Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I got out of there and on out of town and hid in the big woods on the other side of the brass works. They say that most of the people in Greenwood was rounded up and taken out to camps over toward the old fairgrounds. Put inside wire fences like they was beasts and left there in the hot sun to suffer. The white boys walked around town, they said, just shooting at will.”

He stopped talking and sat quietly, patting the corn dust, leaving with each pat a new print of his palm. Delvin saw in the traces that his two middle fingers were the same length and knew this meant something to fortune-tellers but he couldn’t recall what.

“Damn, damn,” Mr. Rome said softly.

Delvin felt a running smoothness all along his skin, a smoothness that turned to an ache. But he didn’t want to do anything about it. Little worm of despair angling up through his body from a place that hardly existed. I would do. . , he thought, but no, he wouldn’t. A crease in his heart like a gouge in rock. Hot tallow seeping in. Hotter and hotter. Tears in his eyes. Tears running down his face. His eyes burning. It was old and had wandered through him all his life — this feeling now. Lonely and helpless and desperate. He pushed up, rose through creaking knees and an unlimberness like a bent branch and stumbled a tiny bit, just an edge of body striking the man, the locuter Frank, but not enough to remark on, and lurched a step or two out into the open space of the car and stood there looking at the door that was a completed picture of darkness. In the distance, low down, a star like a bit of fluff, winking out.

“Airplanes,” Mr. Rome said, his voice soft and frail. “They dropped firebombs on us. Like we was the enemy.”

“This world is full of murder and craziness,” Frank said.

Delvin headed down the car. He’d had enough of these stories for now. You heard them everywhere, a low people telling tales against the ones who held them down. He felt something fade and tremble in him as he walked toward the white men. Three of them were sitting in the open doorway. He stood near them looking out. The train rolled past fields that were glossed under the light of a bruised half moon, the only light for miles. Except for one lamp burning far out in a house across the cotton fields. Some sharecropper up late tending to a sick child maybe, worrying about his life. If you flew in a plane over this country, Delvin thought, you would be looking down into a world of blackness. Maybe we are going to rise up. But he knew that wouldn’t happen.

Just then, down among the card players, somebody raised a shout. A shout and a sudden cry of outrage. Came sounds of struggle, very brief as if half secret, then a tunk and a thin, brittle, cracking sound, followed by a strange meek tiny despairing yelp. Trailed by sounds of whistling, of sighing, of muttering. The humped backs, dark shirts, the white arm raised like somebody signaling, and dust in the air, drifting like a pale yellow smoke. “Jesus, God,” somebody back there said in a big, rich, disappointed voice as the group bowed outwards and men stumbled to their feet, scooted on their butts backwards, and, flailing, rose halfway into the dark above them, half caterwheeling, jumping, getting out of the space occupied by trouble. Leaving what was left, what could wait on trouble now, what could take its time.

At the center of the new circle a man, loosened from his stays, ordinary otherwise, lay on his back not moving, and another man — a little, twitchy man — raised up on his knees, was held in a slump by three other men. The captured man struggled feebly.

“Look at what you done,” one of the men holding him said.

Delvin wanted to ask what it was though he could see well enough. He needed the confirmation of voices, but these were white men so he said nothing, only leaned closer to the men standing in the doorway.

“Shouldn’t a’cheated I guess,” one said.

“If that wo what it was,” said another, a man with a heavy shock of dark hair.

The cardplayers holding the man — this short and scrawny man now selected, man with a clean, frightened face smooth as a child’s (or somebody very old) — dragwalked him to the door, not even hesitating for those standing there to scramble out of the way, and in a smooth motion that looked almost practiced, threw the little man from the train. He didn’t cry out. His arms flailed as he disappeared into the rushing-by dark, but he made no sound.

The evictors didn’t even look out after the tossed man. They returned to the one lying on the floor, a man who hadn’t moved, bent briefly over him — someone going softly skeeter bite skeeter bite all the while — picked him up, carried the middle-sized, regular-looking man, who had a small white bald spot on the shiny dark crown of his head, to the now cleared doorway, and threw him out after the other.

Delvin stood at the side of the doorway looking after the ejected men, but he couldn’t see them. The right of way was grown up in marsh grass and cattails. The moon was westering. To the north tatters of clean white cloud looked like the exhaust of machines invisible to the human eye. He shuddered, and felt the shudder traveling through his body. The wispy clouds had been rubbed into the night. Without realizing it he’d sailed out into a country where he was all by himself again; nobody to approach and linger with, waiting out a rain, say, or eating blackberries out of a cap.

Something like that, he thought, half laughing at himself as one of the white men nearby said to another, “Pitch em and catch em, ay buddy,” and the other laughed a small tight laugh like you would in front of somebody you didn’t want to offend, and the other saying, “He just flung out there, didn’t he?” and the first — small, stiff-faced — laughing again the same cramped laugh; and Delvin thought, It hurt him too, that man getting killed.

He wanted to get off the train, wanted to walk by himself down a dirt road back toward that sharecropper light over yonder and knock on the door and ask if he could stay for a while. But what would he find there? Some old snaggle-toothed couple with their raggedy children. Cold grits and well water for supper. Wash your feet in a pan out on the back porch before going to bed. Lie down on the floor and listen to the skeeters whine around your head. Malaria bubbling in your veins.

An ache like a buckled-on harness clutched him. He wanted more than anything to reach his hand out to somebody he loved, just for a minute. It was like a sickness, a feverish radiance. He reckoned that was what was taking him back to Chattanooga after nearly three years away. People who love you, somebody said to him on the roads once, they’ll cover your nakedness. Guess you’d even risk jail to get that, he thought. But maybe not jail after all this time. He told himself this, charming himself, maybe not jail. But white men had long memories. But he was wily. Go on, go on — it was an endless chain. Not minding himself, not even figuring, he swayed in the doorway. He tilted toward the dark, starting to fall. A hand reached out and grabbed him. It was one of the white men, the little one who had mis-laughed.

“Watch yourself, shinola,” the little man said, grinning cooly. Delvin staggered back a step into the car.

“Thank you,” he said.

The little man turned away without acknowledging him further. He felt grateful to him, wanted to say something more, but he couldn’t; world wasn’t like that.

As if in a dream he returned to his small group and, taking just a moment to dust off a place on the cool rattling chestnutwood floor, lay down against the bulkhead. He slipped his notebook from his pocket into his shirt. His chest felt hot and he let his hand rest there. His heart beat into his fingers, same old cadence, nothing extra. I can’t sleep, he thought, and drifted off.