Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall

“Who is that little boy walking down the middle of the street?” he said. “Come look out here.”

Delvin was trying (unsuccessfully) to light a kitchen match with his thumbnail as he walked.

“Hey you, boy,” Oliver called, but Delvin ignored him. “Run get that boy,” he said to Polly.

A fast runner herself and a girl who hoped every day for something different from yesterday, she set down the pitcher she was using to water the fading begonias and leapt out through the open study window.

“My lord, child,” Mr. Oliver said, but Polly didn’t hear him. She was already sprinting across the narrow patch of close-cropped lawn to intercept Delvin, who saw her coming and veered over to the other side of the unpaved red clay street.

“You, boy!” Polly cried. She had no trouble catching him. It was the holding of him that was difficult. “I got something for you,” she said.

“Many’s spoke of such as that,” Delvin said, “but few’s delivered. Let me go.”

“This is something good. Mr. Oliver wants to speak to you.”

“That your name for the devil?”

“You dumb little clodhopper, don’t—”

“I aint no farmer, I’m from. .” He couldn’t remember the name of his street.

“Don’t you know who Mr. Oliver is?” She was dragging him by the arm across the street. Down the way a breeze shuffled leaves in a big beech tree. A white man in a large straw hat pushed an automobile with a small boy behind the wheel. “Like I said, the devil uses many a false appellation.” This last word he’d picked up from a book he’d found back at the HA house. Or maybe he’d heard it in the street. He was a sharp one for listening in.

She continued to drag him back to the funeral home.

“You taking me into that place — that undertaker’s?”

“Mr. Oliver is a funeral director.”

“Whoo, you looking to bury me?”

“I might, but Mr. Oliver wants you for his charity work, I expect.”

“I don’t need no charity.”

“No, I reckon you are beyond anything charity could do.”

She reset her grip and dragged him into the house, which was cooler than outside and dim and hushed. The last few steps he had gone along with her, curious to see what a bonecracker was up to. Down a hallway paved in soft red carpet she knocked on the paneled white door of Mr. Oliver’s study and was invited by a grave tenor voice to enter. The big room with its vast oak desk with inlaid green felt top, its green leather couch and rug-upholstered armchairs, its tables with fresh flowers in clear vases and assorted mementoes from Mr. Oliver’s customers, its painting on the wall between the two tall windows of Wolfe Dying at Quebec, its rugs in painted patterns of red and green, was the fanciest room Delvin had ever been in. . if he set aside the front parlor of the Emporium. Recalling the fancy swags and silk bunting, the mural of the Queen of Sheba dancing for the enthralled King David — or was it Solomon — and the rose settees with the working ladies lounging on them like perfumed cats, a pang of longing for his mother touched Delvin.

Oliver, a discerning man, voluminous in his physical being and not without concern for others, said, “Boy, you’ve suffered a loss, haven’t you?”

Delvin didn’t want to discuss this with a stranger. “I’m doing fine,” he said.

“Why were you running?”

“To get away from that circus.”

“Rightly so, my young man.”

This made Delvin feel a little better. It troubled him that he would be frightened of the clowns, especially when no one else appeared to be. “What was it you wanted?” he said.

“I need an errand boy and a helper,” Mr. Oliver said.

“How much you pay?”

“Two dollars a week and keep.”

Delvin liked being in the room. He liked Mr. Oliver’s round fat face. Except for Long Dog Wilkins, The Negro Giant, Mr. Oliver was the largest man he had ever seen.

“Who’s your mama and daddy?” Mr. O inquired.

“I got none.”

“You’re on your own, son?”

“Been since I was near to five.”

Mr. Oliver laughed, a bubbly, analgesic laugh. “How old are you now?”

“Six and a half.”

“Where do you live?”

“At the Bell Home.”

“Oh, of course.”

Oliver contacted the home and made the arrangements for Delvin to stay at the mortuary. He had done this before, following a vague impulse to help little boys. He himself had been a little boy set out on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. At eight he had hoboed a train from Montgomery to Chattanooga where he had been pushed off a boxcar ladder, breaking his ankle on a switch tie. An old yard worker had come on him crying and taken him home and with the neighborhood healerwoman’s help straightened his ankle and put it in a poplarwood boxsplint. He stayed with this gentleman and his wife for three years before he began working for Mr. Duluth Mathis, the former owner of the funeral home. Mathis, who had no children, had eventually passed the business on to him. A bachelor, he looked now for other little boys he might fling a lifeline to. It loops back around to me, he would think as he sat in the big tub in his tile bathroom, feeling not so lonely, not so lost.

Delvin accepted the job and went to work, uneasily at first, fetching items from the pantry, doing light cleaning, digging in the garden and watering the flowers, hauling out trash and burning it in the metal drum out back, picking up pecans and bringing them in a yellow enameled bowl he wondered if stolen from kings, and staying close to Mrs. Parker, the cook, and to Polly, in case they needed a quick boy for anything. It offended him to work in such a place, and scared him and made him sad in a way he didn’t quite understand, but they fed him copiously at the big pine table in the kitchen where with the sidemen and the maids he had his meals, and he liked sleeping out in the little barn or shed behind the house, in a room beside the stalls that smelled of sweet hay and leather (that is, before he moved into the house to a small square bedroom off Mr. O’s big bedroom).

He was not shown the working areas right off. Oliver’s experience led him to believe that the living so feared and hated death that only a special sort of person was fit to work in a funeral parlor. The first time he brought Delvin into the viewing room where the embalmed corpse of Mrs. Fretwell Jenkins lay in repose in double-ruffled collars, the boy cursed and ran out of the room. They did not have that many departed put on view. People usually kept their deceased at home after the embalming. Only the very poor, or those who for private reasons did not want the body in the house — some of those reasons being superstition, panic, hatred, flaunting of wealth, neglect or simple grief — left the deceased entirely to Mr. Oliver. If the truth be known, he liked to keep the dead close by him. Taking the body in hand, like a prodigal returned, he pampered and coddled the former person, bringing him or her into the gentleness and beauty that most lacked in their living lives. He wished for them to remain with him as long as possible. It hurt him to have to release them to the rocky soil of the Appalachians.

This affinity made Mr. Oliver one of the most effective mourners a departed soul could wish for and was one reason he had been able to build up the business so well after Mr. Mathis’s demise. He himself had handled the embalming of the not so old man, who had died of a stroke as he sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of vinegar pie. A tenderness had flooded him as he intimately handled the remains. Mr. Mathis’s sloped shoulders, saggy breasts, spindly hairless legs, horny toes, big speckled belly, his crisp private hair and tiny genitalia had fascinated him. He sat in a white kitchen chair alone in the embalming room beside the corpse as a son might sit beside his father waiting for him to wake. Oliver had no illusions about the dead awakening, but he felt in his vigil a sense of the enormity of death that was subsumed usually in his experience of loss when the embalmed and dressed-up carcass was taken from him. He placed his hand on Mr. Mathis’s cold hairless breast and did not move it for half an hour. He knew what meat came to, but he knew too that this heap of flesh was the last of what he could look to in memory. It was like a faint echo, fading gradually as he listened. As he had done for no other dead person in his life, he leaned over the plumped-out, yellow-skinned face and kissed his benefactor gently on the lips, thinking as he did how he loved him and also that the corpse needed a little more solution.