Ginny Gall (41 page)

He put his hands under the table because they had started to shake. He tried with all his will to make them stop, but they kept trembling. His flesh seemed to have come loose from his skin. The thought made him wince so he looked as if he was hearing the unpalatable truth, which the jury noticed. He was so vexed it was all he could do not to leap up and run. He was going to run. If he wasn’t in too many pieces and he found a way. Big hollows inside his body, gaps, cut-through places, like in the hills where one hill fell off and another hadn’t hardly got started. And always these days a chill wind circulating, dipping icy fingers into troughs and low, damp spots. Sometimes he was as still as a thing that had never lived. Sometimes he trembled like a bent motor. Sometimes frozen, sometimes hot as a steam iron. The boys had begun to look to him to speak for them but he didn’t think he could. He could talk, and he could understand what the lawyers were saying, but he could hardly keep from busting into tears—from running. He was
going
to run.

Mr. Pullen had laid out the case, and though he said it was clear as day that the men hadn’t committed the crime, Delvin couldn’t see one good thing about what was coming. Even Little Buster, a child who didn’t know how to read and had to count on his fingers, saw that the joke was on the africano boys. “Might as well get to training for jail,” he’d said. “That is if they don’t light us up.” “We in that training now, fool,” Carl Crawford told him. But two of the boys were so ignorant they hardly realized they were in jail.

In his bed at night Delvin lay on his belly pushing his face into the cotton pallet, coughing up tears until his stomach cramped.
My everyday path a road of fire.
He jammed his fist into his mouth and bit down so hard the pain made him shiver and cry out. “That you, Delvin?” Bonette Collins called out. Delvin didn’t answer, but then when he saw in the dark that Bonette was getting out of his bunk he told him to stay where he was. “I’s all right,” he said. He tried not to let them see him crying, but they could each see the dismals in the others’ faces, the torment. They looked like their best friend had died. Or more, as if something promised—so ordinary and inevitable and such a sure thing they didn’t have to give it a thought—had suddenly been taken away. Something—slide of blood in the veins, the world’s itinerant sweetness—that you didn’t even know could be taken away, something you hardly even knew you had.
But, gone
. . . you were broken and scattered. The white folks made you feel small, sure. They made you feel you were wrong to be . . . yeah,
to be.
But this that was snatched away now was none of that. This was something else. “It’s like we was walking along,” Coover Broadfoot said, “and a mule fell out of the sky and hit us.” “I know which mule it was, too,” Bonette Collins said and the others laughed; they all knew. When you thought about what was happening—what was going to happen—you got so scared you couldn’t think straight.

This is grief, Delvin thought. We’re in mourning.

He wrote some of this down in the little notebook Gammon had told the jailer he needed for the case—not really a notebook but one somebody’d torn crossways in half; enough to write on. It had a mud stain on it and the pages were hooped where they’d gotten wet and dried out.
You want to run right through the walls. Sometimes you can hardly draw breath; sometimes you can’t get any air in your breath. Carl said he thought he was drowning. We all think we are drowning. But we aren’t drowning and we have to breathe and we can’t . . .
He tried to stick to what was going on right this minute.
I am chewing a piece of hard yellow cornbread,
he wrote,
one chew, two, three . . . my fingernails are turning brown . . .
and on he went, but
his mind wouldn’t stay on bread chewing or his nails—or walking up and down or staring at the tin-sheathed wall where a window ought to be.

The town was full of spectators. Sports and the bedeviled, thrillseekers, the estranged and crippled, common people, farmers drifted in on market days, old men riding in weathered wagons and children walking along beside, women in poke bonnets carrying tied-up packages by the string, aficionados of death row, reporters, profiteers, the falsely cunning and bereft. Some few of the africano women tried to bring them gifts. Food in wicker hampers or stacked in plates tied with a cotton cloth. Men wanted to look at them and the deputies brought a few of them back to the cell, white men, most of whom tried to look casual or tough—or maybe they
were
tough—leaning against one of the stone posts thumbing their galluses and leering. Some were calm, others stiff. Some had been walking around for weeks with a numbness on their skin, with a burning in closed places, with a sorrow so old and ugly they took a doctor’s pills to make it subside and stood on the back porch tossing bits of skillet bread to the dog or waked after midnight and went out in the dewy grass and called a name they hadn’t spoken since they were youngsters, parents of children who shuddered at their prayers and were losing weight and husbands of women who locked themselves in their rooms and sat on the bed fiddling with their rings—they had come here to see the living dead. More than one with his face like it was shellacked. Most sweating, some angry, some laughing. Most able to go on with their lives, even the man on a crutch the varnish was worn off of, or the fat man in a striped shirt eating a tamale from a piece of waxed paper. The fat man wiped his mouth with his bare wrist, leaving a streak of red juice on his cheek. A bouncy little man couldn’t stop grinning. A preacher dwelt in pentecostal gloom. Most—even those troubled in their spirit—were appreciative, relieved of the burden of chasing down these miscreants, of handling their black flesh or staring into
their eyes in the last moments of their freedom, of being the ones sweating and running to catch up; they enjoyed now the blood surge that grew in strength as they walked the crooked jailhouse corridors toward the cell. Some experienced this episode as nothing more than a rectifying revenge—and Delvin thought,
That is what it is: revenge by murder
, and he had turned away and gotten sick in the slop bucket. They don’t know me, he thought. And behind him, outside the bars, hearts ticking, breath entering lungs and blood circulating through bodies, deep into the indwellings of the brain, clattering and banging out the news:
Not me, not this time—not me.

Carl’s mother had come and Bonette’s and Little Buster’s, but they weren’t allowed back to the cell. The prisoners could hear people calling to them from the street. At night the voices were clear even in the heavy air. Men saying,
We going to hang yu, jigs.
We gon get yu tucked into hell. Gon slip up there and cut yu up. Burn yu.
Women called too.
Ha ha,
they said,
ha ha ha.
A deputy would have to go out and tell them to be quiet.
You run back in, Horton, and play with yo coons
, somebody yelled and the crowd laughed. They were marginal folk, long dispossessed of love for themselves, mostly. Cunning but not smart. They wrapped themselves in the ragged tails of night. Somebody broke into song. Crooked hymn singing. From a hymnal nobody in the cell had ever read. The voices quoted scriptures of damnation and pestilence. None with green pastures in them. None with still waters. New scriptures, hot off the presses.
Lo, from this place you will exit burning. Oh ye of the jig rind crisping. Yo body become ashes cast on the wind. Where you will dwell forever.

He paced the cell back and forth until he was tired or one of the other boys told him to please, dammit, quit. Or somebody with a problem, some ordinary problem, some ailment or fabrication, some Bonette with a blister where he’d rubbed his thumb against his bunk or Carl with a knee that hurt or Butter whose throat always ached from all the crying in his sleep, took his attention. Delvin would dip the tail of his shirt in the water bucket and press it against the
back of Buster’s neck while the slim boy clutched his hand. He could feel Buster’s pulse through the cloth. “I’m about to buster out of my skin,” Buster said, and laughed at his only joke. Delvin sat up with Carl, who liked to pray. With Rollie, who lied about everything. Rollie’s long, up-curled lip made him look like he was about to say something important, but he never did. He had the training for these ministrations and he knew they would help ease his own panic. He was the one called most often to confer with the lawyers, especially by Gammon, the young man from down the road in Tuxer. Gammon seemed not so scared of him. In the courtroom at the two tables pushed together in an L shape Gammon sat beside him and often scratched notes to him on the large pale brown sheets he carried into the courtroom.
It’s going to be all right,
he wrote; foolishly, Delvin thought.
Things are going to work out.
No, they aint,
Delvin had written back.
Things have already been busted to pieces. Beyond fixing.
That was the point, wadn’t it? But the words, written down, scared him. When Gammon scribbled his note on the same slip of paper and passed it to him, Delvin scratched his own words out.

It was from the Klaudio courthouse that he tried his first escape. During a recess in which the prisoners were taken out of the courtroom to an unoccupied office belonging to the state farm agency in the company of the lawyers and a burly jailer who spit tobacco juice into a white ceramic mug he carried everywhere, Delvin made his first jump. They were on the third floor and looked out of three tall windows cracked to let a little air into the room. They had taken the chains and shackles off because the accused were supposed to be sufficiently cowed. Gammon was talking to him about his love of football when the bailiff stepped out to get a fresh chaw of tobacco. Brown’s Mule. He hadn’t thought about escaping, or not in the way he was used to thinking. A pressure—was that it?—had built up. Something, a scraping in him, low distant rasping he hardly noticed, and this worrisome discomposing in his body—this jumpiness: they had built up. Azalea bushes planted around the courthouse were not
in bloom, but they were thick with gray-green leaves. Which meant the ground underneath them after these late rains would probably be soggy.

This was the sixth time they’d been in the room. This was the first time the bailiff had stepped out.

He was ready, but still, after the door closed behind the bailiff, he hesitated. Maybe the man was coming right back. Maybe the punishment for trying to escape was too severe. Maybe they would beat him. Maybe the lawyers, these rectifying white men, would desert him. Maybe he would be hurt in the fall.

Carl Crawford, carrying a strange formal quality, his face pimply with ingrown hairs, leaned toward Rollie Gregory, twirling his long fingers; Rollie laughed his crackly, misbelieving laugh. Little Buster Wayfield stared at the ceiling, moving his mouth like he was talking. Gammon was just telling him about Jim Thorpe, an Indian hero, an athlete, a performer for white men, who had been humiliated on a football field down in Florida a few years back by Red Grange and his team of NFL brutes, white men still paying the Indians back for Custer.

Then,
click
: he simply moved. A dart toward the window. He caught the look of surprise on Gammon’s face. Coover and Bony looked at him and Bony in a quiet voice that sounded to Delvin like a scream, cried, “Where you going?” Everything else, even the broad day outside and the whole fraudulent enterprise they were mired in, went quiet. The window was heavy but with a hard shove of one hand he forced it fully open and before anybody moved he was out into the air. He fell twenty feet. After the first four or five the fall seemed like flying. A sense of terrifying weightlessness filled him just before he crashed ass first into the azalea bushes. A branch tore through his pants and cut a deep scratch into the side of his leg. But he wasn’t hurt.

He rolled out of the bush, scrambled to his feet—the sight of the long red scratch under the khaki cloth almost made him sick—and began to run across the wide mushy lawn. A large woman in a pink dress stared at him with her mouth open. A man on the cement walk
skipped a step as if he was getting out of Delvin’s way though he wasn’t anywhere near him. A voice cried out from the courthouse porch. “That’s one of them nigras.” Shouts went up, the noise beating against his body like hard rain out of the blue sky, but he was running, fleet, the town moving past him in a blur of little specks of life jumping—the squirrel hanging upside down from a catalpa branch, a little boy pop-eyed and grinning, a woman waving a yellow scarf in front of her face—all additions, subtracting as they went by, as he went by, plunging into space as he ran, each step a fall, each a bungle and bluster and a soaring, each carrying him nowhere and everywhere, and he was running, running . . .

He made it to the corner, dashed across the street, turned right and headed down past a big furniture store. There were three brown leather armchairs in the picture window, arranged looking out, empty—lonely, he thought. An outside staircase led up the side of the gray brick building across the street. He liked outdoor staircases. He was running hard. Up ahead the picture show had Joan Crawford and Clark Gable on the marquee. He had never seen either of them. There looked to be an empty lot on the other side of the theater and beyond it a large white frame building with bushes around it and past that a big yard and past that a little copse of mulberry trees. He thought he could make it to the trees and be gone. He smelled boiled peanuts. The sky was stripped of clouds.

Just then, without warning, a man tackled him. Delvin went sprawling onto his chest on the pavement. He tried to get up but the man held him. In a second another man was on him and then another. He could smell tobacco and raw vinegary sweat and corn whiskey. The men—white men—were cursing him. He writhed against the rough load of bodies—white bodies closer than any white bodies had ever been: hands, fingers gouging, elbows knocking, feet kicking and stomping and knees hitting him in the back and between the legs and an unshaven cheek scraping against his and he could hear somebody’s soft panting like the panting of a dog and somebody’s scratchy breath whistled in his ear and he almost laughed because the whistle seemed like the first bars of that song, what was
the one? He made a whimpering sound that he had not known was in him. A woman somewhere close by was screaming. He kicked out with his feet, or tried to, but he couldn’t get traction, couldn’t reach any step or ledge to prise himself free.