Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall

Just then the door opened and a large tawny-skin woman, ample in all her parts, spilt here and there from her pale blue gown covered partially by a green satin wrapper, entered the room. Delvin got up. He recognized her too: Miz Corona. Miss Maylene introduced him and explained what they were doing. Miz Corona — broad-faced with flesh across the bridge of her nose and filling her cheeks, dark, sharp eyes, a thin mouth heavily rouged — studied him, passed over without seeming to recognize him, and spoke to Miss Maylene about a plumbing problem, overflow on the other side of the house.

“Your mother was a funny lady,” she said to Delvin. “Even there at the last she was making jokes.”

“Do you know what was wrong with her?”

“Weary, like so many. Worked to death. I spect the running didn’t help. She liked to sit in the garden. Right out in the middle of it among the squash and the butterbeans and such. Didn’t like the flowers much, just the old fuzzy yellow squash fruit and the little butterbeans and all. Said where she’d been living she couldn’t get vegetables like that to grow. She would lift the tomatoes — not pick em, just weigh them in her hand, put her face down among the squash leaves — dip way down, almost fall out of her chair.” She glanced at the door. “Then one day,” she said quickly, as if she was already passing like time itself to other things, “she couldn’t get out of bed. You remember that, May.”

“She was right upstairs.”

“That’s right. Tired on top of tired. The next morning when the girl went in to wake her she had passed over.”

Delvin felt a stillness in him, as if a little boat had stopped rocking.

“Who buried her?”

“We did,” Miss Maylene said. “Miz Corona had us pay for the funeral right out of the operating money. We keep a fund for the girls — emergencies. .”

“I mean, which funeral home?”

“Oh. Mr. Oliver’s.” Maylene patted her own wrist. “He’s on his way out, too, I hear.”

“Notice is taken, May,” said Miz Corona.

Delvin experienced a small sadness propped on another, greater, sadness. He was sweating, just slightly, and felt a little cold at the same time. There were pictures on the wall, mountainscapes, tall gray peaks with tiny people standing around at the bottom. He had a feeling that everything was about to bust loose. He wanted to lie down somewhere.

“Could I see the room where my mother died?”

The two women glanced at each other and he saw the look of exasperation pass over Miz Corona’s face.

“You can if you want to,” Miss Maylene said. She called out the name Desiree.

Miz Corona stuck her hand out, palm down — did she want him to kiss it? — and Delvin took it, shook the bulging flesh carefully as he thanked her for her help.

A door on the side opened and the Ghost, wearing khaki army pants and a pink shirt, came in. “Desiree’s busy,” he said. He stared straight at Delvin and Delvin could see surprise hit his face like a shot. His eyes brightened and he pursed his orange lips. But he didn’t say anything. Neither did Delvin.

In the twitchy second or two as they gazed at each other, seconds Maylene spoke into, telling the Ghost to take this man up to the Mockingbird room, he saw his life aimed at this spot like an arrow shot years before, launched into the darktown sky on the July day he was born, anniversary of the futile Union victory at Gettysburg, and fallen here, in a cathouse on Red Row. An ache like an old terrible wound began to throb in his side. Heat flooded his chest and into his face. He steadied himself on the fat yellow arm of the couch he stood beside. He wanted to scream — blast all the crusted-over tears from his body.

“You all right?” Miss Maylene said. “Get him some water, Caroline,” she said to a woman who had come silently in.

They got him a glass of water, sat him down on the couch. From a small silver flask Maylene poured a shot of colorless liquid. “Local heaven,” she said in smiling indication. Miz Corona had left the room. The Ghost just stood there, thin as a wraith, yellow and pink, avid.

In a minute Delvin was better. He smiled at them. His first feelings were strange to him, something not quite right, as if he had planned them. They played off into silence now like notes run by a single hand along piano keys. A sadness held steady. And relief. In his body a looseness, a calm. He got slowly, carefully, to his feet and thanked the women. His gratitude was as strong as his sadness.

In a minute he and the Ghost were climbing the back stairs. The stairs smelled of old washings, of liniment and spicy perfume and several combos of urine and rotten vegetables and pepper sauce. Neither spoke. They crossed the third-floor landing and entered a narrow hallway. The walls were covered in an old-fashioned rose paper down to a muddy brown wainscoting; dim electric bulbs burned in wall sconces stained with verdigris. A narrow strip of featureless dark green carpeting covered the floor. He’d not been in this part of the house before. Doors, liverish repaints crusted into whorls and random patterning, lined the hallway, a few of them open partway. Halfway down a woman’s quavery voice sang, “If you can catch me you can keep me,” from a song he remembered hearing playing on the checkout deputy’s radio as he was being loaded onto the truck for the ride to Acheron penitentiary.

Just beyond a partially opened door and an oblong of drowsy yellow on the floor was his mother’s door, as indicated by the Ghost. He didn’t have any need to come see the room beyond his suddenly wanting to. You take a step, he thought, and the one step leads to another. He felt like he was moving deeper into the dark. But maybe that wasn’t it, maybe he was moving toward the light — or to nothing special.

The Ghost held up one hand for him to stop, took a big ring off his belt, deftly located the key, unlocked the door and held it open.

“You the first bellhop I ever met,” Delvin said.

“You the first on-the-loose jailbird I ever met.” He smiled and stuck out his hand. It was slightly greasy but he held on to Delvin as if he didn’t want to let go. “How you doin, really, Del?” he said. “I am sure sorry about Mr. Oliver. I couldn’t talk much about anything out at Miz Cutler’s.”

“I know. I spect I’m doing pretty well, now that I can walk around unfenced.” He surprised himself how tightly he gripped the Ghost’s hand.

“I’m sorry about your mama.” He still looked nervous.

The room was small, only a bed with a coarse gray wool blanket and uncased square pillow and a little white table beside it with an unlit tin kerosene lamp on the table. A narrow wooden clothespress. A small dormer window looked out on the backyard. He could hear laughter down there.

“I’ll step out here a minute,” the Ghost said and closed the door behind him, leaving Delvin in the dark but for a washed-out light coming in the window. Delvin started to call him back but then he didn’t. He stood in the kerosene-smelling room and then he sat down on the bed and then he lay down on it full length. He curled up on his left side and put his head on the pillow. You’d think time could twist in such a way that the old dried-out moment might come back to life in the present one. What others — what girls, what men passing through, maybe dark horses like the Ghost — had lain on this bed since his mother had slept those few nights here and died? Maybe no one had. Maybe her old festive being still traced itself here. He squeezed his eyes shut. No. It didn’t matter.

He was tired, a graininess in his mind, sand in his eyes; he drifted off to sleep.

How long it was later he wasn’t sure, and in the darkness he wasn’t sure where he was, or if he was somewhere else beside his sling bed at Acheron — or was it Columbia? Strange — he had almost stopped waking in those places. The Ghost’s hand was lightly shaking him as no hand would in prison. He did not come up panicked or fighting. He came up dizzy, as if he was drugged and swimming through layers of drizzle.