Ginny Gall (24 page)

She was patronizing him and they both knew it, but they both knew it was because she was a little hurt. He didn’t rebuke her.

“My father gave this ring to me. Or it was passed down to me after he died.”

He wished he had a ring to give her. “Let me look at it.”

He took her hand in his and with the fingers held together it was as compact and slim as a mockingbird; opened (his fingers brushing her skin as if there was a magic he could unsettle and start with a gentleness), the palm was a pale, yellowish tan, beautiful. He tried to hold it but she spread her fingers. Then she closed them and let him hold her hand and they both knew she was doing this, doing what she’d come to in this way, her hand relaxing in his so it felt softer, yet at the same time more full of life. Gently she pulled away from him.

“I can’t drive,” she said in a small voice.

They said nothing for the last block.

She pulled into the dirt driveway and parked beside the sturdy brick house with the big shocks of daylilies blooming against it. He wanted to sit in the car and talk, keep her with him somehow. Her flattened, coarse, springy hair caught the fading light as she got out. It was impossible that in a minute she’d be gone.

“I thought . . . ,” he said, but she was already around the side of the car, opening the door for him.

He reached to touch her hand on the windowsill but it was gone too quickly and she had already turned to climb the two white painted steps to the little porch. She stopped, pivoted on one foot, looked down at him still sitting in the car and thanked him for going riding with her.

“Come with us in the van,” he blurted and he saw in her eyes that the offer touched her, that she yielded to it and let it enter her and he thought he could see it in the moment of early twilight swing through her, circulating, but she only smiled, a smile diminishing in clarity and strength as she slipped further away. As she reached the door he thought she almost turned back but she didn’t. She gave him a small, sliding wave, a soft almost slicing motion of hand, as she went in. The screen door and then the white paneled main door closed and it was as if she had flown from the world and left him there.

He let out a small cry. He wanted to rush after her, overturning rooms until he found her and made her let him touch her fingers again, made her let him kiss her and have her.

But he only sat there, still inside the car—like a dummy, he
thought later, walking home—dressed up in thriftshop clothes, with cotton ticking in his hair.

The next morning the sun came up through thin peach-colored clouds and seemed to Delvin to be filled with the promise of love, but he had to stay where he was because a group of fifth-graders was coming to tour and the professor had an early appointment with the negro dentist who visited that area on Thursdays (he needed a filigree on his bottom teeth, which were worn down to stubs and hurt) and so he did not get over to the charmed house before nearly noontime. He could smell greens cooking as he walked around to the back door.

Celia was not there. She had left at first light to get to Birmingham before it got too hot.

“Well, it surely is hot,” he said, a look on his face that made the woman who cooked for the family think she’d hardly seen a person look so catercornered to hisself. She wanted to laugh at him, but as the laugh rose in her it changed to pity.

“She left a letter for you,” she said, this woman about whom he was wondering if she could tell him what he was supposed to do now—
what now
?

“A letter?”

“It’s right here on the speckle table,” she said as if he was inside the house, but she hadn’t let him in, and she turned, went away and got it and brought it to him.

He accepted the letter like a starving man told the banquet was not for him but he could have this chunk of cold cornbread here. Those riches! But still, here was food.

Like a dog, he thought as he went down the steps with the letter clasped against his chest, I scurry off to eat my little mess of leftovers in secret.

But he was not bitter, not yet, or ever would be really. Even later, out in the rain-drenched cotton fields of the state prison system as he trudged barefoot along the rows chopping nutgrass with a hoe, he would not cast blame on her.

He kept the unopened letter in his breast pocket safe like a tiny coiled lifeline until after dinner, that he ate alone behind the van under the little detachable awning at the small round folding table they used for meals and sometimes card games on cool nights when the mosquitoes weren’t too vicious. When an older woman carrying a blue cloth parasol with a wide chuffed rim approached, asking to look at the exhibits, he got up, let her in and showed her around. When he stepped out to finish his ham sandwich, she stole half a dozen photos, a fact he only became aware of after the professor got back and discovered it.

The professor was in a foul mood over his teeth. The fretwork hurt and had cost him more than it should have and on top of that among the purloined snaps were two of his favorites. He swore and ordered Delvin out of the van and off the property.

“You firing me?” He was stricken and angry himself.

“Just go on,” the prof said, sitting down in the chair Delvin had vacated. “Leave me be.” The old man felt like closing the museum and driving off someplace by himself to grieve his wounded teeth and the loss of the photos (grieve the founderings of time, the raw blast that had wakened him that morning with thoughts of his own demise, grieve the single-minded woman he’d left back in Biloxi years ago, a woman with shiny hair and a quickness of spirit that sat him up straight in his chair). For the moment he felt as if he could not go on. The boy—damn the boy.

Delvin walked fast away from the van. He had been about to read the letter when the professor appeared. He walked until he was out of town and then crossed the gully and entered the hobo camp. It was mostly deserted this time of day, but a few men were lying under a large persimmon tree smoking and talking. He didn’t want any company, he only wanted to feel less peeled. He was so nervous his hands shook. He walked through the camp and into a field of broomsedge, made a little clearing for himself and sat down in the grass. A ways farther on a little willow stood up from the field, its branches cut partially back and heavy with leaves. He got up and went over there and sat down in the shade of the tree. A killdeer fluttered up and made her
little flopping display trying to draw trouble away from her chicks, but he didn’t pay any attention.

The letter was brief.
I thought so much about our talk and was glad, but I know it is best if I go back to where I belong now. Maybe you would like to write me sometime.
She gave her address, not the school’s address but, so he assumed, her parents’ house, or was it her dormitory, in Shelby. She signed it simply Celia. He spread the single pink page out and ran his fingers lightly over it. He sniffed the spicy, brassy scent, her scent. His heart pounded. He jumped to his feet and started to run—stopped and sank back into the dry grass. The long-fingered willow leaves rustled and shifted and settled.

I thought so much about our talk . . . ,
he read again, stopped and restarted, forcing himself to read again,
I thought . . .
First she wrote
I
, the side of her hand pressing against the paper. She was thinking of him at that moment.
I thought
—had she paused then and struggled to decide what to say next? What did the letter mean? Did it mean for him to forget about loving her? Maybe not.

He lay back in the grass with the letter pressed to his face and for a few minutes inhaled its smell into his body. Part of her was on the inside of him now, filtering through the pipes and tracks, easing in among the muscle and bone, settling into little culverts and housings, finding shelter, seeping into his being. We leave these little trademarks and gizmos and reliquaries behind us. Little stacks of dust in a corner. That others snuff up and take away. Now I am one of them.

He turned over on his stomach and, propped on his elbows, read the letter again. She had sneaked away, that was a fact. But maybe because she felt too much to speak to him. Yes, she felt something strong. But maybe not. Maybe she was used to boys approaching her, used to giving them rides in her car. We didn’t even go to a beautiful spot, or beautiful enough. And what was an africano girl doing owning her own car? This was Bee-luther-hatchee, not Chicago. Not even Shelby, where they had a college. It was Ginny Gall. Bad things happening over on this side of the universe.

He jumped up, fierce in feeling now, ready to go save her. It was not a boy’s notion, or only a boy’s. The grass surged heavily
under a freshening breeze. He shuddered—like a mule, he thought, old Stubbornness, twitching off flies—and a hooting, wailing thing slid off from him, peeling away into depths inside. It trailed a whole lifetime of griefs behind it like knots pulled tight in greased rope, headed toward a howling. He staggered and had to catch himself to keep from falling. What is this? His body, the inside of it, seemed to have slid down, dropped, concentrated itself in a heap, a muddle. He didn’t want any of this now. Not now, not any time. But here it was. Something sharp as a hawk cried
Run!—run for your life!
But before he could act it threw ropes around him. He was being squeezed to death. In a blur he saw his hand out waving, or falling, in front of him. He could feel his forehead burning.
I’m a crazy person.
She was headed at high speed away from him but she was not diminishing in size. Wadn’t that funny. He paced a circle in the grass, catching switches of it, crumbling the feathery tops. Gradually the influence subsided. Somebody over at the camp hooted. Another let loose a high cackling, hateful laugh. Delvin got up and looked over that way past a broken-down fence and a few thin chokecherry trees. Nothing unusual. Down at the far end of the gully, where it passed under a low railroad trestle, he saw some men waiting. They were figuring to hop the westbound that would still be moving slowly after picking up freight in Eula. He thought of joining them. He loved riding on top of a car in good weather, watching the country pass. But he could catch a train any day.

Ah, jeez—he felt like lying down and not getting up. He wanted to run after her without stopping until he found her. Just to get a look at her. What was it—five days since he met her? Before Tuesday he hadn’t in his whole life had one single thought about her, didn’t expect her, wasn’t looking, and now he’d do anything just to touch her hand again. A breeze charged the thin hair on his arm. He closed his eyes. He was an inch away from her. Then she was gone like a bird flown. He ran his fingers along his arm but they were only his fingers. His eyes stung.

The train, pulled by a scuffed green locomotive, rumbled out of a woody area just east and came smoothly on around the big curve
before the straight run to the trestle. He watched as the men got to their feet and stood brushing off their patched pants, resettling bindles and soogans, jostling or joking or just standing alone looking. They were like passengers at the special open-air station—like fleas, he thought bitterly, returning to the dog. Sometimes the bulls got after you, but lately, so he’d heard, there’d been no real trouble of that kind. It was news you couldn’t count on. The train rolled clacking over the trestle and the men began to find their way onto the gondolas and into open boxcars, climbing ladders or pulling themselves through the doors. Many of the gunnels were already taken. In cities you could board a standing train, but there was sometimes more risk. No hobo names on the weigh bills. He wanted to run along and join the boys.

He took a few steps in that direction, folding the letter as he walked and sliding it into his breast pocket. He was about to start running, but he stopped himself. A bitterness that had risen into his throat subsided. The men were scattered across the cars. Some he knew. A baraby wearing a patched crushhat, Parly from Denver, gave a slow looping wave and made a finger sign of good times. Delvin gave a small cocked wave back. He could still make the train, but he didn’t try.

He wasn’t sure why he stopped himself and maybe he was making a mistake. It was right, when something said go, for you to go. He believed this, or thought he did. He wasn’t sure. Something about the letter, about what had happened in the last two days—he’d come on another sense of things. Small but particular, not a dominion, but an understanding. He couldn’t tell what it was but he knew he wasn’t going to make a sprint for the train. He waved again, a larger wave this time, and made a sign of good luck to the nomads settling into the open doors of the cars. In the west the sky was blue and streaked with long fish-tailed clouds.

As he walked back into town he felt a twice-settled weight in him, the dashed freshness of missing the train and the heavier bundle of this
new loss. But it wasn’t a loss, the second one, this woman or girl who had driven away in the gray sweet-smelling morning in her own car. She wanted him to write her. He wanted to get back to his museum job and regular place in the world and now he did that.

The professor was glad to see him. He put him to wiping with a dry rag the glassine folders they stored the extra photos in. Delvin was happy to do this. He finished and then went out back to the little table and wrote a letter that he walked down to the post office and mailed. In it he told her how happy he was to meet her. He told her he would carry her with him everywhere and neither of them could help it one way or the other, that they were in each other’s life now and don’t worry he welcomed her into his.

He wanted them to put the letter on its way immediately and thought of carrying it himself part of the way. Her home was in the extreme western part of the state, other side from the way the professor said they were headed. They were on their way through the eastern towns and north then to Tennessee and on the professor said to Roanoke where he had people he liked to spend a couple of weeks with in the hottest part of the summer. Delvin was planning to get off in Chattanooga.

Back at the van he sat in the shade under the little orange awning writing another letter. Later a few boys came by, paid their nickels and he took them through the exhibits. They liked the pictures of baseball players. He didn’t show them the murder photographs and it was because he didn’t want them to feel bad. He didn’t want to be part of anybody feeling bad just now. One of the boys said the little painted reed baskets looked like Indian ware. Well, Delvin said, there was cross-marrying among Indian and colored folk, that was a fact. Another boy said he had Indian blood. The others began to joke at him and they made their way out of the van laughing. Delvin stayed inside. He needed to study the photos a while. This was something he did regularly. After supper he sat at the little fold-up table inside the van and studied photographs by the light of the coal oil lamp. The professor was off trying to get a donation from one of the churches. This was one of many such nights.