Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I’d be glad to do it,” Delvin said, “but they’re looking for me at home.”

The man grabbed him by the wrist, quick as a snake, and tried to put two dollars in his hand. “You go get that jug,” he said.

“I would, but I can’t.”

“Damn rascal, you take this case cash and go.”

Behind the house the shadows flung their arms up into the heavy leaves and brought them swiftly down. Delvin broke away and ran down the street. Across the street, light from an open grocery shone on a big Bull Durham sign painted on a billboard. A boy stood in the doorway eating with a spoon something out of a tin can. Was that the Ghost down on the ground by the fire? Getting beat on? He told himself it couldn’t have been and ran on, but he was afraid it was, and afraid — knowing it — for the kind of boy he was for running away.

But it wasn’t the Ghost because when he returned home he found him back in the shed, stretched out in the empty stall asleep on his pile of hay. Delvin woke him up. “Where you been?” he wanted to know.

“I had to go see my auntie,” the boy said.

“If you’re going to see your auntie, why couldn’t you stay with her?”

“She’s at the jailhouse. But I knew she’d be worried about me, so I had to go ease her mind.”

In those days the women prisoners were kept around back on the third floor of the old brick jail. From a grassy hill above the parking lot friends and relatives could shout to them standing in the cross-barred windows. Morgred’s auntie, a crazy woman, saved peas from dinner and tossed them at folks. Morgred showed him a pea he had caught.

“Hard as a damn rock,” he said. “Lord, it’s a terrible thing to be locked up in that jailhouse.”

Delvin went in through the big double basement doors and found Oliver finishing up. The dead boy lay peacefully under a mostly repaired face. The smashed-in parts had been picked out with an awl and the dents filled in with putty but they’d left the makeup off so you could see where the work was done. The pick holes and the brown putty. The boy now had hands, or at least he wore white cotton gloves that looked as if they were filled with palms and fingers. “Cotton ticking,” Oliver said, the gloves tied with white hemp twine to the wrists hidden under the white shirt cuffs and the black broadcloth coat taken from among the pile in a big cabinet out in the corridor.

As Oliver bent over the galvanized sink washing his big soft powerful hands, he said, “I thought you’d flown the coop, boy.”

“Flew but not far. Sometimes all this is a hard thing to bear up under.”

The hallway was cleared of everyone except for Culver and Willie. Culver sat in one of the old wheatcloth armchairs against the wall. The big cordovan aprons, hung on hooks by the door, looked as always to Delvin like the skins of cadavers that somehow hadn’t made the grade for burial. “Leftovers,” Culver called them.

Now Culver looked up at him, ashen-faced, his eyes blood-veined, hopeless. But as Delvin passed, his hand shot out and with his knuckles he rapped Delvin on the thigh.

“You’re a good boy,” Culver said, turning his head without shifting his body, which leaned over his knees. And George, the handyman, leaned against the wall, smoking his corncob pipe. “Rumpled us down to the ground,” he said in an uninflected voice.

“Come on, you men,” Oliver said and shepherded them all up to the kitchen where Mrs. Parker had prepared a night breakfast of cheese eggs, ham, hominy and biscuits.

They sat at the honey-wood table eating and then at the end they cut open the white steaming cathead biscuits and poured wide rivers of cane syrup from the big round tin spilling over the plates and sopped the syrup up with the biscuit flesh and chomped it down as the sun, in yellow and peach streaks it slowly gathered into itself, came up. The new day laid its foundations on the windowsills and pushed gradually into the room, lit by the big electric bulb hanging from the ceiling under a green shade and by a coal lamp on the counter, and Delvin, his eyes so packed with sand he could hardly keep them open, was sorry to see these two lights extinguished. He wanted them to keep burning into the day in memorial to the day passed and its events.

But the sunlight that couldn’t be stopped shone on the red bread-box and on the bottle-green icebox and on the blue, marble-painted crock containing cucumber pickles and on the polished black enameled woodstove and on the pale blue safe with the pink floribunda roses painted on the two doors, and he watched all these take their true colors back to themselves and the faces of the men and Mrs. Parker take on the colors and shapes that they carried through daytime that were different from their faces at night under even the brightest light, somehow more supple and creased and softer really than at night, even if they looked more battered and old. He could smell the scents of mock banana flowers and gardenia and pine rosin from the yard, and smell the grass and the dew itself, and it was as if the sun brought these in too. And all of them, including Oliver leaning against the counter sipping a cup of black coffee, felt something hidden inside themselves brought back out into the open, something made up of sorrow and vigor and reverence all bound together. They felt restored, resolved. And this feeling, too, like the tide of light, passing even as they felt it.

The funeral was held a day and a half later at the tall narrow Jericho Holiness church fourteen miles outside the city near the old negro community of Middle Horse among the remnants of a neglected pecan orchard surrounded by mixed cotton fields and woods. But before this, lines of silent mourners trudged through the funeral home to pause before the white-painted pinewood box plumped with quilted blue satin complete with a blue satin pillow for the boy’s head. They’d been coming through since first light. CASEY DAVID HAROLD was etched into a round brass plate on the coffin lid. His mother sat in one of the plush red quilted armchairs in the little family room off to the side of the viewing room, moaning and gripping herself in her arms. Her husband, a heavyset, feckless man taken by drink, skittered around the room laughing in a strenuous false manner and shaking hands with everyone who came in. Behind his gay mask his eyes burned with a fever of grievous perplexity. An air of mortification and sorrow filled the room. A compressed vulcanizing barely contained energy swelled. And in some spots hope guttering.

“We’d have held the viewing out at our home in the country,” Mr. Harold told folks, “but it was just too small.”

The funeral expenses were being paid by Mr. W. B. Bickens, who had also offered his house for the viewing, but he was relieved when Mrs. Harold said no, she wanted the people of Chattanooga to get a look at what those white men had done to her child. (No white folks showed up at the funeral home.) Oliver had worked hard to bring the boy back to the look of health. Mrs. Harold had broken into the room a second time and ordered him to stop fixing her son’s face. At first Oliver had thought he misunderstood her, or he told himself he did. She said, “I don’t want you making a fool of my son.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, “I won’t. . I couldn’t,” and let his hands drop to his sides.

“I don’t want you fancin’ him up.”

A sadness had filled Oliver’s body. The tips of his fingers were shriveled from the ingestants. He wiped his hands on a clean towel he took from a pile on the counter. The towels were usually kept in one of the cabinets, but this case was such a mess he had Culver bring them out. “I will—”

“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say what you will or you won’t. Just quit trying to replace my boy with somebody else. Put him back like them white mens left him.”