Ginny Gall (22 page)

“I’m sorry about your daddy,” Delvin said.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, looking at him with a softness that Delvin could feel in his body. He wanted to take her in his arms, and would have and walked her away into the mustering dark and kissed her if she let him and would do this even though he knew it was the wrong time and place, but he was a few days or hours from knowing her well enough yet and that stopped him.

“Oh me,” she said, “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

“Can I walk along with you?”

She looked lightly at him, a look like a flutter of lace in a summer window, and said, “I suppose.”

Delvin walked with the two women back to Miss Bawnmoss’s house. There was at first a little light talk from Miss Bawnmoss, but this died quickly and they walked in silence. Down the dirt street three boys played with a ball made of cloth scraps, tossing it high in the air and jostling each other to see who would catch it. On the front steps of a crooked house a little girl combed a small black dog with a hairbrush. A woman in overalls sat on a rough wood porch husking green corn. Smell of pine smoke. Dusk easing along.

A man leading a mule on a piece of cotton plowline passed. He tipped his white straw hat to the women. They both laughed with a gaiety that surprised Delvin. The next moment the two women began to run. Celia looked back at Delvin and waved, her expression a mix of mischief and melancholy. “Come by tomorrow,” she called.

He stood in the street watching them run. “Never saw anything like it,” he whispered, took a breath and whispered the words again, saying them because he had suddenly always wanted to in just this situation.

That night he walked through the half-lit gloom of the quarter to the edge of town. The quarter was separated from lush empty fields by a wide ditch grown up in gallberry scrub. On the other side and about a half mile down, close to the railroad tracks, was a hobo camp. Above him a scattering of stars were as hard and white as quartz chips. He was filled to the brim with thoughts of the young woman Celia. He went down into the little depression where the camp was and sat down by the fire. A few of the hoboes had visited the museum, including two white men who said they had been teachers and were now on the road. Last year the stock market had tumbled like a man falling down a flight of stairs and this year brought new travelers to the roads, but in the South the hobo life and bad times were long established. Dixie hadn’t come back from the Civil War, it had just kept going on the busted-up same. The white folks weren’t about to change and they didn’t let the negro folks change either, or tried to keep them from it. An antique asked if he wanted food but he thanked him and said no. The antique was a rough-looking colored man with a dent in his chin. Delvin accepted a cup of coffee, drunk from a partially crumpled tin cup the man offered him. They sat side by side on a downed chestnut branch with the leaves still on it. These trees were dying off, too, poisoned by blight. They talked about the state of the world and agreed that it was, as ever, going to hell.

After a while Delvin got up and walked around the camp. He thought he recognized a few of the men, but he wasn’t sure. These days he often saw folks he thought he had seem somewhere before.

He walked down the eroded slope into the ditch and sat by the milky waters of the little creek and thought about Celia. Her cheeks had a slant to them that made his heart break like an egg. Her eyes
were fully black, and shiny like something brand-new, and she had looked out of them as if she’d never had a chance to use them before. She had to live with her father being killed by white men. But it didn’t seem she’d been turned to hate. You couldn’t always tell. Had she glimpsed her father’s picture in the museum? They had pictures of drowned men; maybe he was one of them, maybe the ashy-mouthed man, naked but for a torn white shirt, hauled up by three men from the dark waters of a country pond, was him. Or the man snagged on a grappling hook and lifted like a big fish out of the Tamal Canal onto a wooden bridge. Or the half-burned man lying in the reeds west of New Orleans. It seemed like life could suddenly snatch you up and kill you,
this
life could. But the professor said every step we take leads us to our destiny. We never make one false step, he said. Delvin stretched his foot out and flattened it against the hard sand. Next step, he said and brought the foot back. Does that one count? A man squatting in a little clearing on the other side of the creek waved but he wasn’t waving at him. A breeze stumbled around in the gallberry bushes, ruffling the flimsy tops. Back at the camp somebody hooted and another voice broke into a clumsy out-of-tune song and stopped. Celia had slim hands, long fingers that slid along like she was about to poke them into something. Her shoulders were square. He wanted to go on a long walk with her, tell her about his travels, hear what she had to say about her life.

He got up, stepped across the creek, climbed the low bank and headed back to the van.

Over the next few days he spent time with her. Due to his putting together a small concession with the negro primary and elementary schools that brought their classes over to look at the exhibits, the professor wanted anyway to stay over.

“It’s a sure two maybe three dollars a day,” he said.

He planned to head northward, summer coming, the wild magnolia trees already blossoming in the woods.

Celia seemed to like walking with Delvin. They drove to the
country in her car (she was the first africano woman he had met who owned her own car, a small Chevrolet coupe). They had to be mindful of where they went; they didn’t want to upset the white folks by alarming them with a couple of out-of-town africanos in an automobile. You got along if you smiled and said yessir and put on a humble front. But even so, the white folks were sometimes spooked by the appearance of a strange africano person. Her cousin Samuel had been beat up in Shelby, where she was from, because he let his irritation at the dumbness of a white store clerk show through.

They had put a couple of cane fishing poles in the rumbleseat, and when they wanted to walk some they would carry the poles with them. Fishing negroes were a familiar and reassuring sight in this part of the world. Delvin had never fished in his life, except for the comical trip he took to a pond with Mr. Oliver, where they both fell in, but he enjoyed walking along with Celia carrying a pole.

It would be pleasing to catch their dinner, maybe sometime they would do that. But neither had brought bait and they didn’t know how to find any. Worms, Delvin had read, or grasshoppers, were good, but where might they be? It was early in the summer for grasshoppers anyway. Celia was no help and they chided each other in a familiar way that made them tense and happy and they tossed their unbaited lines into this or that murky body of water nonetheless. They had remembered hooks and the bobbers made of bits of cork. They liked best, as today, simply to walk along the side of a stream with the poles on their shoulders, and Celia didn’t seem to mind the water dripping off the wound fishing line onto her blouse; he liked that. They spoke of the lives they lived—the traveling in his case, school in hers—and of the towns they were from and each told the other little almost secret details that thrilled them to say and to hear and their skin tingled and their eyes shone and each more than once felt a sudden joyful weepiness come on that each stalled and then rushed past, scattering details and sudden declamatory claims about life and themselves.

Celia’s stepfather was a doctor—as her father had been—trained in Chicago. (“My favorite town,” Delvin crowed, though he allowed
under questioning that he’d never been there—“but I have read much about it,” he said.) Her family lived in the little town of Shelby in Louisiana just south of the Mississippi line, and also in Chicago. She found the South strange and scary (“Like living in a perilous fairy tale,” she said), but the people, “the africano people down here,” she said, were warmhearted, even if they were nosy and gossipy and often chuckleheaded folk; they gave you the feeling they had found a way to some happiness about themselves that she missed up north.

“Everything there split up?” Delvin wanted to know. “Between the white folks and the colored?”

“You could say yes,” she said, but it wasn’t quite so open. The races could sit together in the picture show or even eat together in some restaurants, but there was a feeling that was always there that you might at any minute be called for trespassing. People didn’t pay attention to colored folk like they did to white; you were overlooked, left out. They didn’t mind if you got a little successful, but they didn’t want you getting too close to them.

“Down here we’re all jumbled up together,” Delvin said. He didn’t know why he said that, but it seemed so as he said it.

“Long as you return to the Land of Darkness,” Celia said and laughed. That was what everybody called the quarter, in most every town.

They had stopped under a big oak that had a peltlike green moss growing on its limbs.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” he said. She was at least two years older than him and he could see she looked on him as a boy or tried to. Long streaks of pale cloud ran east to west. Near one a little double-winged airplane chugged along. Only last year, he thought, he had begun to notice airplanes flying; before last year you never saw them, except maybe at fairs and exhibitions.

“I guess I’ll be a doctor too,” she said, switching the end of her pole against some dusty tickseed plants.

“Can you do that?”

“I don’t know for sure. There are places in the east maybe, but I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound too red-hot about it.”

“I know. I’ve always thought I would be a doctor like my father . . .” She bit her lip. “I used always to say
Father
, but now I say
my
father . . . I just realized that a couple of months ago.”

“It’s natural, idn’t it? My mama ran off when I was little, and I always say my . . .”

Her silence stopped him. She stood looking down at the little brush-tangled creek.

“What does your mother do?” he asked.

“She teaches in the negro women’s college in Shelby, english literature.”

“I knew it. I knew she had a job too. I’d like to meet her.”

Celia’s nose was long and straight, her lips had a thin sculptured rim. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak.

“You were talking about being a doctor.”

“No, I’m not . . .”

“It’s all right. I want to know.”

“I think about going to medical school, but when I do—think about it—it seems as if I’m just marching . . . you know, as if I am following orders.”

“Does your stepfather want you to be a doctor?”

“No, I don’t think . . . well, he never speaks of it. I guess he would like . . . I don’t know . . . it’s some feeling I get that I ought to be doing something important, when I don’t know if I really want to do anything at all.”

She looked at him in a slightly embarrassed way and he could see in her shining black eyes that she thought she’d said too much.

“Nothing’s clear to me,” he said and laughed.

“Well, you’re young.” Saying this her mouth turned down in something like chagrin and she touched his wrist, lightly, a touch he would later recall, little pats not of electrical fire but of restoration.

“It’s not that,” he said. “I mean I know what I want to do, but . . .”

“What’s that?”

“What do I want to do?”

“Yes.”

“I want to write books.”

She didn’t laugh but her face became serious and she turned her head away. A flock of blackbirds streamed westward. They were walking again, passing in and out of shade. The grass where the sun touched it was the color of brass. The earth under the trees gave off a musty smell, smell of mushrooms and the drifting underworld.

“A couple years ago I started keeping a notebook,” he said.

“Do you write stories?”

“Mostly I take notes, write down facts, the names of things. I make a lot of lists.”

“Of what?”

“The names of railroad companies. Flowers. Different kinds of rocks. People’s names, their accents, hometowns, words they use a lot.” It sounded silly as he said it.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye—something wild in there—turned abruptly and said she had to go back. Had she changed—what was it? He wanted to stop her, to kiss her, but he couldn’t believe she’d let him.

“Wait—”

“No. I can’t.”

He reached out his hand—as if it was the last, the only thing he could do—and touched the sleeve of her cotton shirt, but she was already turning away, already walking.

They returned along the path to the car they had parked under the short wooden bridge. Instead of getting in she walked to the creek and stood gazing at it. The water was black and shiny like the skin of fox grapes. He followed and stood beside her. He wanted to take her hand, but she was holding it in a way—clasping her left wrist with her right hand—that made it difficult. Across the creek three buzzards resting in a tall cypress got clumsily up and rowed off. Delvin watched them go, thinking that they were so black and large and ponderous that you wanted them to have some big meaning. He said this to Celia.

“Like something tragic,” she said.

“Like a sign of death or something.”

“Well, they are that.”

“Since they eat dead animals. But you’d think that creatures so striking ought to have an independent meaning.”

“You don’t think they do?”

“No. In the funeral business you hear a lot about remarkable meanings. People talk about premonitions of dying and about what the deceased had to say before he or she passed or how the death means something special was or did or is about to happen.”

“And you don’t believe any of that.”

“I believe dying strikes people really hard, most of them, and sometimes it shakes them loose from what they were holding on to.”

“You’re pretty smart.”

“Well, in some areas I’ve seen a lot.”

“Dying scares me. I don’t like to think about it.”

“I guess it would scare you.”

She gave him a searching look. “They told you all about my father.”