Past the Mt. Moriah cemetery where colored folk were buried under wire and worked-iron tombstones and stone tombstones that had been dug out of some mountainside and under tombstones made of clay pots and some made of wood. Among the graves a group of little colored boys moved about challenging the dead and the spirits of the dead and challenging the whole of life to come and the whole of life never coming again. One of them as the train began to pick up speed threw up a hand and waved, and Delvin, looking up from his notebook, waved back.
And onward, loose finally from the bindery and compaction of cities into the nondescript woodlands and raw weather-gouged fields and clay-streaked grassy pastures of that part of the country.
All these forms and folks and structures Delvin noticed, and some he wrote down in his notebook, the latest version, that was worn by now with sweat and wrung by his hands and bent back, its pages covered in his close and tight handwriting, filled with little stories of birds killed by freeze and sunshine stealing all the color from the grain fields and some woman busting some man outside a bar with her fists and all manner of names and lists of railroad companies and flowers and hymns from the Concord hymnbook used in Methodist churches and kinds of shoes and dances and equipment and road terminology and plow parts and military ranks and characters in Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott and perfumes and state capitols and freshwater fishes; and much pertaining to Celia including long sweaty passages keeping her informed of his troubling incapacities and failures of heart and his sense of lostness in the world and of the dawns when he woke terrified and shaking, passages never copied into his letters; and the names of friends and brief sections concerning their doings; and sections pertaining to his childhood, of the shanty floor smelling of coconut oil and of the songs his mother sung and of Coolmist leaning down to give him a kiss and of Spokes his little ragheaded doll and of Ri-Rusty his fluffy old dog and of banana pie and of skeeting in rainwater puddles in the street and of the lure of alleys and dead ends and of his mother fleeing into the wilderness wearing an organdy silk dress and of his brothers and sister singing along with Old Shaky Sims and his Talking Guitar and of the foundling home (lostling home, he wrote) where he learned to love potatoes and flute music and keened for freedom; and of the funeral parlor where when he was seven George held him up over the prep table to stare at the sunken, dented body and filmed-over eyes of Mr. Harvell Burns, former principal of Tucker Elementary school, allowing him to confront for the first time the obstinate bulkage of the dead, and Mr. Oliver waltzing to Mozart; and back-alley life that smelled at this time of year of crabapples crushed underfoot and dead bees and fired clay and spillings of crankcase oil; and of the terrible battles that took place among boys on this ground; and of the smell of summer mornings in the kitchen garden among squash flowers and staked bean rows and of all the distilled and perfumey odors of high summer; of the time Luther Burdle caught Smuckie Sparks in the ear with the old wooden golf club he’d found in the trash out at the Congress Country Club, cutting Smuckie’s ear in half and spraying blood onto Hollie Jo Davis’s white confirmation dress; and on and such and through the dribbles and castings and shucks of his life up to this moment as he sat under the overhang of a Tweety gondola headed west carrying a half load of sand (he’d thought the car was empty).
He turned the pages of the small gray book, reading the story of his life. In no other place, he thought, did this story exist, not even in his own head. Only here, and in the other four notebooks left at Oliver’s. This is what keeps me from disappearing. In these few years riding trains he had watched and recorded the drifting men rucky times had cast onto the rails. This train was filled with shufflers, jobless characters following the latest rumor of work. After a while the dirt and soot wore in. Seemed like it did. Sleeptalkers, sleepwalkers, divers and chokers, barabys and Airedales. A trainload of boys, he wrote, looking for work. It’s a race. Tramps, not the same as hoboes. And the ones who rode for years without ever saying a word. Sixty-two cars on this train, he wrote.
Thirty or forty riders. Say thirty-seven. Mostly white boys headed for (maybe) jobs in Memphis. Nine or ten colored boys. Many dressed in rags, or close to it. One has a yellow bandana tied around his head. A few boys carrying canvas sacks. A couple have suitcases. Soogans. Most of the colored boys aren’t carrying anything, maybe two or three have a few items tied up in handkerchiefs.
To the south clouds were filling up the hollow places in the pale sky, but they didn’t look like rain clouds, just frothy empties and leftovers from summer. The train was passing through grain fields; wheat, he thought. He stood and reached up to steady himself on the edge of the gondola catwalk. A white boy he didn’t at first see, boy with a high freckled forehead, just making his way along the narrow strip below the gondola rim, stepped on his hand.
“Hey,” Delvin said. “Watch those fingers, they’re precious to me.” He was feeling good, glad to be out in the wide world.
“If you want to keep em, chig, then get your ass off the train.”
The boy kicked at him, missed.
“You need to watch yo mouth as well as yo feet,” Delvin said.
He had been stuffing the notebook into his back pocket when the white boy stepped on him. He almost lost his grip — didn’t — but it was not worrisome, little aggravations happened on trains.
“I’ll watch you fly like a sack of shit off this train,” the boy said. He had fish-colored eyes and long pale eyelashes pretty as a girl’s.
A couple of africano boys on the other side of the gondola watched the exchange. Everyone proceeded on his way.
After a while Delvin made a course up the train to one of the two open boxcars and climbed in through the trap. Africano boys were in there talking. They saw Delvin and one waved him over. A burly boy with close-cropped hair said, “You the one that ofay kicked?”
“He didn’t exactly kick me,” Delvin said. “It was more of a step. Just missed being a stomp.”
“That white boy wants to fight about it,” another traveler said, a small, slender boy with not very recently conked hair, slicked back. He wore a long green shirt like some medieval woodsman. “All them white boys wants to fight. They gon come at us.”
“They sure like to mix it up,” another said, a blocky boy with a wide, friendly, scared face. “No questions about why or what for.”
“No why or what for in this world,” another said in a weary voice. He was tall and had narrow round shoulders.
“Long as they got the numbers,” another said.
They were all suddenly nervous.
A few pocket knives (if it came to that), a couple of round whittled sticks, a leather sap (the cracked leather showing the lead plumb underneath), and a bag of ball bearings in a canvas sack, these the weapons.
Down at the other end of the car a couple of unhappy, plain-looking white girls, one of them fat. The fat one interrupted chinning with her skinny buddy to hurl a couple insults at the negro end. A few white boys down there too, but they were just looking.
“Those men?” somebody asked, a dark-skinned boy unmemorable but for a small white scar cutting his left eyebrow in two. He was looking at the little group down the far end.
“They’s other ones coming,” said another boy — they were mostly, but for a couple, just leaving boy life for manhood, fresh travelers, hoboes, Chattanooga and upline angelicas trekked out of the hollows, headed west looking for work. They’d heard the mills in Memphis were hiring. The mills or the box factory or the riverside warehouses or the meat-processing plant, somebody, someplace. One, a skinny boy with pale gold freckles on a tan face, was so scared already his hands shook; he kept slapping them against his jeans. He was on his way to meet his sister in Tulsa, he said. She needed him to escort her down to Dallas for their brother’s wedding.