6
They sling a chain through the gyves and drag him naked across the yard and throw him into the former root cellar beside the warden’s house. A plank door set in the ground over eight wooden steps leading down to a square dirt room. A little light comes through the joining of the planks but not much. As he is dragged past the warden’s house he sees through the kitchen window the warden’s wife, a fat woman who wears a gray shapeless housedress around the clock, set a pan of cornbread to cool on the windowsill. “Wait,” he cries, “I think that white woman wants to give us some of that crackling bread.” Why would she be baking at night? The guard closest to him, Flimsy Plutter, jaundiced and twitchy, swats him across the face with the grommet-speckled work glove he carries for just such occasions. A fingertip cuts Delvin under the eye, making him yelp with pain. The woman looks out the window with no expression in her wide freckled face. On the radio in her kitchen Ethel Merman sings “You’re the Top.” On the little porch in back a calendar with a picture of the snow-covered Rockies is tacked to a post. I could be cartwheeling down that icy mountain, he thinks.
They don’t bother to pull him to his feet. They simply fold the door back and fling him down the steps.
The red dog has every joint bone in his body already hurting so he hardly feels it when he hits the ground on his face and chest, though the cut from the glove keeps stinging for the three days he lies in the dark mostly sleeping or re-stuporized by the malaria. Snakes, come out of some phantom place, crawl over him like the times before, but like the times before they don’t bite. They like the warmth of his body. To him they seem clean and pure, as if the ugliness and dirt of the underworld never touches them. There is no grime, no dust, nothing alien on their long bodies that are cool and dry, and the scales under his fingertips, snugly fastened and hard, flexing as the snake stretches out its length, fascinate him.
“We got no reason to spite each other,” he says to them, dark writhers in the stinky dark. They keep the rats away.
The bugs keep up their poking and probing. He rubs dirt on his body to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when he feels the thin sharp scuttle of a scorpion he stays as still as possible. They never bite him either.
Only the doodlebugs are unimpressed by his efforts or his stature, if that is what it is, as a god among the vermin.
“Chief of the itty-bits,” he says to himself like he is five years old.
The snappish little front-loaded doodlebugs have a tendency to clamp their jaws shut on whatever living things they come in contact with.
“Yi lord,” he cries softly, holding his position so the four-foot swamp rattler lying in the crook of his elbow won’t be disturbed.
He dreams of his mother. She had curly toes with brown nails that had a shine to them. She smelled like he knew heaven smelled. She liked to jump up and down and sing so loud Mr. Culver from next door would send a child over to tell her to stop. She couldn’t read well but she could get anything that was in a picture. She carried photographs around with her of people she didn’t know, given to her by people she didn’t know. My sweets, she called them. She got angry like an animal would get angry, wild and quick and lunging. He never minded being hit by her—not afterwards—he was a child, how could he mind? She looked at him sometimes like she would eat him up with a great relish. He likes that when he thinks about it. In the dreams she runs like the wind, her pale heels flashing.
In his black cabinet under the ground he feels himself jump. His body twitches, not sharply, but in a long slow undulation like a fish moving just under the surface of a dark pond. The snake coiled in his elbow rustles and the stubby rattle purrs. A couple of scorpions nestled against his chest probe with their claws. Centipedes feather their dry legs. “Yi lord,” he says softly. He can sense himself about to fly.
On the fourth night as he lies on his back resting, not so tired, the dog slunk back for now into its cave, he watches as the lid of his cabinet begins slowly to creak upward. He thinks for a second it is the sky itself tipping away and almost hollers out. But it is only Bill Francis, a convict machinist from Carmichael, Louisiana, raising the door. The door was locked with a nail stuck through the hasp.
Delvin hears the whistle of breath. “My God, what a stink,” a whispering voice says.
Moonlight shines into the hole. The lid drops and is caught. “Sweet Jesus,” another voice says.
“Come out,” the first voice says, like King Darius calling to Daniel, calling to the subterranean one.
Delvin tries his voice. It still works though it croaks and rasps. “Let me say my farewells,” he whispers.
“Yall step back,” Bill Francis says.
Delvin detaches himself carefully from his companions of the pit. It takes a short while but he moves steadily until he can get to his knees and then to his feet. It is difficult but not impossible to climb the eight steps. The air rich with cleaned-off life. The bosky smell of the trees. The undergirded reek of the fields. A freshly birthed world. It makes him modest.
“Come on, boon,” Bill says, taking him by the wrist. The man gives him a long look. “We thought you might be swole up and bit by now, but you got a special way.”
What are they doing here, these convicts? They are all convicts. It is too complicated to ask. They’re raising me, he thinks. Gon do some running? I expect so.
He follows as best he can as they make their way behind the work sheds and into the old barn where the mules were formerly kept and to the back where the old privies are. Bill and his crew have been working on a tunnel that has its entrance in the dried shit pit, and they are now finished with it. He has told Delvin that if he is still on the premises he will have a place in the string of folks going out. They have a rope ladder under the second seat—it is an eight-holer—that lets down through the old crumbled, desiccated shit. The tunnel runs horizontally forty feet to the other side of the back wire. It comes up behind the new barns and is only a few steps from the woods.
There are twelve of them and in a matter of six or seven minutes they are all out and running—through wild fennel and rabbit tobacco and bristleweed and goose grass and oxalis and copperleaf and paspalum and pigweed and poke—into the rustling cotton field.
It makes Delvin feel foolish. Just—what was it?—four nights, or weeks, maybe it was weeks, ago, he was trying to make up his mind to climb Bulky’s rope. He misses Milo. He tries to ask if anybody’s heard about Bulky, but Macky Bird, a light timer, shakes him off. He hopes Milo is out there somewhere waiting. It is another little dream. He smells of modified shit and dirt and snake musk and of sweat and animal excretions and of his own piss that spilled back on him when he peed. Webfoot Bilkins is the only one of the escapees besides Bill that he knows well. Most are boys from the machine shop and the planing mill.
They run in a straggle line to the woods and when they reach the trees they slip gradually to a scattering. They are headed to the river which is the way escapees know not to go. The only way out is through the swamp—so he thought. But maybe they have something planned, something fixed. The guards haven’t come after them, not yet anyway. Maybe Bill Francis paid in some way for a clear path and maybe the way downriver is open. Maybe a miracle has occurred. The moon shines through leafy trees spattering white on the ground. A large bird lifts from a branch and flaps ponderously away. It looks like no bird Delvin has ever seem, larger than a hawk or an owl. Maybe an eagle, he thinks. He is barefooted but nothing he steps on bothers him.
After a while he comes to the riverbank. Some of the men are just putting out in a little snub-nose boat. When he tries to get in, they push him away.
“We got too many already,” a voice says, he thinks it comes from Artus Manigalt, one of the mill workers, a man from up north somewhere.
A large hand shoves him in the chest and he slips and falls into the water. The water feels good but he is suddenly—oddly—afraid of snakes. He almost laughs at this but the fear is real like a knife rasping on his skin. He ducks his head under to clear his thinking and to get a start on some cleanness and maybe to make himself all right about being scared; when he comes up the boat is sliding out into the current. One of the men has a paddle and he is trying to get one of the others to use it. The other man turns his face away and the first man hits him in the back of the head. Others grab him and there is a brief mute struggle and then somebody says, “You cotched him,” and then there is quiet and then comes the soft, heavy splashing of a body let go of, and then paddling begins. Delvin’s hand half rises, issuing a farewell, and suddenly it is like it was all those years before when the white boy cried out in the woods and he thought they had killed someone, how suddenly alone he’d felt. That was what they always wanted you to feel. And here it is with them now, with him—and he twirls around, reaching for something, a handhold he forgot he needed, and he feels a slick root and for a second it is the body of a snake and he prays as one would pray to an estranged brother on the road of darkness in the middle of the night—yes, he says, yes, it’s all right, and he looks down into the water that purls softly against his legs, looks at moving blackness, and then he begins to move.
He makes his way stumbling along the riverbank through reeds and low bushes. Once again he’s gotten himself into a futile situation, is what it looks like. But then it is where—for right now—he wants to be, not in futility but on the run from that black hole in the middle of a black hole. He sloshes through spindly maidencane and bulrushes and comes on a piece of forked log resting in the grass. He pushes this out into the river and climbs on top of it and lies down and paddles out into the current, and, scared and thinking how fine it is to be out beneath the star-spattered sky, guides it downstream.
Up ahead he sees the snub boat and then he loses it in the night haze and distance and rides quietly until maybe four or five miles on as they come down on the town he sees the boat again far ahead amid lights and what appear to be a string of boats. The boats have motors attached and when the white men in them see the little boat coming toward them they rev up and head toward it. The boys in the overloaded escape boat try to paddle to shore but they don’t have the power for it. The white men begin shooting even before they are close to the boat. By time they have gotten to it one of them shouts back that there aint anything in here to shoot at cause these niggers is all dead already.
Delvin comes right down on the guard boats. Before he gets there he slides off and stays low in the water, just touching the log enough to keep hold of it, and in this way drifts by the picket line of jailers and sheriff’s deputies and local men both hired and freely come for action. For several minutes they are all around him, heavy shapes in dark clothes. One small boatload pushed by a little motor pokes at the log but Delvin has gone under and though he keeps his grip on the mossy skin they do not see him in the dark and the log turns in the current and is away downstream. Somebody fires a shot anyway and Delvin feels the bullet slap the heavy wood.
Then he is free of the boats and free of the lights and he travels along holding on to the log, trying to keep from falling asleep. He wants to let go and drift away but he catches himself. A barge stacked with cotton bales, pushed by a squat tug, chugs past and he hears the white men on it shouting at each other. It sounds as if they are having a fight. They curse, making threats; it is like hobo life, and thinking this his spirit wakens or shifts in a new way, or an old way recalled, and a sadness cuts into him. But there is happiness mixed with it, a sense of life going on in a world he is part of, not this world of battering and futility but the other—pinched as it is—smelling of churned water and living things moving through the air. It’s natural to him and he realizes this, the world that can’t really be taken away from him, no matter the prison they put him in. He watches the stacked bales disappear ahead and listens to the voices, rich with unimprisoned life—anger edging into sorrow and bafflement and an exculpatory meekness that touches him through his skin—fade into the night.
Lights, solitary and feeble, come and go along the black ribbon of the distant bank. Mostly the dark, entering into every crevice and over looked spot. All those wandering around by themselves in the dark, lying down in it in rooms and on riverbanks and in woods where the big brown owls speak their solemn questions. The professor said that entering each small town was like the Israelites coming out of the wilderness. It’s not your light sets you free, he said, it’s all those others. He decides to get in to shore. He is too tired to stay out in the water. But he doesn’t have the strength to paddle in. All he can do is get up on the log. He does this and crams himself in the sunder and rides along on his back watching the stars as they wheel grandly down into the earth and then he slips into sleep and rides along dreaming lightly of a woman, whose name escapes him, holding in her hands a skein of flowering vine, and turns in sleep and slides into the water.
The cool water wakes him.
Already it is dawn. The river has widened out.
He is near the east bank, approaching a line of willow trees that drag their long slim fingers in the river. He paddles that way and catches onto the spindly trailing branches. Working hand by hand downstream he comes to an opening and pulls himself in to the bank. A stand of mallow bushes in full red bloom behind the willows. His heart beats hard and he raises his eyes and looks at the sky that is the color of blue-eyed grass. He eases off the log onto his knees and the ground seems to sag under him but maybe that is only him and he gets to his feet and at first hunched over then upright puts his footprints into slick black earth and staggers ashore. He stands there looking around and he doesn’t know what to do next. The complicated green bushes all filled in, the red, loose-petaled flowers like gifts he maybe is supposed to take into his hands. I don’t know. Then something comes to him. He backtracks and drags the log up the bank over the prints just in case he finds no place for himself on that side of the continent. Then he crawls up through the mallows to the grassy edge of a field spotted here and there with tall purple pokeweed and stands up, eyeballing the terrain: a fleshed-out hacked and vine-strewn world with no sign of a special prison other than the one that is everywhere. Hilly fields like bosoms lifting into the distance. He pushes back into the mallow bushes, squirrels a place among the sour-smelling leaves, lies down and falls asleep.
There was a time, the professor said—we all remember it in our bones and in the stories we tell—when the gods spoke to human beings. When God’s voice came from bushes and streams and rocks and told human beings what was so in the world and in themselves. Everybody was able to hear and the gods spoke about this and that and maybe they spoke too much and embarrassed themselves or maybe people just got bored hearing some rock or snatch of poke salad yammering endlessly about love trouble or tactics or what to eat for supper, but anyway the gods began to go silent. One by one they dropped off until there was no more talking from the celestial quarter. Then we felt our aloneness in the world. Then we got scared and started building forts and piling up money and inventing artillery and we started shooting at our neighbors and we were scared of anybody who didn’t look like us or act like us. It was time to call on the gods but when we did nobody answered. We were on our own in a way that made expulsion from the Garden look like a dropped piece of bubble gum. And it aint changed. The silence—and you can believe it—is rock solid. The gods have departed to other lands. We been left to make our own way to glory. And truth is, few can do it. But that don’t mean, the professor said, that we got cause enough to stop trying.
Later in the day a small africano boy fishing the river for shell bass comes on him but he is afraid to wake the ragged man and he runs home to tell his folks. An hour or two later three africano men shaking the bushes find him and after a short parley bring him to the home of the little boy. A man in the four-room slabboard house is drunk and laid out in the back room with pneumonia. He tried to treat himself with jick whiskey bought for a half dollar over in Munn City and the combo of the pneumonia and the whiskey is killing him. His brother, who lives with the family, and his wife, who is the mother of one of the brother’s children, offer Delvin a seat at the table and they try to feed him but he is so worn out—he doesn’t think he is really sick anymore, just tired to the bone—that he can hardly keep his head up. The brother offers him a drink of elderberry wine and he takes a sip to be polite but he doesn’t want any of that really. He lips the glass vaguely and puts it down. The wine is purple and has black specks floating in it.
“If I could lay down,” he says. They fix him a bed out on the screened-off half of the back porch and he lies down on an alfalfa-stuffed mattress and thinks This smells like the shed back home, and it isn’t only that but he can’t remember right then what it is and falls asleep. He dreams of fish thrashing feebly in a poke (but maybe it isn’t fish), and of a white man in a leaf-strewn alley entrance making hobo signs (the double diamond of Keep Quiet; the two straight bars of Sky’s the Limit; the triple thatch of Jail) and grinning in a scornful way. He is overtaken by a sobbing that seems wholly part of the dream until it wakes him and his cheeks are wet. He lies in the shade of the roof overhang, coming back mostly to himself. The little boy comes out to look at him. The boy smells of raisins and Delvin remembers sitting on the pantry floor at Mr. O’s as a child eating raisins from a cloth sack with the picture of a raised-up circus elephant stamped on it. “My name,” the boy says and points above his head at the wall. Scratched into the chinking mud are misspelled words, unintelligible signs—Morus, maybe that is a name. “Morris,” Delvin says, and the boy smiles, whirls and runs back into the house. He feels slow and dodgy, without intent, saturated and feebly draining, raveled at the edges, parts coupled and strewn about, wayward. The air is coarse and lively against his skin. Raisins, he thinks. He used to pick them one at a time from the sack, eat them slowly, dreaming of life out in the wild mountains.
He stays with the family for a week until he feels the red dog loosen its grip and then he decides to leave because he wants to get down to the coast. The state men have poked around looking for him but when they came by the folks hid him out in a canebrake under a tarp soaked in tar wine vinegar and even the dogs missed him.
“No reason to go that way,” the brother, a stringy man with a small face flat like a cat’s, tells him. “Aint nobody down that way looking to shelter a black man.”
But Delvin wants to go. He has heard the surf crashing in his dreams and in them he sits beside a great blue sea.
After much calling on the holy trinity and the blowing of milk smoke into his mouth by a man who never saw his father, the placing in his ear of a lock of hair from a child the same color as the sufferer, the forcing of a cup of hot boiled and strained mule manure tea down his throat, his chest painted with turpentine, and a bag of asafetida from the mountains tied around his neck, the sick man dies choking from the pneumonia. When Delvin looks in from the door he sees the man’s gray pinched cheeks and his nose like a stob and his eyes already sunk into the sockets like ball bearings dropped in mud and he thinks here is something familiar but he doesn’t go into the room. The next morning they bury the man in a little africano cemetery down the sand road a mile from the house. The cemetery is set off by itself inside a low twisted stake fence at the edge of a pasture that has a half dozen stringy cows in it. Delvin never mentions that he knows something about preparing the dead. He doesn’t mind fiddling with a corpse but he doesn’t anymore care for sticking himself into anybody’s grief. A stubbornness in his soul, a disheartened doggedness, maybe a divination, some shaky repudiation of the former life, has taken him. The wasted man drowned in his own spit, coughing and gasping and squinting into corners for God or the devil or who knows what—Jacob’s ladder maybe to climb him out of that sticky place—and an abrupt wild panic had come erasing the squint and then a blankness erasing that and no god came.
The burying is on a sweltry day with a dampness attached that makes him feel as if his blood is running hot in his veins. Everybody feels feverish. The body in its raw pine coffin held together with nailed-on baffles stinks of the fever. Oscar is the man’s name. Somebody cries it out from the back of the small crowd, a woman no one admits he knows. A bird in a maple tree makes little pip-pip-pip noises. His brother, Oscar’s brother, cries like a baby. Delvin has been on burial details at Acheron, silent pilgrimages where nobody spoke up about anything. A chaplain tossed a handful of dry words in after the deceased, this nonentity it was clear the Lord cared nothing about. The preacher here, a small man who smells like he has been drinking, says the Lord is already holding brother Oscar in his arms. “Not too tight,” the man next to Delvin says. “It’s hot where he is.” Delvin shivers and wants to shut the man up but he says nothing. Not outloud. Farewell, brother, he says silently, God be with you, have a good . . .—and then the words drop off as if he’s come to a cliff. But it aint no cliff. It is a dam. Behind which a slowly pulsing body of words is backed up, a lifetime—twenty lifetimes—of words and everything else. Somebody throws a bouquet of tea olive in the hole. Delvin can smell it above the stink of the corpse, a sweet drifting scent of the world going down into the ground with him. Tears come to his eyes and the woman next to him, wife of the brother, looks strangely at him, as if she has just realized who he is.
Back at the house he tells them he needs to get farther south.
The brother—his name is Willie Drover—says, “Aint too much farther south you can get,” and even one or two of the grieving women laugh at this.
“I got some business down on the Gulf,” he says, thinking as he speaks the words that he is half lying because he doesn’t really have any place to get to except away and that isn’t a place unless every place not a state prison is.
But he doesn’t mind being made fun of. He is rich—or half-rich—in his spirit on this side of life even if he is slow to rise and suspicious. He favors this walk-around and jump-down, linger-on-the-porch, eat-at-a-table-with-the-children-and-the-women, nobody-hanging-around-with-a-whip side of things. Let me stand and shiver and nobody but somebody worried momently for him might say anything. How you feeling? Well, I’m just fine. Even the big chinaberry tree out the window looks filled with a special life, the big clusters of purple flowers exuding sweet scent you could walk up and put your face in. The sunlight on the gray dirt road out the window seems to shine with a manifold potency. No whipping on that road, no pits to lie down in. He tells some of this to John Paul, Oscar’s almost-grown son. John Paul says he doesn’t know anybody who don’t have a whipping in his future.
“Not like the kind I mean,” Delvin says.
They sit beside a little feeder stream peeling birch twigs and looking at the tiny swirls the water makes where it catches against branches and bits of trailing leafage. The air smells of pine and some moldering bit of animal flesh that hasn’t quite finished curing. The plan for a journey has come to Delvin. He wants to get out to the ocean and travel on it. “I’m going to make a big circle,” he says.
“And come right back here?”
“Someday maybe, but that’s not what I mean. A circle with a chunk left out of it. Or a squinched circle.”
John Paul spreads one of his big hands. His knuckles look like scuff marks. “You gon be a traveling man?”
“For a while.”