For nine months he wandered, catching trains out of little shapeless burgs, riding all night peering up from splintery beds of flatcars at the drifting stars, wondering who he was and where he would wind up, taking his meals at back steps and in alleys behind little restaurants, gnawing on hard store cheese and crusty bread, wondering where he was going and when he would get there, crossing rivers and blackwater sloughs where buzzard delegations perched in tall cypress trees and passing fields ornately laid down, riding and working and pulling his socks off only when he came to a likely stream he could wash in, laying low on the lowdown, a railroad angelina shy of bulls and yeggs, careful with his few cents, taking his time to question others who might look likely, flailing in dreams, and wondering if he would ever again light on somewhere to stay. But time passed, the world edged into fall, and he grew homesick. Outside Barwick, Alabama — the closest he’d been to Chattanooga since he stepped down from his original freight — he caught a ride with a farmer who took him home on a work plan, and all the way Delvin was making up a story, not his, he knew that already, but the man’s, story of a skinny fellow with a wrinkled brow and slim shoulders and a partially withered arm, some farmer with a mystery in his life that he couldn’t express and needed old Delvin to get him going and help him tell his tale. Everybody had a mystery and on the roads you heard versions of mystery like fairy tales and legends continuously revised. Stories of great fights and punishment and loss enduring like an eternal flame. Stories of marriages gone sour and children lost in a fire and stumbles that threw a man down into pits and left him crawling in dark hallways under the gaze of strange faces peering ghostly through windows, and floods come like destitution itself, and somebody had his left hand cut off with a pirate cutlass and another had his back broke by a cotton wagon and somebody else discovered his sweetheart in a junction between towns where nobody would tell you the truth about anything and he said to his sweetheart I will go get us something to eat but when he came back she was dead in the road with her throat cut. The stories stacked in your head like painted plates and you could take them down and read the life of the country in them and he liked to do this even though each one made him lonely. Here was another.
For the next five weeks he stayed on the farm working for the Bealls, that was their name, a husband and wife, africano folks who owned their own farm. He cleaned out the chicken yard and house and hoed the garden and picked vegetables. In the kitchen he worked peeling tomatoes for canning and putting up pickles. He sat at the kitchen table eating green tomato pickles that were so sweet they made his back teeth ache, reading aloud to Mrs. Beall from a book of fairy tales. He read her the story of Sleeping Beauty and the story of the Lost Prince. In both these, one the tale of a single woman drugged and stashed by a thug in the woods and the other of a young man who could not read the signs that were as plain as day, Mrs. B found her life.
I too have been asleep all my life, she said. I too could never read the signs.
She was a stout woman with a plain open face. She voiced these statements in a way that made Delvin feel she knew the stories well and had spoken these sentiments before. Yet she made them with fervor, as if realizing truths about herself for the first time. Her long broad bottom lip trembled. I wonder where my prince is, she said, as if she had just misplaced him, and where is my crippled but kindly dwarf to lead me from the dark wood. Another story about a prince defeating three wily witches did not interest her.
I just don’t believe no prince is going to outwit such remarkable women, she said, baring her stained childish teeth.
This remark too seemed prepared. Maybe, Delvin thought, he was not the first traveler to sit at this table. It was covered with oilcloth printed in tiny red flowers on a blue background. Small red mallow flowers filled a cloudy glass vase set in the center. She picked new flowers every day from the garden, always red mallows, but only the small ones. Others, rose pink and red-streaked and as wide and fat as a dinner plate, she left alone. The kitchen smelled heavily of peeled and blanched and pureed tomatoes, as of a tomato wine.
