“No, I don’t feel that way. And besides I hadn’t done anything. Not a thing.”
“People follow me a lot too,” the Ghost said congenially. “I got lots of admirers these days. That’s probably what it is in your case—admirers. These girls, when they get a whiff of your abilities, they come slinking along after yuh.”
“I don’t know if it’s that. Besides, in yo case I heard it was a snort of that old three jacks and a king.”
“I don’t need no potion.” He shook his head. His greased orange hair shone in the low sunlight. “You rob a bank or something? Shoot somebody again?”
Delvin gave him a look. “No. But I did see a man get stabbed.”
“They want you for a witness?”
“It wadn’t like that.”
He told the Ghost about his experience on the freight.
“You think the fall killed him?” the Ghost asked, referring to the living murderer they threw off the train. “Wonder why they didn’t just kill him outright.”
“People don’t want blood on their hands.”
“Even murderer blood? Seems like that would be a badge of honor.”
“They don’t want nothing on their hands.”
Somebody’d tossed a handful of corn dust on a little spill of blood. Delvin’d had a bitter taste in the back of his throat. But after a while it passed. The man who grabbed him at the door and saved him, the little jeff; the man’s hands had shook. Lying makes violence, the professor always said.
The Ghost scratched his freckled cheek. He began a story of dash and devilment, familiar to Delvin before he heard it. Women, shiny-eyed girls, who loved him. “Got one over at the Emporium who wears a gold bracelet I give her.” Out this way he was ready to take on more responsibility, just as soon as Mr. O thought he was ready for it. Actually not when, but right now, if Delvin knew what he meant. He had a sly look under thick orange eyebrows. Something in his face heretofore hidden had worked its way to the surface. Delvin had seen it before with boys their age. Boys who had once been sweet and shy now become rough customers who pushed others around. Mostly it was the cowed ones, the frightened boys who weren’t quick or strong, who stayed gentle, the over-friendly boys who agreed with everything you said. He preferred the older boys—the men really—he’d met on the trains, riders toughened by experience. They scared him but they gave him somebody to follow. And he too pushed and poked and shouted out his readiness to take on the world. He thought of Celia, who had looked at him as a boy who couldn’t be trusted yet. Who didn’t have the power to—to what? He never could be sure. Protect her, he guessed. I can do that, he thought, but then he wasn’t sure, considered himself too rangy-minded, too loose in his ways. He was what she thought he was—a drifter, picking up jobs where he could, a day worker anywhere, in any town—the world’s day worker, he thought—picking peaches, sweeping out the back, raking a yard, filling baskets with sycamore and oak tree leaves. But still he wanted to write things down, in books maybe. He didn’t just have this in mind. He wadn’t no drifter there. He got down hard on the stories he was jotting down these days, applications of effort and detail, some loose-jointed boy walking by a string of wild grapevine trailing up a fence, talking to a brindle cow on the other side about loneliness, taking the cow’s part, taking it back so he could say how he lived over in the town. Story about a man living in a grass house in a ditch, about a little girl singing to herself as the house next door burned down. He didn’t show these stories to anybody, but some time he would.
He turned on his belly and looked up at the porch where the new boy, Casey, named after the dead burned boy—“My real name is Henry,” he told Delvin, “but Daddy”—speaking of Mr. O—“likes Casey”—read outloud from antique adventures. He had a thin, pleasant voice. Delvin was a little jealous of him, but he tried not to let it show. The worry over vengeful pursuit by white boys had faded away, leaving an irresolute calm. Mr. Oliver was afraid his return might stir things up—vague things, stirred in a vague way—but Delvin saw this was as much because he wanted to be settled in with the new boy, some new boy, as anything else. He wouldn’t be able to stay here long, and this saddened him. He only half wanted to move on, though he figured it was time for him to. He sat in the kitchen with Mr. Oliver and Polly—who herself was married now, living with her husband, Curtis Rodell, a plumber’s helper, in a little cottage behind the big house—discussing what he planned to do. Polly wanted him to stay, but Mr. Oliver encouraged him to put his plans into action. He recommended college, but they both knew he was not really a candidate for that. Delvin had told him he wanted to write books and Mr. Oliver had been happy for him. That was just the sort of profession that appealed to him. Get right into it, he said. Don’t delay a minute. Start up and build you a head of steam. Mr. Oliver offered to stake him, to give him an allowance for a year or two while he got going. Delvin was reluctant to agree to this because he wasn’t sure how he wanted to go about things. I have more traveling to do, he said. I want to gather more information. Novels? Mr. O had asked, and Delvin had said he wasn’t even sure about that. He thought he might like to write about real things.
“Thus your travels, eh?” Mr. O said.
“I feel like I’m winding string onto a ball.”
He told them a little of what he had seen. It was, he thought, a rich but narrow vein, and not very deep.
“Deep’s in the heart, son,” Mr. O said. “But you already know that.” He reached across the red-striped oilcloth and patted Delvin on the arm and ran his thumb over the bone. His eyes were lively. Casey sat on a stool at the counter putting together a jigsaw puzzle: the Parthenon—in New York City, he told Delvin when he asked.
Sylvia, the new assistant, had told Delvin that these days Mr. Oliver was using a preparation he got from the doctor to get to sleep and he had other drugstore remedies to perk himself up, but Delvin saw no real sign of the preparations affecting him. There was the same risive look as always (riding like a pretty boat on his sea of sadness), maybe a tad more hectic. The boy Casey had his own room—Delvin’s old room—but he slept mostly in a little box bed in the corner of Mr. Oliver’s bedroom. Oliver kept the boy like somebody’d keep a fluffy little dog. The boy was generally sullen and fretful, but he had a pretty, clear yellow face and shiny hazel eyes that seemed to weigh everything they saw, not always favorably. As they were talking the boy got up without a word, grabbed a cracker from a plate of Graham crackers and honey Mrs. Parker was putting together and scooted out the back door.
“Just like you used to,” Mr. Oliver said, looking nervously out the kitchen window.
Delvin laughed. “Don’t strain yourself there, Pop.”
Mr. Oliver laughed. “I get so attached to you boys.”
“And who wouldn’t,” Delvin said, grinning ferociously.
The old man laughed again, his laugh slightly wheezy, a little hollowed out by time. The world was receding from him, leaving a space that nothing had quite filled in. Life in the end thievery’s fool. It made Delvin sad, gave him a trembling in his heart that he thought about on the pallet, smelling the thin sweetness of the hay in his nostrils, and he wanted to write these things down, or no, thought he should, maybe take some notes, but it was hard to do, hard while the facts stared him in the face, panting and wheezing. He would have to wait. Some things he could jot down: the patchiness in Mr. O’s face, the smell in the kitchen of roast meat and baking, the wooden counters worn with stains, the petunias in little boxes in the window, Polly reaching back to rub herself low in the back, her hands when she bent them looking like bunched-up brown chicken skin, the faraway look in Mr. O’s eyes, the way his mouth worked sometimes without anything in it. Sadness creeps, he wrote. But then they laughed too, told stories, lingered on the porch in the twilight listening on the radio to The Acousticon Hour or King Biscuit Time, featuring Sonny Boy Williams, nobody wanting to go back in the house, even in the sadness something sweet and alive, life itself rounding out like the moon. They turned the radio off and listened to the horses whinnying in their stalls, to somebody down the street calling for May Ella with something sweet in his voice.
Delvin walked the streets. He felt like a sailor home from a long voyage. He still had the feeling that he was being followed. Don’t be crazy, he said to himself, but he couldn’t completely shake it. At the picture show the couples seemed huddled together in fright. Pedestrians looked lost. Just past the lights of a store he stopped to look back for his trailer, his devotee. There was no one. He was touched by how shabby the buildings were—the Empire office building with its entablatures and foamy cornices, the Western States building with its red brick front and tiny windows that caught the west-tending, falsely glamorous sunlight. The courthouse looked like something left over from the worst of Roman times, a building no one thought enough of even to tear down. Goldman’s offered anoraks and Maine jackets and low-priced formal wear. Dark stains on the mock Greek front of the Mountaineer Bank. The Peacock Hotel with its jowly stone face and its gazebos set like little guardhouses on the corners at the top of its six stories seemed to brood. He noted familiar trees. Cracked buckeyes and thick-waisted poplars and hickories that looked bitter and worn by life. He had always loved city bushes and patches of urban grass and flowers in window boxes and as he walked he recalled these, mostly gone now except for a big patch of red-throated nandina bushes over on Story street planted by the wife of the owner of Holston Hardware to decorate a blank gray brick wall, and pittisporum at Mott’s, Mrs. Combine’s mock banana bushes. He looked in on still-vacant lots spotted with pokeweed and goat sorrel and stopped to gather seeds from bolted morning glories in a fence on Governor Piddle street, where the Munger house, a large building with peeling french doors and concrete vases stuffed with ragged azaleas, had been torn down to put up a center for state culture. He noted broken walls and bellied chicken wire fences, alleys where old men propped themselves against stacked crates, splashing their water on the unwashed bricks. People were living out in the open now, in tents and board shacks and residing in crannies behind buildings and tucked into holes in embankments and under the bridge down on Custer where the street dipped low and made a pond on the rainiest days and down by the river where the muddy water foamed against the pilings of the Converse Bridge. Along a yellow wall with the words CHESTER APPLIANCES written in black letters on it, white men lined up. What were they waiting for? Tractor wheels propped in a row against a wall behind Puckett Machine Shop. Broken metal parts and black, oily ground and a big tub used to cool off the hotwork. He breathed in the rich, heavy, fluid stink of burning metal and thought he too was becoming a man like the other men walking the streets, peering into alleys and vacant lots. In the yard of Manger Auto Repair skeletal cars rested, waiting for armorers to refit them. He preferred—no, not preferred, felt a wobbly, living nostalgia for—the old wagons, returning to the city in force now, horses and mules pulling milk carts and Murphy and Studebaker wagons and buckboards piled with farm produce and, layered under gunny sacks and crushed ice, seafood hauled up by night train from the Gulf. At the ice plant big cloudy blocks coughed out of the chute and were grabbed by shirtless men with tongs and swung onto the back of Carson wagons and stacked in trucks that had ISSOM ICE COMPANY written in gold on their green sides. Here too men hung around, sucking ice slivers, waiting for something to happen. Pointless lines of men, men in bunches and listless groups, solitary men picking shreds of tobacco from their teeth, idlers, worriers, cashed-out men, strong men grown weak and sluggish, skeezing into bars and restaurant doorways. He marked the tremor of a bottom lip, the troubled brow, the picked-at sore on the face of a man reading a newspaper folded to a dozen lines of type; noted the africano lady who looked familiar—but he wasn’t quite able to place—with a cast in her left eye that gave her a cockeyed aspect that didn’t interfere with the small eager smile she directed toward the Embers Supper Club on Mareton Avenue; traced the harried looks, the looks of displacement and earnest willingness to do anything that might engender money or kindness or love or simply a few moments without being shamed or hit; caught the brokenhearted, the outright weepers, with or without handkerchiefs; scoped the cornered, the effusively lying, the desperate making wild claims. He marked the practiced liars, the hard-pressed guilty, the twitching and fluttery humiliated, the dazed, the obnoxious attempting to pass themselves off as simply loud, the ones with stone faces that hid nothing really, checked the self-mocking and envious. He studied the faces swollen by beatings or tears or genetic malformations, birthmarks and such; angled the ones battered into cripples, or the natural cripples, the deaf and dumb, the palsied, the blind, including the blind seller of peanuts, Willie Perkins, still sitting in his little cupped tractor seat by his stand over on Montgomery street; and Ethel Beck, great beauty of the east side, blinded at age eight by an overdose of wood alcohol supplied by her father, still tapping along—more rapping than tapping—with her bamboo cane painted white. He observed the pinched places in people’s cheeks, their noses pointed up sniffing for a change in the weather; considered women barely able to hold back screams, women raging at the mouths of alleys, old ladies pressing their backs against brick walls, mothers crying, laughing, scolding children, harlots with melted ice cream dripping from a paper cup onto stone steps, women without stockings, women with—and men: men resting, waiting, men telling uneasy stories, men shouting into barrels, picking up pennies from the street, men hitting horses, men shaving in alleys, spitting into their hands . . . men waiting for what wasn’t coming . . . or what was . . .
He rested his back against a scarred tulip poplar in Constitution Park, watching an old white man peel an apple with a gold penknife for a little girl in a yellow crepe dress. He watched an unidentified africano man with one leg pull himself into the bed of a wagon, work himself onto the seat, untie the reins from the brake, and clop a brown mule down the cobblestone street, the man smiling sarcastically to himself, the mule never picking up its gait as the wagon rounded the corner and disappeared—into time itself, it seemed to Delvin—leaving behind a patch of undisturbed sunlight on the fish-colored cobbles of Tremaine street.
He bought a paper cup of sweet iced tea at the window marked “Colored” at the back of Hunter’s Restaurant, these windows and doors and slots and chutes the only places, he thought, where the word colored was ever capitalized, smiling to himself as he thought this, tipping his head to the negro woman who handed the cup to him, wanting to touch her hand with his, just for the humanness, the solid pressure of life between them, let her know he was as alive as she was, ready for what came next . . .
He sat drinking the tea on a low wall overlooking the alley in back of a vacant lot between Cooper’s Mercantile and the newspaper offices. Rain had left a tracery of red clay veins running among broom and dog fennel in the lot. Out in the alley a yellow mongrel shook a dirty white glove in its jaws. A crow pecked at a ragged bouquet of chrysanthemums and at the entrance to the alley two women scolded three tiny children who gazed up at them with the rapt faces of believers. A breeze picked at the tops of a patch of fennel, touching the pale green filigree with a mindless tenderness, and brought his lost, or never quite found, love, Celia, to mind. Or maybe, he thought, she just came on her own. Or never left. She’d sent letters to the funeral home, letters he dived into as soon as he got the hugs and handshakes out of the way. He’d tied them up with a string and carried them with him everywhere in the inside pocket of the brown linen coat he wore. He took them out to re-sort them, commonplace with him these days. He opened the first and read it again. Somehow it seemed to have changed. It was not so interested in him as he thought. It was kindly, but distant. He read another and then another. The letters were like messages to a straggler. To the one who couldn’t keep up. How strange the world was—how so easily you could get yourself into a fix. He had a tendency to hang back in corners, wore the brim of his hat pulled down and stood in the shade of great oaks—still not sure the law wasn’t waiting for him. He had begun to dream again about his mother. In the dreams he met her on woodland paths and in mountain fields, the two of them hurrying past each other on unnamed errands. He was already gone by and into the woods or the next field when he realized that had been Cappie just lifting her hand to acknowledge him. When he ran back to find her, she was gone. He felt the mystery of things all around him. He wasn’t even sad, he was only awestruck. He remembered how the professor had said that in olden times you could be changed into a bird, a tree, a crawling troll . . . you could become a star or a set of stars, and the stars could speak, and the rocks and the wind could tell you who you were and what was about to happen, the gods or God himself talk to you directly, and an invisible force could be applied—but none of that kind of speech occurs anymore, only an occasional pale, barely coherent whisper remains in the world, the flicker of a conscience, or the sick tug of love that claims to be real. And this had saddened him and he had spoken to rocks and trees himself but nothing talked back. But the professor was wrong about love. It was more than just a whispering thing. It was strong and it held you up. A happiness had overtaken him—his mother was somewhere out there—he knew it. He would wake with tears in his eyes, only a few, and an easefulness in his heart.
He placed the packet of letters beside him on the wall. A small stack, creased and worn already. He leaned down and kissed them and then he got up and walked away.
“I believe I will be shoving off in the morning,” he told Mr. Oliver.
In the old man’s face was a mix of sadness and relief. The relief outweighed the sadness. It hurt Delvin to see it.
Mr. Oliver put his heavy, knobby hand on his. He was wearing a new ring, a chunky gold ring with a crest on it. Delvin started to ask about it, but just then Mrs. Parker brought dessert into the dining room and Mr. Oliver cried out that Delvin was leaving them again and they both began to weep. Casey sat pulled up tight to the table, looking at Delvin as if he wasn’t sure who he was and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He too was wearing a crusty gold ring. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Delvin thought. I don’t even know who I am.
He repeated these two sentences to the Ghost later as they sat at the card table the Ghost had set up in the old tack room. He now used the room for a combo bedroom, office, dining room and kitchen.
“Probably all the usual,” the Ghost said. Just the day before he’d got rid of his beard and shaved his hair close; it looked like a bit of orange mist had settled on the top of his pale head.
“You as saucy as ever, aint you?”
“Worse.” The albino half rose from his chair. “Let me show you this.” He pulled a new Placer clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. It looked like a sleek silver fish. When Delvin went to pick it up the Ghost skidded it out of reach, pushed it off the table into his other hand and held it up trophy style.
“You gon show it to me?” Delvin said.
“Your hands dry?”
“Let me see it.”
The Ghost gave him the knife.
“It’s right righteous,” Delvin said, though he had no interest in knives and didn’t open it. Still it had a lovely heft and felt compact and complete. He turned it in his hand. He would like to give Celia something that had this detailed perfection. He handed the knife back. In his pocket he carried an old tape-wrapped Barlow. “I mean,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next. In the next minute.”
“Me, I know my way on down the road. That’s the way I like it too.”
“I don’t know which of us is the lucky one.”
“Maybe neither,” the Ghost said, “not in this world.”
Delvin wondered if the Ghost wasn’t more intelligent than he’d thought.
“You want to go traveling with me?”
“Not for a thousand dollars.”
Delvin was troubled that he didn’t want to go alone. He wondered where the man Frank was by now. Maybe he should go over to the Emporium, get somebody over there to go with him. But he didn’t care to see any of that world again just now. He went back into the house and out onto the porch where by light of a kerosene lamp and sitting beside Mr. Oliver in one of the big pontific arm chairs he read a book the professor had given him, Who Is the Negro Man, by Dr. Quinton Merckson of the University of Pennsylvania. Merckson argued that the negro man was the bearer of the world’s troubles. This was because he had the strength to carry the weight. Delvin had read this sort of thing before, heard it before. He had a tendency to believe what he read, just because what he read was down in print. Later he would sort through it and find out what fit. For tonight he was the able negro man, hauler of the world’s burdens. A soul thing, the doctor said in so many words. The negro man had a deeper and more refined, a nobler soul. He’d heard this from preachers at funeral services. For the trampled-on it always came down to something like that.
He put the book down on a little wicker table and looked over at Mr. Oliver, who was listening to the Adelaide concerto, his favorite Mozart, on the wind-up Victrola, turned down low.
“You think the negro man is designed to carry the world’s burden?” Delvin said.
“If we are I spect we need to bulk up,” Mr. Oliver said, look ing down his ample front. He flipped open a wing of his black vest, revealing the red silk underlining. Casey lay on the floor putting another jigsaw puzzle together. Assembled, so Delvin recalled, the puzzle would become a picture of lions resting under a tree in Africa. The tree had a squashed gray top that always seemed to Delvin a mistake until he saw a photo of such a tree in the professor’s museum. Acacia. They grew in Africa where everybody in this house was from. Everybody came from Africa, the professor had told him. White man caught the first train out, he said.
Tomorrow he would be back on the rails. Mr. Oliver had asked where he was off to this time. Delvin had told him about Celia. “Good, good,” Mr. Oliver had said, grinning broadly, “it’ll probably help take your mind off rounding up ladies for yours truly,” and they both had laughed. Delvin had talked a little about how painful the situation was. “What matters to us always makes us a little nervous and spooky when we draw up to it,” the funeral director said. “Look at me. I still live above my shop, like some old grocer off in the big city. I keep thinking I am about to move on to something that will be better, but when I think I am getting there . . . I get shaky.”
Delvin hadn’t known exactly what he was talking about, or maybe he did. In his eyes the real mournfulness under the professional one. Off to the side most folks had a little sparkle, most folks he knew. Some little graced and heroic frolic. But not Mr. O. He had never criticized Delvin for getting into trouble with the white boys (or the no-trouble). But he knew without being told that he had been the heir apparent and was no longer. This hurt him and at the same time he felt relieved to be free. He had never wanted to run a funeral home. Now there was little Casey. Twelve years old—not ten as he’d thought—and quiet-minded, an able boy who liked to do what he was told, seemed to get satisfaction out of it. The boy already smelled faintly of formaldehyde (always the smell around here, even in the kitchen where Mrs. Parker kept some in a mix for cleaning—except on Mr. Oliver, who was obsessive about cleanliness and well-perfumed—except on him, who had bathed readily out in the stable, washing at the pump).
He smiled, nodding in the old way, got up and asked if there was anything he could get his benefactor.
“The sight of you is enough,” Oliver said. The old man—he was not so old, but there was a look in his eyes now, something abashed and wavering. He raised his hand and his hand, wide and furrowed down the back, trembled. They both saw this and Delvin wanted to take the hand and kiss it, press it hard to his heart, but he didn’t, he pretended he didn’t see the tremor, didn’t see the vexed look in Oliver’s eyes, only squeezed the hand, softly, like a promise, instead of with the jocosely competitive pressure they had used since he was a little boy. He didn’t want to hurt him and he didn’t want to let go. From somewhere off in the dark an owl called. The call was followed by the hesitant, falling cry of a widow bird, answering, or commenting, it wasn’t clear.
6
In the late dark of early morning Delvin slipped out the back door. He walked through the quiet streets to the rail yards. The westbound freight was finishing its assembly. A long string of red and yellow boxcars, flatcars and a hook of four black gondolas, all with their big bellies empty, clanked as they were coupled to the big red freight engine. Southern Railroad, Piedmont portion: Bitter Biscuit Line, the breezers called it. Delvin watched from the long grassy hillside above Wainwright Avenue. Two men, one short, the other tall, in striped overalls, carried small suitcases to the dull red caboose and climbed the three steps to the back porch. He wished he was riding in the caboose. From the cupola the brakemen were supposed to watch for jumpers, but they didn’t always do anything if they spotted them. Yard bulls were always a problem, but they too were off somewhere else this morning. A few dozen stampers sat around in the greasy yellow grass waiting for time to board. It was a wonder hawkers didn’t work the crowd. In a way they did. There was Little Simp, a middle-aged hoop chiseler from Georgia, offering tiny handmade dolls for sale. He made them out of gunnysacks stuffed with cotton and colored-in their faces with paints he made himself. There were women in the crowd too, bo-ettes, burlap sisters, zooks, shanty queens, blisters and hay bags they were called by the hobo crowd, janes looking for lost husbands or lovers, mop marys and buzzers. A little boy sold strips of sugar cane. Other men sold whatever anyone wanted to buy, personwise. Most of the shifters it looked like this trip were young, white and colored, boys mostly, looking for work—he overheard a young white boy talking about a big box factory opening in Memphis—and the rest members of the increasing crowd of the out-of-work, troubled or desperate or worn out or knocked to their knees, or slaphappy tourists, workers or lazers or bindlestiffs and beefers, dousers and cons, boys eager to make a start, posseshes joyriding into their cranky destinies. He had written about these travelers in his notebook. Truth was, you could find just about anybody on the road these days.
The morning came up sunny, with only a few shredded clouds in the south. They weren’t high enough in the mountains to miss the humidity. It lay like a film of grease on everybody’s skin. In his notebook he had written sun plowing the night under . . . day touching itself everywhere. . . . Were they his words, or had he copied them from somewhere? Tapping at the page, he couldn’t remember now. He looked around for familiars. Maybe one would show. He recognized a boy from over on the west side, Calvin Binger, and he waved to him. Calvin gave him a slow sweep of wave back, which was his style. They both kept their seat. A man standing in the grass scratching his thigh through new blue jeans looked familiar, but not from here. He looked like a yegg he’d run across, or no, somebody, maybe it was the line foreman Trobilly had pointed out to him in Baton Rouge. They had been eating coon meat sandwiches, a first for Delvin, over near the closed-down rendering plant in the Larusse district near where Molly Picone got killed that time in November when the weather turned foul and her hincty boyfriend turned foul with it. That had been a rough time for everybody. They had tried to pull her out of the rot-choked slough she’d been thrown into—coax her out—but she was more scared of her boyfriend than she was of drowning and wouldn’t come. She was wearing a long yellow dress like a wool nightgown and the dress spread out all around her and as she went under she was singing the Bessie Smith song “One More Good Time with You.” They had stood on the bank crying like babies. That was where that man he was looking at now, hunched up under a peaked gray cap, had been pointed out to him—not the first such a one—as somebody to stay away from. They were the ones you wanted to avoid on these trips. Wolves and high jackets and crazy men, desocialized tramps of evil intent and slimy ways, the rail fighters, croakers who traveled the circuit looking for somebody to whale away on, beat to death and then stomp on the corpse. Few were like that, but there were always those good sense and kindness had never reached. It wasn’t always easy to tell, not at first anyway, not until you got a feel for it.
Delvin took out his volume of Du Bois essays and began to read. Du Bois was writing about the threads that bound a people together. Delvin stopped. He was thinking about skin color. The photographs in the professor’s museum. Black-and-white photos sure, the mix like out here, but not like out here because here the colors didn’t mix, or if they did you were still only the one color, no matter how you fractionalized it; if there was any negro in you, you were negro only. Just a drop would do. Like we were tainted, he thought. But him, Delvin the Dark, he loved the rich deep colors best. His own face was among the blackest. But even among africano folks the light-skinned got the biggest portion. They were treated with more respect. As a tiny child he had sometimes been laughed at, called a dewbaby.
He shivered, and a thin string of anger pulled tight in him. Then the soft drop into gloom. These passed. He liked being dark-skinned. Some of the faces in the photos—he could see all the way back to the African beginnings. It stirred his body strangely to find himself peering through time at faces that carried in them a million years of life and history. As he looked he could feel the wind slipping up a river, turning little dust devils on the dry bank. He could smell the rank stink of a sun-rotted pelt. The people in these faces—what had they been doing out there?
Then he was thinking of Celia. Oh, he shouldn’t have left the letters. Maybe he had misread them; he was capable of it. Mr. Rome had not shown up as promised in Chattanooga. He had looked out for him every day, but the reciter had not appeared. Maybe he hadn’t reached Chicago, where he was to deliver his message to Celia. In the train yard he had asked about him, but no one coming in had seen him. He didn’t know what had happened. He’d written Celia about him coming, but in her return she said the little man had not appeared. He’d asked her to write him in Memphis, general delivery. That was where he was going too, before—maybe—he headed out west. But what was there now in Memphis? His insides clutched. He was a fool. He thought of her dark african face. Even close to her he was looking into time. He wanted to run his fingers over her face, like a blind man, a man who saw the world as black. Maybe he could go find those letters again. Maybe they were still there.
The jacks began to get to their feet. The train was under way. Like grasshoppers the wind shakes from the grain, the hoboes and drifters, the shufflers and stiffs and ex–plow jockeys, ramblers, tramps, and scenery bums moved down through the slick grass to the cinderbeds and crossed the six sets of tracks to the train clanking into motion. They climbed aboard, scurrying to the top or the bottom, into open doors and onto gondolas and flatcars, swung up into the shelter of the two empty boxcars. Delvin hesitated. He felt he was leaving half his heart. Then he ran for the train and climbed up onto a gondola. The last of the travelers boarded. Behind them the breeze shifted and slipped delicately over the trampled grass.
Clanking, screeching, squealing, shuddering, the big train made its way through the yard and out onto the road that passed through the rough western sections of the city, past the warehouses where Delvin once liked to walk inside of with his friend Archie Consadine along the rows of high-stacked cotton bales. Big barrels of water had grease scum on the surfaces of the water to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in them. And past the cotton mills, three of them in a row, painted green originally but now gray with lint. Lint swagged from electrical wires and outlined roof shingles and collected in the eaves of the little shotgun cabins workers lived in and blew along the unpaved streets and every day wisped into the lungs of the workers. And past the rendering plant with its vats of copper-colored solution and its piled white bones waiting to be ground into fertilizer. And past the big pine grove off Dunkins street where little Rozie Coverdale was murdered by two white boys who were caught with Rozie’s mother’s pearl necklace in the pocket of one of them, a necklace never returned, so the story went, to the family. The white boy and his family claimed the necklace was theirs—they were only retrieving it—and the Coverdales could not prove to the satisfaction of the jury that they were lying. Rozie’s mother died without knowing what had really happened, but, so they said, she didn’t really want to know what had gone on in those woods that were still used for trysts and mushroom-picking expeditions.
And past the Ombley pasture where Delvin had once played football with boys who attended Fisk University and after the game gave him his first taste of bonded whiskey, a taste he had spit out onto the rocky ground behind the Buck & Buck barbecue restaurant over on Caprice street. And past cramped unpainted houses where the lives of crackers were lived out in pale concordance, and past them and across the spur to Lucasville, where negro folks in similar shotgun cabins with their tiny front porches sporting a rocking chair and maybe a swing and tomatoes growing in No. 10 cans and string nets tacked on one side for trellising confederate jasmine or morning glories, both still blossoming in early autumn, lived their similar money-fretted lives. And past the primitive Baptist church—white cube with ice-cream-cone steeple—manifested by hardshell believers who refused to accept the injunction to send missionaries around the world spreading the gospel, playing it close to the vest with the Good Book. And past the livestock sale barn, an airy structure built of native pine and tin roofing, now derelict after a sustained outbreak of pinkeye and slop foot, along with the shift in agricultural focus away from the rocky farms of the mountain and sandhill country south and westward. And past Angelo’s, a combination grocery, Italian restaurant and speakeasy where patrons (white only) interested in red-sauced dinners (with Chianti wine) sat around card tables set among the shelves packed with Idea Starch, Calgon, 20 Mule Team Borax, Ajax, sacks of Water Maid rice, stacks of hard lye soap and shoe polish tins, exchanging vernacular quips with Angelo Depesto, immigrant soul from Pesaro on the Adriatic sea, Coloreds served out of a window in back.
And past Wilbur Homewood’s deserted pastures, sold two years ago to the Fox and Hound Hunt Club and left to their natural ways of steeplebush, clover, dusty miller, ironweed, meadow rue, Joe Pye weed and bunchgrass by members who on Saturdays in spring and fall chased foxes on jumpers and farm nags across the rocky ground, a practice they would abandon a few years from then after the last diehard admitted that the granite shelves and schist outcrops of the southern Appalachians were inhospitable to this kind of sport.
Past dumps of generalized refuse and small boys walking along dreaming of adventure and freedom from father’s strap.
Past young girls standing at roller washing machines or pushing corncobs on washer boards or lifting soaked overalls out of No. 2 washtubs.
Past wives walking barefoot out of cornfields just streaked with fall’s first yellow and old men propping barn doors open and farmers slapping at flies and orchard workers studying rolled-over Beauchamp pamphlets they hoped would teach them to use the english language for their social and economic betterment.
Past the Mt. Moriah cemetery where colored folk were buried under wire and worked-iron tombstones and stone tombstones that had been dug out of some mountainside and under tombstones made of clay pots and some made of wood. Among the graves a group of little colored boys moved about challenging the dead and the spirits of the dead and challenging the whole of life to come and the whole of life never coming again. One of them as the train began to pick up speed threw up a hand and waved, and Delvin, looking up from his notebook, waved back.
And onward, loose finally from the bindery and compaction of cities into the nondescript woodlands and raw weather-gouged fields and clay-streaked grassy pastures of that part of the country.
All these forms and folks and structures Delvin noticed, and some he wrote down in his notebook, the latest version, that was worn by now with sweat and wrung by his hands and bent back, its pages covered in his close and tight handwriting, filled with little stories of birds killed by freeze and sunshine stealing all the color from the grain fields and some woman busting some man outside a bar with her fists and all manner of names and lists of railroad companies and flowers and hymns from the Concord hymnbook used in Methodist churches and kinds of shoes and dances and equipment and road terminology and plow parts and military ranks and characters in Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott and perfumes and state capitols and freshwater fishes; and much pertaining to Celia including long sweaty passages keeping her informed of his troubling incapacities and failures of heart and his sense of lostness in the world and of the dawns when he woke terrified and shaking, passages never copied into his letters; and the names of friends and brief sections concerning their doings; and sections pertaining to his childhood, of the shanty floor smelling of coconut oil and of the songs his mother sung and of Coolmist leaning down to give him a kiss and of Spokes his little ragheaded doll and of Ri-Rusty his fluffy old dog and of banana pie and of skeeting in rainwater puddles in the street and of the lure of alleys and dead ends and of his mother fleeing into the wilderness wearing an organdy silk dress and of his brothers and sister singing along with Old Shaky Sims and his Talking Guitar and of the foundling home (lostling home, he wrote) where he learned to love potatoes and flute music and keened for freedom; and of the funeral parlor where when he was seven George held him up over the prep table to stare at the sunken, dented body and filmed-over eyes of Mr. Harvell Burns, former principal of Tucker Elementary school, allowing him to confront for the first time the obstinate bulkage of the dead, and Mr. Oliver waltzing to Mozart; and back-alley life that smelled at this time of year of crabapples crushed underfoot and dead bees and fired clay and spillings of crankcase oil; and of the terrible battles that took place among boys on this ground; and of the smell of summer mornings in the kitchen garden among squash flowers and staked bean rows and of all the distilled and perfumey odors of high summer; of the time Luther Burdle caught Smuckie Sparks in the ear with the old wooden golf club he’d found in the trash out at the Congress Country Club, cutting Smuckie’s ear in half and spraying blood onto Hollie Jo Davis’s white confirmation dress; and on and such and through the dribbles and castings and shucks of his life up to this moment as he sat under the overhang of a Tweety gondola headed west carrying a half load of sand (he’d thought the car was empty).
He turned the pages of the small gray book, reading the story of his life. In no other place, he thought, did this story exist, not even in his own head. Only here, and in the other four notebooks left at Oliver’s. This is what keeps me from disappearing. In these few years riding trains he had watched and recorded the drifting men rucky times had cast onto the rails. This train was filled with shufflers, jobless characters following the latest rumor of work. After a while the dirt and soot wore in. Seemed like it did. Sleeptalkers, sleepwalkers, divers and chokers, barabys and Airedales. A trainload of boys, he wrote, looking for work. It’s a race. Tramps, not the same as hoboes. And the ones who rode for years without ever saying a word. Sixty-two cars on this train, he wrote.
Thirty or forty riders. Say thirty-seven. Mostly white boys headed for (maybe) jobs in Memphis. Nine or ten colored boys. Many dressed in rags, or close to it. One has a yellow bandana tied around his head. A few boys carrying canvas sacks. A couple have suitcases. Soogans. Most of the colored boys aren’t carrying anything, maybe two or three have a few items tied up in handkerchiefs.
To the south clouds were filling up the hollow places in the pale sky, but they didn’t look like rain clouds, just frothy empties and leftovers from summer. The train was passing through grain fields; wheat, he thought. He stood and reached up to steady himself on the edge of the gondola catwalk. A white boy he didn’t at first see, boy with a high freckled forehead, just making his way along the narrow strip below the gondola rim, stepped on his hand.
“Hey,” Delvin said. “Watch those fingers, they’re precious to me.” He was feeling good, glad to be out in the wide world.
“If you want to keep em, chig, then get your ass off the train.”
The boy kicked at him, missed.
“You need to watch yo mouth as well as yo feet,” Delvin said.
He had been stuffing the notebook into his back pocket when the white boy stepped on him. He almost lost his grip—didn’t—but it was not worrisome, little aggravations happened on trains.
“I’ll watch you fly like a sack of shit off this train,” the boy said. He had fish-colored eyes and long pale eyelashes pretty as a girl’s.