Ginny Gall (28 page)

“I’ll be over in the barn,” he told Josie and started out of the store.

As he exited through the front door he saw a small towheaded man pass—foolishly—behind the tied mules. One of the mules, in a motion quick as a snake, lashed out with his back feet and caught the man in the forehead. The man went down as if he’d been shot. He lay in the dirt street crumpled on his side with his arms stretched out
ahead of him like he was running. But he wasn’t moving. His eyes were open and his eyeballs were red with blood.

The stable boy who had come back outside and a white man who leapt suddenly past Delvin both pulled at the mules. The man struck the offending one, a blocky gray, on the side of the head with his fist. The mule’s knees buckled and he almost went down.

“Goddamn you beast,” the man cried. He then turned and struck the colored boy. The boy skittered away, with the man chasing him for a few steps before he turned and came back.

Delvin was shoved roughly aside by men rushing from the store, but he gathered himself and pegged into the street to look. The downed man, wearing overalls and a gray suit coat, had a fresh red quarter moon mark sunk into his forehead. The mark ran up into his stiff yellow hair. There was no blood and except for his red eyes no other sign of wounding.

“God, Clarence,” someone said over and over, “God, Clarence.” Speaking apparently to the felled man.

Josie, breathing heavily, joined Delvin. With a loud clatter that made people jump, a big wooden barrel containing rakes and shovels by the door was knocked over. The implements spilled onto the sidewalk. A large man stepped on a shovel and stumbled and fell to his knees. “Oh, Jesus,” another man said. Two women in light summer dresses had tears in their eyes as they rushed up. “Help him,” one of them said, like she was ordering schoolchildren, even though people were already bending to the fallen man. The men had pale or red or red and pale mottled faces. The faces of the africano men watching darkened.

“Get back,” a large white man yelled. “Get back, you”—as if everybody was trying to assault the man on the ground.

Somebody spoke from the crowd to the fallen man as if he were only sleeping, telling him to get up. “Get up off the ground, Clarence,” the calm clear male voice said. “Get up now.”

A man in a dark suit knelt beside him. Another man knelt on the downed man’s other side and raised his limp hand and massaged it. Another negro boy led the mules back into the barn. They too had
an agitated look, and one kept stepping sideways. The boy hit the stepping mule with the flat of his hand and the mule dropped its head and came along. Delvin couldn’t see where the first boy had gone. He hoped he was all right.

Police arrived in a car and then the boxy ambulance hauled up just ahead of a dust cloud that rolled over the assembled. A woman began coughing and couldn’t stop; a large man in a checked coat started to pull her down the street but she resisted until he quit and then they stood looking at the ambulance attendants as they bent over the man, who hadn’t moved.

One of the attendants, a slim man wearing a white coat over a gray long-sleeved jersey, carefully straightened the man’s arms and then, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them, folded them over the man’s stomach. The man’s eyes were open and he was looking straight up. It was clear that the fallen man was dead. This fact spread through the crowd. People gasped and somebody—it sounded like a man—began to cry.

The limp body was lifted onto a stretcher, placed in the ambulance and carried away.

Delvin and Josie stayed until the area had begun to clear. Far down the street, under a large sycamore tree, two colored boys stood in the street, pulling a piece of rubber between them as they watched the dispersing crowd. A policeman asked Delvin if he had seen the accident.

“Nawsuh,” he said, “I didn’t. I come out and saw the gentleman on the ground.” He’d known he was dead though, he said.

“How is that?’ the policeman, a man with white-blond hair and a creak in his voice, asked.

“I use to work in a funeral parlor.”

“Around here?”

“Nawsuh. Up in Illinois.”

The policeman asked what his name was and what business he had in Rance City, but before Delvin could give him the name he had used on the work farm—Custis Jones—he was called away.

Delvin knew better than to open his mouth with the authorities.
Whatever you said, there was no telling how they would take it. Why had he done it? What was wrong with him? He was a fugitive for goodness’ sake.

Josie had edged off and disappeared around the corner. Delvin couldn’t pull himself away until long after the dust had settled and the crowd had moved on. The store personnel returned to their tasks. Inside the door the mules stood in dimness at a hitching rail. They were eating out of feedbags. The gray stamped one foot and swished its short black tail. Delvin watched them thinking—he didn’t know what he was thinking.
What did it matter what you did?
That was what he was thinking. The hoofprint a death’s grin on the man’s forehead. Then he too turned back to his life and hurried around the corner and up the rising street toward the courthouse. He didn’t slow down (couldn’t walk
too
fast, might catch the white men’s attention) until he was on the other side of the square where Josie waited.

“Let’s head over to the tracks,” Josie said.

“You change your mind about coming along?”

“I’m stud’n it.”

As they walked through the small colored quarter—shotgun houses painted in flat strong colors (yellow, blue, green) faded to a soft cloudiness—Delvin had the feeling he was being followed. When he turned around to look he couldn’t see anybody suspicious. A boy down the street was turning his dog in a circle with a piece of pork rind. A girl tossed a jacks ball against the low brick wall sunk in the grassy face of a small hill before the Antioch Christian church. A man dusted with his yellow handkerchief the hood ornament of a Pontiac automobile parked in front of the Casual Grocery. People on front porches waited for news of the death that would soon provide an evening’s chinning material. But no sleuths, no lurkers. Still, as they walked he felt as if somebody was on their trail.

“You’re just shook up,” Josie said. “Death’ll do that to any man.”

“I’ve seen death before,” Delvin said, though the sudden sharpness of the mule’s kick and the man falling as he did, straight down with his arms thrown out, had shocked him. He really wanted to go off by himself and think about what he’d seen, let the troubled,
disconnected feelings run through him. Too quick, he had thought. Too impossibly quick. What did it matter what you did? It made him sick to think that.

They crossed the double tracks and walked along them toward a low place that was bridged by a creosoted wooden trestle. On the other side, where the tracks curved in toward a pecan grove, was the town’s small hobo camp. Just before they reached the trestle Delvin said he didn’t want to go down there right then. He wanted to stay in town. He returned along the tracks without Josie who said he’d wait for him at the camp.

On his way he met no one he thought might have been following. But when he reached the quarter and began to walk its dusty gray dirt streets he again sensed that somebody was behind him.

He stopped in the shady yard of a little frame church and sat at a picnic table under a big pollarded magnolia and wrote another letter to Celia. Having an interest in a woman gave a man something to do in unsettled times. He told her about the dead man.

His face
, he wrote,
had a puffed-up, stubborn look, as if he was refusing what had come for him.
Get up and run, Delvin had wanted to yell to him.

He was a short man, slim, maybe hiding a secret flaw or vice he wanted no one to find out about. Maybe he owed money, maybe he had recently hurt somebody he cared for.
Soon he’d be naked in a room he’d never visited, might never have thought of. Washed and cleaned of his last bit of earthly dirt and dust. Mr. Oliver always left just a little place of unwashed skin so the deceased could be recognized, he said, by the dust that awaited him.

This was not true but he wrote it anyway.

He stopped writing. A little boy in blue shorts stared at him from the street. Delvin waved—the boy continued staring at him—and went back to his letter.

I’ve felt for the last hour or so that somebody
’
s following me. It
’
s an odd feeling, but familiar, and that
’
s odd. When I saw the man fall down
—
when I saw he was dead
—
I thought What does it matter what you do?
I hate thinking that. It
’
s
got
to matter. I felt so frustrated. It was like the words were written in the dirt and I wanted to rub them out. But they were in my head. I want to rub them out of there but I can
’
t.
What does it matter?
Aren
’
t we supposed to
. . .

He stopped. No one out in the street looked suspicious; maybe his tracker had ducked into a house or store. Or maybe it was a different kind of follower. What kind was that?

I’m on my way back to Chattanooga,
he wrote.

I think of you off at school. It
’
s hard to picture. Big buildings I guess. I saw a college once
—
on top of a mountain, but it was a blacksmith
’
s college. They had fires in caves. Where was that?
I studied with Mr. Oliver at home. We read all of Shakespeare and many of the classics like Sir Walter Scott and those boys. Fielding and Tobias Smollett, who wrote a very funny book. Englishmen. Except for Othello they didn
’
t have any colored folks over there. Daniel Defoe. He wrote a scary book about the black plague. It had nothing to do with negro folk.

He was rambling, passing time, making up his life. Out in the street a small man with a shiny black head stood looking at him. He was fanning himself with a large yellow straw hat. When he saw Delvin notice him he started toward him. He walked straight up the little two-track church driveway, came up to Delvin and stuck out his hand.

“What’s that?” Delvin said. He shook the man’s small puffy hand.

“My name is Ornelio P. Rome,” the man said in a high, slightly hollow voice with a little stuttery wheeze toward the end (pleasant for all that). His shaved head, the color of the dark shine on a crystal ball, gleamed.

“Did the professor send you?” Delvin asked, suddenly sure that was it.

“Sho nuff he did.”

Mr. Rome put his hat back on. It dwarfed his face and made him
look like a wise child. Delvin just caught himself from laughing. Mr. Rome was wearing a stained and rumpled slightly shiny green linen suit.

Raring back into a squared-off stance, chest thrust forward so his flesh pressed against the buttons of his dirty ruffled sky-blue shirt, with his hands on his hips, the little man in a cracked approximation of the professor’s voice said, “Professor Carmel has this to say to you: ‘Continue on, my boy. Do not be daunted and do not feel as if you have to catch up to me. Life takes us in the direction we are meant to go. We do not know who we may meet, how long we may travel along side by side, or when we may part. If you and I have come to a parting, then fare thee well, my boy, godspeed and thanks for your company.’”

By time he finished the speech, for that is what it was, he was wheezing more heavily and making little
tick tick tick
noises. Mr. Rome had removed his hat during the last bit. He brandished it before him like an offering. Delvin almost took it, but the gesture was preceding a half bow.

“O. P. Rome, Verbatim Messenger, at your service,” he said.

“Verbatim?” Delvin didn’t know whether to laugh or clap.

“Word for word. Word by word. You express in your own personal form what you want to say and I will repeat it to your recipient, verbatim—word for word—so there is no mistake as to your intentions.”

“How about the, uh, what is it—the feeling?”

“Ah, yes—the tone, the timbre, the gusto, or lack thereof. Yes. There, my boy, is where you find the art. Any parrot can be taught a speech. But only a great actor—no, not even an actor—a great
expresser
, let us say, can put across a verbatim line. An actor—you never can be sure if he means what he’s saying. Every line sounds sincere. But with yours truly, it’s clear where the meaning begins and where it leaves off and we return to the ordinary business of living. I take it you were moved by your friend’s . . . enthusiasm?”

“Why, yes, I was,” Delvin said, still wanting to laugh or at least chuckle. “How is the professor?”

“Dauntless, but sad, I would say, moody a little, more weary than
he would like to admit, but valiant still, a great captain of the everlasting road.”

“I’d say I’ve grieved for him, but I’ve been so busy trying to catch up with him that I hadn’t had time to settle down and really pine. How much do you charge for a message?”

“Two dollars for that last.”

“Could you repeat it?”

“Yessir. You get one free repetition. Then the price is a dime.”

“Fine.”

The man repeated the message with the same worldly-wise brio.

“It’s kind of a farewell,” Delvin said.

“I would say it fits into that category.”

“Do you have set messages, or does everybody have to make up his own?”

The man pressed his cheek with the side of his thumb, leaving a faintly gleaming grease mark. “I do have a selection of messages appropriate to the occasion.”

“Could I send one back?”

“You could try. But I might not be able to find the gentleman you are looking for. That is sometimes a problem.”

“If you can’t find him do I get a refund?”

‘Yes, but only half. I have to cover my expenses.”

“Where did you meet the professor?”

“In Cullawee.”

“That in Alabama?”

“Arkansas.”

“Whoa. I’m way behind.”

“Life has swept him along like a leaf before the wind.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s doing fine, but last I saw of him he was in a hurry to be on the road.”