Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Looking up the trail that continued through the leafy trees filtering into piney woods, he debated whether to keep going. These moments of hesitation were familiar to him. Seems like that’s where I really live, he sometimes thought, not in the doing of one thing or another. He didn’t really want to go on, but he felt he ought to, ought to be brave enough or interested enough. Or was that a way of really wanting to do something — thinking he should — and hiding it from himself. He’d like to go into the little room where he slept and lie on the bed and read something, maybe the book of fairy stories or a newspaper. In their parlor the Bealls had My Bondage and Freedom by Mr. Douglas and Souls of Black Folk by Dr. Du Bois, but he had already read those books. He wanted to read another masterpiece, like Ivanhoe maybe, that he had read last summer lying on an old couch up in the attic at Mr. Oliver’s. He liked stories of struggle and questing in distant locales. Reading was natural, Miz Parker the cook said, to moody boys, and you are a moody boy. Maybe too moody, he thought, to be out alone in some thorny wood.

Then, without as far as he could tell having decided anything, he continued across the bridge and up the path that was strewn with waxy needles and rose gently into the pine woods. Just a few steps in it shaded off to the right, passed a large hedgelike growth of ligustrum that ran fifty feet in a high green wall and left off abruptly at the edge of a clearing in which there was a small white frame cottage. On the front porch of the cottage in a rocking chair much too big for him sat a tiny white man. The back of his chair soared high above his rusty white head. On one of the posts was hung a gray Confederate battle cap. The old man was looking straight at him. Delvin would have ducked and shot off from there, but the man called to him in a sweet little white man’s voice.

You, boy, welcome, he said.

His voice came so quick it caught Delvin before he could swing around. He must have been listening to him come along the trail. Those are some ears, Delvin thought, on an old man.

Did you bring me my candy? the man said.

No suh, Delvin answered.

Well, come on up here anyway and sit awhile.

Delvin came slowly up a sandy walk that was bordered by bricks set on edge and end to end and painted white. A low tea olive hedge was planted around the base of the front porch. The old man smiled as he came up the steps; he had been smiling since Delvin came in the yard. He half rose from his rocker and stuck out his hand. Delvin didn’t at first know what to do.

Well, the old man said, let’s shake on it.

Delvin bowed his head, took the old man’s hand that under skin so soft it felt like it would pull to pieces was as hard as wood. The man pumped his fingers and let go.

It’s good to get the human touch as often as you can, he said sinking back into his rocker. He sat among plump red cushions looped to the back of his chair. He wore a blue-striped white collarless shirt and a pair of nutbrown heavy cotton trousers. On the crest of the cap were two crossed swords. Delvin knew these caps from the parades in Chattanooga. The old Confederates marched together or were wheeled in their big wooden chairs in the group that grew smaller every year.

I see you’re studying my headpiece, the old man said, though Delvin had only glanced at it. He didn’t say anything. That’s from the independence war, the old man said.

I’ve seen em before.

They getting scarce, aint they?

I was just thinking that.

Where you from?

Atlanta.

Hm. Your accent sounds a touch farther north. Got some mountain in it.

Atlanta’s where I’m from now.

Well, Atlanta. Now there was a fight. Did I introduce myself? Probably not, I usually forget. I’m so happy to get a little company I jump right in. You’ll be lucky to get a word in yourself, young man.

I’m pretty much the quiet type.

Well, that’s too bad. By time I get wound down I like to hear from the other party. I’m Mr. Jobeen Mitchell. He cocked his head to the side. His old flesh slipped on his face as he moved. His nose, long and drawn down to a point at the tip, was waxy and gleamed in the soft light under the sighing pine trees. You been to any extravagant spots lately?

No sir, not lately.

Fletchy up there — you come from the house?

Yassuh, I guess—

Fletchy comes down here to read to me from her fairy books, but I don’t particularly care for them wispy tales. You like em?

I like about anything that’s written down.

Well now that’s a good way to be. Or maybe it aint. It’s a question I ask myself. Is it a man’s duty to let the ramblings go on unchecked, or is it his duty to at some point put a stop to em? That was the question old Ape Lincoln answered with a war against us. The old man knocked against his chin with two fingers, stretched out his jaw. What if he hadn’t won that one?

The Civil War?

That’s what I’m speaking of. War of Secession.

I’d probably still be a slave, Delvin said, thinking, as if I wadn’t one yet. His voice sounded funny to him, clipped, squeezed; maybe that was how they talked in Atlanta.

A slave? the old man said, throwing his head back. Oh, I doubt that. I spect the shame of that arrangement would have gotten under the skin of even these hardskin folks down here. But then, you probably feel like you even now are a slave.

Sometimes I do, Delvin said. Maybe he was under a spell, and this codger was some kind of old man witch.

He was still standing. At this point the old man indicated the companion rocker, also a tall chair. I’m sorry, he said, I was so glad to see you I forgot my manners. With nobody around my mouth gets backed up.

Thank you, Delvin said, and sat down.

I was a corporal in the Sixth Alabama Volunteers, the old man said, looking at him with eyes the blue of which had soaked into the white, a fighting regiment that mustered in after First Manassas and mustered out after Appomattox. I lived personally through eleven major battles and a sack full of skirmishes, all before I was twenty-one years old. The war put itself into my mind in such a way that nothing after it has been able to take its place. He looked away. His profile was jagged, bitten looking. Near bout nothing, he said.

Some of these old confederates, so Delvin knew, believed the war was still going on. This man seemed to be one of them. Twenty-one in ’64—that’d make him eighty-six right now.

The old man pushed back in the rocker and as it rocked back seemed about to go out of sight in the violet gloom of dusk, and then as he caught himself on the return seemed about to pitch into Delvin’s lap. Whoa, the old man said. You come from the house up yonder, didn’t you?

Yessir.

Howse Fletchy doing?

Mrs. Beall?

None other.

She appears to be fine. We been putting up tomatoes.

Well, I hope she brings me a jar of them. He looked in a wistful way toward the trail Delvin had come down. I used to live up in that house.

It has a gentle seat, Delvin said, quoting Ivanhoe.

Howse that?

It’s a good-looking place.

Me and my daddy and his daddy were all born in that house. Fletchy was born up there too — not directly in the house, but in a little house down from it. Her folks used to work for my people. Howse she doing by the way?

She’s doing fine. We been reading in her book of fairy stories.

I gave her that book when she was a spring child. A beautiful young girl she was. She had the jumpinest legs. Just springing about everywhere. You ought to have seen her leap a fence. He stared hard at Delvin. You one of J. D.’s kin?

Nawsir, I’m just down visiting.