“You’re just shook up,” Josie said. “Death’ll do that to any man.”
“I’ve seen death before,” Delvin said, though the sudden sharpness of the mule’s kick and the man falling as he did, straight down with his arms thrown out, had shocked him. He really wanted to go off by himself and think about what he’d seen, let the troubled, disconnected feelings run through him. Too quick, he had thought. Too impossibly quick. What did it matter what you did? It made him sick to think that.
They crossed the double tracks and walked along them toward a low place that was bridged by a creosoted wooden trestle. On the other side, where the tracks curved in toward a pecan grove, was the town’s small hobo camp. Just before they reached the trestle Delvin said he didn’t want to go down there right then. He wanted to stay in town. He returned along the tracks without Josie who said he’d wait for him at the camp.
On his way he met no one he thought might have been following. But when he reached the quarter and began to walk its dusty gray dirt streets he again sensed that somebody was behind him.
He stopped in the shady yard of a little frame church and sat at a picnic table under a big pollarded magnolia and wrote another letter to Celia. Having an interest in a woman gave a man something to do in unsettled times. He told her about the dead man.
His face, he wrote, had a puffed-up, stubborn look, as if he was refusing what had come for him. Get up and run, Delvin had wanted to yell to him.
He was a short man, slim, maybe hiding a secret flaw or vice he wanted no one to find out about. Maybe he owed money, maybe he had recently hurt somebody he cared for. Soon he’d be naked in a room he’d never visited, might never have thought of. Washed and cleaned of his last bit of earthly dirt and dust. Mr. Oliver always left just a little place of unwashed skin so the deceased could be recognized, he said, by the dust that awaited him.
This was not true but he wrote it anyway.
He stopped writing. A little boy in blue shorts stared at him from the street. Delvin waved — the boy continued staring at him — and went back to his letter.
I’ve felt for the last hour or so that somebody’s following me. It’s an odd feeling, but familiar, and that’s odd. When I saw the man fall down — when I saw he was dead — I thought What does it matter what you do? I hate thinking that. It’s got to matter. I felt so frustrated. It was like the words were written in the dirt and I wanted to rub them out. But they were in my head. I want to rub them out of there but I can’t. What does it matter? Aren’t we supposed to. .
He stopped. No one out in the street looked suspicious; maybe his tracker had ducked into a house or store. Or maybe it was a different kind of follower. What kind was that?
I’m on my way back to Chattanooga, he wrote.
I think of you off at school. It’s hard to picture. Big buildings I guess. I saw a college once — on top of a mountain, but it was a blacksmith’s college. They had fires in caves. Where was that? I studied with Mr. Oliver at home. We read all of Shakespeare and many of the classics like Sir Walter Scott and those boys. Fielding and Tobias Smollett, who wrote a very funny book. Englishmen. Except for Othello they didn’t have any colored folks over there. Daniel Defoe. He wrote a scary book about the black plague. It had nothing to do with negro folk.
He was rambling, passing time, making up his life. Out in the street a small man with a shiny black head stood looking at him. He was fanning himself with a large yellow straw hat. When he saw Delvin notice him he started toward him. He walked straight up the little two-track church driveway, came up to Delvin and stuck out his hand.
“What’s that?” Delvin said. He shook the man’s small puffy hand.
“My name is Ornelio P. Rome,” the man said in a high, slightly hollow voice with a little stuttery wheeze toward the end (pleasant for all that). His shaved head, the color of the dark shine on a crystal ball, gleamed.
“Did the professor send you?” Delvin asked, suddenly sure that was it.
“Sho nuff he did.”
Mr. Rome put his hat back on. It dwarfed his face and made him look like a wise child. Delvin just caught himself from laughing. Mr. Rome was wearing a stained and rumpled slightly shiny green linen suit.
Raring back into a squared-off stance, chest thrust forward so his flesh pressed against the buttons of his dirty ruffled sky-blue shirt, with his hands on his hips, the little man in a cracked approximation of the professor’s voice said, “Professor Carmel has this to say to you: ‘Continue on, my boy. Do not be daunted and do not feel as if you have to catch up to me. Life takes us in the direction we are meant to go. We do not know who we may meet, how long we may travel along side by side, or when we may part. If you and I have come to a parting, then fare thee well, my boy, godspeed and thanks for your company.’”
By time he finished the speech, for that is what it was, he was wheezing more heavily and making little tick tick tick noises. Mr. Rome had removed his hat during the last bit. He brandished it before him like an offering. Delvin almost took it, but the gesture was preceding a half bow.
“O. P. Rome, Verbatim Messenger, at your service,” he said.
“Verbatim?” Delvin didn’t know whether to laugh or clap.
“Word for word. Word by word. You express in your own personal form what you want to say and I will repeat it to your recipient, verbatim — word for word — so there is no mistake as to your intentions.”
“How about the, uh, what is it — the feeling?”
“Ah, yes — the tone, the timbre, the gusto, or lack thereof. Yes. There, my boy, is where you find the art. Any parrot can be taught a speech. But only a great actor — no, not even an actor — a great expresser, let us say, can put across a verbatim line. An actor — you never can be sure if he means what he’s saying. Every line sounds sincere. But with yours truly, it’s clear where the meaning begins and where it leaves off and we return to the ordinary business of living. I take it you were moved by your friend’s. . enthusiasm?”
“Why, yes, I was,” Delvin said, still wanting to laugh or at least chuckle. “How is the professor?”
“Dauntless, but sad, I would say, moody a little, more weary than he would like to admit, but valiant still, a great captain of the everlasting road.”
“I’d say I’ve grieved for him, but I’ve been so busy trying to catch up with him that I hadn’t had time to settle down and really pine. How much do you charge for a message?”
“Two dollars for that last.”
“Could you repeat it?”
“Yessir. You get one free repetition. Then the price is a dime.”
“Fine.”
The man repeated the message with the same worldly-wise brio.
“It’s kind of a farewell,” Delvin said.
“I would say it fits into that category.”
“Do you have set messages, or does everybody have to make up his own?”