Ginny Gall

He tried to calm her and was able to for a while. He was frightened and wondered if she had a knife on her. But he was a kind man and was saddened by the trouble she described. That little boy — like many very young colored children — was a pretty little thing. Miller had brought her in behind the closed back door, but he didn’t take her upstairs. As she came close to him he smelled the rich rank odor that he associated with the jungles of Africa, a smell of the untamed and unknowable world that both taunted and fascinated him, the smell that was her mix of pomade and junk perfume and bad food and fear sweat blended with the whole combination of dust and wash water and hog grease and happiness and terror and fealty and love juice and sooty lantern wicks and coal oil and hallelujahs and the sweet stink of old aunties bending down to kiss little boys on the mouth and the half worn away miseries in the heart of a woman with no stake but pride and humility in such a world as this. And in Cappie’s case too the ashy smell of lye soap and the sour tokay wine she used like a tonic. An assortment added to his own characteristic sour smells, smell of new clothes and worry and pickles and dryness of soul and lingering stinks of exclusion and distemper and forlornness and milk and stale bitter cheese. Both of them were attracted by the smell of the other.

Miller felt in his groin the customary stirring he thought of as soundness of spirit and life-giving and he was afraid he would wither and die without. But he was scared. He talked to her in a steady and precise way that only infuriated her further, choking her heart until in frustration and despair she struck him hard in the head with her stiff laminated purse — once and then more than once — and left him lying on the warped wooden floor of his back hall.

She was picked up for drunk later on the street outside the dress shop where Delvin had received his instruction.

In the jail she screamed and threatened, banging her hands on the doors until the jailer, a man because the woman who usually tended to the drunk or fighting negro women was home sick with influenza, until this man, Shorty Burke, a dreamer who in seven months would be stabbed in the neck and killed by a woman he’d been in love with since the second grade, threw buckets of cold pump water four times at Cappie until she stopped yelling and slunk off to a corner where she sat holding her wounded knee, crying, and fitfully sleeping, until the shift change at first light when through the high windows of the old stone cell the eastern light, in a trick of play that neither the architect or the builder or the police chief himself had considered, at this time of year threw a single beam of radiant pale yellow light against the bars, making them shine like silver rods and crosses marking some heavenly spot on earth.

She was let out — she had the money to pay her fine — and was able to make her way home in the emollient, fribbly sunshine to see her child. He still sat in his little chair. He had slept in the chair but only after fatigue pulled him reluctantly down. Through the afternoon and evening, even as his sister fed him from a bowl of fried grits, forking the crisp bits of corn mash into his mouth with a stained fork as she liked to do, pretending that he was her baby, he hardly noticed anything. Through the meal and then through the lengthening twilight into evening with its hoots of men walking in the street and its soft calls of young women walking arm in arm wearing their loose shawls and then into the cries of pain and loss that marked the late hours, he stayed fixated, turning in his fingers the two small gems shaped like cat eyes, one clear as clear water and the other deep yellow, almost brown, that he had kept, and had polished that afternoon with the Astoria polish his mother used on her treasure of six silver spoons she kept in a wooden case that had once held a silver Colt pistol. These gems in the faint light from the kerosene lamp set on the floor beside him shone with an artificiality that drew him, a strangeness and allure that even as he stared at them he felt haunted by as if he was already stranded off in some country where the light of such delicate beauty never reached. They were part, he knew, of the stories his mother had told him and read to him of kings and treasures and palaces in far lands — lands that these jewels proved were so close, so nearby, that if he only thought hard enough he could somehow, without knowing any other key or possibility, get himself to.