Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

All these years later he has come to believe it. His mind has filtered on through that.

This man, Preacher Ansley, who himself stuck a knife in the gizzard of some man he thought cheated him, wants him to believe in some alien god. Well, he will get to that when he has finished with this other project, thanks.

He watches the preacher as he walks, swinging lightly a spring of sorrel grass against his leg, and enters the shade of the barracks. Each barracks has two lanterns. There is no real protection against night life. Men lie awake in the dark listening to the mosquitoes whine and the little house lizards chirp. His own steps are lighter now, but not from happiness. Or not only from that. He has told the doc he is better. The doc has made it clear that he isn’t cured but he’s accepted his claim to feeling well enough to get out. Delvin wants to be free of this extra imprisonment. At least he can escape from the infirmary. His clothes smell of sulfur and citronella. He stood in the shade on the eastern side of the infirmary shaking the outdoor smell into his shirt. But he can still smell the pesthouse on his body.

His step is trivial and untrustworthy, the step of a sick man. He wants to lie down in the dust. He stops walking and Milo offers another drink from the tin cup he carries, an act of love since he too thinks the malaria is contagious. The blood sluices in Delvin’s veins; he can feel it washing back and forth, a heatedness picking up speed. The top of his back feels as if a hot board is pressing against it. He staggers; it takes both of them to catch him up. Steadies, he pauses and takes the cup. The sip of water brings with it a yearning for mountain air, for water that tastes of granite, of iron. Often these delicacies of his past revisited. At first he thought they might be helpful in sustaining his drive to escape but they aren’t. He tries to avoid them, but sometimes, as now, they come unbidden.

Up ahead, on the wooden bench encircling the big water oak, Bulky Dunning sits weaving a length of grass rope. Bulky never weaves lengths longer than two or three feet. Any longer and the guards will confiscate it. Some of these lengths he is able to secrete in various cubbyholes around the prison. He plans to go over the wire using one of the joined-together ropes. Delvin knows all about this. Bulky offered to take him with him and Delvin is glad to see that during his period of incapacitation he hasn’t run off. They met at Delvin’s second day at Uniball, when Bulky asked if he was familiar with the negro writer Zora Hurston. No, he said, he wasn’t. “How do you spell that,” he asked. Bulky carefully spelled the name. “Never met anybody named Zora,” Delvin said. “Oh,” Bulky, a bright-eyed little man with a thin mustache, said, “I know several. Down in Florida where I come from they’re all over.” The remark made Delvin laugh. Bulky went on to describe her work, light-footed stories that caught the flavor of negritude without its being stained with white folks’ life. “Some kind of dream?” Delvin had asked. “Better,” Bulky had answered. “‘I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal.’ That’s her.” Delvin had let out a low whistle. “Well, no wonder I never heard of that woman.” “Yeah,” Bulky said. “Spoken by somebody who’s found a way out of the general disrespectfulness.” Delvin laughed again. The words had pricked him; he experienced a sulky, sullen shame that evaporated as quickly as it came. “I want to read one of her books.” But Bulky didn’t have one and he couldn’t remember any of the titles.

He looks up now from plaiting his eternal rope. He stretches the rope through his fingers and flicks the tail of it, smiling calmly at Delvin he gets up and enters the barracks. He wanted that first day, or the day after, to slide into Delvin’s bed, but Delvin shooed him out. “I’m spoke for,” he whispered, which was what he said from the beginning though it hadn’t always worked; he hadn’t always wanted it to; Sandy Suber up at Uniball he loved like he’d never loved a man before, but Sandy died of diphtheria, moaning and blind and crying for his sister. Crouching beside his bed in the dark, Bulky said he didn’t really mind and appeared not to. They talked occasionally when their paths crossed out in the fields and sometimes after supper Bulky would sit with Delvin on the steps behind the kitchen and talk about his boyhood in Florida. He had swum in the Gulf of Mexico, the first colored person Delvin had met who’d done that, and he’d raked oysters and fished for speckled trout with his uncle who owned a boat. These stories charged Delvin up. He wanted to dive into that big blue water even though he hardly knew how to swim. Delvin knows where Bulky keeps his rope. It is coiled in a little rack under the floor of one of the old deserted barracks where it juts over a latrine. The fit is tight and smelly. The officers never poke up there and the prisoners they send feeling around come back saying there wont nothing but black widow spiders. Bulky won’t speak about what is or isn’t under the floor.

As Delvin counts it this is the night Bulky plans to make the slip; thus the occasion of his early release from the infirmary. Bulky isn’t afraid of the red dog, but he is worried about taking along a sick man. He visited Delvin in the infirmary and though no words were spoken on the subject, Delvin understood Bulky to be giving him the high sign on the decampment.

Delvin straightens up. He can bring himself to bear in whatever way is needed — this is what he always tells himself even though it isn’t always true. But now the sweet lift of floating, of drifting through the hot afternoon, calls him. He nods at Bulky and with Milo supporting him makes his way along a path that curves around behind the barracks. Milo directs him into a wide turn toward the barracks door. The shade is no cooler than the sunlight and this pleases him. He squeezes Milo’s arm to make him stop. Over beyond the next barracks, in a chokecherry tree that still has a few black berries in it, before Delvin was hauled off to the pesthouse, a mockingbird took up early morning residence. Bird won’t be there now, but he wants to make sure. The tree is the tallest of three skinny chokecherries just beyond the barracks. The mockingbird lit each morning in the highest branches of the tallest tree, the one on the right. Mockingbirds always like to be as high as they can get. Early, just after the gray light was split open by the morning’s first coloring, the bird took up its trill and its rising and falling forays, imitations of robins and bobwhites and the old brown thrasher bird, cats and even the screek of squirrels. Each morning on the way to breakfast Delvin stopped to listen. The bird is gone now. Maybe Milo’d noticed him, but he doesn’t want to be told the bird no longer comes around. Looking, staring really — no sir.

“No, sir,” the boy says as if he heard, “I aint seen him.”

And they stand gazing like communicants at the empty trees.

After the fight, the ruinous fight, all those years ago now — twelve years by today’s count — he climbed up on top of the boxcar, a blue Tweetsy car, and sat on the catwalk looking at the country. He felt strong and alive, he felt like singing outloud. Off beyond the tailing run of a big grain field the train had passed a small zoo. The zoo had a camel and a bear and a stringy panther cat, some raccoons and possums. He had seen it before on this run. The camel had two humps, one of which flopped over like a half-empty sack. The bear looked dazed. As the train passed the bear rose up on its hind legs and holding to the cage wire gazed at the train. He looked like he knew all about the fight. Delvin felt sad for the bear locked up in a cage and he remembered how the sadness mingled with the satisfaction and easy fatigue from the fight. Then it seemed, just at that moment, as if something was about to be explained, or fall into place, as if he and the bear and everything else living in the world suddenly knew about it and expected it and would be glad when it happened, but the moment slipped by like the zoo slipping by around the long bend and a salient of dark green pines.