Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He told the Ghost to run on to the house and then he waited a while before going into the grocery and buying a bag of crackers and some store cheese. Then he crossed the Row to Onely’s house. It was a shanty made of boards tacked onto poles and a roof of slats covered in disintegrating tarpaper. He sneaked up through the smelly yard, a skinny pale dog snuffling and bowing-up with delight at his side, and looked through a crack. There was no sign of Onely. As he walked away down the alley Onely called to him from a mass of elderberry bushes. He stepped out to meet Delvin. The alley smelled like dead animals. Gray puffed clouds were out all over the sky, sliding along, hauled like barges by a great current before a pinched moon. Onely had a hat, an old soft snapbrim with a hole in the crown, pulled over his eyes. He didn’t push it back to talk to Delvin.

“I was afraid you’d run off to turn me in,” he said. His large teeth gleamed as he spoke.

“I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t even think of it. Besides, we’re two colored boys. They’d be more happy to fry two than one.”

“I hadn’t seen anything unusual around here,” Onely said.

Delvin told him about the Ghost’s visit to the police station.

“That humbugger. He probably turned us in.”

“He wouldn’t. He’s a free-hearted soul.”

“You think they want to keep it quiet til they catch us?”

“They couldn’t do that. This is the kind of thing word gets around on. You sure you shot that boy?”

“You heard him cry out yourself.”

“I heard somebody.”

“That was probably the somebody that said They shot ’im . Dang. Even if we’d missed him by a mile, they know we’s black uns and they’ll come at us just the same. You shouldn’t a spooked em.”

Delvin thought that too but he didn’t say anything.

He wanted to tell Onely how scared he was but he thought better of it. If they got out of this Onely might hold it against him, or, before that, he might think Delvin couldn’t be trusted and no telling what would happen then.

“I’m shook,” he said, unable after all to help himself.

“You not the only one.”

In the dark stinking alley piled along one side with barrels containing not yet expendable refuse, they stood in the deeper dark cast by the shadow of a tin-sided shed. Delvin leaned against the tin that was cool and made a low crackling sound as it slightly gave. He pulled himself back upright.

“I was thinking of running off into the hills.”

He hadn’t wanted to tell Onely that either, but maybe he would want to come with him. In the dimness Delvin could see in Onely’s eyes knowledge of his life. You can tell what people know, he thought. That was the difference between eyes of the living and eyes of the dead. Dead didn’t know anything. Once he had realized that, he was no longer nervous around corpses. He studied Onely’s round face.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gon catch a train. I was on my way to the yards when I saw you coming around the corner.”

“I’ll go with you,” Delvin said, and the two of them started out. But when they reached the train yard just beyond the south side of the quarter he changed his mind. Not at first but during the time they waited for the train to form up.

“In twenty minutes on the roads we’ll be in Georgia or Alabama and they won’t come looking for us down there,” Onley said.

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

He’d be trapped on a train. He wanted to be on his feet, running.

“I don’t think this is for me,” he said.

But he waited with Onley in the empty boxcar they’d crawled into.

“As soon as this thing starts I’m gone,” Delvin said. But when the car jolted and stopped he only looked up without moving and when it jarred into motion he got up and went to the door but he didn’t jump out. “I’ll ride a little ways with you,” he said coming back to where Onley sat with his chin tipped up and his eyes closed.

He stayed on until the train passed the junction at Buttonwood, first settlement inside the Alabama line, where he intended to jump down, but he stayed on instead, through Buttonwood and then through Shelby and then Holderness and Barwick. It wasn’t until the train rattled through Slimton, just past the two straggly, crooked blocks of the town, as the freight began to pick up speed past the long curve leaving the Culver Ginning Company behind, that he jumped down, rolled into a dry ditch, got up and walked away down the road, heading, to his vague surprise, not back to Chattanooga, but west.

“Since then,” he said, talking to himself as he walked along a hard dirt road, “old Delvin’s been on the loose end of loose.” He thought of turning up in Chicago, half dead, penniless, and making a life for himself as a musician. He had heard Louis Armstrong play on the radio and had once seen Duke Ellington walking down Adams street on his way to conduct his orchestra at the Harmony ballroom. He carried a light cane that he swished like a little limber sword as he walked. Or maybe he would live on the rough streets until winter came to Chicago and then catch a train to Miami.

He was still breathless after a mile walking on the side of the road. Nothing ahead but farm fields and woods. No telling how many miles of them. Why not go back and catch another train? Why not go home and hide under the house? Watch the legs of the police as they rounded everybody up. Oh Lord. If he was going back he would have to walk through that little town. These farmers would eat him alive. Oh Lord. He stopped and stood in the middle of the road. A consternation came on him so powerfully he thought his head would burst. What the mercy do I do? He scuffed the light, speckled dirt. It smelled of the country, of country life. Tall sumac bushes nodded darkly and gave in a little breeze. He thought he might walk on a bit farther, see what he could see. He started out.

As he continued south he would step off the road and crouch in the ditch when he saw car lights coming. The ditch was dry and sandy at the bottom. There weren’t many vehicles, maybe six between when he was set down and when the first gray shadings of dawn began to appear over grassy hills to the east. He stopped to rest. He lay down in the ditch grass. He shut his eyes but he could see the white boys running after him. Then he could see the solemn-faced girl. She was a plucky girl; he hoped their paths would cross again. The grass itched through his shirt. How would he ever get home? He began softly to cry, holding the tears in, ashamed of them, as if there was someone around who might see and rate him. After a while he slept, but just barely, always near the surface where it seemed white boys carrying big sticks were about to catch him. At the earliest shadings of dawn he was up and walking.

For nine months he wandered, catching trains out of little shapeless burgs, riding all night peering up from splintery beds of flatcars at the drifting stars, wondering who he was and where he would wind up, taking his meals at back steps and in alleys behind little restaurants, gnawing on hard store cheese and crusty bread, wondering where he was going and when he would get there, crossing rivers and blackwater sloughs where buzzard delegations perched in tall cypress trees and passing fields ornately laid down, riding and working and pulling his socks off only when he came to a likely stream he could wash in, laying low on the lowdown, a railroad angelina shy of bulls and yeggs, careful with his few cents, taking his time to question others who might look likely, flailing in dreams, and wondering if he would ever again light on somewhere to stay. But time passed, the world edged into fall, and he grew homesick. Outside Barwick, Alabama — the closest he’d been to Chattanooga since he stepped down from his original freight — he caught a ride with a farmer who took him home on a work plan, and all the way Delvin was making up a story, not his, he knew that already, but the man’s, story of a skinny fellow with a wrinkled brow and slim shoulders and a partially withered arm, some farmer with a mystery in his life that he couldn’t express and needed old Delvin to get him going and help him tell his tale. Everybody had a mystery and on the roads you heard versions of mystery like fairy tales and legends continuously revised. Stories of great fights and punishment and loss enduring like an eternal flame. Stories of marriages gone sour and children lost in a fire and stumbles that threw a man down into pits and left him crawling in dark hallways under the gaze of strange faces peering ghostly through windows, and floods come like destitution itself, and somebody had his left hand cut off with a pirate cutlass and another had his back broke by a cotton wagon and somebody else discovered his sweetheart in a junction between towns where nobody would tell you the truth about anything and he said to his sweetheart I will go get us something to eat but when he came back she was dead in the road with her throat cut. The stories stacked in your head like painted plates and you could take them down and read the life of the country in them and he liked to do this even though each one made him lonely. Here was another.