Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He left the train in Huntsville to wait for the Chattanooga-bound Tweetsy freight. He didn’t have the money to pay Mr. Rome for carrying a message but the little man said it was all right and got off with him. Josie stayed on the train. He was on the way, he said, to Denver, where there was a meeting of an anarchist group he wanted to join up with. “They talk about each man having full say in his life,” he said, “but they are generally as touchy as any others about who’s on top.” He and Delvin embraced and then Delvin and Mr. Rome walked off together with Frank into the night. The northbound freight wouldn’t be leaving until early in the A.M. — so they were told by a tall spindle-legged man striding along sheltering a young woman who toted a small guitar wrapped in a piece of checkered cloth. The man reminded Delvin of the professional mourner J. O. Shank back in Chattanooga.

Among thin dust drifts, broken bottles, bent gray grass, and a sprinkling of wild carrot in full white flower, Delvin sat up on an embankment, thinking of faces. They were maps, stories, timetables, confessions. The big celluloid pages in the museum each contained fifty faces, a hundred faces, every one contending with what must be revealed and what must not be, all but a few that had conquered the freakish truths trying to bust out or who had given up and stood back while they careened into view.

He broke off a stalk of carrot and pressed the flat white bracts to his nose. It smelled sour and slightly bitter. He wanted to get up and walk two miles through wildflowers. Beside him Frank was sleeping. Mr. Rome was catching a westbound freight. He said he would be in Chicago in two days and would find Celia and give her his speech. He had agreed to do it on credit, payable in ten days at the Constitution Funeral Home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Not long after this, but well after the fright had come upon him — the police fright, fright of a murderer returned to the scene of his crime, a murderer who on more than one night had waked from a dream in which he pictured a white form lying still with death in the remorseless shade of big trees, and gotten up from pallet or straw bed and paced, shivering with fright and sadness, a fright and sadness that in the years since had been slowly sloughed off like a dry skin until there were times when he believed he could no longer recognize the accomplice to the lead charge shot into the body of another human being, but who knew in his heart that this was not true, that the crime, swinging shadow to light, back and forth, like a lantern in a deserted house, was not forgotten, or left behind like a broken valise, but was carried by him still, banging and weighty against his own body and soul — after this, a Chattanooga man traveling with a small boy told him that he knew of no crime in the last few years in that town in which an africano had shot a white boy. “That’s one you won’t miss,” he said, and laughed, and his son, a small child with a recessed chin and a wry look, laughed too. “You sure you would know?” Delvin asked. In his wandering time he had run into only two others from Chattanooga and one was too drunk to talk and the other had walked away from him without answering. Mostly he had been too scared to ask about it. He had made a vague partial reference to the professor, who had looked at him with a frank, sad eye and turned away without pressing him. It’s all right to carry a misery, he had said over his shoulder. This man said, “’Cept for this one trip to visit the boy’s grandmama in Birmingham, I been in Chattanooga right along.” A blank screen, cold and vapid, pulled across Delvin’s eyes and he almost fell down. “You all right?” the man said. Delvin didn’t answer him. “Look like you seen a wild ghost,” the man said. “No,” Delvin said, “not that.” He thanked the man and walked off. Could what the man said be true? A mixed relief and anguish came on him. Wait — he’d have to wait to know for sure. These years, off in the muddy, punishing world. But how could he call them bad years? Mr. Rome had already boarded his freight, bound for Chicago. I got to get to someplace private, Delvin thought. But he couldn’t miss his train. He stepped among the sleeping bodies of the tramps, careful not to lose his footing, and in a little cleared space by a gallberry bush he lay down. He pressed his body up under the bush and found the trunk and gripped the crooked wood with both hands. I am out beyond myself, he thought. Tears hot as dots of acid squeezed from his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you Jesus in heaven and here on the earth. Thank you everything that walks and rides and swims in the sea.” He let go of the trunk and rolled over on his back. Through straggly leaves he could see a few fuzzed stars. His life was a trick played on him in a game he knew nothing about. A feeling that there was a great powerfulness in the world came over him. Maybe what the man said wasn’t true. But he knew it was. He cried without knowing if it was from sorrow or joy.

And here came the train, a clanking, slow-moving freight bound for Norfolk.

Frank, a man with a wide guileless face and a limp that seemed to come and go, called to him.

Yeah, okay.

He sprang to his feet. The sharp push of his youth stirred him, his body quivered with his strength. He bounded down the embankment, caught the door rider and swung himself up into a yellow East Tennessee & Western boxcar.

Spring had flared out, burned brightly and was smothered by summer, its heroic proposals soon cornered and worn down into soft mountain evenings and hot days nobody wanted to be outside in. Soon fall would be cranking up. Already the tulip poplars and the sycamores showing black-speckled leaves, and the tall sumac reddening in the road ditches. He had returned to the Home, but there was another boy in his old place now, living with Mr. Oliver inside the house; Delvin had to take a berth out in the barn. The Ghost was the regular driver now, captain of the big new Cadillac hearse and even the black-paned ambulance they used to pick up the bodies. They had a contract locally to pick up africano corpses at the city morgue and local hospitals. Mr. Oliver spent much of his time lying on a velvet couch out on the newly glassed-in side porch. You could raise the cloudy louvers and let in breeze and on cool days Delvin would find him out there listening to his new prodigy read to him from the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The boy was only ten, but he was smart as a whip and to Delvin’s eyes a hustling little conniver.

Not that Delvin mentioned any of this. The Ghost, who had told him, laughed about it, but he was on Delvin’s side in the matter, if there was a side, as long as Delvin didn’t try to push in on the driving. Conspiring young ’uns wasn’t much to get charged up about. Not compared to what he found out about what had haunted him the last four years. The old trouble — the shooting, the flight, the law — so the Ghost confirmed, had all been a figment on top of a figment. For a while that busted him up good. As he stood out in the street before the Home on his first day back, still dusty from the rails, the Ghost had come up behind him and cried Boo! Delvin had jumped like a poked dog. The Ghost gave him a big fool’s grin. He’d grown tall, skinny, and had an orange fuzz settled on his face.

“Expected you back sooner’n now,” he said.

“How’s that?” Delvin said.

“That old business.”

“What so?”

“The one bout shooting that white boy?”

“You heard anything?”

“Nothing ’cept there wadn’t no white boy shot.”

Delvin re-experienced a clutching sickness in his gut. “You sure about that?”

“Wadn’t nothing but a wisp.”