Ginny Gall (43 page)

And so it went.

Delvin, his turn come upon him, rose from his seat with his coarse white and blue jail trousers (he’d gone back to wearing the issue) sweat-sticking to his butt and the backs of his legs, swaying nearly to a faint, but able still, rising as man or creature swum continually for miles might rise from the depths of the swamp of being, gasping and looking wild-eyed around the place that was filled with townsfolk and reporters and maybe one or two people who had known him before this calamity flew upon him, or were drawn to him by his own behavior (he pondered this daily and hadn’t yet decided; some blamed him outright, Rollie Gregory among them). Was that the Ghost up in the balcony? The professor?
Was that Celia?
He stopped in his tracks, experiencing for only the second or third time in his life the sensation of his heart catching fire. His mind went blank. The four tall windows looked like paintings filled with blue. No black man with blue eyes. No Celia either. For a second he didn’t know where he was. He came to himself walking to the big wooden witness chair, a copy a guard had told him of the electric chair at Markusville. The judge was looking at him as if he knew him well and was sick and tired of his face. He could hear breathing behind him. It sounded like the bellows in the blacksmith shop over on Florida street in Chattanooga. He would never see that place again. His body felt brittle, waffled through by termites and other hurtbugs until he was eaten with holes and corridors and little bug byways and all dried up. He could hear himself creak as he sat down, or was that the chair about to collapse under him?

Pullen with an insubstantial flourish introduced him to the assembled and left him to himself. If Pullen didn’t ask questions or direct him, then the prosecution couldn’t either. He was alone with what he knew to be so.

He sat then in the trailing silence, waiting for some other voice besides his own to begin to speak. He needed to hear somebody else, some speaker he could respond to or hook up with in a call and shout. But there was no one. He leaned back in the chair. A half-scary man, they had taken the cuffs off but not the shackles. It was embarrass
ing to have to walk in front of people wearing that gear. His escape attempt had made it harder on the others. The guards jostled and poked them, drew their armatures tighter. His fellow transgressors cursed him. He coughed, and a slipperiness went down his throat. He lifted his face and felt on his skin the burning of a blow, some hit from long ago, still afire.

He said, I never did a thing but what any man wouldn’t do.

He told of sitting on the steel crossbar under the hopper and reaching to steady himself when a man, a white boy, stepped on his hand. He had barked at him, barked, he said—
“
so quick I didn’t even know it was me—or him.” The white boy had cursed him for a nigger. One thing led to another and after a while in the empty boxcar that smelled of rotten peaches there had been a fight the colored boys clearly won. Yes, and on from there to his riding on top of a blue boxcar after the fight, sitting with a couple of boys as the train passed a little farm zoo under some big trees. The zoo had an old ratty camel in it and the camel had two humps and one of the humps was folded over and he had wondered if this was because it needed water to pump it back up. The zoo had donkeys and a bear, maybe it was a bear, and several raccoons and a fox or two panting in their cages under the big droopy trees, but then the train went on around this long bend headed toward Haverhill and he sat there wondering about the camel. About what life was for such a beast in a country with no sand dunes and all that. It wasn’t till the train stopped in Kollersburg and the deputies called them down and rounded everybody up that he realized anything was wrong. He had never seen those two white women before he saw them at the jail. He started to say he felt sorry for them, but at that moment it was an actual lie because right then he hated those women though he also pitied them and wondered what made them the way they were, and then he caught himself again for a liar because he knew very well what made them like that because it was the same thing that made anybody mean, just too many whippings, he had seen it with dogs and bindlestiffs and even children, and sure there were those with a natural brokenness inside them too and they were the ones who at
seven years old set fire to the school and all, but what it was most of the time was from the meanness they’d suffered, which there was a sufficiency of in the world, and he had sat in his borrowed courtroom chair over there looking those women in the face and seen the print of the striking hand on their faces and recognized it and wanted to stand up then and say, I know about all this, it’s all right, but he didn’t, as he didn’t now, said no word at all about those women or what he knew, he simply stopped talking and let the communal breathing and a rustly little humid breeze fill up the silence, thinking where was I and what was I saying, oh Lord.

“Those sheriffs must have mistaken me for another person,” he said. “I promised myself to somebody else—a long time ago I did that.”

He scanned the balcony, but whoever might have been Celia was not there. A white boy with bronze ringlets leaned on the balcony rail picking his nose. A white woman in a smart red dress adjusted a yellow cloth flower on her shoulder. A white man in overalls fanned himself with a crushed straw hat. Jakes and Blarneys and cordial bug shifters. Too much going on to keep track of it all. Anything he might say was nothing to what he knew. The lawyers had told him to hang his story on a string of time. One occurrence after another until he was taken away by the sheriffs. They—the sheriffs at the train station—had sweated through their shirts, Delvin remembered. The stocks of their shotguns were slick with sweat. A colored boy in a bright red shirt sat on a wagon seat in front of a store. It was a hardware store and had a box of bright copper piping on the front porch; the boy had ducked down and hid behind the wagon seat. The high sheriff wore a black broadcloth suit and carried a scuffed derby in his hand. His knuckles too were scuffed. In the window of a white house across the dirt street a small white cake rested. I would like a piece of that cake, he had thought.

He wanted to tell them how scared he was, how scared he had been all along.
We all been scared. We been scared to death over here for the last three hundred years
.
All day every day.
Like when somebody you didn’t see jumps out a door at you.

He said, “I can’t tell you I have done wrong when I haven’t, not the wrong you all are accusing me of.”

His voice soft and plain, hardly a negro’s voice at all. Billy Gammon thought he sounded like a white man. And Pullen wondered for a furious second if the boy was mocking them. I’ll kill him myself, he thought.

“If I had violated either of those white women,” Delvin said, “I would have jumped off that train long before it got to Kollersburg. Any of us would. We were born knowing what the penalty for business such as that is. But we didn’t jump off. We didn’t run. Anybody who saw us when the train pulled into that town would know we didn’t suspect a thing. We were not guilty men. Not a one of us—”

He would have gone on, but he saw how they were looking at him. For a moment everything lost its name. He noticed a couple of yellowed leaves lying on the wooden floor between the judge’s bench and the defendants’ tables. The wind must have blown them in through the tall open windows. As he stared at the leaves—they were tulip poplar, black-speckled yellow—he realized he had forgotten the names of his fellow prisoners, and forgotten the names of the lawyers and the judge, of the women, and of everyone he knew or had known. That morning the light in the courtroom had been suffused with green, as if the sunlight coming through the windows had soaked up green from the trees and deposited it here, but now, in the late afternoon, the light in the courtroom was red, as if a storm was descending in the west and the sun had picked this up too and spread it around the room. He did not know who he was or what was happening here—everyone, everything, was strange—he only knew, and it was all he knew, where each of them was going, but this did not frighten him; it seemed only as it should be. A sweetness, a radiancy, filled him, and his weariness slipped away. I am . . . , he thought and then he couldn’t think, and it didn’t matter. Their eyes had glazed over. Or else they were looking at him like they were about to jump up and slap him. He wanted suddenly to reach out and pinch their noses. Chuck them under the chin, thump them on the chest. Come on, we just joking here, aint we? He felt a chill so strong the thin
coiled hairs on his arms stood up. He saw himself loitering on the edge of a hobo creek tossing crabapples into the water. He looked up from the witness chair and saw for the first time a woman with deep black skin and a sharp pretty face. For a second like an eternity he knew this woman for his mama, come to fetch him out of this. But no, not his mama. That was just a dream.

They sling a chain through the gyves and drag him naked across the yard and throw him into the former root cellar beside the warden’s house. A plank door set in the ground over eight wooden steps leading down to a square dirt room. A little light comes through the joining of the planks but not much. As he is dragged past the warden’s house he sees through the kitchen window the warden’s wife, a fat woman who wears a gray shapeless housedress around the clock, set a pan of cornbread to cool on the windowsill. “Wait,” he cries, “I think that white woman wants to give us some of that crackling bread.” Why would she be baking at night? The guard closest to him, Flimsy Plutter, jaundiced and twitchy, swats him across the face with the grommet-speckled work glove he carries for just such occasions. A fingertip cuts Delvin under the eye, making him yelp with pain. The woman looks out the window with no expression in her wide freckled face. On the radio in her kitchen Ethel Merman sings “You’re the Top.” On the little porch in back a calendar with a picture of the snow-covered Rockies is tacked to a post. I could be cartwheeling down that icy mountain, he thinks.

They don’t bother to pull him to his feet. They simply fold the door back and fling him down the steps.

The red dog has every joint bone in his body already hurting so he hardly feels it when he hits the ground on his face and chest, though the cut from the glove keeps stinging for the three days he lies in the dark mostly sleeping or re-stuporized by the malaria. Snakes, come out of some phantom place, crawl over him like the times before, but like the times before they don’t bite. They like the warmth of his body. To him they seem clean and pure, as if the ugliness and dirt of the underworld never touches them. There is no grime, no dust, nothing alien on their long bodies that are cool and dry, and the scales under his fingertips,
snugly fastened and hard, flexing as the snake stretches out its length, fascinate him.

“We got no reason to spite each other,” he says to them, dark writhers in the stinky dark. They keep the rats away.

The bugs keep up their poking and probing. He rubs dirt on his body to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when he feels the thin sharp scuttle of a scorpion he stays as still as possible. They never bite him either.

Only the doodlebugs are unimpressed by his efforts or his stature, if that is what it is, as a god among the vermin.

“Chief of the itty-bits,” he says to himself like he is five years old.

The snappish little front-loaded doodlebugs have a tendency to clamp their jaws shut on whatever living things they come in contact with.

“Yi lord,” he cries softly, holding his position so the four-foot swamp rattler lying in the crook of his elbow won’t be disturbed.

He dreams of his mother. She had curly toes with brown nails that had a shine to them. She smelled like he knew heaven smelled. She liked to jump up and down and sing so loud Mr. Culver from next door would send a child over to tell her to stop. She couldn’t read well but she could get anything that was in a picture. She carried photographs around with her of people she didn’t know, given to her by people she didn’t know. My sweets, she called them. She got angry like an animal would get angry, wild and quick and lunging. He never minded being hit by her—not afterwards—he was a child, how could he mind? She looked at him sometimes like she would eat him up with a great relish. He likes that when he thinks about it. In the dreams she runs like the wind, her pale heels flashing.

In his black cabinet under the ground he feels himself jump. His body twitches, not sharply, but in a long slow undulation like a fish moving just under the surface of a dark pond. The snake coiled in his elbow rustles and the stubby rattle purrs. A couple of scorpions nestled against his chest probe with their claws. Centipedes feather their dry legs. “Yi lord,” he says softly. He can sense himself about to fly.

On the fourth night as he lies on his back resting, not so tired, the dog slunk back for now into its cave, he watches as the lid of his cabinet
begins slowly to creak upward. He thinks for a second it is the sky itself tipping away and almost hollers out. But it is only Bill Francis, a convict machinist from Carmichael, Louisiana, raising the door. The door was locked with a nail stuck through the hasp.

Delvin hears the whistle of breath. “My God, what a stink,” a whispering voice says.

Moonlight shines into the hole. The lid drops and is caught. “Sweet Jesus,” another voice says.

“Come out,” the first voice says, like King Darius calling to Daniel, calling to the subterranean one.

Delvin tries his voice. It still works though it croaks and rasps. “Let me say my farewells,” he whispers.

“Yall step back,” Bill Francis says.

Delvin detaches himself carefully from his companions of the pit. It takes a short while but he moves steadily until he can get to his knees and then to his feet. It is difficult but not impossible to climb the eight steps. The air rich with cleaned-off life. The bosky smell of the trees. The undergirded reek of the fields. A freshly birthed world. It makes him modest.

“Come on, boon,” Bill says, taking him by the wrist. The man gives him a long look. “We thought you might be swole up and bit by now, but you got a special way.”

What are they doing here, these convicts? They are all convicts. It is too complicated to ask. They’re raising me, he thinks. Gon do some running? I expect so.

He follows as best he can as they make their way behind the work sheds and into the old barn where the mules were formerly kept and to the back where the old privies are. Bill and his crew have been working on a tunnel that has its entrance in the dried shit pit, and they are now finished with it. He has told Delvin that if he is still on the premises he will have a place in the string of folks going out. They have a rope ladder under the second seat—it is an eight-holer—that lets down through the old crumbled, desiccated shit. The tunnel runs horizontally forty feet to the other side of the back wire. It comes up behind the new barns and is only a few steps from the woods.

There are twelve of them and in a matter of six or seven minutes they are all out and running—through wild fennel and rabbit tobacco and bristleweed and goose grass and oxalis and copperleaf and paspalum and pigweed and poke—into the rustling cotton field.

It makes Delvin feel foolish. Just—what was it?—four nights, or weeks, maybe it was weeks, ago, he was trying to make up his mind to climb Bulky’s rope. He misses Milo. He tries to ask if anybody’s heard about Bulky, but Macky Bird, a light timer, shakes him off. He hopes Milo is out there somewhere waiting. It is another little dream. He smells of modified shit and dirt and snake musk and of sweat and animal excretions and of his own piss that spilled back on him when he peed. Webfoot Bilkins is the only one of the escapees besides Bill that he knows well. Most are boys from the machine shop and the planing mill.

They run in a straggle line to the woods and when they reach the trees they slip gradually to a scattering. They are headed to the river which is the way escapees know not to go. The only way out is through the swamp—so he thought. But maybe they have something planned, something fixed. The guards haven’t come after them, not yet anyway. Maybe Bill Francis paid in some way for a clear path and maybe the way downriver is open. Maybe a miracle has occurred. The moon shines through leafy trees spattering white on the ground. A large bird lifts from a branch and flaps ponderously away. It looks like no bird Delvin has ever seem, larger than a hawk or an owl. Maybe an eagle, he thinks. He is barefooted but nothing he steps on bothers him.

After a while he comes to the riverbank. Some of the men are just putting out in a little snub-nose boat. When he tries to get in, they push him away.

“We got too many already,” a voice says, he thinks it comes from Artus Manigalt, one of the mill workers, a man from up north somewhere.

A large hand shoves him in the chest and he slips and falls into the water. The water feels good but he is suddenly—oddly—afraid of snakes. He almost laughs at this but the fear is real like a knife rasping
on his skin. He ducks his head under to clear his thinking and to get a start on some cleanness and maybe to make himself all right about being scared; when he comes up the boat is sliding out into the current. One of the men has a paddle and he is trying to get one of the others to use it. The other man turns his face away and the first man hits him in the back of the head. Others grab him and there is a brief mute struggle and then somebody says, “You cotched him,” and then there is quiet and then comes the soft, heavy splashing of a body let go of, and then paddling begins. Delvin’s hand half rises, issuing a farewell, and suddenly it is like it was all those years before when the white boy cried out in the woods and he thought they had killed someone, how suddenly alone he’d felt. That was what they always wanted you to feel. And here it is with them now, with him—and he twirls around, reaching for something, a handhold he forgot he needed, and he feels a slick root and for a second it is the body of a snake and he prays as one would pray to an estranged brother on the road of darkness in the middle of the night—yes, he says, yes, it’s all right, and he looks down into the water that purls softly against his legs, looks at moving blackness, and then he begins to move.

He makes his way stumbling along the riverbank through reeds and low bushes. Once again he’s gotten himself into a futile situation, is what it looks like. But then it is where—for right now—he wants to be, not in futility but on the run from that black hole in the middle of a black hole. He sloshes through spindly maidencane and bulrushes and comes on a piece of forked log resting in the grass. He pushes this out into the river and climbs on top of it and lies down and paddles out into the current, and, scared and thinking how fine it is to be out beneath the star-spattered sky, guides it downstream.

Up ahead he sees the snub boat and then he loses it in the night haze and distance and rides quietly until maybe four or five miles on as they come down on the town he sees the boat again far ahead amid lights and what appear to be a string of boats. The boats have motors attached and when the white men in them see the little boat coming toward them they rev up and head toward it. The boys in the overloaded escape boat try to paddle to shore but they don’t have the power
for it. The white men begin shooting even before they are close to the boat. By time they have gotten to it one of them shouts back that there aint anything in here to shoot at cause these niggers is all dead already.

Delvin comes right down on the guard boats. Before he gets there he slides off and stays low in the water, just touching the log enough to keep hold of it, and in this way drifts by the picket line of jailers and sheriff’s deputies and local men both hired and freely come for action. For several minutes they are all around him, heavy shapes in dark clothes. One small boatload pushed by a little motor pokes at the log but Delvin has gone under and though he keeps his grip on the mossy skin they do not see him in the dark and the log turns in the current and is away downstream. Somebody fires a shot anyway and Delvin feels the bullet slap the heavy wood.

Then he is free of the boats and free of the lights and he travels along holding on to the log, trying to keep from falling asleep. He wants to let go and drift away but he catches himself. A barge stacked with cotton bales, pushed by a squat tug, chugs past and he hears the white men on it shouting at each other. It sounds as if they are having a fight. They curse, making threats; it is like hobo life, and thinking this his spirit wakens or shifts in a new way, or an old way recalled, and a sadness cuts into him. But there is happiness mixed with it, a sense of life going on in a world he is part of, not this world of battering and futility but the other—pinched as it is—smelling of churned water and living things moving through the air. It’s natural to him and he realizes this, the world that can’t really be taken away from him, no matter the prison they put him in. He watches the stacked bales disappear ahead and listens to the voices, rich with unimprisoned life—anger edging into sorrow and bafflement and an exculpatory meekness that touches him through his skin—fade into the night.

Lights, solitary and feeble, come and go along the black ribbon of the distant bank. Mostly the dark, entering into every crevice and over
looked spot. All those wandering around by themselves in the dark, lying down in it in rooms and on riverbanks and in woods where the big brown owls speak their solemn questions. The professor said that entering each small town was like the Israelites coming out of the wilderness. It’s not your light sets you free, he said, it’s all those others. He decides to get in to shore. He is too tired to stay out in the water. But he doesn’t have the strength to paddle in. All he can do is get up on the log. He does this and crams himself in the sunder and rides along on his back watching the stars as they wheel grandly down into the earth and then he slips into sleep and rides along dreaming lightly of a woman, whose name escapes him, holding in her hands a skein of flowering vine, and turns in sleep and slides into the water.

The cool water wakes him.

Already it is dawn. The river has widened out.

He is near the east bank, approaching a line of willow trees that drag their long slim fingers in the river. He paddles that way and catches onto the spindly trailing branches. Working hand by hand downstream he comes to an opening and pulls himself in to the bank. A stand of mallow bushes in full red bloom behind the willows. His heart beats hard and he raises his eyes and looks at the sky that is the color of blue-eyed grass. He eases off the log onto his knees and the ground seems to sag under him but maybe that is only him and he gets to his feet and at first hunched over then upright puts his footprints into slick black earth and staggers ashore. He stands there looking around and he doesn’t know what to do next. The complicated green bushes all filled in, the red, loose-petaled flowers like gifts he maybe is supposed to take into his hands. I don’t know. Then something comes to him. He backtracks and drags the log up the bank over the prints just in case he finds no place for himself on that side of the continent. Then he crawls up through the mallows to the grassy edge of a field spotted here and there with tall purple pokeweed and stands up, eyeballing the terrain: a fleshed-out hacked and vine-strewn world with no sign of a special prison other than the one that is everywhere. Hilly fields like bosoms lifting into the distance. He pushes back into the
mallow bushes, squirrels a place among the sour-smelling leaves, lies down and falls asleep.