6
Carrying his old single-shot .410 shotgun Onely swung the creaky screen door open, grinning as usual like he was the sly one when he wasn’t at all, and they walked up Constable street to where it became a path rising into laurel scrub. They climbed through Virginia pines and young oaks to the ridge and crossed over into the cove where Hoppy Butler had been shot in his underwear by sheriff’s deputies, a spot marked by a hickory slab upon which were burned with a hot nail the words SON O MAN, and climbed transversely along the far ridge and crossed the summit of Bald Face mountain and descended laterally, following a deer trail through a grassy meadow filled with blossoming Joe Pye weed, the pink shaggy flowers nodding in a cool breeze, and entered a flat area of hardwoods.
The trees in this place, mostly white oaks and tulip poplars and chestnuts, were the largest he had ever seen. Onely said they were the oldest leafy trees east of the Mississippi river, a fact passed on by his grandfather and confirmed, he said, in Collier’s Encyclopedia. They had brought chicken and gravy sandwiches and a chunk of hoop cheese wrapped in wax paper and an apple that Onely cut up into chunks with his single-blade Barlow knife. The flesh was mushy and hardly worth eating. They were hunting turkeys. Delvin thought he heard a gobbler as they entered these woods, but he was not sure. The trees, some of them, were ten feet through the base and soared up a hundred feet or more. The tulip poplars had bark that had whitened almost like the peeled places on a sycamore. The leaf tops were sparse in a way that made Delvin think of old wispy-haired men, white men. The oaks were more fulsome, fully decorated with leaves so dark green they were almost black, and the chestnuts had what he thought of as an aristocratic look. There was hardly any undergrowth. Only a carpet of fallen leaves on the rocky floor. It was a hushed place and even the wind was stately and mindful, striding in sockfeet high up through the insubstantial leaves.
When they finished eating, the boys made little beds for themselves among the big tree roots and took a nap.
When he waked, Onely was still sleeping, so Delvin walked off alone under the trees. Every step opened a fresh avenue, no need for paths. He had heard of these old trees before Onely told him. The wind in the tops made a rushing sound, steady and grave. Delvin pressed his palm against the creased bark of a tulip polar. On the ground were scattered a few orange and green tulip flowers. They had the same sweet smell he was familiar with, no codger odor, tree variety. He craned his neck looking upward until he almost fell over. As he watched, an orange and green flower twirled slowly down and came to rest at his feet. Gift from the sky, he thought. Lately he had been thinking about getting up high. Not tree high, not mountain high, but far up into the sky. He wasn’t thinking about flying in a plane either though that would be thrilling, he was thinking about something else. It was like a dream. He couldn’t quite put into words what he meant. But he wanted to be far up, riding right at the border between earth and space. Hang waist deep in the blue air and look up at the stars in the cold black sky.
From off beyond the trees came a faint striking, slapping sound. Maybe it was a bear nosing about. The woods had always been strange to him, he was uneasy in them, nervous. He shied behind a tree and stepped a few paces along a quartering line, taking care on the hard surface of black dirt and leaves, on the chunk granite and schist, not to fall. The sound didn’t come again. In several places there appeared to be regular paths. He followed one. Up ahead he could see sunlight and he hoped it was a meadow. Meadows, pastures, planted fields, these were fine; he preferred places of human habitation, some sign that people were busy with life or had been or might be again soon.
The path curved west under the trees. It made him nervous to follow but he thought he ought to, ought to brave it. A breeze made a whisking sound high up. The path sloped gently downhill. He could hear what sounded like voices. Also a clattering of metal. He ducked off the path and made his way across the leafy ground, drawing closer to the light. He could see an irregular ridgeline way across there, mottled dark and light green patches. Then he could clearly hear voices, white boys shouting. The voices made a high, looping sound, a sound as if they were imitating the sound of owls or wolves. He drew closer, crouched behind a bank of serviceberry bushes and looked out.
Two groups of boys on opposite sides of a narrow grassy field were running toward each other. They carried leather straps and lengths of rope and sticks and some even had long poles the bark had been stripped off of. They ran at each other swinging these—they were weapons. Boys about his age, fifteen, going at it.
Delvin dropped flat to the ground. His heart began to beat hard. The ground had no give at all, a rock floor. He raised himself and peered through the gray, starchy-smelling leaves of the closest bush.
Out in the field the boys ran hard, yelling. With a crunching, pranging sound they struck each other with the flexing weapons, clashing, unchecked and swinging. Those who didn’t fall or drop down or skeet off to the edges limping and hollering ran on to the other side of the grassy field. Only a few had hit the ground and most of these got quickly up. One or two rested on a knee. A boy licked blood off his wrist. Another lay on the ground wailing in a high, unlucky voice. One of the fallen got up, limped over to a fallen boy nearby and dragged him to his feet. The fallen boy had a long bleeding scrape on one arm. He grasped the arm above the elbow, like he was shy with it, and tried to lean his head against the other boy’s shoulder but the boy wouldn’t let him. All the boys were wearing hats, turn-brims, chocked out as if they were stuffed with something.
The boys gathered in separate groups on opposite sides of the pasture. They shouted at each other, insults and curses, none of which carried any heat. One boy waved his hat and strutted with his hand on his hip. Two sashayed arm in arm brandishing their sticks. Taunts, boasts. This was some kind of game.
From among the bushes Delvin watched them regroup and with a shout again run at each other. Shrieking, hollering, they swung straps and sections of yellow rope and peeled sticks and met with a clattery jumble of weapons and bodies. Blood spurted from the ear of one boy. Another cried out with a sound like a child. Two stood off to the side hitting at each other with the long white poles.
Delvin raised higher to see more clearly. Stalks of pokeweed and wild carrot standing up in the field like markers swayed in a quick little breeze. The boys shoved at each other, stumbling, falling and getting up, crouching, darting in with a swing of rope that looped and whistled in the bright air.
Gradually the two groups began to break apart, passing agitatedly from gathering to separation, the boys moving off with twitchy arms and trembling legs across the bent-down grass, leaving behind the three or four more damaged boys to drag along after.
Delvin didn’t see the white boy coming along the edge of the field, a small boy moving dispiritedly just inside the cover of the trees, fleeing the struggle. The boy came up on him. Suddenly they were looking into each other’s eyes. Neither said anything. The boy, who was skinny and wore a red bandana around his ropey neck, stared at him. He had eyes as blue as the blue-eyed grass. He stared at Delvin as if he was looking at something he had never seen before. In that moment Delvin saw all the way into him, all the way down the long hallway of his spirit right to the bottom where the boy lay curled up in terror. The boy knew he saw him and he saw Delvin too, saw fright mixed with wonder. In that way they were not brothers, even under the skin. There was variation, an offslant both experienced, a dizziness of estrangement.
Both ducked to the side, the boy thrashing through the berry bushes flailing his arms, swimming through greenery. He was not trying to call attention, he was trying to get away; Delvin saw this. He had ducked too, and as he saw the boy swinging his arms he began to run.
Some other boy, a boy with narrow muscular shoulders and a crusted star-shaped cut on his cheekbone, a boy done with fighting but afraid to say so, saw Delvin as he raised up and started to run.
He cried out. “Yonder’s a black ’un spying!”
Others too had had enough. They too were ready to retire.
“Get him!” they cried.
The boys were quick in this way, instantly and solidly opposed to an africano person watching them in their secret white boys’ Sunday afternoon battle that they’d come up with to break loose from the boredom and dreariness of their lives. But this here was better.
Whooping, cawing like crows, they took after Delvin.
Delvin was fast, and he remembered the way he’d come. It was easy to run among the trees. He sprinted up the track, cut between two big chestnut trees that said shoo shoo in low windy voices as he passed, dashed straight up the hill and cut over to where he’d left Onely. The white boys came on behind him running, not in a bunch but spread out through the woods. Virgin forest, Onely had said this was. Delvin was wearing sneakers so old the white canvas had turned green. He could feel the rocks and the hard ground through the gutta percha soles.
He reached the spot where they’d napped, but Onely wasn’t there. Maybe he’d mistook the place, but no, he recognized the tulip poplar, a black streak on it about head high.
“Onely,” he called in a low voice, “Whoo, Onely.”
“Keep on coming this way,” said Onely’s voice from on up the track. He stuck his head around a large oak. “Come on,” he said.
Delvin ran toward him. Behind him he could hear the boys coming. As he passed him he saw from the corner of his eye Onely get to his feet. He had the .410 up and pointed. Delvin ran on by him. Then a shot. The gun going off with a loud crumping sound that seemed to slam against the trees.
A cry came from the chasing boys.
“He hit him!” somebody yelled.
Delvin had continued on up the track thinking Onely would follow. Now he did, sprinting right past Delvin. Delvin heard what had happened—heard the shot and the cry—but he didn’t want to know it.
He ran as hard as he could and they continued running up the ridge and along it through the long grass and a stand of yellow birch trees and down into a mixed wood of maples and poplars that made a sound as if it was raining in the leaves (it wasn’t) and on through a canebrake in a hollow where they hid for a minute but couldn’t stay because the fright was on them in a punishing way. They crashed through the limber cane shoots and ran past a huge cherry tree and ran on without fatigue across the shoulder of the ridge and down and across another sun-splashed swale where blackberries were making among their own white flowers. Two young africano girls were picking the ripe berries and dropping them into buckets.
Onely yelled at the girls to run away but they stood looking at them. Delvin grabbed one girl’s wrist and began to pull her along. He stopped when the other didn’t come and said to them both that crazy white boys were coming and they had to run. The other came along slowly, swinging her bucket. When Delvin started to run again they ran too. He was thinking wildly, coming up closer in his mind to jumping off into some hideout or cave he couldn’t find and he wanted to start shrieking and yelling (all the while mutttering “damn damn damn”) and then in the next moment saw ahead of him the cuts and swerves he would be racing along in just a second and he couldn’t get it straight exactly what was happening or even who it was happening to, saw the jostle in a chokecherry branch and the sideslip of some tiny creature exiting the premises, and didn’t know anything, he thought, but just run and run.
Onely had disappeared up ahead but Delvin ran with the girls. One of them was crying but the other ran with a solemn face, not saying a word. They made it to the top of the ridge and when Delvin started down toward the north the solemn girl whose wrist he still held tugged him the opposite way.
“We got to . . . ,” he said, but he didn’t know what, and when the girl pulled him again hard, in her face still wordless a look of severe intelligence and knowing, he went with her.
He couldn’t tell where Onely was. With the girls, the one whose hand he was still holding now leading—twelve-year-old girls, thirteen maybe—he crossed the long bottom where jack-in-the-pulpits bloomed in mucky soil and climbed through a complex understory of rhododendron bushes and laurel beneath tall loblolly pines to a ridge covered in holly bushes that the girl knew a path through and down into a gully that they followed, jumping from rock to rock, until they were suddenly back in Red Row at the head of Jersey street.
He stopped, winded, run through with an exhilaration that made him want to run some more, keep on running, maybe cross out of the mountains to the flatlands that spilled toward the Mississippi river and then rose again to the Texas plains where maybe his mother was if she wasn’t all the way to California and Hollywood or some other flimsy place—stopped and bent over his knees and drew in big breaths that he suddenly wanted the girls to see, notice the heroic boy who’d just outwitted the white people once again, a fine fellow. But when he raised up he was dizzy, and swayed, almost fell. The girls, particularly the one solemn-faced pretty girl, didn’t even seem to be ruffled. Even as he was telling them not to say anything about what had happened, the one he was still holding (for dear life) broke free and together the girls ran away from him down the street, their bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as they ran.
At the corner the girl he’d run with stopped and looked back at him. Her face was solemn yet. For a moment she studied him before wheeling about and disappearing beyond the porch of a man’s house whose wife had been buried the week before, he remembered, by accommodation of the Constitution Funeral Home.
Then the truth of what kind of trouble he was in poked its snout up like a ground rat.
He wouldn’t be safe anywhere and he knew it. If that white boy was killed—even if he wasn’t—they wouldn’t stop looking until they found him. He would have to head right back into the woods. He felt sick to his stomach. Just like his mother he was going to have run off into the mountains.
But before he did that he wanted to go home. He loped across the Row, running like a boy who had somewhere to get to but didn’t want anybody to know it.
Many people saw him that evening, a well-formed boy with a bush of thick hair cut in a high part and the handsome face of a blackness that even africano people remarked on, a good boy, they said, son of a murderer who had escaped retribution, a lucky boy despite that, who, so they figured, would some day come into one of the three or four largest fortunes in the quarter—former dewbaby, as they called him, black as grandmama’s skillet and kindly.
He was sure they would be looking for him at home so he ducked around behind the big yellow frame AME church on Jefferson where under a pollarded magnolia three little girls were playing fly the hoop. One of them skipped and fell in the dust. She looked up at him as if he was the cause. In the office he found Miss Marvie Appleton who let him use the phone to call the house.
Miss Parker said no one had been around looking for him. He asked her to put Willie Burt on and after a few minutes his raspy voice said he too hadn’t seen anybody looking. But then maybe, Delvin thought, it was too early. Had Willie seen the Ghost? Sho, he was out in the shed eating apples he stole from Mr. Oliver’s supply. Well, would Willie tell Winston to come meet him over behind Miss Louise Marchant’s house where he was working on something for her?
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is it you be working on?” Willie wanted to know.
“I’m helping her to write a letter.”
“Okay,” Willie said, “I’ll tell him.”
“I need him to come fast.”
Which the Ghost did, hotfooting across the Row to the back door of Miss Louise’s lime-green house. Miss Louise was the unmarried sister of Rev Poulice Marchant who for forty years was the minister of the Sweetwater Holiness church and now ten years after he died continued on in fine form and local respect (Miss Louise did) in her small two-story house that was the only one on her block that was painted. As Winston started up the brick back steps Delvin called to him from some redtop bushes by a runoff ditch at the bottom of the yard. The Ghost gave him a misshapen grin and loped over.
“Hey, my boon,” he said.
Delvin told him he needed him to go around to the police station to see what he could find out about a boy being shot.
“Ju shoot him?”
“No. It wadn’t me.”
“Okay, fine,” the Ghost said. He’d been living in the shed semi-permanently for a few weeks now, despite being run off twice or three times by Willie or Elmer, slinking back each time under Delvin’s protection.
“I’m going around behind Heberson’s and get something to eat. Let’s meet right there in two hours’ time—around back.”
The Ghost said this was fine with him, grinned and took off running across the yard in his hunched, loping style, his head stiff on his shoulders and his arms swinging as if he was about to grab something.
It was full dark out and gloomy without lights along the streets except here and there on the corners and little wicklamps burning in the houses like it was still the nineteenth century. Instead of going straight to the store Delvin made his way to the Emporium, slipping along the alley behind his old birth house and ducking into the bordello’s wide yard, easing in under one of the big magnolias in back. He wasn’t sure what the Ghost would do and he felt safer near the bordello. The magnolia’s branches drooped all the way to the ground. He climbed up among them, feeling his sense of hopefulness, his strength, ebbing as he climbed and pushed into the smooth fork and lay along the high limb panting, nauseous and afraid he would vomit. His life felt emptied out, like earth from a barrow, and he saw himself alone, a trembling haint on the edge of the world. His mother must have felt like this. He let out a small cry, a squeak of pain and fright. He wanted to throw himself into the air and fly away but there was no way to do that. His felt his spirit leap out from him like a skittish bird, some creature without knowledge of the world or a way to go. He was suddenly dizzy. “Little Time,” he said, “Little Time,” addressing the tick of his life as if it was a small goblin he might appeal to. But there was nothing. He was terrified of every house in the quarter—in Chattanooga—in the world—but at the same time he wanted to rush into them and beg to be hidden. He thought of the Ghost crammed up under the Emporium. Lord, he would jam himself even deeper if he thought he could stay. He shivered, pressing his face against the tree body. His fingers moved across little whorls and striations like ancient messages age-carved into the bark, indecipherable. “Help me,” he said, “Dear God, Little Time, help me.” His heart hammered like a crazy man trying to get out—or in, he thought, trying to burrow deeper into his own body.
At the three-quarters chiming of the second hour by the courthouse clock he shinnied down and made his way across the Row to Heberson’s. The Ghost was crouched behind a line of garbage cans out back. His eyes gleamed like a cat’s.
“Yeah, they’s been some kind of shooting up that old mountain way. They was talking about it round the jailhouse.”
Delvin felt his insides clutch. A slashing pain driving down his body. He felt suddenly as if he needed to evacuate his bowels. “They say what they have on that?” he said in a crumped, rustly voice.
“Not to me, no, but they was talking about somebody’s got shot up on the mountain and they’s had to carry him out. Haul him out or something—somebody, some mosying wanderer or something or maybe it was a bunch of em up there. Or something else, I can’t remember. It’s mixed up. Shell Pickens—they got him on a drunk charge—was shouting in the back.”
“Was it a boy?”
“When? Yeah, I get you. Could have been. You done shot a boy?”
“No.”
“Was it a white boy?”
Delvin ignored the question. “Did they say who did it?”
“They aint come down real hard on that yet. Leastways not in my hearing. Maybe they holding back on it. Maybe they don’t know. That’d be some luck.”
Delvin turned away. He was afraid he was about to start crying. He felt as if a huge part of him was breaking off, shelving away—as if he was big as a town or a continent, something huge about him that he had never noticed now shifting, rumbling and sliding down, contravening solidity and the future. “You got to excuse me,” he said, ran and pushed through the door of Heberson’s outhouse, shucked, squatted and let loose his bowels. Even as he did so something urged him to flee instantly. He had to grip one of the worn two-by-four supports to hold himself in place. He felt sick, as if his insides had melted in a corrosive heat. He strained over himself, the pungent stink rising as he did so. “Lord God, suppose me,” he said. “Suppose me into your way right now. O Help me help me help me.” He was falling through himself and for a second thought he would pass out. But he came back. He tore off a sheet of the old Collier’s Encyclopedia hanging backless on a hook and cleaned himself, fixed his clothes and came out again into the vaguely light-muddled dark behind the store where the Ghost, pale and swaying, piecing out a mountain tune, waited.
“You done fo it now, aint you?” the Ghost said.
The stars faint above the city like pale drops flicked off heaven’s fingers. Never to be the same again. Tick time, he thought, Little Time.
“Was there anything going on at home?”
“I aint been over there, but when I left out Mr. Oliver was preparing a body—Miss Freedly from over on Godown street, that old woman who used to boil up those pots of molasses in her backyard? You didn’t shoot her, did you?
“No. She died?”
“Yeah. Waked up dead in her bed this morning, Elmer said. Mr. Oliver is probably just finishing with her now. Funeral’s tomorrow.”
“Would you tell them I have some business over in town and probably won’t be in tonight?”
“Will they believe me?”
“Tell em I’m going shining for rabbits with some boys.”
“Can I go?”
“It’s just something I want you to tell them.”
“Okay.”