Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“God help us,” Mr. Oliver said over and over and sobbed. “ God help us.” Tears running down his face like water.

In his delirium Delvin cries out these words. God help us. But no God does. As the professor said, the gods are gone from the earth.

The malaria is a sickness that even the dead must feel. His head in a vise. A pain like needles coming up out of the backs of his eyes. Even the sweetest smells become the stink of shit. A freeze inside and out, chilling the mettle out of you, clamped so hard you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. You lie under old running claws, and shiver, your bones stabbing hard-frozen flesh until you know your bones will any minute snap. You cry for blankets, for the house to be burned down on top of you, for your body to be thrown into the mouth of a spewing volcano — or would if you could cry out, if you weren’t so frazzled. You’re so cold every whimper’s iced. And then it turns hot again. Fire claims everything. And nothing fits.

At this time he would confess any crime. Any deepest secret or falsity that could be shoveled into the light. But nobody asks. There is nothing he could reveal or explain that matters in the least to any of them. Let the shine rave. The disease ran him over like a pulpwood truck. His head crushed on the stones. His bones cracked open and hot lead poured into the marrow. Day after day the same, the rank peculiarities, the ugly sporting propositions, the malicious conversations played out interminably in his head until he tries with all his sapped might to give back whatever they want. I have stolen and killed. I have raped and degraded. He confesses himself hoarse or would have if he was actually speaking. Sorting the wind was all it is. A seepage.

Anyway, it is too late for spurious confessions. He is already gaveled.

Slowly the dog moves through him. Out the high screened windows he can see the shadows of live oak leaves shifting in the breeze. He hears the shouts of the men. The world, tapping, hawking and shuffling, returns. He hears voices he recognizes, familiar convict voices explaining or evading or shifting the dices. He hears the rats moving around underneath the floor at night and arguing amongst themselves. Gradually his dreams become less filthy. Less often he hears the sound of horses running down the hard road. Less often he hears the big black scorpions sharpening their claws in the dust.

Finally he is able to get up and shuffle around. First thing he staggers over to Conrad’s bunk and stands looking into the wasted gray face. He feels his heart pour out of his body. And over there Little Buster, twentysome now and the property of Danny Crakes, Little Buster, thirteen years old when they were dragged off the train in Klaudio, a rapist without a hair on his balls. Danny Crakes with his bodyguards Roscoe and Bluebelle stood over Little Buster’s bed weeping noisy tears. “Hey, he aint going to die,” Delvin, in between chills, raised up on his bed and said. He didn’t know whether he was or not but he couldn’t help himself speaking out against those malefactious tears. It was a sign he was getting better. Danny Crakes didn’t even bother to look at him. Bluebelle, huge, with a head like a torpedo, shot him a glance through tear-webbed lashes. He shook an incidental fist. A former africano cotton-bale-lifting champion, he could hardly raise his hands above his head. Crakes, though he was not a Catholic or known to practice any form of religion, licked his finger and made the sign of the cross on Little Buster’s forehead. He later made his bodyguards memorize a short prayer of his own devising and with him prompting the words he made them recite it in whispery voices to the sleeping boy.

Little Buster had not understood what was happening to the eight KO Boys. He knew they were jerked from the train, but he didn’t know what for and had no idea what was coming. “That is to say,” Delvin had told Gammon, “beyond the common understanding that they are in a country run by white folks for white folks, so nigger get out of the way.” Fire flashed in Gammon’s eyes and subsided. How fast that fire subsided was a gauge you measured the next blow by. Something bad was coming for the colored man caught napping — who didn’t know that? “Tell me what really happened,” Gammon said.

Delvin looks over at the boy, at his narrow forehead with the slightly raised ridge running down it, at the eyes that are black as shoe polish — and helplessly friendly back then when he first saw him on the train sucking on a lemon as he sat on a flatcar — at the soft mouth, still untorn. And now he is a surly galboy with nothing to hold on to except these brutes. They say DC uses these boys and when he is tired of them drowns them with his own hands in the swamp.

And the sick days wobble by, right on to the last one. Sunlight streams through the high windows, painting the old brown walls a rich dark color unlike themselves. Delvin walks all the way to the porch and sits down on a milk crate. Tomorrow they will put him back to work hauling water to the cotton fields. A breeze blows the florid, analgesic smell of the fields to him. The smell of cotton lathered with the smells of the big garden over behind the dining hall and the smell of the chicken house and the croaky smell of the hogs in their pen under the apple trees and the pasture smells of bunchgrass, pigweed and sorrel, and the smell of pine and the drifty, dry sharp smell of corn accented with mule manure and human shit — the mix so pungent he feels sometimes as if he could drown himself in the reek of it as under an ether and sleep the rest of his life away. The smell is stronger now after the sickness. His shoulders ache. And his hands, where he gripped the hardwood sides of his bed, are bent and achy in the joints.

Soldier Murphy comes up beside him and the two of them shift to seats on the plank bench set against the wall and look out into the sunlight strained by screen wire. It is hard to look at the light. Escaper, he is picking his way across the big field and into the swamp where from an old deep pool he would raise the submerged bateau from where it lay on the bottom, weighted with chunks of hoarded limestone quarried from the big white hole over at Talcotville and hauled by mule to build the warden’s house. He left a stash of pea meal, matches and a length of coiled rope wrapped in oilcloth, stowed in a croakersack and buried under a pecan tree. He hoped the raccoons hadn’t dug it up. These provisions like a hunter’s hope in the books of his youth, like the boat now, long gone. But not the hope. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Oliver in Chattanooga Tennessee or Mr. Marcus Garvey in Harlem New York or Mr. Alexander Crumwell in Chicago Illinois or Mr. WEB Du Bois in Princeton New Jersey and ask one or all of them to help us. We are caught here in a net not of our own devising. And signed his name and given his address. That was the message he stuck in a syrup bottle plugged with a cob and threw in the river — stuck in several. No one wrote or came, and the captains won’t let him write common letters. What you doing claiming you can write? Well, sir, I can. He hardly knows what to call these people. It is as if they flew down from space and scooped up africanos and carried them back to this alien planet. He’d had only two or three conversations with a white man in his life before this happened, these space creatures, moon men.

The smell of the fields blows up against the screen and spreads its sweet tonnage over him. Running after something is about as happy as things get in this place. There is always, as Ralph had pointed out, some of that. Even if it is only stew beans and a chunk of hard cornbread. He knew from the first that they were done for. It is like a disease, like polio or a sudden cancer that you don’t know when it is going to catch you but you know it will, like the red dog. One day you wake up with it sitting like a fat ugly dog on your chest. Yet even in the dark of that first night in Klaudio with Little Buster crying and Rollie Gregory moaning from where they had beat him across the backs of his legs with a plowline and some of the others making hurt noises in their sleep — night (you could tell) in the black room because they had shoved what they thought was supper (cold peas and cornbread) in to them — he felt something crank down in him, some new figuration of time that he sank into, and after the first scarifying moments when he thrashed, fighting the suffocation of it, he relaxed and began to breathe.