Fire on Madison Street

Otis Renfro was three rungs up a stepladder with a fistful of three-penny nails when the radio changed its voice. He had the transistor set on the shelf behind the register, tuned low to WVON the way he kept it most evenings, more company than entertainment, and he'd stopped really listening to it an hour ago the way a man stops listening to his own heartbeat. But something in the announcer's cadence broke through the static of his attention: a hitch, a wrongness, the sound of a man reading words he did not want to be reading. Otis set the nails down in their bin and came down off the ladder one rung at a time, his hand staying on the metal frame longer than it needed to.

The report was unconfirmed. A shooting, the announcer said, in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King. The word shot hung in the store between the paint cans and the extension cords, and Otis found he was holding a hammer he didn't remember picking up. Three customers stood at different points along the counter, none of them together, none of them having come in as a group, and yet within the space of two or three minutes they had drifted toward the register and toward each other, the way people drift toward a fire on a cold night. Nobody said much. When the second bulletin came through, twenty minutes later, and the announcer's voice cracked open all the way and said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. Central Time, one of the men at the counter, a retired mail carrier named Sweet, took his hat off. He did not put it back on for a long while.

Two miles east, in a diner that smelled of grease and burnt coffee, June Combs had a grilled cheese sandwich going on the flattop when Purvis, the line cook who never raised his voice above a murmur even during the Friday rush, leaned in close to his ear and said it plain: they killed him. June's spatula stopped moving. The bread had already gone dark on one side, and he watched it a moment longer before he understood he wasn't going to flip it, that the sandwich didn't matter anymore, that nothing on this griddle mattered in the way it had ten seconds ago.

Across town on Kedzie Avenue, Officer Daniel Kowalczyk sat in his patrol car with the window down, and the dispatch radio, which usually delivered its business in the same flat monotone whether the call was a burglary or a bar fight, cracked with something that sounded almost like a sob. He pulled over without deciding to. He looked at the corner store his grandfather used to buy cigarettes from back when this stretch of Kedzie belonged to Polish butchers and Bohemian grocers, back before the neighborhood had turned over twice in his own lifetime, and he thought, with no satisfaction at all, that the ground under this street had been shifting for a long time and that tonight it had just shifted again.

Ruth Fentress got the news over the telephone, her sister's voice thin and shaking through the line, and Ruth stood in her kitchen with the receiver pressed hard against her ear as if pressing it harder might change what was coming out of it. Down the hall her youngest was laughing at something, some private nonsense of a seven-year-old's imagination, and the sound of that laughter arriving at the same moment as her sister's grief nearly broke something loose in Ruth's chest. She thought, absurdly, of her older boy's basketball practice, scheduled for tomorrow evening at the rec center, and understood with total certainty that it would not happen, that the world had just rearranged itself around a hole where Dr. King used to be, and that everything downstream of that hole was about to change shape too.

Wallace Odom heard it in a bar on Kedzie, three stools down from where he'd been nursing a beer he was in no hurry to finish. The bartender turned up the radio and the room went quiet, and Wallace watched the quiet settle over the other men's faces, grief plain and raw on some of them, and felt something else move underneath his own grief, something colder and more practical. He didn't examine it too closely. He only knew, the way a man knows weather is coming before the sky has changed color, that the city outside these windows was about to come apart, and that men like him tended to find opportunity in whatever the wreckage left behind.

By full dark, the news had traveled through open windows and porch stoops and idling cars all along Madison Street and Kedzie and Roosevelt, house to house, block to block, grief passing hand to hand like something too hot to hold for long.