Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Josie paused mid-crow and shook his head. “I’ll just trot off in one direction or the other as the incitement takes me,” he said with a softened inflection.

Delvin thought about offering him a ride in the van but he wasn’t sure the professor had gotten the van back or what he might say about the non-owner offering a stranger a ride. He had been in the past a little testy about such behavior on Delvin’s part.

He poked around looking but the professor was nowhere to be found. He could hardly believe he had gone off and left him. With Josie he walked across town to the negro barbershop. He waked the single barber in his porcelain chair and asked him — fat, unshaven, with a merry manner — if he’d seen Professor Carmel, the spare-set gentleman in a long canvas coat and so forth.

The barber said he had indeed and that many like himself — meaning in the negro establishment — had been given a message to pass on to Delvin when he showed up.

“What message was that?”

“Let me see,” the barber, a Mr. Floris, said and rummaged in a small counter drawer among combs and hair nets and various pieces of old dismantled hand clippers until he found what he was looking for, a folded piece of blue paper with Delvin’s name on the outside in the professor’s florid script.

I would have squatted naked in the rain in the public square waiting for you son but they threatened me with the whip and the pains of pitch fire if I did not get out of this town and put at least thirty-five miles between myself and it or that is between the museum and their ignorant dishonorable asses. So I have hightailed it. I am headed to Haverness and will wait if allowed for you there. Don’t fret or be low spirited any more than you have to. Obstacles are only a means for sharpening the wits. Glory to you, boy.

It was signed with the professor’s full name, Professor Clemens John Carmel MS, a name the first part of which Delvin had not heard the professor call himself before.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I need you to tell me how to get to Haverness.”

“Haverness,” the barber said. “I can not only tell you how to get there, but also where you might find yourself a ride with a gentleman going that way.”

He got a ride with Arthur Turnbill, who was hauling a load of sweetgrass hay to Mr. J. B. Suber, a white man up in Conniston county. Josie said he’d like to come along. In the truck Josie squirmed, fidgeted, popped his fingers on the gray metal dash and talked all the time until Mr. Turnbill asked him to take a little time off from it. He then commenced to humming. The humming was tuneless and this drove both Delvin and Mr. Turnbill crazy until Mr. Turnbull, a narrow-faced man with large fleshy lips, asked Josie to get in the back with the hay. Josie looked as if he’d been asked to swim with alligators.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just the naturally jumpy type. They say it was because my mother spilt hot grease on me when I was a baby, causing me not to trust in the given supports of this life, but I am working hard to get over—”

“Please,” Mr. Turnbull, himself a nervous man, said, jerking his head and his eyes to the left. He had pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the truck when he performed this pantomime. The sky was gradually filling in the southwest corner with bruised shadow-gray clouds like big balled fists. Delvin could smell the sweet dry scent of the hay. Off in the distance two red cows stood in the shade of a large oak tree. They didn’t appear to be concerned by any circumstance in the world of human beings. Delvin experienced a small quiet flood of happiness. What a thing it was to be alive. The sky was the glossy blue of turquoise jewelry. He started a popping little finger tune on the dash. Turnbill eyed him. “Yikes,” he softly said and apologized. “You want me to get in the back too?”

“I want both of you to be still before I put you out walking on the road.”

Except for a small burst of song from Josie they both remained silent unless spoken to — both still in the cab — for the rest of the way into Haverness.

In Haverness a row of houses on the highway opened into a district of shops and stores around a courthouse square that pushed up on the far side against a long cotton warehouse. They didn’t find the professor, but there was a note from him held by the minister of the Walls of Jericho Baptist church that said he was called away to attend the funeral of his cousin up in Rance City but would wait there for a week to see if they were following. They traveled by freight to RC, but there too they missed Professor Carmel. He left word with another minister, Caleb Jenkins of the local AME church, housed in a green-painted low wooden building behind the Rance City peanut mill. In the note, scrawled nearly illegibly on a scrap of greasy paper bag still smelling of fried chicken, he apologized but said against his will he was forced to leave RC due to complications with the local officials concerning a fracas over some allegedly pilfered property.

Delvin was ready to push on, but Josie was by this time exhausted.

“Our time on this earth is by its nature a trial to the endurance of human beings,” he said, “but I see no need to make things worse.”

He said he thought he might tarry a while in Rance City.

Delvin said he was sorry to see him leave the expedition, but he understood.

Josie then changed his mind half a dozen times before flopping down on the side of remaining in town.

“I can find work here,” he said, “maybe picking plums or some such thing.” It was long past plum season and the only plums Delvin had heard of in this part of the world anyway were of the sour yellow variety that flourished beside the roadways throughout. They were free for the picking, but few were known to want to pay money for any amount of them.

“I have notions to become a cook,” Josie said. “Cooks have time on their hands and are known for their eccentric and sometimes foolish-seeming ways. My off hours will give me time to work on my book.”

This book fascinated Delvin. Josie had twice shown it to him as they traveled, but though he (or his scrivener) had covered both sides of many pieces of scrap paper he carried wrapped in oilskin in his county-issued paper bag, Delvin had been unable to make any sense of it. This, Delvin figured, was the case with many a would-be writer. He himself might be among that unfortunate number. This thought dashed him slightly, but he remembered that he was still very young. This, so he figured, weighed in his favor; he had many years of energetic effort ahead of him, and even if his novice attempts made little sense and were hardly more than notes, quotations and lists of people and items he had encountered on his travels, he believed he would someday have the skill to shape these materials into a narrative stunning in its force and clarity, or at least readable.

“Fruit preserves,” Josie said when he asked about the interest in plums. “Fruit preserves are the secret passion of many a soul. Loved everywhere. You ever seen anybody turn down a helping of fruit preserves? Of course you haven’t. And what better way to start as a chef than with concoctions the main ingredient of which is free for the picking.”

Delvin pointed out that they had missed the plum season by two months at least.

“Gives me time to gather my materials and procure use of a kitchen,” Josie said with a ferocious and sly and somewhat doggish grin.

They were both dressed in faded overalls, Josie in a strap undershirt and carrying a greasy leather jacket and Delvin in a soft-collared red shirt that along with his underwear he washed every night and hung up to dry. His shoes were getting old and cracked but he hadn’t the money to replace them.