Ginny Gall (39 page)

No, well, no, not today, he thinks, the sunlight like warm cream on his bare arms. Not today a swim into the dark.

He wore himself out on those early escapades, wore out the craziness. He got a reputation, and cognomen, as a willful, uncooperative prisoner, UNC in capital letters on the yellow manila folder that goes with him as he makes his way around the state prison system. The sun is sticky on his face. He could wipe it off like sap from his arms and hands and clean it from his face but he doesn’t want to. The light and heat soak into his body. He unbuttons his shirt, pulls it away from his
chest. The spray of scanty corkscrewed hair soaked in sunlight. You can take your shirt off if you want to, but nobody with any sense takes his shirt off under a sun like this. A black man burns just like a white one. He pulls the blue-and-gray-striped cloth away from his chest. He smells his body odor, sour as oakwood and comforting. Just working a button through a buttonhole gives him a sense of freedom. So does walking across the yard with nowhere the white man told him to go, returning by his own will to the barracks.

He steps along to the well. Milo lets go his arm, grabs one of the long galvanized buckets and lowers it. Delvin listens to the bucket clank hollowly against the sides. He feels a generation older than the boy who jumped into that other well. He leans over the parapet far enough to dip his face into the column of cool air the bucket stirs up. Leaning slightly to the side he can see the sky reflected in the black water. He jumped not toward that pinned-down blue but toward the stars. When you bring the water up it is neither blue or black, it is clear as crystal. They say it tastes of sulfur, but the taste is more like the mold on a old piece of hoop cheese.

Milo pulls steadily on the rope. The bucket, spilling water as it comes, reaches the top.

Delvin presses his hand and then his face against the chilly wet galvanized metal. The feel of it sends him back into his dreams. Celia speaking to him from the rainwet front steps of her friend’s house. She is telling him to read—who was it? Douglas? No. Freeman. This goes by in a zip. He hasn’t thought of Freeman for years, has forgotten him. A writer first mentioned by the professor. Well, these books, these volumes written to prove the black man deserves his freedom, are all right. They make you, while you read them, free. Books come in packed in sacks of rice, sacks of salt. They are directed to particular inmates but the included instructions are ignored. Once in a while the inmates get visitors, wives and mamas and shamed weeping daddies gathered in the fenced-off portion of the yard under a big live oak. You can socialize. In gunny sacks they bring pies and apples and kumquats and
pieces of molasses candy wrapped in a wax paper twist. These bits of food are all that is allowed in. No books, no hardware, no toiletries, not even soap. There are no chairs, people sit on the ground or squat on their heels, men who will be back to work Monday morning in sharecropped cotton fields, women who will be cooking for a dozen or stooping with the men in the fields hoeing cotton or picking it or in summer cropping tobacco. They bring fresh-squeezed cane juice in glass jars, blue jars children hold to the light to see the colors in.

He dips both hands in the bucket—forbidden, but he’s forgotten this rule, for now—and splashes water on his face. He holds his face up to the sunlight and feels the cool burning as the sun takes the water back.

With Milo’s help he tips the bucket and pours the well water over himself. He wears the sulfurous shirt and pants and coarse heavily washed canvas underwear issued to all those who survive a stay in the breakdown ward. The water will leave its residue of sulfur stink but sweat will soon enough wash that out. The old yearning flares again, a piece of it, the edging of the spirit toward freedom that in prison you have to nub off short, most men have to. It roots in him like a sweet potato raised in a glass jar. He feels himself listing. His joints ache and he has a headache, but the crushing chills are gone. They piled gunny sacks on him. He begged them to lie on top of him, but they wouldn’t. In his mind a big bearskin black and stinking of bear lay on him, but later when he asked after it nobody knew what he was talking about.

From the well a spokeway of paths radiates. In some past now lost prisoners were required to walk a certain line to the well. Now these paths each barely a foot wide are sunk in the clay; everybody naturally follows them. “A lesson for you and me,” he says to Milo, pointing this out to him.

“You don tol me,” Milo says, grinning.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I forget what the lesson was.”

Milo places the empty bucket back in its little wooden slot at the foot of the well and they proceed on their way. They take the slightly curv
ing path he named Lope. He named all the paths. Chicago, New York, Bright Leaf Trail, Dixie Highway, Salvation; he keeps the names to himself. Shielding his eyes, he looks at the nearest tin-sheathed tower. One of the guards, Hammersmith, idly watches him. He is the one brought his last letter, one of the four he has received in the last six years (since he left from Uniball), from his old train riding friend Frank. The letter was stamped Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Patches, long rectangular strips, were cut out of the pages.
The religious fervor of our time is
, then blank, a hole letting the air in. Must have been some fiery words. Then the sentence
: Apples are America’s most loved fruit
, then more air. Then:
but what can we know of another’s anguish?
then air, then the words:
anyone whose suffering is one grain worse than our own is one we can’t,
then more air. The words
the heat of them
, and then Frank’s fervor and cool distancing sliced away. Five other pages were similarly rejigged. The pages looked like paper cutouts. Here and there a partial sentence
(in our own selves we have to find . . .; confused and broke we embrace . . .; cancer for . . .; a tenderness most . . .)
scraps of words, a litter really, some
body’s fresh trash. He had memorized every bit, even the odd words
(reddish, conservationist, river’s, unoffered)
they were like gates, buckles, fasteners, letting life in, or out; there were dozens of them. He dug a hole in the clay under his bunk and hid the letter there, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. It would be all right if it wasn’t there the next time he looked. Frank was trying to tell him something important; the guards saw that. There was no return address: that too was turned into an air hole, escape vent.

He leans heavily on Milo’s thin strong arm. They roll as they walk, pals airing it out. Milo chatters about breakouts, about the new man, a gingercake named Arthur Fowler who, so Milo says, has tattooed a portrait of his superior court judge on his chest in an attempt to get a mistrial.

“I love the way courtrooms smell,” Milo says.

Two years ago Milo was thrown by a guard into a pyracantha bush and one of the thorns pierced his left eyeball. He can see light and
shadow with that eye—enough in this world, he says, to tell what’s what. An escape attempt carried him to the bush. “Got to get me some wings,” he says now when asked about it.

Both of them crossed miles of marsh and desert and cleft mountain track and leagues of wintry windswept fields to reach this spot. In the exact center of his body Delvin sways like a stem of billygoat grass. His body held up now by a boy. You can say he loves the boy. He pictures the slips and strips of yellow paper from Frank’s letter fluttering on the breeze.
The suffering of those not ourselves
. Milo’s narrow ridged forehead. The broad, mashed-in nose with the elegantly flaring nostrils. The thin lips with the encircling perimeter line like something chiseled into flesh. The cheeks broad and flat and the eyes set under their ridges of fine bone gleaming like lamps. Shine me home.

In the sky to the south a yellow biplane tats its way west. The small stiff steadily fading sound is beautiful. As are all sounds connected to the outside. Despite the fitful delirium of four hundred men you get used to the noise until the prison seems a quiet place. There are the clatters from the kitchen, the scrape of feet moving over hard clay, the shouts of the guards, the clank of chains, the cries from the dreams of low crawling sleepers, the guzzle of water from the shower tank, these familiar dead-end sounds. But there are also the sounds of rain clattering on the barracks’ tin roofs, the drips onto clay, the rush of wind, the pattering of dust along the walkways, the keen up-piping of killdeer and mourning doves from the fields, the distant bombilation of the gin machinery, trucks gearing down on the rise through the cotton fields and the whisper of breeze passing over the cotton on its way from faraway to here—ordinary, fadeaway sounds to those not held down behind wire but to him treasures ladled secretly out, hoarded and prized. Some nights they can hear the radio from the warden’s quarters, playing live music from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. White man’s music: a thin, bobbing line of melody from which are hung chicken feathers and costume jewelry. Even the old square-jawed mountain music is better, the dancing rhythms scooting along like they are on their way somewhere not here.

When somebody escapes—tempted by the free airs outside, some
body who has something to do out there, or somebody to meet, or a contemptible crisis, a hurt, a face laughing in a dream, life itself he has to flee—the duty guard cranks the handle of a big silver round-mouthed siren. The crank is as big as a pump handle and hard to turn unless you are strong, and they are strong. From the horn spews a metallic whine like a castaway mimic of the olden times when the gods and the earth itself spoke to human beings . . . but now is only a mockery, a falseness and scorn pounded into the brain, screeching proof of how far from dignity and brotherhood they have fallen. You want to crawl under a rock and hide. Men hunch their shoulders, muttering or staring mutely into the distance. Some cover their ears, others try to go on as if nothing is happening. But Delvin—and a few compadres—use the occasion to scream as loudly as possible. A wild vehemence, a whirling, jarring power breaks loose from him with these shouts. And a joy, if he can call it that. The guards know they scream, he and Muster and Calvin Schuler and Willie P from Hattiesburg and a few others—lifting their singalong, repealing lies and broken connections and loss—and sometimes they yell back. Maybe one or two filling the air with his own despair and loneliness. But soon the quiet returns. The low hum of prison whispering that makes up the regulation silence, carrying the iniquitous sound of guile and slander that passes for air in this place. So they lean back in their bunks or stoop low to pluck a burst cotton boll, or stretch their arms out in the dark, or crouch in the latrine over a febrile shit—listening for the woodsy, row crop silence of breeze rustling the three-pointed cotton leaves, scraping among pine needles in the dark woods; listening for the barn owls in the sycamores asking their questions of the field mice and voles and half-grown rabbits; for crows winging across the open expanse of fields the prison sits in the center of, crows croaking
naw naw
, as if testing their voices to make sure they still have them.

Across his path now steps Lionel Ansley, a gaunt man, a preacher who holds one of the services on Sunday mornings. He’s been after Delvin for a while to quit his escape attempts. He is impatient with his unwillingness to attend church. Lionel visited him in the infirmary and Delvin appreciated his not visibly gloating over his condition.
The preacher told him his running ways would get him into trouble and Delvin knows that as far as Lionel is concerned the red dog has come on as a result of his jumpiness. He isn’t the only one tired of his scampering; the guards, who like to make the whole prison pay for one man’s flight, are getting worn out too.

The preacher nods at him, smiling, his bony head bobbing like a chicken’s. Despite his narrow-mindedness he is a kindly man. You never can tell where kindness will come from. The preacher with his little commentaries never goes too far into damnation. Delvin appreciates this.

“Come on, boy,” he says now, “come on over to the one place you can let what’s balled up in you go.”

He doesn’t stop walking as he says this.

Delvin nods at his back. The preacher’s abruptness makes him think of his shock when the jury foreman back in Klaudio, Elmer Suggs, said he was guilty. It had been as if Suggs himself—druggist, father of a girl with a polio-crippled leg, a stranger—had simply stood up from a passing crowd and for no reason on earth but meanness had announced in his slightly elevated voice that he, Delvin Walker, common-law son of Cornelius Oliver and Professor Clemens John Carmel, diverted lover of Miss Celia Cumberland, was guilty of raping two white women. Even after the four weeks of testimony (and thirty minutes of deliberation) he couldn’t believe his ears. Surprise didn’t cover it. Shock didn’t. For a second he had ceased to exist. A short circuit of being in which not only body and mind vanished but all record of his having been on this earth as well, leaving a vacuum that held the shape of a human being. It was quicker than a rifle shot. He was sure none else (outside his cohorts in loss and betrayal, though he never polled them to find out) experienced this or noticed.

But he’d returned in that moment from wherever it was he’d gone (not heaven or hell, not some other planet or system of whirling rocks and gas)—nonexistence was all he knew—to a world that was subtly and completely changed. Every person, every animal, every object in it had been replaced by a duplicate, facsimile so cleverly contrived that the replaced would never suspect what had happened. He too had been
replaced. The Delvin Walker who sat on an oakwood bench wearing a white cotton shirt and khaki trousers provided by the Song of Ruth AME church over on Suches street in the Congo Quarter (same for the other boys) was not the same Delvin Walker of a moment before. The boy he had been, the young man who, like his mother—so they told him—could whistle through his slightly gapped front teeth, who had begun reading Shakespeare as a boy of six and knew everything there was to know about laying out a body and getting it respectfully into the ground, a man sweet on Celia Cumberland, a partaker of life in an alien land, quick to laugh, slow to take offense, curious about everything, note-taker, writer of things down, adventurer by railroad and foot and hitched ride, lover of vistas and the sour fruit of the quince bush, museum keeper, this boy/man was gone.