Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

At a funeral they caught on a pass-through in Coldwater, Louisiana — trying a little utility work to drum up business — as he eavesdropped on a gassy and trouble-infused woman describing her husband’s medical symptoms (bilious fever, bone shave, a gathering in his feet and a little apologetic cough that was driving her crazy), past her terrapinate chewing brown jaw, across the room and out the window and on the other side of a little yard, standing in front of a piney wood the understory of which was filled with blossoming blackberry bushes, he spied a woman, no, a girl, who was the most compelling person, femalewise, he’d ever seen. She was slim and nearly blueblack like him and had bushy hair that looked uncombed and untreated — never treated — and in her wide face was a look of barely suppressed outrage and a sorrow and under this an astonishment that as he looked seemed the most familiar and unusual and irresistible expression in the world. As he watched she bent her head back and caught the sun in her face. She opened her mouth and he watched the sun catch in her white teeth.

Crimped, exhilarated, trying not to draw attention to himself, he scooted out and dashed around the side of the house to introduce himself. But when he got to where she’d been there was no sign of her. Usually shy, usually a slider along the edges, he asked five different people if they’d seen her and would have asked more, but the fifth, a salesman for the Universal Encyclopedia Company, with a leer that would have been a wink except that he had a lazy eyelid, told him she was in town visiting a local friend from college. The salesman didn’t know her name but the local woman was Annie Bawnmoss and she lived two streets over, back from Till’s grocery between the house with a lopsided porch and the Free Will Baptist church.

Delvin hustled over there and arrived just as the two young women were climbing the front steps of a small brick home.

“Hello,” he called from the street and the local woman, Miss Bawnmoss he figured, turned and looked at him.

“Do I know you?” she said.

The other, the one who looked so familiar and unusual at the same time, turned too and looked at him as if she was interested in who he might be.

“I’m Delvin Walker of the American Museum of Negro History,” he said breathlessly, trying to get a smile to set right on his face.

“You look like I’m supposed to know who that is,” the first girl said.

“No way really that you would, unless you are interested in negro history.”

“Negro history,” the other woman said, not a question but musefully.

Delvin wanted desperately to ask her name. “Yes,” he said. “Hello, I’m Delvin Walker — with Professor Carmel. I help put on this traveling museum show we got about negro history.”

“Traveling,” she said, still not a question.

“Oh yes. We got a big old truck type van with the whole museum inside it.”

“I’d like to see that,” she said.

“You could come right now.”

The woman continued to look at him in her museful, slightly dislocated way. Delvin immediately retrenched.

“We’ll be parked over at the Melody AME church, over on — where is that? — on. .,” and he looked at the local college woman, who had a narrow face and hard, intelligent eyes.

“Come on, Celia,” she said, “these wandering wooly heads come through here all the time.”

“That extension off Foster street,” Delvin said. “I could come escort you if you like. When you like.”

“That’s all right,” the woman called Celia said. “I can find my way over there I reckon.”

She smiled. It was a friendly smile that Delvin took to heart.

“Well,” he said, almost choking, “I’ll look out for you.”

The two young women went into the house.

The next morning he swept out the museum and dusted the photos and opened the flat books to what he thought of as the most interesting examples of africano life. His favorite photo was one looking up a dirt road at a grocery store that looked like a little wooden ship drifting in a forest. You could see two small boys sitting on the grocery steps and up ahead a wagon pulled by a mule. It had a grace and loneliness and a passing air about it of quiet welcoming that created a sweet place in his heart. He had already arranged the display cases to include the photographs of the people whose faces he found most interesting. He shook the thin mattresses and the checkered blankets out, rolled them up and shoved them into their space above the cab. The professor commented on his quickness this clear late spring morning, but Delvin didn’t explain. It was a beautiful day. A sky with blue depths and puffed-up complicated clouds. The dew brought the smell of the roses in the church’s side garden and the junebugs were just tuning up in what Delvin thought of as a harmonious fashion. He stood by the back steps listening to them climb their ladders into the higher reaches of sound and stop as if they had been caught at something. Wonder what it is? he thought.

By dinnertime they had made a dollar and fifty-five cents off a first-grade class from the little deckleboard school behind the waterworks. The teacher had to snap her fingers at him as if he was a schoolboy to get his attention on the presentation articles. The professor called him on his distractedness, but in a friendly way. Delvin had mentioned that a young woman might be coming over. They ate noon dinner at a slabwood table by the church garden. Bees tumbled among poppy flowers and floated over the big puffy hydrangeas.

“It’s a miracle I guess that these Methodists allowed themselves even to plant a garden like this,” the prof said, indicating the colorful array of blossoms. “They are so hard on themselves about appreciating any beauty but that of their lord and savior. It is the most foolish response to the truth that I am aware of in these parts.”

“What do you mean by that?” Delvin, only half listening, inquired.

“Anybody who tarries long enough in the quiet of the day will shortly see that the most profound world is intangible. Invisible,” he said, laughing his wheezy one-horse laugh. “Like in that photograph you like so much.”

“Which one?”

“The one of that shady road and that wagon climbing the hill.”

“Invisible?”

“You know what I am talking about. We love being under big trees, in their shade, because they return us, partway at least, to the mysterious world.”

“How come we knuckle down so hard in this one? Everybody I know is trying to make a killing right here.”

“Looks that way, dudn’t it?”

“In the funeral business you see the ones who gathered the most headed out in the slickest style.”

“Still we wonder where they head out to.”

“I wonder about it all the time.”

“All you got to do is slow yourself down a little. Put aside this grasping.”

“You mean like right now?”

“Well, right now you have the hidden world appearing in its most concentrated form. Or about to. Or you hope it will.”

“You mean. .”

“Exactly. She is the most familiar representation of this other world — or at least what we feel about such as her is.”

“I feel so jumpy I am about to crash out of my skin.”

“Pretty likely.” He looked off toward a large blossoming crape myrtle. “How you doing with those books I gave you?”

“Right well. I been reading The Blue Horn , that book by I. B. Connell. He says that desolation and dread are our oldest feelings. That this whole world of cities and government is just our attempt to build walls against them. God, too. He says these are the comedies of foolishness. We got to discard them. Walk away from them like they were a dead dog in the road and make a new life in another place, live in another way.”