After he walked back to Mrs. Cutler’s and talked some more with Mr. Oliver and sat with him as he slept in his chair on the shady porch while the breeze pried at a chinaberry tree by the eave and shook the little bunchy leaves that hadn’t yet turned, he thought about where he was headed — as far north as he could get before Canada (or maybe on into Canada) — and pictured a grassy yard and a house among trees and him out on the porch in a rocking chair under a blanket like Mr. Oliver, working on a book, and he felt a sadness sliding along, sloshing along with the thoughts and the little quivers of knowledge that came along too, the ones that confirmed that he would never be sitting on a porch in this town again, that he was a ghost himself come back briefly to haunt the old venues. Again the tears rose, but again he didn’t cry them.
In his padded rocker Mr. Oliver snored loudly.
Delvin got up and kissed him on the forehead and stood looking down at him. His old smell was gone, replaced by a sour mucky stench not quite overpowered by the odor of wintergreen. People got so they didn’t want to visit somebody who was dying, but they loved to show up to look at a corpse. So the old man had told him years ago as they sat on the side porch watching a thunderstorm come in over the mountains. Mr. Oliver had ridden the train from Alabama to this place and made a life out of nothing but his clever self and hard work. And now he was sleeping his way toward death on an old christian lady’s porch. Well, all right. On the Gulf shore he had walked into the ocean and stood up to his waist in salt water that had never been swum in by africano people. Only africano ones ever in it were those bodies swabbies had rolled off the decks of the slave ships crossing from Africa. He had pushed his face into that salt water. A white woman walking with a big brown dog had called for him to get out of there, but he ignored her. At least until she walked off. Then he high-footed it out of the pale, lank surf and ran for his life.
He wanted to stop people on the street and say that once he left here he’d never be back. Yall come too, he wanted to say — cry out — all of you, you’re free now.
He touched the pitted back of Mr. Oliver’s hand, still a little plump but now ashy and showing red under the knuckles. He didn’t want to leave him. He wanted to go back to the funeral home and get some supper and sit out on a cutblock in the alley and listen to old Mr. Starling from next door tell stories about dances and frights back in the slave times. But no, he didn’t really want that. He wanted these living to go on living, that was the most he wanted. It hurt him to see this battered man here, snoring, a spit bubble like a tiny crystal ball on his lip, hurt to see death crept up so close to him. But that too wasn’t enough to come back for. From the minute he had slipped away from Acheron prison he had felt the exhilaration of freedom. At first it had been so powerful he thought it would be enough to make him happy in the world. But that sense of things had dimmed. It was wearing out. He was nearly back to being a black man in a white man’s kingdom. But not quite. Before the last of that bounteous sense faded away he wanted to stand again in the streets of the town he was born in. Let me see what I feel in Red Row on the dusty street in front of Heberson’s store or standing on the porch of the Home or sitting down to eat in the kitchen. But all those places were gone. He hadn’t counted on that. Well, he should have. Everything was on its way out, handed off into some other configuration, some past you could think about if you wanted to or had to, turned over like soil in a new field in spring to show its bright, glistening other side. Now he had to go. Or would soon. He was older but he was part of the new. And he wanted to tell this to somebody.
He spent the morning sleeping in a back bedroom at Mrs. Cutler’s house and then in the afternoon up the gully in a little pinestraw nest he fashioned under some rhododendron bushes, sleeping some more and writing in his notebook. Mostly notes. Fragments of nothing much, signs painted on the sides of barns saying HERE IT IS in some form or other, extra tall men craning to see over a board fence, a woman washing her hair in a tub out behind a poultry yard. A big dark hemlock by a stream had jolted him. He wanted to jolt people. Touch them in a secret place. That was all right. He’d seen army men in full packs marching down a dusty road that went nowhere. “What you think of that?” he’d asked the man standing beside him in the boxcar door. “A clown parade,” the man had said and spit out the door. “I got the cure for loneliness!” shouted a man peering from a lit window in Jacksonville, but he’d ducked back in before Delvin could ask what it was. Standing under a church window in Monroeville he listened to a choir director correct the same bright-eyed girl six times before she burst into tears. Six, ten, twenty-seven times — whatever it takes, they’ll get you. A man stood so long on a trestle bridge showing off a string of croakers with the train coming he’d had to jump for it into the river. He’d come up without his pole or his fish. Once the professor’d laughed so hard he cut a fart that busted the seat out of his britches. “Could have been worse,” he said and they both laughed until their bellies hurt. “I got it,” a man in faded longhandles rose in an empty fertilizer car to say, “but I don’t know where I put it.” A big woman who said she was from Alaska had slung her wispy girlfriend so far through the boxcar door she landed in a field of golden wheat. And jumped up yelling. “I got to go,” he would say, and he would go, make his break for freedom, no matter how foolishly. That was me, he wrote, the one missing at the head count. His mama had to flee because she killed a man after white folks beat her five-year-old boy for stealing a fake jewel attached to a dress in the window of a shop in Chattanooga. The jewel was yellow like a cat’s eye and he had to have it. That was me, he wrote. And the old, ever-denied guilt licked about his heart. From his leafy hideout he looked back down the long slope to a field grown up in Joe Pye weed. The flimsy tops of the weeds, strangled by fall, nodded and gave in a breeze that didn’t reach up to where he was. “I am that boy,” he said.
After a while he walked back to the house to check on Mr. Oliver but he was sleeping. He used a brush he’d found in the bathroom to brush off his clothes. He sat out on the porch a while and then he started to the Emporium. A couple of old men he thought he recognized sat on the short green bench in front of the overly clean white-man’s store that had replaced Heberson’s. He and the Ghost had stolen whips of licorice from the old store; the candy’d turned their palms brown. “Now I’m full colored,” the Ghost had said, and Delvin had asked him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to be. Looked like now he’d found another satisfaction. From behind the building came the sound of somebody chopping wood. That man there putting a crate of cabbages in a car trunk — we buried his wife out of the funeral home twenty years ago. She was a tiny scaredy woman killed when a bakery wagon knocked her down and backed over her. He remembered Culver joking that they ought to cut a casket down for her and save Mr. — what was his name? — some money but nobody had laughed. The old man — Hunt, that was his name — looked up from his conversation and stared at Delvin. I guess he recognizes me. A chain had started to form. From moving identityless through the world — some essential signifier rubbed so thin that not only was he walking through a foreign land but he was walking through it nameless — he had begun his return to substance, to palpable life in the minds of his former townspeople. Judgments might be made, conclusions drawn, plans of action or gossip take shape. It was scary, yet he wanted to experience this, have it once more: somebody in the so-called free world thinking of him. Minnie May was thinking of him — maybe she was — but that was in Atlanta and he’d left her behind; he wanted more, or wanted it here, in the town he was born in, right now.