Ginny Gall (50 page)

“They would be who now?” the old woman, a sharp-eyed person with puffy cheeks and a light cloud of almost pure white hair, asked.

“Walker,” Delvin said.

“I don’t believe I recollect them,” the old man said. “They live over this way?”

“Long time ago,” Delvin said, “but they moved out toward Shipley Station, died out there.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear they’ve passed,” the old woman said, eyeing him rigorously.

Delvin thanked her. The first bite of fish had burned the roof of his mouth, a problem with hot food he had picked up on the prison circuit. He juggled the fish flesh with his tongue until it was cool and swallowed it down. One of the girls over by her mother giggled and mimicked him. He laughed.

“What sort of work you do?” the old man asked in a friendly way.

“I’m writing on a book,” Delvin said. He took a long pull of tea. It was cooled with chunks of ice hacked off a block. He picked out a piece and pressed it to his lips.

“Burn yoself?” the old man said.

“No sir, I just like ice.”

“Pass that bowl on down,” the old man said to one of the boys, indicating a blue china bowl with ice chunks in it. The girl, slim with a broad mirthful face and quick black eyes, bobbed her head at him. She made big chomping motions.

Delvin said, “I used to cut down through the alley back there looking for my friend Buster Moran.”

“The Morans, sho,” one of the boys said. “They moved away.”

“Old Moran was a pipefitter, I believe,” said the old man. “Out here to Cranley’s. On the colored shift.”

“I believe he was,” Delvin said.

Mr. Dandes talked about his farm out toward Scooterville,
passed down in his family since it was deeded to them just after the Civil War.

“We been out there all summer,” the lively girl said. “That’s all we do in the summer—just farm, farm, farm.”

“Whoo, you don’t do nothing,” the older boy said, Harley. He had a riotous bush of shiny hair. “And sit under the arbor writing letters.”

The girl blushed. Delvin could see the blush on her light skin, feel it, as if the heat traveled, on his own face.

“What kind of letters?” he asked because he wanted to know and wanted her to speak to him.

“She writes to the government,” the other boy said.

“What about?’ Delvin said.

“About their shortcomings and about their longcomings too. I ask them if they are trying to be as helpful as possible.”

“She’s a complainer,” the lopsided twin said.

“I wrote the president a letter when I was a little boy,” Delvin said. This was true.

“What happened?” Harley said.

“He wrote back.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was enjoying himself—I’d asked him about that—and he hoped I was enjoying myself too.”

“Were you?” the girl—more than a girl—asked.

“I was at the time.”

As he spoke to her—this, what, sixteen-year-old girl, seventeen maybe—he experienced a bluster and yank of feeling, something slung onto a pile of odds and ends, an accumulation of breached and disordered living, messes and blunders and crushed years and thoughts too sullen and miserable to do anything about, packed against clotted falsities, outright lies, hopes packed hard into sprung joints—useless dumb hopes—stuffed with the knotted eccentric sadness of the jailbird; slather of meanness and repudiation and scarcity. He hurt in his gut and the ache like a fresh malarial sickness sucked into his bones and filled his mind with confusion. He wanted to lash
these ignorant people with sarcasm and bitterness, to humiliate them and leave them with pictures in their minds that would haunt and hurt them.

Excusing himself—forcing the polite words out of his mouth—he got up and walked away from the table.

He made his way out into the alley and stood in the ample dark, letting pain rush unhindered through him. He was not here, but he was not any other place either. He sat down, unlaced and took off his boots, removed his socks, stood up and walked half a dozen steps in the soft sand that covered the alley. He stretched out his hands like a man sleepwalking in a cartoon. He reached for the air and for whatever was in the air or might be soon. He could smell the hot lard. He could smell the smoke from the fire, birch wood and chestnut, he recognized them, still did. The chestnut trees were dying all over the country, a blight, come from where nobody knew, no way to cure it, the trees just died. He could smell something else, apples, yes, cut apples, a sweetness, unrevisable. Some said
that doesn’t ring a bell
, but for him everything did. Bole and bunch, dry squeak of old runner carpet, a cracked vase painted blue, a white shirt on a hanger hooked on a bedroom wire, smell of liver frying in the morning. The world a checklist of old favorites. He turned and walked slowly back, running his toes through the sand, taking his time. He smelled the roses on runner loops hanging over a fence. He went over and stood close to them. The blossoms were white and flat-faced and sweet. He touched a flower along the back of its face, feeling the swell of the bud it came from.

“It’s a cherokee rose,” a girl’s voice said from behind him.

He turned. The young, dark-eyed girl stood there. She too was barefoot.

He made a tiny sound, as hard to hear as a dog whistle.

The girl moved up and stood silently beside him.

“Indian roses,” he said. “I knew a Indian once.”

“We are part Indian ourselves—at least that’s what Daddy says. But he likes to make things up.”

She laughed a small, crackling, unrueful laugh, a slender girl with high-flown wiry hair.

“Would you like to take a walk?” he said.

“All right.”

They walked past quiet houses, secret lives alit in windows or concealed by the dark. In one yard a tire swing, the tire painted white. In another an old car up on a homemade lift, doorless, hood up, wheels like tilted snaggle teeth. At the next, on a back porch, two women sitting at a round table whispered furiously. They looked up and the whispering stopped, started again as they passed. Leftover summer frogs made clicking sounds. A nightbird issued the early version of its song. The two of them, man and girl, man and woman, boy and woman, boy and girl, walking, not touching, Delvin still barefoot carrying his boots, feeling sand and leaf, a stick, grass, round pebbles, a flat slab of rock under his feet, the girl close beside him, barefoot too; neither speaking.

They reached the end of the alley and stood in the opening that spilled a fan of pale sand like a little river mouth into the faintly lighted street. A tall shuttered house that had belonged to a traveling preacher reared just across quiet Silver road. The night was warm but Delvin could feel the coolness underneath, a coolness that carried winter in its arms. Other nights, feeling this, he might shudder for what was coming, but not now. The warmth was strong enough to keep them safe, for a little while. The silence extended between them until Delvin didn’t know how to break it or if he could. Just then she spoke. She asked him who he really was.

“I’m uneasy about answering that,” he said.

“I guess that’s an answer.”

He sensed that already she was trying to catch something that eluded her, catch her footing. He sensed a sadness in her and an energy that was not all straightforward, and a roughed-up gaiety. Her hands were long-fingered, strong-looking, almost as large as his.

“Are you timid?” she said.

“Vigilant.”

“What are you looking out for?”

He figured that she knew. “Goblins.”

“Plenty of them around this place.”

He was silent. With Minnie he had been let alone to grope his way; both of them groped. Now he sensed he was in another confabulation. He didn’t think he could keep up. Maybe it wouldn’t matter.

“I feel like asking you a hundred questions,” she said.

“Cause I’m a puzzle to you?”

“Yes—but everybody’s that—just some people you want to go ahead and put the questions to them, get on through the whatever it is keeps them off to themselves.”

“Lots of situations’ll do that.”

“Lots of reasons to build hideouts.”

“Sholy.”

“But they don’t matter.”

“How come?”

“Cause if you got to ask the questions anyway, you ask them. And then the other one, the one you asking the questions to, why, he has to decide for himself whether he’s going to answer them or not.”

“Maybe he can’t.”

“If he can’t, then maybe that’s the answer to all of them.”

“That’s a lot of weight,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Let me ask you something. Why do you want to know so much about me?”

“I can’t help it.”

The world seemed to have gone off in all directions. Every day he’d been free had been painful to him. It hurt to decide things. Soon as he could he’d latched on to a woman, Minnie May, sturdy and forbearing, owner of her own house, a small house on a quiet street, a woman away much of the time, grateful for what he might give her. Let her decide things. But what she decided scared him. And it scared him that Mr. Oliver was feeble—dying, he could see that, the future drying like a bubble of spit on his long lower lip. Out here everything was important, everything was too much: flake of soap on your wrist, smell of a bakery, somebody asking the time—like asking if you had the answer to their secret dilemma. It was all he could do not to turn himself in. Not to flee into some kind of drunkenness.
Some other accelerating dark. But he had somewhere to go. Something to do. He had to hold on to that.

He looked at the girl. Her face turned in profile and she seemed to be minding business of her own.

He said, “I like windy rain. I like salad beds—mustard and turnip greens mostly. I like cattle at night. Piney woods in a mountain distance. I like to see winter wheat growing in a big field.”

She snapped her fingers, looked at him sideways under her brows, said, “I like riding in trucks. I like smelling things, anything that has a strong smell to it, even a stink. I like those birds with feathers that change from black to green according to how they take the light. I like stomping my feet in the dust.”

He said, “I like seeing how far I can make a thought go in my mind before I lose track of it.”

She said, “I like gritty cornbread and books about smart women.”

They fell silent again.

Above the houses, above the continuation of the alley behind the houses in front of them, three stars, faint blurred bits, ceaselessly changing entities, hung above the smear of city brightness.

“Where were you on the way to when we shanghaied you?”

“The Emporium.”

She took a half step back. “You one of those it’s important to go over there?”

“Yes. I’m looking for somebody.” He hadn’t let this simple thought come forth before now but it was true.

“I’d like to go over that way.”

“You want to gawk?”

“I guess I do—or no, I just want to see what that life’s like.”

“Like any other, I guess.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not.”

“I want to see what folks over there . . . are featuring . . . in themselves. I think people can’t help but be curious.”

“That’s rightly so,” he said.

“Will you take me?”

“Okay.” He blurted this out but a second later it felt like a mistake. He was weighing himself down, whichever way he moved. But then he guessed he was bound to make mistakes.

A thin breeze angled in off the street, cooling their skin. A depressed feeling came over him. He wanted to ask at the bedhouse about his mother. He wanted to be alone with what he felt about that. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to take me.”

“It’s not that.”

“No,” she said, turning away.

She had a fading, falling quality to her, a weight of promises and needs that troubled him. Every knock at the door felt like all the pressers come to get him. He said, “I want to see if anybody there has heard anything about my mother.”

She looked at him, paying out the line of kindness. “Some odd girl’s not what you need at this time,” she said.

“I’ve come a long way,” he said, “just to take a look-see.”

“These nights lately,” she said, scanning the high parts of the sky, “since the big storm, have had such a deep blue to them. They say the blue only goes up for a few miles but it makes me feel good that we’re wrapped up in it.”

“Buttered in blue,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him. Her broad face was open and friendly, without guile.

“I’m going to shade off this way,” he said, indicating the direction—right, east—with his thumb.

“Born and raised in Chattanooga,” she said, still smiling. “Shouldn’t be hard to find your way back this way.”

“Maybe I’ll slip by . . .”

She seemed to be fading into the dark, but it was just a cloud passing over. The moon hadn’t come up yet. He moved off. When he looked back he couldn’t see her, wasn’t exactly sure where she’d been standing.

The Emporium was lit like an ordinary house. Soft lamplight in the windows, a single lightbulb in a large lantern above the big white double front doors. He went around the side through the arched wooden gate to the back that had been partially paved with bricks and set up with a barbecue grill and tables under colored lights on strings swept up into two of the big fruitless mulberry trees. A couple of white men were sitting in mission chairs drinking beer. An africano woman sat on a bench near them. They looked up when he came through the garden area. He nodded to them, and exchanged pleasantries. He was bound up with nervousness. He asked for Miss Ellereen, the proprietress he remembered, but the woman told him she had died six years before.

“Ate herself to death,” she said, grinning easily.

“Who is the principal these days?” Delvin said.

“Miz Corona,” she said. “You selling something?”

“Not at the moment.”

One of the men was giving him a long, studious look. “You got a familiar face,” he said.

“Everybody says that.”

“Yourn, boy, has a peculiar aspect.”

Two white men, secured by alcohol. They had pudgy, half-collapsed faces, that rucked, white-person skin. They were wearing parts of army uniforms; lost soldiers maybe.

“How you ge’men doing?” Delvin said remembering the protocol, more important, and lasting, than the army’s.

“Especially fine,” one, the slightly fatter, said.

He was thinking how strange it was to speak to white men out in the world. In prison or out he had to call them mister.

“You a fighting man?” the other white man asked.

“Nosir. Cause of my bad leg.”

“You a lucky boy.” He elbowed his partner. “Aint he a lucky boy, Snell.”

“Luckiest boy I seen today,” the other, a red-haired man, said.

“Who you looking for?” the first man asked.

“I was looking for Miss Ellereen, but the lady says she died.”

“I don’t remember her. You must be from around here.”

“Yessir, I is.”

“You a Red Row boy?”

“Born and bred.”

The girl was studying him too. “What’s your name?” she said.

“William,” he told her. “Mind if I step in the kitchen to see after Miz Corona?”

“Sho, it’s all right,” said the girl, just a farm girl skidded this far and no farther.

“Thank you. If you ge’men will excuse me.”

“Oh yeah, Poke, go on, go on,” said the bigger man, waving his wide fish-belly hand at him.

In the kitchen he came on Ostella Baker who had been a helper here years ago. She didn’t seem to remember him. He asked about his mother—he couldn’t keep from it—and every word of asking sounded foolish, backward in his mouth, but still necessary, still a kindness he could do for her. He felt exhausted just trying to keep up.

Everywhere thought extending itself into objects; he could feel the minds percolating around him, a gadgetry of ideas, comeuppances, answers for every problem. The smallest thing, that piece of equipment on the counter, the one with steel protrusions like round combs at the end of stalks . . . he didn’t have time to ask about it.

“She worked here years ago,” he said, “but she got accused of killing a man and she had to leave town.”

The girl, woman now, with her hair shoved under a blue turban, cocked her head and said yes, she thought she remembered. “But I believe she’s passed on,” she said.

His knees went wobbly. A lightness filled his head and a pain
pressed into his left temple. I shouldn’t have asked, he thought. He looked hard into her light brown eyes.

“There was somebody like that . . . right here. I don’t recollect,” the woman said, flustered.

“Anybody around who’d know?”

“Miss Maylene. She helps out Miz Corona. And Miz Corona would know.”

He found Miss Maylene in the large first-floor bedroom converted to office use. It had another small room behind it that looked out on the garden. A tall woman in a yellow tulle dress, Maylene from Dalton, Tennessee, stood at the wide shiny desk, sliding wax paper in between layers of blue blouses. The room smelled of camphor. The woman waved her fingers, picked up a glass atomizer, and sprayed the air in front of her. Behind her, outside the window, somebody turned on a red light. The woman straightened herself and stood stiffly with one hand out in front of her as if holding off the atomizer spray, or feeling her way. She didn’t seem to know him, not at first.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember Cappie. She came back here several years ago. You work for the police, don’t you?”

“No mam, I never been associated with that outfit.”

She gave him a long birdlike look, cocking her narrow face to one side. Her wrists were spindly.

“Are you an army man?”

“Not anymore. They sent me home because of my leg.” He had scars on his legs—where he’d been lashed—if she wanted to check his story. “I’m Miss Cappie’s son—one of em.”

“Not the one that went to prison.”

“No, mam, I’m his older brother.”

“I see the resemblance. Well,” she said sitting down at the desk, “I am sorry about your mother. Sit down,” she said. Her arm like a relic. “That chair.”

He took the pink plush-bottomed reed chair in front of the desk and sank down until he could hardly see over it.

“That’s my mercy chair,” she said, smiling.

He propped himself on the edge. “I hadn’t seen her since I was a boy,” he said. After the first shock he felt calm.

“She was sick when she came here. A couple of people remembered her. It was just after the time that Miss Ellereen died. You remember her?”

“Yes’m, I do.”

“She got a wasting disease, cancer, or something, and we had to keep her in one of the little houses out back. She got it down in her testines and it was a little . . . stinky, you might say.” She smiled in a funny way.

“Miss Ellereen?”

“You remember how big she was. Won’t nothing left of her when she died.” She smiled more brightly. “Then right after that your mother showed up. She arrived in a cab. She was wearing a leather dress, like a Indian squaw. What’s that called—”

“Buckskin?”

“Like she was a squaw . . . or a cowboy woman—Annie Oakley or somebody. From out west.”

“I understand.”

“She was skinny as a bird. She had a flat white hat with little red cloth balls on a fringe around the edges. She was shaking so bad the little balls shook. I believe Miss Corona had just taken over, maybe it was that same week—I believe Miss Corona was afraid at first to let her in. But then a couple of the other women recognized her, or recognized her name. The girls, except for me and Miss Corona, were all too young to remember her. I believe Buster—the workman—he remembered her too. He was a friend I believe of your brother’s when he was living over here at Mr. Oliver’s—the funeral home?”

“Yes.”

“He was the one went up and gave her a hug. He reminded them of who she was—told them, I mean, like they was waiting for a explanation.”

“She was sick?”

“Sick? Did I say sick?” She glanced into her open palm as if the answer was written there. “She was run down and dog-tired.
She didn’t say if there was anything else wrong with her. She just seemed real tired, wore out. They had to near carry her up the stairs. She made it all the way up to the third floor. They put her in one of the little rooms up there. She seemed stronger for a couple of days. She even came downstairs and sat out in the back over by the garden.”

Just then the door opened and a large tawny-skin woman, ample in all her parts, spilt here and there from her pale blue gown covered partially by a green satin wrapper, entered the room. Delvin got up. He recognized her too: Miz Corona. Miss Maylene introduced him and explained what they were doing. Miz Corona—broad-faced with flesh across the bridge of her nose and filling her cheeks, dark, sharp eyes, a thin mouth heavily rouged—studied him, passed over without seeming to recognize him, and spoke to Miss Maylene about a plumbing problem, overflow on the other side of the house.

“Your mother was a funny lady,” she said to Delvin. “Even there at the last she was making jokes.”

“Do you know what was wrong with her?”

“Weary, like so many. Worked to death. I spect the running didn’t help. She liked to sit in the garden. Right out in the middle of it among the squash and the butterbeans and such. Didn’t like the flowers much, just the old fuzzy yellow squash fruit and the little butterbeans and all. Said where she’d been living she couldn’t get vegetables like that to grow. She would lift the tomatoes—not pick em, just weigh them in her hand, put her face down among the squash leaves—dip way down, almost fall out of her chair.” She glanced at the door. “Then one day,” she said quickly, as if she was already passing like time itself to other things, “she couldn’t get out of bed. You remember that, May.”

“She was right upstairs.”

“That’s right. Tired on top of tired. The next morning when the girl went in to wake her she had passed over.”

Delvin felt a stillness in him, as if a little boat had stopped rocking.

“Who buried her?”

“We did,” Miss Maylene said. “Miz Corona had us pay for the fu
neral right out of the operating money. We keep a fund for the girls—emergencies . . .”

“I mean, which funeral home?”

“Oh. Mr. Oliver’s.” Maylene patted her own wrist. “He’s on his way out, too, I hear.”

“Notice is taken, May,” said Miz Corona.

Delvin experienced a small sadness propped on another, greater, sadness. He was sweating, just slightly, and felt a little cold at the same time. There were pictures on the wall, mountainscapes, tall gray peaks with tiny people standing around at the bottom. He had a feeling that everything was about to bust loose. He wanted to lie down somewhere.

“Could I see the room where my mother died?”

The two women glanced at each other and he saw the look of exasperation pass over Miz Corona’s face.

“You can if you want to,” Miss Maylene said. She called out the name Desiree.

Miz Corona stuck her hand out, palm down—did she want him to kiss it?—and Delvin took it, shook the bulging flesh carefully as he thanked her for her help.

A door on the side opened and the Ghost, wearing khaki army pants and a pink shirt, came in. “Desiree’s busy,” he said. He stared straight at Delvin and Delvin could see surprise hit his face like a shot. His eyes brightened and he pursed his orange lips. But he didn’t say anything. Neither did Delvin.

In the twitchy second or two as they gazed at each other, seconds Maylene spoke into, telling the Ghost to take this man up to the Mockingbird room, he saw his life aimed at this spot like an arrow shot years before, launched into the darktown sky on the July day he was born, anniversary of the futile Union victory at Gettysburg, and fallen here, in a cathouse on Red Row. An ache like an old terrible wound began to throb in his side. Heat flooded his chest and into his face. He steadied himself on the fat yellow arm of the couch he stood beside. He wanted to scream—blast all the crusted-over tears from his body.

“You all right?” Miss Maylene said. “Get him some water, Caroline,” she said to a woman who had come silently in.

They got him a glass of water, sat him down on the couch. From a small silver flask Maylene poured a shot of colorless liquid. “Local heaven,” she said in smiling indication. Miz Corona had left the room. The Ghost just stood there, thin as a wraith, yellow and pink, avid.

In a minute Delvin was better. He smiled at them. His first feelings were strange to him, something not quite right, as if he had planned them. They played off into silence now like notes run by a single hand along piano keys. A sadness held steady. And relief. In his body a looseness, a calm. He got slowly, carefully, to his feet and thanked the women. His gratitude was as strong as his sadness.

In a minute he and the Ghost were climbing the back stairs. The stairs smelled of old washings, of liniment and spicy perfume and several combos of urine and rotten vegetables and pepper sauce. Neither spoke. They crossed the third-floor landing and entered a narrow hallway. The walls were covered in an old-fashioned rose paper down to a muddy brown wainscoting; dim electric bulbs burned in wall sconces stained with verdigris. A narrow strip of featureless dark green carpeting covered the floor. He’d not been in this part of the house before. Doors, liverish repaints crusted into whorls and random patterning, lined the hallway, a few of them open partway. Halfway down a woman’s quavery voice sang,
“
If you can catch me you can keep me,”
from a song he remembered hearing playing on the checkout deputy’s radio as he was being loaded onto the truck for the ride to Acheron penitentiary.

Just beyond a partially opened door and an oblong of drowsy yellow on the floor was his mother’s door, as indicated by the Ghost. He didn’t have any need to come see the room beyond his suddenly wanting to. You take a step, he thought, and the one step leads to another. He felt like he was moving deeper into the dark. But maybe that wasn’t it, maybe he was moving toward the light—or to nothing special.

The Ghost held up one hand for him to stop, took a big ring off his belt, deftly located the key, unlocked the door and held it open.

“You the first bellhop I ever met,” Delvin said.

“You the first on-the-loose jailbird
I
ever met.” He smiled and stuck out his hand. It was slightly greasy but he held on to Delvin as if he didn’t want to let go. “How you doin, really, Del?” he said. “I am sure sorry about Mr. Oliver. I couldn’t talk much about anything out at Miz Cutler’s.”

“I know. I spect I’m doing pretty well, now that I can walk around unfenced.” He surprised himself how tightly he gripped the Ghost’s hand.

“I’m sorry about your mama.” He still looked nervous.

The room was small, only a bed with a coarse gray wool blanket and uncased square pillow and a little white table beside it with an unlit tin kerosene lamp on the table. A narrow wooden clothespress. A small dormer window looked out on the backyard. He could hear laughter down there.

“I’ll step out here a minute,” the Ghost said and closed the door behind him, leaving Delvin in the dark but for a washed-out light coming in the window. Delvin started to call him back but then he didn’t. He stood in the kerosene-smelling room and then he sat down on the bed and then he lay down on it full length. He curled up on his left side and put his head on the pillow. You’d think time could twist in such a way that the old dried-out moment might come back to life in the present one. What others—what girls, what men passing through, maybe dark horses like the Ghost—had lain on this bed since his mother had slept those few nights here and died? Maybe no one had. Maybe her old festive being still traced itself here. He squeezed his eyes shut. No. It didn’t matter.