Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He makes his way stumbling along the riverbank through reeds and low bushes. Once again he’s gotten himself into a futile situation, is what it looks like. But then it is where — for right now — he wants to be, not in futility but on the run from that black hole in the middle of a black hole. He sloshes through spindly maidencane and bulrushes and comes on a piece of forked log resting in the grass. He pushes this out into the river and climbs on top of it and lies down and paddles out into the current, and, scared and thinking how fine it is to be out beneath the star-spattered sky, guides it downstream.

Up ahead he sees the snub boat and then he loses it in the night haze and distance and rides quietly until maybe four or five miles on as they come down on the town he sees the boat again far ahead amid lights and what appear to be a string of boats. The boats have motors attached and when the white men in them see the little boat coming toward them they rev up and head toward it. The boys in the overloaded escape boat try to paddle to shore but they don’t have the power for it. The white men begin shooting even before they are close to the boat. By time they have gotten to it one of them shouts back that there aint anything in here to shoot at cause these niggers is all dead already.

Delvin comes right down on the guard boats. Before he gets there he slides off and stays low in the water, just touching the log enough to keep hold of it, and in this way drifts by the picket line of jailers and sheriff’s deputies and local men both hired and freely come for action. For several minutes they are all around him, heavy shapes in dark clothes. One small boatload pushed by a little motor pokes at the log but Delvin has gone under and though he keeps his grip on the mossy skin they do not see him in the dark and the log turns in the current and is away downstream. Somebody fires a shot anyway and Delvin feels the bullet slap the heavy wood.

Then he is free of the boats and free of the lights and he travels along holding on to the log, trying to keep from falling asleep. He wants to let go and drift away but he catches himself. A barge stacked with cotton bales, pushed by a squat tug, chugs past and he hears the white men on it shouting at each other. It sounds as if they are having a fight. They curse, making threats; it is like hobo life, and thinking this his spirit wakens or shifts in a new way, or an old way recalled, and a sadness cuts into him. But there is happiness mixed with it, a sense of life going on in a world he is part of, not this world of battering and futility but the other — pinched as it is — smelling of churned water and living things moving through the air. It’s natural to him and he realizes this, the world that can’t really be taken away from him, no matter the prison they put him in. He watches the stacked bales disappear ahead and listens to the voices, rich with unimprisoned life — anger edging into sorrow and bafflement and an exculpatory meekness that touches him through his skin — fade into the night.

Lights, solitary and feeble, come and go along the black ribbon of the distant bank. Mostly the dark, entering into every crevice and overlooked spot. All those wandering around by themselves in the dark, lying down in it in rooms and on riverbanks and in woods where the big brown owls speak their solemn questions. The professor said that entering each small town was like the Israelites coming out of the wilderness. It’s not your light sets you free, he said, it’s all those others. He decides to get in to shore. He is too tired to stay out in the water. But he doesn’t have the strength to paddle in. All he can do is get up on the log. He does this and crams himself in the sunder and rides along on his back watching the stars as they wheel grandly down into the earth and then he slips into sleep and rides along dreaming lightly of a woman, whose name escapes him, holding in her hands a skein of flowering vine, and turns in sleep and slides into the water.

The cool water wakes him.

Already it is dawn. The river has widened out.

He is near the east bank, approaching a line of willow trees that drag their long slim fingers in the river. He paddles that way and catches onto the spindly trailing branches. Working hand by hand downstream he comes to an opening and pulls himself in to the bank. A stand of mallow bushes in full red bloom behind the willows. His heart beats hard and he raises his eyes and looks at the sky that is the color of blue-eyed grass. He eases off the log onto his knees and the ground seems to sag under him but maybe that is only him and he gets to his feet and at first hunched over then upright puts his footprints into slick black earth and staggers ashore. He stands there looking around and he doesn’t know what to do next. The complicated green bushes all filled in, the red, loose-petaled flowers like gifts he maybe is supposed to take into his hands. I don’t know. Then something comes to him. He backtracks and drags the log up the bank over the prints just in case he finds no place for himself on that side of the continent. Then he crawls up through the mallows to the grassy edge of a field spotted here and there with tall purple pokeweed and stands up, eyeballing the terrain: a fleshed-out hacked and vine-strewn world with no sign of a special prison other than the one that is everywhere. Hilly fields like bosoms lifting into the distance. He pushes back into the mallow bushes, squirrels a place among the sour-smelling leaves, lies down and falls asleep.

There was a time, the professor said — we all remember it in our bones and in the stories we tell — when the gods spoke to human beings. When God’s voice came from bushes and streams and rocks and told human beings what was so in the world and in themselves. Everybody was able to hear and the gods spoke about this and that and maybe they spoke too much and embarrassed themselves or maybe people just got bored hearing some rock or snatch of poke salad yammering endlessly about love trouble or tactics or what to eat for supper, but anyway the gods began to go silent. One by one they dropped off until there was no more talking from the celestial quarter. Then we felt our aloneness in the world. Then we got scared and started building forts and piling up money and inventing artillery and we started shooting at our neighbors and we were scared of anybody who didn’t look like us or act like us. It was time to call on the gods but when we did nobody answered. We were on our own in a way that made expulsion from the Garden look like a dropped piece of bubble gum. And it aint changed. The silence — and you can believe it — is rock solid. The gods have departed to other lands. We been left to make our own way to glory. And truth is, few can do it. But that don’t mean, the professor said, that we got cause enough to stop trying.

Later in the day a small africano boy fishing the river for shell bass comes on him but he is afraid to wake the ragged man and he runs home to tell his folks. An hour or two later three africano men shaking the bushes find him and after a short parley bring him to the home of the little boy. A man in the four-room slabboard house is drunk and laid out in the back room with pneumonia. He tried to treat himself with jick whiskey bought for a half dollar over in Munn City and the combo of the pneumonia and the whiskey is killing him. His brother, who lives with the family, and his wife, who is the mother of one of the brother’s children, offer Delvin a seat at the table and they try to feed him but he is so worn out — he doesn’t think he is really sick anymore, just tired to the bone — that he can hardly keep his head up. The brother offers him a drink of elderberry wine and he takes a sip to be polite but he doesn’t want any of that really. He lips the glass vaguely and puts it down. The wine is purple and has black specks floating in it.