“I didn’t hardly know what to say, it was so clear—clear as the nose on his stupid face. ‘Sheriff, instead of jawing with me, why don’t you take a run down to the N-double-A-C-P,’ I said, ‘and see what alibis they can give you! This is their style. They know that the best way to hurt the cause of segregation is to use the martyr system. Like with Emmet Till, when they killed him and tried to pin it on a Southern white man. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they engineered this bombing, too. Because now that old nigger preacher will be a martyr, see what I mean? People will feel sorry for him. He’ll be mourned, like an assassinated hero! So you can see, I hope, Sheriff,’ I said, ‘that nobody in my organization and nobody with any brains had a thing to do with it.’ He got the point then, but I guess it was so obvious that he was sore at me for havin’ to spell it out for him.”

The silence deepened, as Adam gazed at the men.

“Well,” he said, “that was what I thought, anyway. But while I was in jail, I got to studying. And it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong. I began to wonder: could it be—now, just for an instance; could it be—that somebody in SNAP actually did have something to do with this? Somebody who acted, you might say, on impulse, and didn’t consider the consequences? It didn’t seem possible, of course. But I knew that people sometimes do crazy things and think they’re absolutely right, even though what they do is bound to go against ’em, in the long run. So, even though I don’t believe it, I’m gonna pretend that somewhere here in this room is the man who bought that dynamite and hauled it over to the church and lit it. It’s him I’m gonna talk to, and you-all please just bear with it. I don’t mean it for those of you with common sense.”

Rev. Lorenzo Niesen shifted his position, fingered a sprig of Beech Nut Chewing Tobacco from a crumpled package and began to chew quickly. His eyes seemed filled half with amusement, half with anger.

Adam knew, without any doubt, that it was this poor rooster of a man who had been responsible. He could see Niesen crawling up to the church, carrying his bundle of death; and all in the name of Jesus, sweet dirty-nailed leather-fleshed unwashed Jesus of Nazareth, Who spat streams of tobacco accurately into the eye of falseness and caused the fig tree to wither because it would not yield fruit.

But, he wondered, was it Niesen alone?

Of course it was. The others were his good soldiers, were they not?