Ginny Gall (15 page)

He was still breathless after a mile walking on the side of the road. Nothing ahead but farm fields and woods. No telling how many miles of them. Why not go back and catch another train? Why not go home and hide under the house? Watch the legs of the police as they rounded everybody up. Oh Lord. If he was going back he would have to walk through that little town. These farmers would eat him alive. Oh Lord. He stopped and stood in the middle of the road. A consternation came on him so powerfully he thought his head would burst. What the mercy do I do? He scuffed the light, speckled dirt. It smelled of the country, of country life. Tall sumac bushes nodded darkly and gave in a little breeze. He thought he might walk on a bit farther, see what he could see. He started out.

As he continued south he would step off the road and crouch in the ditch when he saw car lights coming. The ditch was dry and sandy at the bottom. There weren’t many vehicles, maybe six between when he was set down and when the first gray shadings of dawn began to appear over grassy hills to the east. He stopped to rest. He lay down in the ditch grass. He shut his eyes but he could see the white boys running after him. Then he could see the solemn-faced girl. She was a plucky girl; he hoped their paths would cross again. The grass itched through his shirt. How would he ever get home? He began softly to cry, holding the tears in, ashamed of them, as if there was someone around who might see and rate him. After a while he slept, but just barely, always near the surface where it seemed white boys carrying big sticks were about to catch him. At the earliest shadings of dawn he was up and walking.

For nine months he wandered, catching trains out of little shapeless burgs, riding all night peering up from splintery beds
of flatcars at the drifting stars, wondering who he was and where he would wind up, taking his meals at back steps and in alleys behind little restaurants, gnawing on hard store cheese and crusty bread, wondering where he was going and when he would get there, crossing rivers and blackwater sloughs where buzzard delegations perched in tall cypress trees and passing fields ornately laid down, riding and working and pulling his socks off only when he came to a likely stream he could wash in, laying low on the lowdown, a railroad angelina shy of bulls and yeggs, careful with his few cents, taking his time to question others who might look likely, flailing in dreams, and wondering if he would ever again light on somewhere to stay. But time passed, the world edged into fall, and he grew homesick. Outside Barwick, Alabama—the closest he’d been to Chattanooga since he stepped down from his original freight—he caught a ride with a farmer who took him home on a work plan, and all the way Delvin was making up a story, not his, he knew that already, but the man’s, story of a skinny fellow with a wrinkled brow and slim shoulders and a partially withered arm, some farmer with a mystery in his life that he couldn’t express and needed old Delvin to get him going and help him tell his tale. Everybody had a mystery and on the roads you heard versions of mystery like fairy tales and legends continuously revised. Stories of great fights and punishment and loss enduring like an eternal flame. Stories of marriages gone sour and children lost in a fire and stumbles that threw a man down into pits and left him crawling in dark hallways under the gaze of strange faces peering ghostly through windows, and floods come like destitution itself, and somebody had his left hand cut off with a pirate cutlass and another had his back broke by a cotton wagon and somebody else discovered his sweetheart in a junction between towns where nobody would tell you the truth about anything and he said to his sweetheart I will go get us something to eat but when he came back she was dead in the road with her throat cut. The stories stacked in your head like painted plates and you could take them down and read the life of the country in them and he liked to do this even though each one made him lonely. Here was another.

For the next five weeks he stayed on the farm working for the Bealls, that was their name, a husband and wife, africano folks who owned their own farm. He cleaned out the chicken yard and house and hoed the garden and picked vegetables. In the kitchen he worked peeling tomatoes for canning and putting up pickles. He sat at the kitchen table eating green tomato pickles that were so sweet they made his back teeth ache, reading aloud to Mrs. Beall from a book of fairy tales. He read her the story of Sleeping Beauty and the story of the Lost Prince. In both these, one the tale of a single woman drugged and stashed by a thug in the woods and the other of a young man who could not read the signs that were as plain as day, Mrs. B found her life.

I too have been asleep all my life, she said. I too could never read the signs.

She was a stout woman with a plain open face. She voiced these statements in a way that made Delvin feel she knew the stories well and had spoken these sentiments before. Yet she made them with fervor, as if realizing truths about herself for the first time. Her long broad bottom lip trembled. I wonder where my prince is, she said, as if she had just misplaced him, and where is my crippled but kindly dwarf to lead me from the dark wood. Another story about a prince defeating three wily witches did not interest her.

I just don’t believe no prince is going to outwit such remarkable women, she said, baring her stained childish teeth.

This remark too seemed prepared. Maybe, Delvin thought, he was not the first traveler to sit at this table. It was covered with oilcloth printed in tiny red flowers on a blue background. Small red mallow flowers filled a cloudy glass vase set in the center. She picked new flowers every day from the garden, always red mallows, but only the small ones. Others, rose pink and red-streaked and as wide and fat as a dinner plate, she left alone. The kitchen smelled heavily of peeled and blanched and pureed tomatoes, as of a tomato wine.

The first sleep there, morning into afternoon, just before he waked, he had had a dream of his mother kneeling beside a mountain stream dipping water in a yellow gourd. She looked young and
healthy and vigilant and she was carrying a large bunch of white flowers stuffed into a sack on her back. All in the dream seemed right. But she did not look at him and he did not call or go to her. In the dream he asked himself why not, but it did not seem an important question. He waked in the late afternoon with the dream still alive in his mind, a little sad, and refreshed and alert and hungry again. The room was filled with a fine-grained aged-yellow light coming in a narrow window at the foot of the bed. He smelled some lemony herb he didn’t know the name of, some kind of mint, he thought.

He lay on his back feeling surrounded by big events. These events were at a distance, like lights on the horizon. Last year they had buried out of the funeral home a man who’d committed suicide by setting himself on fire. He’d been burned worse than that boy. The man—Stacy Beltram—had bought half a gallon of gasoline that he pumped himself into a little tin jug and out in the alley behind his house under a big blossoming mimosa he poured it over himself and set a match to it. The fire had burned him up and the mimosa too. “That was typical of him,” the man’s old father had said about his ruining all the fuzzy pink blossoms. At the graveside service Delvin overheard a tall man in an army uniform, a man some said was once Mr. Beltram’s best friend, say, “He set fire to himself trying to buy a little time off in Hell.” The other people who heard him laughed with their hands over their mouths. The burned man had been a cardsharp and a japer, a grifter who was once put in jail for selling worthless insurance policies to old ladies. What had been coming for that man finally caught him, Delvin had said to Mr. Oliver as they washed up at the soapstone sink in the basement hall. What caught him, catches everybody, Mr. O had reminded him. Chickens wing home to every roost.

He stood at the window looking out at the poultry yard. Evening coming on out of yellow swirls and loose red patches in the west. The chickens were starting to make for the roost in the chicken house. They clucked and quarreled as they trooped toward the short board inclines, and a few of them continued scratching in the dirt as if the dark wont anything to worry about. But in a minute even the brave ones would pick up and climb aboard. Chickens couldn’t see
at night, so he’d read, that was why the fox could catch them so easy. Among other reasons, he’d thought.

On the day they finished canning the tomatoes it was still early afternoon and Delvin walked out to the pasture beyond the garden. Off to the left a distant truck boiled along a dusty road, probably Mr. Beall, on one of his errands. Mr. Beall often left after breakfast and was gone for a good part of the day. He would return bringing a small shrub or turnip or some seeds folded in a small newspaper packet or once a slender carved wood figurine he said had been brought from Africa. He did a little work around the place, but that usually involved encouraging the chickens and once or twice taking one of the roosters out of the small cages and exchanging its place with the rooster in the big pen. Delvin followed him into the pen the first time, but when Mr. Beall put the fresh rooster down he immediately attacked Delvin, coming at him in a ruckus of feathers and kicks. Mr. Beall had laughed when Delvin ran. I wish I could have got a picture, he said, when he caught the other rooster and shooed the angry cock away from the boy. Delvin figured he could have stomped the rooster if it came to that, but he wasn’t sure. If that devilish bird had gotten him on the ground no telling what would have happened. From the safety of the farmyard he eyed the new rooster, a red and green and black cock with a large red wattle that swayed as it walked. The rooster lifted itself on its legs and let loose a sharp crow. Delvin decided not to let himself be drawn into a battle with the cock. When Mr. Beall invited him into the enclosure again he passed. I’m too young to let myself be killed by a chicken, he said. Mr. Beall had laughed a friendly, farmer-knows-best laugh.

Past the yard, past the garden, Delvin stood in the pasture sniffing the wind. A stand of yellow phlox caught at a bit of breeze, shuddered and let it go, the tall shaggy flower heads fluttering. A meadowlark flew his way, checked and veered sharply off, exposing his yellow breast feathers. The blue sky was strewn with small round clouds, like puffs of cannon fire. The path was wide and grassy, but in the middle of it a narrow strip ran that was sandy, without growth. There were faint footprints in this strip. He experienced a consternated shiver. He
began to follow the path, and as he walked the fear or nervousness at first grew, but then gradually it began to subside or if not quite subside, to be replaced by another kind of trepidation, not just a fear of police agents or detectives trailing him, but of some other presence. The path dipped toward a branch, left the pasture and entered a gray wood. Long spindly trunks of mottled gray trees he didn’t know the names of held up small collections of pale green leaves. Below them crooked skinny bushes with hard glossy leaves squatted. A sharp fluttering came from behind one set of bushes—a bird spooked by something, maybe him, maybe something else. Badgers came to mind. He had been reading in the
Britannica
lately about badgers, about their implacable fierceness. In the drawings, despite their fur, they looked flattened, like some turtles or other reptiles. They had hard black curved claws. He stopped. The wind soughed in the tall thin trees, making a sighing sound. In a minute, he thought, it’s gonna start moaning. The path came to a plank, railed bridge over twenty feet of a tea-colored creek. He made himself stop in the middle of the bridge, carefully lean on the rail and look at the water that had no discernible current. Green and yellow dragonflies darted and hung over the surface, hesitating, tipping, angling, sliding down almost to the water and hovering there as if discovering and examining tremendously interesting material on what to Delvin looked like a glozed, chocolate-colored sheet. The stream had a pleasant peaty smell. The bank on the far side was sandy, speckled with brown and black bits, but the stream itself was opaque; dark water that might contain anything. But no police down there, he thought. He’d never gone fishing, except once when Mr. Oliver and George had taken him to a little pond behind a client’s house out in the country. Nothing but a little black turtle had bit their hooks. He’d like to try it again.

Looking up the trail that continued through the leafy trees filtering into piney woods, he debated whether to keep going. These moments of hesitation were familiar to him. Seems like that’s where I really live, he sometimes thought, not in the
doing
of one thing or another. He didn’t really want to go on, but he felt he ought to, ought
to be brave enough or interested enough. Or was that a way of really wanting to do something—thinking he should—and hiding it from himself. He’d like to go into the little room where he slept and lie on the bed and read something, maybe the book of fairy stories or a newspaper. In their parlor the Bealls had
My Bondage and Freedom
by Mr. Douglas and
Souls of Black Folk
by Dr. Du Bois, but he had already read those books. He wanted to read another masterpiece, like
Ivanhoe
maybe, that he had read last summer lying on an old couch up in the attic at Mr. Oliver’s. He liked stories of struggle and questing in distant locales. Reading was natural, Miz Parker the cook said, to moody boys, and you are a moody boy. Maybe too moody, he thought, to be out alone in some thorny wood.

Then, without as far as he could tell having decided anything, he continued across the bridge and up the path that was strewn with waxy needles and rose gently into the pine woods. Just a few steps in it shaded off to the right, passed a large hedgelike growth of ligustrum that ran fifty feet in a high green wall and left off abruptly at the edge of a clearing in which there was a small white frame cottage. On the front porch of the cottage in a rocking chair much too big for him sat a tiny white man. The back of his chair soared high above his rusty white head. On one of the posts was hung a gray Confederate battle cap. The old man was looking straight at him. Delvin would have ducked and shot off from there, but the man called to him in a sweet little white man’s voice.