Across his path now steps Lionel Ansley, a gaunt man, a preacher who holds one of the services on Sunday mornings. He’s been after Delvin for a while to quit his escape attempts. He is impatient with his unwillingness to attend church. Lionel visited him in the infirmary and Delvin appreciated his not visibly gloating over his condition. The preacher told him his running ways would get him into trouble and Delvin knows that as far as Lionel is concerned the red dog has come on as a result of his jumpiness. He isn’t the only one tired of his scampering; the guards, who like to make the whole prison pay for one man’s flight, are getting worn out too.
The preacher nods at him, smiling, his bony head bobbing like a chicken’s. Despite his narrow-mindedness he is a kindly man. You never can tell where kindness will come from. The preacher with his little commentaries never goes too far into damnation. Delvin appreciates this.
“Come on, boy,” he says now, “come on over to the one place you can let what’s balled up in you go.”
He doesn’t stop walking as he says this.
Delvin nods at his back. The preacher’s abruptness makes him think of his shock when the jury foreman back in Klaudio, Elmer Suggs, said he was guilty. It had been as if Suggs himself — druggist, father of a girl with a polio-crippled leg, a stranger — had simply stood up from a passing crowd and for no reason on earth but meanness had announced in his slightly elevated voice that he, Delvin Walker, common-law son of Cornelius Oliver and Professor Clemens John Carmel, diverted lover of Miss Celia Cumberland, was guilty of raping two white women. Even after the four weeks of testimony (and thirty minutes of deliberation) he couldn’t believe his ears. Surprise didn’t cover it. Shock didn’t. For a second he had ceased to exist. A short circuit of being in which not only body and mind vanished but all record of his having been on this earth as well, leaving a vacuum that held the shape of a human being. It was quicker than a rifle shot. He was sure none else (outside his cohorts in loss and betrayal, though he never polled them to find out) experienced this or noticed.
