Delvin got up and kissed him on the forehead and stood looking down at him. His old smell was gone, replaced by a sour mucky stench not quite overpowered by the odor of wintergreen. People got so they didn’t want to visit somebody who was dying, but they loved to show up to look at a corpse. So the old man had told him years ago as they sat on the side porch watching a thunderstorm come in over the mountains. Mr. Oliver had ridden the train from Alabama to this place and made a life out of nothing but his clever self and hard work. And now he was sleeping his way toward death on an old christian lady’s porch. Well, all right. On the Gulf shore he had walked into the ocean and stood up to his waist in salt water that had never been swum in by africano people. Only africano ones ever in it were those bodies swabbies had rolled off the decks of the slave ships crossing from Africa. He had pushed his face into that salt water. A white woman walking with a big brown dog had called for him to get out of there, but he ignored her. At least until she walked off. Then he high-footed it out of the pale, lank surf and ran for his life.
He wanted to stop people on the street and say that once he left here he’d never be back. Yall come too, he wanted to say—cry out—all of you, you’re free now.
He touched the pitted back of Mr. Oliver’s hand, still a little plump but now ashy and showing red under the knuckles. He didn’t want to leave him. He wanted to go back to the funeral home and get some supper and sit out on a cutblock in the alley and listen to old Mr. Starling from next door tell stories about dances and frights back in the slave times. But no, he didn’t really want that. He wanted these living to go on living, that was the most he wanted. It hurt him to see this battered man here, snoring, a spit bubble like a tiny crystal ball on his lip, hurt to see death crept up so close to him. But that too wasn’t enough to come back for. From the minute he had slipped away from Acheron prison he had felt the exhilaration of freedom. At first it had been so powerful he thought it would be enough to make him happy in the world. But that sense of things had dimmed. It was wearing out. He was nearly back to being a black man in a white man’s kingdom. But not quite. Before the last of that bounteous sense faded away he wanted to stand again in the streets of the town he was born in. Let me see what I feel in Red Row on the dusty street in front of Heberson’s store or standing on the porch of the Home or sitting down to eat in the kitchen. But all those places were gone. He hadn’t counted on that. Well, he should have. Everything was on its way out, handed off into some other configuration, some past you could think about if you wanted to or had to, turned over like soil in a new field in spring to show its bright, glistening other side. Now he had to go. Or would soon. He was older but he was part of the new. And he wanted to tell this to somebody.
He spent the morning sleeping in a back bedroom at Mrs. Cutler’s house and then in the afternoon up the gully in a little pinestraw nest he fashioned under some rhododendron bushes, sleeping some more and writing in his notebook. Mostly notes. Fragments of nothing much, signs painted on the sides of barns saying HERE IT IS in some form or other, extra tall men craning to see over a board fence, a woman washing her hair in a tub out behind a poultry yard. A big dark hemlock by a stream had jolted him. He wanted to jolt people. Touch them in a secret place. That was all right. He’d seen army men in full packs marching down a dusty road that went nowhere. “What you think of that?” he’d asked the man standing beside him in the boxcar door. “A clown parade,” the man had said and spit out the door. “I got the cure for loneliness!” shouted a man peering from a lit window in Jacksonville, but he’d ducked back in before Delvin could ask what it was. Standing under a church window in Monroeville he listened to a choir director correct the same bright-eyed girl six times before she burst into tears. Six, ten, twenty-seven times—whatever it takes, they’ll get you. A man stood so long on a trestle bridge showing off a string of croakers with the train coming he’d had to jump for it into the river. He’d come up without his pole or his fish. Once the professor’d laughed so hard he cut a fart that busted the seat out of his britches. “Could have been worse,” he said and they both laughed until their bellies hurt. “I got it,” a man in faded longhandles rose in an empty fertilizer car to say, “but I don’t know where I put it.” A big woman who said she was from Alaska had slung her wispy girlfriend so far through the boxcar door she landed in a field of golden wheat. And jumped up yelling. “I got to go,” he would say, and he would go, make his break for freedom, no matter how foolishly. That was me, he wrote, the one missing at the head count. His mama had to flee because she killed a man after white folks beat her five-year-old boy for stealing a fake jewel attached to a dress in the window of a shop in Chattanooga. The jewel was yellow like a cat’s eye and he had to have it. That was me, he wrote. And the old, ever-denied guilt licked about his heart. From his leafy hideout he looked back down the long slope to a field grown up in Joe Pye weed. The flimsy tops of the weeds, strangled by fall, nodded and gave in a breeze that didn’t reach up to where he was. “I am that boy,” he said.
After a while he walked back to the house to check on Mr. Oliver but he was sleeping. He used a brush he’d found in the bathroom to brush off his clothes. He sat out on the porch a while and then he started to the Emporium. A couple of old men he thought he recognized sat on the short green bench in front of the overly clean white-man’s store that had replaced Heberson’s. He and the Ghost had stolen whips of licorice from the old store; the candy’d turned their palms brown. “Now I’m full colored,” the Ghost had said, and Delvin had asked him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to be. Looked like now he’d found another satisfaction. From behind the building came the sound of somebody chopping wood. That man there putting a crate of cabbages in a car trunk—we buried his wife out of the funeral home twenty years ago. She was a tiny scaredy woman killed when a bakery wagon knocked her down and backed over her. He remembered Culver joking that they ought to cut a casket down for her and save Mr.—what was his name?—some money but nobody had laughed. The old man—Hunt, that was his name—looked up from his conversation and stared at Delvin. I guess he recognizes me. A chain had started to form. From moving identityless through the world—some essential signifier rubbed so thin that not only was he walking through a foreign land but he was walking through it nameless—he had begun his return to substance, to palpable life in the minds of his former townspeople. Judgments might be made, conclusions drawn, plans of action or gossip take shape. It was scary, yet he wanted to experience this, have it once more: somebody in the so-called free world thinking of him. Minnie May was thinking of him—maybe she was—but that was in Atlanta and he’d left her behind; he wanted more, or wanted it here, in the town he was born in, right now.
He didn’t make a fool of himself as he walked under the big rustling trees, didn’t when the half dozen young men pulled up in their green Olds convertible to the front door of the Hopalong Fancy Room and as they jumped out gave him a quick and not-so-quick lookover, one or two trying to place him in the sultry early fall twilight on Red Row—didn’t exchange witticisms or offer challenges or dares or start in on the dozens, he merely walked calmly on. One boy, who had a piece of yellow satin ribbon tied around his waist, nodded at him, a squarish man with a face black and polished as a shoeshine.
Hell, I’m like one of these Sunday showoffs, these fancy boys strutting. But he wasn’t really showing off. He was joining again. He didn’t want to wait until he got up north and found a place in some town not so fearful of africano folk, some mixed neighborhood in Ypsilanti or Pontiac or Toronto where he would settle in and accept a stipend from the Brotherhood of Africa Aid Society to write his autobiography; he wanted in on things now.
The wanting had come on him like an attack of some kind. Or an understanding that appears from nowhere and catches you eating a muffin or sitting on the toilet or shouting out a piece of homemade verse in a hobo camp. This was after all his hometown. On that corner there, Ellenton and Bunker Hill, he had paid a dime for a big sack of scuppernong grapes, bought from Shorty Youngblood, whose sister was said to be the prettiest girl on Red Row. He had hoped buying the grapes would ingratiate him with her but it didn’t. His footprints were all over that corner. He had skipped, run, walked, danced across it, stopped at a shout, laughed, railed against foolishness, his own included, passed by as if he was on his way to glory, or shame, halted in his tracks to tell Mosley Wilkins that he, Delvin, would one day marry Miss Estelle Franks, convey to Arthur Turnbill that it was not possible, as it was claimed in the story about Fleet Willie Barnes, to run a hundred miles nonstop. Over there, in the right now of time, Mrs. Arthur Coventry, standing in her yard futilely raging, just like she used to, swung her cane at a big mullein plant. She called him by name—“You, Delvin Walker!”—asking what sorriness he was up to now. To her, prison or no, he was still just an impertinent boy. She shook the cane at him. A few strands of green matter clung to the tip. He could smell cornbread baking and maybe gingerbread. At Sammy Wolper’s down the street they baked bread every day in a big pig-iron oven, still did apparently, maybe they would forever.
But mostly the street was empty of people he knew. The big round-fendered cars were shiny from the rain earlier in the day. He had lain on the narrow floral-smelling bed in Mrs. Cutler’s house listening to the light, hesitant rain peck at the tin roof, half counting the drops, half coming to know each one, half marking where each hit, which pile of dobber dust, which leaf or cheek, which shingle or board laid aside and forgotten. Forgotten! That was the conjur. That was the evil word. In each place, each comfy corner, each sideboard with its special teapot or trencher, its little carved doodad brought back from campground, he was forgotten; every porch had grown used to his absence, each room and kettle and heart. He had passed, still living, into the realm of ghosts. It was enough to take the heart out of a man. But oddly—and this was odd to him—he felt not an emptiness but a gathering, a sweetness and an openness that he had not expected. He wanted to run forth like a child, singing some snappy song.
He cut along the alley behind Suber’s Hardware, headed toward the Emporium, walking fast under the big skinned sycamores, on his way to someplace with a name. But then for no reason he stopped at the little auto repair garage Jimmy Dandes operated behind his house and stood in shadow under a monkeypaw tree listening to a couple boys playing guitars. He had stopped in this place when he was a child to listen to these boys’ father play ragtime tunes on his banjo. The two boys, twins, he remembered, looked nothing like each other and their playing too strained against harmony. They stood in the alley on each side of a small fire that as far as Delvin could tell had no reason for being except maybe somebody just liked little fires.
Then a young woman in a light, flower-colored dress covered with a white apron came out of the house carrying a big platter of fresh fish. The men quit playing and began to help her. One of them set a four-legged wire grill over the fire, laid a skillet on top and filled the skillet with lard from a tin bucket. The lard crackled and spit and the men stood looking at the fire. One of the boys ran to the house and came back carrying a small table and some plates and a sack of cornmeal. He looked across the alley and saw Delvin standing under the droopy-leafed tree.
“Do we know you?” he said in a friendly way. He was the brother with the lopsided face.
“I’m not sure,” Delvin said, taking a step forward. “I hadn’t been around here for a while.”
“Didn’t you use to work over to the Riverlight cotton warehouse?” the other said.
“No, that wadn’t me.”
“You play ball for the Negro Pioneers?” the first asked. His name, Delvin remembered, was Harley.
“No, I never played ball.”
“You from Chattanooga?” the other with the round face said. Delvin couldn’t remember his name.
“Born and raised.”
The woman was dredging the fish (they looked like bream) in cornmeal and laying them aside on the table. The closer boy—young man—the one whose face seemed to slant too far down on one side, asked if he would like to join them for dinner. Delvin without thinking said he would be happy to.
He helped them fry the fish and then he carried the platter of crackly, steaming bream back into the yard where the young woman directed him to put it down on a long trestle table that had a dark cloth laid on it. Lanterns were lit, citronella lamps set out on two chairs and then, helped by a couple of young girls, an older couple came out—Delvin recognized the father, now grown grizzled, with thin sunken cheeks—and took places in fat armchairs at either end of the table set up under a maple that was still, so he could see in the light, mostly green.
The boys explained to their father that Delvin was raised in Chattanooga and had just returned from several years away. The old man asked who his folks were and Delvin said he had found that they had passed on years ago.
“They would be who now?” the old woman, a sharp-eyed person with puffy cheeks and a light cloud of almost pure white hair, asked.
“Walker,” Delvin said.
“I don’t believe I recollect them,” the old man said. “They live over this way?”
“Long time ago,” Delvin said, “but they moved out toward Shipley Station, died out there.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear they’ve passed,” the old woman said, eyeing him rigorously.
Delvin thanked her. The first bite of fish had burned the roof of his mouth, a problem with hot food he had picked up on the prison circuit. He juggled the fish flesh with his tongue until it was cool and swallowed it down. One of the girls over by her mother giggled and mimicked him. He laughed.
“What sort of work you do?” the old man asked in a friendly way.
“I’m writing on a book,” Delvin said. He took a long pull of tea. It was cooled with chunks of ice hacked off a block. He picked out a piece and pressed it to his lips.
“Burn yoself?” the old man said.
“No sir, I just like ice.”
“Pass that bowl on down,” the old man said to one of the boys, indicating a blue china bowl with ice chunks in it. The girl, slim with a broad mirthful face and quick black eyes, bobbed her head at him. She made big chomping motions.
Delvin said, “I used to cut down through the alley back there looking for my friend Buster Moran.”
“The Morans, sho,” one of the boys said. “They moved away.”
“Old Moran was a pipefitter, I believe,” said the old man. “Out here to Cranley’s. On the colored shift.”
“I believe he was,” Delvin said.
Mr. Dandes talked about his farm out toward Scooterville, passed down in his family since it was deeded to them just after the Civil War.
“We been out there all summer,” the lively girl said. “That’s all we do in the summer—just farm, farm, farm.”
“Whoo, you don’t do nothing,” the older boy said, Harley. He had a riotous bush of shiny hair. “And sit under the arbor writing letters.”
The girl blushed. Delvin could see the blush on her light skin, feel it, as if the heat traveled, on his own face.
“What kind of letters?” he asked because he wanted to know and wanted her to speak to him.
“She writes to the government,” the other boy said.
“What about?’ Delvin said.
“About their shortcomings and about their longcomings too. I ask them if they are trying to be as helpful as possible.”
“She’s a complainer,” the lopsided twin said.
“I wrote the president a letter when I was a little boy,” Delvin said. This was true.
“What happened?” Harley said.
“He wrote back.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he was enjoying himself—I’d asked him about that—and he hoped I was enjoying myself too.”
“Were you?” the girl—more than a girl—asked.
“I was at the time.”
As he spoke to her—this, what, sixteen-year-old girl, seventeen maybe—he experienced a bluster and yank of feeling, something slung onto a pile of odds and ends, an accumulation of breached and disordered living, messes and blunders and crushed years and thoughts too sullen and miserable to do anything about, packed against clotted falsities, outright lies, hopes packed hard into sprung joints—useless dumb hopes—stuffed with the knotted eccentric sadness of the jailbird; slather of meanness and repudiation and scarcity. He hurt in his gut and the ache like a fresh malarial sickness sucked into his bones and filled his mind with confusion. He wanted to lash these ignorant people with sarcasm and bitterness, to humiliate them and leave them with pictures in their minds that would haunt and hurt them.
Excusing himself—forcing the polite words out of his mouth—he got up and walked away from the table.
He made his way out into the alley and stood in the ample dark, letting pain rush unhindered through him. He was not here, but he was not any other place either. He sat down, unlaced and took off his boots, removed his socks, stood up and walked half a dozen steps in the soft sand that covered the alley. He stretched out his hands like a man sleepwalking in a cartoon. He reached for the air and for whatever was in the air or might be soon. He could smell the hot lard. He could smell the smoke from the fire, birch wood and chestnut, he recognized them, still did. The chestnut trees were dying all over the country, a blight, come from where nobody knew, no way to cure it, the trees just died. He could smell something else, apples, yes, cut apples, a sweetness, unrevisable. Some said that doesn’t ring a bell, but for him everything did. Bole and bunch, dry squeak of old runner carpet, a cracked vase painted blue, a white shirt on a hanger hooked on a bedroom wire, smell of liver frying in the morning. The world a checklist of old favorites. He turned and walked slowly back, running his toes through the sand, taking his time. He smelled the roses on runner loops hanging over a fence. He went over and stood close to them. The blossoms were white and flat-faced and sweet. He touched a flower along the back of its face, feeling the swell of the bud it came from.
“It’s a cherokee rose,” a girl’s voice said from behind him.
He turned. The young, dark-eyed girl stood there. She too was barefoot.
He made a tiny sound, as hard to hear as a dog whistle.
The girl moved up and stood silently beside him.
“Indian roses,” he said. “I knew a Indian once.”
“We are part Indian ourselves—at least that’s what Daddy says. But he likes to make things up.”
She laughed a small, crackling, unrueful laugh, a slender girl with high-flown wiry hair.
“Would you like to take a walk?” he said.
“All right.”
They walked past quiet houses, secret lives alit in windows or concealed by the dark. In one yard a tire swing, the tire painted white. In another an old car up on a homemade lift, doorless, hood up, wheels like tilted snaggle teeth. At the next, on a back porch, two women sitting at a round table whispered furiously. They looked up and the whispering stopped, started again as they passed. Leftover summer frogs made clicking sounds. A nightbird issued the early version of its song. The two of them, man and girl, man and woman, boy and woman, boy and girl, walking, not touching, Delvin still barefoot carrying his boots, feeling sand and leaf, a stick, grass, round pebbles, a flat slab of rock under his feet, the girl close beside him, barefoot too; neither speaking.
They reached the end of the alley and stood in the opening that spilled a fan of pale sand like a little river mouth into the faintly lighted street. A tall shuttered house that had belonged to a traveling preacher reared just across quiet Silver road. The night was warm but Delvin could feel the coolness underneath, a coolness that carried winter in its arms. Other nights, feeling this, he might shudder for what was coming, but not now. The warmth was strong enough to keep them safe, for a little while. The silence extended between them until Delvin didn’t know how to break it or if he could. Just then she spoke. She asked him who he really was.
“I’m uneasy about answering that,” he said.
“I guess that’s an answer.”
He sensed that already she was trying to catch something that eluded her, catch her footing. He sensed a sadness in her and an energy that was not all straightforward, and a roughed-up gaiety. Her hands were long-fingered, strong-looking, almost as large as his.
“Are you timid?” she said.
“Vigilant.”
“What are you looking out for?”
He figured that she knew. “Goblins.”
“Plenty of them around this place.”
He was silent. With Minnie he had been let alone to grope his way; both of them groped. Now he sensed he was in another confabulation. He didn’t think he could keep up. Maybe it wouldn’t matter.
“I feel like asking you a hundred questions,” she said.
“Cause I’m a puzzle to you?”
“Yes—but everybody’s that—just some people you want to go ahead and put the questions to them, get on through the whatever it is keeps them off to themselves.”
“Lots of situations’ll do that.”
“Lots of reasons to build hideouts.”
“Sholy.”
“But they don’t matter.”
“How come?”
“Cause if you got to ask the questions anyway, you ask them. And then the other one, the one you asking the questions to, why, he has to decide for himself whether he’s going to answer them or not.”
“Maybe he can’t.”
“If he can’t, then maybe that’s the answer to all of them.”
“That’s a lot of weight,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Let me ask you something. Why do you want to know so much about me?”
“I can’t help it.”
The world seemed to have gone off in all directions. Every day he’d been free had been painful to him. It hurt to decide things. Soon as he could he’d latched on to a woman, Minnie May, sturdy and forbearing, owner of her own house, a small house on a quiet street, a woman away much of the time, grateful for what he might give her. Let her decide things. But what she decided scared him. And it scared him that Mr. Oliver was feeble—dying, he could see that, the future drying like a bubble of spit on his long lower lip. Out here everything was important, everything was too much: flake of soap on your wrist, smell of a bakery, somebody asking the time—like asking if you had the answer to their secret dilemma. It was all he could do not to turn himself in. Not to flee into some kind of drunkenness. Some other accelerating dark. But he had somewhere to go. Something to do. He had to hold on to that.
He looked at the girl. Her face turned in profile and she seemed to be minding business of her own.
He said, “I like windy rain. I like salad beds—mustard and turnip greens mostly. I like cattle at night. Piney woods in a mountain distance. I like to see winter wheat growing in a big field.”
She snapped her fingers, looked at him sideways under her brows, said, “I like riding in trucks. I like smelling things, anything that has a strong smell to it, even a stink. I like those birds with feathers that change from black to green according to how they take the light. I like stomping my feet in the dust.”
He said, “I like seeing how far I can make a thought go in my mind before I lose track of it.”
She said, “I like gritty cornbread and books about smart women.”