In the garden he picked a tomato and ate it sitting on the ground next to a big pepper plant. The calendar said it was fall but it might as well be summer. The sky was speckled with tiny white clouds like little checkmarks. From another yard, not far off, came the thunk of an ax. “Rooster,” a woman’s voice called, “come here and help me mend that winder shade.” The smell of frying pork from far off, sweet smoke. He dried the tomato juice off his hands by rubbing them hard together, picked a pepper, shucked the flaky white seeds and ate that. Then he picked a few late runner beans, shelled them out into his palm and ate them. Then a small summer squash, the ring of yellow blossom a ruff around one end. I could eat myself around the world, garden to garden.
In the wash shed he cranked water into a tin basin and scrubbed his face and hands. In the piece of mirror propped on a piece of shelf he studied his face. There were deep lines running down his cheeks. He liked that; before prison he’d been a fat-faced boy, now he looked like a man who had seen trouble and lived through it. He patted his hair, mulling its length. Before he was arrested he wore his hair brushed out and squared off with a part razored on the left side, but afterwards, in the convict life, he had his hair cut short. Now, out in the world again, he’d let it grow some, and over here in Atlanta he’d gone to Mr. Eulis’s and while “Laudate Dominum” played on the Victrola had him chop a part into it. He’d tried a mustache, but it looked like a black caterpillar on his lip so he shaved it off. Minnie May had a razor right here in the house, left over from the last man who lived here, and he used that, glad to come that near to having his own. He took time lathering his face, leaned in close to the mirror, examining his creased cheek, the little dents up near his ears, the stubby chin. Sometimes he’d wash the lather off and start over just for the feel of it. Minnie May often heated water in a kettle and carried it out to him; he loved it when she did that.
He took his time shaving, no rush at the moment, pausing to study his face as it reappeared out of the lather.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked it. “You ever gon own up?” He touched the thin puffed scars on his left cheekbone. “I reckon not. No telling what you might have to own up to.” In case somebody was listening he laughed a little shushing laugh to cover his embarrassment at talking to himself.
He carefully washed his face and carefully patted it dry and stared at himself in the mirror. “We’ll keep you awhile longer,” he said. He washed the razor, dried it on the towel, folded it and put it in his pocket.
Back in the house he shucked his clothes and slid into bed next to the sleeping Minnie May. She slept on her back, making a soft purring noise, a snore with a tiny bubbling sound at the end of it. He nestled against her and she automatically turned away but he pressed on until she turned toward him. She wore a loose gray slip washed to a softness like fresh ginned cotton. Softer than that. He slid his hand up behind and pushed the slip up her smooth body that was almost as dark as his, so smooth he felt the rough chafe of his own fingers against it and was almost ashamed to touch her. He could smell her now, smell the spicy odor of her and the fresh sweat and the verbena spice oil she poured over herself and wiped off with a cloth, smell the barley soap and the shelled butterbeans and the okra she itched from and he could smell under these other, unplotted mysteries, deeper reeks and perfumes. He contorted his body until he could put his nose close to her lower back and he inhaled the rich odor of her woman smell and sniffed all the way to her girl smell, even, so it seemed, to her original baby smell, a faint residue of it like a thin sprinkling of garden rain.
With his scarred knees he drove her legs apart and he liked the forcing, liked the resistance, the body’s stiffness and her own pushing back and he kept on driving, hard work he bent to happily, the fullness of his power given to the task like turning a plow in heavy clay, forcing the big coulter with his own body, feeling as he did so the heat rising, the burning life of this slick, fumy soil. He leaned back and stared at her as he separated her from her steady opposition, uncovering her, exposing the black wallow and red pit of her. He touched her with his fingers, three, then only one, surveying, scouting the trail and found it. He slid along trough and excavation, rummaging, loosening. He had at last stopped thinking of Milo and the others. He had believed that if he kept on long enough, if he kissed deeper and held her tighter and stayed close to her and drew her perfumes and funks to him, listened to her and rubbed against her and spoke to her of her desires and longings and of his hunger, spinning a new life from smells and touches and sight and words, conjuring the bed and the house and the streets and the ungovernable city into shape around them, that he could sink into it, into her, and he would forget. And that was happening.
She had started moaning even before he entered her and when he did she stopped. He held himself still, waiting. In the silence he could hear a redbird whistling. Down the row a woman called. “Frankie,” she said. “Frankie, come on over here.” As he shanked into her, waxy leaves of pain slid off. He was raw and charged, alight. He started slow and picked up speed. She began to whimper, or was that him? He was cast forth in long looping lines swinging out over deceptively calm waters. Then she bucked back against him and surged forward, attempting to pull his body on a rope. He followed, shoved her down and jammed her back into the earth, crushing the juice out of her. She clucked and sputtered and banged against his side with her fist. Knocking, knocking, he thought—come on in—and abruptly he cut loose from what held him back and thrust himself hard through his own body, driving into her. But he was too strong to collapse.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”
She shoved and underbowed her back hard as if she was going to break bone.
Something ran through their bodies slamming door after door. Catch me, catch me. He did, and even as he did so he was aware that this confabulation was only a promissory note and appeal to the greater desire that was lodged, had been lodged, all his life deep inside him. What it was he didn’t know exactly but there were times, and they were not in a bedroom or bunk, when he almost caught a glimpse of what it was, what he really wanted, but then it shied, like a dragonfly catching the breeze, and he couldn’t say. In the meantime there was this. He pounded his way in and moved softly among the simple treasures he found.
After a while he got up, went into the kitchen, pumped water over a fresh rag, wrung it and brought it back to the bed and cleaned her.
They lay uncovered in the warm curtained air without talking, touching a little here and there, and then they fell asleep. He dreamed of cotton fields, of stopping at the end of a long row to take a drink from a bucket handed to him by a man whose face he couldn’t make out. As he held the dipper to his mouth he saw over its rim a fish-shaped cloud high in the east. The water tasted better than any water he’d ever drunk. Something was about to come clear, something he’d forgotten about until now but had always longed to recall. He had to remember it, but he couldn’t stop looking at the fish-shaped cloud or tasting the water. I’ve never tasted water in a dream, he thought and waked.
Minnie was gone but she’d left supper for him in the safe. A note written in her big looping hand, misspelled and hard to make out, said she loved him and would be back late because she had to go see her mother. He ate the butterbeans and picked the meat off the ham hock and gnawed her crumbly, agreeably sour cornbread and then he got dressed and went out to Longley’s Beer Bar and stood around drinking with a man he knew who had been in prison down in Florida and liked to talk about the life there. He didn’t mention that he too had been in prison but he listened to the man’s stories. He had a hard unforgiving nature familiar to Delvin. After a while he grew tired of listening and played a game of pool with a man who said his name was George Butters, a sawed-off, tan-skinned man with white patches of vitiligo on his face, and beat him handily.