Ginny Gall (13 page)

After a while the Rev Munch shambled off and stood by himself before the remains of his church, crying helpless tears. No one appeared to be seriously hurt, not physically.

Carrying his old single-shot .410 shotgun Onely swung the creaky screen door open, grinning as usual like he was the sly one when he wasn’t at all, and they walked up Constable street to where it became a path rising into laurel scrub. They climbed through Virginia pines and young oaks to the ridge and crossed over into the cove where Hoppy Butler had been shot in his underwear by sheriff’s deputies, a spot marked by a hickory slab upon which were burned with a hot nail the words S
ON
O
M
AN
, and climbed transversely along the far ridge and crossed the summit of Bald Face mountain and descended laterally, following a deer trail through a grassy meadow filled with blossoming Joe Pye weed, the pink shaggy flowers nodding in a cool breeze, and entered a flat area of hardwoods.

The trees in this place, mostly white oaks and tulip poplars and chestnuts, were the largest he had ever seen. Onely said they were the oldest leafy trees east of the Mississippi river, a fact passed on by his grandfather and confirmed, he said, in
Collier’s Encyclopedia
. They had brought chicken and gravy sandwiches and a chunk of hoop cheese wrapped in wax paper and an apple that Onely cut up into chunks with his single-blade Barlow knife. The flesh was mushy and hardly worth eating. They were hunting turkeys. Delvin thought he heard a gobbler as they entered these woods, but he was not sure. The trees, some of them, were ten feet through the base and soared up a hundred feet or more. The tulip poplars had bark that had whitened almost like the peeled places on a sycamore. The leaf tops were sparse in a way that made Delvin think of old wispy-haired men, white men. The oaks were more fulsome, fully decorated with leaves so dark green they were almost black, and the chestnuts had what he thought of as an aristocratic look. There was
hardly any undergrowth. Only a carpet of fallen leaves on the rocky floor. It was a hushed place and even the wind was stately and mindful, striding in sockfeet high up through the insubstantial leaves.

When they finished eating, the boys made little beds for themselves among the big tree roots and took a nap.

When he waked, Onely was still sleeping, so Delvin walked off alone under the trees. Every step opened a fresh avenue, no need for paths. He had heard of these old trees before Onely told him. The wind in the tops made a rushing sound, steady and grave. Delvin pressed his palm against the creased bark of a tulip polar. On the ground were scattered a few orange and green tulip flowers. They had the same sweet smell he was familiar with, no codger odor, tree variety. He craned his neck looking upward until he almost fell over. As he watched, an orange and green flower twirled slowly down and came to rest at his feet. Gift from the sky, he thought. Lately he had been thinking about getting up high. Not tree high, not mountain high, but far up into the sky. He wasn’t thinking about flying in a plane either though that would be thrilling, he was thinking about something else. It was like a dream. He couldn’t quite put into words what he meant. But he wanted to be far up, riding right at the border between earth and space. Hang waist deep in the blue air and look up at the stars in the cold black sky.

From off beyond the trees came a faint striking, slapping sound. Maybe it was a bear nosing about. The woods had always been strange to him, he was uneasy in them, nervous. He shied behind a tree and stepped a few paces along a quartering line, taking care on the hard surface of black dirt and leaves, on the chunk granite and schist, not to fall. The sound didn’t come again. In several places there appeared to be regular paths. He followed one. Up ahead he could see sunlight and he hoped it was a meadow. Meadows, pastures, planted fields, these were fine; he preferred places of human habitation, some sign that people were busy with life or had been or might be again soon.

The path curved west under the trees. It made him nervous to follow but he thought he ought to, ought to brave it. A breeze made a
whisking sound high up. The path sloped gently downhill. He could hear what sounded like voices. Also a clattering of metal. He ducked off the path and made his way across the leafy ground, drawing closer to the light. He could see an irregular ridgeline way across there, mottled dark and light green patches. Then he could clearly hear voices, white boys shouting. The voices made a high, looping sound, a sound as if they were imitating the sound of owls or wolves. He drew closer, crouched behind a bank of serviceberry bushes and looked out.

Two groups of boys on opposite sides of a narrow grassy field were running toward each other. They carried leather straps and lengths of rope and sticks and some even had long poles the bark had been stripped off of. They ran at each other swinging these—they were weapons. Boys about his age, fifteen, going at it.

Delvin dropped flat to the ground. His heart began to beat hard. The ground had no give at all, a rock floor. He raised himself and peered through the gray, starchy-smelling leaves of the closest bush.

Out in the field the boys ran hard, yelling. With a crunching, pranging sound they struck each other with the flexing weapons, clashing, unchecked and swinging. Those who didn’t fall or drop down or skeet off to the edges limping and hollering ran on to the other side of the grassy field. Only a few had hit the ground and most of these got quickly up. One or two rested on a knee. A boy licked blood off his wrist. Another lay on the ground wailing in a high, unlucky voice. One of the fallen got up, limped over to a fallen boy nearby and dragged him to his feet. The fallen boy had a long bleeding scrape on one arm. He grasped the arm above the elbow, like he was shy with it, and tried to lean his head against the other boy’s shoulder but the boy wouldn’t let him. All the boys were wearing hats, turn-brims, chocked out as if they were stuffed with something.

The boys gathered in separate groups on opposite sides of the pasture. They shouted at each other, insults and curses, none of which carried any heat. One boy waved his hat and strutted with his hand on his hip. Two sashayed arm in arm brandishing their sticks. Taunts, boasts. This was some kind of game.

From among the bushes Delvin watched them regroup and with
a shout again run at each other. Shrieking, hollering, they swung straps and sections of yellow rope and peeled sticks and met with a clattery jumble of weapons and bodies. Blood spurted from the ear of one boy. Another cried out with a sound like a child. Two stood off to the side hitting at each other with the long white poles.

Delvin raised higher to see more clearly. Stalks of pokeweed and wild carrot standing up in the field like markers swayed in a quick little breeze. The boys shoved at each other, stumbling, falling and getting up, crouching, darting in with a swing of rope that looped and whistled in the bright air.

Gradually the two groups began to break apart, passing agitatedly from gathering to separation, the boys moving off with twitchy arms and trembling legs across the bent-down grass, leaving behind the three or four more damaged boys to drag along after.

Delvin didn’t see the white boy coming along the edge of the field, a small boy moving dispiritedly just inside the cover of the trees, fleeing the struggle. The boy came up on him. Suddenly they were looking into each other’s eyes. Neither said anything. The boy, who was skinny and wore a red bandana around his ropey neck, stared at him. He had eyes as blue as the blue-eyed grass. He stared at Delvin as if he was looking at something he had never seen before. In that moment Delvin saw all the way into him, all the way down the long hallway of his spirit right to the bottom where the boy lay curled up in terror. The boy knew he saw him and he saw Delvin too, saw fright mixed with wonder. In that way they were not brothers, even under the skin. There was variation, an offslant both experienced, a dizziness of estrangement.

Both ducked to the side, the boy thrashing through the berry bushes flailing his arms, swimming through greenery. He was not trying to call attention, he was trying to get away; Delvin saw this. He had ducked too, and as he saw the boy swinging his arms he began to run.

Some other boy, a boy with narrow muscular shoulders and a crusted star-shaped cut on his cheekbone, a boy done with fighting but afraid to say so, saw Delvin as he raised up and started to run.

He cried out. “Yonder’s a black ’un spying!”

Others too had had enough. They too were ready to retire.

“Get him!” they cried.

The boys were quick in this way, instantly and solidly opposed to an africano person watching them in their secret white boys’ Sunday afternoon battle that they’d come up with to break loose from the boredom and dreariness of their lives. But this here was better.

Whooping, cawing like crows, they took after Delvin.

Delvin was fast, and he remembered the way he’d come. It was easy to run among the trees. He sprinted up the track, cut between two big chestnut trees that said
shoo shoo
in low windy voices as he passed, dashed straight up the hill and cut over to where he’d left Onely. The white boys came on behind him running, not in a bunch but spread out through the woods. Virgin forest, Onely had said this was. Delvin was wearing sneakers so old the white canvas had turned green. He could feel the rocks and the hard ground through the gutta percha soles.

He reached the spot where they’d napped, but Onely wasn’t there. Maybe he’d mistook the place, but no, he recognized the tulip poplar, a black streak on it about head high.

“Onely,” he called in a low voice, “Whoo, Onely.”

“Keep on coming this way,” said Onely’s voice from on up the track. He stuck his head around a large oak. “Come on,” he said.

Delvin ran toward him. Behind him he could hear the boys coming. As he passed him he saw from the corner of his eye Onely get to his feet. He had the .410 up and pointed. Delvin ran on by him. Then a shot. The gun going off with a loud crumping sound that seemed to slam against the trees.

A cry came from the chasing boys.

“He hit him!” somebody yelled.

Delvin had continued on up the track thinking Onely would follow. Now he did, sprinting right past Delvin. Delvin heard what had happened—heard the shot and the cry—but he didn’t want to know it.

He ran as hard as he could and they continued running up the
ridge and along it through the long grass and a stand of yellow birch trees and down into a mixed wood of maples and poplars that made a sound as if it was raining in the leaves (it wasn’t) and on through a canebrake in a hollow where they hid for a minute but couldn’t stay because the fright was on them in a punishing way. They crashed through the limber cane shoots and ran past a huge cherry tree and ran on without fatigue across the shoulder of the ridge and down and across another sun-splashed swale where blackberries were making among their own white flowers. Two young africano girls were picking the ripe berries and dropping them into buckets.

Onely yelled at the girls to run away but they stood looking at them. Delvin grabbed one girl’s wrist and began to pull her along. He stopped when the other didn’t come and said to them both that crazy white boys were coming and they had to run. The other came along slowly, swinging her bucket. When Delvin started to run again they ran too. He was thinking wildly, coming up closer in his mind to jumping off into some hideout or cave he couldn’t find and he wanted to start shrieking and yelling (all the while mutttering “damn damn damn”) and then in the next moment saw ahead of him the cuts and swerves he would be racing along in just a second and he couldn’t get it straight exactly what was happening or even who it was happening to, saw the jostle in a chokecherry branch and the sideslip of some tiny creature exiting the premises, and didn’t know anything, he thought, but just run and run.

Onely had disappeared up ahead but Delvin ran with the girls. One of them was crying but the other ran with a solemn face, not saying a word. They made it to the top of the ridge and when Delvin started down toward the north the solemn girl whose wrist he still held tugged him the opposite way.

“We got to . . . ,” he said, but he didn’t know what, and when the girl pulled him again hard, in her face still wordless a look of severe intelligence and knowing, he went with her.

He couldn’t tell where Onely was. With the girls, the one whose hand he was still holding now leading—twelve-year-old girls, thirteen maybe—he crossed the long bottom where jack-in-the-pulpits
bloomed in mucky soil and climbed through a complex understory of rhododendron bushes and laurel beneath tall loblolly pines to a ridge covered in holly bushes that the girl knew a path through and down into a gully that they followed, jumping from rock to rock, until they were suddenly back in Red Row at the head of Jersey street.

He stopped, winded, run through with an exhilaration that made him want to run some more, keep on running, maybe cross out of the mountains to the flatlands that spilled toward the Mississippi river and then rose again to the Texas plains where maybe his mother was if she wasn’t all the way to California and Hollywood or some other flimsy place—stopped and bent over his knees and drew in big breaths that he suddenly wanted the girls to see, notice the heroic boy who’d just outwitted the white people once again, a fine fellow. But when he raised up he was dizzy, and swayed, almost fell. The girls, particularly the one solemn-faced pretty girl, didn’t even seem to be ruffled. Even as he was telling them not to say anything about what had happened, the one he was still holding (for dear life) broke free and together the girls ran away from him down the street, their bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as they ran.

At the corner the girl he’d run with stopped and looked back at him. Her face was solemn yet. For a moment she studied him before wheeling about and disappearing beyond the porch of a man’s house whose wife had been buried the week before, he remembered, by accommodation of the Constitution Funeral Home.

Then the truth of what kind of trouble he was in poked its snout up like a ground rat.

He wouldn’t be safe anywhere and he knew it. If that white boy was killed—even if he wasn’t—they wouldn’t stop looking until they found him. He would have to head right back into the woods. He felt sick to his stomach. Just like his mother he was going to have run off into the mountains.