Ginny Gall (16 page)

You, boy, welcome, he said.

His voice came so quick it caught Delvin before he could swing around. He must have been listening to him come along the trail. Those are some ears, Delvin thought, on an old man.

Did you bring me my candy? the man said.

No suh, Delvin answered.

Well, come on up here anyway and sit awhile.

Delvin came slowly up a sandy walk that was bordered by bricks set on edge and end to end and painted white. A low tea olive hedge was planted around the base of the front porch. The old man smiled as he came up the steps; he had been smiling since Delvin came in
the yard. He half rose from his rocker and stuck out his hand. Delvin didn’t at first know what to do.

Well, the old man said, let’s shake on it.

Delvin bowed his head, took the old man’s hand that under skin so soft it felt like it would pull to pieces was as hard as wood. The man pumped his fingers and let go.

It’s good to get the human touch as often as you can, he said sinking back into his rocker. He sat among plump red cushions looped to the back of his chair. He wore a blue-striped white collarless shirt and a pair of nutbrown heavy cotton trousers. On the crest of the cap were two crossed swords. Delvin knew these caps from the parades in Chattanooga. The old Confederates marched together or were wheeled in their big wooden chairs in the group that grew smaller every year.

I see you’re studying my headpiece, the old man said, though Delvin had only glanced at it. He didn’t say anything. That’s from the independence war, the old man said.

I’ve seen em before.

They getting scarce, aint they?

I was just thinking that.

Where you from?

Atlanta.

Hm. Your accent sounds a touch farther north. Got some mountain in it.

Atlanta’s where I’m from now.

Well, Atlanta. Now there was a fight. Did I introduce myself? Probably not, I usually forget. I’m so happy to get a little company I jump right in. You’ll be lucky to get a word in yourself, young man.

I’m pretty much the quiet type.

Well, that’s too bad. By time I get wound down I like to hear from the other party. I’m Mr. Jobeen Mitchell. He cocked his head to the side. His old flesh slipped on his face as he moved. His nose, long and drawn down to a point at the tip, was waxy and gleamed in the soft light under the sighing pine trees. You been to any extravagant spots lately?

No sir, not lately.

Fletchy up there—you come from the house?

Yassuh, I guess—

Fletchy comes down here to read to me from her fairy books, but I don’t particularly care for them wispy tales. You like em?

I like about anything that’s written down.

Well now that’s a good way to be. Or maybe it aint. It’s a question I ask myself. Is it a man’s duty to let the ramblings go on unchecked, or is it his duty to at some point put a stop to em? That was the question old Ape Lincoln answered with a war against us. The old man knocked against his chin with two fingers, stretched out his jaw. What if he hadn’t won that one?

The Civil War?

That’s what I’m speaking of. War of Secession.

I’d probably still be a slave, Delvin said, thinking, as if I wadn’t one yet. His voice sounded funny to him, clipped, squeezed; maybe that was how they talked in Atlanta.

A slave? the old man said, throwing his head back. Oh, I doubt that. I spect the shame of that arrangement would have gotten under the skin of even these hardskin folks down here. But then, you probably feel like you even now are a slave.

Sometimes I do, Delvin said. Maybe he
was
under a spell, and this codger was some kind of old man witch.

He was still standing. At this point the old man indicated the companion rocker, also a tall chair. I’m sorry, he said, I was so glad to see you I forgot my manners. With nobody around my mouth gets backed up.

Thank you, Delvin said, and sat down.

I was a corporal in the Sixth Alabama Volunteers, the old man said, looking at him with eyes the blue of which had soaked into the white, a fighting regiment that mustered in after First Manassas and mustered out after Appomattox. I lived personally through eleven major battles and a sack full of skirmishes, all before I was twenty-one years old. The war put itself into my mind in such a way that nothing after it has been able to take its place. He looked away. His profile was jagged, bitten looking. Near bout nothing, he said.

Some of these old confederates, so Delvin knew, believed the war was still going on. This man seemed to be one of them. Twenty-one in ’64—that’d make him eighty-six right now.

The old man pushed back in the rocker and as it rocked back seemed about to go out of sight in the violet gloom of dusk, and then as he caught himself on the return seemed about to pitch into Delvin’s lap. Whoa, the old man said. You come from the house up yonder, didn’t you?

Yessir.

Howse Fletchy doing?

Mrs. Beall?

None other.

She appears to be fine. We been putting up tomatoes.

Well, I hope she brings me a jar of them. He looked in a wistful way toward the trail Delvin had come down. I used to live up in that house.

It has a gentle seat, Delvin said, quoting Ivanhoe.

Howse that?

It’s a good-looking place.

Me and my daddy and his daddy were all born in that house. Fletchy was born up there too—not directly in the house, but in a little house down from it. Her folks used to work for my people. Howse she doing by the way?

She’s doing fine. We been reading in her book of fairy stories.

I gave her that book when she was a spring child. A beautiful young girl she was. She had the jumpinest legs. Just springing about everywhere. You ought to have seen her leap a fence. He stared hard at Delvin. You one of J. D.’s kin?

Nawsir, I’m just down visiting.

From Atlanta?

Yessuh.

J. D. comes from over around Anniston. He come over this way following his daddy who was a preacher in one them nigra denominations. You go to church, boy?

Well, I do and I don’t.

You being smart?

Nosir. I work at a funeral home and we are in church quite often. But I myself am not a member of any given organization.

You educated, aint you, boy?

It thrilled Delvin to have the man think that, even if he was spiting him. He said, The man I work for lets me read some of his books.

Careful they don’t smoke up your head. The old man barked out a laugh that sounded like he was cracking pecans. I guess they couldn’t smoke your feet, could they?

Nosuh.

I myself got so interested in life that I never had time for reading. I spose I could have during the winters—like when we was holed up from fighting Useless Grant—but even then I found so much to do in the world I din’t even think of it. And look at me now, he said, running his stiff hard mottled hands down his thighs. Under the age-softened cloth they looked like two-by-fours. He looked again toward the trail. Delvin had the sense that he spent his time looking up that way. The edge of the ligustrum cut off sight; from the porch he could only see the sandy white path itself wandering on past the house into the deeper evergreen woods. The old man had the air of somebody waiting for something. D’I tell you I used to live up at that house?

Yessuh, you did. It’s a fine house.

I gave that house to Fletchy when she married J. D. I gave her this whole farm and much else besides.

Delvin didn’t say anything. The old man appeared to be in the grip of great emotion and Delvin figured anything he said might offend him. Mr. Oliver was very good in these sorts of situations. He brought a peacefulness with him that soothed others. But Delvin was a little jumpy. Yet he too cared about the bereaved folk, and this rickety old white man appeared to be one of the bereaved.

Is there anything I can do for you? he asked.

The old man looked at him with his blue-flooded eyes. Naw, son. Not unless you can make time run backwards. He smiled, revealing a snaggly mouth of isolated yellow teeth. And even then, how could you make it stop at just the right intersection?

They sat quietly for a while. His mind wandered to the cot in the Bealls’s back room that wore little shoe polish tins on its feet, filled with water and a touch of coal oil, just like the beds in their little house with his mama. Keep the bedbugs and the roaches and the ants out of bed with you. When he waked in the morning he smelled smells, little trickly odors, that made him want to cry for the memories they brought with them: creosote, rue, soda biscuits: cottagey smells from the long ago.

The sky still held on to its fading blue, blue almost gone to gray now, but the world around the two of them was turning on to black.

They surprised us naked in the woods, the old man said.

Sir?

Old George Thomas’s boys. We was bathing in a creek off from Chickamauga—it was before the big fighting began—and they came upon us washing ourselves. Must of been at least a dozen of us stark naked when they rushed from the woods. They was trying to capture us. I got away but it was without clothes or any weapon. I walked thirty miles through the night and all the next day before I got back to this farm and I was a naked man the whole way. Once or twice I could have maybe got some clothes off of this or that farmstead home but I didn’t, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the dogs, maybe I was ashamed, maybe I just didn’t care. A fit of some kind. I arrived here in the dawn of September twentieth, 1863, last day of that battle that was the last fight we ever won, and I walked up the back steps of that house up yonder naked as a jaybird and there I found . . .

His voice trailed off.

Yessir?

The old man looked at him out of eyes that continued to hold the limitless attachment irremediable and without effort on his part. He made little squeezy sounds in his throat and then he was silent.

After a while he said, You better go on, boy.

Delvin got up, thanked the old man for his time. The white man waved a rickety arm loosely as if it was waving by designs of its own but he said nothing. Delvin started back up the path. On his way he noticed a wide white sand wagon track behind the house running up
through the darkening woods. This was probably where Mr. Beall came to when he went off in his truck, or maybe it was. These were some unusual living arrangements, Delvin thought, but, by way of the funeral home, he had become privy to unusual arrangements. So often who was whose, or had been, lived on as secrets in the hearts of the living. Women revealed as grandmothers, not mothers, aunts who were mothers, sisters who were mothers, mothers who were nobody at all. Same for fathers on their side. Husbands who had been forgotten or simply never mentioned. Children who had been run off and left and who now claimed the first seat on the mourners’ row and wouldn’t be displaced without a fight. He had seen both men and women—and children—leap into the grave hole, trying to continue the struggle with the dead, right on into eternal life. He had seen furious left-behinds hammer with their fists on the coffin and at least once break through the lid and beat the unresisting face. Some had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the grave, some came wailing, some came limp as the freshly dead. Fistfights broke out at times among the bereaved. Once a pistol had been pulled and with a single shot one of the mourners, a smirking brother, had been sent to join the dead child on his journey. He’d seen a husband arrested at the funeral of his wife. You never knew what might happen as the dirt shoveling moment approached.

Death brings out the real person, Mr. O always said. You can’t hold these commotions against anybody. Some of these folks, he said, some of them have waited a lifetime to let the cat out of the bag. We are helping them to do for themselves what nothing else in their lives could. You see estranged children at last drop their hatred and become loving. Others go right exactly the opposite way. Sometimes you can see how happy a spouse is to be finally free. And you can see the ones who know they will never be free. If I wanted to go into business—or get married, he’d say with a look of false horror on his face—I could make up my mind who not to do it with or who would be the best choice just from how people show themselves during the time of bereavement. But it’s our job to provide a backdrop—a stage for these dramas. Without preference. Their lapses or breakouts are
safe with us. Think of it, he would say, puffing on one of the tightly rolled Cuban cigars he had begun to smoke after supper, some of these folks have never in their lives been able to trust anybody with the secret of who they are, not the loved one or the preacher—not even themselves. But they can trust us. We don’t bring it out—death does that—but we make it so they can feel at home with their fit. Some of the displays, Delvin thought, were so public that those folks would have to trust the hundred or so other folks who watched them squeal and roll on the ground begging Mama or Daddy or sweet Sue not to go, and not just Mr. O and his boys. At least once Delvin had seen a man who had just shouted out in glee at the sight of his dead wife fresh from the embalming room threaten Mr. O with a future pistol shot if he did not keep his mouth shut about his delight. Mr. O, trembling a little and thinly smiling, had promised that no word would escape.

The afternoon had slipped quietly away. The evening star was out in the east, trembling as if it had been struck with a hammer. He stopped at the section of the garden where they’d planted strawberries. The fruit time had passed, but all the berries hadn’t been picked; some had withered on the bushes. On the north side of the garden were a few apple trees. The little striped apples soon would be ready for picking. He felt a strange emptiness. It had come so quickly it was as if he had stepped unnoticed from one body into another. The old white man had spent his life in love with the woman he called Fletchy. That was the story he had not quite told. But now he lived in a little house in a pine wood. And the woman, a colored woman, lived with her husband, a colored man, in the ample farmhouse up the hill. But Delvin did not especially care to think on these things. The world was an odd place. He only wanted to stand in the sandy path, smelling fennel and the light dry smell of the broom grass and feeling what was happening to him. The emptiness; as if everything he depended on was gone. As if it never was. He felt as if he could see a hundred miles. As if the rough pasture that ended in a buff dirt road, and the distant cotton field, and the line of pine trees beyond were not there, or if they were they were really miles and miles away. As if in ordinary calculations the ordinary
miles or so between him and the horizon were filled with hundreds of miles of dirt and trees and bushes and wild hay. No, it wasn’t emptiness he was feeling, that was the wrong word. It was lack. As if who he was had vanished. As if he was simply a floating heedfulness, not hovering or lying in wait but simply present in a space and time that was so full of variety and mixes and complications that the ordinary measures of space wouldn’t fit it. The trees were a mile away and they were a hundred miles away. He lived in an endlessness in which everything was also confined. A sense of quiet unchangeableness was all around him. Nothing was required. As he rested in this state gradually it passed, fading slowly like a long twilight. When he stirred again the ordinary world had regained its normal proportions. No residue of special arrangements or tricks remained. Without his noticing lightning bugs had risen from the grass. They swayed and flickered, holding their yellow-green lights aloft. He wished he had a jar to catch them in. His mother once in the backyard had caught a handful and tried to keep them in a big handkerchief she tied around her head, but the tiny lights faded and it was only dead bugs she shook from the cloth. She had given a half sob and laughed in a peculiar way that he could feel in his belly. Coolmist had stroked her arm and he wanted to say something, but he didn’t; sometimes even around his mother he was shy.