Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall

“Born and raised in Chattanooga,” she said, still smiling. “Shouldn’t be hard to find your way back this way.”

“Maybe I’ll slip by. .”

She seemed to be fading into the dark, but it was just a cloud passing over. The moon hadn’t come up yet. He moved off. When he looked back he couldn’t see her, wasn’t exactly sure where she’d been standing.

The Emporium was lit like an ordinary house. Soft lamplight in the windows, a single lightbulb in a large lantern above the big white double front doors. He went around the side through the arched wooden gate to the back that had been partially paved with bricks and set up with a barbecue grill and tables under colored lights on strings swept up into two of the big fruitless mulberry trees. A couple of white men were sitting in mission chairs drinking beer. An africano woman sat on a bench near them. They looked up when he came through the garden area. He nodded to them, and exchanged pleasantries. He was bound up with nervousness. He asked for Miss Ellereen, the proprietress he remembered, but the woman told him she had died six years before.

“Ate herself to death,” she said, grinning easily.

“Who is the principal these days?” Delvin said.

“Miz Corona,” she said. “You selling something?”

“Not at the moment.”

One of the men was giving him a long, studious look. “You got a familiar face,” he said.

“Everybody says that.”

“Yourn, boy, has a peculiar aspect.”

Two white men, secured by alcohol. They had pudgy, half-collapsed faces, that rucked, white-person skin. They were wearing parts of army uniforms; lost soldiers maybe.

“How you ge’men doing?” Delvin said remembering the protocol, more important, and lasting, than the army’s.

“Especially fine,” one, the slightly fatter, said.

He was thinking how strange it was to speak to white men out in the world. In prison or out he had to call them mister.

“You a fighting man?” the other white man asked.

“Nosir. Cause of my bad leg.”

“You a lucky boy.” He elbowed his partner. “Aint he a lucky boy, Snell.”

“Luckiest boy I seen today,” the other, a red-haired man, said.

“Who you looking for?” the first man asked.

“I was looking for Miss Ellereen, but the lady says she died.”

“I don’t remember her. You must be from around here.”

“Yessir, I is.”

“You a Red Row boy?”

“Born and bred.”

The girl was studying him too. “What’s your name?” she said.

“William,” he told her. “Mind if I step in the kitchen to see after Miz Corona?”

“Sho, it’s all right,” said the girl, just a farm girl skidded this far and no farther.

“Thank you. If you ge’men will excuse me.”

“Oh yeah, Poke, go on, go on,” said the bigger man, waving his wide fish-belly hand at him.

In the kitchen he came on Ostella Baker who had been a helper here years ago. She didn’t seem to remember him. He asked about his mother — he couldn’t keep from it — and every word of asking sounded foolish, backward in his mouth, but still necessary, still a kindness he could do for her. He felt exhausted just trying to keep up.

Everywhere thought extending itself into objects; he could feel the minds percolating around him, a gadgetry of ideas, comeuppances, answers for every problem. The smallest thing, that piece of equipment on the counter, the one with steel protrusions like round combs at the end of stalks. . he didn’t have time to ask about it.

“She worked here years ago,” he said, “but she got accused of killing a man and she had to leave town.”

The girl, woman now, with her hair shoved under a blue turban, cocked her head and said yes, she thought she remembered. “But I believe she’s passed on,” she said.

His knees went wobbly. A lightness filled his head and a pain pressed into his left temple. I shouldn’t have asked, he thought. He looked hard into her light brown eyes.

“There was somebody like that. . right here. I don’t recollect,” the woman said, flustered.

“Anybody around who’d know?”

“Miss Maylene. She helps out Miz Corona. And Miz Corona would know.”

He found Miss Maylene in the large first-floor bedroom converted to office use. It had another small room behind it that looked out on the garden. A tall woman in a yellow tulle dress, Maylene from Dalton, Tennessee, stood at the wide shiny desk, sliding wax paper in between layers of blue blouses. The room smelled of camphor. The woman waved her fingers, picked up a glass atomizer, and sprayed the air in front of her. Behind her, outside the window, somebody turned on a red light. The woman straightened herself and stood stiffly with one hand out in front of her as if holding off the atomizer spray, or feeling her way. She didn’t seem to know him, not at first.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember Cappie. She came back here several years ago. You work for the police, don’t you?”

“No mam, I never been associated with that outfit.”

She gave him a long birdlike look, cocking her narrow face to one side. Her wrists were spindly.

“Are you an army man?”

“Not anymore. They sent me home because of my leg.” He had scars on his legs — where he’d been lashed — if she wanted to check his story. “I’m Miss Cappie’s son — one of em.”

“Not the one that went to prison.”

“No, mam, I’m his older brother.”

“I see the resemblance. Well,” she said sitting down at the desk, “I am sorry about your mother. Sit down,” she said. Her arm like a relic. “That chair.”

He took the pink plush-bottomed reed chair in front of the desk and sank down until he could hardly see over it.

“That’s my mercy chair,” she said, smiling.

He propped himself on the edge. “I hadn’t seen her since I was a boy,” he said. After the first shock he felt calm.

“She was sick when she came here. A couple of people remembered her. It was just after the time that Miss Ellereen died. You remember her?”

“Yes’m, I do.”

“She got a wasting disease, cancer, or something, and we had to keep her in one of the little houses out back. She got it down in her testines and it was a little. . stinky, you might say.” She smiled in a funny way.

“Miss Ellereen?”

“You remember how big she was. Won’t nothing left of her when she died.” She smiled more brightly. “Then right after that your mother showed up. She arrived in a cab. She was wearing a leather dress, like a Indian squaw. What’s that called—”

“Buckskin?”

“Like she was a squaw. . or a cowboy woman — Annie Oakley or somebody. From out west.”

“I understand.”

“She was skinny as a bird. She had a flat white hat with little red cloth balls on a fringe around the edges. She was shaking so bad the little balls shook. I believe Miss Corona had just taken over, maybe it was that same week — I believe Miss Corona was afraid at first to let her in. But then a couple of the other women recognized her, or recognized her name. The girls, except for me and Miss Corona, were all too young to remember her. I believe Buster — the workman — he remembered her too. He was a friend I believe of your brother’s when he was living over here at Mr. Oliver’s — the funeral home?”

“Yes.”

“He was the one went up and gave her a hug. He reminded them of who she was — told them, I mean, like they was waiting for a explanation.”

“She was sick?”

“Sick? Did I say sick?” She glanced into her open palm as if the answer was written there. “She was run down and dog-tired. She didn’t say if there was anything else wrong with her. She just seemed real tired, wore out. They had to near carry her up the stairs. She made it all the way up to the third floor. They put her in one of the little rooms up there. She seemed stronger for a couple of days. She even came downstairs and sat out in the back over by the garden.”