Ginny Gall (31 page)

“I got out of there and on out of town and hid in the big woods on the other side of the brass works. They say that most of the people in Greenwood was rounded up and taken out to camps over toward the old fairgrounds. Put inside wire fences like they was beasts and left there in the hot sun to suffer. The white boys walked around town, they said, just shooting at will.”

He stopped talking and sat quietly, patting the corn dust, leaving with each pat a new print of his palm. Delvin saw in the traces that his two middle fingers were the same length and knew this meant something to fortune-tellers but he couldn’t recall what.

“Damn, damn,” Mr. Rome said softly.

Delvin felt a running smoothness all along his skin, a smoothness that turned to an ache. But he didn’t want to do anything about it. Little worm of despair angling up through his body from a place that hardly existed.
I would do . . .
, he thought, but no, he wouldn’t. A crease in his heart like a gouge in rock. Hot tallow seeping in. Hotter and hotter. Tears in his eyes. Tears running down his face. His eyes burning. It was old and had wandered through him all his life—this feeling now. Lonely and helpless and desperate. He pushed up, rose through creaking knees and an unlimberness like a bent branch and stumbled a tiny bit, just an edge of body striking the man, the locuter Frank, but not enough to remark on, and lurched a step or two out into the open space of the car and stood there looking at the door that was a completed picture of darkness. In the distance, low down, a star like a bit of fluff, winking out.

“Airplanes,” Mr. Rome said, his voice soft and frail. “They dropped firebombs on us. Like we was the enemy.”

“This world is full of murder and craziness,” Frank said.

Delvin headed down the car. He’d had enough of these stories for now. You heard them everywhere, a low people telling tales against the ones who held them down. He felt something fade and tremble in him as he walked toward the white men. Three of them were sitting in the open doorway. He stood near them looking out. The train rolled past fields that were glossed under the light of a bruised half moon, the only light for miles. Except for one lamp burning far out in a house across the cotton fields. Some sharecropper up late tending to a sick child maybe, worrying about his life. If you flew in a plane over this country, Delvin thought, you would be looking down into a world of blackness. Maybe we are going to rise up. But he knew that wouldn’t happen.

Just then, down among the card players, somebody raised a shout. A shout and a sudden cry of outrage. Came sounds of struggle, very brief as if half secret, then a
tunk
and a thin, brittle, cracking sound, followed by a strange meek tiny despairing yelp. Trailed by sounds of whistling, of sighing, of muttering. The humped backs, dark shirts, the white arm raised like somebody signaling, and dust
in the air, drifting like a pale yellow smoke. “Jesus, God,” somebody back there said in a big, rich, disappointed voice as the group bowed outwards and men stumbled to their feet, scooted on their butts backwards, and, flailing, rose halfway into the dark above them, half caterwheeling, jumping, getting out of the space occupied by trouble. Leaving what was left, what could wait on trouble now, what could take its time.

At the center of the new circle a man, loosened from his stays, ordinary otherwise, lay on his back not moving, and another man—a little, twitchy man—raised up on his knees, was held in a slump by three other men. The captured man struggled feebly.

“Look at what you done,” one of the men holding him said.

Delvin wanted to ask what it was though he could see well enough. He needed the confirmation of voices, but these were white men so he said nothing, only leaned closer to the men standing in the doorway.

“Shouldn’t a’cheated I guess,” one said.

“If that wo what it was,” said another, a man with a heavy shock of dark hair.

The cardplayers holding the man—this short and scrawny man now selected, man with a clean, frightened face smooth as a child’s (or somebody very old)—dragwalked him to the door, not even hesitating for those standing there to scramble out of the way, and in a smooth motion that looked almost practiced, threw the little man from the train. He didn’t cry out. His arms flailed as he disappeared into the rushing-by dark, but he made no sound.

The evictors didn’t even look out after the tossed man. They returned to the one lying on the floor, a man who hadn’t moved, bent briefly over him—someone going softly
skeeter bite skeeter bite
all the while—picked him up, carried the middle-sized, regular-looking man, who had a small white bald spot on the shiny dark crown of his head, to the now cleared doorway, and threw him out after the other.

Delvin stood at the side of the doorway looking after the ejected men, but he couldn’t see them. The right of way was grown up in marsh grass and cattails. The moon was westering. To the north tat
ters of clean white cloud looked like the exhaust of machines invisible to the human eye. He shuddered, and felt the shudder traveling through his body. The wispy clouds had been rubbed into the night. Without realizing it he’d sailed out into a country where he was all by himself again; nobody to approach and linger with, waiting out a rain, say, or eating blackberries out of a cap.

Something like that, he thought, half laughing at himself as one of the white men nearby said to another, “Pitch em and catch em, ay buddy,” and the other laughed a small tight laugh like you would in front of somebody you didn’t want to offend, and the other saying, “He just flung out there, didn’t he?” and the first—small, stiff-faced—laughing again the same cramped laugh; and Delvin thought, It hurt him too, that man getting killed.

He wanted to get off the train, wanted to walk by himself down a dirt road back toward that sharecropper light over yonder and knock on the door and ask if he could stay for a while. But what would he find there? Some old snaggle-toothed couple with their raggedy children. Cold grits and well water for supper. Wash your feet in a pan out on the back porch before going to bed. Lie down on the floor and listen to the skeeters whine around your head. Malaria bubbling in your veins.

An ache like a buckled-on harness clutched him. He wanted more than anything to reach his hand out to somebody he loved, just for a minute. It was like a sickness, a feverish radiance. He reckoned that was what was taking him back to Chattanooga after nearly three years away. People who love you, somebody said to him on the roads once, they’ll cover your nakedness. Guess you’d even risk jail to get that, he thought. But maybe not jail after all this time. He told himself this, charming himself, maybe not jail. But white men had long memories. But he was wily. Go on, go on—it was an endless chain. Not minding himself, not even figuring, he swayed in the doorway. He tilted toward the dark, starting to fall. A hand reached out and grabbed him. It was one of the white men, the little one who had mis-laughed.

“Watch yourself, shinola,” the little man said, grinning cooly. Delvin staggered back a step into the car.

“Thank you,” he said.

The little man turned away without acknowledging him further. He felt grateful to him, wanted to say something more, but he couldn’t; world wasn’t like that.

As if in a dream he returned to his small group and, taking just a moment to dust off a place on the cool rattling chestnutwood floor, lay down against the bulkhead. He slipped his notebook from his pocket into his shirt. His chest felt hot and he let his hand rest there. His heart beat into his fingers, same old cadence, nothing extra. I can’t sleep, he thought, and drifted off.

He left the train in Huntsville to wait for the Chattanooga-bound Tweetsy freight. He didn’t have the money to pay Mr. Rome for carrying a message but the little man said it was all right and got off with him. Josie stayed on the train. He was on the way, he said, to Denver, where there was a meeting of an anarchist group he wanted to join up with. “They talk about each man having full say in his life,” he said, “but they are generally as touchy as any others about who’s on top.” He and Delvin embraced and then Delvin and Mr. Rome walked off together with Frank into the night. The northbound freight wouldn’t be leaving until early in the
A.M.
—so they were told by a tall spindle-legged man striding along sheltering a young woman who toted a small guitar wrapped in a piece of checkered cloth. The man reminded Delvin of the professional mourner J. O. Shank back in Chattanooga.

Among thin dust drifts, broken bottles, bent gray grass, and a sprinkling of wild carrot in full white flower, Delvin sat up on an embankment, thinking of faces. They were maps, stories, timetables, confessions. The big celluloid pages in the museum each contained fifty faces, a hundred faces, every one contending with what must be revealed and what must not be, all but a few that had conquered the freakish truths trying to bust out or who had given up and stood back while they careened into view.

He broke off a stalk of carrot and pressed the flat white bracts to
his nose. It smelled sour and slightly bitter. He wanted to get up and walk two miles through wildflowers. Beside him Frank was sleeping. Mr. Rome was catching a westbound freight. He said he would be in Chicago in two days and would find Celia and give her his speech. He had agreed to do it on credit, payable in ten days at the Constitution Funeral Home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Not long after this, but well after the fright had come upon him—the police fright, fright of a murderer returned to the scene of his crime, a murderer who on more than one night had waked from a dream in which he pictured a white form lying still with death in the remorseless shade of big trees, and gotten up from pallet or straw bed and paced, shivering with fright and sadness, a fright and sadness that in the years since had been slowly sloughed off like a dry skin until there were times when he believed he could no longer recognize the accomplice to the lead charge shot into the body of another human being, but who knew in his heart that this was not true, that the crime, swinging shadow to light, back and forth, like a lantern in a deserted house, was not forgotten, or left behind like a broken valise, but was carried by him still, banging and weighty against his own body and soul—after this, a Chattanooga man traveling with a small boy told him that he knew of no crime in the last few years in that town in which an africano had shot a white boy. “That’s one you won’t miss,” he said, and laughed, and his son, a small child with a recessed chin and a wry look, laughed too. “You sure you would know?” Delvin asked. In his wandering time he had run into only two others from Chattanooga and one was too drunk to talk and the other had walked away from him without answering. Mostly he had been too scared to ask about it. He had made a vague partial reference to the professor, who had looked at him with a frank, sad eye and turned away without pressing him. It’s all right to carry a misery, he had said over his shoulder. This man said, “’Cept for this one trip to visit the boy’s grandmama in Birmingham, I been in Chattanooga right along.” A blank screen, cold and vapid, pulled across Delvin’s
eyes and he almost fell down. “You all right?” the man said. Delvin didn’t answer him. “Look like you seen a wild ghost,” the man said. “No,” Delvin said, “not that.” He thanked the man and walked off. Could what the man said be true? A mixed relief and anguish came on him. Wait—he’d have to wait to know for sure. These years, off in the muddy, punishing world. But how could he call them bad years? Mr. Rome had already boarded his freight, bound for Chicago. I got to get to someplace private, Delvin thought. But he couldn’t miss his train. He stepped among the sleeping bodies of the tramps, careful not to lose his footing, and in a little cleared space by a gallberry bush he lay down. He pressed his body up under the bush and found the trunk and gripped the crooked wood with both hands. I am out beyond myself, he thought. Tears hot as dots of acid squeezed from his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you Jesus in heaven and here on the earth. Thank you everything that walks and rides and swims in the sea.” He let go of the trunk and rolled over on his back. Through straggly leaves he could see a few fuzzed stars. His life was a trick played on him in a game he knew nothing about. A feeling that there was a great powerfulness in the world came over him. Maybe what the man said wasn’t true. But he knew it was. He cried without knowing if it was from sorrow or joy.

And here came the train, a clanking, slow-moving freight bound for Norfolk.

Frank, a man with a wide guileless face and a limp that seemed to come and go, called to him.

Yeah, okay.

He sprang to his feet. The sharp push of his youth stirred him, his body quivered with his strength. He bounded down the embankment, caught the door rider and swung himself up into a yellow East Tennessee & Western boxcar.

Spring had flared out, burned brightly and was smothered by summer, its heroic proposals soon cornered and worn down into soft mountain evenings and hot days nobody wanted to be outside in. Soon fall would be cranking up. Already the tulip poplars and the sycamores showing black-speckled leaves, and the tall sumac reddening in the road ditches. He had returned to the Home, but there was another boy in his old place now, living with Mr. Oliver inside the house; Delvin had to take a berth out in the barn. The Ghost was the regular driver now, captain of the big new Cadillac hearse and even the black-paned ambulance they used to pick up the bodies. They had a contract locally to pick up africano corpses at the city morgue and local hospitals. Mr. Oliver spent much of his time lying on a velvet couch out on the newly glassed-in side porch. You could raise the cloudy louvers and let in breeze and on cool days Delvin would find him out there listening to his new prodigy read to him from the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The boy was only ten, but he was smart as a whip and to Delvin’s eyes a hustling little conniver.

Not that Delvin mentioned any of this. The Ghost, who had told him, laughed about it, but he was on Delvin’s side in the matter, if there was a side, as long as Delvin didn’t try to push in on the driving. Conspiring young ’uns wasn’t much to get charged up about. Not compared to what he found out about what had haunted him the last four years. The old trouble—the shooting, the flight, the law—so the Ghost confirmed, had all been a figment on top of a figment. For a while that busted him up good. As he stood out in the street before the Home on his first day back, still dusty from the rails, the Ghost had come up behind him and cried Boo! Delvin had jumped like a
poked dog. The Ghost gave him a big fool’s grin. He’d grown tall, skinny, and had an orange fuzz settled on his face.

“Expected you back sooner’n now,” he said.

“How’s that?” Delvin said.

“That old business.”

“What so?”

“The one bout shooting that white boy?”

“You heard anything?”

“Nothing ’cept there wadn’t no white boy shot.”

Delvin re-experienced a clutching sickness in his gut. “You sure about that?”

“Wadn’t nothing but a wisp.”

“I don’t believe you.”

And he didn’t, wouldn’t, until the Ghost walked him aside, led him into the shade of a a big half-peeled sycamore and there told him what was so: there’d been no trouble anybody’d been looking for him about. No Chattanooga white folks had even mentioned negroes shooting. “They’s probably too ashamed to,” the Ghost said.

Delvin had stretched both hands out and eased himself close against the tree. The bark smelled of tree life. He pressed his face against the smooth skin. The Ghost took a step closer but he didn’t touch him. “We’d uv told you but we didn’t know where to write.”

Delvin felt a loose trailing feeling like the ragged tail on a kite falling across the sky. He’d heard this, stray asides or a word let slip, but he realized none of that had he believed. Now what was so swung on him like a club and got through. It was as if he was hearing it for the first time. Tears welled in his eyes, a few, small, crisp as berries. He waited for them to fall but they didn’t. They made a smear where his fingers touched them. He felt a wobbling in his chest, a raveling. The feeling that had come over him in the train yard—of happiness and relief and anger and dumbfoundedness and a solemn castigation that melted as he felt it into a smooth and easygoing slide, of sorrow mixed with joy—came on him again. Lord, I’ve survived. That boy survived. He wanted to go find him—if there ever was a boy, that one who had shouted—and kiss his face. What luck. And what a sham
faced, goddamn— Agh. The professor. Celia. Celia. What luck. When he turned around from the tree, he was laughing—shaking and laughing and crying and about to fall over; the Ghost had to hold him up by the shoulders.

They would sit out in the yard on sunny days drinking Miss Foster’s Punch and talking about what they’d experienced in the world. The Ghost had taken to wearing big Redtone boots, and he did a stomp around the yard to show Delvin how well they fit. He carried keys on a long yellow chain that he said was gold but wasn’t. He was still an angel turnip, though he lied about this and claimed he had the girls at the Emporium eating out of his hand.

“Those caledonias do anything for a man in a big car,” he said, and they both laughed. It was like they could make up anything they wanted and have it be true.

Delvin, leaning back in the big canvas folding chair, breathed in the smell of pine seeds and sun-baked grass and felt for a moment that he was in heaven. A few feathered clouds with an unchased, slowpoke, summery look seemed like they’d still be there tomorrow. The lilt of the new boy’s sweet voice came from the porch, interrupted now and again by Mr. Oliver’s rich barreltone correcting a pronunciation or offering a remark on some aspect of the latest reading. Like Delvin, the boy—and Mr. Oliver—preferred the parts concerning trips and traveling. Delvin missed his old intimacy with Mr. O, but he was not particularly jealous. To have it again he would have to return to being the boy he once was and he was no longer that boy.

What he was now was shaky and fraught; confused, he thought, about half the time, scared—jumpy, he told Winston, the Ghost—full of excuses and plans . . . and desires, he said, speaking the word softly as if afraid just the word would invoke some bustling overriding particular; itching, he said, thinking as he spoke of his attempts to appear blasé, indolent even, while at the same time—as he thought, and spoke—flexing the muscles in his forearms until the Ghost told him to quit showing off what he didn’t have. He picked
pine seeds out of their little single wings and ate them one at time and listened to the easy spell of the old knights and waited for what was coming.

For a time he wrote Celia every day and for a while he was engrossed in this, this job really, he thought, his work for now, or part of it; he was deeply involved in what he thought of as the proper way of life. He told the Ghost about her, and the Ghost, who fantasized nightly of high-yella women crossing the yard to find him, was rightly appreciative and admiring.

“I spect you want to marry her and open up a business of your own,” he said.

“I might,” Delvin said. The rosiness of possibility swelled in his heart. He had begun to believe again—sense, suspect, guess—that he was being followed. “Somebody’s tailing me,” he said to the Ghost, nervously . . . hopefully.

“Somebody sus-pect you of somethin?” the Ghost said. “Somethin else?”

“No, I don’t feel that way. And besides I hadn’t done anything. Not a thing.”

“People follow me a lot too,” the Ghost said congenially. “I got lots of admirers these days. That’s probably what it is in your case—admirers. These girls, when they get a whiff of your abilities, they come slinking along after yuh.”

“I don’t know if it’s that. Besides, in yo case I heard it was a snort of that old three jacks and a king.”

“I don’t need no potion.” He shook his head. His greased orange hair shone in the low sunlight. “You rob a bank or something? Shoot somebody again?”

Delvin gave him a look. “No. But I did see a man get stabbed.”

“They want you for a witness?”

“It wadn’t like that.”

He told the Ghost about his experience on the freight.

“You think the fall killed him?” the Ghost asked, referring to the living murderer they threw off the train. “Wonder why they didn’t just kill him outright.”

“People don’t want blood on their hands.”

“Even murderer blood? Seems like that would be a badge of honor.”

“They don’t want nothing on their hands.”

Somebody’d tossed a handful of corn dust on a little spill of blood. Delvin’d had a bitter taste in the back of his throat. But after a while it passed. The man who grabbed him at the door and saved him, the little jeff; the man’s hands had shook. Lying makes violence, the professor always said.

The Ghost scratched his freckled cheek. He began a story of dash and devilment, familiar to Delvin before he heard it. Women, shiny-eyed girls, who loved him. “Got one over at the Emporium who wears a gold bracelet I give her.” Out this way he was ready to take on more responsibility, just as soon as Mr. O thought he was ready for it. Actually not when, but right now, if Delvin knew what he meant. He had a sly look under thick orange eyebrows. Something in his face heretofore hidden had worked its way to the surface. Delvin had seen it before with boys their age. Boys who had once been sweet and shy now become rough customers who pushed others around. Mostly it was the cowed ones, the frightened boys who weren’t quick or strong, who stayed gentle, the over-friendly boys who agreed with everything you said. He preferred the older boys—the men really—he’d met on the trains, riders toughened by experience. They scared him but they gave him somebody to follow. And he too pushed and poked and shouted out his readiness to take on the world. He thought of Celia, who had looked at him as a boy who couldn’t be trusted yet. Who didn’t have the power to—to what? He never could be sure. Protect her, he guessed. I can do that, he thought, but then he wasn’t sure, considered himself too rangy-minded, too loose in his ways. He was what she thought he was—a drifter, picking up jobs where he could, a day worker anywhere, in any town—the world’s day worker, he thought—picking peaches, sweeping out the back, raking a yard, filling baskets with sycamore and oak tree leaves. But still he wanted to write things down, in books maybe. He didn’t just have this in mind. He wadn’t no drifter there. He got down hard on
the stories he was jotting down these days, applications of effort and detail, some loose-jointed boy walking by a string of wild grapevine trailing up a fence, talking to a brindle cow on the other side about loneliness, taking the cow’s part, taking it back so he could say how he lived over in the town. Story about a man living in a grass house in a ditch, about a little girl singing to herself as the house next door burned down. He didn’t show these stories to anybody, but some time he would.

He turned on his belly and looked up at the porch where the new boy, Casey, named after the dead burned boy—“My real name is Henry,” he told Delvin, “but Daddy”—speaking of Mr. O—“likes Casey”—read outloud from antique adventures. He had a thin, pleasant voice. Delvin
was
a little jealous of him, but he tried not to let it show. The worry over vengeful pursuit by white boys had faded away, leaving an irresolute calm. Mr. Oliver was afraid his return might stir things up—vague things, stirred in a vague way—but Delvin saw this was as much because he wanted to be settled in with the new boy, some new boy, as anything else. He wouldn’t be able to stay here long, and this saddened him. He only half wanted to move on, though he figured it was time for him to. He sat in the kitchen with Mr. Oliver and Polly—who herself was married now, living with her husband, Curtis Rodell, a plumber’s helper, in a little cottage behind the big house—discussing what he planned to do. Polly wanted him to stay, but Mr. Oliver encouraged him to put his plans into action. He recommended college, but they both knew he was not really a candidate for that. Delvin had told him he wanted to write books and Mr. Oliver had been happy for him. That was just the sort of profession that appealed to him. Get right into it, he said. Don’t delay a minute. Start up and build you a head of steam. Mr. Oliver offered to stake him, to give him an allowance for a year or two while he got going. Delvin was reluctant to agree to this because he wasn’t sure how he wanted to go about things. I have more traveling to do, he said. I want to gather more information. Novels? Mr. O had asked, and Delvin had said he wasn’t even sure about that. He thought he might like to write about real things.

“Thus your travels, eh?” Mr. O said.

“I feel like I’m winding string onto a ball.”

He told them a little of what he had seen. It was, he thought, a rich but narrow vein, and not very deep.

“Deep’s in the heart, son,” Mr. O said. “But you already know that.” He reached across the red-striped oilcloth and patted Delvin on the arm and ran his thumb over the bone. His eyes were lively. Casey sat on a stool at the counter putting together a jigsaw puzzle: the Parthenon—in New York City, he told Delvin when he asked.

Sylvia, the new assistant, had told Delvin that these days Mr. Oliver was using a preparation he got from the doctor to get to sleep and he had other drugstore remedies to perk himself up, but Delvin saw no real sign of the preparations affecting him. There was the same risive look as always (riding like a pretty boat on his sea of sadness), maybe a tad more hectic. The boy Casey had his own room—Delvin’s old room—but he slept mostly in a little box bed in the corner of Mr. Oliver’s bedroom. Oliver kept the boy like somebody’d keep a fluffy little dog. The boy was generally sullen and fretful, but he had a pretty, clear yellow face and shiny hazel eyes that seemed to weigh everything they saw, not always favorably. As they were talking the boy got up without a word, grabbed a cracker from a plate of Graham crackers and honey Mrs. Parker was putting together and scooted out the back door.

“Just like you used to,” Mr. Oliver said, looking nervously out the kitchen window.

Delvin laughed. “Don’t strain yourself there, Pop.”

Mr. Oliver laughed. “I get so attached to you boys.”

“And who wouldn’t,” Delvin said, grinning ferociously.

The old man laughed again, his laugh slightly wheezy, a little hollowed out by time. The world was receding from him, leaving a space that nothing had quite filled in. Life in the end thievery’s fool. It made Delvin sad, gave him a trembling in his heart that he thought about on the pallet, smelling the thin sweetness of the hay in his nostrils, and he wanted to write these things down, or no, thought he should, maybe take some notes, but it was hard to do, hard while the
facts stared him in the face, panting and wheezing. He would have to wait. Some things he could jot down: the patchiness in Mr. O’s face, the smell in the kitchen of roast meat and baking, the wooden counters worn with stains, the petunias in little boxes in the window, Polly reaching back to rub herself low in the back, her hands when she bent them looking like bunched-up brown chicken skin, the faraway look in Mr. O’s eyes, the way his mouth worked sometimes without anything in it.
Sadness creeps
, he wrote. But then they laughed too, told stories, lingered on the porch in the twilight listening on the radio to
The Acousticon Hour
or
King Biscuit Time
, featuring Sonny Boy Williams, nobody wanting to go back in the house, even in the sadness something sweet and alive, life itself rounding out like the moon. They turned the radio off and listened to the horses whinnying in their stalls, to somebody down the street calling for May Ella with something sweet in his voice.