Delvin worked his way along, asking for the Ghost. Adam street was the Row’s main street. It ran perpendicular to the gully and white Chat-town and on the other end petered out like an exhausted shout in a track that ran past houses jacked on stilts and up into the leafy mountain woods. On the town side were the stores and other commercial and professional establishments. There was the Peanut Shop (also selling pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts and filberts), Bailey’s Flower Shop, the newspaper office (Mountain Star Weekly), the office of the Ministry of Lost Souls (Protestant), barbecue, chicken and fish shacks (the fish shack attached to Dillard Fish Market), Bynum’s Hardware, Arthur’s Hats and Shoes, Smithwick’s Clothing, the Grand and Benevolent Order of Right-Way Men’s Hall, Kurrel’s Insurance, Elmer’s Garage, painted blue with a flat red roof with Elmer Bainbridge’s name painted in white on the asphalted gravel covering it (24 HOUR WRECKING AND TOWING, a swinging metal sign out front said), and other outfits and materializations appearing from time to time in one or another frame building or in the upper floors of the only multistory structure on the Row, the Brakeman building, conjure shops and false prophets of one kind or another, too, hovering over the hearts of the community for a week, or a few, and then disappearing, whisked away in the dark of a night similar to the one in which they arrived.
But the Ghost was in none of these places. They hadn’t seen him at Pell’s or at the pool hall or in the Occasions Restaurant or at the Pig Grill or at Shorty’s. He wasn’t upstairs at Fitt’s Grocery where the men played poker five nights a week. He wasn’t at the regular Baptist church or the Holiness or the AME or the primitive Baptist either, and not out back of the Free Will Baptist where a few families were eating the latest mess of fresh souse meat somebody’d cornered over at the stockyards. And he wasn’t at the Emporium.
He told himself the reason he was looking for the boy was because he wanted to bring him back to the house, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t want to go back to the house. That was why he was looking for him.
Everywhere he went people knew already about the killing. At Porley’s, young men without attachments drank and loudly raved, but every other place was muted, abashed. Extra white police sat in cars at the bridges and rode in cars through the quarter. They hung from the sides of the cars; like monkeys, Delvin thought, or maybe the start of a police migration. Near the old Morrison livery stable and mule barn, now a garage, he picked up a rock, but even though he carried it for a dozen blocks he didn’t throw it. He didn’t know where he dropped it. The people weren’t out on their porches mostly, but he could see them sitting by kerosene light or electric behind curtains in their front rooms; their shadows were still and waiting. The quarter seemed to swell with brooding, with a sadness that had not yet broken forth in mourning. Flaked mother-of-pearl clouds flew along under a sky sprinkled with coldly glittering stars.
In the Emporium most of the white customers had stayed away. But Frank Dumaine and his buddy were there, as were Mr. Considine and Billy Melton who was kin to the family that owned the First Pioneer Bank downtown. There were a few older white men who had come. These the woman pointed out to Delvin; they couldn’t keep from it. Many of the white men arrived not knowing about the killing, but in one way or another they quickly found out. In the parlor, except for Billy Melton, nobody was dancing. In the dining room Dumaine and his friend ate chicken stew. Delvin realized he was hungry and went back in the kitchen looking for Kattie. She was upstairs, the cook told him.
“Working?” he asked.
“She’s trying it out,” said the cook, a large woman whose dark-complected face was deep red under the black.
Delvin felt a pain in his breast. The cook caught the look on his face.
“This not the place to be rummaging around for a sweetheart, honey. Unless you a rich man. But then you gon be rich someday, aint you?”
“How’s that?”
“Aint you that old mortician’s boy?”
“I work over at the funeral home.”
“Yeah, that’s you. You the one everybody says he’s gon leave that place to.”
Delvin felt a warmth in his chest. “It’ll be a long time,” he said, “before Mr. Oliver leave’s the Constitution to anybody. By time he’s ready I’ll be long gone from this town.”
“I hear you on that one. Lord, hit don’t near stop,” she said, flicking at a musing fly standing on a meringue curl atop a lemon pie. “I don’t think it ever will.”
“It’ll wear us out eventually,” Delvin said. “And we’ll throw off that yoke.”
“Be careful how you talk, boy.”
“I’m not talking, I’m just saying.”
“These white folks aint never gon take they foot off of us.”
“We’ll knock it off ourselves.”
“I think only the Lord can do that, honey. Though I have to say he’s mighty slow-minded about getting to it.”
“Idn’t that the truth,” Delvin said and they both looked away and laughed.
He walked out in the backyard and peered up at the second-story windows. They were lit softly with red or green or blue lights, some with a rich yellow that laid dim oblongs of light on the grass. Maybe the red one was hers. He stepped into the red rectangle that was more black than red and stood in it. He tried to put aside Kattie’s new business, but he couldn’t help but picture it. It wasn’t just the booting itself that got to him, it was the mechanics of it, the body angles and the wrenches and the wringing and the slop-overs and the beads of sweat and the stickiness in your mouth — he saw too much in his mind. Some other — some white man’s greasy face — naw, it was worse for it to be a colored man’s — panting his liquor breath into hers. He didn’t mind the business, not generally; it was his mother’s. . and where was she?
He looked up at the sky. Clouds at night. He loved clouds at night. And electric lights in daytime; he loved those too. And him lying on his bed with the shades pulled reading a book. Mr. O had put in another butterscotch leather chair in his bedroom and at night they sat on two sides of the little marble-topped table reading their books. Shakespeare and Milton (Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) for Mr. O, Shakespeare and Conrad for him, or the explorer books he had begun to prefer, Arctic adventures, dog teams, adventurers stranded on shelves of blue ice.
Just then a flower — a dark carnation, possibly red — sailed by his ear. He looked up to see Kattie standing in an upstairs window. She hissed at him.
“Whoo, you boy, go get me a glass of punch.”
Hearing this, his body turned to stone and as quickly turned back to flesh. But a changed, suffering, jellied flesh, wobbling on jelly feet. He couldn’t speak. When he could his voice squeaked in his mouth.
“Go on, boy,” Kattie said.
He stumbled across the yard into the kitchen and dipped a glass from the crock sitting under a piece of cheesecloth on the counter. The punch was dark red and smelled of wine. He touched the surface in the glass with his tongue. It tasted sharp and sweet, a little of cherries. He carried the glass up the back stairs and into the hall that was lit with widely spaced electric bulbs with square red paper shades covering them. A large negro woman in a maroon silk dress so dark it was almost black snoozed in a brocade chair against the wall. Kattie didn’t even tell him the room number; no, he forgot to ask; he’d just run off like a child. But he wasn’t a child. He had been with a woman — Miz Pauly, a widow he visited, and Eula Banks, a girl others had too, who gave easily because she liked it. None of these pay-as-you-go gals either. But never Kattie.