But he doesn’t mind being made fun of. He is rich — or half-rich — in his spirit on this side of life even if he is slow to rise and suspicious. He favors this walk-around and jump-down, linger-on-the-porch, eat-at-a-table-with-the-children-and-the-women, nobody-hanging-around-with-a-whip side of things. Let me stand and shiver and nobody but somebody worried momently for him might say anything. How you feeling? Well, I’m just fine. Even the big chinaberry tree out the window looks filled with a special life, the big clusters of purple flowers exuding sweet scent you could walk up and put your face in. The sunlight on the gray dirt road out the window seems to shine with a manifold potency. No whipping on that road, no pits to lie down in. He tells some of this to John Paul, Oscar’s almost-grown son. John Paul says he doesn’t know anybody who don’t have a whipping in his future.
“Not like the kind I mean,” Delvin says.
They sit beside a little feeder stream peeling birch twigs and looking at the tiny swirls the water makes where it catches against branches and bits of trailing leafage. The air smells of pine and some moldering bit of animal flesh that hasn’t quite finished curing. The plan for a journey has come to Delvin. He wants to get out to the ocean and travel on it. “I’m going to make a big circle,” he says.
“And come right back here?”
“Someday maybe, but that’s not what I mean. A circle with a chunk left out of it. Or a squinched circle.”
John Paul spreads one of his big hands. His knuckles look like scuff marks. “You gon be a traveling man?”
“For a while.”
He wants to tell him about his plans for writing a book, but he hesitates. To say the words — he is afraid they’ll curdle it. And hell — a book — he is just talking, just dreaming on his feet.
“I want to see something I hadn’t ever seen before.”
“You can see that right here. We just had a display there in the house.”
“I’m sorry about that. I know how a passing can cut deep.”
“Not too deep — not this one.”
“Yeah, and I know you got a promising life here and all, but I’m thinking of my personal plans.”
“Sure you are. I got plans too. Sometimes I can see em right out in front of me. At least up to a point.”
