He steps along to the well. Milo lets go his arm, grabs one of the long galvanized buckets and lowers it. Delvin listens to the bucket clank hollowly against the sides. He feels a generation older than the boy who jumped into that other well. He leans over the parapet far enough to dip his face into the column of cool air the bucket stirs up. Leaning slightly to the side he can see the sky reflected in the black water. He jumped not toward that pinned-down blue but toward the stars. When you bring the water up it is neither blue or black, it is clear as crystal. They say it tastes of sulfur, but the taste is more like the mold on a old piece of hoop cheese.
Milo pulls steadily on the rope. The bucket, spilling water as it comes, reaches the top.
Delvin presses his hand and then his face against the chilly wet galvanized metal. The feel of it sends him back into his dreams. Celia speaking to him from the rainwet front steps of her friend’s house. She is telling him to read — who was it? Douglas? No. Freeman. This goes by in a zip. He hasn’t thought of Freeman for years, has forgotten him. A writer first mentioned by the professor. Well, these books, these volumes written to prove the black man deserves his freedom, are all right. They make you, while you read them, free. Books come in packed in sacks of rice, sacks of salt. They are directed to particular inmates but the included instructions are ignored. Once in a while the inmates get visitors, wives and mamas and shamed weeping daddies gathered in the fenced-off portion of the yard under a big live oak. You can socialize. In gunny sacks they bring pies and apples and kumquats and pieces of molasses candy wrapped in a wax paper twist. These bits of food are all that is allowed in. No books, no hardware, no toiletries, not even soap. There are no chairs, people sit on the ground or squat on their heels, men who will be back to work Monday morning in sharecropped cotton fields, women who will be cooking for a dozen or stooping with the men in the fields hoeing cotton or picking it or in summer cropping tobacco. They bring fresh-squeezed cane juice in glass jars, blue jars children hold to the light to see the colors in.
He dips both hands in the bucket — forbidden, but he’s forgotten this rule, for now — and splashes water on his face. He holds his face up to the sunlight and feels the cool burning as the sun takes the water back.
