“If I could lay down,” he says. They fix him a bed out on the screened-off half of the back porch and he lies down on an alfalfa-stuffed mattress and thinks This smells like the shed back home, and it isn’t only that but he can’t remember right then what it is and falls asleep. He dreams of fish thrashing feebly in a poke (but maybe it isn’t fish), and of a white man in a leaf-strewn alley entrance making hobo signs (the double diamond of Keep Quiet; the two straight bars of Sky’s the Limit; the triple thatch of Jail) and grinning in a scornful way. He is overtaken by a sobbing that seems wholly part of the dream until it wakes him and his cheeks are wet. He lies in the shade of the roof overhang, coming back mostly to himself. The little boy comes out to look at him. The boy smells of raisins and Delvin remembers sitting on the pantry floor at Mr. O’s as a child eating raisins from a cloth sack with the picture of a raised-up circus elephant stamped on it. “My name,” the boy says and points above his head at the wall. Scratched into the chinking mud are misspelled words, unintelligible signs — Morus, maybe that is a name. “Morris,” Delvin says, and the boy smiles, whirls and runs back into the house. He feels slow and dodgy, without intent, saturated and feebly draining, raveled at the edges, parts coupled and strewn about, wayward. The air is coarse and lively against his skin. Raisins, he thinks. He used to pick them one at a time from the sack, eat them slowly, dreaming of life out in the wild mountains.
He stays with the family for a week until he feels the red dog loosen its grip and then he decides to leave because he wants to get down to the coast. The state men have poked around looking for him but when they came by the folks hid him out in a canebrake under a tarp soaked in tar wine vinegar and even the dogs missed him.
“No reason to go that way,” the brother, a stringy man with a small face flat like a cat’s, tells him. “Aint nobody down that way looking to shelter a black man.”
But Delvin wants to go. He has heard the surf crashing in his dreams and in them he sits beside a great blue sea.
