The boy’s burned side was drawn up in a strange lopsided way and ashy now and showed streaks of gray and red flesh under the black rubbled crust. The other, free of rigor mortis by now, was loose and askew, the handless arm with its projecting inch of bone thrown out like a sharpened white pointer aimed at the floor. The body looked like halves of evilly treated people joined together, two people without relation to each other except in the mystery of there being no limit to what human beings could come up with to do to each other. This angel who didn’t know he was an angel, burned and strangled by furious ruffians who didn’t know they were angels too.
Sweat stood on Oliver’s brow. The helper, Culver, washed equipment in the big metal sink on the other side of the room, banging metal against the sides. The boy’s face was blistered and distorted but not terribly burned. Everyone could be thankful for that.
On the counter, beside a red celluloid pinwheel and a line of photographs of male negro movie stars and an ivory frame containing a photo of an elephant the white folks had hung right after the Great War for misbehaving, in open cherrywood boxes the glass bottles of numbers 17 through 52 brown dyes, of conditioners, humectants, anti-edemics, lotions and perfumes waited. On a rolling wooden trolly the big galvanized tank of formaldehyde; gray rubber tubing and silver hand pumps on a tray underneath. One gallon of juice per fifty pounds of corpse. Delvin knew this already. He’d seen corpses, by now he’d helped out.
But he shivered and turned from this one, crowding against the big galvanized tin sink. The clear water running steadily from the tap soothed him. Culver’s presence soothed him. The equipment, gauges and hinges of bright metal, scoops and forceps in their clattering, soothed him. These matters are ordinary and superficial, he thought. No, they’re not. (They are too weighty to be stood up under. No shelter can keep off the load.) Yes, they are. When he turned back to the lighted body he saw he had not fixed his mind and turned again to the sink. The clean gray mottled galvanized bottom, the smoothly whirling clear flushing water. Culver’s wet arms gleaming as he lifted them in the light pouring from the downturned trays on the ceiling.
Delvin stood quietly. He thought about the woods where he liked to stand at the end of the Little Hollow Road trail and ponder on the thousand secrets hidden among the trees. Secrets not like propositions and facts you could come to know but true secrets, mysteries and puzzles you could never discover the answer to or reason for. You could only stand there, like a mourner before a grave, and wonder. He thought of his mother, who was alive, he was sure, moving through that forest of secrets, finding her way. He could feel her, sense her, tracking across the landscape. He bore down steadily — in the few seconds of time that seemed to stretch before him like a day or a year — and once again he could almost find her, almost see her, trailing her blue shawl behind her like a flag. But once again she eluded him. He gasped. He was back in the room. He ran water over his hands, cleaned them with soap.
Wearing green rubber gloves he helped as they washed what remained of the boy and gathered up the pieces that had fallen or been torn off and that came loose as they as gently as possible washed the body. Culver tied off and bandaged the wrists. With a sure hand and tiny stitches Mr. Oliver sewed up the mouth that had been ripped open by blows. He attempted to inject the embalming fluid through the big neck vein and then through others in the thighs and under the arms, but none would hold the slick greenish fluid that drained out onto the white marble table and ran along the gutters into buckets. “It’s all right,” Oliver said when Elmer began to cry.
They had wrapped the torso and legs loosely in yellow oilcloth when a hard banging began on the door. Then the glass pane broke and Mrs. Arctura Harold, the boy’s mother, rushed screaming into the room. Her left wrist streamed blood where she’d cut it breaking the door using the small brass cuspidor that had stood beside it.
Oliver sprang nimbly for so large a man to meet her. He caught her arms and drew them together, crossing them, and pulled her to him and held her against his chest as she screamed. Her scream was like the scream of a creature from the ancient dark of the deepest woods, a creature everybody has forgotten about except when on times like these some ruined individual screams and they suddenly remember.
At the scream, surging and smashing and excavating with a frenzied dedication for the soul already fled the premises, all the strength went out of Delvin’s body. He leaned against the sink, catching himself on the lip of it. The woman wouldn’t stop screaming. Why should she? he thought, amazed at her lung power. He wanted to scream too, but he was already sobbing and the whole front of his body was numb.
