Ginny Gall (29 page)

“Where to?”

“I believe he is heading west.”

“I’m going to miss him,” Delvin said, and as he said this he experienced a pulpy plummeting feeling in his chest and a dampness in
his eyes. He looked down the street where two men in dusty clothes were backing a mule up to a buckboard. The cuffs of the men’s pants were ragged and the shoes of one were tied around with hanks of pale cloth.
Mules going contrary all over the city
, he thought, the words like a sentence he wanted to write down.

“So no return,” the little man said.

“What’s that?”

“On the message?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Ah, well,” Mr. Rome said, looking around without much relish. “Maybe I will find some business in this town.”

“All your work long-distance?”

“Only about half. I get just as much local as out-of-town. I’ve begun to prefer the in-town, actually.”

“Why’s that?”

The man had taken a seat across from Delvin. He was so small that the tabletop came up to his puffy chest. “It’s hard to make a profit of these long journeys.”

“You travel by train.”

“Boxcar class, yes.”

“You been on the western roads?”

“Have I? You name the line, I’ve ridden it. I’ve been a passenger on the Espy, the GN, the Katy, the Octopus, the old Cough & Snort, the Damn Rotten Grub, the UP . . . You traveled in the west?”

“No, not me. But I’m about to catch a ride out this afternoon, headed northeast.”

Mr. Rome said like as how he would be leaving town himself.

“Thought you were looking for local business.”

“These little towns don’t often care for my services. They’re packed so tight they don’t need me. Sometimes though—well, you never can tell.”

Delvin got up and they walked together down the dusty street that smelled of hardwood fires and the sweet tang of summer dusk to the camp. Later that afternoon, with Josie, they caught an eastbound L&S freight.

The sun snagged in the naked branches of a far-off grove of dead trees. Through the trees Delvin could see glints and lusters where some body of water caught the light.

In an empty wood-paneled B&O line boxcar Delvin settled in next to a skinny older negro man carrying a greasy carpetbag. The car smelled of the dried corn it had most recently transported. The man smelled of road wear and animal grease. He introduced himself as Frank Brooks.

Delvin introduced Mr. Rome, who was pressed up against the front wall of the car. The waning daylight shone through the boxcar’s open door.

Mr. Rome said he might return to his home base up in Roanoke. “I miss the smell of the hemlocks,” he said.

The man Frank was traveling from the west—Phoenix, he said, where he had a wife and two children.

At the other end of the car a few white men sat with their bindles. There was race mixing on the trains, but without much friendliness. People sought those they took to be their own, were nervous about other races. Negroes were called dinges, shines, skillets, by the whites, the whites, ofays, slicks, jeffs, by the negroes. Bindlestiffs, beefers, zips—the criminal element—were enough of a concern without adding racial confusions to the mix. Delvin, no longer an angelica or a gonsil, no longer a reg, was now a stamper, maybe a jack, so taken by some or would be soon enough.

Frank, this new fellow, a jack, settling his back carefully against the warped boxcar wall, said last week he’d seen a fight where a jeff—“big pink-faced monstrosity”—had thrown an africano man off a train. The fight had got more than one hurt, on both sides, Frank said. “Like you couldn’t trade out of it,” he said, raising a grimy cap that reveled a lighter tan forehead, “like you got somebody there—some colored man—who all of a sudden lost his everything, you know, like some magic act done took away his humanness—
Get dis sack off the train.
You look at it, think I got to the wrong world. It’s a mistake.”

“I steer clear,” Mr. Rome said.

“Can’t always do that,” Frank said picking at his bottom teeth with a split twig he’d fished from the inner pocket of his tattered salt-and-pepper jacket.

“That is true,” Mr. Rome said with a sigh.

Josie had not come into the boxcar. He was up top or riding on one of the empty flatcars. He said he preferred the open air. Delvin half wanted to go with him, but then he decided to get in the boxcar and try to sleep. He’d felt tired lately, as if the complications of the world outside prison were too much for him; he figured he had to build up a tolerance. When he mentioned this to Mr. Rome, the little man told him he was just feeling the burden of the colored man.

“These white folks are unrightly the black man’s burden,” he said. “Their foolishness and ignorance.” He sat up straighter and looked around, a tiny person of color alone in the kingdom. Delvin asked—off-handedly—if Mr. Rome could give examples of some of his more interesting messages. He was thinking about a bath, a tub somebody’d told him about, carved out of rock in a far island stream under shaggy trees.

“Sans names,” Mr. Rome said. “Nor revealing details. That way it’s not really divulging secrets.” He straightened up and his face brightened. “I am standing under this here tree holding a hatful of cherries,” one began, he said; it was, like many of the others, a plea for a lover’s return. “I can’t sleep at night without you by my side,” another declared, a plea from an older woman—“You’d think she might be young,” Mr. Rome said—to her wandering husband of nearly fifty years. Another time a one-legged man stranded in a town by a frozen lake in Minnesota pleaded for his sweetheart to relent. “‘Your love could melt this icy world and set me free,’” Mr. R quoted in a hushed and passionate voice.

“What you talking about there?” the man Frank said, friendly, working a bit of string between his fingers like a weave. “You some kinda—”

“Oh, no, my son,” Mr. Rome said, and Delvin chimed in that Mr. O. P. Rome was a professional message carrier.

“Yes,” Mr. Rome said. “Declarationist, full-throated pleader and issuer of challenges and stomp-footed assertations. No word spoken too softly or too loudly for me not to be able to carry its full weight. Nothing loses a ounce on the journey—to whoever, or whatever—I once carried a message to a speckle-faced mule—is able to pay the fee. For a dime I’ll carry a message across the room or up to four blocks away. Higher prices the farther I have to go, but I will not only carry an exact rendition of your missive, I will provide the appropriate—that is to say, your own, or what you wish to have as your own, feelings, complete with intonations, speech quirks or added gustatives, per message, limit three to a customer.”

“You aint never heard of Western Union?” Frank said, shuffling himself into a better seat.

“Primitive upstarts,” Mr. Rome said. “I follow a profession as old as talking itself.”

Frank began to peel a potato with his thumbnail. “Yall want some?” He eyed the little man. “Much money in that old racket?”

“Not enough to buy freedom from the white man, but I get by.”

“None of us gon make enough to buy that kind of freedom,” Frank said. “Though I’s heard they’s a town down in Florida populated entirely by negro folk—no whites allowed.”

“Says the white man,” Mr. Rome said.

“You don’t think we are free?” Delvin said. Maybe I am haunting this world, he thought, a fluttered-up spirit on the loose. Down the way a knobby little man said, “I got a misery in my leg’s been hounding me for three years—”

“Hell, we don’t even look free,” Frank said. He leaned forward and studied the tiny Mr. Rome. “You probably make your best money when they’s a calamity,” he said.

“That I do. Folks get talkative when there’s trouble. I once carried a message made up entirely of groans and whizzing sighs. But you can’t count on calamity’s always being in town when you are.”

“Profiteer.”

“I wouldn’t call anything I do very profitable.”

“You ever been in a calamity? A big one?”

“A few,” the little man said cheerfully.

“Like which?”

Mr. Rome pressed his thumb against his cheek, a fond gesture. “I was in the Boveen, Missouri, tornado last year. You read about it in the paper. And year before that I was in that big hurricane that wiped out the whole east side of Texas. I almost drowned in that monstrosity. And I was in Houston for the big Whiteside warehouse fire where thirty blocks went up in flames. I carried three dozen messages after that one. Mostly in-town, but one I carried by rail and bus and dusty aching foot all the way to Shield, Saskatchewan—Canada—to a little white house in a walnut grove where an old woman lived with her thirty-five-year-old deaf and dumb son.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“Wadn’t for her. The message was for the boy.”

“What was it?”

“I’m not free to repeat messages where you might be able to tell who they were from or for. I’ve let slip too much already. My customers rely on my discretion”—diskretchen, he said—“as you can understand. They’re only for those paid up to receive em, but I can say it was one of my greatest challenges.”

“You just write it out for him?”

“I figured writing the words down was not giving full service on the dollar. And I’d had to charge extra for the stretch and general botheration.”

“So what did you do?” the man Frank said, tapping his narrow forehead with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. He had a sharp vertical crease running down the center of his forehead.

“Well sir,” Mr. Rome said—he was collecting a little pile of corn kernels in the brim of his hat that he held before him in his lap—“I of course had to act it out for the boy. I call him a boy even though he was a solid sturdy gentleman with big rough hands he kept flexing like he was working up to break something, but he had a manner that was like that of a child and his mother treated him like one. He may have been mentally slow as well as D and D, but I realize that is no excuse for treating any of God’s creatures as less than precious.
Anyhow, I had a cap the man had given me in Houston, a greasy, faded red cap he’d passed to me for just this situation. I’d been studying all the way across the country (I was on the Espy, then the Falls & Canadian) about what it was I ought to do and I’d come up with a good show. I went to whooping and hollering and swooping and rolling on the ground and beating on my chest like a wild man, repeating the message as I went. This boy—this bald-headed near gray-headed man—started to shrieking. It was one of the most peculiar noises I ever heard in my life, that shriek. He began to mimick my actions, jumping and swooping and rolling on the ground and throwing dirt up in the air and making this shrieking noise like some kind of demented soul—just an awful sound—until he had me so worked up that I’m embarrassed to say I busted out into tears. Right there in front of both of them. I just sagged against this big wire rabbit cage they had there by this old walnut tree we was standing under, sobbing like my heart was broke, which it nearly was. Hell, the man I was reporting on was alive and here I was bringing the happy word to his family and I was crying like a baby. And fool thing was, when we all finally got calmed down, the woman told me her boy read lips. Just like he was hearing what you said. Damnness.”

“Maybe you aint exactly cut out for the work,” Frank said.

Mr. Rome eyed him. He sucked his gray lips in and puffed them out.

“Fact that I have continued on after that particular episode might tell you I am. Oh, I’m a natural for it, that’s for sure. It was something else, the weeping.” He looked off to the open boxcar door where the day’s sliding-away blue sky shone brightly in its last moments on earth. His looking extended in time, seconds ticking along. The clack of the wheels came up through the floor. Somebody down the way, a white man, made through cupped fingers a bird call like a lonely thing. Mr. Rome peering off somewhere. Like he was hearing words. “So freedom can never be taken fully from us,” he said finally, “who knows if even death can do it.” This man maybe not even noticing the sky but soaring through the wild prairies of his own mind, voiceless.

“Well, what was it?” the man Frank said, pulling gently at his bottom lip.

“What was what, son?”

“What something else was it that made you sob like a baby.”

“Oh. Fatigue. Mere fatigue.”

To that Delvin wanted to say suddenly no. No. It’s all right, he wanted to say, to be sad. You don’t have to be ashamed of it. Go on and speak. But he didn’t. He too was tired, and not sad enough, felt ghostly, as if his foot, his hand, his whole body, could sift right on through the bottom of this car and disperse.

“What about you, my fine young man,” Mr. Rome said, addressing him. “What interesting tale have you to tell?”

Delvin rubbed silky corn dust between his fingers. Down at the other end of the car the white men were playing cards. In the middle space, leaned against the opposite closed door, a man mended with a needle and thread a pair of sky-blue pants. Delvin had never seen trousers that shade of blue, and satiny, shining. He wanted to touch the cloth. “I think I want to get you to carry a message to a friend for me,” he said.

“Say and it’s done,” Rome said.

They settled on a fee, and Mr. Rome promised to carry a message to Celia if Delvin could come up with the two dollars.

“I don’t see how you can make any money at all,” Frank said. “Mail a letter for two cents.”

Mr. Rome agreed. He was an agreeable man.

“Back in Tulsa they could have used you,” Frank said.

The little man shuddered. “You talking about that lamentable time, aren’t you?”

“I can call myself doing that,” Frank said. “I just come through there is why I do, day before yesterday. Tulsa’s where I’s born and raised. And it brought it back to my mind.”

“Were you there during the massacre?” Delvin asked. Everybody’d heard about that. He wanted something to eat, but he had nothing beyond Frank’s shared potato. Just then Mr. R pulled a squished ham and mustard sandwich out of his coat pocket, tore it
in three pieces and handed two off to his fellow passengers. They sat quietly for a minute or two chewing. Somebody down on the other end was whistling “Barbry Allen,” the sound clear and fresh over the clack of the wheels.