And the sick days wobble by, right on to the last one. Sunlight streams through the high windows, painting the old brown walls a rich dark color unlike themselves. Delvin walks all the way to the porch and sits down on a milk crate. Tomorrow they will put him back to work hauling water to the cotton fields. A breeze blows the florid, analgesic smell of the fields to him. The smell of cotton lathered with the smells of the big garden over behind the dining hall and the smell of the chicken house and the croaky smell of the hogs in their pen under the apple trees and the pasture smells of bunchgrass, pigweed and sorrel, and the smell of pine and the drifty, dry sharp smell of corn accented with mule manure and human shit — the mix so pungent he feels sometimes as if he could drown himself in the reek of it as under an ether and sleep the rest of his life away. The smell is stronger now after the sickness. His shoulders ache. And his hands, where he gripped the hardwood sides of his bed, are bent and achy in the joints.
