“You remember how big she was. Won’t nothing left of her when she died.” She smiled more brightly. “Then right after that your mother showed up. She arrived in a cab. She was wearing a leather dress, like a Indian squaw. What’s that called—”
“Buckskin?”
“Like she was a squaw . . . or a cowboy woman—Annie Oakley or somebody. From out west.”
“I understand.”
“She was skinny as a bird. She had a flat white hat with little red cloth balls on a fringe around the edges. She was shaking so bad the little balls shook. I believe Miss Corona had just taken over, maybe it was that same week—I believe Miss Corona was afraid at first to let her in. But then a couple of the other women recognized her, or recognized her name. The girls, except for me and Miss Corona, were all too young to remember her. I believe Buster—the workman—he remembered her too. He was a friend I believe of your brother’s when he was living over here at Mr. Oliver’s—the funeral home?”
“Yes.”
“He was the one went up and gave her a hug. He reminded them of who she was—told them, I mean, like they was waiting for a explanation.”
“She was sick?”
“Sick? Did I say sick?” She glanced into her open palm as if the answer was written there. “She was run down and dog-tired. She didn’t say if there was anything else wrong with her. She just seemed real tired, wore out. They had to near carry her up the stairs. She made it all the way up to the third floor. They put her in one of the little rooms up there. She seemed stronger for a couple of days. She even came downstairs and sat out in the back over by the garden.”
Just then the door opened and a large tawny-skin woman, ample in all her parts, spilt here and there from her pale blue gown covered partially by a green satin wrapper, entered the room. Delvin got up. He recognized her too: Miz Corona. Miss Maylene introduced him and explained what they were doing. Miz Corona—broad-faced with flesh across the bridge of her nose and filling her cheeks, dark, sharp eyes, a thin mouth heavily rouged—studied him, passed over without seeming to recognize him, and spoke to Miss Maylene about a plumbing problem, overflow on the other side of the house.
“Your mother was a funny lady,” she said to Delvin. “Even there at the last she was making jokes.”
“Do you know what was wrong with her?”
“Weary, like so many. Worked to death. I spect the running didn’t help. She liked to sit in the garden. Right out in the middle of it among the squash and the butterbeans and such. Didn’t like the flowers much, just the old fuzzy yellow squash fruit and the little butterbeans and all. Said where she’d been living she couldn’t get vegetables like that to grow. She would lift the tomatoes—not pick em, just weigh them in her hand, put her face down among the squash leaves—dip way down, almost fall out of her chair.” She glanced at the door. “Then one day,” she said quickly, as if she was already passing like time itself to other things, “she couldn’t get out of bed. You remember that, May.”
“She was right upstairs.”
“That’s right. Tired on top of tired. The next morning when the girl went in to wake her she had passed over.”
Delvin felt a stillness in him, as if a little boat had stopped rocking.
“Who buried her?”
“We did,” Miss Maylene said. “Miz Corona had us pay for the fu neral right out of the operating money. We keep a fund for the girls—emergencies . . .”
“I mean, which funeral home?”
“Oh. Mr. Oliver’s.” Maylene patted her own wrist. “He’s on his way out, too, I hear.”
“Notice is taken, May,” said Miz Corona.
Delvin experienced a small sadness propped on another, greater, sadness. He was sweating, just slightly, and felt a little cold at the same time. There were pictures on the wall, mountainscapes, tall gray peaks with tiny people standing around at the bottom. He had a feeling that everything was about to bust loose. He wanted to lie down somewhere.
“Could I see the room where my mother died?”
The two women glanced at each other and he saw the look of exasperation pass over Miz Corona’s face.
“You can if you want to,” Miss Maylene said. She called out the name Desiree.
Miz Corona stuck her hand out, palm down—did she want him to kiss it?—and Delvin took it, shook the bulging flesh carefully as he thanked her for her help.
A door on the side opened and the Ghost, wearing khaki army pants and a pink shirt, came in. “Desiree’s busy,” he said. He stared straight at Delvin and Delvin could see surprise hit his face like a shot. His eyes brightened and he pursed his orange lips. But he didn’t say anything. Neither did Delvin.
In the twitchy second or two as they gazed at each other, seconds Maylene spoke into, telling the Ghost to take this man up to the Mockingbird room, he saw his life aimed at this spot like an arrow shot years before, launched into the darktown sky on the July day he was born, anniversary of the futile Union victory at Gettysburg, and fallen here, in a cathouse on Red Row. An ache like an old terrible wound began to throb in his side. Heat flooded his chest and into his face. He steadied himself on the fat yellow arm of the couch he stood beside. He wanted to scream—blast all the crusted-over tears from his body.
“You all right?” Miss Maylene said. “Get him some water, Caroline,” she said to a woman who had come silently in.
They got him a glass of water, sat him down on the couch. From a small silver flask Maylene poured a shot of colorless liquid. “Local heaven,” she said in smiling indication. Miz Corona had left the room. The Ghost just stood there, thin as a wraith, yellow and pink, avid.
In a minute Delvin was better. He smiled at them. His first feelings were strange to him, something not quite right, as if he had planned them. They played off into silence now like notes run by a single hand along piano keys. A sadness held steady. And relief. In his body a looseness, a calm. He got slowly, carefully, to his feet and thanked the women. His gratitude was as strong as his sadness.
In a minute he and the Ghost were climbing the back stairs. The stairs smelled of old washings, of liniment and spicy perfume and several combos of urine and rotten vegetables and pepper sauce. Neither spoke. They crossed the third-floor landing and entered a narrow hallway. The walls were covered in an old-fashioned rose paper down to a muddy brown wainscoting; dim electric bulbs burned in wall sconces stained with verdigris. A narrow strip of featureless dark green carpeting covered the floor. He’d not been in this part of the house before. Doors, liverish repaints crusted into whorls and random patterning, lined the hallway, a few of them open partway. Halfway down a woman’s quavery voice sang, “If you can catch me you can keep me,” from a song he remembered hearing playing on the checkout deputy’s radio as he was being loaded onto the truck for the ride to Acheron penitentiary.
Just beyond a partially opened door and an oblong of drowsy yellow on the floor was his mother’s door, as indicated by the Ghost. He didn’t have any need to come see the room beyond his suddenly wanting to. You take a step, he thought, and the one step leads to another. He felt like he was moving deeper into the dark. But maybe that wasn’t it, maybe he was moving toward the light—or to nothing special.
The Ghost held up one hand for him to stop, took a big ring off his belt, deftly located the key, unlocked the door and held it open.
“You the first bellhop I ever met,” Delvin said.
“You the first on-the-loose jailbird I ever met.” He smiled and stuck out his hand. It was slightly greasy but he held on to Delvin as if he didn’t want to let go. “How you doin, really, Del?” he said. “I am sure sorry about Mr. Oliver. I couldn’t talk much about anything out at Miz Cutler’s.”
“I know. I spect I’m doing pretty well, now that I can walk around unfenced.” He surprised himself how tightly he gripped the Ghost’s hand.
“I’m sorry about your mama.” He still looked nervous.
The room was small, only a bed with a coarse gray wool blanket and uncased square pillow and a little white table beside it with an unlit tin kerosene lamp on the table. A narrow wooden clothespress. A small dormer window looked out on the backyard. He could hear laughter down there.
“I’ll step out here a minute,” the Ghost said and closed the door behind him, leaving Delvin in the dark but for a washed-out light coming in the window. Delvin started to call him back but then he didn’t. He stood in the kerosene-smelling room and then he sat down on the bed and then he lay down on it full length. He curled up on his left side and put his head on the pillow. You’d think time could twist in such a way that the old dried-out moment might come back to life in the present one. What others—what girls, what men passing through, maybe dark horses like the Ghost—had lain on this bed since his mother had slept those few nights here and died? Maybe no one had. Maybe her old festive being still traced itself here. He squeezed his eyes shut. No. It didn’t matter.
He was tired, a graininess in his mind, sand in his eyes; he drifted off to sleep.
How long it was later he wasn’t sure, and in the darkness he wasn’t sure where he was, or if he was somewhere else beside his sling bed at Acheron—or was it Columbia? Strange—he had almost stopped waking in those places. The Ghost’s hand was lightly shaking him as no hand would in prison. He did not come up panicked or fighting. He came up dizzy, as if he was drugged and swimming through layers of drizzle.
“It’s you right on,” he said, swung his legs out and sat up. “I mean it’s me.”
The Ghost stood near enough to grab him. “You need to get a move on,” he said.
Delvin was almost alert. “Somebody call the police?”
“They will soon.”
“Damn. Those old women figure me out?”
“Somebody will if somebody hadn’t awready.”
“What you being mysterious about?”
“You just better come on. Time to move yo hocks.”
Again he could hear singing, a low rough female voice, singing the same song; he must have been asleep only a minute.
“No way I could spend the night here, hunh?”
“You wouldn’t want to do that.”
“Lord, I’m swackered.”
“You on the run already, aint you?”
“I’m on furlough.”
“Like one of them army boys.”
“How come you aint hitched up?”
“Weak heart. How come they didn’t put you in?”
Was he crazy? “They gave me a pass on the whole shebang.”
“Well, come on. It’s time for the civilians to air out.”
On their way, moving slowly, Delvin half alert and memorizing as he went, walls and floor, the hall doors like a cascade in his mind, the faint lights like a lost measure of something grim and unforgivable, half a dozen steps down the passage the Ghost reached to close a door that stood open. “I thought I told you to keep this door shut,” he said into the room.
“You don’t run me,” a woman’s voice said. It was the singer’s voice and a voice he had heard before.
The knob was jerked out of the Ghost’s grasp and the door pulled open. Framed in the doorway, heavier than the last time he saw her, was Lucille Blaine, the woman who’d put him in prison. His mind churred in a white heat. He experienced a weightlessness and he felt as if he could fly—as if he would. He choked and quickly cleared his throat. His chest burned.
The woman looked straight at him and with the tensity that accompanies great acts he waited for what was coming—murder, sorrow, hanging—but then he saw she didn’t seem to recognize him. She had not even appeared at the last trial, and in the one before that her story had sounded so slurred and disembodied the judge laughed outright at her, but still they had not let him go.
He shivered and glanced down at his left hand that seemed to be rattling at the end of his sleeve. He felt as if he was shaking out of his skin but his hand was barely trembling. The woman stared at him. She gave no sign that she knew him. Had he changed so much?
Then she grinned, showing missing teeth—number one on the right, number two on the left—a grin offered like a bag of tarnished jewelry to whatever in the world showed up.
“Looks like you found a fresh fish,” she said to the Ghost.
She winked at Delvin and grinned.
“Come on,” the Ghost said to him in a flat voice. The words seemed to come from far away. “You got to be back at the camp.”
“You an army boy, hunh?” the woman said.
Delvin grunted.
“Mr. Go-Slow the GI Joe,” she said, elaborating on the grin.
Without wanting to—never once in the years having meant to—he saw the fear in her eyes, the lifetime of it. Fear, yes, cultured by hate, but not absolved. And he saw the marks on her skin from the grinding stones that crushed her in the dark and saw the streaks and creases where the burning waters had rolled over her and saw the gouges where the knives had flensed her and saw the pasty cadaverous leftover skin where the vampires of false witness had sucked her blood. A revulsion rose in him at this, a spurning, distant yet collapsible, showered over by his own hate and the hard blows of an old raised hammer. Seconds collected like specie, legal tender for all debts public and private. He had beat the ground with fists, feet, hoe, shovel, cap, with his own bony head, banging the life out of her by proxy. He had screamed in a cell until they threw cold water on him, dragged him out and slung him still screaming into the dark closets of punishment. He had sobbed until his throat was raked raw, until his body ached in every acheable part. He could make a list. This cut, this scrape, this sprain, this blow from the shovel-faced guard, this unloosing of tendon, ganglia and fasciae, this cough, this wheeze, this shiver, this itch, this scar—this breath—issued him by Lucille Blaine of Chat-town, Tennessee.
Yet he continued to stand there in the dim yellow light. On a radio down the hall Mr. Jack Benny, another white man, mock-argued about a restaurant bill. The studio audience—gentle people, wizards, unapprehended malefactors, old ladies in itchy undergarments, girls with fever sores, men smelling of licorice schnapps—ignorant white people—laughed, as they say, fit to bust. Out there, among the passing audience of uncharged felons and saints and collectors of trash and the rustled and fractured losers and freakish layabouts and all the good people of the earth, among the tedious miles of the great republic, war-spooked and weary, in the elaborating dusk, these two, jailbird and slattern, doing their best to keep their feet as the cold ball rolled on through endless space, gazed at each other, eyes light-brown-gone-to-green peering into eyes dark-almost-to-black, and, as if nudged or prodded or slipped, or in frazzlement fallen, shifted the final micro measure that separates nothing from something.
Delvin began to turn away, but she called him back.
“Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry, soldier boy. Why don’t you come in.” There was a softening in the rasp of her voice, quiet, not quite kindness, almost a plea. “Hey,” she said, “you come a long way to get here, I bet, so why don’t you sit a while with me.”
She began to make room for him on the bed, swept soiled undergarments, pages torn from movie magazines, broken nail files, crumbs of misery, off the pale blue cotton cover.
“Come on,” she said.
She was trying, a little, to make up for her harsh manner just now, he could see this. He could see she still didn’t recollect who he was.
“I get to shooting off my mouth,” she said, “no telling what’s going to come out. You want some pop—or some gin? I got a little gin. Pete,” she said, speaking to the Ghost, “go down and get us a bucket of ice. And another bottle.”
Delvin looked into the Ghost’s pale eyes, into the eyes of this man who knew him. “It’s all right,” he said.
“Don’t take my foolishness to heart,” she said, smiling crookedly.
Delvin saw the brokenness, the faltering about to spill into helplessness. He thought of his mother and he could hardly remember her and this had been the truth of it for years. This woman’s unlucky hair, like wire rusted on her head, her pudgy graceless fingers reaching to grasp the lid of a jar of cold cream smeared at the rim with a streak of rouge, the yellow warty elbow showing from under the loose sleeve of her brownish, sweat-streaked wrapper, reminded him of something that had nothing to do with this place and time. Not his mother, and not anyone he recalled, but another world, faltering as it passed.
The Ghost was standing just out in the hall in the sight line of both people, waiting for Delvin to come along, waiting for the moment representing reason and hope for the future and the house’s wish for no disorder among the help to take hold.
“Where you from, soldier boy?” the woman asked, and even though she sounded as if she was reading from a paper Delvin could hear the restless appeal in her words.
She screwed the pale pink lid on the jar, set the jar aside on a table from which half-dollar-sized flakes of yellow paint had peeled and slopped gin into a squat glass she first wiped with a grime-gray handkerchief. A wire strung under the corner ceiling held a couple of fake-fancy dresses on hangers. She offered the glass to him.
This was a moment of great import. Did he take the glass that would in some sense extend forgiveness, if only in the most cursory way, to her? Or did he refuse? Did he in refusing dash the glass to the floor? Or did he take the glass and smash her across the face with it? Was this a trick? Had she recognized him after all and was only playing along—coldly or stiff with terror—until she could signal for Winston to get the laws up here?
He accepted the glass and set it on the low dresser that was close by, close enough to make it easy—appropriate even—to set the glass down; as if the universe had colluded with direction and destiny. He set the fluted cloudy glass down, just snagging it with his little finger and almost but not quite tipping it so she made a barely perceptible move toward it, the two of them leaning closer. She smiled in an unhappy, self-regarding way.
“Yes,” she said, “a drink might not be what you need just now.” She dipped her finger in the metallic-shiny gin and licked the liquor off it. “You must be from around here.”
“I can’t stay,” he said as one might to an unmarried older relative, sad solitary person without recourse or hope for fun, blurting the words like a rube or a boy. But I must be on my way. The living—the freshly escaped—have to be on their way.
“I can make love come down around us,” she said. “I got tricks. I got conjures.”
She flopped back down on the bed, staying just upright enough not to be defenselessly collapsing or offering, and smiled foolishly. He could see that her hand wanted to come up and hide her snaggle mouth. He wondered if she was drunk. The room had a faint medicinal smell.
“Well,” he said, half turning away.