He had come down with the cancer five years ago—“I lost my regularity, that was the sign of it, and couldn’t get it back no matter what Mrs. Parker tried — she’s still in the world, over here cooking for the Sunderson family, in Wildwood I believe”—and he thought at first he could fight it off but that became a full-time job so he sold the funeral home and traveled around the country trying to get cured. Wound up spending his money in phony clinics and wonder working joints. He’d even gone down to Mexico—“By Pan American airplane”—where he ate mashed peach pits—“I could have gotten my fill of them right here”—and drank bovine gall and other bitter liquids that no human should ever put to their lips, and nothing had worked. He had returned to Chattanooga six months ago on the bus from New Orleans, broke—“and spent, you might say”—and was now waiting for death to take him like a man would wait to return to a home he had never been happy in but had to go to because there was nowhere else.
“Least I can be assured of a place to lay my head,” he said and laughed a creaking, mucosal laugh.
Small peaked sores dotted Mr. Oliver’s face. He was missing teeth, which he tried to conceal with a palsied hand. He had an old blue silk quilt wrapped loosely around him and he wore a maroon knit wool cap and matching scarf puddled under his throat.
Casey Boy was nowhere around. He’d took off, Mr. O said, and joined the army. “Fool thing to do,” Mr. Oliver said and waved a flimsy hand.
Mrs. Cutler’s son stepped out directly and asked Delvin if he wanted to come in for breakfast.
Delvin thanked him and said he’d as soon sit out on the porch with Mr. Oliver.
The son, large, wide, with a small close-cropped head, smiled in a friendly way and said he would bring food out to the porch.
Delvin asked about Polly and Elmer and George and the Ghost, and Mr. O said he had given them legacy gifts and let them go. He didn’t know where they were now.
The breeze had dried out. It creaked in the spindly branches of a sycamore next to the house. The mountain sky was a translucent, unhindered blue.
“I could sit out here for years,” Mr. Oliver said, “I’ve come to like it very much.” He said this as if Delvin had asked him a question. He didn’t inquire about prison. They didn’t talk about the war.
A few negro men in uniform walked on the streets, a couple of them passing in front of the house, swinging their arms as they went by. One of them was the Ghost, traipsing back and forth like he was on misshapen guard duty, a peculiar askew figure in dirty army khakis and a crumpled garrison cap. Delvin hailed him from the porch. The Ghost came angling up, walking half sideways like a dog, his head held slightly to the side, the freckles on his cheeks pinker than ever. He gravely shook Delvin’s hand and spoke cheerily to Mr. Oliver who didn’t seem to recognize him. “I’m home on leave,” he said.
“Leave?” Delvin said. “You look like you got left. That a army uniform?”
“I help out with the soldiers. With the cooking.”
“Cooking?”
He was glad to see the Ghost, but something about him, his peculiar listing manner, his off-speaking and the way his pale eyes darted — he wanted to throw him off the porch too.
“So they finally let you out,” the Ghost said, studying Delvin’s face.
“It took some doing,” Delvin said. The news about his escape had scattered like spilled leaves; he’d overheard some people in Jacksonville say every newspaper in the country had written it up. He read about himself first in a paper somebody had used to wrap onions, sitting behind a barbershop with some other men eating fish stew the barber’s wife had prepared for passing tramps. All the assembled had heard about his jump and he had hidden his face in the shade of a droopy magnolia and then cut quietly out of the yard before he got his fill of stew. In C-town they must have been patrolling the streets with shotguns.
“We all figured they would give up trying to trickerate you sooner or later.”
He said it like it was a joke and strung a little frolicky cutup kind of patter together and after a few minutes said he had to be on his way. He bowed to Mr. Oliver and grinned at Delvin and skipped down the steps, the tail of his gray army-style shirt flapping.
Delvin caught up with him out in the street across from a large white oak that had the word GIT carved into its trunk. A large man wearing a shirt made of rainbow patches walked by carrying a sign that said BARLOW BAR-B-Q.
“Where you headed?” Delvin wanted to know. He was afraid the Ghost would try to get him picked up and wondered why this was and wanted to get him to say.
“I’m on my way over to the Emp,” the Ghost said in a finicky, snubbing manner.
“I thought you were done with that place.”
“I don’t believe I ever said anything like that.”
“I was probably given false information,” Delvin said, thinking of his mother gone from there for a quarter of a century now. “I mean—” He couldn’t get the words out straight. He wanted to cry — lord, that was most of what he’d wanted to do since he got out — but he couldn’t do that here, now, not in front of the Ghost.
“I got me a friend over there,” the Ghost said, “a white woman.”
“They got white women at the Emporium?” Times had changed.
“It’s almost fifty-fifty,” the Ghost said. “I’m gon get her to marry me and we gon have white children.”
Delvin turned his head, galled. He started to say something, to tell the Ghost that no kind of mustafina child would be white — no way to wash a black man enough times to make him white — and why would he want that anyway, but he was tired of such arguments even before they started. The world bulged with information, with a full baggage of crumbled-up bits and pieces and you could grab out as big a handful as you wanted and make whatever suited you out of it. Half-facts and letters of intent and unspoken questions and rumors and whispers of vanished lives and snubbed-off growing things that would never be spoken of again. ’Cept you couldn’t make yourself white. Maybe he couldn’t make himself free. He stuck his hand out and took the Ghost’s small pink fingers in his thick flat black ones and shook. His broad hand had softened over the last couple of traveling months but there was still a hardness under the softness that he could tell the Ghost felt. He could recall everything from years ago that included them both, but he didn’t mention any of it. He looked him straight in the eyes and in the pale colorless eyes that couldn’t bear sunlight and shied from whoever was looking at him but looked back at Delvin now, sly but bashful too, scared, too, and worshipping, he saw that the Ghost loved him. And the Ghost could tell he saw. Winston, he could tell. Delvin wanted to say, Don’t betray me, but he couldn’t bring himself to, and hoped it wasn’t necessary. It flashed through his mind to threaten the Ghost — just for good measure, penitentiary style — but he didn’t do that either. You could do anything, you could do everything, but what did it matter? That was something else he’d picked up prison, in the local philosophy class: nothing’s worth fighting for. Was that where he was living now? For a moment he had lost his strength. It was like a hand on his chest held him back. Don’t. ., he wanted to say, or, I’ll kill you, or, Please, or, Remember how I saved you, but he didn’t say any of these things. He couldn’t. Even when he felt the hand relax. Maybe it was love held him back, maybe something else.
He smiled at the Ghost who was only half looking at him now. The Ghost’s eyes were like a kind of crystal. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you over there,” he said, and he was smiling, in as friendly a way as a man who’d just skipped on twelve years in the penitentiary could.