Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“Well,” she said, “what do you mean?”

A flight of fast airplanes moved across the sky to the south, headed toward the big military airfield out that way. He counted them with his finger: eight. Nearer, half a dozen crows circled something interesting. A breeze picked at the leaves of a yard maple where she said redbirds had nested in the spring before blue jays stole the chicks.

He said he didn’t know what he meant, but she had more to say and he listened and then his mind drifted off to the early years with Mr. Oliver out on the side porch as Mr. O made up names for the constellations, fashioned from the speckling stars the constellations themselves, and told stories about these chariots and kings. They were always stories of fortunes lost and found and long journeys hauling the remains of heroes. Never love stories. Delvin’s favorite was the story of the invisible leopard. A giant cat that leapt from hiding to eat passersby in the upland jungles of old Africa. No one could kill this leopard. One day a man claimed he had captured the beast. He produced a large cage in which he said he had the leopard. He charged people a quarter to view the big cat, and many paid to see the leopard that was in fact not there. Some people said the exhibit was a hoax, but many other people came away satisfied. One day a young boy, a brave boy from a nearby village, said he didn’t believe the leopard was in the cage. Nobody ever hears it roar, he said. The man said it was a silent leopard, everybody knew that. Silent my eye, the boy said. He said he would go into the cage to prove it was empty. Fine, the man said, but you got to pay a quarter like everybody else. Here it is, the boy said. The man said, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you get in the cage. I couldn’t live with myself if that leopard tore you to pieces. It’s all right, the boy said, I was getting nervous about it anyway. They became friends and after a long time the man admitted to the boy that there was no leopard. The boy said, I knew you was lying. And I’m gon tell everybody. Then he threw open the cage door and leapt in. The leopard ate him up.

That was a great story, Delvin thought, very scary, and he wished he could hear Mr. O tell it again. But this woman was talking.

“Gettin what?” he said. “Married?”

“Why, you aint even listening.”

“Yes I am, I just got caught in a dream. It’s a ailment I have.”

“You don’t have no ailment, you just wont paying attention.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Everything out here in the busy world catches hold of me sometimes and I forget what is happening.”

She gave him a long look. He had told her about the red dog and she believed him, but in Atlanta at that time there were few such cases and she knew only two people, a machinist and a peach sorter, who had caught the disease and it didn’t seem too much of a bother — if it was the same thing he was talking about — for either of them. She was sad because she knew she couldn’t keep him around. Sooner or later she asked each of the boys she took in to marry her and they always turned her down. She was not pretty and she had a rough temperament but she knew herself to have a tender heart if they could just stay around long enough to find it. It was easy to find.

“Well, dreamer,” she said, “I’ll give you the rest of the week to make up your mind and then you got to go — or if you — you know. .”

“About the marrying?”

“What you think I’m talking about?”

She got up and went back into the house.

Delvin sat on the steps, unsure of what had just happened. She had wanted him to say how pleased he was but there was this other and it had scared him. He sensed her plans, her configurations of desire underneath her simple demands and he had shied. But he had crossed this woman’s threshold, eaten her baked bread and frolicked in early morning recreation in her big bed, and even simplified it was too much for him. He had known many men who thrived in prison because prison asked so little of them. But he didn’t think he was one of those men or if he did he thought still he was the boy — the man now, thirty years old — he had always been. He was finding out this wasn’t so. A redbird hung half upside down in the little chinese elm at the side of the yard. Life was coming steadily back to him. Often it hurt. He had watched the natty mockingbirds hopping around on the grassy margins outside the prison wire and he had thought about how easy it was for those birds to go anywhere they wanted. Birds, rats, toads, bugs, even skeeters, could dash away free creatures beyond the fence. And now he had dashed away and was skittering around loose in the so-called free territory. But each step or shake of the wrist baffled him. And he hadn’t thought it would hurt so much to be free, at least loose.

He walked over to Willie Feveril’s place and sat out in the backyard listening to him talk about the war. Willie, a tall man with a craggy face and a look in his eye as if he was warding off blows, had been kept out of the war by his clubfoot.

“I darsent go anyhow,” he said, sipping from a beer bottle filled with screech liquor. “It aint my business what these white folks get stirred up about. None of em like each other much and every so often the not liking spills over into the killing.” He spit between his feet. They were sitting on an unpainted bench under a big butternut tree. “When they gets they fill of killing they go back to the not liking. Not one damn thing changes.”

The Atlanta streets were full of soldiers and he had to be careful he was not stopped to produce a paper saying why he was not in uniform. Word had gotten around that a man was living at Minnie May’s house and yesterday a frog-faced fellow with a heavy limp had stopped by the house to say they were talking down at the store about he was a deserter. Delvin thought the man might be lying but now he was scared. He thought of stealing Feveril’s card or paper or whatever it was but he didn’t have the strength for it right now. This world out here was a mystery to him; he was shadowed by a fragile and dessicate past and bewildered by the rackety present. It was best to keep his mouth shut and just watch carefully.

He’d bought a notebook and a pencil out of the two dollars Minnie gave him each week and started keeping a record of what had happened to him in prison; he could remember that. He was scared to write openly about prison life, scared of getting caught that way, so wrote in a squinched script. He read some of the childhood parts to Feveril who said they brought back his own raising in Atlanta. “’Cept I didn’t have no mama who killed a man. Why’d she do that?”

“Man tried to shame her.”

“They wont nothin else?”

“Something mysterious.” He didn’t want to say more, he never did. The old man she killed had been her regular Saturday-night date for years. That’s what he had heard over at the Emporium. But there was more. An unavoidable dark hand stretching forth unsuspected by her in a world where a black person had to stay alert at all times. He carried not only the shame of her crime, but the surprise, and the dread of its perplexing circumstance. “Got stretched out past what she could take,” he said.

Feveril had a job sweeping at the Jeep plant over in Riverdale, but he was bad about missing work. “I got a sister,” he said when Delvin asked about this, “and she brings me goodins in from the country when she comes. I aint going to serve in no army I can tell you.”

Delvin enjoyed Feveril’s stories about his sister, about farm folks and the long country days, and he thought of heading out that way, but he had a journey to make to Chattanooga and then it was on from there to the northland. This had fixed in his mind by now. But he was taking his time about getting started. He liked living with Minnie May. He enjoyed cleaning house for her and cooking and hoeing in the garden out back and rolling in the bed with her, and that wasn’t all. Maybe he would marry her. She had a frightful temper. She was always blowing up about little things, things Delvin didn’t even see. It was like she had magnifying eyes. Feveril said she’d been that way since she was a little girl.