Ginny Gall (9 page)

Delvin turned away from the boy and looked off into the corner where hay was stacked in bales. He rubbed his hand against the unsanded stall wood and felt a tiny sharp splinter slide into the flesh under his thumb. Barely go in. A dot of blood. He sucked the blood and tasted it in his mouth and then in his throat and thought of the boy they couldn’t get the preservative to stay in, saw it running out and pooling on the table, the clear green glistening liquid that was beautiful and made you want to run your fingers through it, which he had done, sliding his hand—this hand here—discreetly along the slab until he touched the tensile edge of the juice and felt it cool on his fingers and he looked up and Mr. Oliver was looking at him with an expression on his face of such sadness as he’d not seen before.

He got up and went outside into the mid dark of night. People who at first had stayed away for fear of the police and the angry white folks had begun to collect in the alley. Small groups clustered across from the back gate and around the garage that let onto the alley and onto the curved drive at the side of the house. Men and women from the neighborhood and others he didn’t know, relatives probably of the deceased. They had brought the body in the back of a box-nosed Ford truck that kept breaking down, they said. The men had worked on the motor with the body wrapped in a quilt in the back as cars passed on the unpaved road at the junction into US 83, and they had felt the weight of the curiosity, of the snoopiness and greed in people’s glances, seen in their faces the hatred and disgust and fear (and seen the desire to feel something strongly enough to wrest them free of their own misery); and how hard it was
to know they
were thieving our own hopes,
someone said, from the dead body of this son or brother or nephew, feeding like buzzards on the dear remains. And some of those white folks spit from the windows of their automobiles, and others,
you could see,
one said, were gloating and making ugly remarks among themselves—
sho nuff,
someone said—and others turned away in shame, but even these looked again—
they wants to see the blood of the black man
, another said and others agreed:
yessuh, yessuh
—staring, and you could see
how hard it was for them not to stop they cars,
one said, and
get out and beat this poor child some more—oh, Lord
—and desecrate his body further—He’s
whole before Jesus
someone said—Yes, I guess he is, but
we are left here with the mortmain and the grief,
the voice said.

All the time, so Delvin noticed, a cool breeze was softly blowing—
Lookout breeze
, they called it in Red Row—flowing down from the big mountain carrying with it the scent of sweet laurel and woodbine blossoming in the cuts and protected places. Mostly these people were silent. But then one or two asked him about the Harolds, mother and father. He’d not seen the father, he said, but the mother was grieving deeply.

He stepped away, walked to the end of the alley and looked out at the big field across the road. The wisteria looped and trailing from telephone and electric wires running along poles out on the old circus ground had bloomed for a second time this year, but the flowers were gone now, and the leaves were turning gold early, before fall had near come. Each year the wisteria, that was to him like some tropical effusion, bloomed early in May, surprising him, and each year Mr. Oliver, laughing, asked, “Where is your head, boy?” and he wanted to say, “Where it ought to be,” but he just laughed too because Oliver wasn’t mad, it was just his way of drawing him close, and both of them liked that.

But now, standing under the sweet gum listening to the heavy leaves make their swishing sound like big skirts rustling, he didn’t know what to think. There didn’t seem to be any happiness in any direction. Before him, the big rusty and ragged field and the meat
packing plant and the dusty fertilizer plant, the auto shops and the foundry and the smelting plant, and then the public road running through the mountains and Tennessee into Kentucky and Ohio and Indiana and Canada—all of it—was a wilderness and unsettled; it was all a land of monsters. He shuddered. The wind was cold. It tasted of unvisited streams and rock. He wondered again how it had been for his mother making her way in the dark over the mountains. Had she forgotten him? He couldn’t sense her out there in the wilderness, but he believed she was there. But where was
he
? And
what
was he, standing at the end of a leafy alley in Chattanooga, Tennessee? His hands were still attached, his face uncut, his side unburnt. But for how long? How easy it was to step off into ruin. He wanted to slip into the crowd and stay there in its midst, jostling and petting and sliding body to body, smelling and tasting and touching. And he wanted to haul off by himself, crawl up under a bush and roll into a ball like a possum, sink down into a musty hole like a gopher, hide deep in the rocks like a bear.

When Mr. Oliver had discovered what he’d done with the rendezvous women, tricking them and him into getting together, he was at first so mad he had ordered Delvin out of the house. Get out and be gone, he’d said to him in as stony a voice as he’d heard coming from him. Delvin had walked out not knowing whether he meant just for now or for all time. The yard that night was fragrant with mock banana flowers and peonies. The twins heaved their lanky selves toward the west trailing Cassiopeia and Taurus. Delvin had stood at the end of this alley feeling his life like snow falling on him or the stars falling in cold white bits off the heavenly firmament and the night had seemed too much for him but still great and wonderful. As scared and hurt as he was, he had laughed outloud. Now the stars were something else entirely. Bleak and wind-polished, half sopped up by wads of cloud blowing from the west. There was nothing in the stars. He stood on the shore of a dark and terrible sea.

But that wasn’t true. Where he stood was not a shore.

The breeze picked fitfully at the mimosas bent over the fence behind him, nicked the roses on the Ballard’s fence, scuffed its
knuckles on the loose grass behind Capell’s. Somebody in the Lewises’ yard was banging on a piece of metal. Not hitting it hard, just lightly, marking time. It made a hollow sound. He turned and it was a turning back into a world corrupt and ruined, a dirty place with a stink on it. But it was still the world, white quartz pebbles mixed into the grass track down the center of the alley, the sound of Big Archie the bay horse whinnying, somebody singing
Do, Lord
in a soft way.

He walked down the alley, speaking to people as he passed, telling them he was sorry, doing what Mr. Oliver did, a facsimile of it. Folks knew him as Mr. Oliver’s ward. He was a good boy they thought, but what did they know. In his heart he was an unruly force, battering mountains, a wild lover ravaging the world’s naked body.

On the way back to the shed he decided he would get Morgred to join him in a flight to another place. To Texas maybe.

But when he got to the shed the Ghost was gone.

“Got hisself run off,” Mortimer Fuchs, who was petting the gray’s face, told him, “cause he was about to steal one of these horses.”

“I needed him for something,” Delvin said. Yes, he was going to leave Chattanooga.

“If I knowed you wanted him, I’d ah helt him for you,” Mortimer said.

“That’s okay. I’ll find him.” He pulled out his notebook, intending to write Oliver a message—
Headed West
. “Would you do me a favor?” As he said this he felt a pressure in him. He couldn’t leave now, not with all this hanging over Mr. Oliver, over Polly and Mrs. Parker and all of them. He would have to stay. But right now he needed to be somewhere else.

He scribbled a note, folded it and handed it to Mortimer.

“Would you take this to Mr. Oliver for me?”

Mortimer, a naturally troubled-looking person, looked scared.

“If you can’t find him, give it to Polly. You know who that is?”

“Sholy I do.”

“She’ll give it to Mr. Oliver. I’m Delvin.”

“I know who you are too,” Mortimer said, offended that Delvin might think he didn’t.

“Thanks.”

“Taint no trouble.”

He walked the streets of Red Row looking for the Ghost. On the backside of the quarter the streets played out into the woods, climbing uphill into the mountains. On the opposite they funneled into Washington street, which paralleled the gully and crossed it back and forth in half a dozen places, bridged and unbridged. Other streets shanked and flopped over each other and wound like a snake. If you tended west most likely you’d eventually reach Morgan street and the block the funeral home was on. East they met the white section of town across a dusty unpaved street of mixed domesticities, white and black staring face-to-face through the red dust, and beyond this standoff the railroad tracks beyond which the real white world began.

Delvin worked his way along, asking for the Ghost. Adam street was the Row’s main street. It ran perpendicular to the gully and white Chat-town and on the other end petered out like an exhausted shout in a track that ran past houses jacked on stilts and up into the leafy mountain woods. On the town side were the stores and other commercial and professional establishments. There was the Peanut Shop (also selling pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts and filberts), Bailey’s Flower Shop, the newspaper office (
Mountain Star Weekly
), the office of the Ministry of Lost Souls (Protestant), barbecue, chicken and fish shacks (the fish shack attached to Dillard Fish Market), Bynum’s Hardware, Arthur’s Hats and Shoes, Smithwick’s Clothing, the Grand and Benevolent Order of Right-Way Men’s Hall, Kurrel’s Insurance, Elmer’s Garage, painted blue with a flat red roof with Elmer Bainbridge’s name painted in white on the asphalted gravel covering it (
24
H
OUR
W
RECKING AND
T
OWING
, a swinging metal sign out front said), and other outfits and materializations appearing from time to time in one or another frame building or in the upper floors of the only multistory structure on the Row, the Brakeman building, conjure shops and false prophets of one kind or another, too, hovering over the hearts of the community for a week, or a few,
and then disappearing, whisked away in the dark of a night similar to the one in which they arrived.

But the Ghost was in none of these places. They hadn’t seen him at Pell’s or at the pool hall or in the Occasions Restaurant or at the Pig Grill or at Shorty’s. He wasn’t upstairs at Fitt’s Grocery where the men played poker five nights a week. He wasn’t at the regular Baptist church or the Holiness or the AME or the primitive Baptist either, and not out back of the Free Will Baptist where a few families were eating the latest mess of fresh souse meat somebody’d cornered over at the stockyards. And he wasn’t at the Emporium.

He told himself the reason he was looking for the boy was because he wanted to bring him back to the house, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t want to go back to the house.
That
was why he was looking for him.

Everywhere he went people knew already about the killing. At Porley’s, young men without attachments drank and loudly raved, but every other place was muted, abashed. Extra white police sat in cars at the bridges and rode in cars through the quarter. They hung from the sides of the cars; like monkeys, Delvin thought, or maybe the start of a police migration. Near the old Morrison livery stable and mule barn, now a garage, he picked up a rock, but even though he carried it for a dozen blocks he didn’t throw it. He didn’t know where he dropped it. The people weren’t out on their porches mostly, but he could see them sitting by kerosene light or electric behind curtains in their front rooms; their shadows were still and waiting. The quarter seemed to swell with brooding, with a sadness that had not yet broken forth in mourning. Flaked mother-of-pearl clouds flew along under a sky sprinkled with coldly glittering stars.

In the Emporium most of the white customers had stayed away. But Frank Dumaine and his buddy were there, as were Mr. Considine and Billy Melton who was kin to the family that owned the First Pioneer Bank downtown. There were a few older white men who had come. These the woman pointed out to Delvin; they couldn’t keep
from it. Many of the white men arrived not knowing about the killing, but in one way or another they quickly found out. In the parlor, except for Billy Melton, nobody was dancing. In the dining room Dumaine and his friend ate chicken stew. Delvin realized he was hungry and went back in the kitchen looking for Kattie. She was upstairs, the cook told him.

“Working?” he asked.

“She’s trying it out,” said the cook, a large woman whose dark-complected face was deep red under the black.

Delvin felt a pain in his breast. The cook caught the look on his face.

“This not the place to be rummaging around for a sweetheart, honey. Unless you a rich man. But then you gon be rich someday, aint you?”

“How’s that?”

“Aint you that old mortician’s boy?”

“I work over at the funeral home.”

“Yeah, that’s you. You the one everybody says he’s gon leave that place to.”

Delvin felt a warmth in his chest. “It’ll be a long time,” he said, “before Mr. Oliver leave’s the Constitution to anybody. By time he’s ready I’ll be long gone from this town.”

“I hear you on that one. Lord, hit don’t near stop,” she said, flicking at a musing fly standing on a meringue curl atop a lemon pie. “I don’t think it ever will.”

“It’ll wear us out eventually,” Delvin said. “And we’ll throw off that yoke.”

“Be careful how you talk, boy.”

“I’m not talking, I’m just saying.”

“These white folks aint never gon take they foot off of us.”

“We’ll knock it off ourselves.”

“I think only the Lord can do that, honey. Though I have to say he’s mighty slow-minded about getting to it.”

“Idn’t that the truth,” Delvin said and they both looked away and laughed.

He walked out in the backyard and peered up at the second-story windows. They were lit softly with red or green or blue lights, some with a rich yellow that laid dim oblongs of light on the grass. Maybe the red one was hers. He stepped into the red rectangle that was more black than red and stood in it. He tried to put aside Kattie’s new business, but he couldn’t help but picture it. It wasn’t just the booting itself that got to him, it was the mechanics of it, the body angles and the wrenches and the wringing and the slop-overs and the beads of sweat and the stickiness in your mouth—he saw too much in his mind. Some other—some white man’s greasy face—naw, it was worse for it to be a colored man’s—panting his liquor breath into hers. He didn’t mind the
business
, not generally; it was his mother’s . . . and where was
she
?