They were sitting now on a couple of bottomless rush chairs that Mr. Heberson had set beside a storage shed for possible repairing. Mr. Heberson ran a sideline in repaired used furniture. The backyard was piled with couches and broken tables and smashed-up chairs. From the grocery’s double back doors came the sound of Heberson’s crystal radio playing white church music. Delvin listened for a minute; a few passages were soothing, then a run of growly, stiff exhorting was not. He wanted to phonecall Mr. Oliver, but he better forgo that. A wan emptiness revealed itself under his heart. He longed to go lie down on the big red and gold rug in Mr. O’s bedroom and read his book on sea voyages—longed to be there right now turning the big stiff pages, listening to Mr. O humming under his breath. But he didn’t want to have to tell him what happened. The Ghost’s information had plunged him into a terror so brusque and enveloping he could hardly think. As if a whole scotched world has just shook into place and he stood in the middle of it. A scotched world in a scotched world, he thought and almost laughed. Poor white boy. He hoped he wasn’t dead. Off in the lonely leaf strew of the mountain. Loneliness flooding along inside him as he thought this.
He told the Ghost to run on to the house and then he waited a while before going into the grocery and buying a bag of crackers and some store cheese. Then he crossed the Row to Onely’s house. It was a shanty made of boards tacked onto poles and a roof of slats covered in disintegrating tarpaper. He sneaked up through the smelly yard, a skinny pale dog snuffling and bowing-up with delight at his side, and looked through a crack. There was no sign of Onely. As he walked away down the alley Onely called to him from a mass of elderberry bushes. He stepped out to meet Delvin. The alley smelled like dead animals. Gray puffed clouds were out all over the sky, sliding along, hauled like barges by a great current before a pinched moon. Onely had a hat, an old soft snapbrim with a hole in the crown, pulled over his eyes. He didn’t push it back to talk to Delvin.
“I was afraid you’d run off to turn me in,” he said. His large teeth gleamed as he spoke.
“I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t even think of it. Besides, we’re two colored boys. They’d be more happy to fry two than one.”
“I hadn’t seen anything unusual around here,” Onely said.
Delvin told him about the Ghost’s visit to the police station.
“That humbugger. He probably turned us in.”
“He wouldn’t. He’s a free-hearted soul.”
“You think they want to keep it quiet til they catch us?”
“They couldn’t do that. This is the kind of thing word gets around on. You sure you shot that boy?”
“You heard him cry out yourself.”
“I heard somebody.”
“That was probably the somebody that said They shot ’im. Dang. Even if we’d missed him by a mile, they know we’s black uns and they’ll come at us just the same. You shouldn’t a spooked em.”
Delvin thought that too but he didn’t say anything.
He wanted to tell Onely how scared he was but he thought better of it. If they got out of this Onely might hold it against him, or, before that, he might think Delvin couldn’t be trusted and no telling what would happen then.
“I’m shook,” he said, unable after all to help himself.
“You not the only one.”
In the dark stinking alley piled along one side with barrels containing not yet expendable refuse, they stood in the deeper dark cast by the shadow of a tin-sided shed. Delvin leaned against the tin that was cool and made a low crackling sound as it slightly gave. He pulled himself back upright.
“I was thinking of running off into the hills.”
He hadn’t wanted to tell Onely that either, but maybe he would want to come with him. In the dimness Delvin could see in Onely’s eyes knowledge of his life. You can tell what people know, he thought. That was the difference between eyes of the living and eyes of the dead. Dead didn’t know anything. Once he had realized that, he was no longer nervous around corpses. He studied Onely’s round face.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gon catch a train. I was on my way to the yards when I saw you coming around the corner.”
“I’ll go with you,” Delvin said, and the two of them started out. But when they reached the train yard just beyond the south side of the quarter he changed his mind. Not at first but during the time they waited for the train to form up.
“In twenty minutes on the roads we’ll be in Georgia or Alabama and they won’t come looking for us down there,” Onley said.
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
He’d be trapped on a train. He wanted to be on his feet, running.
“I don’t think this is for me,” he said.
But he waited with Onley in the empty boxcar they’d crawled into.
“As soon as this thing starts I’m gone,” Delvin said. But when the car jolted and stopped he only looked up without moving and when it jarred into motion he got up and went to the door but he didn’t jump out. “I’ll ride a little ways with you,” he said coming back to where Onley sat with his chin tipped up and his eyes closed.
He stayed on until the train passed the junction at Buttonwood, first settlement inside the Alabama line, where he intended to jump down, but he stayed on instead, through Buttonwood and then through Shelby and then Holderness and Barwick. It wasn’t until the train rattled through Slimton, just past the two straggly, crooked blocks of the town, as the freight began to pick up speed past the long curve leaving the Culver Ginning Company behind, that he jumped down, rolled into a dry ditch, got up and walked away down the road, heading, to his vague surprise, not back to Chattanooga, but west.
“Since then,” he said, talking to himself as he walked along a hard dirt road, “old Delvin’s been on the loose end of loose.” He thought of turning up in Chicago, half dead, penniless, and making a life for himself as a musician. He had heard Louis Armstrong play on the radio and had once seen Duke Ellington walking down Adams street on his way to conduct his orchestra at the Harmony ballroom. He carried a light cane that he swished like a little limber sword as he walked. Or maybe he would live on the rough streets until winter came to Chicago and then catch a train to Miami.
He was still breathless after a mile walking on the side of the road. Nothing ahead but farm fields and woods. No telling how many miles of them. Why not go back and catch another train? Why not go home and hide under the house? Watch the legs of the police as they rounded everybody up. Oh Lord. If he was going back he would have to walk through that little town. These farmers would eat him alive. Oh Lord. He stopped and stood in the middle of the road. A consternation came on him so powerfully he thought his head would burst. What the mercy do I do? He scuffed the light, speckled dirt. It smelled of the country, of country life. Tall sumac bushes nodded darkly and gave in a little breeze. He thought he might walk on a bit farther, see what he could see. He started out.
As he continued south he would step off the road and crouch in the ditch when he saw car lights coming. The ditch was dry and sandy at the bottom. There weren’t many vehicles, maybe six between when he was set down and when the first gray shadings of dawn began to appear over grassy hills to the east. He stopped to rest. He lay down in the ditch grass. He shut his eyes but he could see the white boys running after him. Then he could see the solemn-faced girl. She was a plucky girl; he hoped their paths would cross again. The grass itched through his shirt. How would he ever get home? He began softly to cry, holding the tears in, ashamed of them, as if there was someone around who might see and rate him. After a while he slept, but just barely, always near the surface where it seemed white boys carrying big sticks were about to catch him. At the earliest shadings of dawn he was up and walking.
For nine months he wandered, catching trains out of little shapeless burgs, riding all night peering up from splintery beds of flatcars at the drifting stars, wondering who he was and where he would wind up, taking his meals at back steps and in alleys behind little restaurants, gnawing on hard store cheese and crusty bread, wondering where he was going and when he would get there, crossing rivers and blackwater sloughs where buzzard delegations perched in tall cypress trees and passing fields ornately laid down, riding and working and pulling his socks off only when he came to a likely stream he could wash in, laying low on the lowdown, a railroad angelina shy of bulls and yeggs, careful with his few cents, taking his time to question others who might look likely, flailing in dreams, and wondering if he would ever again light on somewhere to stay. But time passed, the world edged into fall, and he grew homesick. Outside Barwick, Alabama—the closest he’d been to Chattanooga since he stepped down from his original freight—he caught a ride with a farmer who took him home on a work plan, and all the way Delvin was making up a story, not his, he knew that already, but the man’s, story of a skinny fellow with a wrinkled brow and slim shoulders and a partially withered arm, some farmer with a mystery in his life that he couldn’t express and needed old Delvin to get him going and help him tell his tale. Everybody had a mystery and on the roads you heard versions of mystery like fairy tales and legends continuously revised. Stories of great fights and punishment and loss enduring like an eternal flame. Stories of marriages gone sour and children lost in a fire and stumbles that threw a man down into pits and left him crawling in dark hallways under the gaze of strange faces peering ghostly through windows, and floods come like destitution itself, and somebody had his left hand cut off with a pirate cutlass and another had his back broke by a cotton wagon and somebody else discovered his sweetheart in a junction between towns where nobody would tell you the truth about anything and he said to his sweetheart I will go get us something to eat but when he came back she was dead in the road with her throat cut. The stories stacked in your head like painted plates and you could take them down and read the life of the country in them and he liked to do this even though each one made him lonely. Here was another.
For the next five weeks he stayed on the farm working for the Bealls, that was their name, a husband and wife, africano folks who owned their own farm. He cleaned out the chicken yard and house and hoed the garden and picked vegetables. In the kitchen he worked peeling tomatoes for canning and putting up pickles. He sat at the kitchen table eating green tomato pickles that were so sweet they made his back teeth ache, reading aloud to Mrs. Beall from a book of fairy tales. He read her the story of Sleeping Beauty and the story of the Lost Prince. In both these, one the tale of a single woman drugged and stashed by a thug in the woods and the other of a young man who could not read the signs that were as plain as day, Mrs. B found her life.
I too have been asleep all my life, she said. I too could never read the signs.
She was a stout woman with a plain open face. She voiced these statements in a way that made Delvin feel she knew the stories well and had spoken these sentiments before. Yet she made them with fervor, as if realizing truths about herself for the first time. Her long broad bottom lip trembled. I wonder where my prince is, she said, as if she had just misplaced him, and where is my crippled but kindly dwarf to lead me from the dark wood. Another story about a prince defeating three wily witches did not interest her.
I just don’t believe no prince is going to outwit such remarkable women, she said, baring her stained childish teeth.
This remark too seemed prepared. Maybe, Delvin thought, he was not the first traveler to sit at this table. It was covered with oilcloth printed in tiny red flowers on a blue background. Small red mallow flowers filled a cloudy glass vase set in the center. She picked new flowers every day from the garden, always red mallows, but only the small ones. Others, rose pink and red-streaked and as wide and fat as a dinner plate, she left alone. The kitchen smelled heavily of peeled and blanched and pureed tomatoes, as of a tomato wine.
The first sleep there, morning into afternoon, just before he waked, he had had a dream of his mother kneeling beside a mountain stream dipping water in a yellow gourd. She looked young and healthy and vigilant and she was carrying a large bunch of white flowers stuffed into a sack on her back. All in the dream seemed right. But she did not look at him and he did not call or go to her. In the dream he asked himself why not, but it did not seem an important question. He waked in the late afternoon with the dream still alive in his mind, a little sad, and refreshed and alert and hungry again. The room was filled with a fine-grained aged-yellow light coming in a narrow window at the foot of the bed. He smelled some lemony herb he didn’t know the name of, some kind of mint, he thought.
He lay on his back feeling surrounded by big events. These events were at a distance, like lights on the horizon. Last year they had buried out of the funeral home a man who’d committed suicide by setting himself on fire. He’d been burned worse than that boy. The man—Stacy Beltram—had bought half a gallon of gasoline that he pumped himself into a little tin jug and out in the alley behind his house under a big blossoming mimosa he poured it over himself and set a match to it. The fire had burned him up and the mimosa too. “That was typical of him,” the man’s old father had said about his ruining all the fuzzy pink blossoms. At the graveside service Delvin overheard a tall man in an army uniform, a man some said was once Mr. Beltram’s best friend, say, “He set fire to himself trying to buy a little time off in Hell.” The other people who heard him laughed with their hands over their mouths. The burned man had been a cardsharp and a japer, a grifter who was once put in jail for selling worthless insurance policies to old ladies. What had been coming for that man finally caught him, Delvin had said to Mr. Oliver as they washed up at the soapstone sink in the basement hall. What caught him, catches everybody, Mr. O had reminded him. Chickens wing home to every roost.
He stood at the window looking out at the poultry yard. Evening coming on out of yellow swirls and loose red patches in the west. The chickens were starting to make for the roost in the chicken house. They clucked and quarreled as they trooped toward the short board inclines, and a few of them continued scratching in the dirt as if the dark wont anything to worry about. But in a minute even the brave ones would pick up and climb aboard. Chickens couldn’t see at night, so he’d read, that was why the fox could catch them so easy. Among other reasons, he’d thought.
On the day they finished canning the tomatoes it was still early afternoon and Delvin walked out to the pasture beyond the garden. Off to the left a distant truck boiled along a dusty road, probably Mr. Beall, on one of his errands. Mr. Beall often left after breakfast and was gone for a good part of the day. He would return bringing a small shrub or turnip or some seeds folded in a small newspaper packet or once a slender carved wood figurine he said had been brought from Africa. He did a little work around the place, but that usually involved encouraging the chickens and once or twice taking one of the roosters out of the small cages and exchanging its place with the rooster in the big pen. Delvin followed him into the pen the first time, but when Mr. Beall put the fresh rooster down he immediately attacked Delvin, coming at him in a ruckus of feathers and kicks. Mr. Beall had laughed when Delvin ran. I wish I could have got a picture, he said, when he caught the other rooster and shooed the angry cock away from the boy. Delvin figured he could have stomped the rooster if it came to that, but he wasn’t sure. If that devilish bird had gotten him on the ground no telling what would have happened. From the safety of the farmyard he eyed the new rooster, a red and green and black cock with a large red wattle that swayed as it walked. The rooster lifted itself on its legs and let loose a sharp crow. Delvin decided not to let himself be drawn into a battle with the cock. When Mr. Beall invited him into the enclosure again he passed. I’m too young to let myself be killed by a chicken, he said. Mr. Beall had laughed a friendly, farmer-knows-best laugh.
Past the yard, past the garden, Delvin stood in the pasture sniffing the wind. A stand of yellow phlox caught at a bit of breeze, shuddered and let it go, the tall shaggy flower heads fluttering. A meadowlark flew his way, checked and veered sharply off, exposing his yellow breast feathers. The blue sky was strewn with small round clouds, like puffs of cannon fire. The path was wide and grassy, but in the middle of it a narrow strip ran that was sandy, without growth. There were faint footprints in this strip. He experienced a consternated shiver. He began to follow the path, and as he walked the fear or nervousness at first grew, but then gradually it began to subside or if not quite subside, to be replaced by another kind of trepidation, not just a fear of police agents or detectives trailing him, but of some other presence. The path dipped toward a branch, left the pasture and entered a gray wood. Long spindly trunks of mottled gray trees he didn’t know the names of held up small collections of pale green leaves. Below them crooked skinny bushes with hard glossy leaves squatted. A sharp fluttering came from behind one set of bushes—a bird spooked by something, maybe him, maybe something else. Badgers came to mind. He had been reading in the Britannica lately about badgers, about their implacable fierceness. In the drawings, despite their fur, they looked flattened, like some turtles or other reptiles. They had hard black curved claws. He stopped. The wind soughed in the tall thin trees, making a sighing sound. In a minute, he thought, it’s gonna start moaning. The path came to a plank, railed bridge over twenty feet of a tea-colored creek. He made himself stop in the middle of the bridge, carefully lean on the rail and look at the water that had no discernible current. Green and yellow dragonflies darted and hung over the surface, hesitating, tipping, angling, sliding down almost to the water and hovering there as if discovering and examining tremendously interesting material on what to Delvin looked like a glozed, chocolate-colored sheet. The stream had a pleasant peaty smell. The bank on the far side was sandy, speckled with brown and black bits, but the stream itself was opaque; dark water that might contain anything. But no police down there, he thought. He’d never gone fishing, except once when Mr. Oliver and George had taken him to a little pond behind a client’s house out in the country. Nothing but a little black turtle had bit their hooks. He’d like to try it again.
Looking up the trail that continued through the leafy trees filtering into piney woods, he debated whether to keep going. These moments of hesitation were familiar to him. Seems like that’s where I really live, he sometimes thought, not in the doing of one thing or another. He didn’t really want to go on, but he felt he ought to, ought to be brave enough or interested enough. Or was that a way of really wanting to do something—thinking he should—and hiding it from himself. He’d like to go into the little room where he slept and lie on the bed and read something, maybe the book of fairy stories or a newspaper. In their parlor the Bealls had My Bondage and Freedom by Mr. Douglas and Souls of Black Folk by Dr. Du Bois, but he had already read those books. He wanted to read another masterpiece, like Ivanhoe maybe, that he had read last summer lying on an old couch up in the attic at Mr. Oliver’s. He liked stories of struggle and questing in distant locales. Reading was natural, Miz Parker the cook said, to moody boys, and you are a moody boy. Maybe too moody, he thought, to be out alone in some thorny wood.
Then, without as far as he could tell having decided anything, he continued across the bridge and up the path that was strewn with waxy needles and rose gently into the pine woods. Just a few steps in it shaded off to the right, passed a large hedgelike growth of ligustrum that ran fifty feet in a high green wall and left off abruptly at the edge of a clearing in which there was a small white frame cottage. On the front porch of the cottage in a rocking chair much too big for him sat a tiny white man. The back of his chair soared high above his rusty white head. On one of the posts was hung a gray Confederate battle cap. The old man was looking straight at him. Delvin would have ducked and shot off from there, but the man called to him in a sweet little white man’s voice.
You, boy, welcome, he said.
His voice came so quick it caught Delvin before he could swing around. He must have been listening to him come along the trail. Those are some ears, Delvin thought, on an old man.
Did you bring me my candy? the man said.
No suh, Delvin answered.
Well, come on up here anyway and sit awhile.
Delvin came slowly up a sandy walk that was bordered by bricks set on edge and end to end and painted white. A low tea olive hedge was planted around the base of the front porch. The old man smiled as he came up the steps; he had been smiling since Delvin came in the yard. He half rose from his rocker and stuck out his hand. Delvin didn’t at first know what to do.
Well, the old man said, let’s shake on it.
Delvin bowed his head, took the old man’s hand that under skin so soft it felt like it would pull to pieces was as hard as wood. The man pumped his fingers and let go.
It’s good to get the human touch as often as you can, he said sinking back into his rocker. He sat among plump red cushions looped to the back of his chair. He wore a blue-striped white collarless shirt and a pair of nutbrown heavy cotton trousers. On the crest of the cap were two crossed swords. Delvin knew these caps from the parades in Chattanooga. The old Confederates marched together or were wheeled in their big wooden chairs in the group that grew smaller every year.
I see you’re studying my headpiece, the old man said, though Delvin had only glanced at it. He didn’t say anything. That’s from the independence war, the old man said.
I’ve seen em before.
They getting scarce, aint they?
I was just thinking that.
Where you from?
Atlanta.
Hm. Your accent sounds a touch farther north. Got some mountain in it.
Atlanta’s where I’m from now.
Well, Atlanta. Now there was a fight. Did I introduce myself? Probably not, I usually forget. I’m so happy to get a little company I jump right in. You’ll be lucky to get a word in yourself, young man.
I’m pretty much the quiet type.
Well, that’s too bad. By time I get wound down I like to hear from the other party. I’m Mr. Jobeen Mitchell. He cocked his head to the side. His old flesh slipped on his face as he moved. His nose, long and drawn down to a point at the tip, was waxy and gleamed in the soft light under the sighing pine trees. You been to any extravagant spots lately?
No sir, not lately.
Fletchy up there—you come from the house?
Yassuh, I guess—
Fletchy comes down here to read to me from her fairy books, but I don’t particularly care for them wispy tales. You like em?
I like about anything that’s written down.
Well now that’s a good way to be. Or maybe it aint. It’s a question I ask myself. Is it a man’s duty to let the ramblings go on unchecked, or is it his duty to at some point put a stop to em? That was the question old Ape Lincoln answered with a war against us. The old man knocked against his chin with two fingers, stretched out his jaw. What if he hadn’t won that one?
The Civil War?
That’s what I’m speaking of. War of Secession.
I’d probably still be a slave, Delvin said, thinking, as if I wadn’t one yet. His voice sounded funny to him, clipped, squeezed; maybe that was how they talked in Atlanta.
A slave? the old man said, throwing his head back. Oh, I doubt that. I spect the shame of that arrangement would have gotten under the skin of even these hardskin folks down here. But then, you probably feel like you even now are a slave.
Sometimes I do, Delvin said. Maybe he was under a spell, and this codger was some kind of old man witch.
He was still standing. At this point the old man indicated the companion rocker, also a tall chair. I’m sorry, he said, I was so glad to see you I forgot my manners. With nobody around my mouth gets backed up.
Thank you, Delvin said, and sat down.
I was a corporal in the Sixth Alabama Volunteers, the old man said, looking at him with eyes the blue of which had soaked into the white, a fighting regiment that mustered in after First Manassas and mustered out after Appomattox. I lived personally through eleven major battles and a sack full of skirmishes, all before I was twenty-one years old. The war put itself into my mind in such a way that nothing after it has been able to take its place. He looked away. His profile was jagged, bitten looking. Near bout nothing, he said.
Some of these old confederates, so Delvin knew, believed the war was still going on. This man seemed to be one of them. Twenty-one in ’64—that’d make him eighty-six right now.
The old man pushed back in the rocker and as it rocked back seemed about to go out of sight in the violet gloom of dusk, and then as he caught himself on the return seemed about to pitch into Delvin’s lap. Whoa, the old man said. You come from the house up yonder, didn’t you?
Yessir.
Howse Fletchy doing?
Mrs. Beall?
None other.