Ginny Gall (33 page)

Tomorrow he would be back on the rails. Mr. Oliver had asked where he was off to this time. Delvin had told him about Celia. “Good, good,” Mr. Oliver had said, grinning broadly, “it’ll probably help take your mind off rounding up ladies for yours truly,” and they both had laughed. Delvin had talked a little about how painful the situation was. “What matters to us always makes us a little nervous and spooky when we draw up to it,” the funeral director said. “Look at me. I still live above my shop, like some old grocer off in the big city. I keep thinking I am about to move on to something that will be better, but when I think I am getting there . . . I get shaky.”

Delvin hadn’t known exactly what he was talking about, or maybe he did. In his eyes the real mournfulness under the professional one. Off to the side most folks had a little sparkle, most folks he knew. Some little graced and heroic frolic. But not Mr. O. He had never criticized Delvin for getting into trouble with the white boys (or the no-trouble). But he knew without being told that he had been the heir apparent and was no longer. This hurt him and at the same time he felt relieved to be free. He had never wanted to run a funeral home. Now there was little Casey. Twelve years old—not ten as he’d thought—and quiet-minded, an able boy who liked to do what he was told, seemed to get satisfaction out of it. The boy already smelled faintly of formaldehyde (always the smell around here, even in the kitchen where Mrs. Parker kept some in a mix for cleaning—except on Mr. Oliver, who was obsessive about cleanliness and well-perfumed—except on him, who had bathed readily out in the stable, washing at the pump).

He smiled, nodding in the old way, got up and asked if there was anything he could get his benefactor.

“The sight of you is enough,” Oliver said. The old man—he was not so old, but there was a look in his eyes now, something abashed and wavering. He raised his hand and his hand, wide and furrowed down the back, trembled. They both saw this and Delvin wanted to take the hand and kiss it, press it hard to his heart, but he didn’t, he pretended he didn’t see the tremor, didn’t see the vexed look in Oliver’s eyes, only squeezed the hand, softly, like a promise, instead of with the jocosely competitive pressure they had used since he was a little boy. He didn’t want to hurt him and he didn’t want to let go. From somewhere off in the dark an owl called. The call was followed by the hesitant, falling cry of a widow bird, answering, or commenting, it wasn’t clear.

In the late dark of early morning Delvin slipped out the back door. He walked through the quiet streets to the rail yards. The westbound freight was finishing its assembly. A long string of red and yellow boxcars, flatcars and a hook of four black gondolas, all with their big bellies empty, clanked as they were coupled to the big red freight engine. Southern Railroad, Piedmont portion: Bitter Biscuit Line, the breezers called it. Delvin watched from the long grassy hillside above Wainwright Avenue. Two men, one short, the other tall, in striped overalls, carried small suitcases to the dull red caboose and climbed the three steps to the back porch. He wished he was riding in the caboose. From the cupola the brakemen were supposed to watch for jumpers, but they didn’t always do anything if they spotted them. Yard bulls were always a problem, but they too were off somewhere else this morning. A few dozen stampers sat around in the greasy yellow grass waiting for time to board. It was a wonder hawkers didn’t work the crowd. In a way they did. There was Little Simp, a middle-aged hoop chiseler from Georgia, offering tiny handmade dolls for sale. He made them out of gunnysacks stuffed with cotton and colored-in their faces with paints he made himself. There were women in the crowd too, bo-ettes, burlap sisters, zooks, shanty queens, blisters and hay bags they were called by the hobo crowd, janes looking for lost husbands or lovers, mop marys and buzzers. A little boy sold strips of sugar cane. Other men sold whatever anyone wanted to buy, personwise. Most of the shifters it looked like this trip were young, white and colored, boys mostly, looking for work—he overheard a young white boy talking about a big box factory opening in Memphis—and the rest members of the increasing crowd of the out-of-work, troubled or desperate or worn out or knocked to their
knees, or slaphappy tourists, workers or lazers or bindlestiffs and beefers, dousers and cons, boys eager to make a start, posseshes joyriding into their cranky destinies. He had written about these travelers in his notebook. Truth was, you could find just about anybody on the road these days.

The morning came up sunny, with only a few shredded clouds in the south. They weren’t high enough in the mountains to miss the humidity. It lay like a film of grease on everybody’s skin. In his notebook he had written
sun plowing the night under . . . day touching itself everywhere. . . .
Were they his words, or had he copied them from somewhere? Tapping at the page, he couldn’t remember now. He looked around for familiars. Maybe one would show. He recognized a boy from over on the west side, Calvin Binger, and he waved to him. Calvin gave him a slow sweep of wave back, which was his style. They both kept their seat. A man standing in the grass scratching his thigh through new blue jeans looked familiar, but not from here. He looked like a yegg he’d run across, or no, somebody, maybe it was the line foreman Trobilly had pointed out to him in Baton Rouge. They had been eating coon meat sandwiches, a first for Delvin, over near the closed-down rendering plant in the Larusse district near where Molly Picone got killed that time in November when the weather turned foul and her hincty boyfriend turned foul with it. That had been a rough time for everybody. They had tried to pull her out of the rot-choked slough she’d been thrown into—coax her out—but she was more scared of her boyfriend than she was of drowning and wouldn’t come. She was wearing a long yellow dress like a wool nightgown and the dress spread out all around her and as she went under she was singing the Bessie Smith song “One More Good Time with You.” They had stood on the bank crying like babies. That was where that man he was looking at now, hunched up under a peaked gray cap, had been pointed out to him—not the first such a one—as somebody to stay away from. They were the ones you wanted to avoid on these trips. Wolves and high jackets and crazy men, desocialized tramps of evil intent and slimy ways, the rail fighters, croakers who traveled the circuit looking for somebody to whale
away on, beat to death and then stomp on the corpse. Few were like that, but there were always those good sense and kindness had never reached. It wasn’t always easy to tell, not at first anyway, not until you got a feel for it.

Delvin took out his volume of Du Bois essays and began to read. Du Bois was writing about the threads that bound a people together. Delvin stopped. He was thinking about skin color. The photographs in the professor’s museum. Black-and-white photos sure, the mix like out here, but not like out here because here the colors didn’t mix, or if they did you were still only the one color, no matter how you fractionalized it; if there was any negro in you, you were negro only. Just a drop would do. Like we were tainted, he thought. But him, Delvin the Dark, he loved the rich deep colors best. His own face was among the blackest. But even among africano folks the light-skinned got the biggest portion. They were treated with more respect. As a tiny child he had sometimes been laughed at, called a dewbaby.

He shivered, and a thin string of anger pulled tight in him. Then the soft drop into gloom. These passed. He liked being dark-skinned. Some of the faces in the photos—he could see all the way back to the African beginnings. It stirred his body strangely to find himself peering through time at faces that carried in them a million years of life and history. As he looked he could feel the wind slipping up a river, turning little dust devils on the dry bank. He could smell the rank stink of a sun-rotted pelt. The people in these faces—what had they been doing out there?

Then he was thinking of Celia. Oh, he shouldn’t have left the letters. Maybe he had misread them; he was capable of it. Mr. Rome had not shown up as promised in Chattanooga. He had looked out for him every day, but the reciter had not appeared. Maybe he hadn’t reached Chicago, where he was to deliver his message to Celia. In the train yard he had asked about him, but no one coming in had seen him. He didn’t know what had happened. He’d written Celia about him coming, but in her return she said the little man had not appeared. He’d asked her to write him in Memphis, general delivery. That was where he was going too, before—maybe—he headed out
west. But what was there now in Memphis? His insides clutched. He was a fool. He thought of her dark african face. Even close to her he was looking into time. He wanted to run his fingers over her face, like a blind man, a man who saw the world as black. Maybe he could go find those letters again. Maybe they were still there.

The jacks began to get to their feet. The train was under way. Like grasshoppers the wind shakes from the grain, the hoboes and drifters, the shufflers and stiffs and ex–plow jockeys, ramblers, tramps, and scenery bums moved down through the slick grass to the cinderbeds and crossed the six sets of tracks to the train clanking into motion. They climbed aboard, scurrying to the top or the bottom, into open doors and onto gondolas and flatcars, swung up into the shelter of the two empty boxcars. Delvin hesitated. He felt he was leaving half his heart. Then he ran for the train and climbed up onto a gondola. The last of the travelers boarded. Behind them the breeze shifted and slipped delicately over the trampled grass.

Clanking, screeching, squealing, shuddering, the big train made its way through the yard and out onto the road that passed through the rough western sections of the city, past the warehouses where Delvin once liked to walk inside of with his friend Archie Consadine along the rows of high-stacked cotton bales. Big barrels of water had grease scum on the surfaces of the water to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in them. And past the cotton mills, three of them in a row, painted green originally but now gray with lint. Lint swagged from electrical wires and outlined roof shingles and collected in the eaves of the little shotgun cabins workers lived in and blew along the unpaved streets and every day wisped into the lungs of the workers. And past the rendering plant with its vats of copper-colored solution and its piled white bones waiting to be ground into fertilizer. And past the big pine grove off Dunkins street where little Rozie Coverdale was murdered by two white boys who were caught with Rozie’s mother’s pearl necklace in the pocket of one of them, a necklace never returned, so the story went, to the family. The white boy and his family claimed the necklace was theirs—they were only retrieving it—and the Coverdales could not prove to the satisfaction of
the jury that they were lying. Rozie’s mother died without knowing what had really happened, but, so they said, she didn’t really want to know what had gone on in those woods that were still used for trysts and mushroom-picking expeditions.

And past the Ombley pasture where Delvin had once played football with boys who attended Fisk University and after the game gave him his first taste of bonded whiskey, a taste he had spit out onto the rocky ground behind the Buck & Buck barbecue restaurant over on Caprice street. And past cramped unpainted houses where the lives of crackers were lived out in pale concordance, and past them and across the spur to Lucasville, where negro folks in similar shotgun cabins with their tiny front porches sporting a rocking chair and maybe a swing and tomatoes growing in No. 10 cans and string nets tacked on one side for trellising confederate jasmine or morning glories, both still blossoming in early autumn, lived their similar money-fretted lives. And past the primitive Baptist church—white cube with ice-cream-cone steeple—manifested by hardshell believers who refused to accept the injunction to send missionaries around the world spreading the gospel, playing it close to the vest with the Good Book. And past the livestock sale barn, an airy structure built of native pine and tin roofing, now derelict after a sustained outbreak of pinkeye and slop foot, along with the shift in agricultural focus away from the rocky farms of the mountain and sandhill country south and westward. And past Angelo’s, a combination grocery, Italian restaurant and speakeasy where patrons (white only) interested in red-sauced dinners (with Chianti wine) sat around card tables set among the shelves packed with Idea Starch, Calgon, 20 Mule Team Borax, Ajax, sacks of Water Maid rice, stacks of hard lye soap and shoe polish tins, exchanging vernacular quips with Angelo Depesto, immigrant soul from Pesaro on the Adriatic sea, Coloreds served out of a window in back.

And past Wilbur Homewood’s deserted pastures, sold two years ago to the Fox and Hound Hunt Club and left to their natural ways of steeplebush, clover, dusty miller, ironweed, meadow rue, Joe Pye weed and bunchgrass by members who on Saturdays in spring and
fall chased foxes on jumpers and farm nags across the rocky ground, a practice they would abandon a few years from then after the last diehard admitted that the granite shelves and schist outcrops of the southern Appalachians were inhospitable to this kind of sport.

Past dumps of generalized refuse and small boys walking along dreaming of adventure and freedom from father’s strap.

Past young girls standing at roller washing machines or pushing corncobs on washer boards or lifting soaked overalls out of No. 2 washtubs.

Past wives walking barefoot out of cornfields just streaked with fall’s first yellow and old men propping barn doors open and farmers slapping at flies and orchard workers studying rolled-over Beauchamp pamphlets they hoped would teach them to use the english language for their social and economic betterment.

Past the Mt. Moriah cemetery where colored folk were buried under wire and worked-iron tombstones and stone tombstones that had been dug out of some mountainside and under tombstones made of clay pots and some made of wood. Among the graves a group of little colored boys moved about challenging the dead and the spirits of the dead and challenging the whole of life to come and the whole of life never coming again. One of them as the train began to pick up speed threw up a hand and waved, and Delvin, looking up from his notebook, waved back.

And onward, loose finally from the bindery and compaction of cities into the nondescript woodlands and raw weather-gouged fields and clay-streaked grassy pastures of that part of the country.

All these forms and folks and structures Delvin noticed, and some he wrote down in his notebook, the latest version, that was worn by now with sweat and wrung by his hands and bent back, its pages covered in his close and tight handwriting, filled with little stories of birds killed by freeze and sunshine stealing all the color from the grain fields and some woman busting some man outside a bar with her fists and all manner of names and lists of railroad companies and flowers and hymns from the Concord hymnbook used in Methodist churches and kinds of shoes and dances and equipment and
road terminology and plow parts and military ranks and characters in Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott and perfumes and state capitols and freshwater fishes; and much pertaining to Celia including long sweaty passages keeping her informed of his troubling incapacities and failures of heart and his sense of lostness in the world and of the dawns when he woke terrified and shaking, passages never copied into his letters; and the names of friends and brief sections concerning their doings; and sections pertaining to his childhood, of the shanty floor smelling of coconut oil and of the songs his mother sung and of Coolmist leaning down to give him a kiss and of Spokes his little ragheaded doll and of Ri-Rusty his fluffy old dog and of banana pie and of skeeting in rainwater puddles in the street and of the lure of alleys and dead ends and of his mother fleeing into the wilderness wearing an organdy silk dress and of his brothers and sister singing along with Old Shaky Sims and his Talking Guitar and of the foundling home (
lostling home
, he wrote) where he learned to love potatoes and flute music and keened for freedom; and of the funeral parlor where when he was seven George held him up over the prep table to stare at the sunken, dented body and filmed-over eyes of Mr. Harvell Burns, former principal of Tucker Elementary school, allowing him to confront for the first time the obstinate bulkage of the dead, and Mr. Oliver waltzing to Mozart; and back-alley life that smelled at this time of year of crabapples crushed underfoot and dead bees and fired clay and spillings of crankcase oil; and of the terrible battles that took place among boys on this ground; and of the smell of summer mornings in the kitchen garden among squash flowers and staked bean rows and of all the distilled and perfumey odors of high summer; of the time Luther Burdle caught Smuckie Sparks in the ear with the old wooden golf club he’d found in the trash out at the Congress Country Club, cutting Smuckie’s ear in half and spraying blood onto Hollie Jo Davis’s white confirmation dress; and on and such and through the dribbles and castings and shucks of his life up to this moment as he sat under the overhang of a Tweety gondola headed west carrying a half load of sand (he’d thought the car was empty).