Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

That your job? he called, delivering laundry for the neighborhood?

It was a foolish thing to say, he knew, but the girl’s prettiness confused him.

The girl didn’t look at him. Least I got one, she said.

He thought he caught a glimmer of a smile and didn’t feel so alone. His old fantasy of being the intrepid man alone — one of his fantasies — had fallen quickly apart. The morning had a dewy, comfortable feeling to it. Salvia and mexican sage bloomed along the sides of the ravine. He walked along the way the girl had gone — she’d disappeared into one of the yards up ahead, but he didn’t see a way to cross unless he wanted to wade the rusty little stream at the bottom, and he didn’t. He liked wearing clean clothes, liked the feeling of fullness from breakfast. Liked waiting.

He returned to the yard behind the store. The sky was touched up here and there by a few high clouds like smears of white. The day would be hot. He took a seat on a crate under the camphor tree. There were camphor trees in the negro section of the municipal cemetery in Chattanooga. He wondered who was on the funeral list. Mr. O studied the paper and listened to stories from the neighborhoods of Red Row and kept a list, sometimes on a sheet of linen stationery in his bedroom, sometimes simply in his head, of the ones who would most likely be needing his services soon. He never spoke up ahead of time, but he was ready when the day came. Often before he was called. Mrs. Turnipseed was on the last list he’d seen, a middle-aged widow dying of bowel cancer. Her whole house smelled of shit, somebody said. One of the boys he smoked cigarettes with in the alley. And Rufus Wainwright who had taken to his bed with rheumatism. He lay in a room wallpapered with newspapers, listening to band music on the radio, reading the headlines out loud. And they said little Eustace Rogers, eleven, who had fallen off the roof onto the sharp palings of an old wooden fence his father was keeping around, hoping to set it up in his yard, wouldn’t recover. There were others, the sick and the aged mostly, occupants of the waiting room, Mr. O called them, and Delvin had pictured them sitting in the colored-only room outside the heavenly office, their straw suitcases and carpetbags closed with string at their feet, old people and young, children too, some weeping, others stoical, others not understanding why they were there and maybe only slowly figuring it out. What was the weather like outside the window? There had to be a window. He pictured himself in that room. He would be looking out the window at whatever was growing in the yard. Probably mallow bushes and mock banana, a few straggly corn plants, a rosebush dripping pink blooms, tomato vines lying on the ground. He was coming to love the smell of the fields.

A little boy threw open the screen door and rushed out into the yard.

Don’t hit me with that switch, he cried to the woman who chased behind him. She was carrying a long, limber elm switch.

The little boy circled the yard, coming in close to Delvin under the tree. He shot him a glance of humiliation and regret and ran on by. The woman — his mother, Delvin assumed — stood just outside the doorway waiting for him. The little boy stopped on the edge of the ravine and looked at her.

You gon come here, Stacy? the woman said.

I aint coming to take no whipping, the boy said.

Well, if you don’t then you don’t get to come home at all.

The woman stared at the boy a moment longer and then wheeled and vanished back into the store. The little boy, six or seven, squatted and began to cry. Delvin watched him. After a while the boy dried his eyes with the bottoms of his hands, straightened up and came over to Delvin.

What you doing? he asked.

Waiting.

For what?

The bus.

Aint no bus come back here.

It’s a different kind of bus.

You think my mama’s gon whip me? the boy said with an almost saucy air.

Sure does look like it.

Well, she won’t. I’ll just wait out here til she gets lonely for me then I’ll mosey on home.

How long will that be?

Oh, bout five minutes. He scratched his arms. Delvin could see the faint raised red circles of ringworm on his tan arms.

Shouldn’t scratch that, he said.

I don’t see how you can keep from it.

That what your mama’s after you for?

That’s it. He began to cry again. That doctor, he sniffed after a minute, wants to shave my head bald and paint it with grease that stings like fire.

That bad?

Sure is. I seen it done.

But those worms’ll eat you alive.

He scratched mournfully at the rings. It’s a problem that’s got me in a vise grip, he said.

Just then the boy’s mother pushed the screen door halfway open. Here’s a strawberry drink, honey, she said, her voice light and tender. Come on now.

You gon beat me, the little boy said.

Come on sugarbite, his mother said, and the boy walked to her and took the drink and she put her hand on his shoulder and steered him into the store.

After a few minutes Delvin followed the boy inside. The pair were gone, but some men were sitting at a corkboard table set on a crate in a cleared space off to the side in back. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if she didn’t know him. Then in a blink she did. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

That’s Sterling, she said to him, indicating with her elbow one of the men sitting at the table. They weren’t playing a game, they weren’t really sitting around the table, they were just near it. The man she indicated, a middle-aged stocky man with bushy hair mashed down under a forage cap, gave him a one-finger salute and said, We’re waiting on my sister’s boy. He grinned a grin of uselessness and amiable futility. Another of the men, an older fellow wearing a greasy black vest over a clean white collarless shirt, offered him a chair. Delvin slid in and joined the little confab. He was used to sitting with adults, listening to their talk. He had sat up in the viewing parlor or in the Home parlor on call for the bereaved who spoke in all kinds of ways, very often about things that had nothing to do with the dead. People, no matter what happened, kept their eye on the living side of things. The third man, a slim geezer with a fist-sized red rose pinned to the lapel of a yellow bathrobe he kept pulling tighter around himself, looked as if he might be joining the funeral list pretty soon. I’m Albert, he said, offering slim shiny fingers for Delvin to shake. Yes, he said, turning back to the group, my grandfather won that election fair and true. Eighteen seventy-four, he said, turning his narrow face to Delvin, Slidell — fair and true.

What for? Delvin asked.

Why, the US Congress, the man Albert said.

He went on to tell how his grandfather had served two terms before he was thrown out of office after the soldiers left in ’78.

They put it to him straight over the barrel of a Spencer rifle that it was not in his best interests to run for Congress, or any other office, again, he said.

Sho they did, the older man said. Happened all over this country down here. After the US government left.

He was a tall man, Albert said, six and a half feet. He had a natural bearing to him. A smart man, too. He proposed we open the southern part of the state with canals to help with trade — dig em straight to the Gulf — but nobody would vote for the measure. He never got over losing his office. He wound up living out on Mr. Roscoe Tillman’s farm.

Up here, Mr. Sterling said.

Sure. Out in one of the cabins down by the river. Just sitting out there on the front porch in a old rocking chair, like he was dreaming with his eyes open.

Did you know him? Sterling asked.

I did when I was a boy. He wore his Congress suit of black cloth, white shirt and a little black string tie. He was a handsome man.