Mr. Beall looked up from the tea he’d been steadily slurping for the last five minutes and asked if he would accompany him to town tomorrow. Delvin, brought sharply back, said yes sure.
The next morning he waked as Mrs. Beall was bringing the fire up in the kitchen. She didn’t always make the fire, or when she did, she’d bank it for restarting in the morning. Just the two of them out here, she said — we don’t need it. But this morning she built it up and made a large breakfast for them. While he and Mr. Beall were eating she packed a lunch in a small shellacked wicker basket. They had given him clothes to replace the dirty ones he showed up in. He carefully folded these and set them on the soft green coverlet on his bed and changed back into the washed originals. No one said anything to him, but he knew what was up. When in town Mr. Beall stopped the truck, handed him the little basket and told him it was time for him to go on his way he was not surprised. The old man pressed two one-dollar bills into his palm. Delvin hesitated a moment as if there was something he wanted to say, as if you could in a slender second or two like this somehow recount the goodness you’d found, the walks in the garden and the light shining unhampered over the fields and especially the human company, its softened edges and wandering, sympathetic talk, but there was no way to do this; he thanked him for his hospitality and started across the courthouse square. Four big water oaks squatted at the corners around the big rough granite building. He felt a sharp aloneness. He didn’t know where to go. The town was small but he had to walk half an hour before he discovered a small colored neighborhood. It was really only two short streets past the cotton gin and a couple of warehouses. Cotton lint hung in the trees. It looked like dirty snow had fallen. Women, their lower lips pouched with snuff, gazed at him from their front porches. He went in a store and bought a grape soda. The woman who sold it to him studied him carefully. She seemed as if she would let him go without speaking, but as he turned away, she drummed her big fingers on the counter and asked, Who you visiting?
I been out here to see the Bealls, he said.
Oh, you’re that boy.
Yes mam.
You off again.
Well, I would be, but I don’t quite know the way.
Looks like you don’t know how either.
No mam, I don’t.
Where is it you headed?
Chattanooga.
I thought you was from Atlanta.
Well, I am, but I got folks to visit up in Tennessee.
She studied him with a sharp black eye. Her face was grayish as if she was not well, a thin woman wearing a khaki dress almost completely covered by a worn gray apron. Without turning her head she called out, Hankie!
A voice outside the back door called back, Mam?
Come in here.
A skinny man in faded overalls came in carrying a bucket.
Go over yonder and ask Mr. Sterling if he’s going up to Chattanooga this morning.
Yessum.
She said all this without taking her eye off Delvin. You had your breakfast? she said.
Yes I have.
Well you can go wait out behind the store til Hankie gets back. Take your drink.
Delvin exited by the back screen door into a yard that was filled with stacked-up wooden crates of all sizes. On one side a bushy camphor tree with elegant dark leaves. On the other perched above a shallow ravine a small board cabin. He walked to the ravine and looked down into it. Trash of all kinds filled it. A pig tied to a stake ate melon rinds. On the other side two skinny brown dogs glanced up and went back to their meal. Delvin couldn’t see what they were eating. Odd that they didn’t bother the pig. On the far side of the ravine was a wide path bordered by a half-broken-down board fence. Beyond the fence were houses in dirt yards, a few fruit and chinaberry trees. A girl in a pale blue dress walked along the path. She carried a large basket of laundry.
Hope your day’s going well, Delvin said across the divide.
The girl didn’t answer. He watched her continue along the path and turn down a street out of sight.
He finished the drink and put the bottle in the little basket, sat down on a crate and began to make up a story. He hadn’t done much writing work, but he figured his trip would give him many things to write about. He thought about the ex-confederate soldier living in the cottage. He might tell a story about him. This old white man who loved a black woman who had betrayed him with another. And so the man, who was much older than the young black woman, had given her and her husband the farm he owned just to make her stay close to him. He made them sign papers so they wouldn’t move away or throw him off the place. He had even paid them to stay, a salary drawn off his accounts that he had set up from the sale of property he owned here in town. That was why the couple didn’t do too much work. They were on salary. Maybe that was the story. Delvin wished he had a notebook with him. He had left in such a hurry that he hadn’t thought about it. Remembering, his fear came back. Maybe he should stay out of C-town longer. He had been away a few months shy of a year. The police were probably looking for him still — or ready to start again if they caught a lead. They would always be looking for him. A sadness crept in on him. It was like an old unfriendly cat. Just then the girl came back around the corner. She still carried the now empty basket.
That your job? he called, delivering laundry for the neighborhood?
It was a foolish thing to say, he knew, but the girl’s prettiness confused him.
The girl didn’t look at him. Least I got one, she said.
He thought he caught a glimmer of a smile and didn’t feel so alone. His old fantasy of being the intrepid man alone — one of his fantasies — had fallen quickly apart. The morning had a dewy, comfortable feeling to it. Salvia and mexican sage bloomed along the sides of the ravine. He walked along the way the girl had gone — she’d disappeared into one of the yards up ahead, but he didn’t see a way to cross unless he wanted to wade the rusty little stream at the bottom, and he didn’t. He liked wearing clean clothes, liked the feeling of fullness from breakfast. Liked waiting.
He returned to the yard behind the store. The sky was touched up here and there by a few high clouds like smears of white. The day would be hot. He took a seat on a crate under the camphor tree. There were camphor trees in the negro section of the municipal cemetery in Chattanooga. He wondered who was on the funeral list. Mr. O studied the paper and listened to stories from the neighborhoods of Red Row and kept a list, sometimes on a sheet of linen stationery in his bedroom, sometimes simply in his head, of the ones who would most likely be needing his services soon. He never spoke up ahead of time, but he was ready when the day came. Often before he was called. Mrs. Turnipseed was on the last list he’d seen, a middle-aged widow dying of bowel cancer. Her whole house smelled of shit, somebody said. One of the boys he smoked cigarettes with in the alley. And Rufus Wainwright who had taken to his bed with rheumatism. He lay in a room wallpapered with newspapers, listening to band music on the radio, reading the headlines out loud. And they said little Eustace Rogers, eleven, who had fallen off the roof onto the sharp palings of an old wooden fence his father was keeping around, hoping to set it up in his yard, wouldn’t recover. There were others, the sick and the aged mostly, occupants of the waiting room, Mr. O called them, and Delvin had pictured them sitting in the colored-only room outside the heavenly office, their straw suitcases and carpetbags closed with string at their feet, old people and young, children too, some weeping, others stoical, others not understanding why they were there and maybe only slowly figuring it out. What was the weather like outside the window? There had to be a window. He pictured himself in that room. He would be looking out the window at whatever was growing in the yard. Probably mallow bushes and mock banana, a few straggly corn plants, a rosebush dripping pink blooms, tomato vines lying on the ground. He was coming to love the smell of the fields.