This is his fourth prison. He described (in earlier notebooks) the concrete floors at Burning Mountain, the red dirt floors at Uniball, the stone at Columbia, now the packed blue-clay floors at Acheron. Here when it rains, the floors became so slick you can hardly stand on them. In each prison he placed himself in this or that nook, in fields, under roof, walking across a dusty yard, standing under a graybeard tree looking out at rain pouring down in bright sunlight, squatting in a cotton field or tucked in his own deck address and darkest corner, and looked out at the world and wrote it down. They took the notebooks away, but he got more, bought more, that is, from whoever was selling them. He paid in whatever coin he could muster. Load-humping, errand work, decoying, the wealth accumulated at three cents a day from chopping cotton or picking vegetables, trade or capital turned over at the store. One of those, he would tell the clerk, one just like that one you’re scribbling into. The clerk each time had to be talked into it, sometimes paid extra or traded. But this was easy. No one can hold out against anything in prison, that is prison’s secret. No bit of information, no treasure secreted away, no practice, no escape plan or ruinous bit of felony behavior was secure. It is impossible to protect these safes and mental cashboxes. What held fast out in the world unraveled and fumed away in prison. Everybody walks around with fluxed, soggy insides. It’s okay. It is simply what you have to live with. No friend will protect you, no believer, no hard ass. They can’t even protect themselves. And it isn’t the various holes, pits, cabinets, closets, unheated tin sheds, Bake Houses and hotboxes the butchers stick reluctant or rowdy prisoners into. It isn’t beatings or starvation or forced labor in the killing sun. It is hopelessness. Delvin’s own sense of it, the crude stalled massing in his gut, comes back. This time not just in here. By now the disease has spread like a personal plague into all the corners of his mind. The world itself has in this way become infected. The long gray dirt road out there, slick as a gullet, running for miles through the sloppy, beat-down fields, the ragged (free) men they pass standing in ditches pushing gobs of clay into their mouths to quell hunger and for the minerals in it, the little boys shitting grease in the thin grass, the skinny, lacerated women not even turning to look at the truck passing. You see a griffe squinting into the sun and realize he isn’t seeing anything. One man has a goiter on his neck the size of a citron. He has to rip his shirts to be able to wear them. Country women humpbacked with rheumatism, children bowlegged with rickets and red-faced and slimy from pellagra, wasting from hookworm. Nobody has the money to fix anything that can make life endurable. Hammer toes and bunions and busted elbows and broken wrists and stomachaches that eventually turn out to be cancer except nobody learns that is the name for it because nobody calls the doctor and even if they did he would be the negro doctor just now dying himself of tuberculosis over in the little negro clinic in Sharpsburg; he’d be dead before they could piece together where it was you lived. In the whole prison no africano man who has ever lived on a street or a road that has a sign on it saying its name. Down these streets the drag-footed go.
And you lie on your back in the dawnlight pulled like a gray washrag up out of dumps and poisoned dews, listening to the little hermit thrushes and the killdeer and the meadow lark’s wakeful remarks, a man with a pure knowledge of himself like the philosophers and the alienists wish they could somehow come by, a knowledge gained not through manipulation and secondhand tittering but through means of the simple quest each of these imprisoned men is on, the standard issue of jail life: you are, in the end, only men: in the end you break: in the end you will not be able to hold out against even the least of it.
Here, now, as he moves from the infirmary porch out into the tireless sunshine, Delvin feels the truth of himself like a surplus malaria settling in. It is not all right but it is all right. Now Milo taking his hand — Carl has drifted away — pressing his forefinger down the row of knuckles sweetly and back as is his way, patting the fleshy place at the bottom of his palm. Except for scattered lumps of aching bone he can barely feel his hands, barely feel his arms; his feet have a life of their own and a great delicacy. He wants to lie down in the dust and roll slowly in it. Across the way at House Number 2, from the sterile shade of the overhang, Shorty Willis gazes at him. He’d have come out to knock him to the ground, if he didn’t have the dog. The cons think it is catching. They think all ailments are contagious and shrink from them, wounds, cripplings, maimings as well. In the dining hall they yelp from distant tables that the place ought to be cleared of these infect rats. In the barracks he will generally find his rack in an island of its own, the others shoved away from a teeming nobody wants to touch. Maybe find it in the yard.
Yet there are those who relish disease. The crazy boys and some of the lap nuzzlers will cozy up to him, asking if there is anything they can do. One, Dizzy Placer, will lick your sores if you have any to spare. Years ago the doctor cautioned him. “Don’t go letting any of these yardboys out here apply their treatments,” old Dr. Willy told him. Dr. Willy died of a busted ulcer none of the white doctors around Covington wanted to treat, groaning and calling out the name of a woman nobody had heard of — so Donell Brakage told him three years ago when he was resting up from an earlier malaria attack with the other kings of misguidance in Columbia penitentiary. That was before the last trial that let all but Delvin and Carl and Bony and Little Buster go free, pardoned for their crimes. Other lawyers reaped the crop the first lawyers sowed.
The sun is getting cozy on his neck, kittenish. He leans his head forward so the beam can find more flesh. Ripe sunlight a treasure beyond counting. So bright you have to look through your lashes to see. The heat seeps under his clothes, spreading along his back like a feather cape. In November they ride in wagons on top of the cotton to the gin. He always burrows in deep, loving the encasement and, if it was possible without being torn to pieces, would let himself be lifted up into the suction tube and tossed through the machinery to come out the other end mashed in the press inside a bale. Lying there like a caterpillar in his cocoon, waiting for some chinaman across the sea to jack the bale open and lookee here what I found. Oh knit me back up. He hasn’t started sweating yet.
Milo works his little trad on his knuckles. Delvin can smell the lime stink of the latrines. Last week it rained all week, but three days of sun this week has brought up the dust. A week of straight sun, and dust will whirl up in clouds the size of a county, wind-hauled a hundred miles to set an inch of topsoil down on top of some other county’s dirt.