Yet there are those who relish disease. The crazy boys and some of the lap nuzzlers will cozy up to him, asking if there is anything they can do. One, Dizzy Placer, will lick your sores if you have any to spare. Years ago the doctor cautioned him. “Don’t go letting any of these yardboys out here apply their treatments,” old Dr. Willy told him. Dr. Willy died of a busted ulcer none of the white doctors around Covington wanted to treat, groaning and calling out the name of a woman nobody had heard of — so Donell Brakage told him three years ago when he was resting up from an earlier malaria attack with the other kings of misguidance in Columbia penitentiary. That was before the last trial that let all but Delvin and Carl and Bony and Little Buster go free, pardoned for their crimes. Other lawyers reaped the crop the first lawyers sowed.
The sun is getting cozy on his neck, kittenish. He leans his head forward so the beam can find more flesh. Ripe sunlight a treasure beyond counting. So bright you have to look through your lashes to see. The heat seeps under his clothes, spreading along his back like a feather cape. In November they ride in wagons on top of the cotton to the gin. He always burrows in deep, loving the encasement and, if it was possible without being torn to pieces, would let himself be lifted up into the suction tube and tossed through the machinery to come out the other end mashed in the press inside a bale. Lying there like a caterpillar in his cocoon, waiting for some chinaman across the sea to jack the bale open and lookee here what I found. Oh knit me back up. He hasn’t started sweating yet.
Milo works his little trad on his knuckles. Delvin can smell the lime stink of the latrines. Last week it rained all week, but three days of sun this week has brought up the dust. A week of straight sun, and dust will whirl up in clouds the size of a county, wind-hauled a hundred miles to set an inch of topsoil down on top of some other county’s dirt.
