And then, from outside the room, from the hallway that had been filling with people from who knows where, came more screams, loud mixed voices, human voices, crying out, yelling and shouting and screeching until Delvin thought the air itself would shatter and fall down and they would be standing screaming with forsaken eyes in the face of heaven or whatever monstrosity or nothingness was behind the world.
The screams went on and then abruptly they seemed to collapse on themselves and they trailed away. The mother of the boy croup-moaned in Oliver’s arms. He began gently to speak to her, but as he did she broke away and lunged at the table. Outside the room a low groaning and keening had begun and as she moved, the crowd, that only a few of could see into the room, swayed and trembled like a sea, moaning and making little chattering and clicking sounds, little human expressions, nicks and chips at the unholiness, at the failed light, whispers and clucks, tiny hisses like spray blown off the tops of waves, all entirely human, pure and unbreakable in perfection, the only perfection left to any of them just now.
Mrs. Harold had thrown her body across her son’s body and she was kissing his sewn-up lips.
Still bent over, she took a shuffling step back, placing her hands not on her son’s body but on the marble table. She raised up. “Oh, Lord, do not,” she cried in a wild voice. “Do not, Lord, do not. Do not ransom this child.”
She began again to scream, to shriek in a high, unworldly voice, but before she got well begun her voice sheared off and she dropped to the floor. In the hallway, like a sea, voices massively groaning. Oliver had tried to catch her, but she hit the floor on her side. Both Mrs. Harold and Oliver were smeared with blood that was seeping from the cut on her wrist.
Oliver called for them to get the doctor and he and Culver lifted Mrs. Harold onto the auxiliary table, an old steel-topped folding table used when he had to travel out to the country to work. With alcohol and a tourniquet and hard pressure that made Mrs. Harold cry out again, Oliver was able to stop the bleeding. He had Culver and Elmer carry Mrs. Harold out the double back doors and up to the back screen porch where they could lay her on the big daybed kept there along with folding cots for sleeping on hot summer nights.
Out in the hall he comforted Mr. Harold, who had not come into the embalming room.
“She just got a nick on her wrist,” he said. “The doctor will be here in a speck.”
Then he went himself and phoned from the telephone hanging on the wall of the embalming room. He came back and said, “The doctor is leaving now.” Dr. Mullens lived in the next block and was the only africano doctor in the city at that time.
Oliver spoke gentling words to those standing in the hallway and came back inside and shut the door behind him. Culver had hung one of the big aprons over the missing glass.
“Thank you, Culver,” Oliver said and leaned against the wall. “Thank all of you.” He closed his eyes and pressed the unbloodied knob of his wrist against his forehead. He looked over at Delvin and smiled a sad, weary smile that brought out his dimples. “Take a long breath, son,” he said.
Delvin breathed deeply in. His chest was a dusty empty room filling with a burning wind. His face was wet, and he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes on one of the gray clean towels stacked on the counter. The shouts, the screams and yells, had been like huge scouring pads, rubbing the feeling off his skin. He was numb — in the places he wasn’t still burning. He felt a pressure in his head like a trunk filled with something creaturely that was pushing to get loose. He sat down in a chair by the sink and pressed his face against his knees. The blood rushed and dammed and he sat up quickly. He was about to faint. He grabbed the edge of the sink, pulled himself up and vomited. Culver came over to him and said he ought to go outside. But he said no. He wanted to stay here as long as he could. He thought he could make it through. “I’m doing all right.”
“Anymore all right as that and we’ll have to take care of you,” Culver said. Nothing ever seemed to bother Culver.
With the paints, some of which he had mixed himself from raw earth he collected in the ravines and from under rhododendrons growing below the ridge and had drawn from roots collected in the deep woods and dug up from clay pits and boiled out of leaves and bark, Oliver painted the broken boy’s face, and with other paints, commercial cosmetics mostly, he added color to his cheeks. He picked the boy’s hair loose and oiled it and brushed it back from his bony forehead and then for the second time in his life as a mortician he bent down and kissed the product of his ministrations, this ruined child, on the forehead. He had not looked directly at Delvin, who had stayed in the room for most of the work before he remembered Morgred waiting in the horse shed and became distressed and nervous because he didn’t know what to do and told Culver, a small tidy man worn to exhaustion by now, that he had to pee and went out and carried the food he had packed in a small hamper out to the shed and gave it to the Ghost, who knew nothing of what had happened except he said for the hollering somewhere off there, and was peevish and unfriendly and, so he said, starving.
“Me too,” Delvin said, but Morgred didn’t want to share his food with him.
“I can’t afford to,” he said.
Delvin laughed. “You can’t?”
“I’m mixed up,” the boy said.
“Bout what?”
“I know this is you all’s food and so I ought to give you what you want of it, but then I am starving to death and don’t know where my next bit of panbread for example is coming from. So I wants to keep it. But if I do you might just take it from me and kick me out of this stable.”
“I might.” He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll get something inside.”
“Naw. Take one of these sandwiches.”
“Okay. I’ll take half of one. Give me the ham.”
“I want the ham.”
“Okay. Give me half the roast beef.”
“There it tis,” the Ghost said, handing a pinched piece. His voice had a little of a cicadas’ unraveling buzz in it — no bounce, no pick up, only a background of scrub fields, wet basement steps. The look in his eyes was dull as corn meal. He shied and slanted. It was as if he had spent too much time on the Blue Ridge’s bare rocky tops where only stunted blueberries and coarse tufts grew. The juice and kick of the city was dried out of him. Delvin was too twitchy to ask him much. The left side of the Ghost’s face was puffed out and red, and with two scuffed fingers he rocked a tooth like a tiny post set in too large a hole. He breathed shallowly, with a little hiccup like a rut at the end of each breath. He was a blinker.
Delvin turned away from the boy and looked off into the corner where hay was stacked in bales. He rubbed his hand against the unsanded stall wood and felt a tiny sharp splinter slide into the flesh under his thumb. Barely go in. A dot of blood. He sucked the blood and tasted it in his mouth and then in his throat and thought of the boy they couldn’t get the preservative to stay in, saw it running out and pooling on the table, the clear green glistening liquid that was beautiful and made you want to run your fingers through it, which he had done, sliding his hand — this hand here — discreetly along the slab until he touched the tensile edge of the juice and felt it cool on his fingers and he looked up and Mr. Oliver was looking at him with an expression on his face of such sadness as he’d not seen before.