He still thinks of Celia, but she is a cattercorner, endways Celia now. And why shouldn’t she be? Once he raged and spit on the ground and beat his hands into the dirt as his insides crumbled and splintered to bone in his chest. He moaned like a dog, and far out in the Babylon field at Burning Mountain he hollered his sorrow into the wind that blew everything lost into the black pine woods. At Uniball he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the streaked dirt. Loss become unified grief breathed in the dirt until he was swimming down through the richness of soil and drifting among the big limestone plates and the secret caves of pure water that washed him clean of everything but his humanness. You could lose your mind, lose your soul, lose your day count, but you couldn’t lose that. He had cuts on his forearms from trying to. In Uniball he slashed his own face with the heated edge of a file and the cuts had ridged up so tight his face for a year felt pulled to one side. Somewhere he picked up a limp. He limped into the courtroom for the last trial; the limp hadn’t changed anything.
For a while Celia wrote him and then the letters fell off. He pictured words like leaves sailing in a chill fall breeze. “What has become of you?” he asked. Asked the last address he had for her. The letters came back stamped in red: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Oh but, Mr. Postman, she is known. “I know her,” he cried. “I know her better than she knows I know her.” He built her from the scraps available. Scraps was all they were. Curls and shreds and discards. But enough. Her five foot six of blueblack body. A sheen on her like the dew on a butternut bush. Her hair crisp and shining, catching the light so the blackness turned into a coppery gleam like the gleam of the world in its earliest days. Her eyes black as pieces of the night saved uncut for the day. Quick-mindedness. A quietude about her. Wondering at the world. Feeling around. A jump-upness. She smiled and he held this smile in an enterprise of the heart that was ever growing. Now gone. He wrote her family but they didn’t write back. PLEASE OPEN THIS, he wrote on the envelopes and underlined it, hoping in a way that somebody would open the letter, maybe a passerby who knew her, knew who she was and would answer him. Finally somebody did. Her sister, Sheila, whom she almost never mentioned. Wrote him a few words on a sheet of pink paper. “My sister was married a year ago, to a man from Shreveport, a doctor. They have a lovely little baby boy. She does not need to hear from you again.” He wrote back to the sister, asking for more and thought maybe I will leapfrog over her to Celia and knew this could not be. He lay down under a big hickory tree and cried until his throat was sore. For a while he continued to write letters but one day he stopped. He started a letter and quit in the middle. He sat at the edge of Big Egypt field waiting for Tulip to bring up the mules. The stub of pencil was worn down so small he could hardly grip it. He wrote: “I watched a big old redwing hawk take a pigeon in the air. .” and stopped. He decided nothing, he only quit. Since then not a missive word on paper.
But still, fading as they go, the words come to him. He writes stories about her now. Stories about some woman, some slipping-away woman, who runs barefoot into a sliding surf and laughs until she makes herself sick.
Up ahead the round, stuccoed and whitewashed well with its crosstree and six buckets on separate ropes. Once at Burning Mountain he tried to escape by jumping into the well. Those were his crazy years.
Not that the escapements have stopped. He has a list: fires set in the drying corn of fall, bullfrogs thrown into the supposedly electrified fence to short-circuit it, tunnels sworn to lead to open fields of sweet grass beyond the woods; he hid under mounds of green peppers and piles of cotton seeds, crouched in garbage, jumped off the back of trucks, lit out across fields, faked sick, attempted to bribe guards, simply turned away from the group crowded around the captain and ran for it.
But the well. That is legend. He tried to swim his way out through tunnels Bennie Combers swore were there. A great underground river Bennie said that would take him quickly to the big river. Plenty of room to draw breath. But there was no river, no room for breath. He got turned around and nearly lost his life, swimming downward in the dark. They hauled him out with a scrap of net he was barely able to crawl into.
No, well, no, not today, he thinks, the sunlight like warm cream on his bare arms. Not today a swim into the dark.
He wore himself out on those early escapades, wore out the craziness. He got a reputation, and cognomen, as a willful, uncooperative prisoner, UNC in capital letters on the yellow manila folder that goes with him as he makes his way around the state prison system. The sun is sticky on his face. He could wipe it off like sap from his arms and hands and clean it from his face but he doesn’t want to. The light and heat soak into his body. He unbuttons his shirt, pulls it away from his chest. The spray of scanty corkscrewed hair soaked in sunlight. You can take your shirt off if you want to, but nobody with any sense takes his shirt off under a sun like this. A black man burns just like a white one. He pulls the blue-and-gray-striped cloth away from his chest. He smells his body odor, sour as oakwood and comforting. Just working a button through a buttonhole gives him a sense of freedom. So does walking across the yard with nowhere the white man told him to go, returning by his own will to the barracks.
He steps along to the well. Milo lets go his arm, grabs one of the long galvanized buckets and lowers it. Delvin listens to the bucket clank hollowly against the sides. He feels a generation older than the boy who jumped into that other well. He leans over the parapet far enough to dip his face into the column of cool air the bucket stirs up. Leaning slightly to the side he can see the sky reflected in the black water. He jumped not toward that pinned-down blue but toward the stars. When you bring the water up it is neither blue or black, it is clear as crystal. They say it tastes of sulfur, but the taste is more like the mold on a old piece of hoop cheese.
Milo pulls steadily on the rope. The bucket, spilling water as it comes, reaches the top.
Delvin presses his hand and then his face against the chilly wet galvanized metal. The feel of it sends him back into his dreams. Celia speaking to him from the rainwet front steps of her friend’s house. She is telling him to read — who was it? Douglas? No. Freeman. This goes by in a zip. He hasn’t thought of Freeman for years, has forgotten him. A writer first mentioned by the professor. Well, these books, these volumes written to prove the black man deserves his freedom, are all right. They make you, while you read them, free. Books come in packed in sacks of rice, sacks of salt. They are directed to particular inmates but the included instructions are ignored. Once in a while the inmates get visitors, wives and mamas and shamed weeping daddies gathered in the fenced-off portion of the yard under a big live oak. You can socialize. In gunny sacks they bring pies and apples and kumquats and pieces of molasses candy wrapped in a wax paper twist. These bits of food are all that is allowed in. No books, no hardware, no toiletries, not even soap. There are no chairs, people sit on the ground or squat on their heels, men who will be back to work Monday morning in sharecropped cotton fields, women who will be cooking for a dozen or stooping with the men in the fields hoeing cotton or picking it or in summer cropping tobacco. They bring fresh-squeezed cane juice in glass jars, blue jars children hold to the light to see the colors in.
He dips both hands in the bucket — forbidden, but he’s forgotten this rule, for now — and splashes water on his face. He holds his face up to the sunlight and feels the cool burning as the sun takes the water back.