The jacks began to get to their feet. The train was under way. Like grasshoppers the wind shakes from the grain, the hoboes and drifters, the shufflers and stiffs and ex — plow jockeys, ramblers, tramps, and scenery bums moved down through the slick grass to the cinderbeds and crossed the six sets of tracks to the train clanking into motion. They climbed aboard, scurrying to the top or the bottom, into open doors and onto gondolas and flatcars, swung up into the shelter of the two empty boxcars. Delvin hesitated. He felt he was leaving half his heart. Then he ran for the train and climbed up onto a gondola. The last of the travelers boarded. Behind them the breeze shifted and slipped delicately over the trampled grass.
Clanking, screeching, squealing, shuddering, the big train made its way through the yard and out onto the road that passed through the rough western sections of the city, past the warehouses where Delvin once liked to walk inside of with his friend Archie Consadine along the rows of high-stacked cotton bales. Big barrels of water had grease scum on the surfaces of the water to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in them. And past the cotton mills, three of them in a row, painted green originally but now gray with lint. Lint swagged from electrical wires and outlined roof shingles and collected in the eaves of the little shotgun cabins workers lived in and blew along the unpaved streets and every day wisped into the lungs of the workers. And past the rendering plant with its vats of copper-colored solution and its piled white bones waiting to be ground into fertilizer. And past the big pine grove off Dunkins street where little Rozie Coverdale was murdered by two white boys who were caught with Rozie’s mother’s pearl necklace in the pocket of one of them, a necklace never returned, so the story went, to the family. The white boy and his family claimed the necklace was theirs — they were only retrieving it — and the Coverdales could not prove to the satisfaction of the jury that they were lying. Rozie’s mother died without knowing what had really happened, but, so they said, she didn’t really want to know what had gone on in those woods that were still used for trysts and mushroom-picking expeditions.
And past the Ombley pasture where Delvin had once played football with boys who attended Fisk University and after the game gave him his first taste of bonded whiskey, a taste he had spit out onto the rocky ground behind the Buck & Buck barbecue restaurant over on Caprice street. And past cramped unpainted houses where the lives of crackers were lived out in pale concordance, and past them and across the spur to Lucasville, where negro folks in similar shotgun cabins with their tiny front porches sporting a rocking chair and maybe a swing and tomatoes growing in No. 10 cans and string nets tacked on one side for trellising confederate jasmine or morning glories, both still blossoming in early autumn, lived their similar money-fretted lives. And past the primitive Baptist church — white cube with ice-cream-cone steeple — manifested by hardshell believers who refused to accept the injunction to send missionaries around the world spreading the gospel, playing it close to the vest with the Good Book. And past the livestock sale barn, an airy structure built of native pine and tin roofing, now derelict after a sustained outbreak of pinkeye and slop foot, along with the shift in agricultural focus away from the rocky farms of the mountain and sandhill country south and westward. And past Angelo’s, a combination grocery, Italian restaurant and speakeasy where patrons (white only) interested in red-sauced dinners (with Chianti wine) sat around card tables set among the shelves packed with Idea Starch, Calgon, 20 Mule Team Borax, Ajax, sacks of Water Maid rice, stacks of hard lye soap and shoe polish tins, exchanging vernacular quips with Angelo Depesto, immigrant soul from Pesaro on the Adriatic sea, Coloreds served out of a window in back.
And past Wilbur Homewood’s deserted pastures, sold two years ago to the Fox and Hound Hunt Club and left to their natural ways of steeplebush, clover, dusty miller, ironweed, meadow rue, Joe Pye weed and bunchgrass by members who on Saturdays in spring and fall chased foxes on jumpers and farm nags across the rocky ground, a practice they would abandon a few years from then after the last diehard admitted that the granite shelves and schist outcrops of the southern Appalachians were inhospitable to this kind of sport.
Past dumps of generalized refuse and small boys walking along dreaming of adventure and freedom from father’s strap.
Past young girls standing at roller washing machines or pushing corncobs on washer boards or lifting soaked overalls out of No. 2 washtubs.
