With the paints, some of which he had mixed himself from raw earth he collected in the ravines and from under rhododendrons growing below the ridge and had drawn from roots collected in the deep woods and dug up from clay pits and boiled out of leaves and bark, Oliver painted the broken boy’s face, and with other paints, commercial cosmetics mostly, he added color to his cheeks. He picked the boy’s hair loose and oiled it and brushed it back from his bony forehead and then for the second time in his life as a mortician he bent down and kissed the product of his ministrations, this ruined child, on the forehead. He had not looked directly at Delvin, who had stayed in the room for most of the work before he remembered Morgred waiting in the horse shed and became distressed and nervous because he didn’t know what to do and told Culver, a small tidy man worn to exhaustion by now, that he had to pee and went out and carried the food he had packed in a small hamper out to the shed and gave it to the Ghost, who knew nothing of what had happened except he said for the hollering somewhere off there, and was peevish and unfriendly and, so he said, starving.
“Me too,” Delvin said, but Morgred didn’t want to share his food with him.
“I can’t afford to,” he said.
Delvin laughed. “You can’t?”
“I’m mixed up,” the boy said.
“Bout what?”
“I know this is you all’s food and so I ought to give you what you want of it, but then I am starving to death and don’t know where my next bit of panbread for example is coming from. So I wants to keep it. But if I do you might just take it from me and kick me out of this stable.”
“I might.” He laughed. “You go ahead. I’ll get something inside.”
“Naw. Take one of these sandwiches.”
“Okay. I’ll take half of one. Give me the ham.”
“I want the ham.”
“Okay. Give me half the roast beef.”
“There it tis,” the Ghost said, handing a pinched piece. His voice had a little of a cicadas’ unraveling buzz in it — no bounce, no pick up, only a background of scrub fields, wet basement steps. The look in his eyes was dull as corn meal. He shied and slanted. It was as if he had spent too much time on the Blue Ridge’s bare rocky tops where only stunted blueberries and coarse tufts grew. The juice and kick of the city was dried out of him. Delvin was too twitchy to ask him much. The left side of the Ghost’s face was puffed out and red, and with two scuffed fingers he rocked a tooth like a tiny post set in too large a hole. He breathed shallowly, with a little hiccup like a rut at the end of each breath. He was a blinker.
Delvin turned away from the boy and looked off into the corner where hay was stacked in bales. He rubbed his hand against the unsanded stall wood and felt a tiny sharp splinter slide into the flesh under his thumb. Barely go in. A dot of blood. He sucked the blood and tasted it in his mouth and then in his throat and thought of the boy they couldn’t get the preservative to stay in, saw it running out and pooling on the table, the clear green glistening liquid that was beautiful and made you want to run your fingers through it, which he had done, sliding his hand — this hand here — discreetly along the slab until he touched the tensile edge of the juice and felt it cool on his fingers and he looked up and Mr. Oliver was looking at him with an expression on his face of such sadness as he’d not seen before.
