Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

It was like breathing air without time in it.

Far off down the dark lanes of that first night in dreams he saw Celia standing in a trashy field, cartons and tin cans and pieces of rusted equipment around her, Celia looking lost. He called to her, but she couldn’t hear him; his voice wasn’t strong enough. He wished with all his might that he hadn’t left her letters on that low wall in Chattanooga. An emptiness then blowing through him, hollowing him. A dustiness and a picture in his mind, a memory really, of furniture and family items strewn around an old house he came on once standing in the middle of a cotton field. The knee-high cotton surrounded the house, running right up to the porch and windows, and the house deserted. He climbed the steps and looked in. Inside everything was still there, the clothes and the filigreed spread on the bed and an upright piano with its face broken in against the wall. All covered with dust. Undisturbed for how long — you couldn’t tell. He didn’t go in, though he saw a basket and a little box like a jewelry box sitting on a dresser that he could use — didn’t because he sensed he was not supposed to disturb the dust. In his chest then too a hollowness. Now he saw his old life drying and flaking away. He had to make himself stop. But when he stopped, the crackling, stinky blackness returned. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips until he saw stars, white stars and flashes of purple light and little quivery yellow dashes. Around him that night in the dark the moaning the crying the calling out as if from eroded patches in black space.

You could say they hadn’t quit on themselves. They were still breathing. It wasn’t because they were strong or brave. Certainly not noble. They would have sold each other out. Carl tried. Rollie tried. But they had nothing to offer. The white man didn’t even need confessions. It was as if the method was the only thing that mattered. Get that right. And they had nothing to do with that. They hadn’t quit because there wadn’t any way to and there wadn’t anything to quit in a universe of endless effort. No quit, boys. Unless you just slacked down until you died. But even that wadn’t allowed. Carl — after he tried the other — had tried that, tried rolling up against the wall and not moving, not eating, not drinking, but with a work-gloved hand they slapped him in the face until he changed his mind. Come on back to us, boy. Then they slapped him because of the trouble he’d caused them.

And here I sit, he thinks, feeling the hard board infirmary porch seat against the bottom of his spine, resting before a journey. He laughs a little and looks across the yard at Milo Macraw, his young boy, the one who sleeps beside him at night, and a tenderness enters him, surprising him as it does sometimes, making him stop, say, under the big sycamore with half its limbs lightning-shrunk, and look up into the living branches in a kind of wonderment. Milo wants to go with him all the time. After the last escape they put him, put Delvin, in the Bake House, threw him in among the ants and ground wasps and the doodlebugs and hoppergrasses and the big black scorpions clacking their swords. He lay among them thinking of the creatures that lived so close to the earth they felt the vibration of every step and smelled every smell and sensed in the cold or heat seeping into the grains of sand what was coming and going in this world, like they had to know, like this knowledge was so important to them that, like the professor said, they had evolved — evoluted he’d called it before he met the professor — until they were able to crouch so low to the ground they missed nothing. And he wondered: What do they need all this information for? Were they waiting for some hint of something? The coming of some Bug Redeemer?

He lay among them flat on the earth studying what it was like in the bug universe, and he was lying there when the big cottonmouth slid over his belly and curled up on his chest. Its tongue flicked his chin and then it flicked his lips, and then it flicked his eyes he’d squeezed shut and he could feel the snake’s cold breath and he knew it was drinking from the little balls of sweat at the corners. With its tiny delicate tongue it licked his ears clean and his nose and the corners of his eyes and his lips, and he could feel the snake’s heart beating like the covered drum of a distant tribe, speaking in the dark of the world of light. He could smell the odor of the snake like the smell of garbage and he lay still in the dark with the weight of the snake on him because the smell told him the snake was afraid. It was hard to breathe and he thought well I am being suffocated by a damn poison snake and then he felt the snake’s breath in his mouth, the slow, you couldn’t call it pulsation, but a slithering of expelled breath from the snake’s broad nostrils making a regular susurration coming into his own mouth.

For how many days he couldn’t be sure he lived with the snake lying upon his body. Sometimes it left him but soon enough it returned. During the periods of its absence he found no need to get up and piss or shit or even to teethe the hard cornbread or take a sip of water. Once they opened the door to look in on him, but seeing the big olive-colored, cross-hatched snake coiled on his chest the guard, a small muscular man named William Burden, cried out “Help me, Jesus!” and slammed the door shut, leaving him from then on undisturbed. He heard the LT say to let him go until they smelled him begin to rot. But he didn’t rot.

He drifted on a sea of time. And one day the snake slipped away and didn’t return, but Delvin didn’t notice.

When they came eventually for his body he was asleep on the floor, alone except for the bugs, and on that Sunday afternoon in October he was dreaming of riding up front in the professor’s van through the north Mississippi countryside where the leaves of hickory trees lay like yellow footprints on the red clay road and somewhere up ahead, but not yet, the Fall of Man was walking back into history. The sky was coral blue and the clouds were outlined in black ink that made them stand out.

The guards banged on the tin sides of the shed to scare the snake, but they were too late.

“Look at this crafty nigger with a grin on his face,” he heard the guard Jim Karnes say to another guard as they carried him out of the Bake House. He was sick near to death with malaria. They dumped him on the little porch outside the infirmary and left him for the medico to find.

Well, I’m better now, he thinks, watching Milo raise his long leg slightly to scratch along his thigh, better than I was.

Billy Gammon, boy lawyer, studied the notes Baco had prepared and then he walked out into the hot fall day where leaves twirled up and lay back down as a breeze smelling of cotton fields passed through the square. I better just make something up, he thought. Those boys are headed in one direction only. And he wondered if life seemed shorter to those who only moved along a single, fixed road. He nodded as he passed the townsfolk, but many didn’t nod back. Nor did many in the Red Rooster, where he had dinner with Davis Pullen.

“What you think?” he asked Pullen, one of the lead lawyers, a chatty, florid man who had come in last in his law school class at the university but was in no way hampered by this, practicewise or mouthwise.

Davis chewed the edge of a yellow biscuit, put the biscuit down on his plate of soupy rice and chicken gravy and looked Billy in the face. This was Davis’s big courtroom trick, the straight-in-the-face look. He had such a wide simple face that sometimes the juries, taken aback by the foolish openness displayed before them, forgot what it was they wanted to do and signed off on a not-guilty verdict. Davis had a good reputation as a lawyer who could get a man off.