Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

The professor looked up at the sky that was so clear by now it was almost white, summer white.

“What kind of life?”

“He doesn’t clearly say. He just recommends that we vacate the premises.”

“Yes.”

Delvin looked off toward the van. “I guess we pretty naturally are living that way right now.”

“Our ambling way of life, you mean?”

“Yessir. Traveling from town to town.”

“It’s a splendid life, I agree, but it doesn’t appear to be for everybody.”

“It pretty much suits me.”

“You are one in a thousand, my boy.”

It was difficult under the circumstances to keep up his end of the conversation but he felt it was his duty to, and besides, at least on most occasions, their talks excited him. But today his spirit lay sunk in longing and the afternoon was a parched plain spread around him and the food he ate unidentifiable. He kept getting up to go check the street in both directions; the professor had to call him back to the table.

Just before sunset, stepping out from under the blue shadow cast by a big box elder down the street, Celia appeared. She came with her friend. Delvin, his throat so thick he first had to step around the side of the van and hack and take deep breaths, showed them around the premises. Miss Bawnmoss held back, allowing that she was not at all impressed, but Celia — she said to call her that — wept a quiet seep of tears before a stack of pictures of suffering and degradation, of hangings and burnings. Delvin did not interfere. He had learned from Mr. Oliver that there was a proper distance to allow grievers to express themselves without them feeling that they too were being urged into the pit. She leaned with her hand propping her body against the long table. Before her men with blood gleaming on their backs knelt under the whip hand. She swayed slightly. Her face gleamed with tears. She cried without making a sound. He wanted to touch her. Just before his hand rose she turned blindly from the helpless bodies, first toward the front of the van and then, catching herself, turned back and stumbled by him and out into the fading light. He followed her to the door and then down the steps.

She crossed the sidewalk and stood in the grass beyond it. The sky looked like a piece of pale gray silk stretched tight. The trees had darkened almost to black. Between them a few sips of color, of peach and cherry, shone through.

Miss Bawnmoss came down the steps and stood beside him, wringing her hands in a white handkerchief.

“It’s her father,” she said.

“In the pictures?”

“No. But her father got killed by white men. Over in Mississippi.”

“They hanged him?”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

She didn’t go to the woman, who had stopped weeping and was standing now in the churchyard looking off into the distance.

What have I done? he thought.

“They drowned him,” Miss Bawnmoss said.

“Aie, Lord.”

She went to her friend. The two woman embraced. Celia’s right hand fluttered down to her side and hung there like something forgotten. She separated herself from her friend and came over to Delvin who stood now in the shadow behind the truck.

“Thank you for showing me your exhibit,” she said. “I guess I was just surprised by some of it.”

“I’m sorry about your daddy,” Delvin said.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, looking at him with a softness that Delvin could feel in his body. He wanted to take her in his arms, and would have and walked her away into the mustering dark and kissed her if she let him and would do this even though he knew it was the wrong time and place, but he was a few days or hours from knowing her well enough yet and that stopped him.

“Oh me,” she said, “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

“Can I walk along with you?”

She looked lightly at him, a look like a flutter of lace in a summer window, and said, “I suppose.”

Delvin walked with the two women back to Miss Bawnmoss’s house. There was at first a little light talk from Miss Bawnmoss, but this died quickly and they walked in silence. Down the dirt street three boys played with a ball made of cloth scraps, tossing it high in the air and jostling each other to see who would catch it. On the front steps of a crooked house a little girl combed a small black dog with a hairbrush. A woman in overalls sat on a rough wood porch husking green corn. Smell of pine smoke. Dusk easing along.

A man leading a mule on a piece of cotton plowline passed. He tipped his white straw hat to the women. They both laughed with a gaiety that surprised Delvin. The next moment the two women began to run. Celia looked back at Delvin and waved, her expression a mix of mischief and melancholy. “Come by tomorrow,” she called.

He stood in the street watching them run. “Never saw anything like it,” he whispered, took a breath and whispered the words again, saying them because he had suddenly always wanted to in just this situation.

That night he walked through the half-lit gloom of the quarter to the edge of town. The quarter was separated from lush empty fields by a wide ditch grown up in gallberry scrub. On the other side and about a half mile down, close to the railroad tracks, was a hobo camp. Above him a scattering of stars were as hard and white as quartz chips. He was filled to the brim with thoughts of the young woman Celia. He went down into the little depression where the camp was and sat down by the fire. A few of the hoboes had visited the museum, including two white men who said they had been teachers and were now on the road. Last year the stock market had tumbled like a man falling down a flight of stairs and this year brought new travelers to the roads, but in the South the hobo life and bad times were long established. Dixie hadn’t come back from the Civil War, it had just kept going on the busted-up same. The white folks weren’t about to change and they didn’t let the negro folks change either, or tried to keep them from it. An antique asked if he wanted food but he thanked him and said no. The antique was a rough-looking colored man with a dent in his chin. Delvin accepted a cup of coffee, drunk from a partially crumpled tin cup the man offered him. They sat side by side on a downed chestnut branch with the leaves still on it. These trees were dying off, too, poisoned by blight. They talked about the state of the world and agreed that it was, as ever, going to hell.

After a while Delvin got up and walked around the camp. He thought he recognized a few of the men, but he wasn’t sure. These days he often saw folks he thought he had seem somewhere before.

He walked down the eroded slope into the ditch and sat by the milky waters of the little creek and thought about Celia. Her cheeks had a slant to them that made his heart break like an egg. Her eyes were fully black, and shiny like something brand-new, and she had looked out of them as if she’d never had a chance to use them before. She had to live with her father being killed by white men. But it didn’t seem she’d been turned to hate. You couldn’t always tell. Had she glimpsed her father’s picture in the museum? They had pictures of drowned men; maybe he was one of them, maybe the ashy-mouthed man, naked but for a torn white shirt, hauled up by three men from the dark waters of a country pond, was him. Or the man snagged on a grappling hook and lifted like a big fish out of the Tamal Canal onto a wooden bridge. Or the half-burned man lying in the reeds west of New Orleans. It seemed like life could suddenly snatch you up and kill you, this life could. But the professor said every step we take leads us to our destiny. We never make one false step, he said. Delvin stretched his foot out and flattened it against the hard sand. Next step, he said and brought the foot back. Does that one count? A man squatting in a little clearing on the other side of the creek waved but he wasn’t waving at him. A breeze stumbled around in the gallberry bushes, ruffling the flimsy tops. Back at the camp somebody hooted and another voice broke into a clumsy out-of-tune song and stopped. Celia had slim hands, long fingers that slid along like she was about to poke them into something. Her shoulders were square. He wanted to go on a long walk with her, tell her about his travels, hear what she had to say about her life.