Delvin worked his way along, asking for the Ghost. Adam street was the Row’s main street. It ran perpendicular to the gully and white Chat-town and on the other end petered out like an exhausted shout in a track that ran past houses jacked on stilts and up into the leafy mountain woods. On the town side were the stores and other commercial and professional establishments. There was the Peanut Shop (also selling pecans, walnuts, hickory nuts and filberts), Bailey’s Flower Shop, the newspaper office (
But the Ghost was in none of these places. They hadn’t seen him at Pell’s or at the pool hall or in the Occasions Restaurant or at the Pig Grill or at Shorty’s. He wasn’t upstairs at Fitt’s Grocery where the men played poker five nights a week. He wasn’t at the regular Baptist church or the Holiness or the AME or the primitive Baptist either, and not out back of the Free Will Baptist where a few families were eating the latest mess of fresh souse meat somebody’d cornered over at the stockyards. And he wasn’t at the Emporium.
He told himself the reason he was looking for the boy was because he wanted to bring him back to the house, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t want to go back to the house.
Everywhere he went people knew already about the killing. At Porley’s, young men without attachments drank and loudly raved, but every other place was muted, abashed. Extra white police sat in cars at the bridges and rode in cars through the quarter. They hung from the sides of the cars; like monkeys, Delvin thought, or maybe the start of a police migration. Near the old Morrison livery stable and mule barn, now a garage, he picked up a rock, but even though he carried it for a dozen blocks he didn’t throw it. He didn’t know where he dropped it. The people weren’t out on their porches mostly, but he could see them sitting by kerosene light or electric behind curtains in their front rooms; their shadows were still and waiting. The quarter seemed to swell with brooding, with a sadness that had not yet broken forth in mourning. Flaked mother-of-pearl clouds flew along under a sky sprinkled with coldly glittering stars.
In the Emporium most of the white customers had stayed away. But Frank Dumaine and his buddy were there, as were Mr. Considine and Billy Melton who was kin to the family that owned the First Pioneer Bank downtown. There were a few older white men who had come. These the woman pointed out to Delvin; they couldn’t keep from it. Many of the white men arrived not knowing about the killing, but in one way or another they quickly found out. In the parlor, except for Billy Melton, nobody was dancing. In the dining room Dumaine and his friend ate chicken stew. Delvin realized he was hungry and went back in the kitchen looking for Kattie. She was upstairs, the cook told him.
“Working?” he asked.
“She’s trying it out,” said the cook, a large woman whose dark-complected face was deep red under the black.
Delvin felt a pain in his breast. The cook caught the look on his face.
“This not the place to be rummaging around for a sweetheart, honey. Unless you a rich man. But then you gon be rich someday, aint you?”
“How’s that?”
“Aint you that old mortician’s boy?”
“I work over at the funeral home.”
“Yeah, that’s you. You the one everybody says he’s gon leave that place to.”
Delvin felt a warmth in his chest. “It’ll be a long time,” he said, “before Mr. Oliver leave’s the Constitution to anybody. By time he’s ready I’ll be long gone from this town.”
“I hear you on that one. Lord, hit don’t near stop,” she said, flicking at a musing fly standing on a meringue curl atop a lemon pie. “I don’t think it ever will.”
“It’ll wear us out eventually,” Delvin said. “And we’ll throw off that yoke.”
“Be careful how you talk, boy.”
“I’m not talking, I’m just saying.”
“These white folks aint never gon take they foot off of us.”
“We’ll knock it off ourselves.”
“I think only the Lord can do that, honey. Though I have to say he’s mighty slow-minded about getting to it.”
