Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“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 BARLOW BAR-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, thinking 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.

After he walked back to Mrs. Cutler’s and talked some more with Mr. Oliver and sat with him as he slept in his chair on the shady porch while the breeze pried at a chinaberry tree by the eave and shook the little bunchy leaves that hadn’t yet turned, he thought about where he was headed — as far north as he could get before Canada (or maybe on into Canada) — and pictured a grassy yard and a house among trees and him out on the porch in a rocking chair under a blanket like Mr. Oliver, working on a book, and he felt a sadness sliding along, sloshing along with the thoughts and the little quivers of knowledge that came along too, the ones that confirmed that he would never be sitting on a porch in this town again, that he was a ghost himself come back briefly to haunt the old venues. Again the tears rose, but again he didn’t cry them.

In his padded rocker Mr. Oliver snored loudly.

Delvin got up and kissed him on the forehead and stood looking down at him. His old smell was gone, replaced by a sour mucky stench not quite overpowered by the odor of wintergreen. People got so they didn’t want to visit somebody who was dying, but they loved to show up to look at a corpse. So the old man had told him years ago as they sat on the side porch watching a thunderstorm come in over the mountains. Mr. Oliver had ridden the train from Alabama to this place and made a life out of nothing but his clever self and hard work. And now he was sleeping his way toward death on an old christian lady’s porch. Well, all right. On the Gulf shore he had walked into the ocean and stood up to his waist in salt water that had never been swum in by africano people. Only africano ones ever in it were those bodies swabbies had rolled off the decks of the slave ships crossing from Africa. He had pushed his face into that salt water. A white woman walking with a big brown dog had called for him to get out of there, but he ignored her. At least until she walked off. Then he high-footed it out of the pale, lank surf and ran for his life.

He wanted to stop people on the street and say that once he left here he’d never be back. Yall come too, he wanted to say — cry out — all of you, you’re free now.

He touched the pitted back of Mr. Oliver’s hand, still a little plump but now ashy and showing red under the knuckles. He didn’t want to leave him . He wanted to go back to the funeral home and get some supper and sit out on a cutblock in the alley and listen to old Mr. Starling from next door tell stories about dances and frights back in the slave times. But no, he didn’t really want that. He wanted these living to go on living, that was the most he wanted. It hurt him to see this battered man here, snoring, a spit bubble like a tiny crystal ball on his lip, hurt to see death crept up so close to him. But that too wasn’t enough to come back for. From the minute he had slipped away from Acheron prison he had felt the exhilaration of freedom. At first it had been so powerful he thought it would be enough to make him happy in the world. But that sense of things had dimmed. It was wearing out. He was nearly back to being a black man in a white man’s kingdom. But not quite. Before the last of that bounteous sense faded away he wanted to stand again in the streets of the town he was born in. Let me see what I feel in Red Row on the dusty street in front of Heberson’s store or standing on the porch of the Home or sitting down to eat in the kitchen. But all those places were gone. He hadn’t counted on that. Well, he should have. Everything was on its way out, handed off into some other configuration, some past you could think about if you wanted to or had to, turned over like soil in a new field in spring to show its bright, glistening other side. Now he had to go. Or would soon. He was older but he was part of the new. And he wanted to tell this to somebody.