Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“If I could lay down,” he says. They fix him a bed out on the screened-off half of the back porch and he lies down on an alfalfa-stuffed mattress and thinks This smells like the shed back home, and it isn’t only that but he can’t remember right then what it is and falls asleep. He dreams of fish thrashing feebly in a poke (but maybe it isn’t fish), and of a white man in a leaf-strewn alley entrance making hobo signs (the double diamond of Keep Quiet; the two straight bars of Sky’s the Limit; the triple thatch of Jail) and grinning in a scornful way. He is overtaken by a sobbing that seems wholly part of the dream until it wakes him and his cheeks are wet. He lies in the shade of the roof overhang, coming back mostly to himself. The little boy comes out to look at him. The boy smells of raisins and Delvin remembers sitting on the pantry floor at Mr. O’s as a child eating raisins from a cloth sack with the picture of a raised-up circus elephant stamped on it. “My name,” the boy says and points above his head at the wall. Scratched into the chinking mud are misspelled words, unintelligible signs — Morus, maybe that is a name. “Morris,” Delvin says, and the boy smiles, whirls and runs back into the house. He feels slow and dodgy, without intent, saturated and feebly draining, raveled at the edges, parts coupled and strewn about, wayward. The air is coarse and lively against his skin. Raisins, he thinks. He used to pick them one at a time from the sack, eat them slowly, dreaming of life out in the wild mountains.

He stays with the family for a week until he feels the red dog loosen its grip and then he decides to leave because he wants to get down to the coast. The state men have poked around looking for him but when they came by the folks hid him out in a canebrake under a tarp soaked in tar wine vinegar and even the dogs missed him.

“No reason to go that way,” the brother, a stringy man with a small face flat like a cat’s, tells him. “Aint nobody down that way looking to shelter a black man.”

But Delvin wants to go. He has heard the surf crashing in his dreams and in them he sits beside a great blue sea.

After much calling on the holy trinity and the blowing of milk smoke into his mouth by a man who never saw his father, the placing in his ear of a lock of hair from a child the same color as the sufferer, the forcing of a cup of hot boiled and strained mule manure tea down his throat, his chest painted with turpentine, and a bag of asafetida from the mountains tied around his neck, the sick man dies choking from the pneumonia. When Delvin looks in from the door he sees the man’s gray pinched cheeks and his nose like a stob and his eyes already sunk into the sockets like ball bearings dropped in mud and he thinks here is something familiar but he doesn’t go into the room. The next morning they bury the man in a little africano cemetery down the sand road a mile from the house. The cemetery is set off by itself inside a low twisted stake fence at the edge of a pasture that has a half dozen stringy cows in it. Delvin never mentions that he knows something about preparing the dead. He doesn’t mind fiddling with a corpse but he doesn’t anymore care for sticking himself into anybody’s grief. A stubbornness in his soul, a disheartened doggedness, maybe a divination, some shaky repudiation of the former life, has taken him. The wasted man drowned in his own spit, coughing and gasping and squinting into corners for God or the devil or who knows what — Jacob’s ladder maybe to climb him out of that sticky place — and an abrupt wild panic had come erasing the squint and then a blankness erasing that and no god came.

The burying is on a sweltry day with a dampness attached that makes him feel as if his blood is running hot in his veins. Everybody feels feverish. The body in its raw pine coffin held together with nailed-on baffles stinks of the fever. Oscar is the man’s name. Somebody cries it out from the back of the small crowd, a woman no one admits he knows. A bird in a maple tree makes little pip-pip-pip noises. His brother, Oscar’s brother, cries like a baby. Delvin has been on burial details at Acheron, silent pilgrimages where nobody spoke up about anything. A chaplain tossed a handful of dry words in after the deceased, this nonentity it was clear the Lord cared nothing about. The preacher here, a small man who smells like he has been drinking, says the Lord is already holding brother Oscar in his arms. “Not too tight,” the man next to Delvin says. “It’s hot where he is.” Delvin shivers and wants to shut the man up but he says nothing. Not outloud. Farewell, brother, he says silently, God be with you, have a good. . — and then the words drop off as if he’s come to a cliff. But it aint no cliff. It is a dam. Behind which a slowly pulsing body of words is backed up, a lifetime — twenty lifetimes — of words and everything else. Somebody throws a bouquet of tea olive in the hole. Delvin can smell it above the stink of the corpse, a sweet drifting scent of the world going down into the ground with him. Tears come to his eyes and the woman next to him, wife of the brother, looks strangely at him, as if she has just realized who he is.

Back at the house he tells them he needs to get farther south.

The brother — his name is Willie Drover — says, “Aint too much farther south you can get,” and even one or two of the grieving women laugh at this.

“I got some business down on the Gulf,” he says, thinking as he speaks the words that he is half lying because he doesn’t really have any place to get to except away and that isn’t a place unless every place not a state prison is.

But he doesn’t mind being made fun of. He is rich — or half-rich — in his spirit on this side of life even if he is slow to rise and suspicious. He favors this walk-around and jump-down, linger-on-the-porch, eat-at-a-table-with-the-children-and-the-women, nobody-hanging-around-with-a-whip side of things. Let me stand and shiver and nobody but somebody worried momently for him might say anything. How you feeling? Well, I’m just fine. Even the big chinaberry tree out the window looks filled with a special life, the big clusters of purple flowers exuding sweet scent you could walk up and put your face in. The sunlight on the gray dirt road out the window seems to shine with a manifold potency. No whipping on that road, no pits to lie down in. He tells some of this to John Paul, Oscar’s almost-grown son. John Paul says he doesn’t know anybody who don’t have a whipping in his future.

“Not like the kind I mean,” Delvin says.

They sit beside a little feeder stream peeling birch twigs and looking at the tiny swirls the water makes where it catches against branches and bits of trailing leafage. The air smells of pine and some moldering bit of animal flesh that hasn’t quite finished curing. The plan for a journey has come to Delvin. He wants to get out to the ocean and travel on it. “I’m going to make a big circle,” he says.

“And come right back here?”

“Someday maybe, but that’s not what I mean. A circle with a chunk left out of it. Or a squinched circle.”

John Paul spreads one of his big hands. His knuckles look like scuff marks. “You gon be a traveling man?”

“For a while.”

He wants to tell him about his plans for writing a book, but he hesitates. To say the words — he is afraid they’ll curdle it. And hell — a book — he is just talking, just dreaming on his feet.

“I want to see something I hadn’t ever seen before.”

“You can see that right here. We just had a display there in the house.”