Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“What you talking about there?” the man Frank said, friendly, working a bit of string between his fingers like a weave. “You some kinda—”

“Oh, no, my son,” Mr. Rome said, and Delvin chimed in that Mr. O. P. Rome was a professional message carrier.

“Yes,” Mr. Rome said. “Declarationist, full-throated pleader and issuer of challenges and stomp-footed assertations. No word spoken too softly or too loudly for me not to be able to carry its full weight. Nothing loses a ounce on the journey — to whoever, or whatever — I once carried a message to a speckle-faced mule — is able to pay the fee. For a dime I’ll carry a message across the room or up to four blocks away. Higher prices the farther I have to go, but I will not only carry an exact rendition of your missive, I will provide the appropriate — that is to say, your own, or what you wish to have as your own, feelings, complete with intonations, speech quirks or added gustatives, per message, limit three to a customer.”

“You aint never heard of Western Union?” Frank said, shuffling himself into a better seat.

“Primitive upstarts,” Mr. Rome said. “I follow a profession as old as talking itself.”

Frank began to peel a potato with his thumbnail. “Yall want some?” He eyed the little man. “Much money in that old racket?”

“Not enough to buy freedom from the white man, but I get by.”

“None of us gon make enough to buy that kind of freedom,” Frank said. “Though I’s heard they’s a town down in Florida populated entirely by negro folk — no whites allowed.”

“Says the white man,” Mr. Rome said.

“You don’t think we are free?” Delvin said. Maybe I am haunting this world, he thought, a fluttered-up spirit on the loose. Down the way a knobby little man said, “I got a misery in my leg’s been hounding me for three years—”

“Hell, we don’t even look free,” Frank said. He leaned forward and studied the tiny Mr. Rome. “You probably make your best money when they’s a calamity,” he said.

“That I do. Folks get talkative when there’s trouble. I once carried a message made up entirely of groans and whizzing sighs. But you can’t count on calamity’s always being in town when you are.”

“Profiteer.”

“I wouldn’t call anything I do very profitable.”

“You ever been in a calamity? A big one?”

“A few,” the little man said cheerfully.

“Like which?”

Mr. Rome pressed his thumb against his cheek, a fond gesture. “I was in the Boveen, Missouri, tornado last year. You read about it in the paper. And year before that I was in that big hurricane that wiped out the whole east side of Texas. I almost drowned in that monstrosity. And I was in Houston for the big Whiteside warehouse fire where thirty blocks went up in flames. I carried three dozen messages after that one. Mostly in-town, but one I carried by rail and bus and dusty aching foot all the way to Shield, Saskatchewan — Canada — to a little white house in a walnut grove where an old woman lived with her thirty-five-year-old deaf and dumb son.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“Wadn’t for her. The message was for the boy.”

“What was it?”

“I’m not free to repeat messages where you might be able to tell who they were from or for. I’ve let slip too much already. My customers rely on my discretion”—diskretchen, he said—“as you can understand. They’re only for those paid up to receive em, but I can say it was one of my greatest challenges.”

“You just write it out for him?”

“I figured writing the words down was not giving full service on the dollar. And I’d had to charge extra for the stretch and general botheration.”

“So what did you do?” the man Frank said, tapping his narrow forehead with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. He had a sharp vertical crease running down the center of his forehead.

“Well sir,” Mr. Rome said — he was collecting a little pile of corn kernels in the brim of his hat that he held before him in his lap—“I of course had to act it out for the boy. I call him a boy even though he was a solid sturdy gentleman with big rough hands he kept flexing like he was working up to break something, but he had a manner that was like that of a child and his mother treated him like one. He may have been mentally slow as well as D and D, but I realize that is no excuse for treating any of God’s creatures as less than precious. Anyhow, I had a cap the man had given me in Houston, a greasy, faded red cap he’d passed to me for just this situation. I’d been studying all the way across the country (I was on the Espy, then the Falls & Canadian) about what it was I ought to do and I’d come up with a good show. I went to whooping and hollering and swooping and rolling on the ground and beating on my chest like a wild man, repeating the message as I went. This boy — this bald-headed near gray-headed man — started to shrieking. It was one of the most peculiar noises I ever heard in my life, that shriek. He began to mimick my actions, jumping and swooping and rolling on the ground and throwing dirt up in the air and making this shrieking noise like some kind of demented soul — just an awful sound — until he had me so worked up that I’m embarrassed to say I busted out into tears. Right there in front of both of them. I just sagged against this big wire rabbit cage they had there by this old walnut tree we was standing under, sobbing like my heart was broke, which it nearly was. Hell, the man I was reporting on was alive and here I was bringing the happy word to his family and I was crying like a baby. And fool thing was, when we all finally got calmed down, the woman told me her boy read lips. Just like he was hearing what you said. Damnness.”

“Maybe you aint exactly cut out for the work,” Frank said.

Mr. Rome eyed him. He sucked his gray lips in and puffed them out.

“Fact that I have continued on after that particular episode might tell you I am. Oh, I’m a natural for it, that’s for sure. It was something else, the weeping.” He looked off to the open boxcar door where the day’s sliding-away blue sky shone brightly in its last moments on earth. His looking extended in time, seconds ticking along. The clack of the wheels came up through the floor. Somebody down the way, a white man, made through cupped fingers a bird call like a lonely thing. Mr. Rome peering off somewhere. Like he was hearing words. “So freedom can never be taken fully from us,” he said finally, “who knows if even death can do it.” This man maybe not even noticing the sky but soaring through the wild prairies of his own mind, voiceless.

“Well, what was it?” the man Frank said, pulling gently at his bottom lip.

“What was what, son?”

“What something else was it that made you sob like a baby.”

“Oh. Fatigue. Mere fatigue.”

To that Delvin wanted to say suddenly no. No. It’s all right, he wanted to say, to be sad. You don’t have to be ashamed of it. Go on and speak. But he didn’t. He too was tired, and not sad enough, felt ghostly, as if his foot, his hand, his whole body, could sift right on through the bottom of this car and disperse.

“What about you, my fine young man,” Mr. Rome said, addressing him. “What interesting tale have you to tell?”

Delvin rubbed silky corn dust between his fingers. Down at the other end of the car the white men were playing cards. In the middle space, leaned against the opposite closed door, a man mended with a needle and thread a pair of sky-blue pants. Delvin had never seen trousers that shade of blue, and satiny, shining. He wanted to touch the cloth. “I think I want to get you to carry a message to a friend for me,” he said.

“Say and it’s done,” Rome said.