Ginny Gall

Delvin liked the young man’s clothes that were soft gray and had gleaming black buttons. He remembered the gems he had stolen from the shop on Adams street. Where had they gone to? He had carried them in his pocket but somehow they had fallen out, all but the diamond and the cat eye. These two had disappeared as well, lost on the way to the orphanage, or somewhere after he got there. Only a yellow piece left that had somehow by now disappeared too. He felt helpless. Unable to save himself.

He wondered where his sister and brothers were.

As the workers cleaned up and the dismantled body was placed in the hearse and the reclamation party made their way back to the funeral home where the body would be prepared for shipping, by train, to Chicago, and the young man, who knew that the cycle of time is endless, turned his back without sentiment on the green fallen world of east Tennessee, Delvin continued to think of his siblings. The twins had been adopted from the orphanage by a family, so the director had told him, who took them to their farm in Texas. Colored folks owned land out there, she had said, not just little garden plots but whole ranches. They raised beef cattle and grew wheat on the north Texas plains. Delvin wished he could fly out there and see them. Whistler had a little scar on his knee where he had fallen under the bumper of a car he was teetering on trying to hit a horse fly with a rag. Warren liked to sing a little song he called “Homeward” that he said he learned from a woman in a gold dress at the Emporium. Coolmist had picked the song up and she sang it some nights as she washed up out on the back porch. He liked to listen to her splashing water and singing the song in the savory darkness as he lay in bed. Where his sister was he didn’t know. She had been standing on the running board of a dusty Ford truck the last time he saw her, wiping her face with a huge red bandana. Had she gone to Texas too? Nothing really seemed to get her down. He was afraid something would. It amazed him how people could get lost in the world.

Soon enough in his early years of dreaming Delvin discovered the second floor, shut off behind a switchback staircase, and climbed up there. The doors along a dim, sullenly carpeted hallway were shut so tightly they seemed at first to be locked, but they weren’t. They opened on bed and sitting rooms each fully appointed, everything, including the beds, mummified under big wheat-colored dust cloths. He slapped a bed to see the dust rise in clouds and stood gazing, halfway in a dream, at the motes and powdery fluff slowly resettling. The light coming through the thick, wavy glass windowpanes seemed ancient. It brought to mind his mother’s stories. He wished that if he looked closely he might catch sight of her cavorting in a red shiny dress in an antique world, but he knew such thinking was a lie. In one of the bathrooms he stood before a bleached mirror, choking himself with both hands. He pulled his hair, drawing it out above his head. He crossed his eyes and made faces as grotesque as he was able. Once he brought Mrs. Parker’s kitchen shears up there and cut his hair short on top, almost down to the skull. Why he did that — when they asked — he couldn’t say, but he liked staring into one of the second-floor mirrors at himself. He lay on his back on one bed or another, gazing at the ceiling, trying to slow his heart down to a stop. He wanted to jump into eternity, poke around, see what was there, and jump back quick before the devil caught him. He sprang up and danced wildly. His bare feet slapped the floor. He whirled and capered. “Oh, oh, oh,” he cried, “I am nobody’s child.”

Before long he was eight, then he was nine; in another minute he was twelve.

2

In the evenings Delvin would read to Mr. Oliver. The mortician had come on him in his study lying on the green leather couch scrutinizing a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He barked at him to take his feet off the leather, then asked what he was studying.

“I can’t make all of it out,” Delvin said, “but I think I get the draw of it.”

“Which one you reading, boy?”

“This is one called Macbeth. It’s about a greedy Scotsman.”

“That is a mighty tale,” Oliver said, though he was unfamiliar with it. He owned the volume as he owned most of his books: because they gave him a feeling of substance. “Maybe we can study that one out together,” he said.

Delvin liked the idea.