# As If It Were a Pack of Hounds

They had hanged the son, barely thirteen, while the witch hid among the cornfields. Her crying gave her away the moment the hanged man's neck snapped, and she fled downhill toward the river. The hair on Terry's arms bristled; his quarterback reflexes would play in his favor; his Dr. Martens and jacket, not so much. He imagined he could smell his prey, her fear, her urgency to live; he wanted to howl, walk on all fours and salivate.

But he had to start running now. He ordered Daniel to go toward the junction and Jacob to the ferry station. He would go straight ahead, toward the Port-Prince bridge. They nodded their heads and went out in different directions through the cornfields. Terry still had a lot of rope in his backpack. Sheriff Jeffrey S. Colescott would be thrilled that the youngest of his great-great-grandsons was also the fiercest, purest and most Aryan. "A worthy heir of the Invisible Empire," just as Mama Rosie used to say.

Terry came out of the swamp. The full moon was enormous and illuminated so well that you could see the details of the reeds on the other side of the river. Terry knew the witch was close. He could feel her. He closed his eyes and calmed his breathing. He put his knee on the ground to concentrate, as Mama Rosie had told him to do before every game. For a few instants nothing existed but Terry and his breathing. A splashing was heard to the left: the witch was trying to cross the river.

Terry ran toward her and grabbed her by the hair. He dragged her out of the water. He placed her face up and put his boot on her neck. Mama Rosie said the witch was deformed, with tumors on her cheekbones and that she had no abdomen and that her legs started right below her chest; that her eyes were injected with green, that voodoo had made her the vehicle of the devil. Though he respected Mama Rosie, he always knew those were nonsense, but he also didn't expect the witch to look so young: she couldn't be more than thirty and was almost the same height as a teenager. Something similar to compassion surged in him, but it was immediately buried by Mama Rosie's words: "The devil is always black and hides in the fragility of a woman." He pressed the boot deeper into her neck and raised his gaze to breathe the night air. To his left, he saw the cypress where Sheriff Colescott hanged his first black man.

Terry was "old-fashioned." From Mama Rosie's stories, he believed the Invisible Empire should be established in America, that blacks, Japanese and Mexicans had no place in God's land and that the white robe should be raised at every civic event. Not even his father and his uncles, respectable white supremacists, had Terry and his grandmother's vision: the Klan was about to have its third resurgence. And this one would go beyond hatecore, neonazism and simple racism. The new Imperial Wizard would establish order, would bring back the golden age. And Terry had his sights set on being like Colescott: Grand Dragon of the Realm of Louisiana.

In his house, there was a very old photo of the sheriff: with Confederate mustache and serious gesture. At the bottom of the frame, you could notice the white robe of the Klan. Terry had looked at that photo since he was a child and always wondered why neither his father, nor his grandfather, nor his brothers had that power in their eyes. Mama Rosie had told him during all the nights of his childhood about that mythical February 15, 1922 when young Colescott hanged a black man on the Port-Prince cypress. She took him to see the place one Sunday morning after church.

"The cypress is dry, Terrence, but not the sheriff's spirit," she told him, while tickling his neck. "My grandfather lives in you, my child, and you will raise the great eagle spirit of the Colescotts."

His grandmother hugged him and kissed him on the forehead. At that moment, Terry felt that the very sheriff himself also hugged him and baptized him beside the cypress. His grandmother always smelled of something that made him feel very good, that took him back to simpler times. But it was a diffuse, distant smell, and after his grandmother's death, he never smelled it again.

Terry woke from his daydream, turned the witch over and tied her arms behind her back. He dragged her toward the tree, conscious of her destiny and willing to accept it. He threw her beside the roots and passed the rope through a thick branch. The other end, with a firm knot, he placed around the witch's neck and pulled her to her feet with a tug. The witch had trouble breathing, but she fixed her eyes on Terry.

"Let me go and I won't kill you," she said; it was an order.

Terry stopped. How could she not beg? How could she have no fear? He shook his head and remembered Mama Rosie's warning: "The power of voodoo runs through the witch's blood. But it is false power; it is a serpent's tongue." Terry's instinct ignited and resulted in a laugh. He spat on the witch's face. He wouldn't answer her.

"Your friends are going to die for what they did to Juda, but you just let me go and you stay alive."

With the sixty kilos he had on the witch, he pulled the rope and lifted her with a tug. Though he was incredibly strong for a twenty-year-old boy, it took effort to raise the black woman's feet about thirty centimeters. Terry tied the end to one of the roots and waited while the woman died in spasms.

He sat to watch her until she stopped moving and still waited another ten minutes to contemplate his work, with crickets and toads in the background. "To your health, Grand Dragon. And to yours too, Mama Rosie," Terry thought. He took out his iPhone, saw the time, three in the morning, and tried to call Daniel and Jacob; there was no signal. He felt lazy about burying her alone, but he couldn't allow liberals to take him to trial for the death of a bitch like the witch. He had to take her down and make the body disappear. First, he took some photos. The cypress looked beautiful under the moonlight and with a body swinging from its branches.

Terry thought he saw the corpse open its mouth slightly. He turned on his phone's flashlight and brought it close to the face. Some white tattoos, stripes and circles, began to appear on the witch's face. The woman opened her eyes. Frightened, Terry tripped over the roots. The corpse said some words in a language he had never heard and vomited black onto his face.

The liquid entered through his nose, his mouth, his ears; it suffocated him. It also burned. Terry managed to remove some of the vomit from his eyes and ran toward the river to wash himself. He submerged completely while scrubbing his face. He came out and screamed in rage. He took off his jacket and threw himself on the riverbank to wait for the pain to pass.

About five minutes went by. The burning became tolerable, he opened his eyes and looked at the sky. Thousands of stars shone in the sky, witnesses to the beginning of his new life. He breathed deep and calmed down. "What a beautiful night!" he thought. He felt cold and looked for his jacket. At that moment, he realized he was barefoot, that instead of tight black Levi's he wore worn overalls; they were enormous on him. His hands were black. Black as the witch's vomit.

Terry got scared, but he didn't have time to think much, because the sound of horses approaching was heard. The night illuminated even more: dozens of hooded men, white, imposing; all with Klan symbols in sight. The horses came with immaculate uniforms. One of those men carried high a burning cross. Another, in a purple robe, pointed at Terry and three threw themselves on him and began beating him.

***

When Terry woke up, he was sitting between the roots of a cypress; a thick rope surrounded his neck. He raised his gaze: the tree was alive, its leaves shone because of the enormous burning cross that rose twenty meters away; he could hear how the wood creaked as it burned. A multitude of white hoods stood before him. Terry screamed that it was all a mistake. A rifle butt broke his teeth and nose.

Terry choked on his own blood. He raised his gaze. The one in the purple robe stepped forward and removed his hood. Under it, a man with a broad forehead and round bifocal glasses appeared. Very white and blond. He had blue eyes. Terry recognized him immediately: General William Joseph Simmons, the great Imperial Wizard, responsible for the first resurgence of the Klan. Terry swallowed. Simmons knelt before him and smelled the air between them.

"Black trash. Black trash that must be fertilizer for our white land."

He stood up and with his gaze despised Terry. Another hooded man, in white robes, broke ranks. Simmons approached him and took him by the shoulders.

"My dear, my adopted son. This is the day we found the Realm of Louisiana," he began to speak to the crowd. "This is the blood baptism of our brother, of our prodigal son, of the next leader, of my most beloved. Let us celebrate, then, that in us a Grand Dragon is about to be born."

The crowd exploded in screams. Some fired into the air. Terry screamed again that he was a brother of white supremacy, that they were mistaken, but his plea was drowned because they tightened the knot on his neck.

The other man removed his hood. Though he was barely a teenager, though he didn't have the mustache, the eyes were the same and Terry recognized him immediately: Jeffrey S. Colescott. Enormous despite being no more than fifteen, he took the end of the rope and, with a tug, pulled him to his feet. Terry felt fear for the first time in his life and began to cry. Colescott approached him.

"Please, Pa Jeff, please," Terry murmured.

Colescott stopped for a few seconds. How did this black man know his name and why did he dare to treat him with such confidence? He doubted. He squinted to recognize if this black man worked on his father's plantation, if he had played with him when he was a child. But the energy of the crowd hurried him and he grew bold.

"Specters have no right to cry," he answered.

He threw a punch to his stomach and with his knee hit his testicles. The white robes exploded in screams again.

With a single movement, he lifted Terry and tied the end of the rope to one of the roots. Terry's fifty-kilo body was not much competition for Colescott. The black feet remained about thirty centimeters from the ground. The crowd kept screaming, firing into the air, as if it were a pack of hounds. Colescott positioned himself beside Simmons and, with arms crossed, they watched the black man swing on the cypress.

While Terry died, he remembered the sound of the river from that Sunday morning, the sunlight, and the cold wind, and the warmth of Mama Rosie's body and her smell when she hugged him beside the dry cypress: a mixture of cinnamon rolls and pumpkin butter.