Ginny Gall (10 page)

He looked up at the sky. Clouds at night. He loved clouds at night. And electric lights in daytime; he loved those too. And him lying on his bed with the shades pulled reading a book. Mr. O had put in another butterscotch leather chair in his bedroom and at night they sat on two sides of the little marble-topped table reading their books. Shakespeare and Milton (
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
) for Mr. O, Shakespeare and Conrad for him, or the explorer books he had begun to prefer, Arctic adventures, dog teams, adventurers stranded on shelves of blue ice.

Just then a flower—a dark carnation, possibly red—sailed by his ear. He looked up to see Kattie standing in an upstairs window. She hissed at him.

“Whoo, you boy, go get me a glass of punch.”

Hearing this, his body turned to stone and as quickly turned back to flesh. But a changed, suffering, jellied flesh, wobbling on jelly feet. He couldn’t speak. When he could his voice squeaked in his mouth.

“Go on, boy,” Kattie said.

He stumbled across the yard into the kitchen and dipped a glass from the crock sitting under a piece of cheesecloth on the counter. The punch was dark red and smelled of wine. He touched the surface in the glass with his tongue. It tasted sharp and sweet, a little
of cherries. He carried the glass up the back stairs and into the hall that was lit with widely spaced electric bulbs with square red paper shades covering them. A large negro woman in a maroon silk dress so dark it was almost black snoozed in a brocade chair against the wall. Kattie didn’t even tell him the room number; no, he forgot to ask; he’d just run off like a child. But he wasn’t a child. He had been with a woman—Miz Pauly, a widow he visited, and Eula Banks, a girl others had too, who gave easily because she liked it. None of these pay-as-you-go gals either. But never Kattie.

He knocked on the door he thought was hers, but the laughing voice that answered was somebody else’s. The next down he found her. Even the words
Come in
were spoken with an imperiousness he hadn’t heard before. But he understood where it came from. The first time Mr. O had let him drive the horses—down the alley and across the road onto the circus grounds—he had felt like a king. This was the same thing. But that didn’t stop it from hurting. One hurt piled on another tonight; piled on all the others, he thought, as something twisted inside him, something acidic and sour. He entered the room with a sneer on his face.

She lay alone amid the fouled bedclothes, wrapped in an old silk robe that belonged to Miss Ellereen. He recalled it from years ago. Yellow silk with pictures of seagulls and sailboats stamped on it. “My mother wore a robe like—” he started to say, but she stopped him with a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. A yellow robe Miss Ellereen had given to Cappie and then taken back when she saw how she looked in it, back when Miss Ellereen was still one of the girls. That was the story about his mother Coolmist had told him as they lay in a foundling bed on a hot summer night that smelled of the creosote the city oiled the dirt streets with. He remembered the smell of the creosote and the story and his Coolmist crying tears of frustration. A yellow robe with sailing boats on it. No one else was in the room with her, not a man, not Miss Ellereen, not the Ghost, not his mother.

He placed the glass on the little parson’s table by the bed; hesitated.

“You can go,” Kattie said.

She was wearing lip rouge and her cheeks were powdered the color of cornmeal.

“No,” she said, “stay.”

“What you want?”

“Stay a minute.”

She pulled her legs up under her robe, indicating for him to sit on the bed. He let himself gingerly down on the lumpy mattress. She canted her face and looked at him with a bovine expression that dissolved and was replaced by pique. But not before he caught in her eyes the strangling disappointment and lonesomeness. Something in him that he hadn’t even paid attention to, something hard and ready to strike, whirled slowly.

“You never have anything to do, do you,” she said, “but hang around doing nothing.”

“I got plenty to do. You didn’t hear about what happened to that boy?”

She pulled the robe tighter around her. “It’s got all these women scared to death. Not just them.”

“And what about you?”

“I been shivering all day.”

“Me too,” he said.

She looked at the punch.

“I didn’t really want that. I just wanted you to come up here.”

“For what?”

“You don’t have cause to be angry.”

“That robe you’re wearing used to belong to my mother.”

“I know your mama worked here.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“What about me?”

“You working here? I’d rather you hadn’t started.”

“I’m middling about it. I don’t like it much, but I don’t mind it much either. I been doing it a while now,” she said, her voice wandering off, “and I don’t mind it much.” She fingered her lapels. “You want me to take this robe off?”

“No. Not right now.”

“Miz Ellereen give me this robe.”

“She took it back from my mama.”

The sense of shame he had suffered under since the boy’s battered body was brought in deepened. The unruly thing in him—hard as slate—began to slide under. He reached for it but he couldn’t pull it back up. He lay back on the bed. She raised herself and bent over him, looking into his face.

“I don’t even know you,” she said.

A crease ran down the center of her bottom lip. What caused that? he wondered. He turned on his side. Suddenly he felt like a man waking with fever in a room where nothing matched. He scrambled off the bed and stood up.

“I got to go.”

“You don’t really have to.”

He stared at her. “I’m glad you got that robe.”

“How come?”

“So somebody—so you’re walking around on the earth in it. I like it that it’s still lasting.”

“I don’t know how long I’m going to last.”

“You seen the Ghost?”

“That boy they pulled out from under the house? He wouldn’t come around here again.”

“Maybe he would.”

A silence then. Somebody down the hall was laughing in a high unhappy voice. The walls of the room were covered in flocked pink wallpaper. Small places in the paper bulged out like there was something behind it. Anything could be there. The hardness had slumped, drained. Who was he? What was it he was about to do?

He said, “I’d go crazy having to be in this room all night.”

“Why don’t you get out of it then.”

It was like a light flashed across the back of his eyes. So quick he wasn’t sure if he’d seen it or not. He got up, reached down and pulled hard at the yellow bedspread. He pulled it off and her with it. She hit the floor and rolled over and scrambled away from him.

“You get the hell out of here,” she cried. “Lola!”

He cast a look of scorn at her. Not at her, at what was in the world behind her and all around them. If he had a match he could burn the place down—the row, the whole city. He didn’t have a match. He turned and ran out and away.

On the way home a man he knew slightly from the neighborhood, a worker on road crews, called to him from the side yard of Boniface Tillman’s house. Boniface was a gangster man, a runner of liquor and drugs through the mountain traces.

“Come over here, boy,” the man said. He stood foursquare, half in half out of the tree shadow, waiting for him. “I want you to drop over get a jug from the chinaman’s,” he said when Delvin approached.

Behind the house men moved around a large fire burning in an open space among large oak trees, doing something Delvin at first couldn’t make out. Then he saw they were thrashing somebody on the ground with what looked like willow switches.

“I’d be glad to do it,” Delvin said, “but they’re looking for me at home.”

The man grabbed him by the wrist, quick as a snake, and tried to put two dollars in his hand. “You go get that jug,” he said.

“I would, but I can’t.”

“Damn rascal, you take this case cash and go.”

Behind the house the shadows flung their arms up into the heavy leaves and brought them swiftly down. Delvin broke away and ran down the street. Across the street, light from an open grocery shone on a big Bull Durham sign painted on a billboard. A boy stood in the doorway eating with a spoon something out of a tin can. Was that the Ghost down on the ground by the fire? Getting beat on? He told himself it couldn’t have been and ran on, but he was afraid it was, and afraid—knowing it—for the kind of boy he was for running away.

But it wasn’t the Ghost because when he returned home he found him back in the shed, stretched out in the empty stall asleep on his
pile of hay. Delvin woke him up. “Where you been?” he wanted to know.

“I had to go see my auntie,” the boy said.

“If you’re going to see your auntie, why couldn’t you stay with her?”

“She’s at the jailhouse. But I knew she’d be worried about me, so I had to go ease her mind.”

In those days the women prisoners were kept around back on the third floor of the old brick jail. From a grassy hill above the parking lot friends and relatives could shout to them standing in the cross-barred windows. Morgred’s auntie, a crazy woman, saved peas from dinner and tossed them at folks. Morgred showed him a pea he had caught.

“Hard as a damn rock,” he said. “Lord, it’s a terrible thing to be locked up in that jailhouse.”

Delvin went in through the big double basement doors and found Oliver finishing up. The dead boy lay peacefully under a mostly repaired face. The smashed-in parts had been picked out with an awl and the dents filled in with putty but they’d left the makeup off so you could see where the work was done. The pick holes and the brown putty. The boy now had hands, or at least he wore white cotton gloves that looked as if they were filled with palms and fingers. “Cotton ticking,” Oliver said, the gloves tied with white hemp twine to the wrists hidden under the white shirt cuffs and the black broadcloth coat taken from among the pile in a big cabinet out in the corridor.

As Oliver bent over the galvanized sink washing his big soft powerful hands, he said, “I thought you’d flown the coop, boy.”

“Flew but not far. Sometimes all this is a hard thing to bear up under.”

The hallway was cleared of everyone except for Culver and Willie. Culver sat in one of the old wheatcloth armchairs against the wall. The big cordovan aprons, hung on hooks by the door, looked
as always to Delvin like the skins of cadavers that somehow hadn’t made the grade for burial. “Leftovers,” Culver called them.

Now Culver looked up at him, ashen-faced, his eyes blood-veined, hopeless. But as Delvin passed, his hand shot out and with his knuckles he rapped Delvin on the thigh.

“You’re a good boy,” Culver said, turning his head without shifting his body, which leaned over his knees. And George, the handyman, leaned against the wall, smoking his corncob pipe. “Rumpled us down to the ground,” he said in an uninflected voice.

“Come on, you men,” Oliver said and shepherded them all up to the kitchen where Mrs. Parker had prepared a night breakfast of cheese eggs, ham, hominy and biscuits.

They sat at the honey-wood table eating and then at the end they cut open the white steaming cathead biscuits and poured wide rivers of cane syrup from the big round tin spilling over the plates and sopped the syrup up with the biscuit flesh and chomped it down as the sun, in yellow and peach streaks it slowly gathered into itself, came up. The new day laid its foundations on the windowsills and pushed gradually into the room, lit by the big electric bulb hanging from the ceiling under a green shade and by a coal lamp on the counter, and Delvin, his eyes so packed with sand he could hardly keep them open, was sorry to see these two lights extinguished. He wanted them to keep burning into the day in memorial to the day passed and its events.

But the sunlight that couldn’t be stopped shone on the red bread-box and on the bottle-green icebox and on the blue, marble-painted crock containing cucumber pickles and on the polished black enameled woodstove and on the pale blue safe with the pink floribunda roses painted on the two doors, and he watched all these take their true colors back to themselves and the faces of the men and Mrs. Parker take on the colors and shapes that they carried through daytime that were different from their faces at night under even the brightest light, somehow more supple and creased and softer really than at night, even if they looked more battered and old. He could smell the scents of mock banana flowers and gardenia and pine rosin
from the yard, and smell the grass and the dew itself, and it was as if the sun brought these in too. And all of them, including Oliver leaning against the counter sipping a cup of black coffee, felt something hidden inside themselves brought back out into the open, something made up of sorrow and vigor and reverence all bound together. They felt restored, resolved. And this feeling, too, like the tide of light, passing even as they felt it.

The funeral was held a day and a half later at the tall narrow Jericho Holiness church fourteen miles outside the city near the old negro community of Middle Horse among the remnants of a neglected pecan orchard surrounded by mixed cotton fields and woods. But before this, lines of silent mourners trudged through the funeral home to pause before the white-painted pinewood box plumped with quilted blue satin complete with a blue satin pillow for the boy’s head. They’d been coming through since first light. C
ASEY
D
AVID
H
AROLD
was etched into a round brass plate on the coffin lid. His mother sat in one of the plush red quilted armchairs in the little family room off to the side of the viewing room, moaning and gripping herself in her arms. Her husband, a heavyset, feckless man taken by drink, skittered around the room laughing in a strenuous false manner and shaking hands with everyone who came in. Behind his gay mask his eyes burned with a fever of grievous perplexity. An air of mortification and sorrow filled the room. A compressed vulcanizing barely contained energy swelled. And in some spots hope guttering.

“We’d have held the viewing out at our home in the country,” Mr. Harold told folks, “but it was just too small.”

The funeral expenses were being paid by Mr. W. B. Bickens, who had also offered his house for the viewing, but he was relieved when Mrs. Harold said no, she wanted the people of Chattanooga to get a look at what those white men had done to her child. (No white folks showed up at the funeral home.) Oliver had worked hard to bring the boy back to the look of health. Mrs. Harold had broken into the room a second time and ordered him to stop fixing her son’s face. At first Oliver had thought he misunderstood her, or he told himself he did. She said, “I don’t want you making a fool of my son.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, “I won’t . . . I couldn’t,” and let his hands drop to his sides.

“I don’t want you fancin’ him up.”

A sadness had filled Oliver’s body. The tips of his fingers were shriveled from the ingestants. He wiped his hands on a clean towel he took from a pile on the counter. The towels were usually kept in one of the cabinets, but this case was such a mess he had Culver bring them out. “I will—”

“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say what you will or you won’t. Just quit trying to replace my boy with somebody else. Put him back like them white mens left him.”

In the end it was a mix. Oliver could not bring himself to wound the boy’s half-restored face again. But he didn’t go further. The cuts were still apparent, the lip with its vertical gash like a field-dressed wound. He had wept in frustration and despair as he worked. In the end he was left with a weariness he hadn’t known he could experience and still walk around in. His legs hurt, and a hard pain had worked its way into his shoulders and roosted there.

The boy looked the victim of ugly drubbing and of haste and unrectified fear and sorriness. There were stitches in his forehead, and one eye was sunk into his head. Wads of putty like the clay we are made of. Everywhere in his face was the strange seriousness of underbone. His artificial hands of cotton in their white gloves looked like doll hands. Shame tinged Oliver, but he wanted to give the family what they wanted. He knew it would all work out in the ground.

In the parlor viewers recoiled trembling. Some fainted, others stared, many wept seamless tears and clutched their hands to their hearts, held each other, others passed by mutely, some stared avidly, feeding, some wanted to touch the body, even caress it, others squeezed their eyes shut. A photographer, a small broad-shouldered man smelling of ferrous sulphate, had come in and taken pictures. He had fumbled with his equipment. He dropped two plates, ruining them. A tiny ball of sweat collected by his ear and trailed slowly
down his jaw. His eyes rapidly blinked. He sighed. His hands shook and then they steadied and he was able to take the pictures that ran two days later in the africano
Mountain Star Weekly
and appeared later in papers up north. Spikes, cascades, flushes of anger and sadness. Many felt new weights added to an old heaviness and it was part of life for them, understay and manacle, what you grew up with as a counterpoint to tenderness, murder on the other side of the door.
My soul has been tipped into a deep well,
somebody said.

Solomon Baker took off his glasses and rubbed them with a blue silk handkerchief.

“How much, Lord?” somebody said.

“How much longer, Lord?” somebody else said.

The people trooped by through the day, through the evening and deep into the petty hours of night. Into the buckled and slumped hours of false dawn. The yeasty realness of life was in their breasts, and even as they grieved many experienced themselves as held deeply in the weave of being and even smacked hard by grief were grateful. Others were simply glad it was not them. Oliver lay on the hardest of the two couches in his office, trying to rest. Delvin came in and without turning on the light lay down on the floor beside him. A night bird asked a question, waited, and asked the same question again, a question never answered on this earth, unless the earth itself was the answer. Oliver let his hand fall from the couch and seek the boy’s face that he touched so gently Delvin could barely feel it and then he groped for his hand. Delvin caught the older man’s fingers and he felt as if he was catching him as he sank into the sea; he gripped down hard and the older man spoke out and Delvin said he was sorry and then in a soft seep he was crying.

After a while Oliver said, “This is only the second time I have had to do this. Usually they take the poor fellow out to some hollow or country pasture and bury him without calling on my ministrations.” He blew his breath out and breathed it back deeply in. Delvin could smell the cigar on his breath. Oliver said, “When she came in the laboratory the last time—to tell me not to fix her boy—I thought
I would explode. With frustration and regret. I was afraid I might strike that woman. Oh, I knew I wouldn’t, wouldn’t ever, but I felt so consternated.” He turned heavily—Delvin could smell his musky cologne, and the horsehair in the couch—and his wide face seemed to rest disembodied on the edge of the couch, like a face in one of the books he had read as a child, disembodied and filled with curiosity. He said, “For a second I thought I would strike that woman and walk out of the room and keep walking until I came to some other world to live in.” He looked in the dimness at Delvin with eyes that contained a shadowed mournfulness. “But there is no other world.” A crinkling, whispering sound then where Oliver’s silk robe rubbed against the couch. “I could walk for a thousand thousand years,” he said, “and not find any world but this one. Lord.” He patted the edge of the couch. “A mortician’s not supposed to feel like that.”

“What about Africa?” Delvin said.

“What’s that?”

“When you’re walking.”

“Walking—hunh.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Africa. That old bushy place? Those folks over there have forgot all about us. We wouldn’t fit in. Despite what old Marcus Garvey in his big hat and with the whole UNIM behind him says.”

“What about some empty place? Some place nobody stays in and nobody wants?”

“Only place like that is a place nobody can live in. Shoot, I’d go live on an iceberg in the Arctic ocean if I thought it could be done. But even there the white man would come and run us off. Wouldn’t want us mixing with the polar bears.”

“I don’t want to mix with them anyway,” Delvin said for the laugh in it, but he was thinking,
Always the hard way’s the only way
.

Oliver let loose a long rattling sigh and then silence fell again. The night bird inserted its ascending cry, only the final note a true question.

“I’ve known rivers,”
Delvin said.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world and older

than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

“That’s beautiful, boy. Did you make that up?”

Delvin didn’t say anything.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s strong and faithful, faithful to the truth.” Oliver raised himself. “You ought to say that at the funeral tomorrow. Or I mean today. This afternoon.”

“Oh, no,” Delvin said.

“I wish you would. I know it would be a piece that would be a great help to everybody.”

Though he wanted to claim the words as his own, and might have if he wasn’t spooked by Oliver’s proposal that he say the lines of Langston Hughes’s poem at the funeral, he admitted they were the great Harlem poet’s and not his. Oliver looked him in the eyes and smiled, knowing what the boy had almost done and not offended at all by that sort of humanness.

“You’re an uncommon young man,” he said, words that Delvin would recall often—sometimes derisively—in years to come.

“I might be,” he said, “but I don’t want to get up before those people and say anything at all.”

“I can’t make you, boy, but I would be happy to support you in saying them.”

They were both exhausted, and shortly after that, after the whippoorwill’s duty was passed on to a widow bird offering its own cranky cry, they fell asleep and would have slept right through the funeral if Polly, who had cried half the night, hadn’t kept calling from the door until they waked. Delvin, despite the occasion, experienced a jolt of happiness when he saw her standing in her fresh navy-blue dress in the doorway. He spoke to Mr. Oliver, who lay on his back on the long couch, thinking—so he said in a moment—about the net sack of oranges a white woman had given him one Christmas when her driver stopped her carriage in the middle of Valhalla street in Montgomery and called him to the door. Later three africano boys had taken the oranges from him.

They got up and moved quietly in the faint clattery silence of early morning.

The leaves of sweet gum trees made moving shadows on the walls of the church. Across the yard was the old church, a tiny square wooden building, hardly bigger than a cotton house, with a cocked steeple the size of an apple crate riding the roof. The old structure had become so infirm that it had been locked for years and would have been torn down except for the sentimental and historic value it had for the community. It had been recently whitewashed, thanks to Cordell Meeks, a parishioner whose cotton fields bordered the property, and this had made the congregation proud. The new church was an elaborated version of the old one, planed boards, a shingle roof and a tin steeple perched on the roof line like a squared and pointed hat. There were hitching posts for the mules and horses in front of the old church. A cleared space for cars in front of the new. Mostly folks came in wagons. Many sat now in their wagons, two hours before the service, patiently waiting. On the other side of the red dirt road sheriff’s deputies sat in two big black cars.

They pulled up and backed around to the door of the new church and several men stepped down from the wagons, blistered men, men of sorrows and men held in contempt, men in washed overalls and starched white shirts, men who didn’t know how to read or had never held in their hands any other book but the Bible, if that, men who took the long view that the Lord was waiting for them in heaven, these men, who Delvin was thinking of and had been thinking of now since last night when he watched the last of them come through the parlor of the Home and stop and stare down at the unrefabricated dead boy, the illuminated and beaten but not destroyed boy, standing in a moment of capacious silence that in itself stood for four hundred years of isolation among men—he had thought of these men who had hardly ever known an unbullied moment in their lives but who went on anyway, wondering what they believed in those nights in the country when the last lamp had been put out and they
lay beside their narrow wives in the dark that was of a blackness impenetrable by human eyes as skeeters and fleas and flatbugs went about their cunning business, wondered if they thought of anything at all—these men helped unload the burden and carry it into the church.

Those who hadn’t gotten a chance to view the body in town got one now. There was rustling and whispering and fresh bursts of tears, and voices cried out, making hollow despairing sounds against rafters and roof. After a while an old man in shirtsleeves held off his wrists with black silk garters began to play a large nickel-plated accordion. “There Is a Balm in Gilead” was the first selection, and then Delvin didn’t pay attention because he was harried by nervousness concerning the poem he was supposed to recite. Mr. Oliver was busy with the family. Many cousins and uncles and aunties and brothers and sisters in the Sunday clothes they had worn just three days before at services in this building. A small black stove in the center of the floor was draped in blue cloth and a basket filled with daisies and meadow rue and daylilies set on top. The windows along the sides had been raised and Delvin could smell the dry, rusty scent of new cotton in the fields. A pale green damselfly, elegant and hesitating as it came, drifted in and floated over the assembling congregation. With the paddle fans taken from a box by the door, women fanned themselves vigorously. The fans had advertisements for the Constitution Funeral Home on one side and a color picture of a beautiful sloping tree-shaded field bordering a quiet river on the other.

The place grew warm, and the people, already exhausted, coming off little sleep and the work of their home lives, leaned back on the music for support of a weariness that never really left them.

Delvin, standing next to the open window through which a lazy green fly buzzed slowly back and forth, looked out. Beyond the little ragged graveyard, now rife with fresh flowers amid the undersized gravestones and ceramic urns and worked wire markers, was a big
hickory-handled plow with ponderous coulter leaned against a pine tree. He wondered why it was there and wondered what it would be like to plow a field. Beyond the plow the great expanse of cotton hung heavy with hard green bolls.

Now the minister, a deeply black portly man in a black suit with vest and a soft gray tie, ascended the three plank steps to the altar and took a seat in one of the big cypresswood chairs behind and to the side of the pulpit. He was followed by a thin young man in a brown suit who sat down in a similar chair on the other side. The choir had come quietly as ghosts through a door at the side of the church and was now sitting in two short rows farther back on a low platform behind the ministers. They began softly to sing. The accordion that had been playing steadily, the rangy musician pumping, never stopping once to wipe the sweat running down both sides of his face, stopped. The choir sang about how it was going to cross over into campground. Out the big open windows the leaves of the sweet gum soughed and sighed and squared themselves and shook in the breeze that barely reached the floor of the church. Crickets sawed their legs. The bob-white cry of quail. Without Delvin realizing it the service had begun.