She appears to be fine. We been putting up tomatoes.
Well, I hope she brings me a jar of them. He looked in a wistful way toward the trail Delvin had come down. I used to live up in that house.
It has a gentle seat, Delvin said, quoting Ivanhoe.
Howse that?
It’s a good-looking place.
Me and my daddy and his daddy were all born in that house. Fletchy was born up there too—not directly in the house, but in a little house down from it. Her folks used to work for my people. Howse she doing by the way?
She’s doing fine. We been reading in her book of fairy stories.
I gave her that book when she was a spring child. A beautiful young girl she was. She had the jumpinest legs. Just springing about everywhere. You ought to have seen her leap a fence. He stared hard at Delvin. You one of J. D.’s kin?
Nawsir, I’m just down visiting.
From Atlanta?
Yessuh.
J. D. comes from over around Anniston. He come over this way following his daddy who was a preacher in one them nigra denominations. You go to church, boy?
Well, I do and I don’t.
You being smart?
Nosir. I work at a funeral home and we are in church quite often. But I myself am not a member of any given organization.
You educated, aint you, boy?
It thrilled Delvin to have the man think that, even if he was spiting him. He said, The man I work for lets me read some of his books.
Careful they don’t smoke up your head. The old man barked out a laugh that sounded like he was cracking pecans. I guess they couldn’t smoke your feet, could they?
Nosuh.
I myself got so interested in life that I never had time for reading. I spose I could have during the winters—like when we was holed up from fighting Useless Grant—but even then I found so much to do in the world I din’t even think of it. And look at me now, he said, running his stiff hard mottled hands down his thighs. Under the age-softened cloth they looked like two-by-fours. He looked again toward the trail. Delvin had the sense that he spent his time looking up that way. The edge of the ligustrum cut off sight; from the porch he could only see the sandy white path itself wandering on past the house into the deeper evergreen woods. The old man had the air of somebody waiting for something. D’I tell you I used to live up at that house?
Yessuh, you did. It’s a fine house.
I gave that house to Fletchy when she married J. D. I gave her this whole farm and much else besides.
Delvin didn’t say anything. The old man appeared to be in the grip of great emotion and Delvin figured anything he said might offend him. Mr. Oliver was very good in these sorts of situations. He brought a peacefulness with him that soothed others. But Delvin was a little jumpy. Yet he too cared about the bereaved folk, and this rickety old white man appeared to be one of the bereaved.
Is there anything I can do for you? he asked.
The old man looked at him with his blue-flooded eyes. Naw, son. Not unless you can make time run backwards. He smiled, revealing a snaggly mouth of isolated yellow teeth. And even then, how could you make it stop at just the right intersection?
They sat quietly for a while. His mind wandered to the cot in the Bealls’s back room that wore little shoe polish tins on its feet, filled with water and a touch of coal oil, just like the beds in their little house with his mama. Keep the bedbugs and the roaches and the ants out of bed with you. When he waked in the morning he smelled smells, little trickly odors, that made him want to cry for the memories they brought with them: creosote, rue, soda biscuits: cottagey smells from the long ago.
The sky still held on to its fading blue, blue almost gone to gray now, but the world around the two of them was turning on to black.
They surprised us naked in the woods, the old man said.
Sir?
Old George Thomas’s boys. We was bathing in a creek off from Chickamauga—it was before the big fighting began—and they came upon us washing ourselves. Must of been at least a dozen of us stark naked when they rushed from the woods. They was trying to capture us. I got away but it was without clothes or any weapon. I walked thirty miles through the night and all the next day before I got back to this farm and I was a naked man the whole way. Once or twice I could have maybe got some clothes off of this or that farmstead home but I didn’t, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the dogs, maybe I was ashamed, maybe I just didn’t care. A fit of some kind. I arrived here in the dawn of September twentieth, 1863, last day of that battle that was the last fight we ever won, and I walked up the back steps of that house up yonder naked as a jaybird and there I found . . .
His voice trailed off.
Yessir?
The old man looked at him out of eyes that continued to hold the limitless attachment irremediable and without effort on his part. He made little squeezy sounds in his throat and then he was silent.
After a while he said, You better go on, boy.
Delvin got up, thanked the old man for his time. The white man waved a rickety arm loosely as if it was waving by designs of its own but he said nothing. Delvin started back up the path. On his way he noticed a wide white sand wagon track behind the house running up through the darkening woods. This was probably where Mr. Beall came to when he went off in his truck, or maybe it was. These were some unusual living arrangements, Delvin thought, but, by way of the funeral home, he had become privy to unusual arrangements. So often who was whose, or had been, lived on as secrets in the hearts of the living. Women revealed as grandmothers, not mothers, aunts who were mothers, sisters who were mothers, mothers who were nobody at all. Same for fathers on their side. Husbands who had been forgotten or simply never mentioned. Children who had been run off and left and who now claimed the first seat on the mourners’ row and wouldn’t be displaced without a fight. He had seen both men and women—and children—leap into the grave hole, trying to continue the struggle with the dead, right on into eternal life. He had seen furious left-behinds hammer with their fists on the coffin and at least once break through the lid and beat the unresisting face. Some had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the grave, some came wailing, some came limp as the freshly dead. Fistfights broke out at times among the bereaved. Once a pistol had been pulled and with a single shot one of the mourners, a smirking brother, had been sent to join the dead child on his journey. He’d seen a husband arrested at the funeral of his wife. You never knew what might happen as the dirt shoveling moment approached.
Death brings out the real person, Mr. O always said. You can’t hold these commotions against anybody. Some of these folks, he said, some of them have waited a lifetime to let the cat out of the bag. We are helping them to do for themselves what nothing else in their lives could. You see estranged children at last drop their hatred and become loving. Others go right exactly the opposite way. Sometimes you can see how happy a spouse is to be finally free. And you can see the ones who know they will never be free. If I wanted to go into business—or get married, he’d say with a look of false horror on his face—I could make up my mind who not to do it with or who would be the best choice just from how people show themselves during the time of bereavement. But it’s our job to provide a backdrop—a stage for these dramas. Without preference. Their lapses or breakouts are safe with us. Think of it, he would say, puffing on one of the tightly rolled Cuban cigars he had begun to smoke after supper, some of these folks have never in their lives been able to trust anybody with the secret of who they are, not the loved one or the preacher—not even themselves. But they can trust us. We don’t bring it out—death does that—but we make it so they can feel at home with their fit. Some of the displays, Delvin thought, were so public that those folks would have to trust the hundred or so other folks who watched them squeal and roll on the ground begging Mama or Daddy or sweet Sue not to go, and not just Mr. O and his boys. At least once Delvin had seen a man who had just shouted out in glee at the sight of his dead wife fresh from the embalming room threaten Mr. O with a future pistol shot if he did not keep his mouth shut about his delight. Mr. O, trembling a little and thinly smiling, had promised that no word would escape.
The afternoon had slipped quietly away. The evening star was out in the east, trembling as if it had been struck with a hammer. He stopped at the section of the garden where they’d planted strawberries. The fruit time had passed, but all the berries hadn’t been picked; some had withered on the bushes. On the north side of the garden were a few apple trees. The little striped apples soon would be ready for picking. He felt a strange emptiness. It had come so quickly it was as if he had stepped unnoticed from one body into another. The old white man had spent his life in love with the woman he called Fletchy. That was the story he had not quite told. But now he lived in a little house in a pine wood. And the woman, a colored woman, lived with her husband, a colored man, in the ample farmhouse up the hill. But Delvin did not especially care to think on these things. The world was an odd place. He only wanted to stand in the sandy path, smelling fennel and the light dry smell of the broom grass and feeling what was happening to him. The emptiness; as if everything he depended on was gone. As if it never was. He felt as if he could see a hundred miles. As if the rough pasture that ended in a buff dirt road, and the distant cotton field, and the line of pine trees beyond were not there, or if they were they were really miles and miles away. As if in ordinary calculations the ordinary miles or so between him and the horizon were filled with hundreds of miles of dirt and trees and bushes and wild hay. No, it wasn’t emptiness he was feeling, that was the wrong word. It was lack. As if who he was had vanished. As if he was simply a floating heedfulness, not hovering or lying in wait but simply present in a space and time that was so full of variety and mixes and complications that the ordinary measures of space wouldn’t fit it. The trees were a mile away and they were a hundred miles away. He lived in an endlessness in which everything was also confined. A sense of quiet unchangeableness was all around him. Nothing was required. As he rested in this state gradually it passed, fading slowly like a long twilight. When he stirred again the ordinary world had regained its normal proportions. No residue of special arrangements or tricks remained. Without his noticing lightning bugs had risen from the grass. They swayed and flickered, holding their yellow-green lights aloft. He wished he had a jar to catch them in. His mother once in the backyard had caught a handful and tried to keep them in a big handkerchief she tied around her head, but the tiny lights faded and it was only dead bugs she shook from the cloth. She had given a half sob and laughed in a peculiar way that he could feel in his belly. Coolmist had stroked her arm and he wanted to say something, but he didn’t; sometimes even around his mother he was shy.
For supper that night they had hominy and thin slices of salt ham cut from a large ham hanging in the pantry and tomatoes stewed with okra and for dessert hot soda biscuits slathered with salted butter with cane syrup poured over them. Mr. Beall had come in from his afternoon trip. He looked at Delvin in an odd way, not unfriendly, almost sad. Delvin asked about the old white man down in the vale, but neither of them would go very far into it. He was their tenant, Mr. B said, a man who had once worked this land but was now retired. Delvin studied Mrs. Beall’s face as best he could without being rude, but she showed no special feelings about the matter. She didn’t ask after the man.
After supper Mr. Beall and Delvin went out on the side screen porch and sat in the dark looking out at the night. The tin foil Mr. Beall rolled from his cigar made a crinkling sound. His big sulfur match flared light and stink and the end of the cigar flamed and Delvin could see the ball of smoke and then there was only the red glowing tip in the dark. From the woods an owl called, looping its brief two-speed call out like a lariat. A whippoorwill offered its question and continued for several minutes before falling silent, answered or tired, no way to tell. Another night bird, peewit or thrush, let loose a short burst of sharp small cries that seemed to run along the tops of the field grasses, as if the little bird, in a panic, was hurrying toward a still distant roost. In the apple trees by the garden they could hear blackbirds jostling for their final places before sleep. After a while Mrs. Beall came out bringing cups of sassafras tea. He’d never drank this kind of root tea before. It had a sharp cedary smell and tasted faintly of wood. With the honey she also brought it was all right. They must do this often, Delvin thought (though it was the first time they had done it since he came). Sit out here among the birds and woods creatures listening to this racket. Country people. Like they were tiptoeing around in this big greeny world. Folks who lived out here had special secret places they retreated to—so he imagined—canebrakes and branches, caves under the fox grapes where in shady green citadels they could sit undisturbed and think about the world that couldn’t find them just now. All this rural world was like that for him. Not just some hideout in an alder thicket or ramshackle cotton house, but all of it, the whole parcel of woods and rivers and planted fields and all the houses and other buildings and sites too. Nobody in the world knew he was here. He could stop and loiter among the sedge and thistles like he’d done this afternoon and let himself think about things. It didn’t even matter what he thought; the thinking was the point. After fear of the police it was loneliness, he remembered now, that had driven him on. Thoughts of Mr. Oliver and George and Polly and the Ghost and a girl he saw over at the Emporium one night standing in a window winding her brassy hair in her hands. Thoughts of his brothers and sister and his mother. The tenderness he felt sending him off looking for more of it.
Mr. Beall looked up from the tea he’d been steadily slurping for the last five minutes and asked if he would accompany him to town tomorrow. Delvin, brought sharply back, said yes sure.
The next morning he waked as Mrs. Beall was bringing the fire up in the kitchen. She didn’t always make the fire, or when she did, she’d bank it for restarting in the morning. Just the two of them out here, she said—we don’t need it. But this morning she built it up and made a large breakfast for them. While he and Mr. Beall were eating she packed a lunch in a small shellacked wicker basket. They had given him clothes to replace the dirty ones he showed up in. He carefully folded these and set them on the soft green coverlet on his bed and changed back into the washed originals. No one said anything to him, but he knew what was up. When in town Mr. Beall stopped the truck, handed him the little basket and told him it was time for him to go on his way he was not surprised. The old man pressed two one-dollar bills into his palm. Delvin hesitated a moment as if there was something he wanted to say, as if you could in a slender second or two like this somehow recount the goodness you’d found, the walks in the garden and the light shining unhampered over the fields and especially the human company, its softened edges and wandering, sympathetic talk, but there was no way to do this; he thanked him for his hospitality and started across the courthouse square. Four big water oaks squatted at the corners around the big rough granite building. He felt a sharp aloneness. He didn’t know where to go. The town was small but he had to walk half an hour before he discovered a small colored neighborhood. It was really only two short streets past the cotton gin and a couple of warehouses. Cotton lint hung in the trees. It looked like dirty snow had fallen. Women, their lower lips pouched with snuff, gazed at him from their front porches. He went in a store and bought a grape soda. The woman who sold it to him studied him carefully. She seemed as if she would let him go without speaking, but as he turned away, she drummed her big fingers on the counter and asked, Who you visiting?
I been out here to see the Bealls, he said.
Oh, you’re that boy.
Yes mam.
You off again.
Well, I would be, but I don’t quite know the way.
Looks like you don’t know how either.
No mam, I don’t.
Where is it you headed?
Chattanooga.
I thought you was from Atlanta.
Well, I am, but I got folks to visit up in Tennessee.
She studied him with a sharp black eye. Her face was grayish as if she was not well, a thin woman wearing a khaki dress almost completely covered by a worn gray apron. Without turning her head she called out, Hankie!
A voice outside the back door called back, Mam?
Come in here.
A skinny man in faded overalls came in carrying a bucket.
Go over yonder and ask Mr. Sterling if he’s going up to Chattanooga this morning.
Yessum.
She said all this without taking her eye off Delvin. You had your breakfast? she said.
Yes I have.
Well you can go wait out behind the store til Hankie gets back. Take your drink.
Delvin exited by the back screen door into a yard that was filled with stacked-up wooden crates of all sizes. On one side a bushy camphor tree with elegant dark leaves. On the other perched above a shallow ravine a small board cabin. He walked to the ravine and looked down into it. Trash of all kinds filled it. A pig tied to a stake ate melon rinds. On the other side two skinny brown dogs glanced up and went back to their meal. Delvin couldn’t see what they were eating. Odd that they didn’t bother the pig. On the far side of the ravine was a wide path bordered by a half-broken-down board fence. Beyond the fence were houses in dirt yards, a few fruit and chinaberry trees. A girl in a pale blue dress walked along the path. She carried a large basket of laundry.
Hope your day’s going well, Delvin said across the divide.
The girl didn’t answer. He watched her continue along the path and turn down a street out of sight.
He finished the drink and put the bottle in the little basket, sat down on a crate and began to make up a story. He hadn’t done much writing work, but he figured his trip would give him many things to write about. He thought about the ex-confederate soldier living in the cottage. He might tell a story about him. This old white man who loved a black woman who had betrayed him with another. And so the man, who was much older than the young black woman, had given her and her husband the farm he owned just to make her stay close to him. He made them sign papers so they wouldn’t move away or throw him off the place. He had even paid them to stay, a salary drawn off his accounts that he had set up from the sale of property he owned here in town. That was why the couple didn’t do too much work. They were on salary. Maybe that was the story. Delvin wished he had a notebook with him. He had left in such a hurry that he hadn’t thought about it. Remembering, his fear came back. Maybe he should stay out of C-town longer. He had been away a few months shy of a year. The police were probably looking for him still—or ready to start again if they caught a lead. They would always be looking for him. A sadness crept in on him. It was like an old unfriendly cat. Just then the girl came back around the corner. She still carried the now empty basket.
That your job? he called, delivering laundry for the neighborhood?
It was a foolish thing to say, he knew, but the girl’s prettiness confused him.
The girl didn’t look at him. Least I got one, she said.
He thought he caught a glimmer of a smile and didn’t feel so alone. His old fantasy of being the intrepid man alone—one of his fantasies—had fallen quickly apart. The morning had a dewy, comfortable feeling to it. Salvia and mexican sage bloomed along the sides of the ravine. He walked along the way the girl had gone—she’d disappeared into one of the yards up ahead, but he didn’t see a way to cross unless he wanted to wade the rusty little stream at the bottom, and he didn’t. He liked wearing clean clothes, liked the feeling of fullness from breakfast. Liked waiting.
He returned to the yard behind the store. The sky was touched up here and there by a few high clouds like smears of white. The day would be hot. He took a seat on a crate under the camphor tree. There were camphor trees in the negro section of the municipal cemetery in Chattanooga. He wondered who was on the funeral list. Mr. O studied the paper and listened to stories from the neighborhoods of Red Row and kept a list, sometimes on a sheet of linen stationery in his bedroom, sometimes simply in his head, of the ones who would most likely be needing his services soon. He never spoke up ahead of time, but he was ready when the day came. Often before he was called. Mrs. Turnipseed was on the last list he’d seen, a middle-aged widow dying of bowel cancer. Her whole house smelled of shit, somebody said. One of the boys he smoked cigarettes with in the alley. And Rufus Wainwright who had taken to his bed with rheumatism. He lay in a room wallpapered with newspapers, listening to band music on the radio, reading the headlines out loud. And they said little Eustace Rogers, eleven, who had fallen off the roof onto the sharp palings of an old wooden fence his father was keeping around, hoping to set it up in his yard, wouldn’t recover. There were others, the sick and the aged mostly, occupants of the waiting room, Mr. O called them, and Delvin had pictured them sitting in the colored-only room outside the heavenly office, their straw suitcases and carpetbags closed with string at their feet, old people and young, children too, some weeping, others stoical, others not understanding why they were there and maybe only slowly figuring it out. What was the weather like outside the window? There had to be a window. He pictured himself in that room. He would be looking out the window at whatever was growing in the yard. Probably mallow bushes and mock banana, a few straggly corn plants, a rosebush dripping pink blooms, tomato vines lying on the ground. He was coming to love the smell of the fields.
A little boy threw open the screen door and rushed out into the yard.
Don’t hit me with that switch, he cried to the woman who chased behind him. She was carrying a long, limber elm switch.
The little boy circled the yard, coming in close to Delvin under the tree. He shot him a glance of humiliation and regret and ran on by. The woman—his mother, Delvin assumed—stood just outside the doorway waiting for him. The little boy stopped on the edge of the ravine and looked at her.
You gon come here, Stacy? the woman said.
I aint coming to take no whipping, the boy said.
Well, if you don’t then you don’t get to come home at all.
The woman stared at the boy a moment longer and then wheeled and vanished back into the store. The little boy, six or seven, squatted and began to cry. Delvin watched him. After a while the boy dried his eyes with the bottoms of his hands, straightened up and came over to Delvin.
What you doing? he asked.
Waiting.
For what?
The bus.