Not that Delvin mentioned any of this. The Ghost, who had told him, laughed about it, but he was on Delvin’s side in the matter, if there was a side, as long as Delvin didn’t try to push in on the driving. Conspiring young ’uns wasn’t much to get charged up about. Not compared to what he found out about what had haunted him the last four years. The old trouble — the shooting, the flight, the law — so the Ghost confirmed, had all been a figment on top of a figment. For a while that busted him up good. As he stood out in the street before the Home on his first day back, still dusty from the rails, the Ghost had come up behind him and cried Boo! Delvin had jumped like a poked dog. The Ghost gave him a big fool’s grin. He’d grown tall, skinny, and had an orange fuzz settled on his face.
“Expected you back sooner’n now,” he said.
“How’s that?” Delvin said.
“That old business.”
“What so?”
“The one bout shooting that white boy?”
“You heard anything?”
“Nothing ’cept there wadn’t no white boy shot.”
Delvin re-experienced a clutching sickness in his gut. “You sure about that?”
“Wadn’t nothing but a wisp.”
“I don’t believe you.”
And he didn’t, wouldn’t, until the Ghost walked him aside, led him into the shade of a a big half-peeled sycamore and there told him what was so: there’d been no trouble anybody’d been looking for him about. No Chattanooga white folks had even mentioned negroes shooting. “They’s probably too ashamed to,” the Ghost said.
Delvin had stretched both hands out and eased himself close against the tree. The bark smelled of tree life. He pressed his face against the smooth skin. The Ghost took a step closer but he didn’t touch him. “We’d uv told you but we didn’t know where to write.”
Delvin felt a loose trailing feeling like the ragged tail on a kite falling across the sky. He’d heard this, stray asides or a word let slip, but he realized none of that had he believed. Now what was so swung on him like a club and got through. It was as if he was hearing it for the first time. Tears welled in his eyes, a few, small, crisp as berries. He waited for them to fall but they didn’t. They made a smear where his fingers touched them. He felt a wobbling in his chest, a raveling. The feeling that had come over him in the train yard — of happiness and relief and anger and dumbfoundedness and a solemn castigation that melted as he felt it into a smooth and easygoing slide, of sorrow mixed with joy — came on him again. Lord, I’ve survived. That boy survived. He wanted to go find him — if there ever was a boy, that one who had shouted — and kiss his face. What luck. And what a shamfaced, goddamn— Agh. The professor. Celia. Celia. What luck. When he turned around from the tree, he was laughing — shaking and laughing and crying and about to fall over; the Ghost had to hold him up by the shoulders.
They would sit out in the yard on sunny days drinking Miss Foster’s Punch and talking about what they’d experienced in the world. The Ghost had taken to wearing big Redtone boots, and he did a stomp around the yard to show Delvin how well they fit. He carried keys on a long yellow chain that he said was gold but wasn’t. He was still an angel turnip, though he lied about this and claimed he had the girls at the Emporium eating out of his hand.
“Those caledonias do anything for a man in a big car,” he said, and they both laughed. It was like they could make up anything they wanted and have it be true.
Delvin, leaning back in the big canvas folding chair, breathed in the smell of pine seeds and sun-baked grass and felt for a moment that he was in heaven. A few feathered clouds with an unchased, slowpoke, summery look seemed like they’d still be there tomorrow. The lilt of the new boy’s sweet voice came from the porch, interrupted now and again by Mr. Oliver’s rich barreltone correcting a pronunciation or offering a remark on some aspect of the latest reading. Like Delvin, the boy — and Mr. Oliver — preferred the parts concerning trips and traveling. Delvin missed his old intimacy with Mr. O, but he was not particularly jealous. To have it again he would have to return to being the boy he once was and he was no longer that boy.
What he was now was shaky and fraught; confused, he thought, about half the time, scared — jumpy, he told Winston, the Ghost — full of excuses and plans. . and desires, he said, speaking the word softly as if afraid just the word would invoke some bustling overriding particular; itching, he said, thinking as he spoke of his attempts to appear blasé, indolent even, while at the same time — as he thought, and spoke — flexing the muscles in his forearms until the Ghost told him to quit showing off what he didn’t have. He picked pine seeds out of their little single wings and ate them one at time and listened to the easy spell of the old knights and waited for what was coming.
