Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Both of them crossed miles of marsh and desert and cleft mountain track and leagues of wintry windswept fields to reach this spot. In the exact center of his body Delvin sways like a stem of billygoat grass. His body held up now by a boy. You can say he loves the boy. He pictures the slips and strips of yellow paper from Frank’s letter fluttering on the breeze. The suffering of those not ourselves . Milo’s narrow ridged forehead. The broad, mashed-in nose with the elegantly flaring nostrils. The thin lips with the encircling perimeter line like something chiseled into flesh. The cheeks broad and flat and the eyes set under their ridges of fine bone gleaming like lamps. Shine me home.

In the sky to the south a yellow biplane tats its way west. The small stiff steadily fading sound is beautiful. As are all sounds connected to the outside. Despite the fitful delirium of four hundred men you get used to the noise until the prison seems a quiet place. There are the clatters from the kitchen, the scrape of feet moving over hard clay, the shouts of the guards, the clank of chains, the cries from the dreams of low crawling sleepers, the guzzle of water from the shower tank, these familiar dead-end sounds. But there are also the sounds of rain clattering on the barracks’ tin roofs, the drips onto clay, the rush of wind, the pattering of dust along the walkways, the keen up-piping of killdeer and mourning doves from the fields, the distant bombilation of the gin machinery, trucks gearing down on the rise through the cotton fields and the whisper of breeze passing over the cotton on its way from faraway to here — ordinary, fadeaway sounds to those not held down behind wire but to him treasures ladled secretly out, hoarded and prized. Some nights they can hear the radio from the warden’s quarters, playing live music from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. White man’s music: a thin, bobbing line of melody from which are hung chicken feathers and costume jewelry. Even the old square-jawed mountain music is better, the dancing rhythms scooting along like they are on their way somewhere not here.

When somebody escapes — tempted by the free airs outside, somebody who has something to do out there, or somebody to meet, or a contemptible crisis, a hurt, a face laughing in a dream, life itself he has to flee — the duty guard cranks the handle of a big silver round-mouthed siren. The crank is as big as a pump handle and hard to turn unless you are strong, and they are strong. From the horn spews a metallic whine like a castaway mimic of the olden times when the gods and the earth itself spoke to human beings. . but now is only a mockery, a falseness and scorn pounded into the brain, screeching proof of how far from dignity and brotherhood they have fallen. You want to crawl under a rock and hide. Men hunch their shoulders, muttering or staring mutely into the distance. Some cover their ears, others try to go on as if nothing is happening. But Delvin — and a few compadres — use the occasion to scream as loudly as possible. A wild vehemence, a whirling, jarring power breaks loose from him with these shouts. And a joy, if he can call it that. The guards know they scream, he and Muster and Calvin Schuler and Willie P from Hattiesburg and a few others — lifting their singalong, repealing lies and broken connections and loss — and sometimes they yell back. Maybe one or two filling the air with his own despair and loneliness. But soon the quiet returns. The low hum of prison whispering that makes up the regulation silence, carrying the iniquitous sound of guile and slander that passes for air in this place. So they lean back in their bunks or stoop low to pluck a burst cotton boll, or stretch their arms out in the dark, or crouch in the latrine over a febrile shit — listening for the woodsy, row crop silence of breeze rustling the three-pointed cotton leaves, scraping among pine needles in the dark woods; listening for the barn owls in the sycamores asking their questions of the field mice and voles and half-grown rabbits; for crows winging across the open expanse of fields the prison sits in the center of, crows croaking naw naw , as if testing their voices to make sure they still have them.

Across his path now steps Lionel Ansley, a gaunt man, a preacher who holds one of the services on Sunday mornings. He’s been after Delvin for a while to quit his escape attempts. He is impatient with his unwillingness to attend church. Lionel visited him in the infirmary and Delvin appreciated his not visibly gloating over his condition. The preacher told him his running ways would get him into trouble and Delvin knows that as far as Lionel is concerned the red dog has come on as a result of his jumpiness. He isn’t the only one tired of his scampering; the guards, who like to make the whole prison pay for one man’s flight, are getting worn out too.

The preacher nods at him, smiling, his bony head bobbing like a chicken’s. Despite his narrow-mindedness he is a kindly man. You never can tell where kindness will come from. The preacher with his little commentaries never goes too far into damnation. Delvin appreciates this.

“Come on, boy,” he says now, “come on over to the one place you can let what’s balled up in you go.”

He doesn’t stop walking as he says this.

Delvin nods at his back. The preacher’s abruptness makes him think of his shock when the jury foreman back in Klaudio, Elmer Suggs, said he was guilty. It had been as if Suggs himself — druggist, father of a girl with a polio-crippled leg, a stranger — had simply stood up from a passing crowd and for no reason on earth but meanness had announced in his slightly elevated voice that he, Delvin Walker, common-law son of Cornelius Oliver and Professor Clemens John Carmel, diverted lover of Miss Celia Cumberland, was guilty of raping two white women. Even after the four weeks of testimony (and thirty minutes of deliberation) he couldn’t believe his ears. Surprise didn’t cover it. Shock didn’t. For a second he had ceased to exist. A short circuit of being in which not only body and mind vanished but all record of his having been on this earth as well, leaving a vacuum that held the shape of a human being. It was quicker than a rifle shot. He was sure none else (outside his cohorts in loss and betrayal, though he never polled them to find out) experienced this or noticed.

But he’d returned in that moment from wherever it was he’d gone (not heaven or hell, not some other planet or system of whirling rocks and gas) — nonexistence was all he knew — to a world that was subtly and completely changed. Every person, every animal, every object in it had been replaced by a duplicate, facsimile so cleverly contrived that the replaced would never suspect what had happened. He too had been replaced. The Delvin Walker who sat on an oakwood bench wearing a white cotton shirt and khaki trousers provided by the Song of Ruth AME church over on Suches street in the Congo Quarter (same for the other boys) was not the same Delvin Walker of a moment before. The boy he had been, the young man who, like his mother — so they told him — could whistle through his slightly gapped front teeth, who had begun reading Shakespeare as a boy of six and knew everything there was to know about laying out a body and getting it respectfully into the ground, a man sweet on Celia Cumberland, a partaker of life in an alien land, quick to laugh, slow to take offense, curious about everything, note-taker, writer of things down, adventurer by railroad and foot and hitched ride, lover of vistas and the sour fruit of the quince bush, museum keeper, this boy/man was gone.

He had stood up and started to walk out of the courtroom. A shout arose and some guard, some man he didn’t even know, had clubbed him in the ear. He still had a little cauliflowering from the blow. With the blow (it had been as if) his mind had been knocked out of his body into the street two floors down. He couldn’t believe it — that was putting it mildly.