And then, from outside the room, from the hallway that had been filling with people from who knows where, came more screams, loud mixed voices, human voices, crying out, yelling and shouting and screeching until Delvin thought the air itself would shatter and fall down and they would be standing screaming with forsaken eyes in the face of heaven or whatever monstrosity or nothingness was behind the world.
The screams went on and then abruptly they seemed to collapse on themselves and they trailed away. The mother of the boy croup-moaned in Oliver’s arms. He began gently to speak to her, but as he did she broke away and lunged at the table. Outside the room a low groaning and keening had begun and as she moved, the crowd, that only a few of could see into the room, swayed and trembled like a sea, moaning and making little chattering and clicking sounds, little human expressions, nicks and chips at the unholiness, at the failed light, whispers and clucks, tiny hisses like spray blown off the tops of waves, all entirely human, pure and unbreakable in perfection, the only perfection left to any of them just now.
Mrs. Harold had thrown her body across her son’s body and she was kissing his sewn-up lips.
Still bent over, she took a shuffling step back, placing her hands not on her son’s body but on the marble table. She raised up. “Oh, Lord, do not,” she cried in a wild voice. “Do not, Lord, do not. Do not ransom this child.”
She began again to scream, to shriek in a high, unworldly voice, but before she got well begun her voice sheared off and she dropped to the floor. In the hallway, like a sea, voices massively groaning. Oliver had tried to catch her, but she hit the floor on her side. Both Mrs. Harold and Oliver were smeared with blood that was seeping from the cut on her wrist.
Oliver called for them to get the doctor and he and Culver lifted Mrs. Harold onto the auxiliary table, an old steel-topped folding table used when he had to travel out to the country to work. With alcohol and a tourniquet and hard pressure that made Mrs. Harold cry out again, Oliver was able to stop the bleeding. He had Culver and Elmer carry Mrs. Harold out the double back doors and up to the back screen porch where they could lay her on the big daybed kept there along with folding cots for sleeping on hot summer nights.
Out in the hall he comforted Mr. Harold, who had not come into the embalming room.
“She just got a nick on her wrist,” he said. “The doctor will be here in a speck.”
Then he went himself and phoned from the telephone hanging on the wall of the embalming room. He came back and said, “The doctor is leaving now.” Dr. Mullens lived in the next block and was the only africano doctor in the city at that time.
Oliver spoke gentling words to those standing in the hallway and came back inside and shut the door behind him. Culver had hung one of the big aprons over the missing glass.
“Thank you, Culver,” Oliver said and leaned against the wall. “Thank all of you.” He closed his eyes and pressed the unbloodied knob of his wrist against his forehead. He looked over at Delvin and smiled a sad, weary smile that brought out his dimples. “Take a long breath, son,” he said.
Delvin breathed deeply in. His chest was a dusty empty room filling with a burning wind. His face was wet, and he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes on one of the gray clean towels stacked on the counter. The shouts, the screams and yells, had been like huge scouring pads, rubbing the feeling off his skin. He was numb — in the places he wasn’t still burning. He felt a pressure in his head like a trunk filled with something creaturely that was pushing to get loose. He sat down in a chair by the sink and pressed his face against his knees. The blood rushed and dammed and he sat up quickly. He was about to faint. He grabbed the edge of the sink, pulled himself up and vomited. Culver came over to him and said he ought to go outside. But he said no. He wanted to stay here as long as he could. He thought he could make it through. “I’m doing all right.”
“Anymore all right as that and we’ll have to take care of
