Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“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.