Public demands and cries for vengeance disguised as justice were rampant and harrowing. Signs, rallies in front of the courthouses, editorials—all seemed unassuageable by anything less than the culprit's beheading. T. Jackson joined the chorus but was not impressed by so facile a solution. What he wanted was not the man's death, but his life afflicted with remorse and pain without end. Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice—to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation. The rage, the public clamor upon the conviction of the nicest man in the world, shook him as much as his brother's death. The trial itself was not long but the preliminaries seemed eternal to him. Throughout the days of newspaper headlines, talk radio and neighborhood gossip he struggled to find some way to freeze and individualize his feelings, to separate them from the sorrow and frenzied anger of other families. His brother's calamity, he thought, was not public fare to be confined to one line in a newspaper's list of the few victims. It was private, belonging only to the two brothers. Two years later, a satisfactory and calming solution came to him. Reenacting the gesture he'd made at his brother's funeral, he had a small rose tattooed on his left shoulder. Was this the same chair the predator sat in, the same needle used on his paste-white skin? He didn't ask. The tattoo artist didn't have the dazzling yellow of his memory, so they settled for an orangish kind of red.