One day he took a walk across town to the house where he was born, the canted little shabby place where an old woman whose name he could never keep straight until she spelled it — B-e-a-u-c-h-a-m-p, pronounced Beecham — told him the story of that day, his birth day. (He had already heard it from old Mr. Heberson down at the store.) As the woman spoke he pulled a new penny notebook from his pocket and began to take notes. She said fresh out in the air he’d made sounds like he was talking to himself in an unknown language. Said the day was hot and still, all the leaves in the big poplar tree hanging straight down. Said the big old black rooster over at Hemley’s crowed and wouldn’t stop. Said, “You could smell the birth from out de alley.” She looked hard at him. “You not going to put that in the paper is you?”
“No mam, I just want to keep up with my story.”
The house — shanty, owned by Mr. Odel Dupee, an oldtime Red Row colored landlord, with rusty broken windowsills hanging like a drunkard’s lip and leaning shiplap walls — was temporarily empty due to the flight of its most recent occupants after a homebrewed liquor bust two days before. Delvin thought of moving back in himself, but he enjoyed living at the funeral home. He thought it would probably be too hard on his feelings if he did. On the porch floor were little cone-shaped piles of sawdust from where the boring bugs had been at the wood. The shabbiness of the place bothered him, humiliated him a little; he didn’t want to have to try to fix up the house. The smell he remembered of it (and occasionally ran into out in the world) made him recall the wood as oiled-down, smooth and dark, but in life that wasn’t so. The floors, walls — every part — were scabby and dry and smelled of faded and stalled living. He shied from the place.
He walked the neighborhood, stopping at various spots to ask questions about his mother. She had never been apprehended, never heard from again after her flight. Many thought she was dead. At the Emporium she was remembered by a few — forgotten by most — as a quick-spirited woman without guile but fast to anger — if he really wanted to know, real hotheaded. A fat woman in yellow stockings remembered that she liked to tear cloth into strips and try to weave something out of it but was unable to come up with anything much. She had tried to read books, too, but she couldn’t do it well enough to make it fun. Tried to play the ukulele, but couldn’t master that either.
“She was good at talking to men,” the woman said, pursing her large mouth and making a puffing sound, “good at telling funny stories.”
The room they sat in that afternoon had yellow-and-purple-striped wallpaper.
“You looking for a tryout?” she asked Delvin and he wasn’t sure what she meant and said, no, he didn’t think so.
A man in a checked yellow suit came in through a door to the right and he had a pistol butt poking out of his coat pocket. The pistol gave Delvin an exhilarated feeling and he had to press himself not to jump up and run. The man grinned at him. Bunny Boy Williams — everybody knew he lived there. He had two large steel teeth in front. He rubbed the teeth with the side of his left forefinger and grinned again at Delvin and propped himself against the striped wall.
Sweating, Delvin asked the fat woman if his mother had left anything there.
“I don’t know about that,” the woman said. She was primping a curly bronze wig on a stand as she talked. “You don’t have to be worried about that gentleman,” she said indicating Williams. “He’s all show like a green fly.”
“Would somebody else know about Mama’s things?”
“You don’t have to be afraid to look at him neither,” the fat woman said and laughed.
Delvin could feel his face burning. The woman patted his arm.
“Go ask Miss Ellereen,” she said. “She’ll know.”
Miss Ellereen, the proprietress, gave him an ivory letter opener with a broken tip that, so she said, had belonged to his mother. Chinese characters were stamped on the yellowed blade and the handle was shaded in swirls and stripes and looked as if it had once been painted gold; it was a faded blood color. Miss Ellereen said his mother was light on her feet in a way men noticed. “She had a bounce to her,” she said. “A quick mouth too.”
“You think she’s still alive?”
The woman cocked her head to the side and stared at him. A smell of anise and soapy sweat gusted from her. She wore an oversized man’s green silk robe.
“I expect she’s off in some other swell town, carrying on like she knows how to do.”
“She said my daddy’s from out west.”
“Yes, child, they all are, all them daddies.”
His love-pimping for Mr. Oliver had led to his being banished to the yard where he lived for a week in a tent made from an old quilt strung between two trees, and he wondered if word of the humiliation had gotten this far over into Red Row. The thought made him sweat some more. He said something about this and Miss Ellereen laughed outloud.
“You too nervous to know what to talk about, aint you?”
