Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

And you lie on your back in the dawnlight pulled like a gray washrag up out of dumps and poisoned dews, listening to the little hermit thrushes and the killdeer and the meadow lark’s wakeful remarks, a man with a pure knowledge of himself like the philosophers and the alienists wish they could somehow come by, a knowledge gained not through manipulation and secondhand tittering but through means of the simple quest each of these imprisoned men is on, the standard issue of jail life: you are, in the end, only men: in the end you break: in the end you will not be able to hold out against even the least of it.

Here, now, as he moves from the infirmary porch out into the tireless sunshine, Delvin feels the truth of himself like a surplus malaria settling in. It is not all right but it is all right. Now Milo taking his hand — Carl has drifted away — pressing his forefinger down the row of knuckles sweetly and back as is his way, patting the fleshy place at the bottom of his palm. Except for scattered lumps of aching bone he can barely feel his hands, barely feel his arms; his feet have a life of their own and a great delicacy. He wants to lie down in the dust and roll slowly in it. Across the way at House Number 2, from the sterile shade of the overhang, Shorty Willis gazes at him. He’d have come out to knock him to the ground, if he didn’t have the dog. The cons think it is catching. They think all ailments are contagious and shrink from them, wounds, cripplings, maimings as well. In the dining hall they yelp from distant tables that the place ought to be cleared of these infect rats. In the barracks he will generally find his rack in an island of its own, the others shoved away from a teeming nobody wants to touch. Maybe find it in the yard.

Yet there are those who relish disease. The crazy boys and some of the lap nuzzlers will cozy up to him, asking if there is anything they can do. One, Dizzy Placer, will lick your sores if you have any to spare. Years ago the doctor cautioned him. “Don’t go letting any of these yardboys out here apply their treatments,” old Dr. Willy told him. Dr. Willy died of a busted ulcer none of the white doctors around Covington wanted to treat, groaning and calling out the name of a woman nobody had heard of — so Donell Brakage told him three years ago when he was resting up from an earlier malaria attack with the other kings of misguidance in Columbia penitentiary. That was before the last trial that let all but Delvin and Carl and Bony and Little Buster go free, pardoned for their crimes. Other lawyers reaped the crop the first lawyers sowed.

The sun is getting cozy on his neck, kittenish. He leans his head forward so the beam can find more flesh. Ripe sunlight a treasure beyond counting. So bright you have to look through your lashes to see. The heat seeps under his clothes, spreading along his back like a feather cape. In November they ride in wagons on top of the cotton to the gin. He always burrows in deep, loving the encasement and, if it was possible without being torn to pieces, would let himself be lifted up into the suction tube and tossed through the machinery to come out the other end mashed in the press inside a bale. Lying there like a caterpillar in his cocoon, waiting for some chinaman across the sea to jack the bale open and lookee here what I found. Oh knit me back up. He hasn’t started sweating yet.

Milo works his little trad on his knuckles. Delvin can smell the lime stink of the latrines. Last week it rained all week, but three days of sun this week has brought up the dust. A week of straight sun, and dust will whirl up in clouds the size of a county, wind-hauled a hundred miles to set an inch of topsoil down on top of some other county’s dirt.

He still thinks of Celia, but she is a cattercorner, endways Celia now. And why shouldn’t she be? Once he raged and spit on the ground and beat his hands into the dirt as his insides crumbled and splintered to bone in his chest. He moaned like a dog, and far out in the Babylon field at Burning Mountain he hollered his sorrow into the wind that blew everything lost into the black pine woods. At Uniball he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the streaked dirt. Loss become unified grief breathed in the dirt until he was swimming down through the richness of soil and drifting among the big limestone plates and the secret caves of pure water that washed him clean of everything but his humanness. You could lose your mind, lose your soul, lose your day count, but you couldn’t lose that. He had cuts on his forearms from trying to. In Uniball he slashed his own face with the heated edge of a file and the cuts had ridged up so tight his face for a year felt pulled to one side. Somewhere he picked up a limp. He limped into the courtroom for the last trial; the limp hadn’t changed anything.

For a while Celia wrote him and then the letters fell off. He pictured words like leaves sailing in a chill fall breeze. “What has become of you?” he asked. Asked the last address he had for her. The letters came back stamped in red: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Oh but, Mr. Postman, she is known. “I know her,” he cried. “I know her better than she knows I know her.” He built her from the scraps available. Scraps was all they were. Curls and shreds and discards. But enough. Her five foot six of blueblack body. A sheen on her like the dew on a butternut bush. Her hair crisp and shining, catching the light so the blackness turned into a coppery gleam like the gleam of the world in its earliest days. Her eyes black as pieces of the night saved uncut for the day. Quick-mindedness. A quietude about her. Wondering at the world. Feeling around. A jump-upness. She smiled and he held this smile in an enterprise of the heart that was ever growing. Now gone. He wrote her family but they didn’t write back. PLEASE OPEN THIS, he wrote on the envelopes and underlined it, hoping in a way that somebody would open the letter, maybe a passerby who knew her, knew who she was and would answer him. Finally somebody did. Her sister, Sheila, whom she almost never mentioned. Wrote him a few words on a sheet of pink paper. “My sister was married a year ago, to a man from Shreveport, a doctor. They have a lovely little baby boy. She does not need to hear from you again.” He wrote back to the sister, asking for more and thought maybe I will leapfrog over her to Celia and knew this could not be. He lay down under a big hickory tree and cried until his throat was sore. For a while he continued to write letters but one day he stopped. He started a letter and quit in the middle. He sat at the edge of Big Egypt field waiting for Tulip to bring up the mules. The stub of pencil was worn down so small he could hardly grip it. He wrote: “I watched a big old redwing hawk take a pigeon in the air. .” and stopped. He decided nothing, he only quit. Since then not a missive word on paper.

But still, fading as they go, the words come to him. He writes stories about her now. Stories about some woman, some slipping-away woman, who runs barefoot into a sliding surf and laughs until she makes herself sick.

Up ahead the round, stuccoed and whitewashed well with its crosstree and six buckets on separate ropes. Once at Burning Mountain he tried to escape by jumping into the well. Those were his crazy years.

Not that the escapements have stopped. He has a list: fires set in the drying corn of fall, bullfrogs thrown into the supposedly electrified fence to short-circuit it, tunnels sworn to lead to open fields of sweet grass beyond the woods; he hid under mounds of green peppers and piles of cotton seeds, crouched in garbage, jumped off the back of trucks, lit out across fields, faked sick, attempted to bribe guards, simply turned away from the group crowded around the captain and ran for it.