Death brings out the real person, Mr. O always said. You can’t hold these commotions against anybody. Some of these folks, he said, some of them have waited a lifetime to let the cat out of the bag. We are helping them to do for themselves what nothing else in their lives could. You see estranged children at last drop their hatred and become loving. Others go right exactly the opposite way. Sometimes you can see how happy a spouse is to be finally free. And you can see the ones who know they will never be free. If I wanted to go into business — or get married, he’d say with a look of false horror on his face — I could make up my mind who not to do it with or who would be the best choice just from how people show themselves during the time of bereavement. But it’s our job to provide a backdrop — a stage for these dramas. Without preference. Their lapses or breakouts are safe with us. Think of it, he would say, puffing on one of the tightly rolled Cuban cigars he had begun to smoke after supper, some of these folks have never in their lives been able to trust anybody with the secret of who they are, not the loved one or the preacher — not even themselves. But they can trust us. We don’t bring it out — death does that — but we make it so they can feel at home with their fit. Some of the displays, Delvin thought, were so public that those folks would have to trust the hundred or so other folks who watched them squeal and roll on the ground begging Mama or Daddy or sweet Sue not to go, and not just Mr. O and his boys. At least once Delvin had seen a man who had just shouted out in glee at the sight of his dead wife fresh from the embalming room threaten Mr. O with a future pistol shot if he did not keep his mouth shut about his delight. Mr. O, trembling a little and thinly smiling, had promised that no word would escape.
The afternoon had slipped quietly away. The evening star was out in the east, trembling as if it had been struck with a hammer. He stopped at the section of the garden where they’d planted strawberries. The fruit time had passed, but all the berries hadn’t been picked; some had withered on the bushes. On the north side of the garden were a few apple trees. The little striped apples soon would be ready for picking. He felt a strange emptiness. It had come so quickly it was as if he had stepped unnoticed from one body into another. The old white man had spent his life in love with the woman he called Fletchy. That was the story he had not quite told. But now he lived in a little house in a pine wood. And the woman, a colored woman, lived with her husband, a colored man, in the ample farmhouse up the hill. But Delvin did not especially care to think on these things. The world was an odd place. He only wanted to stand in the sandy path, smelling fennel and the light dry smell of the broom grass and feeling what was happening to him. The emptiness; as if everything he depended on was gone. As if it never was. He felt as if he could see a hundred miles. As if the rough pasture that ended in a buff dirt road, and the distant cotton field, and the line of pine trees beyond were not there, or if they were they were really miles and miles away. As if in ordinary calculations the ordinary miles or so between him and the horizon were filled with hundreds of miles of dirt and trees and bushes and wild hay. No, it wasn’t emptiness he was feeling, that was the wrong word. It was lack. As if who he was had vanished. As if he was simply a floating heedfulness, not hovering or lying in wait but simply present in a space and time that was so full of variety and mixes and complications that the ordinary measures of space wouldn’t fit it. The trees were a mile away and they were a hundred miles away. He lived in an endlessness in which everything was also confined. A sense of quiet unchangeableness was all around him. Nothing was required. As he rested in this state gradually it passed, fading slowly like a long twilight. When he stirred again the ordinary world had regained its normal proportions. No residue of special arrangements or tricks remained. Without his noticing lightning bugs had risen from the grass. They swayed and flickered, holding their yellow-green lights aloft. He wished he had a jar to catch them in. His mother once in the backyard had caught a handful and tried to keep them in a big handkerchief she tied around her head, but the tiny lights faded and it was only dead bugs she shook from the cloth. She had given a half sob and laughed in a peculiar way that he could feel in his belly. Coolmist had stroked her arm and he wanted to say something, but he didn’t; sometimes even around his mother he was shy.
For supper that night they had hominy and thin slices of salt ham cut from a large ham hanging in the pantry and tomatoes stewed with okra and for dessert hot soda biscuits slathered with salted butter with cane syrup poured over them. Mr. Beall had come in from his afternoon trip. He looked at Delvin in an odd way, not unfriendly, almost sad. Delvin asked about the old white man down in the vale, but neither of them would go very far into it. He was their tenant, Mr. B said, a man who had once worked this land but was now retired. Delvin studied Mrs. Beall’s face as best he could without being rude, but she showed no special feelings about the matter. She didn’t ask after the man.
After supper Mr. Beall and Delvin went out on the side screen porch and sat in the dark looking out at the night. The tin foil Mr. Beall rolled from his cigar made a crinkling sound. His big sulfur match flared light and stink and the end of the cigar flamed and Delvin could see the ball of smoke and then there was only the red glowing tip in the dark. From the woods an owl called, looping its brief two-speed call out like a lariat. A whippoorwill offered its question and continued for several minutes before falling silent, answered or tired, no way to tell. Another night bird, peewit or thrush, let loose a short burst of sharp small cries that seemed to run along the tops of the field grasses, as if the little bird, in a panic, was hurrying toward a still distant roost. In the apple trees by the garden they could hear blackbirds jostling for their final places before sleep. After a while Mrs. Beall came out bringing cups of sassafras tea. He’d never drank this kind of root tea before. It had a sharp cedary smell and tasted faintly of wood. With the honey she also brought it was all right. They must do this often, Delvin thought (though it was the first time they had done it since he came). Sit out here among the birds and woods creatures listening to this racket. Country people. Like they were tiptoeing around in this big greeny world. Folks who lived out here had special secret places they retreated to — so he imagined — canebrakes and branches, caves under the fox grapes where in shady green citadels they could sit undisturbed and think about the world that couldn’t find them just now. All this rural world was like that for him. Not just some hideout in an alder thicket or ramshackle cotton house, but all of it, the whole parcel of woods and rivers and planted fields and all the houses and other buildings and sites too. Nobody in the world knew he was here. He could stop and loiter among the sedge and thistles like he’d done this afternoon and let himself think about things. It didn’t even matter what he thought; the thinking was the point. After fear of the police it was loneliness, he remembered now, that had driven him on. Thoughts of Mr. Oliver and George and Polly and the Ghost and a girl he saw over at the Emporium one night standing in a window winding her brassy hair in her hands. Thoughts of his brothers and sister and his mother. The tenderness he felt sending him off looking for more of it.