Just this week he had been disciplined for fighting with the kitchen boy. The boy had called him a dumb bastard child. Delvin had knocked him into the kindling box. The boy had cut the back of his head on a piece of fat lighter wood. Sunny was his name, but the boy was anything but. Delvin couldn’t stand him and would have fought him until he was nothing but another customer for the establishment, but he didn’t want to lose his place. Oliver had made him work in the garden spreading horse manure and then working it into the black-eyed pea and tomato rows. From the kitchen window Sunny had eyed him evilly, ducking behind the red cheesecloth curtain whenever Delvin caught him looking. The punishment made him restless, or added to his restlessness, but he didn’t want to hit the road, he told himself — if he was
He began to ask for the names and addresses and the telephone numbers when they had them of the more likely-looking women. He questioned them, discreetly, so he thought, about their situation. Were they married? What did they think of the mortuary business? Didn’t they just love the swank and the soundness of the outfit? Did they know that those velvet curtains over there cost nearly one hundred dollars? That organ in the chapel was over a thousand dollars and Mr. Oliver was planning to buy an even better one soon. He tried to enlist Polly’s help, but she was not a willing accomplice. She told him if he didn’t cut it out she was going to tell Mr. O.
“He’s a lonely man,” Delvin said.
“Mr. Oliver is too busy to be lonely,” Polly replied.
But Delvin knew his loneliness. They had begun to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. The ones that spoke of the absent lover touched them both. In the dim light of the big green-shaded lamp by the bed they had both wiped away tears, Mr. O dabbing with the corner of a blue silk handkerchief, Delvin using the tips of his fingers.
“Here he’s saying the only way to live forever is to get yourself a child,” Delvin said after reading sonnet no. 12. “If you are going to get a child, you have to first get yourself a wife. Or a woman.”
Delvin knew his mother had not married his father. He had been much too young to investigate such business, but once before she ran off as they sat side by side in the God Is Love Beauty Parlor over on Forrest street waiting for Cappie to get her thick crozzled hair straightened, he had asked who his father was and she told him he was a man from the west — an actor, she said. There was a tiny note of pride in her voice. It made Delvin feel as if his daddy was a somebody for sure. Maybe he had acted in Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe in
A colored general married to a white woman — it seemed a strange dream, so impossible, fantastical, that it had left them breathless. But after that first shock when sitting side by side at the little mahogany table upon which burned an electric lamp softly shaded by a gold paper shade, as they apprehended not simply the facts of the situation but the lack of fear and shame and, better even than that, the kowtowing he received, it seemed a right and proper notion. They saw too how despite the victories he won for them the people of Venice looked down on the general, even as they bowed to him. “Can’t get too important not to get your tail set on fire — if you’re a black man,” Oliver pointed out. Delvin saw it too.
“He works for em,” he said. “He’s the one they hired to clean up their messes.” He said this more to ingratiate himself with Oliver — to get the love going, to nestle deeper into this man’s heart — than anything else. “But what about his getting married to that woman?” he said. This excited Delvin.
“Cast that from your mind,” Oliver said. A strange look came into his broad face. “It might be a thrill for some,” he said. “But not everybody wants to strike that note.” He sighed. “Truth is, you never can tell where love is going to hit.”
