4
Willie Burt and Elmer and Polly and Mr. Oliver’s assistant Culver and a large dark-skinned man he didn’t know were in the cool fieldstone hallway outside the embalming room. The room was faced along its full length on one side with frosted white glass, and the darkwood door in the center was in the top half panel covered by the same glass. The word RESTRUCTURE that had been there when Mr. Oliver arrived was painted in black on the pebbly glass.
Mrs. Brass, who worked with Polly, was sobbing loudly, as was the big dark-complected man who held a red bandana to his face. The others were quiet. Their faces looked like masks. Polly, tears on her cheeks, came up to him and took him in her arms. He felt her body in the long length of it against his and felt the remarkableness of it—she had never hugged him before—but this was so in the midst of the choppy, ice-laced fire in his gut.
As Polly held him the door opened and Mr. Oliver stuck his head out. “There you are, boy. I need you.” He came out. He was wearing a cordovan leather apron that covered his body and under the apron a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his black funeral pants. He stepped to the crying man and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Carl,” he said, “dear Carl.”
The man lifted his eyes from the bandana. His eyes were so wet and red they looked bloody.
Delvin let Polly go and followed Mr. Oliver into the embalming room.
A twisted, naked, half-charred corpse lay on the marble table. Delvin cut his eyes away but not quickly enough, and he wanted to run out of the room. Mr. Oliver closed the door and came up behind him. He put his arm around Delvin’s shoulders.
“Come help me with this poor boy,” he said.
The man’s name, boy’s name, written in green ink on a square white card and propped against an empty water glass on the counter that ran along one side of the room, was Casey David Harold.
“Seventeen,” Oliver said. “Caught sneaking, they said, from a white woman’s bedroom—they said—with a gold acorn bracelet and a ruby necklace and some of the woman’s clothes stuffed in a valise.”
He touched the crusted forehead with the first two fingers of his right hand, lightly but without hesitation, as if this was some imprimatur he was placing there, resolution of flesh on flesh, from wretched life to life everlasting.
“They put him in the jail over in Custis,” he said, “and shortly after midnight last night some men came and got him out of that jail. They put him in chains and hauled him in the back of a truck out to the river where they tormented him with fire and water before they cut his hands off with an ax and then raised him up to hang him in a hickory tree beside the dirt road they came in on. Then they set him on fire. The fire—as you can see—burned him on one side only.”
His voice was hollow, oratorical.
The boy’s burned side was drawn up in a strange lopsided way and ashy now and showed streaks of gray and red flesh under the black rubbled crust. The other, free of rigor mortis by now, was loose and askew, the handless arm with its projecting inch of bone thrown out like a sharpened white pointer aimed at the floor. The body looked like halves of evilly treated people joined together, two people without relation to each other except in the mystery of there being no limit to what human beings could come up with to do to each other. This angel who didn’t know he was an angel, burned and strangled by furious ruffians who didn’t know they were angels too.
Sweat stood on Oliver’s brow. The helper, Culver, washed equipment in the big metal sink on the other side of the room, banging metal against the sides. The boy’s face was blistered and distorted but not terribly burned. Everyone could be thankful for that.
On the counter, beside a red celluloid pinwheel and a line of photographs of male negro movie stars and an ivory frame containing a photo of an elephant the white folks had hung right after the Great War for misbehaving, in open cherrywood boxes the glass bottles of numbers 17 through 52 brown dyes, of conditioners, humectants, anti-edemics, lotions and perfumes waited. On a rolling wooden trolly the big galvanized tank of formaldehyde; gray rubber tubing and silver hand pumps on a tray underneath. One gallon of juice per fifty pounds of corpse. Delvin knew this already. He’d seen corpses, by now he’d helped out.
But he shivered and turned from this one, crowding against the big galvanized tin sink. The clear water running steadily from the tap soothed him. Culver’s presence soothed him. The equipment, gauges and hinges of bright metal, scoops and forceps in their clattering, soothed him. These matters are ordinary and superficial, he thought. No, they’re not. (They are too weighty to be stood up under. No shelter can keep off the load.) Yes, they are. When he turned back to the lighted body he saw he had not fixed his mind and turned again to the sink. The clean gray mottled galvanized bottom, the smoothly whirling clear flushing water. Culver’s wet arms gleaming as he lifted them in the light pouring from the downturned trays on the ceiling.
Delvin stood quietly. He thought about the woods where he liked to stand at the end of the Little Hollow Road trail and ponder on the thousand secrets hidden among the trees. Secrets not like propositions and facts you could come to know but true secrets, mysteries and puzzles you could never discover the answer to or reason for. You could only stand there, like a mourner before a grave, and wonder. He thought of his mother, who was alive, he was sure, moving through that forest of secrets, finding her way. He could feel her, sense her, tracking across the landscape. He bore down steadily—in the few seconds of time that seemed to stretch before him like a day or a year—and once again he could almost find her, almost see her, trailing her blue shawl behind her like a flag. But once again she eluded him. He gasped. He was back in the room. He ran water over his hands, cleaned them with soap.
Wearing green rubber gloves he helped as they washed what re mained of the boy and gathered up the pieces that had fallen or been torn off and that came loose as they as gently as possible washed the body. Culver tied off and bandaged the wrists. With a sure hand and tiny stitches Mr. Oliver sewed up the mouth that had been ripped open by blows. He attempted to inject the embalming fluid through the big neck vein and then through others in the thighs and under the arms, but none would hold the slick greenish fluid that drained out onto the white marble table and ran along the gutters into buckets. “It’s all right,” Oliver said when Elmer began to cry.
They had wrapped the torso and legs loosely in yellow oilcloth when a hard banging began on the door. Then the glass pane broke and Mrs. Arctura Harold, the boy’s mother, rushed screaming into the room. Her left wrist streamed blood where she’d cut it breaking the door using the small brass cuspidor that had stood beside it.
Oliver sprang nimbly for so large a man to meet her. He caught her arms and drew them together, crossing them, and pulled her to him and held her against his chest as she screamed. Her scream was like the scream of a creature from the ancient dark of the deepest woods, a creature everybody has forgotten about except when on times like these some ruined individual screams and they suddenly remember.
At the scream, surging and smashing and excavating with a frenzied dedication for the soul already fled the premises, all the strength went out of Delvin’s body. He leaned against the sink, catching himself on the lip of it. The woman wouldn’t stop screaming. Why should she? he thought, amazed at her lung power. He wanted to scream too, but he was already sobbing and the whole front of his body was numb.
And then, from outside the room, from the hallway that had been filling with people from who knows where, came more screams, loud mixed voices, human voices, crying out, yelling and shouting and screeching until Delvin thought the air itself would shatter and fall down and they would be standing screaming with forsaken eyes in the face of heaven or whatever monstrosity or nothingness was behind the world.
The screams went on and then abruptly they seemed to collapse on themselves and they trailed away. The mother of the boy croup-moaned in Oliver’s arms. He began gently to speak to her, but as he did she broke away and lunged at the table. Outside the room a low groaning and keening had begun and as she moved, the crowd, that only a few of could see into the room, swayed and trembled like a sea, moaning and making little chattering and clicking sounds, little human expressions, nicks and chips at the unholiness, at the failed light, whispers and clucks, tiny hisses like spray blown off the tops of waves, all entirely human, pure and unbreakable in perfection, the only perfection left to any of them just now.
Mrs. Harold had thrown her body across her son’s body and she was kissing his sewn-up lips.
Still bent over, she took a shuffling step back, placing her hands not on her son’s body but on the marble table. She raised up. “Oh, Lord, do not,” she cried in a wild voice. “Do not, Lord, do not. Do not ransom this child.”
She began again to scream, to shriek in a high, unworldly voice, but before she got well begun her voice sheared off and she dropped to the floor. In the hallway, like a sea, voices massively groaning. Oliver had tried to catch her, but she hit the floor on her side. Both Mrs. Harold and Oliver were smeared with blood that was seeping from the cut on her wrist.
Oliver called for them to get the doctor and he and Culver lifted Mrs. Harold onto the auxiliary table, an old steel-topped folding table used when he had to travel out to the country to work. With alcohol and a tourniquet and hard pressure that made Mrs. Harold cry out again, Oliver was able to stop the bleeding. He had Culver and Elmer carry Mrs. Harold out the double back doors and up to the back screen porch where they could lay her on the big daybed kept there along with folding cots for sleeping on hot summer nights.
Out in the hall he comforted Mr. Harold, who had not come into the embalming room.
“She just got a nick on her wrist,” he said. “The doctor will be here in a speck.”
Then he went himself and phoned from the telephone hanging on the wall of the embalming room. He came back and said, “The doctor is leaving now.” Dr. Mullens lived in the next block and was the only africano doctor in the city at that time.
Oliver spoke gentling words to those standing in the hallway and came back inside and shut the door behind him. Culver had hung one of the big aprons over the missing glass.
“Thank you, Culver,” Oliver said and leaned against the wall. “Thank all of you.” He closed his eyes and pressed the unbloodied knob of his wrist against his forehead. He looked over at Delvin and smiled a sad, weary smile that brought out his dimples. “Take a long breath, son,” he said.
Delvin breathed deeply in. His chest was a dusty empty room filling with a burning wind. His face was wet, and he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes on one of the gray clean towels stacked on the counter. The shouts, the screams and yells, had been like huge scouring pads, rubbing the feeling off his skin. He was numb—in the places he wasn’t still burning. He felt a pressure in his head like a trunk filled with something creaturely that was pushing to get loose. He sat down in a chair by the sink and pressed his face against his knees. The blood rushed and dammed and he sat up quickly. He was about to faint. He grabbed the edge of the sink, pulled himself up and vomited. Culver came over to him and said he ought to go outside. But he said no. He wanted to stay here as long as he could. He thought he could make it through. “I’m doing all right.”
“Anymore all right as that and we’ll have to take care of you,” Culver said. Nothing ever seemed to bother Culver.
With the paints, some of which he had mixed himself from raw earth he collected in the ravines and from under rhododendrons growing below the ridge and had drawn from roots collected in the deep woods and dug up from clay pits and boiled out of leaves and bark, Oliver painted the broken boy’s face, and with other paints, com mercial cosmetics mostly, he added color to his cheeks. He picked the boy’s hair loose and oiled it and brushed it back from his bony forehead and then for the second time in his life as a mortician he bent down and kissed the product of his ministrations, this ruined child, on the forehead. He had not looked directly at Delvin, who had stayed in the room for most of the work before he remembered Morgred waiting in the horse shed and became distressed and nervous because he didn’t know what to do and told Culver, a small tidy man worn to exhaustion by now, that he had to pee and went out and carried the food he had packed in a small hamper out to the shed and gave it to the Ghost, who knew nothing of what had happened except he said for the hollering somewhere off there, and was peevish and unfriendly and, so he said, starving.
“Me too,” Delvin said, but Morgred didn’t want to share his food with him.
“I can’t afford to,” he said.
Delvin laughed. “You can’t?”
“I’m mixed up,” the boy said.
“Bout what?”
“I know this is you all’s food and so I ought to give you what you want of it, but then I am starving to death and don’t know where my next bit of panbread for example is coming from. So I wants to keep it. But if I do you might just take it from me and kick me out of this stable.”
“I might.” He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll get something inside.”
“Naw. Take one of these sandwiches.”
“Okay. I’ll take half of one. Give me the ham.”
“I want the ham.”
“Okay. Give me half the roast beef.”
“There it tis,” the Ghost said, handing a pinched piece. His voice had a little of a cicadas’ unraveling buzz in it—no bounce, no pick up, only a background of scrub fields, wet basement steps. The look in his eyes was dull as corn meal. He shied and slanted. It was as if he had spent too much time on the Blue Ridge’s bare rocky tops where only stunted blueberries and coarse tufts grew. The juice and kick of the city was dried out of him. Delvin was too twitchy to ask him much. The left side of the Ghost’s face was puffed out and red, and with two scuffed fingers he rocked a tooth like a tiny post set in too large a hole. He breathed shallowly, with a little hiccup like a rut at the end of each breath. He was a blinker.
Delvin turned away from the boy and looked off into the corner where hay was stacked in bales. He rubbed his hand against the unsanded stall wood and felt a tiny sharp splinter slide into the flesh under his thumb. Barely go in. A dot of blood. He sucked the blood and tasted it in his mouth and then in his throat and thought of the boy they couldn’t get the preservative to stay in, saw it running out and pooling on the table, the clear green glistening liquid that was beautiful and made you want to run your fingers through it, which he had done, sliding his hand—this hand here—discreetly along the slab until he touched the tensile edge of the juice and felt it cool on his fingers and he looked up and Mr. Oliver was looking at him with an expression on his face of such sadness as he’d not seen before.
He got up and went outside into the mid dark of night. People who at first had stayed away for fear of the police and the angry white folks had begun to collect in the alley. Small groups clustered across from the back gate and around the garage that let onto the alley and onto the curved drive at the side of the house. Men and women from the neighborhood and others he didn’t know, relatives probably of the deceased. They had brought the body in the back of a box-nosed Ford truck that kept breaking down, they said. The men had worked on the motor with the body wrapped in a quilt in the back as cars passed on the unpaved road at the junction into US 83, and they had felt the weight of the curiosity, of the snoopiness and greed in people’s glances, seen in their faces the hatred and disgust and fear (and seen the desire to feel something strongly enough to wrest them free of their own misery); and how hard it was to know they were thieving our own hopes, someone said, from the dead body of this son or brother or nephew, feeding like buzzards on the dear remains. And some of those white folks spit from the windows of their automobiles, and others, you could see, one said, were gloating and making ugly remarks among themselves—sho nuff, someone said—and others turned away in shame, but even these looked again—they wants to see the blood of the black man, another said and others agreed: yessuh, yessuh—staring, and you could see how hard it was for them not to stop they cars, one said, and get out and beat this poor child some more—oh, Lord—and desecrate his body further—He’s whole before Jesus someone said—Yes, I guess he is, but we are left here with the mortmain and the grief, the voice said.
All the time, so Delvin noticed, a cool breeze was softly blowing—Lookout breeze, they called it in Red Row—flowing down from the big mountain carrying with it the scent of sweet laurel and woodbine blossoming in the cuts and protected places. Mostly these people were silent. But then one or two asked him about the Harolds, mother and father. He’d not seen the father, he said, but the mother was grieving deeply.
He stepped away, walked to the end of the alley and looked out at the big field across the road. The wisteria looped and trailing from telephone and electric wires running along poles out on the old circus ground had bloomed for a second time this year, but the flowers were gone now, and the leaves were turning gold early, before fall had near come. Each year the wisteria, that was to him like some tropical effusion, bloomed early in May, surprising him, and each year Mr. Oliver, laughing, asked, “Where is your head, boy?” and he wanted to say, “Where it ought to be,” but he just laughed too because Oliver wasn’t mad, it was just his way of drawing him close, and both of them liked that.
But now, standing under the sweet gum listening to the heavy leaves make their swishing sound like big skirts rustling, he didn’t know what to think. There didn’t seem to be any happiness in any direction. Before him, the big rusty and ragged field and the meat packing plant and the dusty fertilizer plant, the auto shops and the foundry and the smelting plant, and then the public road running through the mountains and Tennessee into Kentucky and Ohio and Indiana and Canada—all of it—was a wilderness and unsettled; it was all a land of monsters. He shuddered. The wind was cold. It tasted of unvisited streams and rock. He wondered again how it had been for his mother making her way in the dark over the mountains. Had she forgotten him? He couldn’t sense her out there in the wilderness, but he believed she was there. But where was he? And what was he, standing at the end of a leafy alley in Chattanooga, Tennessee? His hands were still attached, his face uncut, his side unburnt. But for how long? How easy it was to step off into ruin. He wanted to slip into the crowd and stay there in its midst, jostling and petting and sliding body to body, smelling and tasting and touching. And he wanted to haul off by himself, crawl up under a bush and roll into a ball like a possum, sink down into a musty hole like a gopher, hide deep in the rocks like a bear.
When Mr. Oliver had discovered what he’d done with the rendezvous women, tricking them and him into getting together, he was at first so mad he had ordered Delvin out of the house. Get out and be gone, he’d said to him in as stony a voice as he’d heard coming from him. Delvin had walked out not knowing whether he meant just for now or for all time. The yard that night was fragrant with mock banana flowers and peonies. The twins heaved their lanky selves toward the west trailing Cassiopeia and Taurus. Delvin had stood at the end of this alley feeling his life like snow falling on him or the stars falling in cold white bits off the heavenly firmament and the night had seemed too much for him but still great and wonderful. As scared and hurt as he was, he had laughed outloud. Now the stars were something else entirely. Bleak and wind-polished, half sopped up by wads of cloud blowing from the west. There was nothing in the stars. He stood on the shore of a dark and terrible sea.
But that wasn’t true. Where he stood was not a shore.
The breeze picked fitfully at the mimosas bent over the fence behind him, nicked the roses on the Ballard’s fence, scuffed its knuckles on the loose grass behind Capell’s. Somebody in the Lewises’ yard was banging on a piece of metal. Not hitting it hard, just lightly, marking time. It made a hollow sound. He turned and it was a turning back into a world corrupt and ruined, a dirty place with a stink on it. But it was still the world, white quartz pebbles mixed into the grass track down the center of the alley, the sound of Big Archie the bay horse whinnying, somebody singing Do, Lord in a soft way.
He walked down the alley, speaking to people as he passed, telling them he was sorry, doing what Mr. Oliver did, a facsimile of it. Folks knew him as Mr. Oliver’s ward. He was a good boy they thought, but what did they know. In his heart he was an unruly force, battering mountains, a wild lover ravaging the world’s naked body.
On the way back to the shed he decided he would get Morgred to join him in a flight to another place. To Texas maybe.
But when he got to the shed the Ghost was gone.
“Got hisself run off,” Mortimer Fuchs, who was petting the gray’s face, told him, “cause he was about to steal one of these horses.”
“I needed him for something,” Delvin said. Yes, he was going to leave Chattanooga.
“If I knowed you wanted him, I’d ah helt him for you,” Mortimer said.
“That’s okay. I’ll find him.” He pulled out his notebook, intending to write Oliver a message—Headed West. “Would you do me a favor?” As he said this he felt a pressure in him. He couldn’t leave now, not with all this hanging over Mr. Oliver, over Polly and Mrs. Parker and all of them. He would have to stay. But right now he needed to be somewhere else.
He scribbled a note, folded it and handed it to Mortimer.
“Would you take this to Mr. Oliver for me?”
Mortimer, a naturally troubled-looking person, looked scared.
“If you can’t find him, give it to Polly. You know who that is?”
“Sholy I do.”
“She’ll give it to Mr. Oliver. I’m Delvin.”
“I know who you are too,” Mortimer said, offended that Delvin might think he didn’t.
“Thanks.”
“Taint no trouble.”