Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“Me too,” Delvin said, but Morgred didn’t want to share his food with him.

“I can’t afford to,” he said.

Delvin laughed. “You can’t?”

“I’m mixed up,” the boy said.

“Bout what?”

“I know this is you all’s food and so I ought to give you what you want of it, but then I am starving to death and don’t know where my next bit of panbread for example is coming from. So I wants to keep it. But if I do you might just take it from me and kick me out of this stable.”

“I might.” He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll get something inside.”

“Naw. Take one of these sandwiches.”

“Okay. I’ll take half of one. Give me the ham.”

“I want the ham.”

“Okay. Give me half the roast beef.”

“There it tis,” the Ghost said, handing a pinched piece. His voice had a little of a cicadas’ unraveling buzz in it — no bounce, no pick up, only a background of scrub fields, wet basement steps. The look in his eyes was dull as corn meal. He shied and slanted. It was as if he had spent too much time on the Blue Ridge’s bare rocky tops where only stunted blueberries and coarse tufts grew. The juice and kick of the city was dried out of him. Delvin was too twitchy to ask him much. The left side of the Ghost’s face was puffed out and red, and with two scuffed fingers he rocked a tooth like a tiny post set in too large a hole. He breathed shallowly, with a little hiccup like a rut at the end of each breath. He was a blinker.

Delvin turned away from the boy and looked off into the corner where hay was stacked in bales. He rubbed his hand against the unsanded stall wood and felt a tiny sharp splinter slide into the flesh under his thumb. Barely go in. A dot of blood. He sucked the blood and tasted it in his mouth and then in his throat and thought of the boy they couldn’t get the preservative to stay in, saw it running out and pooling on the table, the clear green glistening liquid that was beautiful and made you want to run your fingers through it, which he had done, sliding his hand — this hand here — discreetly along the slab until he touched the tensile edge of the juice and felt it cool on his fingers and he looked up and Mr. Oliver was looking at him with an expression on his face of such sadness as he’d not seen before.

He got up and went outside into the mid dark of night. People who at first had stayed away for fear of the police and the angry white folks had begun to collect in the alley. Small groups clustered across from the back gate and around the garage that let onto the alley and onto the curved drive at the side of the house. Men and women from the neighborhood and others he didn’t know, relatives probably of the deceased. They had brought the body in the back of a box-nosed Ford truck that kept breaking down, they said. The men had worked on the motor with the body wrapped in a quilt in the back as cars passed on the unpaved road at the junction into US 83, and they had felt the weight of the curiosity, of the snoopiness and greed in people’s glances, seen in their faces the hatred and disgust and fear (and seen the desire to feel something strongly enough to wrest them free of their own misery); and how hard it was to know they were thieving our own hopes, someone said, from the dead body of this son or brother or nephew, feeding like buzzards on the dear remains. And some of those white folks spit from the windows of their automobiles, and others, you could see, one said, were gloating and making ugly remarks among themselves— sho nuff, someone said — and others turned away in shame, but even these looked again— they wants to see the blood of the black man , another said and others agreed: yessuh, yessuh —staring, and you could see how hard it was for them not to stop they cars, one said, and get out and beat this poor child some more — oh, Lord —and desecrate his body further — He’s whole before Jesus someone said — Yes, I guess he is, but we are left here with the mortmain and the grief, the voice said.

All the time, so Delvin noticed, a cool breeze was softly blowing— Lookout breeze , they called it in Red Row — flowing down from the big mountain carrying with it the scent of sweet laurel and woodbine blossoming in the cuts and protected places. Mostly these people were silent. But then one or two asked him about the Harolds, mother and father. He’d not seen the father, he said, but the mother was grieving deeply.

He stepped away, walked to the end of the alley and looked out at the big field across the road. The wisteria looped and trailing from telephone and electric wires running along poles out on the old circus ground had bloomed for a second time this year, but the flowers were gone now, and the leaves were turning gold early, before fall had near come. Each year the wisteria, that was to him like some tropical effusion, bloomed early in May, surprising him, and each year Mr. Oliver, laughing, asked, “Where is your head, boy?” and he wanted to say, “Where it ought to be,” but he just laughed too because Oliver wasn’t mad, it was just his way of drawing him close, and both of them liked that.

But now, standing under the sweet gum listening to the heavy leaves make their swishing sound like big skirts rustling, he didn’t know what to think. There didn’t seem to be any happiness in any direction. Before him, the big rusty and ragged field and the meat packing plant and the dusty fertilizer plant, the auto shops and the foundry and the smelting plant, and then the public road running through the mountains and Tennessee into Kentucky and Ohio and Indiana and Canada — all of it — was a wilderness and unsettled; it was all a land of monsters. He shuddered. The wind was cold. It tasted of unvisited streams and rock. He wondered again how it had been for his mother making her way in the dark over the mountains. Had she forgotten him? He couldn’t sense her out there in the wilderness, but he believed she was there. But where was he ? And what was he, standing at the end of a leafy alley in Chattanooga, Tennessee? His hands were still attached, his face uncut, his side unburnt. But for how long? How easy it was to step off into ruin. He wanted to slip into the crowd and stay there in its midst, jostling and petting and sliding body to body, smelling and tasting and touching. And he wanted to haul off by himself, crawl up under a bush and roll into a ball like a possum, sink down into a musty hole like a gopher, hide deep in the rocks like a bear.

When Mr. Oliver had discovered what he’d done with the rendezvous women, tricking them and him into getting together, he was at first so mad he had ordered Delvin out of the house. Get out and be gone, he’d said to him in as stony a voice as he’d heard coming from him. Delvin had walked out not knowing whether he meant just for now or for all time. The yard that night was fragrant with mock banana flowers and peonies. The twins heaved their lanky selves toward the west trailing Cassiopeia and Taurus. Delvin had stood at the end of this alley feeling his life like snow falling on him or the stars falling in cold white bits off the heavenly firmament and the night had seemed too much for him but still great and wonderful. As scared and hurt as he was, he had laughed outloud. Now the stars were something else entirely. Bleak and wind-polished, half sopped up by wads of cloud blowing from the west. There was nothing in the stars. He stood on the shore of a dark and terrible sea.

But that wasn’t true. Where he stood was not a shore.

The breeze picked fitfully at the mimosas bent over the fence behind him, nicked the roses on the Ballard’s fence, scuffed its knuckles on the loose grass behind Capell’s. Somebody in the Lewises’ yard was banging on a piece of metal. Not hitting it hard, just lightly, marking time. It made a hollow sound. He turned and it was a turning back into a world corrupt and ruined, a dirty place with a stink on it. But it was still the world, white quartz pebbles mixed into the grass track down the center of the alley, the sound of Big Archie the bay horse whinnying, somebody singing Do, Lord in a soft way.