The first sleep there, morning into afternoon, just before he waked, he had had a dream of his mother kneeling beside a mountain stream dipping water in a yellow gourd. She looked young and healthy and vigilant and she was carrying a large bunch of white flowers stuffed into a sack on her back. All in the dream seemed right. But she did not look at him and he did not call or go to her. In the dream he asked himself why not, but it did not seem an important question. He waked in the late afternoon with the dream still alive in his mind, a little sad, and refreshed and alert and hungry again. The room was filled with a fine-grained aged-yellow light coming in a narrow window at the foot of the bed. He smelled some lemony herb he didn’t know the name of, some kind of mint, he thought.
He lay on his back feeling surrounded by big events. These events were at a distance, like lights on the horizon. Last year they had buried out of the funeral home a man who’d committed suicide by setting himself on fire. He’d been burned worse than that boy. The man — Stacy Beltram — had bought half a gallon of gasoline that he pumped himself into a little tin jug and out in the alley behind his house under a big blossoming mimosa he poured it over himself and set a match to it. The fire had burned him up and the mimosa too. “That was typical of him,” the man’s old father had said about his ruining all the fuzzy pink blossoms. At the graveside service Delvin overheard a tall man in an army uniform, a man some said was once Mr. Beltram’s best friend, say, “He set fire to himself trying to buy a little time off in Hell.” The other people who heard him laughed with their hands over their mouths. The burned man had been a cardsharp and a japer, a grifter who was once put in jail for selling worthless insurance policies to old ladies. What had been coming for that man finally caught him, Delvin had said to Mr. Oliver as they washed up at the soapstone sink in the basement hall. What caught him, catches everybody, Mr. O had reminded him. Chickens wing home to every roost.
He stood at the window looking out at the poultry yard. Evening coming on out of yellow swirls and loose red patches in the west. The chickens were starting to make for the roost in the chicken house. They clucked and quarreled as they trooped toward the short board inclines, and a few of them continued scratching in the dirt as if the dark wont anything to worry about. But in a minute even the brave ones would pick up and climb aboard. Chickens couldn’t see at night, so he’d read, that was why the fox could catch them so easy. Among other reasons, he’d thought.
On the day they finished canning the tomatoes it was still early afternoon and Delvin walked out to the pasture beyond the garden. Off to the left a distant truck boiled along a dusty road, probably Mr. Beall, on one of his errands. Mr. Beall often left after breakfast and was gone for a good part of the day. He would return bringing a small shrub or turnip or some seeds folded in a small newspaper packet or once a slender carved wood figurine he said had been brought from Africa. He did a little work around the place, but that usually involved encouraging the chickens and once or twice taking one of the roosters out of the small cages and exchanging its place with the rooster in the big pen. Delvin followed him into the pen the first time, but when Mr. Beall put the fresh rooster down he immediately attacked Delvin, coming at him in a ruckus of feathers and kicks. Mr. Beall had laughed when Delvin ran. I wish I could have got a picture, he said, when he caught the other rooster and shooed the angry cock away from the boy. Delvin figured he could have stomped the rooster if it came to that, but he wasn’t sure. If that devilish bird had gotten him on the ground no telling what would have happened. From the safety of the farmyard he eyed the new rooster, a red and green and black cock with a large red wattle that swayed as it walked. The rooster lifted itself on its legs and let loose a sharp crow. Delvin decided not to let himself be drawn into a battle with the cock. When Mr. Beall invited him into the enclosure again he passed. I’m too young to let myself be killed by a chicken, he said. Mr. Beall had laughed a friendly, farmer-knows-best laugh.
