Solomon Baker took off his glasses and rubbed them with a blue silk handkerchief.
“How much, Lord?” somebody said.
“How much longer, Lord?” somebody else said.
The people trooped by through the day, through the evening and deep into the petty hours of night. Into the buckled and slumped hours of false dawn. The yeasty realness of life was in their breasts, and even as they grieved many experienced themselves as held deeply in the weave of being and even smacked hard by grief were grateful. Others were simply glad it was not them. Oliver lay on the hardest of the two couches in his office, trying to rest. Delvin came in and without turning on the light lay down on the floor beside him. A night bird asked a question, waited, and asked the same question again, a question never answered on this earth, unless the earth itself was the answer. Oliver let his hand fall from the couch and seek the boy’s face that he touched so gently Delvin could barely feel it and then he groped for his hand. Delvin caught the older man’s fingers and he felt as if he was catching him as he sank into the sea; he gripped down hard and the older man spoke out and Delvin said he was sorry and then in a soft seep he was crying.
After a while Oliver said, “This is only the second time I have had to do this. Usually they take the poor fellow out to some hollow or country pasture and bury him without calling on my ministrations.” He blew his breath out and breathed it back deeply in. Delvin could smell the cigar on his breath. Oliver said, “When she came in the laboratory the last time — to tell me not to fix her boy — I thought I would explode. With frustration and regret. I was afraid I might strike that woman. Oh, I knew I wouldn’t, wouldn’t ever, but I felt so consternated.” He turned heavily — Delvin could smell his musky cologne, and the horsehair in the couch — and his wide face seemed to rest disembodied on the edge of the couch, like a face in one of the books he had read as a child, disembodied and filled with curiosity. He said, “For a second I thought I would strike that woman and walk out of the room and keep walking until I came to some other world to live in.” He looked in the dimness at Delvin with eyes that contained a shadowed mournfulness. “But there is no other world.” A crinkling, whispering sound then where Oliver’s silk robe rubbed against the couch. “I could walk for a thousand thousand years,” he said, “and not find any world but this one. Lord.” He patted the edge of the couch. “A mortician’s not supposed to feel like that.”
“What about Africa?” Delvin said.
“What’s that?”
“When you’re walking.”
“Walking — hunh.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Africa. That old bushy place? Those folks over there have forgot all about us. We wouldn’t fit in. Despite what old Marcus Garvey in his big hat and with the whole UNIM behind him says.”
“What about some empty place? Some place nobody stays in and nobody wants?”
“Only place like that is a place nobody can live in. Shoot, I’d go live on an iceberg in the Arctic ocean if I thought it could be done. But even there the white man would come and run us off. Wouldn’t want us mixing with the polar bears.”
“I don’t want to mix with them anyway,” Delvin said for the laugh in it, but he was thinking, Always the hard way’s the only way.
Oliver let loose a long rattling sigh and then silence fell again. The night bird inserted its ascending cry, only the final note a true question.
“I’ve known rivers,” Delvin said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
“That’s beautiful, boy. Did you make that up?”
Delvin didn’t say anything.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s strong and faithful, faithful to the truth.” Oliver raised himself. “You ought to say that at the funeral tomorrow. Or I mean today. This afternoon.”
“Oh, no,” Delvin said.
“I wish you would. I know it would be a piece that would be a great help to everybody.”
Though he wanted to claim the words as his own, and might have if he wasn’t spooked by Oliver’s proposal that he say the lines of Langston Hughes’s poem at the funeral, he admitted they were the great Harlem poet’s and not his. Oliver looked him in the eyes and smiled, knowing what the boy had almost done and not offended at all by that sort of humanness.
“You’re an uncommon young man,” he said, words that Delvin would recall often — sometimes derisively — in years to come.
“I might be,” he said, “but I don’t want to get up before those people and say anything at all.”
“I can’t make you, boy, but I would be happy to support you in saying them.”
They were both exhausted, and shortly after that, after the whippoorwill’s duty was passed on to a widow bird offering its own cranky cry, they fell asleep and would have slept right through the funeral if Polly, who had cried half the night, hadn’t kept calling from the door until they waked. Delvin, despite the occasion, experienced a jolt of happiness when he saw her standing in her fresh navy-blue dress in the doorway. He spoke to Mr. Oliver, who lay on his back on the long couch, thinking — so he said in a moment — about the net sack of oranges a white woman had given him one Christmas when her driver stopped her carriage in the middle of Valhalla street in Montgomery and called him to the door. Later three africano boys had taken the oranges from him.
They got up and moved quietly in the faint clattery silence of early morning.
The leaves of sweet gum trees made moving shadows on the walls of the church. Across the yard was the old church, a tiny square wooden building, hardly bigger than a cotton house, with a cocked steeple the size of an apple crate riding the roof. The old structure had become so infirm that it had been locked for years and would have been torn down except for the sentimental and historic value it had for the community. It had been recently whitewashed, thanks to Cordell Meeks, a parishioner whose cotton fields bordered the property, and this had made the congregation proud. The new church was an elaborated version of the old one, planed boards, a shingle roof and a tin steeple perched on the roof line like a squared and pointed hat. There were hitching posts for the mules and horses in front of the old church. A cleared space for cars in front of the new. Mostly folks came in wagons. Many sat now in their wagons, two hours before the service, patiently waiting. On the other side of the red dirt road sheriff’s deputies sat in two big black cars.
They pulled up and backed around to the door of the new church and several men stepped down from the wagons, blistered men, men of sorrows and men held in contempt, men in washed overalls and starched white shirts, men who didn’t know how to read or had never held in their hands any other book but the Bible, if that, men who took the long view that the Lord was waiting for them in heaven, these men, who Delvin was thinking of and had been thinking of now since last night when he watched the last of them come through the parlor of the Home and stop and stare down at the unrefabricated dead boy, the illuminated and beaten but not destroyed boy, standing in a moment of capacious silence that in itself stood for four hundred years of isolation among men — he had thought of these men who had hardly ever known an unbullied moment in their lives but who went on anyway, wondering what they believed in those nights in the country when the last lamp had been put out and they lay beside their narrow wives in the dark that was of a blackness impenetrable by human eyes as skeeters and fleas and flatbugs went about their cunning business, wondered if they thought of anything at all — these men helped unload the burden and carry it into the church.