Both of them crossed miles of marsh and desert and cleft mountain track and leagues of wintry windswept fields to reach this spot. In the exact center of his body Delvin sways like a stem of billygoat grass. His body held up now by a boy. You can say he loves the boy. He pictures the slips and strips of yellow paper from Frank’s letter fluttering on the breeze. The suffering of those not ourselves. Milo’s narrow ridged forehead. The broad, mashed-in nose with the elegantly flaring nostrils. The thin lips with the encircling perimeter line like something chiseled into flesh. The cheeks broad and flat and the eyes set under their ridges of fine bone gleaming like lamps. Shine me home.
In the sky to the south a yellow biplane tats its way west. The small stiff steadily fading sound is beautiful. As are all sounds connected to the outside. Despite the fitful delirium of four hundred men you get used to the noise until the prison seems a quiet place. There are the clatters from the kitchen, the scrape of feet moving over hard clay, the shouts of the guards, the clank of chains, the cries from the dreams of low crawling sleepers, the guzzle of water from the shower tank, these familiar dead-end sounds. But there are also the sounds of rain clattering on the barracks’ tin roofs, the drips onto clay, the rush of wind, the pattering of dust along the walkways, the keen up-piping of killdeer and mourning doves from the fields, the distant bombilation of the gin machinery, trucks gearing down on the rise through the cotton fields and the whisper of breeze passing over the cotton on its way from faraway to here — ordinary, fadeaway sounds to those not held down behind wire but to him treasures ladled secretly out, hoarded and prized. Some nights they can hear the radio from the warden’s quarters, playing live music from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. White man’s music: a thin, bobbing line of melody from which are hung chicken feathers and costume jewelry. Even the old square-jawed mountain music is better, the dancing rhythms scooting along like they are on their way somewhere not here.
