Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He already felt trailed — hunted really — by the boy loping behind him. He wished he hadn’t said anything to him. The Ghost. He gave him an angry look. Elta Napier, a girl his age, stood out in her yard stringing ragged shirts on the washline. She wore a white shift that dragged up her thighs as she reached to pin a fluttering gray shirt. Delvin wanted to leave his self-appointed duty and go speak to Elta. Her thick hair was tied around with a pale blue cloth. His heart took a leap; it was a day, he thought, for heart leaping. He wanted to rush across the yard and push Elta to the ground. He wanted to fly to her and kneel on the packed and swept dirt at her feet. He slowed down, stopped and gave her a wave; Elta waved back without looking at him.

The boy came and stood close enough behind so Delvin could smell him.

“I thought you was going to show me a place.”

“We’re on our way to it now,” he said without looking at him. “I thought I told you to hang back.”

“I got to lie down.”

“Well come on then.”

He led him to the shed and piled a bed of straw for him in one of the unused stalls. As Delvin worked, the boy watched without offering to help, an impatient, grieving look on his face. The two horses shifted uneasily. The big gray nickered at him and Delvin stroked his nose. “Yall be friendly,” he said to the pair.

“You can camp here,” he told the boy. “I’ll go up to the house and get you something to eat.”

Willie and the yardboy Elmer were nowhere about and Delvin wondered where they’d gotten off to. No one was in the kitchen either. Delvin went into the pantry and made up a basket of food from the array of delectables they had received from the two funerals Oliver had presided over earlier in the week. The pantry was always stocked with a bounty — layer cakes and big yellow hams and roasts in gelatin and eggy puddings and covered casseroles and blueberry and huckleberry pies and tureens of soup covered with cheesecloth. Delvin made a couple of ham and roast beef sandwiches on thick slices of white bread he cut from a long loaf. He filled a bowl with Brunswick stew made by Mrs. Constable Brown to serve at the funeral of her husband Harry J, the bullying boss of a negro road crew working out on the Capital highway.

Where was everybody? He went out to the dining room and stood listening. In the big enameled tin plates propped along the chair rail Delvin could make out his distorted reflection. No sound in the house except for the hollow ticking of the big clock in the hall and the finches Mr. Oliver kept in the big cage in his office. The birds peeped and rustled and the familiar sound seemed the sound of the house itself. Then he picked up the low sound of voices coming from the workrooms downstairs. He went back through the pantry into the kitchen and down the back stairs where he met Mrs. Parker coming up. She was wiping tears with her apron.

“Lord,” she said, “they done hung another one.”

Delvin felt a hard exacting chill.

“Help me up these stairs,” Mrs. Parker said.

He took her arm and helped her up and got her a cup of coffee from the big tin pot at the back of the stove and sat her in the rocking chair she kept by the breakfast table and then even though she asked him not to leave her and then told him not to go down those stairs he went. He had forgotten all about the Ghost.

Willie Burt and Elmer and Polly and Mr. Oliver’s assistant Culver and a large dark-skinned man he didn’t know were in the cool fieldstone hallway outside the embalming room. The room was faced along its full length on one side with frosted white glass, and the darkwood door in the center was in the top half panel covered by the same glass. The word RESTRUCTURE that had been there when Mr. Oliver arrived was painted in black on the pebbly glass.

Mrs. Brass, who worked with Polly, was sobbing loudly, as was the big dark-complected man who held a red bandana to his face. The others were quiet. Their faces looked like masks. Polly, tears on her cheeks, came up to him and took him in her arms. He felt her body in the long length of it against his and felt the remarkableness of it — she had never hugged him before — but this was so in the midst of the choppy, ice-laced fire in his gut.

As Polly held him the door opened and Mr. Oliver stuck his head out. “There you are, boy. I need you.” He came out. He was wearing a cordovan leather apron that covered his body and under the apron a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his black funeral pants. He stepped to the crying man and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Carl,” he said, “dear Carl.”

The man lifted his eyes from the bandana. His eyes were so wet and red they looked bloody.

Delvin let Polly go and followed Mr. Oliver into the embalming room.

A twisted, naked, half-charred corpse lay on the marble table. Delvin cut his eyes away but not quickly enough, and he wanted to run out of the room. Mr. Oliver closed the door and came up behind him. He put his arm around Delvin’s shoulders.

“Come help me with this poor boy,” he said.

The man’s name, boy’s name, written in green ink on a square white card and propped against an empty water glass on the counter that ran along one side of the room, was Casey David Harold.

“Seventeen,” Oliver said. “Caught sneaking, they said, from a white woman’s bedroom — they said — with a gold acorn bracelet and a ruby necklace and some of the woman’s clothes stuffed in a valise.”

He touched the crusted forehead with the first two fingers of his right hand, lightly but without hesitation, as if this was some imprimatur he was placing there, resolution of flesh on flesh, from wretched life to life everlasting.

“They put him in the jail over in Custis,” he said, “and shortly after midnight last night some men came and got him out of that jail. They put him in chains and hauled him in the back of a truck out to the river where they tormented him with fire and water before they cut his hands off with an ax and then raised him up to hang him in a hickory tree beside the dirt road they came in on. Then they set him on fire. The fire — as you can see — burned him on one side only.”

His voice was hollow, oratorical.

The boy’s burned side was drawn up in a strange lopsided way and ashy now and showed streaks of gray and red flesh under the black rubbled crust. The other, free of rigor mortis by now, was loose and askew, the handless arm with its projecting inch of bone thrown out like a sharpened white pointer aimed at the floor. The body looked like halves of evilly treated people joined together, two people without relation to each other except in the mystery of there being no limit to what human beings could come up with to do to each other. This angel who didn’t know he was an angel, burned and strangled by furious ruffians who didn’t know they were angels too.

Sweat stood on Oliver’s brow. The helper, Culver, washed equipment in the big metal sink on the other side of the room, banging metal against the sides. The boy’s face was blistered and distorted but not terribly burned. Everyone could be thankful for that.

On the counter, beside a red celluloid pinwheel and a line of photographs of male negro movie stars and an ivory frame containing a photo of an elephant the white folks had hung right after the Great War for misbehaving, in open cherrywood boxes the glass bottles of numbers 17 through 52 brown dyes, of conditioners, humectants, anti-edemics, lotions and perfumes waited. On a rolling wooden trolly the big galvanized tank of formaldehyde; gray rubber tubing and silver hand pumps on a tray underneath. One gallon of juice per fifty pounds of corpse. Delvin knew this already. He’d seen corpses, by now he’d helped out.