Ginny Gall (21 page)

And he met the grief-stricken and the celebratory, the quilters and choristers. He met people at weddings and football games and
pasture track meets and at barbecues under voluminous oaks by blackwater rivers where the smell of slow-roasting pork filled the woods with its sweetness. He met peddlers and dodgemen offering burial and life insurance for pennies a week and truck drivers and higglers; and he met preachers, jolly ones and severe ones and ones who told funny jokes at dinner and ones whose speech was so filled with extraordinary locutions that he wondered if it was a special language taught only to preachers and understood only by them; he met schoolteachers and doctors and barbers and lodgekeepers and tinners and ragpickers and butter and egg men and grifters and ex-bindlestiffs turned shouters, and a sightless wanderer who liked to fondle the porphyry necklaces. In Tarbitha, Alabama, he watched a silky-haired copperbright woman throw back a glass of red wine punch and thought his heart would stop. He met africano policemen wearing cracked Sam Browne belts and met house painters and a writer of tall tales that he said were better than the Uncle Remus stories that newspaperman Harris had stolen from the colored folks over there in Georgia. He met undertakers and talked shop with them and by way of the undertaker railroad you might call it sent messages to Oliver, telling him he was on a mighty adventure.

In the passing nights, the old days—of youth already encrusted with memory and the peculiar visitations of dream time—in these short summer nights and fall nights when the dust was lifted from the dry fields and sailed in clouds before the moon, turning the moon to rose—more secured now—again he brought back Oliver, Polly and the Ghost, and brought back the streets of the Row where he was a prince of boys, a wanderer among familiar byways, poking into the unusual facts and alliances of a neighborhood built on the lives of patrimonial and historical mimicries. He caught himself coughing quietly, from no disease other than the heart’s tendernesses, and pressed his hand on the floor of the van to steady himself as he shook with dream tears over the days gone from tarrying in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Parker about her adventures as a freight hauler’s wife in Florida, or the times, at the end of short winter days, when he sprawled in the voluminous armchair in Oliver’s bedroom reading of the high kings of Scotland and Venice. From a silence that seemed to flow endlessly both backward and forward he reached toward the shade that was his mother—shade of lingering breath. On cold days his own breath seemed at times to be hers too. The extensions of himself, the remainders, and especially the folded notes he sometimes handed to visitors asking them to pass the notes on if they were ever to come on an aubergine-faced, beautiful, springy-haired woman talking about the lives of kings—these scraps haunted him, their messages of hope and descriptions of some adventitious moment, of pulling on an oversized red sock or eating supper with gypsies or of waiting at a railroad crossing on a clay road in the late afternoon watching a breeze pick up and sort through its scatterings of yellow leaves. As far as the scribbled notes went, he had no idea if they found her, but he told himself—sometimes—that they
did. This was his homemade religion, as the roads and the little towns smelling of wet ashes and pork grease, their painted arches welcoming everybody—so they said—and their overfed trees and storefronts where he and the professor caught themselves reflected with the same articulation and clarity as any other passersby, were his religion, and the cookfires they built and the august and pilfering nights and the collection itself, the big portmanteau they hauled around like medieval peddlers rolling their creaking schooners of trade goods, all these, and on some days not only these but everything he saw, touched, smelled and chanced on like motherless foundlings beside the road, were his religion. He tried to remember them all in the prayers of his noticing and his footsteps, especially his mother Cappie, offering a nodding and insufficient worship. Meanwhile in sleep he wrestled so mightily that the professor told him he would put him outside under the truck if he didn’t quiet down. It took a long time to ease up in the dreams. But the professor never did put him out. It was a secret ministration he thought and he thanked him for it. The old man’s clucky, crusty ways did not interfere with his kindness. Raised around childless grownups, Delvin was used to the standard selfishness of the lonely and habitbound. He had been studying people all his life so far. “Some kind of lookout,” the professor said when he told him. “You could say that,” Delvin said. Out the truck window the wind stroked channels and currents through a field of yellowing barley as they talked.

At a funeral they caught on a pass-through in Coldwater, Louisiana—trying a little utility work to drum up business—as he eavesdropped on a gassy and trouble-infused woman describing her husband’s medical symptoms (bilious fever, bone shave, a gathering in his feet and a little apologetic cough that was driving her crazy), past her terrapinate chewing brown jaw, across the room and out the window and on the other side of a little yard, standing in front of a piney wood the understory of which was filled with blossoming blackberry bushes, he spied a woman, no, a girl, who was the most compelling person, femalewise, he’d ever seen. She was slim and nearly
blueblack like him and had bushy hair that looked uncombed and untreated—never treated—and in her wide face was a look of barely suppressed outrage and a sorrow and under this an astonishment that as he looked seemed the most familiar and unusual and irresistible expression in the world. As he watched she bent her head back and caught the sun in her face. She opened her mouth and he watched the sun catch in her white teeth.

Crimped, exhilarated, trying not to draw attention to himself, he scooted out and dashed around the side of the house to introduce himself. But when he got to where she’d been there was no sign of her. Usually shy, usually a slider along the edges, he asked five different people if they’d seen her and would have asked more, but the fifth, a salesman for the Universal Encyclopedia Company, with a leer that would have been a wink except that he had a lazy eyelid, told him she was in town visiting a local friend from college. The salesman didn’t know her name but the local woman was Annie Bawnmoss and she lived two streets over, back from Till’s grocery between the house with a lopsided porch and the Free Will Baptist church.

Delvin hustled over there and arrived just as the two young women were climbing the front steps of a small brick home.

“Hello,” he called from the street and the local woman, Miss Bawnmoss he figured, turned and looked at him.

“Do I know you?” she said.

The other, the one who looked so familiar and unusual at the same time, turned too and looked at him as if she was interested in who he might be.

“I’m Delvin Walker of the American Museum of Negro History,” he said breathlessly, trying to get a smile to set right on his face.

“You look like I’m supposed to know who that is,” the first girl said.

“No way really that you would, unless you are interested in negro history.”

“Negro history,” the other woman said, not a question but musefully.

Delvin wanted desperately to ask her name. “Yes,” he said.
“Hello, I’m Delvin Walker—with Professor Carmel. I help put on this traveling museum show we got about negro history.”

“Traveling,” she said, still not a question.

“Oh yes. We got a big old truck type van with the whole museum inside it.”

“I’d like to see that,” she said.

“You could come right now.”

The woman continued to look at him in her museful, slightly dislocated way. Delvin immediately retrenched.

“We’ll be parked over at the Melody AME church, over on—where is that?—on . . . ,” and he looked at the local college woman, who had a narrow face and hard, intelligent eyes.

“Come on, Celia,” she said, “these wandering wooly heads come through here all the time.”

“That extension off Foster street,” Delvin said. “I could come escort you if you like. When you like.”

“That’s all right,” the woman called Celia said. “I can find my way over there I reckon.”

She smiled. It was a friendly smile that Delvin took to heart.

“Well,” he said, almost choking, “I’ll look out for you.”

The two young women went into the house.

The next morning he swept out the museum and dusted the photos and opened the flat books to what he thought of as the most interesting examples of africano life. His favorite photo was one looking up a dirt road at a grocery store that looked like a little wooden ship drifting in a forest. You could see two small boys sitting on the grocery steps and up ahead a wagon pulled by a mule. It had a grace and loneliness and a passing air about it of quiet welcoming that created a sweet place in his heart. He had already arranged the display cases to include the photographs of the people whose faces he found most interesting. He shook the thin mattresses and the checkered blankets out, rolled them up and shoved them into their space above the cab. The professor commented on his quickness this clear late spring morning, but Delvin didn’t explain. It was a beautiful day. A sky with blue depths and puffed-up complicated clouds. The dew
brought the smell of the roses in the church’s side garden and the junebugs were just tuning up in what Delvin thought of as a harmonious fashion. He stood by the back steps listening to them climb their ladders into the higher reaches of sound and stop as if they had been caught at something. Wonder what it is? he thought.

By dinnertime they had made a dollar and fifty-five cents off a first-grade class from the little deckleboard school behind the waterworks. The teacher had to snap her fingers at him as if he was a schoolboy to get his attention on the presentation articles. The professor called him on his distractedness, but in a friendly way. Delvin had mentioned that a young woman might be coming over. They ate noon dinner at a slabwood table by the church garden. Bees tumbled among poppy flowers and floated over the big puffy hydrangeas.

“It’s a miracle I guess that these Methodists allowed themselves even to plant a garden like this,” the prof said, indicating the colorful array of blossoms. “They are so hard on themselves about appreciating any beauty but that of their lord and savior. It is the most foolish response to the truth that I am aware of in these parts.”

“What do you mean by that?” Delvin, only half listening, inquired.

“Anybody who tarries long enough in the quiet of the day will shortly see that the most profound world is intangible. Invisible,” he said, laughing his wheezy one-horse laugh. “Like in that photograph you like so much.”

“Which one?”

“The one of that shady road and that wagon climbing the hill.”

“Invisible?”

“You know what I am talking about. We love being under big trees, in their shade, because they return us, partway at least, to the mysterious world.”

“How come we knuckle down so hard in this one? Everybody I know is trying to make a killing right here.”

“Looks that way, dudn’t it?”

“In the funeral business you see the ones who gathered the most headed out in the slickest style.”

“Still we wonder where they head out to.”

“I wonder about it all the time.”

“All you got to do is slow yourself down a little. Put aside this grasping.”

“You mean like right now?”

“Well, right now you have the hidden world appearing in its most concentrated form. Or about to. Or you hope it will.”

“You mean . . .”

“Exactly. She is the most familiar representation of this other world—or at least what we feel about such as her is.”

“I feel so jumpy I am about to crash out of my skin.”

“Pretty likely.” He looked off toward a large blossoming crape myrtle. “How you doing with those books I gave you?”

“Right well. I been reading
The Blue Horn
, that book by I. B. Connell. He says that desolation and dread are our oldest feelings. That this whole world of cities and government is just our attempt to build walls against them. God, too. He says these are the comedies of foolishness. We got to discard them. Walk away from them like they were a dead dog in the road and make a new life in another place, live in another way.”

The professor looked up at the sky that was so clear by now it was almost white, summer white.

“What kind of life?”

“He doesn’t clearly say. He just recommends that we vacate the premises.”

“Yes.”

Delvin looked off toward the van. “I guess we pretty naturally are living that way right now.”

“Our ambling way of life, you mean?”

“Yessir. Traveling from town to town.”

“It’s a splendid life, I agree, but it doesn’t appear to be for everybody.”

“It pretty much suits me.”

“You are one in a thousand, my boy.”

It was difficult under the circumstances to keep up his end of the
conversation but he felt it was his duty to, and besides, at least on most occasions, their talks excited him. But today his spirit lay sunk in longing and the afternoon was a parched plain spread around him and the food he ate unidentifiable. He kept getting up to go check the street in both directions; the professor had to call him back to the table.

Just before sunset, stepping out from under the blue shadow cast by a big box elder down the street, Celia appeared. She came with her friend. Delvin, his throat so thick he first had to step around the side of the van and hack and take deep breaths, showed them around the premises. Miss Bawnmoss held back, allowing that she was not at all impressed, but Celia—she said to call her that—wept a quiet seep of tears before a stack of pictures of suffering and degradation, of hangings and burnings. Delvin did not interfere. He had learned from Mr. Oliver that there was a proper distance to allow grievers to express themselves without them feeling that they too were being urged into the pit. She leaned with her hand propping her body against the long table. Before her men with blood gleaming on their backs knelt under the whip hand. She swayed slightly. Her face gleamed with tears. She cried without making a sound. He wanted to touch her. Just before his hand rose she turned blindly from the helpless bodies, first toward the front of the van and then, catching herself, turned back and stumbled by him and out into the fading light. He followed her to the door and then down the steps.

She crossed the sidewalk and stood in the grass beyond it. The sky looked like a piece of pale gray silk stretched tight. The trees had darkened almost to black. Between them a few sips of color, of peach and cherry, shone through.

Miss Bawnmoss came down the steps and stood beside him, wringing her hands in a white handkerchief.

“It’s her father,” she said.

“In the pictures?”

“No. But her father got killed by white men. Over in Mississippi.”

“They hanged him?”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

She didn’t go to the woman, who had stopped weeping and was standing now in the churchyard looking off into the distance.

What have I done? he thought.

“They drowned him,” Miss Bawnmoss said.

“Aie, Lord.”

She went to her friend. The two woman embraced. Celia’s right hand fluttered down to her side and hung there like something forgotten. She separated herself from her friend and came over to Delvin who stood now in the shadow behind the truck.

“Thank you for showing me your exhibit,” she said. “I guess I was just surprised by some of it.”