One of the attendants, a slim man wearing a white coat over a gray long-sleeved jersey, carefully straightened the man’s arms and then, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them, folded them over the man’s stomach. The man’s eyes were open and he was looking straight up. It was clear that the fallen man was dead. This fact spread through the crowd. People gasped and somebody — it sounded like a man — began to cry.
The limp body was lifted onto a stretcher, placed in the ambulance and carried away.
Delvin and Josie stayed until the area had begun to clear. Far down the street, under a large sycamore tree, two colored boys stood in the street, pulling a piece of rubber between them as they watched the dispersing crowd. A policeman asked Delvin if he had seen the accident.
“Nawsuh,” he said, “I didn’t. I come out and saw the gentleman on the ground.” He’d known he was dead though, he said.
“How is that?’ the policeman, a man with white-blond hair and a creak in his voice, asked.
“I use to work in a funeral parlor.”
“Around here?”
“Nawsuh. Up in Illinois.”
The policeman asked what his name was and what business he had in Rance City, but before Delvin could give him the name he had used on the work farm — Custis Jones — he was called away.
Delvin knew better than to open his mouth with the authorities. Whatever you said, there was no telling how they would take it. Why had he done it? What was wrong with him? He was a fugitive for goodness’ sake.
Josie had edged off and disappeared around the corner. Delvin couldn’t pull himself away until long after the dust had settled and the crowd had moved on. The store personnel returned to their tasks. Inside the door the mules stood in dimness at a hitching rail. They were eating out of feedbags. The gray stamped one foot and swished its short black tail. Delvin watched them thinking — he didn’t know what he was thinking.
“Let’s head over to the tracks,” Josie said.
“You change your mind about coming along?”
“I’m stud’n it.”
As they walked through the small colored quarter — shotgun houses painted in flat strong colors (yellow, blue, green) faded to a soft cloudiness — Delvin had the feeling he was being followed. When he turned around to look he couldn’t see anybody suspicious. A boy down the street was turning his dog in a circle with a piece of pork rind. A girl tossed a jacks ball against the low brick wall sunk in the grassy face of a small hill before the Antioch Christian church. A man dusted with his yellow handkerchief the hood ornament of a Pontiac automobile parked in front of the Casual Grocery. People on front porches waited for news of the death that would soon provide an evening’s chinning material. But no sleuths, no lurkers. Still, as they walked he felt as if somebody was on their trail.
“You’re just shook up,” Josie said. “Death’ll do that to any man.”
“I’ve seen death before,” Delvin said, though the sudden sharpness of the mule’s kick and the man falling as he did, straight down with his arms thrown out, had shocked him. He really wanted to go off by himself and think about what he’d seen, let the troubled, disconnected feelings run through him. Too quick, he had thought. Too impossibly quick. What did it matter what you did? It made him sick to think that.
They crossed the double tracks and walked along them toward a low place that was bridged by a creosoted wooden trestle. On the other side, where the tracks curved in toward a pecan grove, was the town’s small hobo camp. Just before they reached the trestle Delvin said he didn’t want to go down there right then. He wanted to stay in town. He returned along the tracks without Josie who said he’d wait for him at the camp.
On his way he met no one he thought might have been following. But when he reached the quarter and began to walk its dusty gray dirt streets he again sensed that somebody was behind him.
He stopped in the shady yard of a little frame church and sat at a picnic table under a big pollarded magnolia and wrote another letter to Celia. Having an interest in a woman gave a man something to do in unsettled times. He told her about the dead man.
