Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Soon enough in his early years of dreaming Delvin discovered the second floor, shut off behind a switchback staircase, and climbed up there. The doors along a dim, sullenly carpeted hallway were shut so tightly they seemed at first to be locked, but they weren’t. They opened on bed and sitting rooms each fully appointed, everything, including the beds, mummified under big wheat-colored dust cloths. He slapped a bed to see the dust rise in clouds and stood gazing, halfway in a dream, at the motes and powdery fluff slowly resettling. The light coming through the thick, wavy glass windowpanes seemed ancient. It brought to mind his mother’s stories. He wished that if he looked closely he might catch sight of her cavorting in a red shiny dress in an antique world, but he knew such thinking was a lie. In one of the bathrooms he stood before a bleached mirror, choking himself with both hands. He pulled his hair, drawing it out above his head. He crossed his eyes and made faces as grotesque as he was able. Once he brought Mrs. Parker’s kitchen shears up there and cut his hair short on top, almost down to the skull. Why he did that — when they asked — he couldn’t say, but he liked staring into one of the second-floor mirrors at himself. He lay on his back on one bed or another, gazing at the ceiling, trying to slow his heart down to a stop. He wanted to jump into eternity, poke around, see what was there, and jump back quick before the devil caught him. He sprang up and danced wildly. His bare feet slapped the floor. He whirled and capered. “Oh, oh, oh,” he cried, “I am nobody’s child.”

Before long he was eight, then he was nine; in another minute he was twelve.

In the evenings Delvin would read to Mr. Oliver. The mortician had come on him in his study lying on the green leather couch scrutinizing a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He barked at him to take his feet off the leather, then asked what he was studying.

“I can’t make all of it out,” Delvin said, “but I think I get the draw of it.”

“Which one you reading, boy?”

“This is one called Macbeth . It’s about a greedy Scotsman.”

“That is a mighty tale,” Oliver said, though he was unfamiliar with it. He owned the volume as he owned most of his books: because they gave him a feeling of substance. “Maybe we can study that one out together,” he said.

Delvin liked the idea.

They began sessions at night after work was done for the day, or when there was freedom from it. People died at all hours of the day and night. Oliver and his crew had to be prepared to go forth to retrieve the deceased, ready to rise in the wee-est hours to open his house to the dead. The deceased crossed his threshold on stretchers, on doors, on planks and carried in blankets or pulled down from the backs of horses or from the beds of trucks or hauled by hand between weeping, teeth-gnashing grievers, once on the broad iron gate that opened onto the farm of Mr. Wendell Comer, whose only son had been kicked in the head by a mule. Mostly these days they came by ambulance from the hospitals and the morgue. Or he went to fetch them, rising to his midnight errand, a heroic figure, as he saw it, civilization’s appointed guide, liaison between the two worlds, navigator and helmsman for the journey to the terrible (and beautiful) mysteries. Oliver had several assistants now, both in the prep room and upstairs in the viewing parlors. He himself was a minister, minister enough, and sometimes performed funeral services in the old dining room that had been converted to a chapel. The boy got into everything, but he hardly learned about anything. Oliver figured the trade — hoped the trade — the seep of it, would infuse him. His dream of finding an heir had settled on the boy — for now.

Both of them enjoyed the reading sessions. They read stories of French kings and stories of explorers and dudes in fancy clothes, but the stories they liked best were the stories in the Shakespeare plays. Propped together on his great bed, Oliver in his wine-red silk dressing gown, Delvin in his green cotton robe and blue pajamas with smiling caucasian faces printed on them, the boy did his best each session to get through a few pages of one of the plays. They made it all the way through Macbeth without either of them understanding half of what the boy read; it made them both feel as if they were getting somewhere in life. Delvin was good at saying the words but they were both poor at figuring out what they meant. They got the gist however, or the draw as the boy called it. He had plenty of words Oliver had never heard, probably words that would encourage Mr. Shakespeare himself. “That man had a rowdy life,” Delvin said, speaking of the Scottish murderer. “Like a tiger,” Oliver concurred. They shuddered and looked off in separate directions, Delvin studying the flame of the squat red candle on the old desk and Oliver looking at the boy’s reflection in the window glass. He shuddered again.

“I would like to meet a woman like that Mrs. Mac B,” Delvin said.

“Naw you wouldn’t, boy.”

“How come you hadn’t married?” he wanted to know.

“Lots of reasons.”

“Name one.”

“Not that many care to marry an undertaker.”

“Scared, hunh?”

“Mortified mostly.”

“What else?”

“I’m busy and don’t have that much time to meet them.”

“Seems like you’d get first dibs on the widers.”

Oliver laughed. “Does, dudn’t it?”

“I can help you meet women.”

“How is that?”

“I can scout em out for you.”

“Don’t you be doing that, boy.”

“Okay.” Delvin snickered. “I won’t.”

Unless I just have to, he thought, exercising his form of honesty in the situation.

He had already begun to keep an eye peeled for likely marital candidates. He studied the mourners come to view the bodies of their loved ones. The better families preferred to have the remains brought to the house. Some liked to have Mr. Oliver there on the premises with the loved one, others didn’t want him anywhere around. For a rich man he had to be awfully humble, Delvin thought. That would not be his road to riches. He would — he didn’t know what he he would do. Lately he’d been feeling restless. Some boys he met in the alley behind the mortuary told him they were riding freights all over the place.

“For fun?” he had asked.

“No, you little fool,” one of them, Portly Sanders, a boy he remembered, or thought he did, from his old Jim’s Gully neighborhood, said. “We looking for work.”

“I got enough of that right here,” Delvin said.

“Bunch of ghouls,” Sammy Brakes said.

Delvin had not seen his sweaty face before. “What’s that word?” he asked.

“You know,” Sammy said, “the ones who dig around in graves.”

“We don’t dig in the grave. We fill the grave.”

A breeze caught in the tops of the bamboo hedge and passed on. He wanted to hit this Sammy with the greasy, pockmarked face, but he held back. He turned quickly, spinning almost, his arms flying free, and staggered away in mock fright. The other boys laughed.

“Gon miss your train,” Delvin said, laughing, and skipped through the wire gate into the backyard where the boys, superstitious and afraid of legal trouble, wouldn’t follow him. He waved at them before he went into the house.

Just this week he had been disciplined for fighting with the kitchen boy. The boy had called him a dumb bastard child. Delvin had knocked him into the kindling box. The boy had cut the back of his head on a piece of fat lighter wood. Sunny was his name, but the boy was anything but. Delvin couldn’t stand him and would have fought him until he was nothing but another customer for the establishment, but he didn’t want to lose his place. Oliver had made him work in the garden spreading horse manure and then working it into the black-eyed pea and tomato rows. From the kitchen window Sunny had eyed him evilly, ducking behind the red cheesecloth curtain whenever Delvin caught him looking. The punishment made him restless, or added to his restlessness, but he didn’t want to hit the road, he told himself — if he was going to — before he found a bride for Mr. Oliver. He hung around the viewing rooms, wearing the cut-down black suit (once belonging to another favored boy) that Mr. O had provided for him when he rode in the hearse.