Ginny Gall (17 page)

For supper that night they had hominy and thin slices of salt ham cut from a large ham hanging in the pantry and tomatoes stewed with okra and for dessert hot soda biscuits slathered with salted butter with cane syrup poured over them. Mr. Beall had come in from his afternoon trip. He looked at Delvin in an odd way, not unfriendly, almost sad. Delvin asked about the old white man down in the vale, but neither of them would go very far into it. He was their tenant, Mr. B said, a man who had once worked this land but was now retired. Delvin studied Mrs. Beall’s face as best he could without being rude, but she showed no special feelings about the matter. She didn’t ask after the man.

After supper Mr. Beall and Delvin went out on the side screen porch and sat in the dark looking out at the night. The tin foil Mr.
Beall rolled from his cigar made a crinkling sound. His big sulfur match flared light and stink and the end of the cigar flamed and Delvin could see the ball of smoke and then there was only the red glowing tip in the dark. From the woods an owl called, looping its brief two-speed call out like a lariat. A whippoorwill offered its question and continued for several minutes before falling silent, answered or tired, no way to tell. Another night bird, peewit or thrush, let loose a short burst of sharp small cries that seemed to run along the tops of the field grasses, as if the little bird, in a panic, was hurrying toward a still distant roost. In the apple trees by the garden they could hear blackbirds jostling for their final places before sleep. After a while Mrs. Beall came out bringing cups of sassafras tea. He’d never drank this kind of root tea before. It had a sharp cedary smell and tasted faintly of wood. With the honey she also brought it was all right. They must do this often, Delvin thought (though it was the first time they had done it since he came). Sit out here among the birds and woods creatures listening to this racket. Country people. Like they were tiptoeing around in this big greeny world. Folks who lived out here had special secret places they retreated to—so he imagined—canebrakes and branches, caves under the fox grapes where in shady green citadels they could sit undisturbed and think about the world that couldn’t find them just now.
All
this rural world was like that for him. Not just some hideout in an alder thicket or ramshackle cotton house, but all of it, the whole parcel of woods and rivers and planted fields and all the houses and other buildings and sites too. Nobody in the world knew he was here. He could stop and loiter among the sedge and thistles like he’d done this afternoon and let himself think about things. It didn’t even matter what he thought; the thinking was the point. After fear of the police it was loneliness, he remembered now, that had driven him on. Thoughts of Mr. Oliver and George and Polly and the Ghost and a girl he saw over at the Emporium one night standing in a window winding her brassy hair in her hands. Thoughts of his brothers and sister and his mother. The tenderness he felt sending him off looking for more of it.

Mr. Beall looked up from the tea he’d been steadily slurping for
the last five minutes and asked if he would accompany him to town tomorrow. Delvin, brought sharply back, said yes sure.

The next morning he waked as Mrs. Beall was bringing the fire up in the kitchen. She didn’t always make the fire, or when she did, she’d bank it for restarting in the morning. Just the two of them out here, she said—we don’t need it. But this morning she built it up and made a large breakfast for them. While he and Mr. Beall were eating she packed a lunch in a small shellacked wicker basket. They had given him clothes to replace the dirty ones he showed up in. He carefully folded these and set them on the soft green coverlet on his bed and changed back into the washed originals. No one said anything to him, but he knew what was up. When in town Mr. Beall stopped the truck, handed him the little basket and told him it was time for him to go on his way he was not surprised. The old man pressed two one-dollar bills into his palm. Delvin hesitated a moment as if there was something he wanted to say, as if you could in a slender second or two like this somehow recount the goodness you’d found, the walks in the garden and the light shining unhampered over the fields and especially the human company, its softened edges and wandering, sympathetic talk, but there was no way to do this; he thanked him for his hospitality and started across the courthouse square. Four big water oaks squatted at the corners around the big rough granite building. He felt a sharp aloneness. He didn’t know where to go. The town was small but he had to walk half an hour before he discovered a small colored neighborhood. It was really only two short streets past the cotton gin and a couple of warehouses. Cotton lint hung in the trees. It looked like dirty snow had fallen. Women, their lower lips pouched with snuff, gazed at him from their front porches. He went in a store and bought a grape soda. The woman who sold it to him studied him carefully. She seemed as if she would let him go without speaking, but as he turned away, she drummed her big fingers on the counter and asked, Who you visiting?

I been out here to see the Bealls, he said.

Oh, you’re that boy.

Yes mam.

You off again.

Well, I would be, but I don’t quite know the way.

Looks like you don’t know how either.

No mam, I don’t.

Where is it you headed?

Chattanooga.

I thought you was from Atlanta.

Well, I am, but I got folks to visit up in Tennessee.

She studied him with a sharp black eye. Her face was grayish as if she was not well, a thin woman wearing a khaki dress almost completely covered by a worn gray apron. Without turning her head she called out, Hankie!

A voice outside the back door called back, Mam?

Come in here.

A skinny man in faded overalls came in carrying a bucket.

Go over yonder and ask Mr. Sterling if he’s going up to Chattanooga this morning.

Yessum.

She said all this without taking her eye off Delvin. You had your breakfast? she said.

Yes I have.

Well you can go wait out behind the store til Hankie gets back. Take your drink.

Delvin exited by the back screen door into a yard that was filled with stacked-up wooden crates of all sizes. On one side a bushy camphor tree with elegant dark leaves. On the other perched above a shallow ravine a small board cabin. He walked to the ravine and looked down into it. Trash of all kinds filled it. A pig tied to a stake ate melon rinds. On the other side two skinny brown dogs glanced up and went back to their meal. Delvin couldn’t see what they were eating. Odd that they didn’t bother the pig. On the far side of the ravine was a wide path bordered by a half-broken-down board fence. Beyond the fence were houses in dirt yards, a few fruit and chinaberry trees. A girl in a pale blue dress walked along the path. She carried a large basket of laundry.

Hope your day’s going well, Delvin said across the divide.

The girl didn’t answer. He watched her continue along the path and turn down a street out of sight.

He finished the drink and put the bottle in the little basket, sat down on a crate and began to make up a story. He hadn’t done much writing work, but he figured his trip would give him many things to write about. He thought about the ex-confederate soldier living in the cottage. He might tell a story about him. This old white man who loved a black woman who had betrayed him with another. And so the man, who was much older than the young black woman, had given her and her husband the farm he owned just to make her stay close to him. He made them sign papers so they wouldn’t move away or throw him off the place. He had even paid them to stay, a salary drawn off his accounts that he had set up from the sale of property he owned here in town. That was why the couple didn’t do too much work. They were on salary. Maybe that was the story. Delvin wished he had a notebook with him. He had left in such a hurry that he hadn’t thought about it. Remembering, his fear came back. Maybe he should stay out of C-town longer. He had been away a few months shy of a year. The police were probably looking for him still—or ready to start again if they caught a lead. They would always be looking for him. A sadness crept in on him. It was like an old unfriendly cat. Just then the girl came back around the corner. She still carried the now empty basket.

That your job? he called, delivering laundry for the neighborhood?

It was a foolish thing to say, he knew, but the girl’s prettiness confused him.

The girl didn’t look at him. Least I got one, she said.

He thought he caught a glimmer of a smile and didn’t feel so alone. His old fantasy of being the intrepid man alone—one of his fantasies—had fallen quickly apart. The morning had a dewy, comfortable feeling to it. Salvia and mexican sage bloomed along the sides of the ravine. He walked along the way the girl had gone—she’d disappeared into one of the yards up ahead, but he didn’t see
a way to cross unless he wanted to wade the rusty little stream at the bottom, and he didn’t. He liked wearing clean clothes, liked the feeling of fullness from breakfast. Liked waiting.

He returned to the yard behind the store. The sky was touched up here and there by a few high clouds like smears of white. The day would be hot. He took a seat on a crate under the camphor tree. There were camphor trees in the negro section of the municipal cemetery in Chattanooga. He wondered who was on the funeral list. Mr. O studied the paper and listened to stories from the neighborhoods of Red Row and kept a list, sometimes on a sheet of linen stationery in his bedroom, sometimes simply in his head, of the ones who would most likely be needing his services soon. He never spoke up ahead of time, but he was ready when the day came. Often before he was called. Mrs. Turnipseed was on the last list he’d seen, a middle-aged widow dying of bowel cancer. Her whole house smelled of shit, somebody said. One of the boys he smoked cigarettes with in the alley. And Rufus Wainwright who had taken to his bed with rheumatism. He lay in a room wallpapered with newspapers, listening to band music on the radio, reading the headlines out loud. And they said little Eustace Rogers, eleven, who had fallen off the roof onto the sharp palings of an old wooden fence his father was keeping around, hoping to set it up in his yard, wouldn’t recover. There were others, the sick and the aged mostly, occupants of the waiting room, Mr. O called them, and Delvin had pictured them sitting in the colored-only room outside the heavenly office, their straw suitcases and carpetbags closed with string at their feet, old people and young, children too, some weeping, others stoical, others not understanding why they were there and maybe only slowly figuring it out. What was the weather like outside the window? There had to be a window. He pictured himself in that room. He would be looking out the window at whatever was growing in the yard. Probably mallow bushes and mock banana, a few straggly corn plants, a rosebush dripping pink blooms, tomato vines lying on the ground. He was coming to love the smell of the fields.

A little boy threw open the screen door and rushed out into the yard.

Don’t hit me with that switch, he cried to the woman who chased behind him. She was carrying a long, limber elm switch.

The little boy circled the yard, coming in close to Delvin under the tree. He shot him a glance of humiliation and regret and ran on by. The woman—his mother, Delvin assumed—stood just outside the doorway waiting for him. The little boy stopped on the edge of the ravine and looked at her.

You gon come here, Stacy? the woman said.

I aint coming to take no whipping, the boy said.

Well, if you don’t then you don’t get to come home at all.

The woman stared at the boy a moment longer and then wheeled and vanished back into the store. The little boy, six or seven, squatted and began to cry. Delvin watched him. After a while the boy dried his eyes with the bottoms of his hands, straightened up and came over to Delvin.

What you doing? he asked.

Waiting.

For what?

The bus.

Aint no bus come back here.

It’s a different kind of bus.

You think my mama’s gon whip me? the boy said with an almost saucy air.

Sure does look like it.

Well, she won’t. I’ll just wait out here til she gets lonely for me then I’ll mosey on home.

How long will that be?

Oh, bout five minutes. He scratched his arms. Delvin could see the faint raised red circles of ringworm on his tan arms.

Shouldn’t scratch that, he said.

I don’t see how you can keep from it.

That what your mama’s after you for?

That’s it. He began to cry again. That doctor, he sniffed after a minute, wants to shave my head bald and paint it with grease that stings like fire.

That bad?

Sure is. I seen it done.

But those worms’ll eat you alive.

He scratched mournfully at the rings. It’s a problem that’s got me in a vise grip, he said.

Just then the boy’s mother pushed the screen door halfway open. Here’s a strawberry drink, honey, she said, her voice light and tender. Come on now.

You gon beat me, the little boy said.

Come on sugarbite, his mother said, and the boy walked to her and took the drink and she put her hand on his shoulder and steered him into the store.

After a few minutes Delvin followed the boy inside. The pair were gone, but some men were sitting at a corkboard table set on a crate in a cleared space off to the side in back. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if she didn’t know him. Then in a blink she did. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

That’s Sterling, she said to him, indicating with her elbow one of the men sitting at the table. They weren’t playing a game, they weren’t really sitting around the table, they were just near it. The man she indicated, a middle-aged stocky man with bushy hair mashed down under a forage cap, gave him a one-finger salute and said, We’re waiting on my sister’s boy. He grinned a grin of uselessness and amiable futility. Another of the men, an older fellow wearing a greasy black vest over a clean white collarless shirt, offered him a chair. Delvin slid in and joined the little confab. He was used to sitting with adults, listening to their talk. He had sat up in the viewing parlor or in the Home parlor on call for the bereaved who spoke in all kinds of ways, very often about things that had nothing to do with the dead. People, no matter what happened, kept their eye on the living side of things. The third man, a slim geezer with a fist-sized red rose pinned to the lapel of a yellow bathrobe he kept pulling tighter around himself, looked as if he might be joining the funeral list pretty soon. I’m Albert, he said, offering slim shiny fingers for Delvin to shake. Yes, he said, turning back to the group, my grandfather won that election
fair and true. Eighteen seventy-four, he said, turning his narrow face to Delvin, Slidell—fair and true.