“We got too many already,” a voice says, he thinks it comes from Artus Manigalt, one of the mill workers, a man from up north somewhere.
A large hand shoves him in the chest and he slips and falls into the water. The water feels good but he is suddenly — oddly — afraid of snakes. He almost laughs at this but the fear is real like a knife rasping on his skin. He ducks his head under to clear his thinking and to get a start on some cleanness and maybe to make himself all right about being scared; when he comes up the boat is sliding out into the current. One of the men has a paddle and he is trying to get one of the others to use it. The other man turns his face away and the first man hits him in the back of the head. Others grab him and there is a brief mute struggle and then somebody says, “You cotched him,” and then there is quiet and then comes the soft, heavy splashing of a body let go of, and then paddling begins. Delvin’s hand half rises, issuing a farewell, and suddenly it is like it was all those years before when the white boy cried out in the woods and he thought they had killed someone, how suddenly alone he’d felt. That was what they always wanted you to feel. And here it is with them now, with him — and he twirls around, reaching for something, a handhold he forgot he needed, and he feels a slick root and for a second it is the body of a snake and he prays as one would pray to an estranged brother on the road of darkness in the middle of the night — yes, he says, yes, it’s all right, and he looks down into the water that purls softly against his legs, looks at moving blackness, and then he begins to move.
He makes his way stumbling along the riverbank through reeds and low bushes. Once again he’s gotten himself into a futile situation, is what it looks like. But then it is where — for right now — he wants to be, not in futility but on the run from that black hole in the middle of a black hole. He sloshes through spindly maidencane and bulrushes and comes on a piece of forked log resting in the grass. He pushes this out into the river and climbs on top of it and lies down and paddles out into the current, and, scared and thinking how fine it is to be out beneath the star-spattered sky, guides it downstream.
