Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

But he shivered and turned from this one, crowding against the big galvanized tin sink. The clear water running steadily from the tap soothed him. Culver’s presence soothed him. The equipment, gauges and hinges of bright metal, scoops and forceps in their clattering, soothed him. These matters are ordinary and superficial, he thought. No, they’re not. (They are too weighty to be stood up under. No shelter can keep off the load.) Yes, they are. When he turned back to the lighted body he saw he had not fixed his mind and turned again to the sink. The clean gray mottled galvanized bottom, the smoothly whirling clear flushing water. Culver’s wet arms gleaming as he lifted them in the light pouring from the downturned trays on the ceiling.

Delvin stood quietly. He thought about the woods where he liked to stand at the end of the Little Hollow Road trail and ponder on the thousand secrets hidden among the trees. Secrets not like propositions and facts you could come to know but true secrets, mysteries and puzzles you could never discover the answer to or reason for. You could only stand there, like a mourner before a grave, and wonder. He thought of his mother, who was alive, he was sure, moving through that forest of secrets, finding her way. He could feel her, sense her, tracking across the landscape. He bore down steadily — in the few seconds of time that seemed to stretch before him like a day or a year — and once again he could almost find her, almost see her, trailing her blue shawl behind her like a flag. But once again she eluded him. He gasped. He was back in the room. He ran water over his hands, cleaned them with soap.

Wearing green rubber gloves he helped as they washed what remained of the boy and gathered up the pieces that had fallen or been torn off and that came loose as they as gently as possible washed the body. Culver tied off and bandaged the wrists. With a sure hand and tiny stitches Mr. Oliver sewed up the mouth that had been ripped open by blows. He attempted to inject the embalming fluid through the big neck vein and then through others in the thighs and under the arms, but none would hold the slick greenish fluid that drained out onto the white marble table and ran along the gutters into buckets. “It’s all right,” Oliver said when Elmer began to cry.

They had wrapped the torso and legs loosely in yellow oilcloth when a hard banging began on the door. Then the glass pane broke and Mrs. Arctura Harold, the boy’s mother, rushed screaming into the room. Her left wrist streamed blood where she’d cut it breaking the door using the small brass cuspidor that had stood beside it.

Oliver sprang nimbly for so large a man to meet her. He caught her arms and drew them together, crossing them, and pulled her to him and held her against his chest as she screamed. Her scream was like the scream of a creature from the ancient dark of the deepest woods, a creature everybody has forgotten about except when on times like these some ruined individual screams and they suddenly remember.

At the scream, surging and smashing and excavating with a frenzied dedication for the soul already fled the premises, all the strength went out of Delvin’s body. He leaned against the sink, catching himself on the lip of it. The woman wouldn’t stop screaming. Why should she? he thought, amazed at her lung power. He wanted to scream too, but he was already sobbing and the whole front of his body was numb.

And then, from outside the room, from the hallway that had been filling with people from who knows where, came more screams, loud mixed voices, human voices, crying out, yelling and shouting and screeching until Delvin thought the air itself would shatter and fall down and they would be standing screaming with forsaken eyes in the face of heaven or whatever monstrosity or nothingness was behind the world.

The screams went on and then abruptly they seemed to collapse on themselves and they trailed away. The mother of the boy croup-moaned in Oliver’s arms. He began gently to speak to her, but as he did she broke away and lunged at the table. Outside the room a low groaning and keening had begun and as she moved, the crowd, that only a few of could see into the room, swayed and trembled like a sea, moaning and making little chattering and clicking sounds, little human expressions, nicks and chips at the unholiness, at the failed light, whispers and clucks, tiny hisses like spray blown off the tops of waves, all entirely human, pure and unbreakable in perfection, the only perfection left to any of them just now.

Mrs. Harold had thrown her body across her son’s body and she was kissing his sewn-up lips.

Still bent over, she took a shuffling step back, placing her hands not on her son’s body but on the marble table. She raised up. “Oh, Lord, do not,” she cried in a wild voice. “Do not, Lord, do not. Do not ransom this child.”

She began again to scream, to shriek in a high, unworldly voice, but before she got well begun her voice sheared off and she dropped to the floor. In the hallway, like a sea, voices massively groaning. Oliver had tried to catch her, but she hit the floor on her side. Both Mrs. Harold and Oliver were smeared with blood that was seeping from the cut on her wrist.

Oliver called for them to get the doctor and he and Culver lifted Mrs. Harold onto the auxiliary table, an old steel-topped folding table used when he had to travel out to the country to work. With alcohol and a tourniquet and hard pressure that made Mrs. Harold cry out again, Oliver was able to stop the bleeding. He had Culver and Elmer carry Mrs. Harold out the double back doors and up to the back screen porch where they could lay her on the big daybed kept there along with folding cots for sleeping on hot summer nights.

Out in the hall he comforted Mr. Harold, who had not come into the embalming room.

“She just got a nick on her wrist,” he said. “The doctor will be here in a speck.”

Then he went himself and phoned from the telephone hanging on the wall of the embalming room. He came back and said, “The doctor is leaving now.” Dr. Mullens lived in the next block and was the only africano doctor in the city at that time.

Oliver spoke gentling words to those standing in the hallway and came back inside and shut the door behind him. Culver had hung one of the big aprons over the missing glass.

“Thank you, Culver,” Oliver said and leaned against the wall. “Thank all of you.” He closed his eyes and pressed the unbloodied knob of his wrist against his forehead. He looked over at Delvin and smiled a sad, weary smile that brought out his dimples. “Take a long breath, son,” he said.

Delvin breathed deeply in. His chest was a dusty empty room filling with a burning wind. His face was wet, and he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes on one of the gray clean towels stacked on the counter. The shouts, the screams and yells, had been like huge scouring pads, rubbing the feeling off his skin. He was numb — in the places he wasn’t still burning. He felt a pressure in his head like a trunk filled with something creaturely that was pushing to get loose. He sat down in a chair by the sink and pressed his face against his knees. The blood rushed and dammed and he sat up quickly. He was about to faint. He grabbed the edge of the sink, pulled himself up and vomited. Culver came over to him and said he ought to go outside. But he said no. He wanted to stay here as long as he could. He thought he could make it through. “I’m doing all right.”

“Anymore all right as that and we’ll have to take care of you ,” Culver said. Nothing ever seemed to bother Culver.

With the paints, some of which he had mixed himself from raw earth he collected in the ravines and from under rhododendrons growing below the ridge and had drawn from roots collected in the deep woods and dug up from clay pits and boiled out of leaves and bark, Oliver painted the broken boy’s face, and with other paints, commercial cosmetics mostly, he added color to his cheeks. He picked the boy’s hair loose and oiled it and brushed it back from his bony forehead and then for the second time in his life as a mortician he bent down and kissed the product of his ministrations, this ruined child, on the forehead. He had not looked directly at Delvin, who had stayed in the room for most of the work before he remembered Morgred waiting in the horse shed and became distressed and nervous because he didn’t know what to do and told Culver, a small tidy man worn to exhaustion by now, that he had to pee and went out and carried the food he had packed in a small hamper out to the shed and gave it to the Ghost, who knew nothing of what had happened except he said for the hollering somewhere off there, and was peevish and unfriendly and, so he said, starving.