By JOE ATKINS
   OXFORD - Roy Bryant and I sat in the little café-bar he'd built in the back of his Delta crossroads store. His bodyguard, a hulking, silent presence, stood nearby. It was in the summer of 1985.
   One cigarette followed another as his mood grew darker. I was pushing him to talk about that night 30 years before, when he and his half-brother J.W. Milam killed a14-year-old black youth named Emmett Till and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
   He said he was tired of living with the ghost of Emmett Till. "He's been dead 30 years and I can't see why it can't stay dead."
   Bryant died in 1994, but the ghost that haunted him is alive and well. The U.S. Justice Department has reopened the case. A U.S. senator from New York says he'll make it an issue with President Bush's new nominee for attorney general. A documentary on Till by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp is getting national attention, and a group called the Emmett Till Justice Campaign wants to exhume his remains to make sure it's him in the grave.
   I spent most of one hot Mississippi Delta day 19 years ago with the man who last saw Emmett Till alive, the man who watched Milam put a bullet in Till's head, and who then helped tie a 70-pound cotton gin fan around his neck so he'd sink to the river bottom.
   An all-white jury in Sumner acquitted Milam and Bryant of the crime. Four months later, they sold their confession to Look magazine writer William Bradford Huie for $4,000.  They'd abducted Till from his uncle's house after he'd flirted with Bryant's wife Carolyn at their country story in Money.
   Milam, who died in 1981, told Huie they only wanted to "whip him, scare some sense in him, kick his ass back to Chicago." But Till wouldn't back down, talked back even in the face of death. "I couldn't scare the niggah," Milam told Huie. "He thought he was good as any white man. I decided it was time a few people got put on notice."
   That day in 1985 I pressed Bryant to tell me the story.
   "What you going to pay me?" he growled. "A bunch of money" might jog his memory, he said. Nothing, I told him. I don't pay for stories.
   "You don't expect me to admit to it now. Of course, they couldn't do anything to me if I did." Then he leaned across the table and got his face close to mine. "If Emmett Till hadn't got out of line, it probably wouldn't have happened to him."
   Reporters stop taking notes when they hear a quote like that. They commit it to memory, write it down later. This was as close to a confession as he got with me, but it was close enough and free of charge. I already knew the story.
   Till was a brash, big-for-his-age city kid from Chicago trying to impress his country bumpkin friends. He bragged about his conquests of white women, flashed a picture of one in his wallet. His friends dared him to try his luck with Carolyn Bryant, a black-eyed beauty the press called a "crossroads Marilyn Monroe".
   He went into the store, asked her for a date, talked big, and he paid for it with his life. What worked in Chicago could cost you your life in Mississippi in 1955.
   Over the years, I've had the chance to interview several murderers. I still wonder where in their brains they park their dark sins. I got to know two Roy Bryants, one who feared eventual retribution and wanted to forget the past, the other a man who in a twisted way seemed to value his one, infamous claim to fame.
   I never got to know Emmett Till, but his ghost was with us in that café-bar that day.