Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“Why don’t you talk more about little things?” she said. “All these big topics wear a person out.”

“You mean like love and marriage?”

“And the rest. Look at this.” She held her right hand out, showing on her middle finger a ring with a cut violet stone.

“An amethyst,” he said.

“Aren’t you smart.”

She was patronizing him and they both knew it, but they both knew it was because she was a little hurt. He didn’t rebuke her.

“My father gave this ring to me. Or it was passed down to me after he died.”

He wished he had a ring to give her. “Let me look at it.”

He took her hand in his and with the fingers held together it was as compact and slim as a mockingbird; opened (his fingers brushing her skin as if there was a magic he could unsettle and start with a gentleness), the palm was a pale, yellowish tan, beautiful. He tried to hold it but she spread her fingers. Then she closed them and let him hold her hand and they both knew she was doing this, doing what she’d come to in this way, her hand relaxing in his so it felt softer, yet at the same time more full of life. Gently she pulled away from him.

“I can’t drive,” she said in a small voice.

They said nothing for the last block.

She pulled into the dirt driveway and parked beside the sturdy brick house with the big shocks of daylilies blooming against it. He wanted to sit in the car and talk, keep her with him somehow. Her flattened, coarse, springy hair caught the fading light as she got out. It was impossible that in a minute she’d be gone.

“I thought. .,” he said, but she was already around the side of the car, opening the door for him.

He reached to touch her hand on the windowsill but it was gone too quickly and she had already turned to climb the two white painted steps to the little porch. She stopped, pivoted on one foot, looked down at him still sitting in the car and thanked him for going riding with her.

“Come with us in the van,” he blurted and he saw in her eyes that the offer touched her, that she yielded to it and let it enter her and he thought he could see it in the moment of early twilight swing through her, circulating, but she only smiled, a smile diminishing in clarity and strength as she slipped further away. As she reached the door he thought she almost turned back but she didn’t. She gave him a small, sliding wave, a soft almost slicing motion of hand, as she went in. The screen door and then the white paneled main door closed and it was as if she had flown from the world and left him there.

He let out a small cry. He wanted to rush after her, overturning rooms until he found her and made her let him touch her fingers again, made her let him kiss her and have her.

But he only sat there, still inside the car — like a dummy, he thought later, walking home — dressed up in thriftshop clothes, with cotton ticking in his hair.

The next morning the sun came up through thin peach-colored clouds and seemed to Delvin to be filled with the promise of love, but he had to stay where he was because a group of fifth-graders was coming to tour and the professor had an early appointment with the negro dentist who visited that area on Thursdays (he needed a filigree on his bottom teeth, which were worn down to stubs and hurt) and so he did not get over to the charmed house before nearly noontime. He could smell greens cooking as he walked around to the back door.

Celia was not there. She had left at first light to get to Birmingham before it got too hot.

“Well, it surely is hot,” he said, a look on his face that made the woman who cooked for the family think she’d hardly seen a person look so catercornered to hisself. She wanted to laugh at him, but as the laugh rose in her it changed to pity.

“She left a letter for you,” she said, this woman about whom he was wondering if she could tell him what he was supposed to do now— what now ?

“A letter?”

“It’s right here on the speckle table,” she said as if he was inside the house, but she hadn’t let him in, and she turned, went away and got it and brought it to him.

He accepted the letter like a starving man told the banquet was not for him but he could have this chunk of cold cornbread here. Those riches! But still, here was food.

Like a dog, he thought as he went down the steps with the letter clasped against his chest, I scurry off to eat my little mess of leftovers in secret.

But he was not bitter, not yet, or ever would be really. Even later, out in the rain-drenched cotton fields of the state prison system as he trudged barefoot along the rows chopping nutgrass with a hoe, he would not cast blame on her.

He kept the unopened letter in his breast pocket safe like a tiny coiled lifeline until after dinner, that he ate alone behind the van under the little detachable awning at the small round folding table they used for meals and sometimes card games on cool nights when the mosquitoes weren’t too vicious. When an older woman carrying a blue cloth parasol with a wide chuffed rim approached, asking to look at the exhibits, he got up, let her in and showed her around. When he stepped out to finish his ham sandwich, she stole half a dozen photos, a fact he only became aware of after the professor got back and discovered it.

The professor was in a foul mood over his teeth. The fretwork hurt and had cost him more than it should have and on top of that among the purloined snaps were two of his favorites. He swore and ordered Delvin out of the van and off the property.

“You firing me?” He was stricken and angry himself.

“Just go on,” the prof said, sitting down in the chair Delvin had vacated. “Leave me be.” The old man felt like closing the museum and driving off someplace by himself to grieve his wounded teeth and the loss of the photos (grieve the founderings of time, the raw blast that had wakened him that morning with thoughts of his own demise, grieve the single-minded woman he’d left back in Biloxi years ago, a woman with shiny hair and a quickness of spirit that sat him up straight in his chair). For the moment he felt as if he could not go on. The boy — damn the boy.

Delvin walked fast away from the van. He had been about to read the letter when the professor appeared. He walked until he was out of town and then crossed the gully and entered the hobo camp. It was mostly deserted this time of day, but a few men were lying under a large persimmon tree smoking and talking. He didn’t want any company, he only wanted to feel less peeled. He was so nervous his hands shook. He walked through the camp and into a field of broomsedge, made a little clearing for himself and sat down in the grass. A ways farther on a little willow stood up from the field, its branches cut partially back and heavy with leaves. He got up and went over there and sat down in the shade of the tree. A killdeer fluttered up and made her little flopping display trying to draw trouble away from her chicks, but he didn’t pay any attention.

The letter was brief. I thought so much about our talk and was glad, but I know it is best if I go back to where I belong now. Maybe you would like to write me sometime. She gave her address, not the school’s address but, so he assumed, her parents’ house, or was it her dormitory, in Shelby. She signed it simply Celia. He spread the single pink page out and ran his fingers lightly over it. He sniffed the spicy, brassy scent, her scent. His heart pounded. He jumped to his feet and started to run — stopped and sank back into the dry grass. The long-fingered willow leaves rustled and shifted and settled.

I thought so much about our talk. ., he read again, stopped and restarted, forcing himself to read again, I thought. . First she wrote I , the side of her hand pressing against the paper. She was thinking of him at that moment. I thought —had she paused then and struggled to decide what to say next? What did the letter mean? Did it mean for him to forget about loving her? Maybe not.