Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

In the end it was a mix. Oliver could not bring himself to wound the boy’s half-restored face again. But he didn’t go further. The cuts were still apparent, the lip with its vertical gash like a field-dressed wound. He had wept in frustration and despair as he worked. In the end he was left with a weariness he hadn’t known he could experience and still walk around in. His legs hurt, and a hard pain had worked its way into his shoulders and roosted there.

The boy looked the victim of ugly drubbing and of haste and unrectified fear and sorriness. There were stitches in his forehead, and one eye was sunk into his head. Wads of putty like the clay we are made of. Everywhere in his face was the strange seriousness of underbone. His artificial hands of cotton in their white gloves looked like doll hands. Shame tinged Oliver, but he wanted to give the family what they wanted. He knew it would all work out in the ground.

In the parlor viewers recoiled trembling. Some fainted, others stared, many wept seamless tears and clutched their hands to their hearts, held each other, others passed by mutely, some stared avidly, feeding, some wanted to touch the body, even caress it, others squeezed their eyes shut. A photographer, a small broad-shouldered man smelling of ferrous sulphate, had come in and taken pictures. He had fumbled with his equipment. He dropped two plates, ruining them. A tiny ball of sweat collected by his ear and trailed slowly down his jaw. His eyes rapidly blinked. He sighed. His hands shook and then they steadied and he was able to take the pictures that ran two days later in the africano Mountain Star Weekly and appeared later in papers up north. Spikes, cascades, flushes of anger and sadness. Many felt new weights added to an old heaviness and it was part of life for them, understay and manacle, what you grew up with as a counterpoint to tenderness, murder on the other side of the door. My soul has been tipped into a deep well, somebody said.

Solomon Baker took off his glasses and rubbed them with a blue silk handkerchief.

“How much, Lord?” somebody said.

“How much longer, Lord?” somebody else said.

The people trooped by through the day, through the evening and deep into the petty hours of night. Into the buckled and slumped hours of false dawn. The yeasty realness of life was in their breasts, and even as they grieved many experienced themselves as held deeply in the weave of being and even smacked hard by grief were grateful. Others were simply glad it was not them. Oliver lay on the hardest of the two couches in his office, trying to rest. Delvin came in and without turning on the light lay down on the floor beside him. A night bird asked a question, waited, and asked the same question again, a question never answered on this earth, unless the earth itself was the answer. Oliver let his hand fall from the couch and seek the boy’s face that he touched so gently Delvin could barely feel it and then he groped for his hand. Delvin caught the older man’s fingers and he felt as if he was catching him as he sank into the sea; he gripped down hard and the older man spoke out and Delvin said he was sorry and then in a soft seep he was crying.

After a while Oliver said, “This is only the second time I have had to do this. Usually they take the poor fellow out to some hollow or country pasture and bury him without calling on my ministrations.” He blew his breath out and breathed it back deeply in. Delvin could smell the cigar on his breath. Oliver said, “When she came in the laboratory the last time — to tell me not to fix her boy — I thought I would explode. With frustration and regret. I was afraid I might strike that woman. Oh, I knew I wouldn’t, wouldn’t ever, but I felt so consternated.” He turned heavily — Delvin could smell his musky cologne, and the horsehair in the couch — and his wide face seemed to rest disembodied on the edge of the couch, like a face in one of the books he had read as a child, disembodied and filled with curiosity. He said, “For a second I thought I would strike that woman and walk out of the room and keep walking until I came to some other world to live in.” He looked in the dimness at Delvin with eyes that contained a shadowed mournfulness. “But there is no other world.” A crinkling, whispering sound then where Oliver’s silk robe rubbed against the couch. “I could walk for a thousand thousand years,” he said, “and not find any world but this one. Lord.” He patted the edge of the couch. “A mortician’s not supposed to feel like that.”

“What about Africa?” Delvin said.

“What’s that?”

“When you’re walking.”

“Walking — hunh.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Africa. That old bushy place? Those folks over there have forgot all about us. We wouldn’t fit in. Despite what old Marcus Garvey in his big hat and with the whole UNIM behind him says.”

“What about some empty place? Some place nobody stays in and nobody wants?”

“Only place like that is a place nobody can live in. Shoot, I’d go live on an iceberg in the Arctic ocean if I thought it could be done. But even there the white man would come and run us off. Wouldn’t want us mixing with the polar bears.”

“I don’t want to mix with them anyway,” Delvin said for the laugh in it, but he was thinking, Always the hard way’s the only way .

Oliver let loose a long rattling sigh and then silence fell again. The night bird inserted its ascending cry, only the final note a true question.

“I’ve known rivers,” Delvin said.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world and older

than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

“That’s beautiful, boy. Did you make that up?”

Delvin didn’t say anything.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s strong and faithful, faithful to the truth.” Oliver raised himself. “You ought to say that at the funeral tomorrow. Or I mean today. This afternoon.”

“Oh, no,” Delvin said.

“I wish you would. I know it would be a piece that would be a great help to everybody.”

Though he wanted to claim the words as his own, and might have if he wasn’t spooked by Oliver’s proposal that he say the lines of Langston Hughes’s poem at the funeral, he admitted they were the great Harlem poet’s and not his. Oliver looked him in the eyes and smiled, knowing what the boy had almost done and not offended at all by that sort of humanness.

“You’re an uncommon young man,” he said, words that Delvin would recall often — sometimes derisively — in years to come.

“I might be,” he said, “but I don’t want to get up before those people and say anything at all.”

“I can’t make you, boy, but I would be happy to support you in saying them.”

They were both exhausted, and shortly after that, after the whippoorwill’s duty was passed on to a widow bird offering its own cranky cry, they fell asleep and would have slept right through the funeral if Polly, who had cried half the night, hadn’t kept calling from the door until they waked. Delvin, despite the occasion, experienced a jolt of happiness when he saw her standing in her fresh navy-blue dress in the doorway. He spoke to Mr. Oliver, who lay on his back on the long couch, thinking — so he said in a moment — about the net sack of oranges a white woman had given him one Christmas when her driver stopped her carriage in the middle of Valhalla street in Montgomery and called him to the door. Later three africano boys had taken the oranges from him.

They got up and moved quietly in the faint clattery silence of early morning.

The leaves of sweet gum trees made moving shadows on the walls of the church. Across the yard was the old church, a tiny square wooden building, hardly bigger than a cotton house, with a cocked steeple the size of an apple crate riding the roof. The old structure had become so infirm that it had been locked for years and would have been torn down except for the sentimental and historic value it had for the community. It had been recently whitewashed, thanks to Cordell Meeks, a parishioner whose cotton fields bordered the property, and this had made the congregation proud. The new church was an elaborated version of the old one, planed boards, a shingle roof and a tin steeple perched on the roof line like a squared and pointed hat. There were hitching posts for the mules and horses in front of the old church. A cleared space for cars in front of the new. Mostly folks came in wagons. Many sat now in their wagons, two hours before the service, patiently waiting. On the other side of the red dirt road sheriff’s deputies sat in two big black cars.