He walked the streets of Red Row looking for the Ghost. On the backside of the quarter the streets played out into the woods, climbing uphill into the mountains. On the opposite they funneled into Washington street, which paralleled the gully and crossed it back and forth in half a dozen places, bridged and unbridged. Other streets shanked and flopped over each other and wound like a snake. If you tended west most likely you’d eventually reach Morgan street and the block the funeral home was on. East they met the white section of town across a dusty unpaved street of mixed domesticities, white and black staring face-to-face through the red dust, and beyond this standoff the railroad tracks beyond which the real white world began.
Delvin worked his way along, asking for the Ghost. Adam street was the Row’s main street. It ran perpendicular to the gully and white Chat-town and on the other end petered out like an exhausted shout in a track that ran past houses jacked on stilts and up into the leafy mountain woods. On the town side were the stores and other commercial and professional establishments. There was the Peanut Shop (also selling pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts and filberts), Bailey’s Flower Shop, the newspaper office (Mountain Star Weekly), the office of the Ministry of Lost Souls (Protestant), barbecue, chicken and fish shacks (the fish shack attached to Dillard Fish Market), Bynum’s Hardware, Arthur’s Hats and Shoes, Smithwick’s Clothing, the Grand and Benevolent Order of Right-Way Men’s Hall, Kurrel’s Insurance, Elmer’s Garage, painted blue with a flat red roof with Elmer Bainbridge’s name painted in white on the asphalted gravel covering it (24 HOUR WRECKING AND TOWING, a swinging metal sign out front said), and other outfits and materializations appearing from time to time in one or another frame building or in the upper floors of the only multistory structure on the Row, the Brakeman building, conjure shops and false prophets of one kind or another, too, hovering over the hearts of the community for a week, or a few, and then disappearing, whisked away in the dark of a night similar to the one in which they arrived.
But the Ghost was in none of these places. They hadn’t seen him at Pell’s or at the pool hall or in the Occasions Restaurant or at the Pig Grill or at Shorty’s. He wasn’t upstairs at Fitt’s Grocery where the men played poker five nights a week. He wasn’t at the regular Baptist church or the Holiness or the AME or the primitive Baptist either, and not out back of the Free Will Baptist where a few families were eating the latest mess of fresh souse meat somebody’d cornered over at the stockyards. And he wasn’t at the Emporium.
He told himself the reason he was looking for the boy was because he wanted to bring him back to the house, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t want to go back to the house. That was why he was looking for him.
Everywhere he went people knew already about the killing. At Porley’s, young men without attachments drank and loudly raved, but every other place was muted, abashed. Extra white police sat in cars at the bridges and rode in cars through the quarter. They hung from the sides of the cars; like monkeys, Delvin thought, or maybe the start of a police migration. Near the old Morrison livery stable and mule barn, now a garage, he picked up a rock, but even though he carried it for a dozen blocks he didn’t throw it. He didn’t know where he dropped it. The people weren’t out on their porches mostly, but he could see them sitting by kerosene light or electric behind curtains in their front rooms; their shadows were still and waiting. The quarter seemed to swell with brooding, with a sadness that had not yet broken forth in mourning. Flaked mother-of-pearl clouds flew along under a sky sprinkled with coldly glittering stars.
In the Emporium most of the white customers had stayed away. But Frank Dumaine and his buddy were there, as were Mr. Considine and Billy Melton who was kin to the family that owned the First Pioneer Bank downtown. There were a few older white men who had come. These the woman pointed out to Delvin; they couldn’t keep from it. Many of the white men arrived not knowing about the killing, but in one way or another they quickly found out. In the parlor, except for Billy Melton, nobody was dancing. In the dining room Dumaine and his friend ate chicken stew. Delvin realized he was hungry and went back in the kitchen looking for Kattie. She was upstairs, the cook told him.
“Working?” he asked.
“She’s trying it out,” said the cook, a large woman whose dark-complected face was deep red under the black.
Delvin felt a pain in his breast. The cook caught the look on his face.
“This not the place to be rummaging around for a sweetheart, honey. Unless you a rich man. But then you gon be rich someday, aint you?”
“How’s that?”
“Aint you that old mortician’s boy?”
“I work over at the funeral home.”
“Yeah, that’s you. You the one everybody says he’s gon leave that place to.”
Delvin felt a warmth in his chest. “It’ll be a long time,” he said, “before Mr. Oliver leave’s the Constitution to anybody. By time he’s ready I’ll be long gone from this town.”
“I hear you on that one. Lord, hit don’t near stop,” she said, flicking at a musing fly standing on a meringue curl atop a lemon pie. “I don’t think it ever will.”
“It’ll wear us out eventually,” Delvin said. “And we’ll throw off that yoke.”
“Be careful how you talk, boy.”
“I’m not talking, I’m just saying.”
“These white folks aint never gon take they foot off of us.”
“We’ll knock it off ourselves.”
“I think only the Lord can do that, honey. Though I have to say he’s mighty slow-minded about getting to it.”
“Idn’t that the truth,” Delvin said and they both looked away and laughed.
He walked out in the backyard and peered up at the second-story windows. They were lit softly with red or green or blue lights, some with a rich yellow that laid dim oblongs of light on the grass. Maybe the red one was hers. He stepped into the red rectangle that was more black than red and stood in it. He tried to put aside Kattie’s new business, but he couldn’t help but picture it. It wasn’t just the booting itself that got to him, it was the mechanics of it, the body angles and the wrenches and the wringing and the slop-overs and the beads of sweat and the stickiness in your mouth—he saw too much in his mind. Some other—some white man’s greasy face—naw, it was worse for it to be a colored man’s—panting his liquor breath into hers. He didn’t mind the business, not generally; it was his mother’s . . . and where was she?
He looked up at the sky. Clouds at night. He loved clouds at night. And electric lights in daytime; he loved those too. And him lying on his bed with the shades pulled reading a book. Mr. O had put in another butterscotch leather chair in his bedroom and at night they sat on two sides of the little marble-topped table reading their books. Shakespeare and Milton (Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) for Mr. O, Shakespeare and Conrad for him, or the explorer books he had begun to prefer, Arctic adventures, dog teams, adventurers stranded on shelves of blue ice.
Just then a flower—a dark carnation, possibly red—sailed by his ear. He looked up to see Kattie standing in an upstairs window. She hissed at him.
“Whoo, you boy, go get me a glass of punch.”
Hearing this, his body turned to stone and as quickly turned back to flesh. But a changed, suffering, jellied flesh, wobbling on jelly feet. He couldn’t speak. When he could his voice squeaked in his mouth.
“Go on, boy,” Kattie said.
He stumbled across the yard into the kitchen and dipped a glass from the crock sitting under a piece of cheesecloth on the counter. The punch was dark red and smelled of wine. He touched the surface in the glass with his tongue. It tasted sharp and sweet, a little of cherries. He carried the glass up the back stairs and into the hall that was lit with widely spaced electric bulbs with square red paper shades covering them. A large negro woman in a maroon silk dress so dark it was almost black snoozed in a brocade chair against the wall. Kattie didn’t even tell him the room number; no, he forgot to ask; he’d just run off like a child. But he wasn’t a child. He had been with a woman—Miz Pauly, a widow he visited, and Eula Banks, a girl others had too, who gave easily because she liked it. None of these pay-as-you-go gals either. But never Kattie.
He knocked on the door he thought was hers, but the laughing voice that answered was somebody else’s. The next down he found her. Even the words Come in were spoken with an imperiousness he hadn’t heard before. But he understood where it came from. The first time Mr. O had let him drive the horses—down the alley and across the road onto the circus grounds—he had felt like a king. This was the same thing. But that didn’t stop it from hurting. One hurt piled on another tonight; piled on all the others, he thought, as something twisted inside him, something acidic and sour. He entered the room with a sneer on his face.
She lay alone amid the fouled bedclothes, wrapped in an old silk robe that belonged to Miss Ellereen. He recalled it from years ago. Yellow silk with pictures of seagulls and sailboats stamped on it. “My mother wore a robe like—” he started to say, but she stopped him with a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. A yellow robe Miss Ellereen had given to Cappie and then taken back when she saw how she looked in it, back when Miss Ellereen was still one of the girls. That was the story about his mother Coolmist had told him as they lay in a foundling bed on a hot summer night that smelled of the creosote the city oiled the dirt streets with. He remembered the smell of the creosote and the story and his Coolmist crying tears of frustration. A yellow robe with sailing boats on it. No one else was in the room with her, not a man, not Miss Ellereen, not the Ghost, not his mother.
He placed the glass on the little parson’s table by the bed; hesitated.
“You can go,” Kattie said.
She was wearing lip rouge and her cheeks were powdered the color of cornmeal.
“No,” she said, “stay.”
“What you want?”
“Stay a minute.”
She pulled her legs up under her robe, indicating for him to sit on the bed. He let himself gingerly down on the lumpy mattress. She canted her face and looked at him with a bovine expression that dissolved and was replaced by pique. But not before he caught in her eyes the strangling disappointment and lonesomeness. Something in him that he hadn’t even paid attention to, something hard and ready to strike, whirled slowly.
“You never have anything to do, do you,” she said, “but hang around doing nothing.”
“I got plenty to do. You didn’t hear about what happened to that boy?”
She pulled the robe tighter around her. “It’s got all these women scared to death. Not just them.”
“And what about you?”
“I been shivering all day.”
“Me too,” he said.
She looked at the punch.
“I didn’t really want that. I just wanted you to come up here.”
“For what?”
“You don’t have cause to be angry.”
“That robe you’re wearing used to belong to my mother.”
“I know your mama worked here.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“What about me?”
“You working here? I’d rather you hadn’t started.”
“I’m middling about it. I don’t like it much, but I don’t mind it much either. I been doing it a while now,” she said, her voice wandering off, “and I don’t mind it much.” She fingered her lapels. “You want me to take this robe off?”
“No. Not right now.”
“Miz Ellereen give me this robe.”
“She took it back from my mama.”
The sense of shame he had suffered under since the boy’s battered body was brought in deepened. The unruly thing in him—hard as slate—began to slide under. He reached for it but he couldn’t pull it back up. He lay back on the bed. She raised herself and bent over him, looking into his face.
“I don’t even know you,” she said.
A crease ran down the center of her bottom lip. What caused that? he wondered. He turned on his side. Suddenly he felt like a man waking with fever in a room where nothing matched. He scrambled off the bed and stood up.
“I got to go.”
“You don’t really have to.”
He stared at her. “I’m glad you got that robe.”
“How come?”
“So somebody—so you’re walking around on the earth in it. I like it that it’s still lasting.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to last.”
“You seen the Ghost?”
“That boy they pulled out from under the house? He wouldn’t come around here again.”
“Maybe he would.”
A silence then. Somebody down the hall was laughing in a high unhappy voice. The walls of the room were covered in flocked pink wallpaper. Small places in the paper bulged out like there was something behind it. Anything could be there. The hardness had slumped, drained. Who was he? What was it he was about to do?
He said, “I’d go crazy having to be in this room all night.”
“Why don’t you get out of it then.”
It was like a light flashed across the back of his eyes. So quick he wasn’t sure if he’d seen it or not. He got up, reached down and pulled hard at the yellow bedspread. He pulled it off and her with it. She hit the floor and rolled over and scrambled away from him.
“You get the hell out of here,” she cried. “Lola!”
He cast a look of scorn at her. Not at her, at what was in the world behind her and all around them. If he had a match he could burn the place down—the row, the whole city. He didn’t have a match. He turned and ran out and away.
On the way home a man he knew slightly from the neighborhood, a worker on road crews, called to him from the side yard of Boniface Tillman’s house. Boniface was a gangster man, a runner of liquor and drugs through the mountain traces.
“Come over here, boy,” the man said. He stood foursquare, half in half out of the tree shadow, waiting for him. “I want you to drop over get a jug from the chinaman’s,” he said when Delvin approached.
Behind the house men moved around a large fire burning in an open space among large oak trees, doing something Delvin at first couldn’t make out. Then he saw they were thrashing somebody on the ground with what looked like willow switches.
“I’d be glad to do it,” Delvin said, “but they’re looking for me at home.”
The man grabbed him by the wrist, quick as a snake, and tried to put two dollars in his hand. “You go get that jug,” he said.
“I would, but I can’t.”
“Damn rascal, you take this case cash and go.”
Behind the house the shadows flung their arms up into the heavy leaves and brought them swiftly down. Delvin broke away and ran down the street. Across the street, light from an open grocery shone on a big Bull Durham sign painted on a billboard. A boy stood in the doorway eating with a spoon something out of a tin can. Was that the Ghost down on the ground by the fire? Getting beat on? He told himself it couldn’t have been and ran on, but he was afraid it was, and afraid—knowing it—for the kind of boy he was for running away.
But it wasn’t the Ghost because when he returned home he found him back in the shed, stretched out in the empty stall asleep on his pile of hay. Delvin woke him up. “Where you been?” he wanted to know.
“I had to go see my auntie,” the boy said.
“If you’re going to see your auntie, why couldn’t you stay with her?”
“She’s at the jailhouse. But I knew she’d be worried about me, so I had to go ease her mind.”
In those days the women prisoners were kept around back on the third floor of the old brick jail. From a grassy hill above the parking lot friends and relatives could shout to them standing in the cross-barred windows. Morgred’s auntie, a crazy woman, saved peas from dinner and tossed them at folks. Morgred showed him a pea he had caught.
“Hard as a damn rock,” he said. “Lord, it’s a terrible thing to be locked up in that jailhouse.”
Delvin went in through the big double basement doors and found Oliver finishing up. The dead boy lay peacefully under a mostly repaired face. The smashed-in parts had been picked out with an awl and the dents filled in with putty but they’d left the makeup off so you could see where the work was done. The pick holes and the brown putty. The boy now had hands, or at least he wore white cotton gloves that looked as if they were filled with palms and fingers. “Cotton ticking,” Oliver said, the gloves tied with white hemp twine to the wrists hidden under the white shirt cuffs and the black broadcloth coat taken from among the pile in a big cabinet out in the corridor.
As Oliver bent over the galvanized sink washing his big soft powerful hands, he said, “I thought you’d flown the coop, boy.”
“Flew but not far. Sometimes all this is a hard thing to bear up under.”
The hallway was cleared of everyone except for Culver and Willie. Culver sat in one of the old wheatcloth armchairs against the wall. The big cordovan aprons, hung on hooks by the door, looked as always to Delvin like the skins of cadavers that somehow hadn’t made the grade for burial. “Leftovers,” Culver called them.
Now Culver looked up at him, ashen-faced, his eyes blood-veined, hopeless. But as Delvin passed, his hand shot out and with his knuckles he rapped Delvin on the thigh.
“You’re a good boy,” Culver said, turning his head without shifting his body, which leaned over his knees. And George, the handyman, leaned against the wall, smoking his corncob pipe. “Rumpled us down to the ground,” he said in an uninflected voice.
“Come on, you men,” Oliver said and shepherded them all up to the kitchen where Mrs. Parker had prepared a night breakfast of cheese eggs, ham, hominy and biscuits.
They sat at the honey-wood table eating and then at the end they cut open the white steaming cathead biscuits and poured wide rivers of cane syrup from the big round tin spilling over the plates and sopped the syrup up with the biscuit flesh and chomped it down as the sun, in yellow and peach streaks it slowly gathered into itself, came up. The new day laid its foundations on the windowsills and pushed gradually into the room, lit by the big electric bulb hanging from the ceiling under a green shade and by a coal lamp on the counter, and Delvin, his eyes so packed with sand he could hardly keep them open, was sorry to see these two lights extinguished. He wanted them to keep burning into the day in memorial to the day passed and its events.
But the sunlight that couldn’t be stopped shone on the red bread-box and on the bottle-green icebox and on the blue, marble-painted crock containing cucumber pickles and on the polished black enameled woodstove and on the pale blue safe with the pink floribunda roses painted on the two doors, and he watched all these take their true colors back to themselves and the faces of the men and Mrs. Parker take on the colors and shapes that they carried through daytime that were different from their faces at night under even the brightest light, somehow more supple and creased and softer really than at night, even if they looked more battered and old. He could smell the scents of mock banana flowers and gardenia and pine rosin from the yard, and smell the grass and the dew itself, and it was as if the sun brought these in too. And all of them, including Oliver leaning against the counter sipping a cup of black coffee, felt something hidden inside themselves brought back out into the open, something made up of sorrow and vigor and reverence all bound together. They felt restored, resolved. And this feeling, too, like the tide of light, passing even as they felt it.