Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I’m sorry about that. I know how a passing can cut deep.”

“Not too deep — not this one.”

“Yeah, and I know you got a promising life here and all, but I’m thinking of my personal plans.”

“Sure you are. I got plans too. Sometimes I can see em right out in front of me. At least up to a point.”

That point being, so Delvin knew, the one where you give up because you have to admit to yourself that every day is going to be like the one you just finished. It is why things around here like weather and holidays and births and deaths and the mysteries of religion are so important. Harmless fun. Constant pressure from the white folks until you got to bust out. So you rob a store or kill somebody and here you go down into the hole. Big Broadus back at Burning Mountain said he ought to just settle down and do his time. Well, that is what everybody with sense or asleep out here is doing too. In him is something scratchy and moving. Good or bad he doesn’t know. Something clucking at night or whispering to him or pleading. Maybe that is the way the gods have come back. The professor said conscience is as close as we get anymore to the gods. But in prison his conscience has become strained and elaborated with unusual amendments and declarations. He doesn’t know anymore what kind of voice speaks to him. He can hardly sit here now with this farm boy talking. He wants to leap up and run off, just keep running.

“I think I want to move around for my whole life.”

“I was in New Orleans once,” John Paul says, “but it knocked me down and trampled on me. I was lucky to get back here with any hide left on my body.”

“You didn’t uncover anything you liked?”

“Sholly I did. That’s what got me runned over.” He scratches his temple with the end of a twig. “I guess after you sit in the jailhouse for a while even a section of dirt road with nobody on it starts to look good.”

“I reckon.”

“I don’t want to get into no jailhouse.”

“No you don’t.”

He doesn’t either want to get in a jailhouse and feels the press and cluster of an excisement only partial, ragged in his body as he moves about the homestead. He is shy of the porch and the steps and the rooms filled with the smell of fatback and corn mush and the smells of women and he is shy in the yard where they have set out wild rose bushes in buckets and shy too even in the backhouse where an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue serves as paper. He sidles away, drifting along a line of diminishing notification, and finds a little spot among myrtle bushes back behind the house where he feels most safe and sits on the grass there thinking. He can think about anything and so he thinks of the Gulf and the wide world beyond it and he’s done this before even though the cons told him not to but this time it seems close enough to touch almost. Space. That’s where they keep it. So get down to the Gulf. His heart beats faster than usual and he knows already his loneliness has extended out into the world, following him like a dog. It is still there. I am a common man, he thinks, and on this day I am free to walk around loose but I am still lonely and maybe there is no cure for it. He wonders what Milo is doing, if he is alive, and Ralph Curry and Peaches and Still Run Siems and Bony and Carl and the preacher and his minions. He leans over his knees with his hands gripped together as the worshippers do and says a few words about the wideness of the world and finding a place in it, just general commentary and wondering. He is still tired but a new energy has poked up in him like a fresh growth. He is tapping along like a blind man, looking for a way to open up. The sun streaks his shoulders with a softening light. He begins to cry and he lets himself go with this until he hears himself making noise and stops. He leans over his knees and presses his hands flat on the grass and holds them there like he is holding the world down. Or gripping it by the handle. Nobody comes along and tells him to move on.

Two days later he catches a ride on a wagon heading down to Salt Town to pick up a load of oysters and fish. Every so often this run is made and the seafood brought back under croaker sacks piled with cracked ice to sell in the communities, white folks first. The bed of the wagon gleams with fish scales. The man who carries him, Billy Foster, wears a pair of washed-out overalls and a patched gray shirt buttoned at the wrist and all the way to the Gulf he talks mournfully about his wife who has recently taken up with another man. There are fish scales on his cracked boots and his small flat fingernails gleam like scales. He seems at every minute about to cry but he doesn’t.

“You can’t make em do what they won’t,” he says glumly, clucking at the hammer-headed mule over the cotton plowline he uses for reins.

The sky is cloudy for the ten miles down and as they arrive in Salt Town it begins softly to rain. Delvin bids the man farewell and walks along the sandy main road out to the beach that is gray and littered with pine straw and forbidden to a person of color and stands under the tall longleaf pines looking out at the chopped-up gray Gulf. The water seems to be moving steadily toward him and this bothers him and he retreats farther back among the trees. Three or four short roads run in from the main road to the water. A few white men are standing out in the low brown surf working a long net. He walks back closer to the waves, but not far, not even out from under the pines. He doesn’t like the shaky look of the water, doesn’t like how big and empty it is, and the white men spook him. Getting out into that world of salt and waves and white men pulling on nets like they think they are back on the shores of Galilee or someplace; it is too much for him. He’ll just stand a while under these whishing pine trees, he thinks, and enjoy being a free man.

Gammon entered the visiting room that was only a squared-off bit of an old holding cell that had bars over a single taped-over window with one little corner scraped away so if you put your eye to it you could see across the street the corner of the Miller Finery sign and the screen-door entrance to the Collins Bakery and a set of cement steps leading where you couldn’t tell, and told Delvin that he had found the woman he saw in the gallery and she said she was not his mother.

“Maybe she is lying to protect herself — and me.”

“Maybe that is true,” Gammon said, “but she says it isn’t — I asked that too — and says that she dudn’t want to come to the jail.”

“Maybe I will just have to go see her,” Delvin said and laughed a dry laugh. He could feel a mercilessness rising in his soul. Soul, he thought, I don’t know what that is.

Gammon looked at him with mixed compassion and and aggravation and said he didn’t think things were going very well.

“I thought it was your job to keep everything hopeful.”

“Yes, that is what I am supposed to do and I am sorry I have failed.”

“Don’t worry your head with it,” Delvin said. “I won’t be long for this place whatever you do.”

“I hope that dudn’t mean you are going to try to escape.”

“You are a foolish person,” Delvin said without heat. He felt things flattening out, sliding away. He knew his mother was gone, but just one little (maybe) glimpse and it was as if she was back. Something peeled off in his heart. He grimaced.

“It’s not cause of you,” Gammon said.

“What’s that?” Delvin said, startled.

“The trial.”

“I sho didn’t help the truth along though.”

“Truth’s a stone these folks don’t want to swallow.”