Two days later he catches a ride on a wagon heading down to Salt Town to pick up a load of oysters and fish. Every so often this run is made and the seafood brought back under croaker sacks piled with cracked ice to sell in the communities, white folks first. The bed of the wagon gleams with fish scales. The man who carries him, Billy Foster, wears a pair of washed-out overalls and a patched gray shirt buttoned at the wrist and all the way to the Gulf he talks mournfully about his wife who has recently taken up with another man. There are fish scales on his cracked boots and his small flat fingernails gleam like scales. He seems at every minute about to cry but he doesn’t.
“You can’t make em do what they won’t,” he says glumly, clucking at the hammer-headed mule over the cotton plowline he uses for reins.
The sky is cloudy for the ten miles down and as they arrive in Salt Town it begins softly to rain. Delvin bids the man farewell and walks along the sandy main road out to the beach that is gray and littered with pine straw and forbidden to a person of color and stands under the tall longleaf pines looking out at the chopped-up gray Gulf. The water seems to be moving steadily toward him and this bothers him and he retreats farther back among the trees. Three or four short roads run in from the main road to the water. A few white men are standing out in the low brown surf working a long net. He walks back closer to the waves, but not far, not even out from under the pines. He doesn’t like the shaky look of the water, doesn’t like how big and empty it is, and the white men spook him. Getting out into that world of salt and waves and white men pulling on nets like they think they are back on the shores of Galilee or someplace; it is too much for him. He’ll just stand a while under these whishing pine trees, he thinks, and enjoy being a free man.
<p><strong>7</strong></p>Gammon entered the visiting room that was only a squared-off bit of an old holding cell that had bars over a single taped-over window with one little corner scraped away so if you put your eye to it you could see across the street the corner of the Miller Finery sign and the screen-door entrance to the Collins Bakery and a set of cement steps leading where you couldn’t tell, and told Delvin that he had found the woman he saw in the gallery and she said she was not his mother.
“Maybe she is lying to protect herself — and me.”
“Maybe that is true,” Gammon said, “but she says it isn’t — I asked that too — and says that she dudn’t want to come to the jail.”
“Maybe I will just have to go see her,” Delvin said and laughed a dry laugh. He could feel a mercilessness rising in his soul. Soul, he thought, I don’t know what that is.
Gammon looked at him with mixed compassion and and aggravation and said he didn’t think things were going very well.
“I thought it was your job to keep everything hopeful.”
“Yes, that is what I am supposed to do and I am sorry I have failed.”
“Don’t worry your head with it,” Delvin said. “I won’t be long for this place whatever you do.”
“I hope that dudn’t mean you are going to try to escape.”
