Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I missed that mockingbird,” Delvin says.

He feels all of a sudden cast down, burned through by the sun, broken up and scattered. Fool loneliness, that’s what it is, and what is he doing thinking about that?

In another minute they are in the barracks and Milo is trying to help him into bed.

“I don’t need none,” Delvin says. He wants to look strong.

He does a couple of jumps just to make Bulky, sitting on his rack three bunks away, think he is a springy character. Is Bulky paying attention? He can’t tell; maybe he is looking at him through his private mosquito net.

Delvin lets himself down again, leans back and after telling Milo to wake him in an hour goes to sleep.

Two hours later he wakes with Milo shaking him and telling him to come to supper. Bulky passes the bed as Delvin is getting up. He leans down without fully stopping, or only stopping for a second — Delvin drowsy still, hot and sweaty — and says “I’ll catch you on the right side,” and passes on smiling in that sideways way he has so he is actually smiling at something off to the other direction.

After supper and after a walk around the compound in the Sunday dusk that smells of green pecans, after a few short conversations with this or that wise or feckless one, he heads back to his bed. The sheet still smells faintly of his body. Milo squats next to him.

“We’ll wake you,” Delvin says.

The boy’s eyes shine. He lets his hand fall on the boy’s; the pull of his flesh that always smells faintly of wood smoke is strong; he grips the two middle fingers and lets go. He wants to grab the boy’s shirt collar and pull him down, smash his face right into his own. The boy’s fine soft lips are sweet. He wants everything in him, wants the weight of flesh on him, wants to feel his hands, the ingenious fingers, the energy that leaps into him from Milo’s touch. But he is too tired. He wants to sleep and he wants to be alone even more than he wants the boy. He wants to escape into oblivion. His shoulders ache deep in the sockets.

Milo runs his hand over Delvin’s knuckles.

“You feel like you coming back to life,” he says. “I like that.”

He grins. Around them others are getting ready for their night’s endeavors, alone or with a friend. The bell rings for lights out. Little Boy Dunlap blows out the lanterns. He makes a little funny squealing sound after he blows out the last one. Sam Brown, Little Boy’s protector, laughs as he always does. The prisoners can hear guards out in the yards talking. They will be walking around all night. They have a routine not difficult to keep track of. Delvin lies listening to the footfalls. He recognizes Blubber Watts’s heavy step. Blubber will beat you to death if you give him half a reason. Or no reason at all, Delvin thinks just before he vanishes into sleep.

There was plenty of room in the jail, but for safety’s sake they were kept now in two holding cells at the courthouse. Deputies, sweating in the heat, brought them up the back stairs to the third floor and through a side door into another holding cell, this a large room with benches around the walls and, screwed into blocks set into the walls, steel rings heavy chains ran through. The negroes — become the KO boys — were cuffed to these chains. Their legs were shackled. Nobody’d told Little Buster or Butter Beecham about working the cloth of their pants under the shackles, so they had sores now around their ankles. These sores that were beginning to ulcerate kept them awake at night. Delvin listened to them moaning and crying in the bunks across from him. He had gotten up to see to them but there was nothing he could do; he regretted forgetting to tell them about the tuck-in. He mentioned the problem to Billy Gammon and Gammon told the deputies, but the deputies didn’t care. His words bounced off their impervious eyeballs and lay withered and derelict on the floor. He thought maybe if I keep talking I’ll build a pile of words that’ll bury them, but he knew there weren’t enough words.

Gammon told the deputies that the doc said they’d have to delay the trial if the boys got sick or hurt and he’d heard the sheriff complaining already about how much the damn trial was costing the county; he tried that.

“You the ones costing the county,” Deputy Fred Wirkle said with a slapped-on smirk. “You ought to plead those jigs out and let us get on to frying em.”

Gammon gave a weak smile. “We were gon do that, but if we did these New York slickers would just start the appeals and then we would really be in a mess.”

“You the one’s a mess, Billy boy,” Deputy Bee Banks said.

He lived now in the hotel and liked being there in his little room that looked out on the alley. When it rained, water ran down the alley, carrying bits of grass and twigs and chunks of crumbling yellow dirt in a foamy stream that gurgled as it ran. It was as if he was living in a forest and not right in the middle of town. A maid came in every week to change the sheets and towels. He called his mother a couple times a week and they talked about how things were out on the farm. He had attended the state university and then the law school and she had made him promise to come back to Big Cumber county after that. He planned to leave as soon as the trial was over. Those two youngest boys didn’t understand yet that they were being tried . “But, mister,” fifteen-year-old Bony Bates said, “I aint done nothing. Tell em I aint done nothing.” The youngest, thirteen-year-old Little Buster Wayfield liked to play with a piece of string one of the deputies had given him. He made a cat’s cradle and swung a little acorn baby in it. He couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the charges. He smiled at whatever was said to him and reckoned, so he said, that the white mens were going to do what they needed to. Yes, Little Buster, they were. The boy didn’t seem to mind being in jail. He was a skinny child who had never gotten enough to eat and figured he was doing pretty well now. Most of the others couldn’t read or write. The one who understood best was the one who had started it all when he talked back to Carl Willis. Willis looked like a Sunday school boy. Walker was as black as Africa. Even among the colored folks he was considered low class. He had too much smartness in his eyes. But he was young too and Billy could see how scared he was. “How you going to get me free of this, Mr. Gammon?” he had asked. “What you going to do?”

It was obvious those girls were lying. One of them, the skinny one, looked like all she wanted to do was sneak off and forget the whole thing. Billy had talked to her about the Lord, His stand on deceit. She had gotten a sick look on her face when he told her that sending them to the electric chair on a lie was the same as murdering them. But she didn’t change her story. You got locked in, he knew that. Fear — and pride, the old devil. Marcus Worley, the county attorney, had told him if he ever came near those girls again he would have him disbarred. People talked like that, but they all had to live with each other down here. After these boys — white and colored — were gone the rest of us would have to go on living together side by side. It wasn’t like up north where people didn’t live together like we do down here. When you’re close, you got to have an assigned sacrificial lamb. Local version. “Hell, I aint hardly barred as it is,” he’d told Marcus, and they’d both laughed.

He’d grown tired of legal work, but it didn’t matter, still the years rolled on. His spirit had taken the shape of the suit the profession fit him for.