“I guess it would scare you.”
She gave him a searching look. “They told you all about my father.”
“Yes. What little a stranger could tell.”
“I shouldn’t talk about him as if he was still alive, but I always do. I’m one of those who got shook loose by somebody dying.”
“Me too,” he said. “Dying—or missing.”
“What do you mean?”
He told her about his mother’s flight.
“Did you look for her in the photographs?”
He brightened at her thinking that. “Yes. She wasn’t there. But I wondered last night—again—if I might have overlooked her.”
“I don’t want to think you might have a picture of my father.”
“We don’t.”
“How do you know?”
“We don’t have anybody who fit the description.”
She clasped herself in her arms and turned away from him. A truck rumbled over the wooden bridge, making running slapping sounds as the tires went over the boards. Around the creosoted wooden pilings the current displayed little brown froth collars. At any minute, he thought, the water could pull the bridge away. A thin shiver went through him; he wanted to run. But he made himself stay still. His head had begun to hurt.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m okay.”
“You look discomposed.”
“Sometimes I feel like everything is about to collapse. As if the next second it’ll all be knocked down and swept away.”
“I feel that way too sometimes.”
“Or sometimes I feel like it’s already happened. As if I’m standing in havocs and confusions.”
“Yes.”
“I used to sit at night out on the back steps of this orphan’s home I lived in and it would seem like if I got up I wouldn’t be able to prevent myself from stepping off into the dark that would swallow me up. Nothing I could do to hold myself from it. I’d sit there shivering, afraid to move at all. I could hardly call myself. Somebody’d have to come get me.”
He’d not talked like this to anybody before. And it was as if he’d not thought this way or felt this way or had these things happen before he said them. As if his life was not something that occurred out in the world, but instead was a collection of stories that came to him out of his heart and mind. He thought of telling this to Celia, but he knew he wouldn’t say it correctly.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I touch some living thing, like a bush or a bit of slick grass, or a . . . cricket . . . and I feel like I’m going to disappear.”
This was no better, and he flushed as he said the words. She was silent. He could not put properly what he felt. With a feeling that he must or die he wanted to tell her how it felt to be pulled into the state he was trying to describe, but he couldn’t. Maybe every part of this had only to do with her being here.
Below the low gray bank they stood on was a narrow stretch of white sand. He had seen this before, white sand under cutback dark soil. It too had given him a peculiar feeling. He was full of peculiar feelings. He didn’t want to let her know what a curioussome person he was, but then he did.
She put her hand again on his bare wrist. The touch felt so powerfully delightful that he thought he could run up the steps of it right into her heart. But it was only a friendly touch, a pat. She smiled at him and her smile was congenial, nothing more. Way back in the woods a bird, some unidentifiable, ridiculous creature, let loose a single cry, round and sweet as a scuppernong grape. He jumped down to the sandy bar and stood there peering upstream under the bridge. Big clots of brush tucked under the eaves. He had a great desire to jump into a boat and float away down the stream, but the stream was too shallow, the dark water turned thin and copper colored as it washed the sand edge, and he had no boat. A turtle with a saucer-shaped black and yellow shell perched on a slanted log. It wobbled and fell into the water; he didn’t know they were so ungainly.
She walked away, but still he stood there. He picked up a piece of pine bark and sailed it at the water. It flipped and parried off, catching on the surface as he stood thinking. Everybody he met had a different dream. Every dream was strong and secret and clung-to and hoped for with all the dreamer’s might. One wanted a little patch of good soil, another folding money on the section, another a hazel-eyed baby with a burblous laugh, another rescue rolling in from a far country. Each thought he could find his soul’s satisfaction in a single scrap of creation . . . and build his life on it. But the air or water or bit of ground that separated you from the dream . . . how could you cross it?
He climbed the bank and walked back to the car where she sat waiting. He had hoped she would look up, look away from where she had stored herself these last moments, look at him with delight, but she only looked half pleased at seeing him, half annoyed at having to wait. He got in the car and leaned toward her to kiss her anyway, but halfway there he stopped and smiled at her. It was a forced smile that felt cracked and stiff on his face.
“You know,” he said, “I think you and I fit together better than any two . . .” And then stopped. He slumped back into his seat as she started the car. She didn’t need a crank, the machine fired right up.
“I like you,” she said, understanding everything, he thought, seeing right into him, “but I am older than you. I feel kind of sisterly toward you.”
Oh no, he wanted to say and raised his hand as if to stop her: Don’t talk that way. “You and I would be perfect together,” he said.
“None are perfect,” she said, “and we both have other plans, other lives we want.”
He turned away, for the moment defeated. The car chugged, creaking and shaking up the bank and stopped; the bank was too steep. She gave him a scared look. He told her to drive it back down and turn around. After she did this he took the wheel and backed it up the slope, something he had seen a driver do before. Her face was flushed a hidden, rising red, strongest in the point of her cheeks, and a bead of sweat slid down under her ear. At the top, after he’d wheeled around and stopped, as he leaned back in the seat under big mossy oaks, a smoothness, a calm in his body, she darted in and kissed him on the cheek. They changed places and then sat a minute on the grassy shoulder. The dirt road was a soft orange dusty color. She looked as if she wanted to kiss him again but she only put the car in gear and they started out.
“That was too scary,” she said.
“Wadn’t much to it.”
“I’m so thankful you knew what to do.”
“Me too,” he said and smiled.
“You’re a curious boy.”
“Not in a bad way.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just . . . you’re out here in the world wandering around on your own.”
“I got the professor. I got a job.”
“I don’t mean to insult you.”
“It’s all right.”
They were silent. The pine woods streamed by. A distant hawk, drifting in its singleness, tipped and slid off to the west.
“Thank you for telling me everything you have,” she said. “I love listening to you.”
“You said you didn’t really want to become a doctor. What is it that you want to be?”
“I’d like to do something like you’re doing,” she said, reaching over and touching his hand. “I’d like to ride around showing people things.”
“Why don’t you come along with us?”
She smiled at him and then she tossed her head in an artificial way. “I probably will become a doctor if they’ll let me. A nurse if that’s all they’ll allow. And then I’ll travel around helping sick people.”
He could offer her a lot of things better than that, he thought.
“What people really want,” he said, “is to hook up with somebody they feel comfortable with and then get on with living.”
“I don’t really think much about that,” she said.
“But you don’t have to. We got it in our nature already. You don’t have to cozen it up.”
“But I have other things to do first.” She smiled again, fondly; distantly. “And so do you.”
“No,” he said emphatically, hurriedly. “The somebody you hook up with goes right along with all this other business we got to do. They’re a natural fit. One helps the other.”
“Still, I don’t think I quite would be . . .” She stopped talking. They were passing a small cane syrup mill. The press turned by a single gray mule attached to the end of a long pole. A white man wearing overalls and no shirt fed stalks of purple cane into the mill.
“You want some syrup?” Delvin asked.
“Oh, I’d love some . . . but I don’t know.”
“Sho. Pull on in.”
She parked on the road shoulder just beyond the cooking shed and they got out and the man watched them walk back to him as he continued to stuff stalks into the press. He was a thin white man, his skin clammy pale where it showed under the overalls.
“Could we buy a jug of your syrup, mister?” Delvin asked.
The man went on feeding the long purple stalks into the press. Delvin could see his left nipple, like a dark brown button, slip in and out of view as he worked.
“Excuse me, suh.”
The man just looked at them and went on feeding in the stalks. The mule, head down, had nothing on his mind but muleness.
“Do you sell cane syrup, mister?”
The man stopped feeding, stepped to the press, unsnagged the full bucket of dark juice from under the slot and walked with it past them to the cooking shed. He poured the juice into the kettle, stoked the fire with a billet of whiteoak wood and then stood looking across the fields that were planted in cotton. He did not appear any longer to be aware of their presence.
They got back in the car. They drove a couple of miles down the road before Delvin said, “Sometimes a white man will act like a human being, sometimes he won’t.”
“He didn’t like to see negro folk riding around in their own fine car.” She laughed and then they both laughed. It seemed so funny and ridiculously humiliating to be treated like that, so crazy to them both, that they couldn’t help but laugh. He reached over, fumbled with her face, managed to turn it toward him and kissed her partially on the lips.
She smiled again, the fond now slightly askew distant smile, and said, “That’s sweet.”
He drew instantly back and looked straight ahead at the road that seemed to be running through exotic green country. He didn’t feel any more like laughing.
Soon they were back in town, bumping along the main street of the quarter. The day was hot. Two lines of sweat ran down her face as she laughed at his story about a peg-legged man who, in Fitzgerald, Georgia, had challenged him to a foot race and beat him.
“He wanted to wrestle,” he said, “but I told him I didn’t think I could take being mortified twice.”
They parked behind the van, through the open door of which the prof could be seen sitting in his collapsible canvas chair drinking from a tall glass. Without getting up he waved at them. They didn’t get out of the car.
“You think you want to have children anytime soon?” Delvin asked.
Instead of mocking or laughing she looked searchingly at him and said, “I’m troubled about all that.”
“How so?”
She made a discarding motion with the gathered fingers of one hand and said, “I sometimes feel this yearning for children—it’s like, I don’t know, a searchlight of happiness has found me out in some swamp of myself and I think a child is that light, but then I feel very calm and cool about the whole thing and believe I have so much to do in this life that I am not interested in children or not interested right now or in this situation or in that person and I just let it sink away from me. Like when you’re thinking about eating a peach and don’t for some reason and you just forget it.”
“What is that?”
“Oh, I’m not making sense, am I?”
She was speaking rapidly and almost frantically, as if she had herself caught on to something and wanted to elude it.
“The professor says it’s good to marry early and have children early and all that—get started,” he said, “on what life’s really about.”
“I don’t think you can avoid that—or avoid the opportunity.”
“Shoot. You ought to ride the trains. Wasted lives. Ruined folk. And then you come to town and you see most people—those that got a chance—white or colored—can’t get away from that study quick enough.”
He too was talking fast. He didn’t want her to go away, that was why. Probably she wouldn’t come back. Maybe if he tried everything she would go for one something. But he was going too fast.
“Can I buy you a lemonade?” he said.
She would sit up nights trying to feel at ease enough on the earth to go to sleep. Some nights she thought the fighting in her would never stop. It was always the same: whether or not she was a good girl, a girl God could love. Girl a man could love. She didn’t be lieve she was that girl. In the half light of her college room, with her roommate’s little tuk . . . tuk . . . tuk snores gently percolating in the next bed, she would wrestle with herself and always lose. She would rediscover herself as a bad person who could never get free of her badness. Always she would begin silently to apologize: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. But not even this let her sleep. Only the vague exhaustion that came over her, thoughts like musty gray shadows settling around her, tucking the space like moss. This boy pushing her was scary.
A breeze felt around in the trees. Down the street a couple of little girls playing hullygully.
“No, I can’t do that,” she said.
“No lemonade? Everybody needs lemonade. Except for my foster uncle Herman who got his stomach tore out during the war—everybody but him.”
“I have to be at Annie’s for supper.”
“It’s still early.”