Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

By this time a couple of others had joined the group around the makeshift table and they too offered their stories. One spoke of a pack of wolves living in an abandoned house on one of the great cotton plantations to the west. Another told of money, confederate gold, buried in malachite chests along the Porterville Road, some said, at the bottom of a pond in a cypress grove. Another said he knew that grove, but he had heard of no money buried out there.

Wadn’t no gold left among those folks after the yankees got through with them, Albert said and everybody laughed.

Around them the great fields of cotton stretched away in every direction, the last fields in the last big cotton county before the mountains. The split bolls leaked white fiber and on a clear night the earth seemed covered with small showy stars. As the stories went around a feeling grew in Delvin that his life’s journey had begun. He had not thought of journeys in particular, not his or anyone’s, outside a book, but the strong feeling came that he was beginning on a journey of journeys. Not just this little jaunt down the road from C-town, but on from here (even if he was already on the way back to his birthplace) farther and farther. He wanted to ask Mr. Sterling when they would be leaving. He was afraid to, what with his circumstances; he got up, went over to the corner and sat down beside some stacked boxes of canned beans. In a few minutes he had drifted into a light sleep. He dreamed of a boy tussling with another boy who was as tall as a giant, and of leaping off a viney bridge into a great green river, and of dancing in front of a pretty girl, and of washing long yellow rolls of cloth in a barbecue restaurant kitchen, and of a dog that understood everything he said. He could still hear the voices of the men droning on. They were trying to top each other’s stories. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake or asleep. He started to say something and then Mr. Sterling was shaking him by the shoulder. He jumped to his feet. In only a few quick minutes he was out front in bright sunshine tossing his bindle into Sterling’s dusty Chevrolet pickup and the two of them were headed out of town.

He rode turned away from the man — older, with ragged gray hair under a gray felt hat and above a dark-complected face — because he had an erection. It came up shortly after they got in the car. Sterling had glanced at him and Delvin thought he saw his minor predicament. The town flowed away from them and they were in the country. Tall red spires of sumac flowers by the road, cattails in the ditches spilling their stuffing. In front of a squashed-looking white house, lumberous oaks with dark green leaves. The trees made the house look small and lonely. What was it he had been dreaming about? He remembered: fights and friendly dogs, and something else, something muted, stepping from a stillness that didn’t want to stay still. His plans seemed silly now as he traveled through the farmed countryside. What of the old man in the cottage? Would he just sit on his porch waiting for the woman until he died? Was there a contest, fight of wills and desire and hopes going on without cease on that farm? Did the Bealls lie awake at night struggling with loss and consequences, decisions made that changed everything? The path down into the piney woods was well traveled. By whom? It hurt that he would never know.

Delvin’s familiar erection passed. He didn’t know where these traveling erections came from, what they were about. He wasn’t charged up by sex right now. They hung around then drifted off like some corner rogue who’d thought of something else. A streak of high white cloud narrowed in the west. The fields were planted with cotton mostly, some with barley, some with hay grass. Mr. Sterling talked of his family — a wife and two boys who were mostly grown. The boys worked in town at the Easy Buy Tire store, fixing flats and putting new tires on trucks and tractors. In houses they passed — isolated farmhouses, tenant shanties, farmworker cabins in a row under sycamore trees — tragedies, commonplace occurrences, religious makeovers, births, nonsensical familiar arguments, were taking place. A wife threw boiling water at her hateful son and missed him. An old man lay in bed choking on a radish. A little boy with a pale white scar on his heel stood on the seat of a hay rake, tottering, about to fall into a harrow’s teeth. A man spoke on the party line to his brother, wondering what they should get Mother for her birthday. A tea caddy? his brother asked. A young woman who had lost her husband’s gold-plated watch cried in her bedroom, sorry she had ever married and left her home. An aging ne’er-do-well, father of eight, paused on the back steps to look back at a field of flowering purple vetch, thinking that the beauty of the world was endless.

Time passed and the closer to Chattanooga they got the more scared Delvin became. He had tried to forget his predicament but he couldn’t and now it flopped out onto him like a bitter truth. The closer he got the surer he was that he couldn’t go back. The police were waiting. Delvin knew what the penalty was for shooting a white boy. His mother had fled a killing herself, taking to the woods after she had brained that old haberdasher in the hallway behind his shop. No forgiveness for her in this world. And none for him. He felt a rush of feeling for his mother, and tears rose in the corners of his eyes. He trembled and he put his hands on the dashboard to steady himself. His hands looked wrinkled and old and this frightened him more. As they passed through a small railroad hamlet he asked Mr. Sterling to stop the truck. You all right, boy? the man asked. I think I changed my mind — I forgot something back yonder. Well too late to go back for it. I got to, Delvin said. The old man pulled over in front of a small hardware store on the main street. Behind the store the train tracks ran north and south. Thank you, sir, Delvin said, and he gave the man his one case dollar left. The man didn’t want to take it but then he took it anyway. Delvin got down and stood in the dust watching the truck go on up the road. A crow, passing from here to there, croaked as it flew. He headed around back to the tracks to wait for a train.

So his real travels began. He rode the trains that passed through dinky towns and entered big cities through the back doors and he rested on the top of boxcars smelling of rotted grain and rode the gunnels when he had to and swung onto the metal porches of gondolas and spoke with men who had wandered so far that they had almost outdistanced their own bodies and become ghosts, and he learned to dodge the bulls and the rough riders, and he picked up what he could working here and there, baling hay and hoeing bush beans and winding tobacco leaves onto sticks, and everywhere he went the stories collected and the unpainted domiciles of black citizens stood before him like memories of olden times and he entered new worlds life by life and gathered there his tares and offered what he could and the days passed clanking or whispering along the chain of his life. At night sometimes a loneliness like a lost letter found him in his bed in a cottonhouse or on a forest floor or inside the patternless wooden walls of a boxcar and it tried to explain to him that he would never find a home but he refused to listen and turned his back and gazed out at the moonlight standing in wet grass like an angelina too shy to come inside. Time sang its cracked songs in rail yards and along the edges of the fields and passed on, leaving half memories and slights and a false heartiness and belly laughs and cold suppers on somebody’s sagging back steps: the poor-mouthings of a crass deceiver he took little count of and rarely worried about.

The dots of blackness on each calendar date, marking another day when the police did not come pulling at him, rousting him from a hobo jungle or barn or back steps, added time, freedom from what he knew was awaiting him. He carried this knowledge of the pursuit like a stranger, dark man, darker than he was, accompanying him into whatever town he passed through, whatever road he walked along, slipping with him at night into open fields or woods or along leafy riverbanks. It was in this flight, in these days, that he touched his mother again. Beside a stream in Louisiana choked with rusty foam he found himself dreaming of her so profoundly that he thought he lay with his head in her lap listening to her sing “Old Johnny Jones,” one of the songs she had sung to him under the little peach tree in their backyard in Chattanooga. He too was a runner, he had wanted to say, he too knew pursuit, but she faded before he could get the words out. In dawns of swirling fog he called silently to her, but she never answered. The days came up, wintry or steaming with heat, and in them he felt the press of the law. But always he felt the reassurance of his mother, escapee and wanderer, out ahead of him somewhere on the roads or crossing a river on a hand-pulled ferry, sitting by a campfire or dancing on a stage before admiring crowds, and gradually in these dreams, these fantasies or reveries or boy’s make-believe, she bent toward success, toward kindness and elaboration, rosy with life, resting as a free woman in a happiness that was the happiness of dreams, and in these dreams he too was free.