Aint no bus come back here.
It’s a different kind of bus.
You think my mama’s gon whip me? the boy said with an almost saucy air.
Sure does look like it.
Well, she won’t. I’ll just wait out here til she gets lonely for me then I’ll mosey on home.
How long will that be?
Oh, bout five minutes. He scratched his arms. Delvin could see the faint raised red circles of ringworm on his tan arms.
Shouldn’t scratch that, he said.
I don’t see how you can keep from it.
That what your mama’s after you for?
That’s it. He began to cry again. That doctor, he sniffed after a minute, wants to shave my head bald and paint it with grease that stings like fire.
That bad?
Sure is. I seen it done.
But those worms’ll eat you alive.
He scratched mournfully at the rings. It’s a problem that’s got me in a vise grip, he said.
Just then the boy’s mother pushed the screen door halfway open. Here’s a strawberry drink, honey, she said, her voice light and tender. Come on now.
You gon beat me, the little boy said.
Come on sugarbite, his mother said, and the boy walked to her and took the drink and she put her hand on his shoulder and steered him into the store.
After a few minutes Delvin followed the boy inside. The pair were gone, but some men were sitting at a corkboard table set on a crate in a cleared space off to the side in back. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if she didn’t know him. Then in a blink she did. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
That’s Sterling, she said to him, indicating with her elbow one of the men sitting at the table. They weren’t playing a game, they weren’t really sitting around the table, they were just near it. The man she indicated, a middle-aged stocky man with bushy hair mashed down under a forage cap, gave him a one-finger salute and said, We’re waiting on my sister’s boy. He grinned a grin of uselessness and amiable futility. Another of the men, an older fellow wearing a greasy black vest over a clean white collarless shirt, offered him a chair. Delvin slid in and joined the little confab. He was used to sitting with adults, listening to their talk. He had sat up in the viewing parlor or in the Home parlor on call for the bereaved who spoke in all kinds of ways, very often about things that had nothing to do with the dead. People, no matter what happened, kept their eye on the living side of things. The third man, a slim geezer with a fist-sized red rose pinned to the lapel of a yellow bathrobe he kept pulling tighter around himself, looked as if he might be joining the funeral list pretty soon. I’m Albert, he said, offering slim shiny fingers for Delvin to shake. Yes, he said, turning back to the group, my grandfather won that election fair and true. Eighteen seventy-four, he said, turning his narrow face to Delvin, Slidell—fair and true.
What for? Delvin asked.
Why, the US Congress, the man Albert said.
He went on to tell how his grandfather had served two terms before he was thrown out of office after the soldiers left in ’78.
They put it to him straight over the barrel of a Spencer rifle that it was not in his best interests to run for Congress, or any other office, again, he said.
Sho they did, the older man said. Happened all over this country down here. After the US government left.
He was a tall man, Albert said, six and a half feet. He had a natural bearing to him. A smart man, too. He proposed we open the southern part of the state with canals to help with trade—dig em straight to the Gulf—but nobody would vote for the measure. He never got over losing his office. He wound up living out on Mr. Roscoe Tillman’s farm.
Up here, Mr. Sterling said.
Sure. Out in one of the cabins down by the river. Just sitting out there on the front porch in a old rocking chair, like he was dreaming with his eyes open.
Did you know him? Sterling asked.
I did when I was a boy. He wore his Congress suit of black cloth, white shirt and a little black string tie. He was a handsome man.
I remember him well, the older man said. He came up here eventually to live with his sister, aint that right?
Yessuh.
They sighed and made soft sounds like swallowed humming and Delvin listened as the stories went around. The old man told a story about a magician who kept losing things. You know that magic’s just a trick, he said, but this fellow—lived over just outside Birmingham in a little crossroads settlement I believe it was, called Cherrytown, and he had a magic act at the Gifford show.
What you mean he started losing things? Albert said.
These objects that he made disappear, for his show act, he got so he couldn’t bring em back. First, so they said, it was a blue rubber ball. You know how they wave a cloth or some such thing and it’ll disappear? Well he waved his cloth over this blue ball and it disappeared, but when he went to wave it again it wouldn’t come back.
Where was it? Albert asked.
That was the thing. He didn’t know. He looked everywhere for that ball but it didn’t show up. He wondered about it, so they said, but he didn’t think too much of it. Maybe it had rolled off under the couch or something. Then a Mason jar filled with honeybees disappeared and was lost forever. Same way as the rubber ball. He waved the cloth over the jar and presto it was gone, but then it wouldn’t come back. That jar filled with bees—he’d punched holes in the lid so they could breathe and so the customers could hear the bees buzzing—was gone for good.
Haw, Sterling said. It had to be somewhere.
Well, where was it? Nobody saw it again. He tried the trick again, with a new silver dollar and . . . wham! . . . it vanished and was never heard from again. He couldn’t find it in any of the pockets it usually wound up in. He tried the trick on a little hairless dog and the dog vanished. Gone for good, though his little girl, whose dog it was, said she sometimes could hear the dog’s squeaky little bark, ghostly like, as she lay in her bed at night. Well, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether he had discovered a blessing or a curse. He tried it on a bushel of fresh peaches and lost all the cobblers his wife was planning to make for the lawn supper over at the church. He tried it on a pile of trash in the backyard and found a lazy man’s way to work.
It was gone too, Delvin said.
Like it had never been there. He decided that this was a power that he had to be careful with. It was too important to use as a trick. He wouldn’t use it at all. But then a thought began to come on him. He started to wonder if it would work on a person. He’d never got along with his wife. She was a fine woman, but she had a sharp tongue, as the wives of magicians are said to have. She was on him night and day. Even with the new power he was still not bringing any income into the family circle. His wife began to nag him to use the power in his act. He would become the best known magician around, and maybe the richest. He pointed out that not being able to bring back what you made disappear cut into the value of the trick. That didn’t matter to his wife. She went right on picking at him. Plenty of folks, she said, want to get rid of things. Think about all that trash, those busted wagons and such and old barrels you see piled up in people’s yards. You want me to be a garbage collector? I want you to collect a few dollars, she said. Well, finally he decided that he would use the trick one more time. He’d use it to get rid of his wife.
Albert guffawed.
Yes, thass right, the old man said, bending toward his listeners. He licked his narrow black lips. As his wife sat sleeping in her porch rocker one Sunday afternoon he took out his cloth, so they said, and with his daughter and his daughter’s new fyce pup watching, he waved it over his wife. The old man paused. Could you get me another lemon drink there, Sally? he asked the proprietress. And sat back in his chair.
Damnation, Sterling said, what happened? Did she disappear?
Naw.
It didn’t work?
Oh, it worked.
But she didn’t vanish?
Naw. He did.
Albert guffawed as Sterling sputtered. He half-raised a fist in mock attack. You rascal.
It’s a true story, said the old man, smiling behind white store teeth.
There were other stories. A man in khaki clothes, juggling boxes of 20 Mule Team Borax, joined them and told a story of his uncle who walked from California to Alabama, traveling through the desert for hundreds of miles carrying water in two army canteens. He said his uncle, Uncle Dorrit, told him that one night the stars filled the sky so thick they looked like they were poured out of a bucket. They formed themselves as he lay watching them. Took shapes, like clouds on a summer day. They made shapes of houses and horses and absent relatives and the shape of a huge angel right at the top of the sky. The day after this happened his uncle came on a donkey walking loose in the scrub and he rode this donkey through New Mexico and across Texas through the byways and little hamlets and across Louisiana, through Mississippi into Alabama and all the way to his home on the Jemeson farm out from Dothan.
I thought you said he walked, Delvin said.
I did, but I misremembered. He only walked part of the way.
The man in the bathrobe, Albert, told a story of a two-headed child who strangled one of the heads so he could have the whole body to himself.
The others laughed, but Morris said the story was true. The man told the family that the other head—his brother—had died during the night. They had to cut the dead head off and they buried it in an apple crate. But the man felt so much remorse for the murder that he fled his home and disappeared. It was said that he traveled around the country by himself, taking a job here and there—bean picker in California, deliveryman in Kansas for a dairy—but never staying any place long. In some places he pretended to be his brother, even though no one in the place knew either of them. He called himself by his brother’s name and wore the kind of clothes his brother preferred. At night in his room—he stayed usually in a rooming house—people could hear what sounded like two people talking. Sometimes they’d argue and sometimes one begged forgiveness from the other, a forgiveness the other would never give, and sometimes they would sing a duet. How that could be no one knew, but two voices is what some people said they heard, singing old songs like “Wonder Where Is Good Old Daniel” and “’Buked and Scorned.” Almost always the old jubilees, folks said. He was a good worker, people said. He had a habit of leaning his head over to one side, like he was resting it on something, and when he did this a wistful, tearful look would come into his face. He never stayed in any job long, never stayed long in any place. One day you’d see him on the road walking toward the next town. Or maybe you wouldn’t see him at all. The housekeeper would come into his room and find the bed made and the towel and washcloth neatly folded and dust tracks on the floor where he tried to sweep the room clean. Usually there was a note and the note always said the same thing. My brother and I thank you for our stay. It was said he left the rural life and moved to the city where he took jobs in restaurants, working in sculleries washing dishes and such. Some people in the cities had heard of the two-headed man, some had even heard that one of the heads had died, but nobody suspected this man of being that person. It was said that in the beginning he lived in rooming houses, even in a small apartment a few blocks from the river, but then, so it was said, he began to appear in flops and missions where often his few belongings were stolen and his wistful look was taken for a sign of weakness and he was sometimes beaten up. He moved to the streets, where he lived in alleys and parks. On summer nights sometimes you could see him sitting by the river. Some said he had a little dog, a spotted mongrel, that followed him everywhere. Others said he had no dog. Eventually no one saw him again. Once or twice some reporter, having got wind of an old story that was said to involve such a man, something overheard in a newsman’s bar, would look for him, but he was not found. It was said that one summer night—when Castor and Pollux were in their ascendancy—he slipped into the river and was carried away.
By this time a couple of others had joined the group around the makeshift table and they too offered their stories. One spoke of a pack of wolves living in an abandoned house on one of the great cotton plantations to the west. Another told of money, confederate gold, buried in malachite chests along the Porterville Road, some said, at the bottom of a pond in a cypress grove. Another said he knew that grove, but he had heard of no money buried out there.
Wadn’t no gold left among those folks after the yankees got through with them, Albert said and everybody laughed.
Around them the great fields of cotton stretched away in every direction, the last fields in the last big cotton county before the mountains. The split bolls leaked white fiber and on a clear night the earth seemed covered with small showy stars. As the stories went around a feeling grew in Delvin that his life’s journey had begun. He had not thought of journeys in particular, not his or anyone’s, outside a book, but the strong feeling came that he was beginning on a journey of journeys. Not just this little jaunt down the road from C-town, but on from here (even if he was already on the way back to his birthplace) farther and farther. He wanted to ask Mr. Sterling when they would be leaving. He was afraid to, what with his circumstances; he got up, went over to the corner and sat down beside some stacked boxes of canned beans. In a few minutes he had drifted into a light sleep. He dreamed of a boy tussling with another boy who was as tall as a giant, and of leaping off a viney bridge into a great green river, and of dancing in front of a pretty girl, and of washing long yellow rolls of cloth in a barbecue restaurant kitchen, and of a dog that understood everything he said. He could still hear the voices of the men droning on. They were trying to top each other’s stories. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake or asleep. He started to say something and then Mr. Sterling was shaking him by the shoulder. He jumped to his feet. In only a few quick minutes he was out front in bright sunshine tossing his bindle into Sterling’s dusty Chevrolet pickup and the two of them were headed out of town.
He rode turned away from the man—older, with ragged gray hair under a gray felt hat and above a dark-complected face—because he had an erection. It came up shortly after they got in the car. Sterling had glanced at him and Delvin thought he saw his minor predicament. The town flowed away from them and they were in the country. Tall red spires of sumac flowers by the road, cattails in the ditches spilling their stuffing. In front of a squashed-looking white house, lumberous oaks with dark green leaves. The trees made the house look small and lonely. What was it he had been dreaming about? He remembered: fights and friendly dogs, and something else, something muted, stepping from a stillness that didn’t want to stay still. His plans seemed silly now as he traveled through the farmed countryside. What of the old man in the cottage? Would he just sit on his porch waiting for the woman until he died? Was there a contest, fight of wills and desire and hopes going on without cease on that farm? Did the Bealls lie awake at night struggling with loss and consequences, decisions made that changed everything? The path down into the piney woods was well traveled. By whom? It hurt that he would never know.
Delvin’s familiar erection passed. He didn’t know where these traveling erections came from, what they were about. He wasn’t charged up by sex right now. They hung around then drifted off like some corner rogue who’d thought of something else. A streak of high white cloud narrowed in the west. The fields were planted with cotton mostly, some with barley, some with hay grass. Mr. Sterling talked of his family—a wife and two boys who were mostly grown. The boys worked in town at the Easy Buy Tire store, fixing flats and putting new tires on trucks and tractors. In houses they passed—isolated farmhouses, tenant shanties, farmworker cabins in a row under sycamore trees—tragedies, commonplace occurrences, religious makeovers, births, nonsensical familiar arguments, were taking place. A wife threw boiling water at her hateful son and missed him. An old man lay in bed choking on a radish. A little boy with a pale white scar on his heel stood on the seat of a hay rake, tottering, about to fall into a harrow’s teeth. A man spoke on the party line to his brother, wondering what they should get Mother for her birthday. A tea caddy? his brother asked. A young woman who had lost her husband’s gold-plated watch cried in her bedroom, sorry she had ever married and left her home. An aging ne’er-do-well, father of eight, paused on the back steps to look back at a field of flowering purple vetch, thinking that the beauty of the world was endless.
Time passed and the closer to Chattanooga they got the more scared Delvin became. He had tried to forget his predicament but he couldn’t and now it flopped out onto him like a bitter truth. The closer he got the surer he was that he couldn’t go back. The police were waiting. Delvin knew what the penalty was for shooting a white boy. His mother had fled a killing herself, taking to the woods after she had brained that old haberdasher in the hallway behind his shop. No forgiveness for her in this world. And none for him. He felt a rush of feeling for his mother, and tears rose in the corners of his eyes. He trembled and he put his hands on the dashboard to steady himself. His hands looked wrinkled and old and this frightened him more. As they passed through a small railroad hamlet he asked Mr. Sterling to stop the truck. You all right, boy? the man asked. I think I changed my mind—I forgot something back yonder. Well too late to go back for it. I got to, Delvin said. The old man pulled over in front of a small hardware store on the main street. Behind the store the train tracks ran north and south. Thank you, sir, Delvin said, and he gave the man his one case dollar left. The man didn’t want to take it but then he took it anyway. Delvin got down and stood in the dust watching the truck go on up the road. A crow, passing from here to there, croaked as it flew. He headed around back to the tracks to wait for a train.
So his real travels began. He rode the trains that passed through dinky towns and entered big cities through the back doors and he rested on the top of boxcars smelling of rotted grain and rode the gunnels when he had to and swung onto the metal porches of gondolas and spoke with men who had wandered so far that they had almost outdistanced their own bodies and become ghosts, and he learned to dodge the bulls and the rough riders, and he picked up what he could working here and there, baling hay and hoeing bush beans and winding tobacco leaves onto sticks, and everywhere he went the stories collected and the unpainted domiciles of black citizens stood before him like memories of olden times and he entered new worlds life by life and gathered there his tares and offered what he could and the days passed clanking or whispering along the chain of his life. At night sometimes a loneliness like a lost letter found him in his bed in a cottonhouse or on a forest floor or inside the patternless wooden walls of a boxcar and it tried to explain to him that he would never find a home but he refused to listen and turned his back and gazed out at the moonlight standing in wet grass like an angelina too shy to come inside. Time sang its cracked songs in rail yards and along the edges of the fields and passed on, leaving half memories and slights and a false heartiness and belly laughs and cold suppers on somebody’s sagging back steps: the poor-mouthings of a crass deceiver he took little count of and rarely worried about.
The dots of blackness on each calendar date, marking another day when the police did not come pulling at him, rousting him from a hobo jungle or barn or back steps, added time, freedom from what he knew was awaiting him. He carried this knowledge of the pursuit like a stranger, dark man, darker than he was, accompanying him into whatever town he passed through, whatever road he walked along, slipping with him at night into open fields or woods or along leafy riverbanks. It was in this flight, in these days, that he touched his mother again. Beside a stream in Louisiana choked with rusty foam he found himself dreaming of her so profoundly that he thought he lay with his head in her lap listening to her sing “Old Johnny Jones,” one of the songs she had sung to him under the little peach tree in their backyard in Chattanooga. He too was a runner, he had wanted to say, he too knew pursuit, but she faded before he could get the words out. In dawns of swirling fog he called silently to her, but she never answered. The days came up, wintry or steaming with heat, and in them he felt the press of the law. But always he felt the reassurance of his mother, escapee and wanderer, out ahead of him somewhere on the roads or crossing a river on a hand-pulled ferry, sitting by a campfire or dancing on a stage before admiring crowds, and gradually in these dreams, these fantasies or reveries or boy’s make-believe, she bent toward success, toward kindness and elaboration, rosy with life, resting as a free woman in a happiness that was the happiness of dreams, and in these dreams he too was free.