He touched the pitted back of Mr. Oliver’s hand, still a little plump but now ashy and showing red under the knuckles. He didn’t want to leave him. He wanted to go back to the funeral home and get some supper and sit out on a cutblock in the alley and listen to old Mr. Starling from next door tell stories about dances and frights back in the slave times. But no, he didn’t really want that. He wanted these living to go on living, that was the most he wanted. It hurt him to see this battered man here, snoring, a spit bubble like a tiny crystal ball on his lip, hurt to see death crept up so close to him. But that too wasn’t enough to come back for. From the minute he had slipped away from Acheron prison he had felt the exhilaration of freedom. At first it had been so powerful he thought it would be enough to make him happy in the world. But that sense of things had dimmed. It was wearing out. He was nearly back to being a black man in a white man’s kingdom. But not quite. Before the last of that bounteous sense faded away he wanted to stand again in the streets of the town he was born in. Let me see what I feel in Red Row on the dusty street in front of Heberson’s store or standing on the porch of the Home or sitting down to eat in the kitchen. But all those places were gone. He hadn’t counted on that. Well, he should have. Everything was on its way out, handed off into some other configuration, some past you could think about if you wanted to or had to, turned over like soil in a new field in spring to show its bright, glistening other side. Now he had to go. Or would soon. He was older but he was part of the new. And he wanted to tell this to somebody.
He spent the morning sleeping in a back bedroom at Mrs. Cutler’s house and then in the afternoon up the gully in a little pinestraw nest he fashioned under some rhododendron bushes, sleeping some more and writing in his notebook. Mostly notes. Fragments of nothing much, signs painted on the sides of barns saying HERE IT IS in some form or other, extra tall men craning to see over a board fence, a woman washing her hair in a tub out behind a poultry yard. A big dark hemlock by a stream had jolted him. He wanted to jolt people. Touch them in a secret place. That was all right. He’d seen army men in full packs marching down a dusty road that went nowhere. “What you think of that?” he’d asked the man standing beside him in the boxcar door. “A clown parade,” the man had said and spit out the door. “I got the cure for loneliness!” shouted a man peering from a lit window in Jacksonville, but he’d ducked back in before Delvin could ask what it was. Standing under a church window in Monroeville he listened to a choir director correct the same bright-eyed girl six times before she burst into tears. Six, ten, twenty-seven times — whatever it takes, they’ll get you. A man stood so long on a trestle bridge showing off a string of croakers with the train coming he’d had to jump for it into the river. He’d come up without his pole or his fish. Once the professor’d laughed so hard he cut a fart that busted the seat out of his britches. “Could have been worse,” he said and they both laughed until their bellies hurt. “I got it,” a man in faded longhandles rose in an empty fertilizer car to say, “but I don’t know where I put it.” A big woman who said she was from Alaska had slung her wispy girlfriend so far through the boxcar door she landed in a field of golden wheat. And jumped up yelling. “I got to go,” he would say, and he would go, make his break for freedom, no matter how foolishly. That was me, he wrote, the one missing at the head count. His mama had to flee because she killed a man after white folks beat her five-year-old boy for stealing a fake jewel attached to a dress in the window of a shop in Chattanooga. The jewel was yellow like a cat’s eye and he had to have it. That was me, he wrote. And the old, ever-denied guilt licked about his heart. From his leafy hideout he looked back down the long slope to a field grown up in Joe Pye weed. The flimsy tops of the weeds, strangled by fall, nodded and gave in a breeze that didn’t reach up to where he was. “I am that boy,” he said.
