Ginny Gall полностью

Past the yard, past the garden, Delvin stood in the pasture sniffing the wind. A stand of yellow phlox caught at a bit of breeze, shuddered and let it go, the tall shaggy flower heads fluttering. A meadowlark flew his way, checked and veered sharply off, exposing his yellow breast feathers. The blue sky was strewn with small round clouds, like puffs of cannon fire. The path was wide and grassy, but in the middle of it a narrow strip ran that was sandy, without growth. There were faint footprints in this strip. He experienced a consternated shiver. He began to follow the path, and as he walked the fear or nervousness at first grew, but then gradually it began to subside or if not quite subside, to be replaced by another kind of trepidation, not just a fear of police agents or detectives trailing him, but of some other presence. The path dipped toward a branch, left the pasture and entered a gray wood. Long spindly trunks of mottled gray trees he didn’t know the names of held up small collections of pale green leaves. Below them crooked skinny bushes with hard glossy leaves squatted. A sharp fluttering came from behind one set of bushes — a bird spooked by something, maybe him, maybe something else. Badgers came to mind. He had been reading in the Britannica lately about badgers, about their implacable fierceness. In the drawings, despite their fur, they looked flattened, like some turtles or other reptiles. They had hard black curved claws. He stopped. The wind soughed in the tall thin trees, making a sighing sound. In a minute, he thought, it’s gonna start moaning. The path came to a plank, railed bridge over twenty feet of a tea-colored creek. He made himself stop in the middle of the bridge, carefully lean on the rail and look at the water that had no discernible current. Green and yellow dragonflies darted and hung over the surface, hesitating, tipping, angling, sliding down almost to the water and hovering there as if discovering and examining tremendously interesting material on what to Delvin looked like a glozed, chocolate-colored sheet. The stream had a pleasant peaty smell. The bank on the far side was sandy, speckled with brown and black bits, but the stream itself was opaque; dark water that might contain anything. But no police down there, he thought. He’d never gone fishing, except once when Mr. Oliver and George had taken him to a little pond behind a client’s house out in the country. Nothing but a little black turtle had bit their hooks. He’d like to try it again.

Looking up the trail that continued through the leafy trees filtering into piney woods, he debated whether to keep going. These moments of hesitation were familiar to him. Seems like that’s where I really live, he sometimes thought, not in the doing of one thing or another. He didn’t really want to go on, but he felt he ought to, ought to be brave enough or interested enough. Or was that a way of really wanting to do something — thinking he should — and hiding it from himself. He’d like to go into the little room where he slept and lie on the bed and read something, maybe the book of fairy stories or a newspaper. In their parlor the Bealls had My Bondage and Freedom by Mr. Douglas and Souls of Black Folk by Dr. Du Bois, but he had already read those books. He wanted to read another masterpiece, like Ivanhoe maybe, that he had read last summer lying on an old couch up in the attic at Mr. Oliver’s. He liked stories of struggle and questing in distant locales. Reading was natural, Miz Parker the cook said, to moody boys, and you are a moody boy. Maybe too moody, he thought, to be out alone in some thorny wood.

Then, without as far as he could tell having decided anything, he continued across the bridge and up the path that was strewn with waxy needles and rose gently into the pine woods. Just a few steps in it shaded off to the right, passed a large hedgelike growth of ligustrum that ran fifty feet in a high green wall and left off abruptly at the edge of a clearing in which there was a small white frame cottage. On the front porch of the cottage in a rocking chair much too big for him sat a tiny white man. The back of his chair soared high above his rusty white head. On one of the posts was hung a gray Confederate battle cap. The old man was looking straight at him. Delvin would have ducked and shot off from there, but the man called to him in a sweet little white man’s voice.

You, boy, welcome, he said.

His voice came so quick it caught Delvin before he could swing around. He must have been listening to him come along the trail. Those are some ears, Delvin thought, on an old man.

Did you bring me my candy? the man said.

No suh, Delvin answered.

Well, come on up here anyway and sit awhile.