Ginny Gall (5 page)

Delvin accepted the job and went to work, uneasily at first, fetching items from the pantry, doing light cleaning, digging in the garden and watering the flowers, hauling out trash and burning it in the metal drum out back, picking up pecans and bringing them in a yellow enameled bowl he wondered if stolen from kings, and staying close to Mrs. Parker, the cook, and to Polly, in case they needed a quick boy for anything. It offended him to work in such a place, and scared him and made him sad in a way he didn’t quite understand, but they fed him copiously at the big pine table in the kitchen where with the sidemen and the maids he had his meals, and he liked sleeping out in the little barn or shed behind the house, in a room beside the stalls that smelled of sweet hay and leather (that is, before he moved into the house to a small square bedroom off Mr. O’s big bedroom).

He was not shown the working areas right off. Oliver’s experience led him to believe that the living so feared and hated death that only a special sort of person was fit to work in a funeral parlor. The first time he brought Delvin into the viewing room where the embalmed corpse of Mrs. Fretwell Jenkins lay in repose in double-ruffled collars, the boy cursed and ran out of the room. They did not have that many departed put on view. People usually kept their deceased at home after the embalming. Only the very poor, or those who for private reasons did not want the body in the house—some of those reasons being superstition, panic, hatred, flaunting of wealth, neglect or simple grief—left the deceased entirely to Mr. Oliver. If the truth be
known, he liked to keep the dead close by him. Taking the body in hand, like a prodigal returned, he pampered and coddled the former person, bringing him or her into the gentleness and beauty that most lacked in their living lives. He wished for them to remain with him as long as possible. It hurt him to have to release them to the rocky soil of the Appalachians.

This affinity made Mr. Oliver one of the most effective mourners a departed soul could wish for and was one reason he had been able to build up the business so well after Mr. Mathis’s demise. He himself had handled the embalming of the not so old man, who had died of a stroke as he sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of vinegar pie. A tenderness had flooded him as he intimately handled the remains. Mr. Mathis’s sloped shoulders, saggy breasts, spindly hairless legs, horny toes, big speckled belly, his crisp private hair and tiny genitalia had fascinated him. He sat in a white kitchen chair alone in the embalming room beside the corpse as a son might sit beside his father waiting for him to wake. Oliver had no illusions about the dead awakening, but he felt in his vigil a sense of the enormity of death that was subsumed usually in his experience of loss when the embalmed and dressed-up carcass was taken from him. He placed his hand on Mr. Mathis’s cold hairless breast and did not move it for half an hour. He knew what meat came to, but he knew too that this heap of flesh was the last of what he could look to in memory. It was like a faint echo, fading gradually as he listened. As he had done for no other dead person in his life, he leaned over the plumped-out, yellow-skinned face and kissed his benefactor gently on the lips, thinking as he did how he loved him and also that the corpse needed a little more solution.

He had dressed Mr. Mathis in the suit he wore to direct funerals, an off-the-rack black broadcloth suit purchased by mail from Brooks Brothers in New York City. In the pockets he had placed the small gilt-framed picture of his mother that Mr. Mathis kept by his bed, a silver penknife, a small blue marble he had carried since childhood, a tiny gold medallion presented to him by the Negro Benevolent Society for
his service to the community, a paperbound copy of Shelley’s poems marked with a small red bookmark at Mr. Mathis’s favorite poem, “Ode to Dejection,” and an ivory locket containing a photograph of a fair-haired young white woman, the secret love of Mr. Mathis’s life, unrequited. Mr. Mathis had been buried out of the Mother Holiness church over on Barlow street and it had taken all of Oliver’s strength for him not to break down during the service.

For a few weeks afterward he considered selling the business (that had been left to him outright) and moving away. But in the end he knew he was where he belonged. He wished to pass this experience and knowledge on but the child scooting around his property quick as a little roach was probably not the one he was looking for.

Delvin didn’t reappear until dinnertime. He smelled of tobacco smoke and his breath reeked of liquor like a loafer. “You are a foolish and wayward child,” Mr. O told him. Delvin grinned at him and said he might be but he sure wadn’t wasting his time petting dead folks. Mr. Oliver was ready then to whack him one and send him on his way. But something stopped him. Maybe it was a ray of late sunshine catching in the boy’s springy hair. Maybe it was an evening bird letting loose a frail sweet cry that touched his heart. Maybe a blip in his brain just then. Maybe only the sturdy-legged boy and the quickened light in his eyes. But he sighed and told Mrs. Parker to get the boy some food. After supper he invited him into his bedroom and they read the newspaper together and then Mr. O gave him a book of stories about explorations in the cold countries and the Arctic. In these stories were plenty of dead men, starved or bear-bitten or shot. Many different ways of disposing of the dead were offered. He thought this would help the boy to revise himself.

He took the boy along when they exhumed the old Harmon woman after the family decided to rebury her remains up north. Coloreds from Red Row, they had gotten rich in Chicago and wanted to dig the old matriarch—the last of them buried in this part of the world—out of the South’s bloody ground. A coroner’s assistant and a great-
grandson down by train and himself and the diggers had driven out there. He and the boy had ridden in the big squared-off Cadillac carved-panel hearse. When they dug down through the yellow, black, gray and red sectionated earth they found the coffin broken through—sometimes after time the weight of the soil itself would collapse the casing—and the body decayed away to the bones. They had brought the remains up in pieces. The grandson had gotten sick off in a tea olive bush. But the boy had been spellbound. He wanted to touch the fragments. A belt buckle, the lapis lazuli necklace she was buried in, were intact. The skull lay in its nest of white marcelled hair. Here and there bits of curled tissue like wispy fried pork skins.

She had spent the last fifty years in the ground. Since shortly after the Civil War when for a moment it seemed black folks might have a living stake in the world’s bounty. But that had been only a dream that faded in the hot sunshine of a Dixie June.

As the fragments lay on a white cotton sheet in the tinlined box they would be transported to Chicago in, the boy had reached into the box and taken the skull into his hands. The grandson, a lawyer from Cedar Park, had been too busy upchucking to pay any mind. But Oliver let slip a quivery whistle of alarm. A small outcry, smothered by his habitual discretion. The boy hadn’t noticed. He turned the skull in his hands, examining it. Nothing disrespectful, Oliver realized; the boy just wanted to study it.

“Boy,” he said, “you’d probably better put that bit of holiness down.”

The boy looked at him with a wise and wondering expression. His eyes were lighter colored than usual in one with skin so dark. They were almost hazel.

“Did they stitch her up?” he asked.

“No, son, the lady died of old age.”

“But what are these?” he said, indicating the scantlet seams where the skull plates joined.

“That’s just where the skull grows together.”

“When does it grow?”

“Inside the mother’s body, and later when we’re little.”

“We’re just a bunch of pieces, aint we?” He laid the skull gently back in the box. The remnants had a dry smell like unbrushed carpet.

“Why holiness?” he asked, getting to his feet. He skeeted the soil off the knees of his overalls.

“Cause the minister prayed over her,” Oliver said. The grandson was wiping his hands on a piece of shaggy green moss.

“What about the ones he didn’t pray over?”

“The preacher’d say they are on their own.”

“Aye.” A tear welled in the boy’s eye.

He was remembering something, Oliver thought.

In a way he was. His mother, fled into the wilderness, was always with him, the sadness was, but this sadness had spread out, like a creek flooding the woods, until it soaked everything. He was thinking about all those folks traipsing around in the world, falling over dead or knocked down or sinking into deep waters, who never had anybody to pray for them. These others—they had somebody. Even Mr. Buster Carrie he read about in the paper, knocked down by a heart attack as he purchased a pork roast at Cutler’s Butcher shop, or Miss May Wetherburn, whose dress caught fire as she bent over the stove to stir a pot of caramel candy, or Scooter Ellis, visiting from Arizona, the negro paper said, who fell off the mule he was attempting to ride and busted his head open on the iron foot scraper on the steps of the Masons’ hall; he expected that each of them had plenty of folks ready and willing to shoot prayers up to heaven or wherever they went.

He watched as the grandson peered at the remains with a look of distaste on his tan, freckled face. “Why aint you sad?” Delvin asked.

The man looked at him with the same urbane distaste. He hated this world down here, restolen from negro folks by Reconstruction, these pitiful luckless helots, still grubbing in the dirt for Ol Massa.

“Time’s worn sadness out,” he said.

Off across the rolling ground of the negro section of Astoria Cemetery, tucked in between the foundry and the book bindery, beyond
the line of blue pines to the west, the sky was filled with a gray pudding of clouds. A vaporous string of red along one seam.

“Time’s not going to do that to me,” the boy said.

He had just turned seven and had faith in who he was and would become.

“You wait,” the man said.

Delvin liked the young man’s clothes that were soft gray and had gleaming black buttons. He remembered the gems he had stolen from the shop on Adams street. Where had they gone to? He had carried them in his pocket but somehow they had fallen out, all but the diamond and the cat eye. These two had disappeared as well, lost on the way to the orphanage, or somewhere after he got there. Only a yellow piece left that had somehow by now disappeared too. He felt helpless. Unable to save himself.

He wondered where his sister and brothers were.

As the workers cleaned up and the dismantled body was placed in the hearse and the reclamation party made their way back to the funeral home where the body would be prepared for shipping, by train, to Chicago, and the young man, who knew that the cycle of time is endless, turned his back without sentiment on the green fallen world of east Tennessee, Delvin continued to think of his siblings. The twins had been adopted from the orphanage by a family, so the director had told him, who took them to their farm in Texas. Colored folks owned land out there, she had said, not just little garden plots but whole ranches. They raised beef cattle and grew wheat on the north Texas plains. Delvin wished he could fly out there and see them. Whistler had a little scar on his knee where he had fallen under the bumper of a car he was teetering on trying to hit a horse fly with a rag. Warren liked to sing a little song he called “Homeward” that he said he learned from a woman in a gold dress at the Emporium. Coolmist had picked the song up and she sang it some nights as she washed up out on the back porch. He liked to listen to her splashing water and singing the song in the savory darkness as he lay in bed. Where his sister was he didn’t know. She had been standing on the running board of a dusty Ford truck the
last time he saw her, wiping her face with a huge red bandana. Had she gone to Texas too? Nothing really seemed to get her down. He was afraid something would. It amazed him how people could get lost in the world.

Soon enough in his early years of dreaming Delvin discovered the second floor, shut off behind a switchback staircase, and climbed up there. The doors along a dim, sullenly carpeted hallway were shut so tightly they seemed at first to be locked, but they weren’t. They opened on bed and sitting rooms each fully appointed, everything, including the beds, mummified under big wheat-colored dust cloths. He slapped a bed to see the dust rise in clouds and stood gazing, halfway in a dream, at the motes and powdery fluff slowly resettling. The light coming through the thick, wavy glass windowpanes seemed ancient. It brought to mind his mother’s stories. He wished that if he looked closely he might catch sight of her cavorting in a red shiny dress in an antique world, but he knew such thinking was a lie. In one of the bathrooms he stood before a bleached mirror, choking himself with both hands. He pulled his hair, drawing it out above his head. He crossed his eyes and made faces as grotesque as he was able. Once he brought Mrs. Parker’s kitchen shears up there and cut his hair short on top, almost down to the skull. Why he did that—when they asked—he couldn’t say, but he liked staring into one of the second-floor mirrors at himself. He lay on his back on one bed or another, gazing at the ceiling, trying to slow his heart down to a stop. He wanted to jump into eternity, poke around, see what was there, and jump back quick before the devil caught him. He sprang up and danced wildly. His bare feet slapped the floor. He whirled and capered. “Oh, oh, oh,” he cried, “I am nobody’s child.”

Before long he was eight, then he was nine; in another minute he was twelve.

In the evenings Delvin would read to Mr. Oliver. The mortician had come on him in his study lying on the green leather couch scrutinizing a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He barked at him to take his feet off the leather, then asked what he was studying.

“I can’t make all of it out,” Delvin said, “but I think I get the draw of it.”

“Which one you reading, boy?”

“This is one called
Macbeth
. It’s about a greedy Scotsman.”

“That is a mighty tale,” Oliver said, though he was unfamiliar with it. He owned the volume as he owned most of his books: because they gave him a feeling of substance. “Maybe we can study that one out together,” he said.

Delvin liked the idea.

They began sessions at night after work was done for the day, or when there was freedom from it. People died at all hours of the day and night. Oliver and his crew had to be prepared to go forth to retrieve the deceased, ready to rise in the wee-est hours to open his house to the dead. The deceased crossed his threshold on stretchers, on doors, on planks and carried in blankets or pulled down from the backs of horses or from the beds of trucks or hauled by hand between weeping, teeth-gnashing grievers, once on the broad iron gate that opened onto the farm of Mr. Wendell Comer, whose only son had been kicked in the head by a mule. Mostly these days they came by ambulance from the hospitals and the morgue. Or he went to fetch them, rising to his midnight errand, a heroic figure, as he saw it, civilization’s appointed guide, liaison between the two worlds, navigator and helmsman for the journey to the terrible (and beautiful) mysteries. Oliver had several assistants now, both in the prep room
and upstairs in the viewing parlors. He himself was a minister, minister enough, and sometimes performed funeral services in the old dining room that had been converted to a chapel. The boy got into everything, but he hardly learned about anything. Oliver figured the trade—hoped the trade—the seep of it, would infuse him. His dream of finding an heir had settled on the boy—for now.

Both of them enjoyed the reading sessions. They read stories of French kings and stories of explorers and dudes in fancy clothes, but the stories they liked best were the stories in the Shakespeare plays. Propped together on his great bed, Oliver in his wine-red silk dressing gown, Delvin in his green cotton robe and blue pajamas with smiling caucasian faces printed on them, the boy did his best each session to get through a few pages of one of the plays. They made it all the way through
Macbeth
without either of them understanding half of what the boy read; it made them both feel as if they were getting somewhere in life. Delvin was good at saying the words but they were both poor at figuring out what they meant. They got the gist however, or the draw as the boy called it. He had plenty of words Oliver had never heard, probably words that would encourage Mr. Shakespeare himself. “That man had a rowdy life,” Delvin said, speaking of the Scottish murderer. “Like a tiger,” Oliver concurred. They shuddered and looked off in separate directions, Delvin studying the flame of the squat red candle on the old desk and Oliver looking at the boy’s reflection in the window glass. He shuddered again.

“I would like to meet a woman like that Mrs. Mac B,” Delvin said.

“Naw you wouldn’t, boy.”

“How come you hadn’t married?” he wanted to know.

“Lots of reasons.”

“Name one.”

“Not that many care to marry an undertaker.”

“Scared, hunh?”

“Mortified mostly.”

“What else?”

“I’m busy and don’t have that much time to meet them.”

“Seems like you’d get first dibs on the widers.”

Oliver laughed. “Does, dudn’t it?”

“I can help you meet women.”

“How is that?”

“I can scout em out for you.”

“Don’t you be doing that, boy.”

“Okay.” Delvin snickered. “I won’t.”

Unless I just have to, he thought, exercising his form of honesty in the situation.

He had already begun to keep an eye peeled for likely marital candidates. He studied the mourners come to view the bodies of their loved ones. The better families preferred to have the remains brought to the house. Some liked to have Mr. Oliver there on the premises with the loved one, others didn’t want him anywhere around. For a rich man he had to be awfully humble, Delvin thought. That would not be
his
road to riches. He would—he didn’t know what he he would do. Lately he’d been feeling restless. Some boys he met in the alley behind the mortuary told him they were riding freights all over the place.

“For fun?” he had asked.

“No, you little fool,” one of them, Portly Sanders, a boy he remembered, or thought he did, from his old Jim’s Gully neighborhood, said. “We looking for work.”

“I got enough of that right here,” Delvin said.

“Bunch of ghouls,” Sammy Brakes said.

Delvin had not seen his sweaty face before. “What’s that word?” he asked.

“You know,” Sammy said, “the ones who dig around in graves.”

“We don’t dig
in
the grave. We
fill
the grave.”

A breeze caught in the tops of the bamboo hedge and passed on. He wanted to hit this Sammy with the greasy, pockmarked face, but he held back. He turned quickly, spinning almost, his arms flying free, and staggered away in mock fright. The other boys laughed.

“Gon miss your train,” Delvin said, laughing, and skipped through the wire gate into the backyard where the boys, superstitious
and afraid of legal trouble, wouldn’t follow him. He waved at them before he went into the house.

Just this week he had been disciplined for fighting with the kitchen boy. The boy had called him a dumb bastard child. Delvin had knocked him into the kindling box. The boy had cut the back of his head on a piece of fat lighter wood. Sunny was his name, but the boy was anything but. Delvin couldn’t stand him and would have fought him until he was nothing but another customer for the establishment, but he didn’t want to lose his place. Oliver had made him work in the garden spreading horse manure and then working it into the black-eyed pea and tomato rows. From the kitchen window Sunny had eyed him evilly, ducking behind the red cheesecloth curtain whenever Delvin caught him looking. The punishment made him restless, or added to his restlessness, but he didn’t want to hit the road, he told himself—if he was
going
to—before he found a bride for Mr. Oliver. He hung around the viewing rooms, wearing the cut-down black suit (once belonging to another favored boy) that Mr. O had provided for him when he rode in the hearse.

He began to ask for the names and addresses and the telephone numbers when they had them of the more likely-looking women. He questioned them, discreetly, so he thought, about their situation. Were they married? What did they think of the mortuary business? Didn’t they just love the swank and the soundness of the outfit? Did they know that those velvet curtains over there cost nearly one hundred dollars? That organ in the chapel was over a thousand dollars and Mr. Oliver was planning to buy an even better one soon. He tried to enlist Polly’s help, but she was not a willing accomplice. She told him if he didn’t cut it out she was going to tell Mr. O.

“He’s a lonely man,” Delvin said.

“Mr. Oliver is too busy to be lonely,” Polly replied.

But Delvin knew his loneliness. They had begun to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. The ones that spoke of the absent lover touched them both. In the dim light of the big green-shaded lamp by the bed they had both wiped away tears, Mr. O dabbing with the corner of a blue silk handkerchief, Delvin using the tips of his fingers.

“Here he’s saying the only way to live forever is to get yourself a child,” Delvin said after reading sonnet no. 12. “If you are going to get a child, you have to first get yourself a wife. Or a woman.”

Delvin knew his mother had not married his father. He had been much too young to investigate such business, but once before she ran off as they sat side by side in the God Is Love Beauty Parlor over on Forrest street waiting for Cappie to get her thick crozzled hair straightened, he had asked who his father was and she told him he was a man from the west—an actor, she said. There was a tiny note of pride in her voice. It made Delvin feel as if his daddy was a somebody for sure. Maybe he had acted in Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe in
Othello
, which was their favorite.

A colored general married to a white woman—it seemed a strange dream, so impossible, fantastical, that it had left them breathless. But after that first shock when sitting side by side at the little mahogany table upon which burned an electric lamp softly shaded by a gold paper shade, as they apprehended not simply the facts of the situation but the lack of fear and shame and, better even than that, the kowtowing he received, it seemed a right and proper notion. They saw too how despite the victories he won for them the people of Venice looked down on the general, even as they bowed to him. “Can’t get too important not to get your tail set on fire—if you’re a black man,” Oliver pointed out. Delvin saw it too.

“He works for em,” he said. “He’s the one they hired to clean up their messes.” He said this more to ingratiate himself with Oliver—to get the love going, to nestle deeper into this man’s heart—than anything else. “But what about his getting married to that woman?” he said. This excited Delvin.

“Cast that from your mind,” Oliver said. A strange look came into his broad face. “It might be a thrill for some,” he said. “But not everybody wants to strike that note.” He sighed. “Truth is, you never can tell where love is going to hit.”

How true, Delvin thought. He was in love with Polly—love had hit him, the soft thin kind that comes in early youth—but he knew it didn’t amount to much because Polly, who herself was in love
with one of the yardmen, had told him so. The ache had already begun to subside. And he was sure he could find a wife for Mr. Oliver. He had two candidates in mind. Miss Plurafore Conner and Mrs. Duplaine Misty. Miss Conner had a little candy shop over on Washington street and Mrs. Duplaine was the widow of Mr. Stephen Misty, former principal of the colored high school over on Brickson avenue. Both women had seemed suitably impressed by the deluxe Constitution Funeral Home accommodations they enjoyed at the funerals where he had first spied them. Miss Conner, a slim woman quick to tremble and shudder, had buried her father from the Home, and Mrs. Duplaine, a portly, emotional woman, had spent hours with Mr. O going over the special arrangements she wanted for her husband’s funeral (cornet band, all-white flowers and four dumpling-sized gilt rings on his fingers). It had been Mr. O’s arm she leaned on—instead of her feckless son’s (a nightclub singer living with a white woman said to be an ether addict—
there’s
your Chattanooga Othello) when she wobbled down the aisle of the Mt. Moriah Baptist church. Mr. O had put together a perfect service for her, including a choir of pink-robed singers at the gravesite. As the last strains of “Cross Over into Campground” had faded into the pines, Delvin had noticed Mr. Oliver’s eyes wet with tears. It was true that Mr. Oliver was known to weep at funerals—some mocked it as put-on—but Delvin knew him as a man of great feeling. Mrs. D saw this too; Delvin noticed her swiveling an eye in Mr. O’s direction as he stood tall and plump by one of the brass poles supporting the green canvas tent over the grave. He had asked tenderly if she wanted to place anything else in the casket’s little memento drawer and, when she said yes, helped her get the reluctant slide to work and shielded her as she placed what looked to Delvin like a dried cat’s head in it; he saw how she appreciated this thoughtfulness. His hand cupped over her hand clutching his arm, he had held on later as she swayed keening over the casket as it was cranked down into the layered red and yellow clay. Mr. O had ridden with her back to the Home and served her brandy and let her cry on his shoulder and then he’d had Willie Burt drive her home in her own
new Buick and sent Elmer in the big car to fetch Willie Burt, who came in whistling and smelling of liquor.

Mr. Oliver had been similarly attentive to Miss Conner who had needed help with the music for the service and in deciding which suit she wanted her father to wear. She had sat out on the side porch with Mr. Oliver after the funeral and Delvin had heard the creak of the old slat swing far into the night.

When over the next few weeks nothing happened, Delvin decided he had to help the business along. He stole a few sheets of Mr. Oliver’s private stationery, along with envelopes and stamps, and wrote notes to the two women. He suggested to Mr. Oliver that he begin home visiting services, especially to the homes of those whose loved ones had been recently interred. “Seems like a funeral home ought to include such services,” he said. “It idn’t just at the grave that those poor ladies—”

“Which poor ladies?” Mr. Oliver asked. He was at the soapstone sink in the basement outside the embalming room washing his hands with the soap that smelled of lemons.

“Any of em,” Delvin said. “I was thinking especially—because they’re the latest—of Mrs. . . .” And he went on to remind Mr. O of the gratefulness shown by the two substantially fixed women whose loved ones he’d just ushered into eternity.

They walked out into the backyard. A new snow had fallen, an inch of glossy powder that emphasized the lines of the old sycamore and the half broken red maple and set tiny gleaming caps on the leaves of the holly bush by the back steps.

“You’re trying to push me into something, aren’t you?”

“What if I was?”

“It won’t do any good, boy.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not fit for such folly as that.”

“Why aint you?”

“Quit saying aint. I’ve told you about it.”

“I forget. I can’t keep every instruction in my mind at all times. My mind is too full of other prospects.”

“Other than becoming a gentleman?”

“What good in this world would that do?”

“Kindness—gentleness—will always do.”

“You just changing the subject.”

“There aint no subject, boy,” Mr. O said and laughed his wheezy, pressurized laugh.