Authors: Charlie Smith
There was a time, the professor said—we all remember it in our bones and in the stories we tell—when the gods spoke to human beings. When God’s voice came from bushes and streams and rocks and told human beings what was so in the world and in themselves. Everybody was able to hear and the gods spoke about this and that and maybe they spoke too much and embarrassed themselves or maybe people just got bored hearing some rock or snatch of poke salad yammering endlessly about love trouble or tactics or what to eat for supper, but anyway the gods began to go silent. One by one they dropped off until there was no more talking from the celestial quarter. Then we felt our aloneness in the world. Then we got scared and started building forts and piling up money and inventing artillery and we started shooting at our neighbors and we were scared of anybody who didn’t look like us or act like us. It was time to call on the gods but when we did nobody answered. We were on our own in a way that made expulsion from the Garden look like a dropped piece of bubble gum. And it aint changed. The silence—and you can believe it—is rock solid. The gods have departed to other lands. We been left to make our own way to glory. And truth is, few can do it. But that don’t mean, the professor said, that we got cause enough to stop trying.
Later in the day a small africano boy fishing the river for shell bass comes on him but he is afraid to wake the ragged man and he runs home to tell his folks. An hour or two later three africano men shaking the bushes find him and after a short parley bring him to the home of the little boy. A man in the four-room slabboard house is drunk and laid out in the back room with pneumonia. He tried to treat himself with jick whiskey bought for a half dollar over in Munn City and the combo of the pneumonia and the whiskey is killing him. His brother, who lives with the family, and his wife, who is the mother of one of
the brother’s children, offer Delvin a seat at the table and they try to feed him but he is so worn out—he doesn’t think he is really sick anymore, just tired to the bone—that he can hardly keep his head up. The
brother offers him a drink of elderberry wine and he takes a sip to be polite but he doesn’t want any of that really. He lips the glass vaguely and puts it down. The wine is purple and has black specks floating in it.
“If I could lay down,” he says. They fix him a bed out on the screened-off half of the back porch and he lies down on an alfalfa-stuffed mattress and thinks This smells like the shed back home, and it isn’t only that but he can’t remember right then what it is and falls asleep. He dreams of fish thrashing feebly in a poke (but maybe it isn’t fish), and of a white man in a leaf-strewn alley entrance making hobo signs (the double diamond of Keep Quiet; the two straight bars of Sky’s the Limit; the triple thatch of Jail) and grinning in a scornful way. He is overtaken by a sobbing that seems wholly part of the dream until it wakes him and his cheeks are wet. He lies in the shade of the roof overhang, coming back mostly to himself. The little boy comes out to look at him. The boy smells of raisins and Delvin remembers sitting on the pantry floor at Mr. O’s as a child eating raisins from a cloth sack with the picture of a raised-up circus elephant stamped on it. “My name,” the boy says and points above his head at the wall. Scratched into the chinking mud are misspelled words, unintelligible signs—Morus, maybe that is a name. “Morris,” Delvin says, and the boy smiles, whirls and runs back into the house. He feels slow and dodgy, without intent, saturated and feebly draining, raveled at the edges, parts coupled and strewn about, wayward. The air is coarse and lively against his skin. Raisins, he thinks. He used to pick them one at a time from the sack, eat them slowly, dreaming of life out in the wild mountains.
He stays with the family for a week until he feels the red dog loosen its grip and then he decides to leave because he wants to get down to the coast. The state men have poked around looking for him but when they
came by the folks hid him out in a canebrake under a tarp soaked in tar wine vinegar and even the dogs missed him.
“No reason to go that way,” the brother, a stringy man with a small face flat like a cat’s, tells him. “Aint nobody down that way looking to shelter a black man.”
But Delvin wants to go. He has heard the surf crashing in his dreams and in them he sits beside a great blue sea.
After much calling on the holy trinity and the blowing of milk smoke into his mouth by a man who never saw his father, the placing in his ear of a lock of hair from a child the same color as the sufferer, the forcing of a cup of hot boiled and strained mule manure tea down his throat, his chest painted with turpentine, and a bag of asafetida from the mountains tied around his neck, the sick man dies choking from the pneumonia. When Delvin looks in from the door he sees the man’s gray pinched cheeks and his nose like a stob and his eyes already sunk into the sockets like ball bearings dropped in mud and he thinks here is something familiar but he doesn’t go into the room. The next morning they bury the man in a little africano cemetery down the sand road a mile from the house. The cemetery is set off by itself inside a low twisted stake fence at the edge of a pasture that has a half dozen stringy cows in it. Delvin never mentions that he knows something about preparing the dead. He doesn’t mind fiddling with a corpse but he doesn’t anymore care for sticking himself into anybody’s grief. A stubbornness in his soul, a disheartened doggedness, maybe a divination, some shaky repudiation of the former life, has taken him. The wasted man drowned in his own spit, coughing and gasping and squinting into corners for God or the devil or who knows what—Jacob’s ladder maybe to climb him out of that sticky place—and an abrupt wild panic had come erasing the squint and then a blankness erasing that and no god came.
The burying is on a sweltry day with a dampness attached that makes him feel as if his blood is running hot in his veins. Everybody feels feverish. The body in its raw pine coffin held together with nailed-on baffles stinks of the fever. Oscar is the man’s name. Somebody cries it out from the back of the small crowd, a woman no
one admits he knows. A bird in a maple tree makes little
pip-pip-pip
noises. His brother, Oscar’s brother, cries like a baby. Delvin has been on burial details at Acheron, silent pilgrimages where nobody spoke up about anything. A chaplain tossed a handful of dry words in after the deceased, this nonentity it was clear the Lord cared nothing about. The preacher here, a small man who smells like he has been drinking, says the Lord is already holding brother Oscar in his arms. “Not too tight,” the man next to Delvin says. “It’s hot where he is.” Delvin shivers and wants to shut the man up but he says nothing. Not outloud. Farewell, brother, he says silently, God be with you, have a good . . .—and then the words drop off as if he’s come to a cliff. But it aint no cliff. It is a dam. Behind which a slowly pulsing body of words is backed up, a lifetime—twenty lifetimes—of words and everything else. Somebody throws a bouquet of tea olive in the hole. Delvin can smell it above the stink of the corpse, a sweet drifting scent of the world going down into the ground with him. Tears come to his eyes and the woman next to him, wife of the brother, looks strangely at him, as if she has just realized who he is.
Back at the house he tells them he needs to get farther south.
The brother—his name is Willie Drover—says, “Aint too much farther south you can get,” and even one or two of the grieving women laugh at this.
“I got some business down on the Gulf,” he says, thinking as he speaks the words that he is half lying because he doesn’t really have any place to get to except away and that isn’t a place unless every place not a state prison is.
But he doesn’t mind being made fun of. He is rich—or half-rich—in his spirit on this side of life even if he is slow to rise and suspicious. He favors this walk-around and jump-down, linger-on-the-porch, eat-at-a-table-with-the-children-and-the-women, nobody-hanging-around-with-a-whip side of things. Let me stand and shiver and nobody but somebody worried momently for him might say anything. How you feeling? Well, I’m just fine. Even the big chinaberry tree out the window looks filled with a special life, the big clusters of purple flowers exuding sweet scent you could walk up and put your
face in. The sunlight on the gray dirt road out the window seems to shine with a manifold potency. No whipping on that road, no pits to lie down in. He tells some of this to John Paul, Oscar’s almost-grown son. John Paul says he doesn’t know anybody who don’t have a whipping in his future.
“Not like the kind I mean,” Delvin says.
They sit beside a little feeder stream peeling birch twigs and looking at the tiny swirls the water makes where it catches against branches and bits of trailing leafage. The air smells of pine and some moldering bit of animal flesh that hasn’t quite finished curing. The plan for a journey has come to Delvin. He wants to get out to the ocean and travel on it. “I’m going to make a big circle,” he says.
“And come right back here?”
“Someday maybe, but that’s not what I mean. A circle with a chunk left out of it. Or a squinched circle.”
John Paul spreads one of his big hands. His knuckles look like scuff marks. “You gon be a traveling man?”
“For a while.”
He wants to tell him about his plans for writing a book, but he hesitates. To say the words—he is afraid they’ll curdle it. And hell—a book—he is just talking, just dreaming on his feet.
“I want to see something I hadn’t ever seen before.”
“You can see that right here. We just had a display there in the house.”
“I’m sorry about that. I know how a passing can cut deep.”
“Not too deep—not this one.”
“Yeah, and I know you got a promising life here and all, but I’m thinking of my personal plans.”
“Sure you are. I got plans too. Sometimes I can see em right out in front of me. At least up to a point.”
That point being, so Delvin knew, the one where you give up because you have to admit to yourself that every day is going to be like the one you just finished. It is why things around here like weather and holidays and births and deaths and the mysteries of religion are so important. Harmless fun. Constant pressure from the white folks
until you got to bust out. So you rob a store or kill somebody and here you go down into the hole. Big Broadus back at Burning Mountain said he ought to just settle down and do his time. Well, that is what everybody with sense or asleep out here is doing too. In him is something scratchy and moving. Good or bad he doesn’t know. Something clucking at night or whispering to him or pleading. Maybe that is the way the gods have come back. The professor said conscience is as close as we get anymore to the gods. But in prison his conscience has become strained and elaborated with unusual amendments and declarations. He doesn’t know anymore what kind of voice speaks to him. He can hardly sit here now with this farm boy talking. He wants to leap up and run off, just keep running.
“I think I want to move around for my whole life.”
“I was in New Orleans once,” John Paul says, “but it knocked me down and trampled on me. I was lucky to get back here with any hide left on my body.”
“You didn’t uncover anything you liked?”
“Sholly I did. That’s what got me runned over.” He scratches his temple with the end of a twig. “I guess after you sit in the jailhouse for a while even a section of dirt road with nobody on it starts to look good.”
“I reckon.”
“I don’t want to get into no jailhouse.”
“No you don’t.”
He doesn’t either want to get in a jailhouse and feels the press and cluster of an excisement only partial, ragged in his body as he moves about the homestead. He is shy of the porch and the steps and the rooms filled with the smell of fatback and corn mush and the smells of women and he is shy in the yard where they have set out wild rose bushes in buckets and shy too even in the backhouse where an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue serves as paper. He sidles away, drifting along a line of diminishing notification, and finds a little spot among myrtle bushes back behind the house where he feels most safe and sits on the grass there thinking. He can think about anything and so he thinks of the Gulf and the wide world beyond it and he’s done this before even
though the cons told him not to but this time it seems close enough to touch almost. Space. That’s where they keep it. So get down to the Gulf. His heart beats faster than usual and he knows already his loneliness has extended out into the world, following him like a dog. It is still there. I am a common man, he thinks, and on this day I am free to walk around loose but I am still lonely and maybe there is no cure for it. He wonders what Milo is doing, if he is alive, and Ralph Curry and Peaches and Still Run Siems and Bony and Carl and the preacher and his minions. He leans over his knees with his hands gripped together as the worshippers do and says a few words about the wideness of the world and finding a place in it, just general commentary and wondering. He is still tired but a new energy has poked up in him like a fresh growth. He is tapping along like a blind man, looking for a way to open up. The sun streaks his shoulders with a softening light. He begins to cry and he lets himself go with this until he hears himself making noise and stops. He leans over his knees and presses his hands flat on the grass and holds them there like he is holding the world down. Or gripping it by the handle. Nobody comes along and tells him to move on.
Two days later he catches a ride on a wagon heading down to Salt Town to pick up a load of oysters and fish. Every so often this run is made and the seafood brought back under croaker sacks piled with cracked ice to sell in the communities, white folks first. The bed of the wagon gleams with fish scales. The man who carries him, Billy Foster, wears a pair of washed-out overalls and a patched gray shirt buttoned at the wrist and all the way to the Gulf he talks mournfully about his wife who has recently taken up with another man. There are fish scales on his cracked boots and his small flat fingernails gleam like scales. He seems at every minute about to cry but he doesn’t.