He told her a little about his life, eliminating the prison part, speaking of his time on the cotton plantation and his years on the rails before that and his travels with the professor and a little about his life in the funeral home in a small city he didn’t name. Minnie May loved him and didn’t mind his falsifying — she knew it for what it was — but she thought he was foolish not to marry her and told him so.
“We are supposed to enjoy the bounty that is offered us,” she said as they sat in the afternoon on the back steps sipping iced tea with a piece of lemon in it she had brought home from the market, his first lemon since he was a child. His teeth were loose in his head (like seeds in a gourd, he said) and his bones ached from the residual malaria but he was delighted to receive the bounty of these small touches, ice and citrus fruit, and he told her so.
“I mean some of the larger style bounties that have come your way.”
“I am also happy to have received the gift of your hospitality in much greater ways, I can promise you that,” he said, and rubbed along her strong smooth thigh. “I don’t mean just this either, though I do enjoy it.”
“Where in Ginny Gall’d you learn to talk like that?” Minnie said, looking off into the sweet gum that was beginning to soak up yellow.
He blushed in his deep black skin, and the blushing was new, or new again, and ran his knuckles lightly over her up-turned palm that was pink and hard as a workingman’s.
He found a woman’s body — this woman’s body — to be voluminous and swampy, massive, without end, a colossal force that threatened to sweep him away, that crammed against him, making him think of the Gulf that time off Sunny Point and of dreams and of the strange rolling affections that came on the darkest of prison nights. Touching her set off alarms that the touches themselves quieted.
“Well,” she said, “what do you mean?”
A flight of fast airplanes moved across the sky to the south, headed toward the big military airfield out that way. He counted them with his finger: eight. Nearer, half a dozen crows circled something interesting. A breeze picked at the leaves of a yard maple where she said redbirds had nested in the spring before blue jays stole the chicks.
He said he didn’t know what he meant, but she had more to say and he listened and then his mind drifted off to the early years with Mr. Oliver out on the side porch as Mr. O made up names for the constellations, fashioned from the speckling stars the constellations themselves, and told stories about these chariots and kings. They were always stories of fortunes lost and found and long journeys hauling the remains of heroes. Never love stories. Delvin’s favorite was the story of the invisible leopard. A giant cat that leapt from hiding to eat passersby in the upland jungles of old Africa. No one could kill this leopard. One day a man claimed he had captured the beast. He produced a large cage in which he said he had the leopard. He charged people a quarter to view the big cat, and many paid to see the leopard that was in fact not there. Some people said the exhibit was a hoax, but many other people came away satisfied. One day a young boy, a brave boy from a nearby village, said he didn’t believe the leopard was in the cage. Nobody ever hears it roar, he said. The man said it was a silent leopard, everybody knew that. Silent my eye, the boy said. He said he would go into the cage to prove it was empty. Fine, the man said, but you got to pay a quarter like everybody else. Here it is, the boy said. The man said, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you get in the cage. I couldn’t live with myself if that leopard tore you to pieces. It’s all right, the boy said, I was getting nervous about it anyway. They became friends and after a long time the man admitted to the boy that there was no leopard. The boy said, I knew you was lying. And I’m gon tell everybody. Then he threw open the cage door and leapt in. The leopard ate him up.
That was a great story, Delvin thought, very scary, and he wished he could hear Mr. O tell it again. But this woman was talking.
“Gettin what?” he said. “Married?”
“Why, you aint even listening.”
“Yes I am, I just got caught in a dream. It’s a ailment I have.”
“You don’t have no ailment, you just wont paying attention.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Everything out here in the busy world catches hold of me sometimes and I forget what is happening.”
She gave him a long look. He had told her about the red dog and she believed him, but in Atlanta at that time there were few such cases and she knew only two people, a machinist and a peach sorter, who had caught the disease and it didn’t seem too much of a bother — if it was the same thing he was talking about — for either of them. She was sad because she knew she couldn’t keep him around. Sooner or later she asked each of the boys she took in to marry her and they always turned her down. She was not pretty and she had a rough temperament but she knew herself to have a tender heart if they could just stay around long enough to find it. It was easy to find.
“Well, dreamer,” she said, “I’ll give you the rest of the week to make up your mind and then you got to go — or if you — you know. .”
“About the marrying?”
“What you think I’m talking about?”
She got up and went back into the house.
Delvin sat on the steps, unsure of what had just happened. She had wanted him to say how pleased he was but there was this other and it had scared him. He sensed her plans, her configurations of desire underneath her simple demands and he had shied. But he had crossed this woman’s threshold, eaten her baked bread and frolicked in early morning recreation in her big bed, and even simplified it was too much for him. He had known many men who thrived in prison because prison asked so little of them. But he didn’t think he was one of those men or if he did he thought still he was the boy — the man now, thirty years old — he had always been. He was finding out this wasn’t so. A redbird hung half upside down in the little chinese elm at the side of the yard. Life was coming steadily back to him. Often it hurt. He had watched the natty mockingbirds hopping around on the grassy margins outside the prison wire and he had thought about how easy it was for those birds to go anywhere they wanted. Birds, rats, toads, bugs, even skeeters, could dash away free creatures beyond the fence. And now he had dashed away and was skittering around loose in the so-called free territory. But each step or shake of the wrist baffled him. And he hadn’t thought it would hurt so much to be free, at least loose.
He walked over to Willie Feveril’s place and sat out in the backyard listening to him talk about the war. Willie, a tall man with a craggy face and a look in his eye as if he was warding off blows, had been kept out of the war by his clubfoot.
“I darsent go anyhow,” he said, sipping from a beer bottle filled with screech liquor. “It aint my business what these white folks get stirred up about. None of em like each other much and every so often the not liking spills over into the killing.” He spit between his feet. They were sitting on an unpainted bench under a big butternut tree. “When they gets they fill of killing they go back to the not liking. Not one damn thing changes.”