Ginny Gall полностью

He turned on his belly and looked up at the porch where the new boy, Casey, named after the dead burned boy—“My real name is Henry,” he told Delvin, “but Daddy”—speaking of Mr. O—“likes Casey”—read outloud from antique adventures. He had a thin, pleasant voice. Delvin was a little jealous of him, but he tried not to let it show. The worry over vengeful pursuit by white boys had faded away, leaving an irresolute calm. Mr. Oliver was afraid his return might stir things up — vague things, stirred in a vague way — but Delvin saw this was as much because he wanted to be settled in with the new boy, some new boy, as anything else. He wouldn’t be able to stay here long, and this saddened him. He only half wanted to move on, though he figured it was time for him to. He sat in the kitchen with Mr. Oliver and Polly — who herself was married now, living with her husband, Curtis Rodell, a plumber’s helper, in a little cottage behind the big house — discussing what he planned to do. Polly wanted him to stay, but Mr. Oliver encouraged him to put his plans into action. He recommended college, but they both knew he was not really a candidate for that. Delvin had told him he wanted to write books and Mr. Oliver had been happy for him. That was just the sort of profession that appealed to him. Get right into it, he said. Don’t delay a minute. Start up and build you a head of steam. Mr. Oliver offered to stake him, to give him an allowance for a year or two while he got going. Delvin was reluctant to agree to this because he wasn’t sure how he wanted to go about things. I have more traveling to do, he said. I want to gather more information. Novels? Mr. O had asked, and Delvin had said he wasn’t even sure about that. He thought he might like to write about real things.

“Thus your travels, eh?” Mr. O said.

“I feel like I’m winding string onto a ball.”

He told them a little of what he had seen. It was, he thought, a rich but narrow vein, and not very deep.

“Deep’s in the heart, son,” Mr. O said. “But you already know that.” He reached across the red-striped oilcloth and patted Delvin on the arm and ran his thumb over the bone. His eyes were lively. Casey sat on a stool at the counter putting together a jigsaw puzzle: the Parthenon — in New York City, he told Delvin when he asked.

Sylvia, the new assistant, had told Delvin that these days Mr. Oliver was using a preparation he got from the doctor to get to sleep and he had other drugstore remedies to perk himself up, but Delvin saw no real sign of the preparations affecting him. There was the same risive look as always (riding like a pretty boat on his sea of sadness), maybe a tad more hectic. The boy Casey had his own room — Delvin’s old room — but he slept mostly in a little box bed in the corner of Mr. Oliver’s bedroom. Oliver kept the boy like somebody’d keep a fluffy little dog. The boy was generally sullen and fretful, but he had a pretty, clear yellow face and shiny hazel eyes that seemed to weigh everything they saw, not always favorably. As they were talking the boy got up without a word, grabbed a cracker from a plate of Graham crackers and honey Mrs. Parker was putting together and scooted out the back door.

“Just like you used to,” Mr. Oliver said, looking nervously out the kitchen window.

Delvin laughed. “Don’t strain yourself there, Pop.”

Mr. Oliver laughed. “I get so attached to you boys.”

“And who wouldn’t,” Delvin said, grinning ferociously.

The old man laughed again, his laugh slightly wheezy, a little hollowed out by time. The world was receding from him, leaving a space that nothing had quite filled in. Life in the end thievery’s fool. It made Delvin sad, gave him a trembling in his heart that he thought about on the pallet, smelling the thin sweetness of the hay in his nostrils, and he wanted to write these things down, or no, thought he should, maybe take some notes, but it was hard to do, hard while the facts stared him in the face, panting and wheezing. He would have to wait. Some things he could jot down: the patchiness in Mr. O’s face, the smell in the kitchen of roast meat and baking, the wooden counters worn with stains, the petunias in little boxes in the window, Polly reaching back to rub herself low in the back, her hands when she bent them looking like bunched-up brown chicken skin, the faraway look in Mr. O’s eyes, the way his mouth worked sometimes without anything in it. Sadness creeps, he wrote. But then they laughed too, told stories, lingered on the porch in the twilight listening on the radio to The Acousticon Hour or King Biscuit Time, featuring Sonny Boy Williams, nobody wanting to go back in the house, even in the sadness something sweet and alive, life itself rounding out like the moon. They turned the radio off and listened to the horses whinnying in their stalls, to somebody down the street calling for May Ella with something sweet in his voice.