Ginny Gall (36 page)

“God help us,” Mr. Oliver said over and over and sobbed. “
God help us.”
Tears running down his face like water.

In his delirium Delvin cries out these words.
God help us.
But no God does. As the professor said, the gods are gone from the earth.

The malaria is a sickness that even the dead must feel. His head in a vise. A pain like needles coming up out of the backs of his eyes. Even the sweetest smells become the stink of shit. A freeze inside and out, chilling the mettle out of you, clamped so hard you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. You lie under old running claws, and shiver, your bones stabbing hard-frozen flesh until you know your bones will any minute snap. You cry for blankets, for the house to be burned down on top of you, for your body to be thrown into the mouth of a spewing volcano—or would if you could cry out, if you weren’t so frazzled. You’re so cold every whimper’s iced. And then it turns hot again. Fire claims everything. And nothing fits.

At this time he would confess any crime. Any deepest secret or falsity that could be shoveled into the light. But nobody asks. There is nothing he could reveal or explain that matters in the least to any of them. Let the shine rave. The disease ran him over like a pulpwood
truck. His head crushed on the stones. His bones cracked open and hot lead poured into the marrow. Day after day the same, the rank peculiarities, the ugly sporting propositions, the malicious conversations played out interminably in his head until he tries with all his sapped might to give back whatever they want. I have stolen and killed. I have raped and degraded. He confesses himself hoarse or would have if he was actually speaking. Sorting the wind was all it is. A seepage.

Anyway, it is too late for spurious confessions. He is already gaveled.

Slowly the dog moves through him. Out the high screened windows he can see the shadows of live oak leaves shifting in the breeze. He hears the shouts of the men. The world, tapping, hawking and shuffling, returns. He hears voices he recognizes, familiar convict voices explaining or evading or shifting the dices. He hears the rats moving around underneath the floor at night and arguing amongst themselves. Gradually his dreams become less filthy. Less often he hears the sound of horses running down the hard road. Less often he hears the big black scorpions sharpening their claws in the dust.

Finally he is able to get up and shuffle around. First thing he staggers over to Conrad’s bunk and stands looking into the wasted gray face. He feels his heart pour out of his body. And over there Little Buster, twentysome now and the property of Danny Crakes, Little Buster, thirteen years old when they were dragged off the train in Klaudio, a rapist without a hair on his balls. Danny Crakes with his bodyguards Roscoe and Bluebelle stood over Little Buster’s bed weeping noisy tears. “Hey, he aint going to die,” Delvin, in between chills, raised up on his bed and said. He didn’t know whether he was or not but he couldn’t help himself speaking out against those malefactious tears. It was a sign he was getting better. Danny Crakes didn’t even bother to look at him. Bluebelle, huge, with a head like a torpedo, shot him a glance through tear-webbed lashes. He shook an incidental fist. A former africano cotton-bale-lifting champion, he could hardly raise his hands above his head. Crakes, though he was not a Catholic or known to practice any form of religion, licked his finger and made the
sign of the cross on Little Buster’s forehead. He later made his bodyguards memorize a short prayer of his own devising and with him prompting the words he made them recite it in whispery voices to the sleeping boy.

Little Buster had not understood what was happening to the eight KO Boys. He knew they were jerked from the train, but he didn’t know what for and had no idea what was coming. “That is to say,” Delvin had told Gammon, “beyond the common understanding that they are in a country run by white folks for white folks, so nigger get out of the way.” Fire flashed in Gammon’s eyes and subsided. How fast that fire subsided was a gauge you measured the next blow by. Something bad was coming for the colored man caught napping—who didn’t know that? “Tell me what really happened,” Gammon said.

Delvin looks over at the boy, at his narrow forehead with the slightly raised ridge running down it, at the eyes that are black as shoe polish—and helplessly friendly back then when he first saw him on the train sucking on a lemon as he sat on a flatcar—at the soft mouth, still untorn. And now he is a surly galboy with nothing to hold on to except these brutes. They say DC uses these boys and when he is tired of them drowns them with his own hands in the swamp.

And the sick days wobble by, right on to the last one. Sunlight streams through the high windows, painting the old brown walls a rich dark color unlike themselves. Delvin walks all the way to the porch and sits down on a milk crate. Tomorrow they will put him back to work hauling water to the cotton fields. A breeze blows the florid, analgesic smell of the fields to him. The smell of cotton lathered with the smells of the big garden over behind the dining hall and the smell of the chicken house and the croaky smell of the hogs in their pen under the apple trees and the pasture smells of bunchgrass, pigweed and sorrel, and the smell of pine and the drifty, dry sharp smell of corn accented with mule manure and human shit—the mix so pungent he feels sometimes as if he could drown himself in the reek of it as under an ether and sleep the rest of his life away. The smell is stronger now after the sickness. His shoulders ache. And his hands, where he gripped the hardwood sides of his bed, are bent and achy in the joints.

Soldier Murphy comes up beside him and the two of them shift to seats on the plank bench set against the wall and look out into the sunlight strained by screen wire. It is hard to look at the light. Escaper, he is picking his way across the big field and into the swamp where from an old deep pool he would raise the submerged bateau from where it lay on the bottom, weighted with chunks of hoarded limestone quarried from the big white hole over at Talcotville and hauled by mule to build the warden’s house. He left a stash of pea meal, matches and a length of coiled rope wrapped in oilcloth, stowed in a croakersack and buried under a pecan tree. He hoped the raccoons hadn’t dug it up. These provisions like a hunter’s hope in the books of his youth, like the boat now, long gone. But not the hope. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Oliver in Chattanooga Tennessee or Mr. Marcus Garvey in Harlem New York or Mr. Alexander Crumwell in Chicago Illinois or Mr. WEB Du Bois in Princeton New Jersey and ask one or all of them to help us. We are caught here in a net not of our own devising. And signed his name and given his address. That was the message he stuck in a syrup bottle plugged with a cob and threw in the river—stuck in several. No one wrote or came, and the captains won’t let him write common letters. What you doing claiming you can write? Well, sir, I can. He hardly knows what to call these people. It is as if they flew down from space and scooped up africanos and carried them back to this alien planet. He’d had only two or three conversations with a white man in his life before this happened, these space creatures, moon men.

The smell of the fields blows up against the screen and spreads its sweet tonnage over him. Running after something is about as happy as things get in this place. There is always, as Ralph had pointed out, some of that. Even if it is only stew beans and a chunk of hard cornbread. He knew from the first that they were done for. It is like a disease, like polio or a sudden cancer that you don’t know when it is going to catch you but you know it will, like the red dog. One day you wake up with it sitting like a fat ugly dog on your chest. Yet even in the dark of that first night in Klaudio with Little Buster crying and Rollie Gregory moaning from where they had beat him across the backs of his legs with a plowline and some of the others making hurt noises
in their sleep—night (you could tell) in the black room because they had shoved what they thought was supper (cold peas and cornbread) in to them—he felt something crank down in him, some new figuration of time that he sank into, and after the first scarifying moments when he thrashed, fighting the suffocation of it, he relaxed and began to breathe.

It was like breathing air without time in it.

Far off down the dark lanes of that first night in dreams he saw Celia standing in a trashy field, cartons and tin cans and pieces of rusted equipment around her, Celia looking lost. He called to her, but she couldn’t hear him; his voice wasn’t strong enough. He wished with all his might that he hadn’t left her letters on that low wall in Chattanooga. An emptiness then blowing through him, hollowing him. A dustiness and a picture in his mind, a memory really, of furniture and family items strewn around an old house he came on once standing in the middle of a cotton field. The knee-high cotton surrounded the house, running right up to the porch and windows, and the house deserted. He climbed the steps and looked in. Inside everything was still there, the clothes and the filigreed spread on the bed and an upright piano with its face broken in against the wall. All covered with dust. Undisturbed for how long—you couldn’t tell. He didn’t go in, though he saw a basket and a little box like a jewelry box sitting on a dresser that he could use—didn’t because he sensed he was not supposed to disturb the dust. In his chest then too a hollowness. Now he saw his old life drying and flaking away. He had to make himself stop. But when he stopped, the crackling, stinky blackness returned. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips until he saw stars, white stars and flashes of purple light and little quivery yellow dashes. Around him that night in the dark the moaning the crying the calling out as if from eroded patches in black space.

You could say they hadn’t quit on themselves. They were still breathing. It wasn’t because they were strong or brave. Certainly not noble. They would have sold each other out. Carl tried. Rollie tried. But they had nothing to offer. The white man didn’t even need confes
sions. It was as if the method was the only thing that mattered. Get that right. And they had nothing to do with that. They hadn’t quit because there wadn’t any way to and there wadn’t anything to quit in a universe of endless effort. No quit, boys. Unless you just slacked down until you died. But even that wadn’t allowed. Carl—after he tried the other—had tried that, tried rolling up against the wall and not moving, not eating, not drinking, but with a work-gloved hand they slapped him in the face until he changed his mind. Come on back to us, boy. Then they slapped him because of the trouble he’d caused them.

And here I sit, he thinks, feeling the hard board infirmary porch seat against the bottom of his spine, resting before a journey. He laughs a little and looks across the yard at Milo Macraw, his young boy, the one who sleeps beside him at night, and a tenderness enters him, surprising him as it does sometimes, making him stop, say, under the big sycamore with half its limbs lightning-shrunk, and look up into the living branches in a kind of wonderment. Milo wants to go with him all the time. After the last escape they put him, put Delvin, in the Bake House, threw him in among the ants and ground wasps and the doodlebugs and hoppergrasses and the big black scorpions clacking their swords. He lay among them thinking of the creatures that lived so close to the earth they felt the vibration of every step and smelled every smell and sensed in the cold or heat seeping into the grains of sand what was coming and going in this world, like they had to know, like this knowledge was so important to them that, like the professor said, they had evolved—evoluted he’d called it before he met the professor—until they were able to crouch so low to the ground they missed nothing. And he wondered: What do they need all this information for? Were they waiting for some hint of something? The coming of some Bug Redeemer?

He lay among them flat on the earth studying what it was like in the bug universe, and he was lying there when the big cottonmouth slid over his belly and curled up on his chest. Its tongue flicked his chin and then it flicked his lips, and then it flicked his eyes he’d squeezed shut
and he could feel the snake’s cold breath and he knew it was drinking from the little balls of sweat at the corners. With its tiny delicate tongue it licked his ears clean and his nose and the corners of his eyes and his lips, and he could feel the snake’s heart beating like the covered drum of a distant tribe, speaking in the dark of the world of light. He could smell the odor of the snake like the smell of garbage and he lay still in the dark with the weight of the snake on him because the smell told him the snake was afraid. It was hard to breathe and he thought well I am being suffocated by a damn poison snake and then he felt the snake’s breath in his mouth, the slow, you couldn’t call it pulsation, but a slithering of expelled breath from the snake’s broad nostrils making a regular susurration coming into his own mouth.

For how many days he couldn’t be sure he lived with the snake lying upon his body. Sometimes it left him but soon enough it returned. During the periods of its absence he found no need to get up and piss or shit or even to teethe the hard cornbread or take a sip of water. Once they opened the door to look in on him, but seeing the big olive-colored, cross-hatched snake coiled on his chest the guard, a small muscular man named William Burden, cried out “Help me, Jesus!” and slammed the door shut, leaving him from then on undisturbed. He heard the LT say to let him go until they smelled him begin to rot. But he didn’t rot.

He drifted on a sea of time. And one day the snake slipped away and didn’t return, but Delvin didn’t notice.

When they came eventually for his body he was asleep on the floor, alone except for the bugs, and on that Sunday afternoon in October he was dreaming of riding up front in the professor’s van through the north Mississippi countryside where the leaves of hickory trees lay like yellow footprints on the red clay road and somewhere up ahead, but not yet, the Fall of Man was walking back into history. The sky was coral blue and the clouds were outlined in black ink that made them stand out.