Ginny Gall полностью

. . born on the back steps of a sporting girl’s house in Chattanooga and from there travels a crooked way through the cobbled streets of that town and into the woods and back to the visiting circus and then to the undertaker’s house where as a six-year-old boy he liked to sit on the back of the hairy-footed dray horse Old Bob. The horse was so wide he believed he could sleep on his back, get a mattress and blanket and move onto him. He asked Mr. Oliver if he could and Mr. O laughed his high sweet laugh and said why sholy you can my boy and it wasn’t until they caught him dragging the mattress from his little sleigh bed out the back door that he was stopped from trying. “But you told me,” he said to Mr. O as tears streamed down his face. “Yes, I did, and I was wrong to tell you you could do something that I couldn’t really let you do.” Mr. O was tangled up. “I’ll have to keep an eye on myself from now on,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on you too,” the little boy said. Mr. O said, “I’m sorry, Slip,” which was what he was called around the house in those days.

When the trap in his cell door opens and his two pails are handed out to the guard and in a minute the door opens again and in are shoved two fresh buckets, one an empty slop pail and the other his week’s worth of what the underground population calls cinder soup, with a chunk of cornbread so hard it has sunk to the bottom without soaking any juice in, he is barely interrupted, even in his thoughts, or especially in his thoughts.

He continues his story. In it he lists the different local bugs and green fruits he ate as a child, including red and black ants, doodlebugs, bees, dirt dobbers, beetles of various kinds, four types of grasshoppers, worms, all raw; among the fruits he ate: green plums, blackberries and raspberries, cherries, apples, grapes, quinces and figs. He lies quietly on his wood bunk trying to think of others. He sees his name written high on the wall of his bedroom where he climbed up a stepladder to scrawl it, using one of Mr. O’s mascara pens from the preparation room down in the basement.

The story goes uninterruptedly on.

He begins to say parts of it over to himself until they fill his memory.

The first line of the book is I waked to the sight of a woman wildly dancing. He says this sentence over to himself, and all the sentences that follow, until they are carved into his brain sentence after sentence and he has memorized a first chapter. The work is both exhilarating and tedious, and there begin to be times when what he says outloud is not strictly true. He didn’t really chase Jack Elbert down the alley and leg-swipe him so he fell into the barrel of an old washing machine and broke his left ankle. It didn’t happen like that. Nor did old Mr. Anse Carter say he, Delvin, was bound for the hangman’s noose. He said the Ghost was.

He goes over these parts of the story and corrects them and then changes them again, just slightly. He can’t stay away from the little changes that seem to brighten things.

He grows confused and loses his place.

He stops telling the book for a day and lies on his back, sleeping and thinking and listening to the scurrying of the rats, and realizes finally that something is breaking apart inside him. He begins to weep. For a week he cries, waking each day in the slush of himself and turning on his side and weeping, letting the tears run down his face and drop onto the packed dirt.

He thinks, well, I can maybe get to the other side of this bawling, but then his thoughts cut back to his mother and his phantom father and Mr. O and the professor in his truck and Celia — and Celia — everything becomes elaborated and tricked out with grief.

When the tears finally stop he is not redeemed or relieved or free in any way he can figure, he is only exhausted.