He wasn’t sure why he stopped himself and maybe he was making a mistake. It was right, when something said go, for you to go. He believed this, or thought he did. He wasn’t sure. Something about the letter, about what had happened in the last two days — he’d come on another sense of things. Small but particular, not a dominion, but an understanding. He couldn’t tell what it was but he knew he wasn’t going to make a sprint for the train. He waved again, a larger wave this time, and made a sign of good luck to the nomads settling into the open doors of the cars. In the west the sky was blue and streaked with long fish-tailed clouds.
As he walked back into town he felt a twice-settled weight in him, the dashed freshness of missing the train and the heavier bundle of this new loss. But it wasn’t a loss, the second one, this woman or girl who had driven away in the gray sweet-smelling morning in her own car. She wanted him to write her. He wanted to get back to his museum job and regular place in the world and now he did that.
The professor was glad to see him. He put him to wiping with a dry rag the glassine folders they stored the extra photos in. Delvin was happy to do this. He finished and then went out back to the little table and wrote a letter that he walked down to the post office and mailed. In it he told her how happy he was to meet her. He told her he would carry her with him everywhere and neither of them could help it one way or the other, that they were in each other’s life now and don’t worry he welcomed her into his.
He wanted them to put the letter on its way immediately and thought of carrying it himself part of the way. Her home was in the extreme western part of the state, other side from the way the professor said they were headed. They were on their way through the eastern towns and north then to Tennessee and on the professor said to Roanoke where he had people he liked to spend a couple of weeks with in the hottest part of the summer. Delvin was planning to get off in Chattanooga.
Back at the van he sat in the shade under the little orange awning writing another letter. Later a few boys came by, paid their nickels and he took them through the exhibits. They liked the pictures of baseball players. He didn’t show them the murder photographs and it was because he didn’t want them to feel bad. He didn’t want to be part of anybody feeling bad just now. One of the boys said the little painted reed baskets looked like Indian ware. Well, Delvin said, there was cross-marrying among Indian and colored folk, that was a fact. Another boy said he had Indian blood. The others began to joke at him and they made their way out of the van laughing. Delvin stayed inside. He needed to study the photos a while. This was something he did regularly. After supper he sat at the little fold-up table inside the van and studied photographs by the light of the coal oil lamp. The professor was off trying to get a donation from one of the churches. This was one of many such nights.
The next day they were on the road, headed for Cary. Then on to Dumont and then to Cromville. They drove past the long finger lake, Rommy Run. Inland gulls, white and gray, their sickle wings catching the late afternoon light, wheeled over the dark green waters of a little cove. They made it to Depburg by dark.
3
From time to time, but regularly, after the museum closed, after he wrote his letter to Celia and posted it, he studied the photographs. Looking at them — for signs, clues, entryways into mysteries, facts, solutions — he wondered if his own face were not a collection of hidden messages, like one of the notes posted on signboards at crossroads stores and post offices, readable by all, telling stories, revealing secrets, offering humorous bits or pitiful revelations; in the triangular piece of mirror they hung on the back door each morning for washing he began to study his face to discover what was there, what hidden messages or revelations were posted for the searchers of the world and the passersby. . and not just the traditional indicators such as a weak chin (his was short but square) or ferrety eyes (his were large and hazel), but others, the special sign in the slightly curled and hard-edged upper lip that he was a man who dreamed of silver flying fishes and an empty caleche on a tropic shore. . and a crease at the corner of his mouth that revealed the love of a duplicitous but comely woman who would leave him for a mule trader, say, who was losing his business to the tractor companies. . or a level gouge above his short chin that revealed his susceptibility to the taste of quince and vinegar pie. . a tiny curving indentation, a hook, at the edge of his left eyebrow that foretold hard days in the cotton and sweet pepper fields above the Acheron river (unknown to him as yet), as well as the throbbing soreness in his chest on evenings smelling of rust and sour pecans. . and the tiny indentation below his left nostril, put there by a wasp sting when he was three months old (he’d been told by Coolmist), that signified the suffering of humankind. .
The future, like a purple martin swooping in the last light of day, was almost near enough, clear enough, to see, to fix. . but then it was gone.
His face collapsed back into a pudding of dark lumpy skin. It had no character, he thought.
He went back to studying the faces of the mostly anonymous photographed negroes. These faces were fascinating to him. He had asked the prof why they didn’t take more pictures themselves, and the professor had said creation was not his line and besides he was baffled by some of the complex workings of that craft. Delvin himself was not particularly interested in taking pictures but it bothered him that they didn’t add more of their own manufacture to the lot. But they didn’t have money for a new camera and the one they had was busted when the professor threw it at a rabid coon.
Despite all this Delvin had begun to study the faces of those who came to view the exhibits.
He began to jot down descriptions of the clientele. He looked for signifying features, marks, signs. In this one he saw by the slant of a nose the confusion and the name-calling that was coming. In another down-shaded mouth he thought he perceived the impotent attempts to shift blame. In a drooping earlobe he saw bitterness against children. He liked the bumpy spots in faces. The knots and swellings. He himself had two small knots on his forehead and another just back of his chin on the left side. What they were caused by he didn’t know, but they worried him; he hoped they weren’t infant goiters. The hen’s egg on the forehead of a workman in Bayless fascinated him. He described it as a hen’s egg, duck’s egg, eagle’s egg, as a marble under the skin or a lump of custard. He wanted to run it between his fingers; squeeze the juice out of it, he wrote. The left half of one woman’s lip was swollen and droopy. She wanted to hide it with her hand (he wrote), but she’d decided not to. Bravely, she entered the museum with her head high. It was only as she re-entered the brilliant waxy sunlight that she ever so slightly flinched. He wanted to kiss her lip and tell her not to be ashamed and thought of Celia whose lips looked carved, long lips with the narrowest ridges running along their edge and tiny lines stroked vertically into them — lips he wanted more than anything to kiss. He described her face before he forgot. He kept the written-down description of Celia’s face and returned to it in the night, adding a little, taking a little away, raising her cheekbones slightly, tapering her eyebrows and plucking them. She was fading. Without the description he couldn’t picture her.
He turned to describing what was around him. The truck was once black: but now it’s gray, he wrote.
It’s becoming ghostly. We’re the ghosts of present, past and future, slipping through the towns. In the morning sometimes when there’s fog the truck disappears and no one can find it. It’s as if all this huge collection of photographs, of pictured history, was erased, as if it never existed at all. Something makes me want to cry. Not just for my own troubles, which are pointed and rolling right on, but for everybody’s. Each photographed face is something true about the world. The happy ones, the sad ones, the lost ones, the found, each one telling its story. The truck hauling this great assembly through the towns. The people, the dazed and the suffering. .