Authors: Charlie Smith
“I think she’s mad about being so plain—excuse me,” he said in deference to Delvin’s situation.
“I aint missed that part,” Delvin said. “She’s got other good qualities.”
“I know she do.”
“How you know?”
“I’ve knowed her all my life and she’s a big woman—you can’t miss em.”
“Hmm.”
Delvin didn’t think homeliness was what was bothering her—or not the only thing. “She just hadn’t fulfilled her purpose,” he said.
“Depends on what it is, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
When Feveril went in to pour himself another from from his kitchen jug, Delvin wandered out of his yard. On Lester street on his way to Minnie’s he heard the strains of a song he was familiar with, “Der Stürmische Morgen,” coming from the little one-man barbershop. He peeked in as he passed by and saw the barber, Mr. Eulis, sitting in his tipped-back porcelain chair listening to the Victrola with his eyes closed and moving one finger the way Mr. Oliver did when he played the same Schubert song on the wind-up machine in his bedroom. Down the street outside Leary’s grocery a tan dog stood on its hind legs trying to lick one of the hams Mr. Leary had hanging from the porch eave. A little boy dressed in white stumped slowly on crutches back and forth along the walk in front of a house on Bee way. A large man wearing pressed overalls without a shirt sat in a tree swing staring at the soft dust under his feet. Delvin wished the man would look up so he could hail him and smile. He’d started hanging a smile on his face since he left prison, making himself appear friendly. Wherever he got a chance and figured he could
take
a chance. Stella Burkle, a fine-looking woman but crazy, walked along on the other side of the street, swinging her big white patent leather pocketbook. If you spoke to her she would hit you with it.
Maybe a limp, he thought, maybe I ought to go back to that—throw the marshals off. But it was too late. People knew he had been sick, but that was all they’d heard of that might exclude him from military service. The penitentiary would keep you out. ’Cept they
were probably putting prisoners now on work gangs for the good of the country. Well, the country needed cotton and the prisons he’d been in were good at producing that. The war was one more fright jabbing at men in prison. Negro men locked up in a lost corner of the white man’s world. What’s gon become of you? Who are you? Who you be? And here comes Mr. Billy Camp and his goat cart. The old man, walking beside his two-wheel cart pulled by two billies and accompanied by half a dozen outwalker goats, passed by going the other way. He gave Delvin a friendly wave with his leafy mulberry stick and Delvin waved back. Maybe he could join up with him, see the country at goat speed, pass as a friendly colored crazy man. Back at Minnie May’s white cottage home he sat on the back steps wearing a stained derby with a hole in the back the size of a peach, a hat he had picked out of the trash in Jacksonville. The warden at Burning Mountain had worn a derby with two scuffed marks on the front like the white eyes of a ghost. He had picked up his notebook on the way through the bedroom. The little slip of blue paper he put in it to mark his place was gone; Minnie May had looked through it. So now she knew he was an escapee—probably. But why had he left it for her to easily find? In the book he had taken note of the tin washtub hung on the shed wall, the beans coiled around their strings in the garden. A leaf on a spicebush that spun crazily in no wind he could feel, white as the wing of a cabbage butterfly. He’d studied the soft slim prints of Minnie May’s bare feet in the dust by the back steps, prints that reminded him of his mother’s. First thing his mama did when she came home was to take off her shoes. Walked around all day in her bare feet, leaving tracks he’d followed like a detective. He didn’t think about her as much as he used to. But still in dreams she came to him, laughing or crying, mute and determined, one time yelling at him with her thin arm raised like he was a dog she was bound to beat on.
Sitting now on the back steps, tracing with one finger his mother’s name, Cappie, looking at Minnie’s footprints that might have been his mama’s, he began to cry. He shaded his face and choked down the sounds, careful still of prison dangers. His body shook.
It wasn’t all grief. Mingled with the pasty, durable, extenuated sadness was a happiness, a new one, a stretching out of himself, long-shanked and agile—he was, in this moment of American time, free, a misplaced man, overlooked, drifting on the breeze, a wanderer amid the garrison of interlockedness, sunk deep enough in negro life for a while not to be missed, uncounted by any census, omitted by the tax man, skipped by the army. Only the cross-Dixie skookum boys were looking for him.
He wiped his eyes.
If
they were looking. Maybe they’d . . . but he knew they hadn’t forgot. Couldn’t down here afford to neglect for too long any unaccounted-for colored man. Colored man—the
rules
he had to follow—was the linchpin of the whole business down here. Lynch pin.
In the garden he picked a tomato and ate it sitting on the ground next to a big pepper plant. The calendar said it was fall but it might as well be summer. The sky was speckled with tiny white clouds like little checkmarks. From another yard, not far off, came the thunk of an ax. “Rooster,” a woman’s voice called, “come here and help me mend that winder shade.” The smell of frying pork from far off, sweet smoke. He dried the tomato juice off his hands by rubbing them hard together, picked a pepper, shucked the flaky white seeds and ate that. Then he picked a few late runner beans, shelled them out into his palm and ate them. Then a small summer squash, the ring of yellow blossom a ruff around one end. I could eat myself around the world, garden to garden.
In the wash shed he cranked water into a tin basin and scrubbed his face and hands. In the piece of mirror propped on a piece of shelf he studied his face. There were deep lines running down his cheeks. He liked that; before prison he’d been a fat-faced boy, now he looked like a man who had seen trouble and lived through it. He patted his hair, mulling its length. Before he was arrested he wore his hair brushed out and squared off with a part razored on the left side, but afterwards, in the convict life, he had his hair cut short. Now, out in the world again, he’d let it grow some, and over here in Atlanta
he’d gone to Mr. Eulis’s and while “Laudate Dominum” played on the Victrola had him chop a part into it. He’d tried a mustache, but it looked like a black caterpillar on his lip so he shaved it off. Minnie May had a razor right here in the house, left over from the last man who lived here, and he used that, glad to come that near to having his own. He took time lathering his face, leaned in close to the mirror, examining his creased cheek, the little dents up near his ears, the stubby chin. Sometimes he’d wash the lather off and start over just for the feel of it. Minnie May often heated water in a kettle and carried it out to him; he loved it when she did that.
He took his time shaving, no rush at the moment, pausing to study his face as it reappeared out of the lather.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked it. “You ever gon own up?” He touched the thin puffed scars on his left cheekbone. “I reckon not. No telling what you might have to own up
to
.” In case somebody was listening he laughed a little shushing laugh to cover his embarrassment at talking to himself.
He carefully washed his face and carefully patted it dry and stared at himself in the mirror. “We’ll keep you awhile longer,” he said. He washed the razor, dried it on the towel, folded it and put it in his pocket.
Back in the house he shucked his clothes and slid into bed next to the sleeping Minnie May. She slept on her back, making a soft purring noise, a snore with a tiny bubbling sound at the end of it. He nestled against her and she automatically turned away but he pressed on until she turned toward him. She wore a loose gray slip washed to a softness like fresh ginned cotton. Softer than that. He slid his hand up behind and pushed the slip up her smooth body that was almost as dark as his, so smooth he felt the rough chafe of his own fingers against it and was almost ashamed to touch her. He could smell her now, smell the spicy odor of her and the fresh sweat and the verbena spice oil she poured over herself and wiped off with a cloth, smell the barley soap and the shelled butterbeans and the okra she itched
from and he could smell under these other, unplotted mysteries, deeper reeks and perfumes. He contorted his body until he could put his nose close to her lower back and he inhaled the rich odor of her woman smell and sniffed all the way to her girl smell, even, so it seemed, to her original baby smell, a faint residue of it like a thin sprinkling of garden rain.
With his scarred knees he drove her legs apart and he liked the forcing, liked the resistance, the body’s stiffness and her own pushing back and he kept on driving, hard work he bent to happily, the fullness of his power given to the task like turning a plow in heavy clay, forcing the big coulter with his own body, feeling as he did so the heat rising, the burning life of this slick, fumy soil. He leaned back and stared at her as he separated her from her steady opposition, uncovering her, exposing the black wallow and red pit of her. He touched her with his fingers, three, then only one, surveying, scouting the trail and found it. He slid along trough and excavation, rummaging, loosening. He had at last stopped thinking of Milo and the others. He had believed that if he kept on long enough, if he kissed deeper and held her tighter and stayed close to her and drew her perfumes and funks to him, listened to her and rubbed against her and spoke to her of her desires and longings and of his hunger, spinning a new life from smells and touches and sight and words, conjuring the bed and the house and the streets and the ungovernable city into shape around them, that he could sink into it, into
her
, and he would forget. And that was happening.
She had started moaning even before he entered her and when he did she stopped. He held himself still, waiting. In the silence he could hear a redbird whistling. Down the row a woman called. “Frankie,” she said. “Frankie, come on over here.” As he shanked into her, waxy leaves of pain slid off. He was raw and charged, alight. He started slow and picked up speed. She began to whimper, or was that him? He was cast forth in long looping lines swinging out over deceptively calm waters. Then she bucked back against him and surged forward, attempting to pull his body on a rope. He followed, shoved her down and jammed her back into the earth, crushing the
juice out of her. She clucked and sputtered and banged against his side with her fist. Knocking, knocking, he thought—
come on in
—and abruptly he cut loose from what held him back and thrust himself hard through his own body, driving into her. But he was too strong to collapse.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”
She shoved and underbowed her back hard as if she was going to break bone.
Something ran through their bodies slamming door after door.
Catch me, catch me.
He did, and even as he did so he was aware that this confabulation was only a promissory note and appeal to the greater desire that was lodged, had been lodged, all his life deep inside him. What it was he didn’t know exactly but there were times, and they were not in a bedroom or bunk, when he almost caught a glimpse of what it was, what he really wanted, but then it shied, like a dragonfly catching the breeze, and he couldn’t say. In the meantime there was this. He pounded his way in and moved softly among the simple treasures he found.
After a while he got up, went into the kitchen, pumped water over a fresh rag, wrung it and brought it back to the bed and cleaned her.
They lay uncovered in the warm curtained air without talking, touching a little here and there, and then they fell asleep. He dreamed of cotton fields, of stopping at the end of a long row to take a drink from a bucket handed to him by a man whose face he couldn’t make out. As he held the dipper to his mouth he saw over its rim a fish-shaped cloud high in the east. The water tasted better than any water he’d ever drunk. Something was about to come clear, something he’d forgotten about until now but had always longed to recall. He had to remember it, but he couldn’t stop looking at the fish-shaped cloud or tasting the water. I’ve never tasted water in a dream, he thought and waked.
Minnie was gone but she’d left supper for him in the safe. A note written in her big looping hand, misspelled and hard to make out,
said she loved him and would be back late because she had to go see her mother. He ate the butterbeans and picked the meat off the ham hock and gnawed her crumbly, agreeably sour cornbread and then he got dressed and went out to Longley’s Beer Bar and stood around drinking with a man he knew who had been in prison down in Florida and liked to talk about the life there. He didn’t mention that he too had been in prison but he listened to the man’s stories. He had a hard unforgiving nature familiar to Delvin. After a while he grew tired of listening and played a game of pool with a man who said his name was George Butters, a sawed-off, tan-skinned man with white patches of vitiligo on his face, and beat him handily.
About midnight the place was raided by the police looking for a draft cheat who’d supposedly robbed Calhoun’s grocery down the street. Delvin slipped out the back and ran down to the river where a man in a thin raincoat told him about a big freight forming up for St. Louis by way of Chattanooga and Memphis. Without deciding anything particularly he caught a ride on a jitney over to west Atlanta and walked six blocks to the rail yards, climbed aboard the freight and as the hundred-car lineup racked and creaked out of the yard he lay on top of a red boxcar watching the moon come up over the crown of the Mosley Hotel and Bathhouse, thinking of Mr. Oliver and the Ghost.
In Chattanooga, just off Wildmon street, he leapt from the train neat as a cat and slipped through the moody early morning foglicked streets into Red Row and across town and up hill to the old familiar corner of Columbia street and Arvy road, to find, instead of the comfortable, viney, outstretching old house and funeral home, a green and white Sinclair gas station. He stood out in the now paved street looking at this piggish oddity with wonder and sorrow. He couldn’t believe it. Magic had whisked the old place out of sight in some trickery that in a merciful blink would reveal the wide front steps and the big crape myrtle at the edge of the porch and the high white facade that always looked raked back. He became so shaky he staggered and backed up against a big cow oak across the street from this dwarfish foolery. A smooth, damp breeze slid along, touching this or that tree. The leaves of a large tulip poplar he recognized were already burned by fall. He wanted to embrace the familiar tree, pump it with questions foolishly, pump somebody.
He loitered on the sidewalk, squatting on his haunches, letting the facts push amazement and grief through his body. A man in gray coveralls drove up in a shiny blue Chevrolet car, parked by the station, crossed the paved court and unlocked the door. Delvin walked up to the man and with a sound in his throat stopped him.
“I’ll have her ready in a minute,” the man said, a white man with a half ring of white close-cropped hair fringe around his tanned freckled head. “Car run out of gas?” he said.
Delvin couldn’t speak.
“You need a container of some kind?” the man asked as Delvin followed him into the station that smelled not of corn mush and formaldehyde and Mr. O’s exuberant cologne but of used motor oil.
From a narrow metal locker he unlocked with a small key the man got a broom and started back out to the front.
“You not looking for a job, are ye?”
Delvin said nothing.
“Well, you can start by sweeping off that concrete out there if you aint too fancy for it.”
Delvin took the broom from him and began to sweep off the little sidewalk and forecourt. Across Arvy road where the old circus grounds used to be was a line of low red, tarpaper-roofed warehouses. He recognized a mimosa bush under the unlit corner streetlight or told himself he did. He kept sweeping, afraid to ask the white man what had happened here. His head began to hurt and he thought his malaria was coming back. It couldn’t be that. His mind was like a closed door. He stood outside of it sweeping steadily.
After a while he leaned the broom against one of the two gas pumps, went inside and asked the man about Mr. Oliver.
“Old man Oliver?”
Delvin felt his spirit fall into a hole. “Is he still alive?”
“Last I heard.”
A stuttery joy filled him.
“He’s living over yonder, somewhere over in the Row, I think. Maybe it’s that old preacher woman’s house over by the . . . Exhilaration Church, I think they call it.”
“Thank you,” Delvin said. He was still so discombobulated he went out, got the broom and started to walk off with it before he remembered and turned back and handed it to the man who’d followed him out. “I don’t guess I need a job right now.’”
“Okay,” the man said, handed him a fifty-cent piece and took up sweeping himself.
Delvin walked around back of the station. Everything was gone there too, except for one of the garage sheds. Parked in it now was a dusty stake truck.
He walked then ran down the alley toward the Row, but soon he slowed down and dawdled some, stopping occasionally to catch his
breath that was heavy and hot in his chest. Now that he knew Mr. Oliver was alive he had doubts about going to see him. He didn’t want to upset him, didn’t want him carrying guilty knowledge; mostly he was afraid of being turned away by him. But he kept walking.
On the Row the first person he saw that he knew was Libby Holmes, a now retired domestic who remembered him as the delinquent boy who stole apples from the box in front of the old Heberson market. She looked at him as if she was taking down details for her report to the police. He smiled and nodded and asked how she was doing and inquired as to where he might find the present residence of Mr. Cornelius Oliver.
“Aint you supposed to be in jail?” she said, and he thought, I am going to be in a car heading back to Acheron before lunchtime.
“Well, I was, but they let me out when I finished my time, thank you Miz Libby for inquiring.”
She sniffed and shifted her blue taffeta parasol and said, “That good man is staying over here to Miz Corrine Cutler’s house I believe.”
He thanked her twice and went that way through the unpaved streets under the big leafy trees that seemed even more now to be roomy hideouts and past the barbershop and grocery and the insurance agency and the Knicknack Art Shop and the hardware store with barrels of nails and digging tools out front and past the other stores that were mixed among houses that looked no more prosperous now than when he left. Over all a blue sky with puffed rafts of white cloud a child might dream he could float away on. Few young men were about except for a couple in army uniforms. One boy with a garrison cap pulled low sat on the front steps of the old Vereen house, turning something small in his hands. He looked lonely. Delvin felt a surge that made him want to run up and shake hands with everybody he saw, but then, almost as powerfully, he wanted to slink back into the alleys and under the big shady trees so nobody’d see him. It’d been several months now since he’d been locked up, but who he was, who he’d become in prison—the shallow, scornful
vigilance, the fear like a lacing in his brain, the edges everywhere—kept hanging with him, making him nervous.
He found Mr. Oliver sitting out on the porch of the Cutler house sipping a cup of boneset tea. Delvin climbed the steps not knowing what he would do or what unhappy surprise might come next, but when he saw the old man—he had become an old man—he began to weep and he threw his arms around his shrunken body and hugged him or would have except Mr. O who was crying too said the cancer had made his skin kind of touchy and he had to be careful. “Just better lightly pat me,” he said.
They bleared at each other and Delvin sat down on the porch floor and asked how he was—“How are you, dear”—the man gray in the face and contrived into old age by his body’s struggle with an indefatigable disease. Delvin could see clearly what the facts at issue were. He asked nothing about the funeral home but quietly just told the old man he was free now and doing fine and listened.
“One day life just bucked me off,” Mr. Oliver said.
He had come down with the cancer five years ago—“I lost my regularity, that was the sign of it, and couldn’t get it back no matter what Mrs. Parker tried—she’s still in the world, over here cooking for the Sunderson family, in Wildwood I believe”—and he thought at first he could fight it off but that became a full-time job so he sold the funeral home and traveled around the country trying to get cured. Wound up spending his money in phony clinics and wonder working joints. He’d even gone down to Mexico—“By Pan American airplane”—where he ate mashed peach pits—“I could have gotten my fill of them right here”—and drank bovine gall and other bitter liquids that no human should ever put to their lips, and nothing had worked. He had returned to Chattanooga six months ago on the bus from New Orleans, broke—“and spent, you might say”—and was now waiting for death to take him like a man would wait to return to a home he had never been happy in but had to go to because there was nowhere else.
“Least I can be assured of a place to lay my head,” he said and laughed a creaking, mucosal laugh.
Small peaked sores dotted Mr. Oliver’s face. He was missing teeth, which he tried to conceal with a palsied hand. He had an old blue silk quilt wrapped loosely around him and he wore a maroon knit wool cap and matching scarf puddled under his throat.
Casey Boy was nowhere around. He’d took off, Mr. O said, and joined the army. “Fool thing to do,” Mr. Oliver said and waved a flimsy hand.
Mrs. Cutler’s son stepped out directly and asked Delvin if he wanted to come in for breakfast.
Delvin thanked him and said he’d as soon sit out on the porch with Mr. Oliver.
The son, large, wide, with a small close-cropped head, smiled in a friendly way and said he would bring food out to the porch.
Delvin asked about Polly and Elmer and George and the Ghost, and Mr. O said he had given them legacy gifts and let them go. He didn’t know where they were now.
The breeze had dried out. It creaked in the spindly branches of a sycamore next to the house. The mountain sky was a translucent, unhindered blue.
“I could sit out here for years,” Mr. Oliver said, “I’ve come to like it very much.” He said this as if Delvin had asked him a question. He didn’t inquire about prison. They didn’t talk about the war.
A few negro men in uniform walked on the streets, a couple of them passing in front of the house, swinging their arms as they went by. One of them was the Ghost, traipsing back and forth like he was on misshapen guard duty, a peculiar askew figure in dirty army khakis and a crumpled garrison cap. Delvin hailed him from the porch. The Ghost came angling up, walking half sideways like a dog, his head held slightly to the side, the freckles on his cheeks pinker than ever. He gravely shook Delvin’s hand and spoke cheerily to Mr. Oliver who didn’t seem to recognize him. “I’m home on leave,” he said.
“Leave?” Delvin said. “You look like
you
got left. That a army uniform?”
“I help out with the soldiers. With the cooking.”
“Cooking?”
He was glad to see the Ghost, but something about him, his peculiar listing manner, his off-speaking and the way his pale eyes darted—he wanted to throw him off the porch too.
“So they finally let you out,” the Ghost said, studying Delvin’s face.
“It took some doing,” Delvin said. The news about his escape had scattered like spilled leaves; he’d overheard some people in Jacksonville say every newspaper in the country had written it up. He read about himself first in a paper somebody had used to wrap onions, sitting behind a barbershop with some other men eating fish stew the barber’s wife had prepared for passing tramps. All the assembled had heard about his jump and he had hidden his face in the shade of a droopy magnolia and then cut quietly out of the yard before he got his fill of stew. In C-town they must have been patrolling the streets with shotguns.
“We all figured they would give up trying to trickerate you sooner or later.”
He said it like it was a joke and strung a little frolicky cutup kind of patter together and after a few minutes said he had to be on his way. He bowed to Mr. Oliver and grinned at Delvin and skipped down the steps, the tail of his gray army-style shirt flapping.
Delvin caught up with him out in the street across from a large white oak that had the word GIT carved into its trunk. A large man wearing a shirt made of rainbow patches walked by carrying a sign that said B
ARLOW
B
AR-
B
-
Q.
“Where you headed?” Delvin wanted to know. He was afraid the Ghost would try to get him picked up and wondered why this was and wanted to get him to say.
“I’m on my way over to the Emp,” the Ghost said in a finicky, snubbing manner.
“I thought you were done with that place.”
“I don’t believe I ever said anything like that.”
“I was probably given false information,” Delvin said, think
ing of his mother gone from there for a quarter of a century now. “I mean—” He couldn’t get the words out straight. He wanted to cry—lord, that was most of what he’d wanted to do since he got out—but he couldn’t do that here, now, not in front of the Ghost.
“I got me a friend over there,” the Ghost said, “a white woman.”
“They got white women at the Emporium?” Times had changed.
“It’s almost fifty-fifty,” the Ghost said. “I’m gon get her to marry me and we gon have white children.”
Delvin turned his head, galled. He started to say something, to tell the Ghost that no kind of mustafina child would be white—no way to wash a black man enough times to make him white—and why would he want that anyway, but he was tired of such arguments even before they started. The world bulged with information, with a full baggage of crumbled-up bits and pieces and you could grab out as big a handful as you wanted and make whatever suited you out of it. Half-facts and letters of intent and unspoken questions and rumors and whispers of vanished lives and snubbed-off growing things that would never be spoken of again. ’Cept you couldn’t make yourself white. Maybe he couldn’t make himself free. He stuck his hand out and took the Ghost’s small pink fingers in his thick flat black ones and shook. His broad hand had softened over the last couple of traveling months but there was still a hardness under the softness that he could tell the Ghost felt. He could recall everything from years ago that included them both, but he didn’t mention any of it. He looked him straight in the eyes and in the pale colorless eyes that couldn’t bear sunlight and shied from whoever was looking at him but looked back at Delvin now, sly but bashful too, scared, too, and worshipping, he saw that the Ghost loved him. And the Ghost could tell he saw. Winston,
he
could tell. Delvin wanted to say,
Don’t betray me
, but he couldn’t bring himself to, and hoped it wasn’t necessary. It flashed through his mind to threaten the Ghost—just for good measure, penitentiary style—but he didn’t do that either. You could do anything, you could do everything, but what did it matter? That was something else he’d picked up prison, in the local philosophy class:
nothing’s worth fighting for.
Was that where he was living now? For a
moment he had lost his strength. It was like a hand on his chest held him back.
Don’t . . .
, he wanted to say, or,
I’ll kill you
, or,
Please
, or,
Remember how I saved you
, but he didn’t say any of these things. He couldn’t. Even when he felt the hand relax. Maybe it was love held him back, maybe something else.
He smiled at the Ghost who was only half looking at him now. The Ghost’s eyes were like a kind of crystal. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you over there,” he said, and he was smiling, in as friendly a way as a man who’d just skipped on twelve years in the penitentiary could.