The burying is on a sweltry day with a dampness attached that makes him feel as if his blood is running hot in his veins. Everybody feels feverish. The body in its raw pine coffin held together with nailed-on baffles stinks of the fever. Oscar is the man’s name. Somebody cries it out from the back of the small crowd, a woman no one admits he knows. A bird in a maple tree makes little pip-pip-pip noises. His brother, Oscar’s brother, cries like a baby. Delvin has been on burial details at Acheron, silent pilgrimages where nobody spoke up about anything. A chaplain tossed a handful of dry words in after the deceased, this nonentity it was clear the Lord cared nothing about. The preacher here, a small man who smells like he has been drinking, says the Lord is already holding brother Oscar in his arms. “Not too tight,” the man next to Delvin says. “It’s hot where he is.” Delvin shivers and wants to shut the man up but he says nothing. Not outloud. Farewell, brother, he says silently, God be with you, have a good. . — and then the words drop off as if he’s come to a cliff. But it aint no cliff. It is a dam. Behind which a slowly pulsing body of words is backed up, a lifetime — twenty lifetimes — of words and everything else. Somebody throws a bouquet of tea olive in the hole. Delvin can smell it above the stink of the corpse, a sweet drifting scent of the world going down into the ground with him. Tears come to his eyes and the woman next to him, wife of the brother, looks strangely at him, as if she has just realized who he is.
Back at the house he tells them he needs to get farther south.
The brother — his name is Willie Drover — says, “Aint too much farther south you can get,” and even one or two of the grieving women laugh at this.
“I got some business down on the Gulf,” he says, thinking as he speaks the words that he is half lying because he doesn’t really have any place to get to except away and that isn’t a place unless every place not a state prison is.
