised on poles along the roads leading into town—a warning to other strangers who might bring trouble.

Tucker’s head is placed alongside the northbound road at Smith’s Creek Bridge, facing north.

Big Gee’s is raised beside the tollhouse on the Shell Road, leading to the ocean.

The heads of Willis and Terel are rowed across the river to the swampy peninsula where the channel forks into the Cape Fear and the Northeast Branch. The poles are twenty feet tall, so the heads can be seen from passing boats.

Coates’s head is paraded up Market Street a mile and a half from the river, where the city peters out into longleaf pine forest, and is mounted beside the wrought-iron hitching post of a tavern.

They raise Grant’s head right beside the ferry landing at the foot of Market Street, the place of execution. Boys wing stones at it with slingshots. Overhead, gulls wheel and rant, quarreling over the flesh. Men point it out to visitors. Women hurry by without looking up.

Black servants weep behind closed doors. Word carries to the cotton fields, to the mills, to the rice and turpentine plantations up and down the river. It is a bad time. Mothers keep their children close. Something is loose upon the land. Nat Turner is killing whitefolks in the Virginia tidewater, and no good will ever come of it. All the way up north in Boston, David Walker has been poisoned right outside his own tailor shop. Jesus is not coming again in this century.

Having slept off an evil drunk, Dal Parmele has retrieved his skiff and gone fishing.

Late in the afternoon, when the tide has turned, husky men working in pairs sling the decapitated bodies off the sea wall into the river. Headless, they all look alike. Each one floats briefly, tumbling in the current. A southwesterly breeze has risen, pushing whitecaps against the brown tide.

At last, the river has them all, surging toward the Atlantic, spiriting them away toward Africa.

Arms akimbo, the Colonel stands on the wharf watching them go. After a time, he sees only a greasy smear of blood on the receding tide. To the pairs of husky men, he remarks, “This has always been a peaceful town. A good town.”

To himself, he says, “ ‘In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ ”