There was a time, the professor said — we all remember it in our bones and in the stories we tell — when the gods spoke to human beings. When God’s voice came from bushes and streams and rocks and told human beings what was so in the world and in themselves. Everybody was able to hear and the gods spoke about this and that and maybe they spoke too much and embarrassed themselves or maybe people just got bored hearing some rock or snatch of poke salad yammering endlessly about love trouble or tactics or what to eat for supper, but anyway the gods began to go silent. One by one they dropped off until there was no more talking from the celestial quarter. Then we felt our aloneness in the world. Then we got scared and started building forts and piling up money and inventing artillery and we started shooting at our neighbors and we were scared of anybody who didn’t look like us or act like us. It was time to call on the gods but when we did nobody answered. We were on our own in a way that made expulsion from the Garden look like a dropped piece of bubble gum. And it aint changed. The silence — and you can believe it — is rock solid. The gods have departed to other lands. We been left to make our own way to glory. And truth is, few can do it. But that don’t mean, the professor said, that we got cause enough to stop trying.
Later in the day a small africano boy fishing the river for shell bass comes on him but he is afraid to wake the ragged man and he runs home to tell his folks. An hour or two later three africano men shaking the bushes find him and after a short parley bring him to the home of the little boy. A man in the four-room slabboard house is drunk and laid out in the back room with pneumonia. He tried to treat himself with jick whiskey bought for a half dollar over in Munn City and the combo of the pneumonia and the whiskey is killing him. His brother, who lives with the family, and his wife, who is the mother of one of the brother’s children, offer Delvin a seat at the table and they try to feed him but he is so worn out — he doesn’t think he is really sick anymore, just tired to the bone — that he can hardly keep his head up. The brother offers him a drink of elderberry wine and he takes a sip to be polite but he doesn’t want any of that really. He lips the glass vaguely and puts it down. The wine is purple and has black specks floating in it.
