Ginny Gall

She reset her grip and dragged him into the house, which was cooler than outside and dim and hushed. The last few steps he had gone along with her, curious to see what a bonecracker was up to. Down a hallway paved in soft red carpet she knocked on the paneled white door of Mr. Oliver’s study and was invited by a grave tenor voice to enter. The big room with its vast oak desk with inlaid green felt top, its green leather couch and rug-upholstered armchairs, its tables with fresh flowers in clear vases and assorted mementoes from Mr. Oliver’s customers, its painting on the wall between the two tall windows of Wolfe Dying at Quebec, its rugs in painted patterns of red and green, was the fanciest room Delvin had ever been in. . if he set aside the front parlor of the Emporium. Recalling the fancy swags and silk bunting, the mural of the Queen of Sheba dancing for the enthralled King David — or was it Solomon — and the rose settees with the working ladies lounging on them like perfumed cats, a pang of longing for his mother touched Delvin.

Oliver, a discerning man, voluminous in his physical being and not without concern for others, said, “Boy, you’ve suffered a loss, haven’t you?”

Delvin didn’t want to discuss this with a stranger. “I’m doing fine,” he said.

“Why were you running?”

“To get away from that circus.”

“Rightly so, my young man.”

This made Delvin feel a little better. It troubled him that he would be frightened of the clowns, especially when no one else appeared to be. “What was it you wanted?” he said.

“I need an errand boy and a helper,” Mr. Oliver said.

“How much you pay?”

“Two dollars a week and keep.”

Delvin liked being in the room. He liked Mr. Oliver’s round fat face. Except for Long Dog Wilkins, The Negro Giant, Mr. Oliver was the largest man he had ever seen.

“Who’s your mama and daddy?” Mr. O inquired.

“I got none.”

“You’re on your own, son?”

“Been since I was near to five.”

Mr. Oliver laughed, a bubbly, analgesic laugh. “How old are you now?”

“Six and a half.”

“Where do you live?”

“At the Bell Home.”

“Oh, of course.”

Oliver contacted the home and made the arrangements for Delvin to stay at the mortuary. He had done this before, following a vague impulse to help little boys. He himself had been a little boy set out on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. At eight he had hoboed a train from Montgomery to Chattanooga where he had been pushed off a boxcar ladder, breaking his ankle on a switch tie. An old yard worker had come on him crying and taken him home and with the neighborhood healerwoman’s help straightened his ankle and put it in a poplarwood boxsplint. He stayed with this gentleman and his wife for three years before he began working for Mr. Duluth Mathis, the former owner of the funeral home. Mathis, who had no children, had eventually passed the business on to him. A bachelor, he looked now for other little boys he might fling a lifeline to. It loops back around to me, he would think as he sat in the big tub in his tile bathroom, feeling not so lonely, not so lost.

Delvin accepted the job and went to work, uneasily at first, fetching items from the pantry, doing light cleaning, digging in the garden and watering the flowers, hauling out trash and burning it in the metal drum out back, picking up pecans and bringing them in a yellow enameled bowl he wondered if stolen from kings, and staying close to Mrs. Parker, the cook, and to Polly, in case they needed a quick boy for anything. It offended him to work in such a place, and scared him and made him sad in a way he didn’t quite understand, but they fed him copiously at the big pine table in the kitchen where with the sidemen and the maids he had his meals, and he liked sleeping out in the little barn or shed behind the house, in a room beside the stalls that smelled of sweet hay and leather (that is, before he moved into the house to a small square bedroom off Mr. O’s big bedroom).