She’s doing fine. We been reading in her book of fairy stories.
I gave her that book when she was a spring child. A beautiful young girl she was. She had the jumpinest legs. Just springing about everywhere. You ought to have seen her leap a fence. He stared hard at Delvin. You one of J. D.’s kin?
Nawsir, I’m just down visiting.
From Atlanta?
Yessuh.
J. D. comes from over around Anniston. He come over this way following his daddy who was a preacher in one them nigra denominations. You go to church, boy?
Well, I do and I don’t.
You being smart?
Nosir. I work at a funeral home and we are in church quite often. But I myself am not a member of any given organization.
You educated, aint you, boy?
It thrilled Delvin to have the man think that, even if he was spiting him. He said, The man I work for lets me read some of his books.
Careful they don’t smoke up your head. The old man barked out a laugh that sounded like he was cracking pecans. I guess they couldn’t smoke your feet, could they?
Nosuh.
I myself got so interested in life that I never had time for reading. I spose I could have during the winters — like when we was holed up from fighting Useless Grant — but even then I found so much to do in the world I din’t even think of it. And look at me now, he said, running his stiff hard mottled hands down his thighs. Under the age-softened cloth they looked like two-by-fours. He looked again toward the trail. Delvin had the sense that he spent his time looking up that way. The edge of the ligustrum cut off sight; from the porch he could only see the sandy white path itself wandering on past the house into the deeper evergreen woods. The old man had the air of somebody waiting for something. D’I tell you I used to live up at that house?
Yessuh, you did. It’s a fine house.
I gave that house to Fletchy when she married J. D. I gave her this whole farm and much else besides.
Delvin didn’t say anything. The old man appeared to be in the grip of great emotion and Delvin figured anything he said might offend him. Mr. Oliver was very good in these sorts of situations. He brought a peacefulness with him that soothed others. But Delvin was a little jumpy. Yet he too cared about the bereaved folk, and this rickety old white man appeared to be one of the bereaved.
Is there anything I can do for you? he asked.
The old man looked at him with his blue-flooded eyes. Naw, son. Not unless you can make time run backwards. He smiled, revealing a snaggly mouth of isolated yellow teeth. And even then, how could you make it stop at just the right intersection?
They sat quietly for a while. His mind wandered to the cot in the Bealls’s back room that wore little shoe polish tins on its feet, filled with water and a touch of coal oil, just like the beds in their little house with his mama. Keep the bedbugs and the roaches and the ants out of bed with you. When he waked in the morning he smelled smells, little trickly odors, that made him want to cry for the memories they brought with them: creosote, rue, soda biscuits: cottagey smells from the long ago.
The sky still held on to its fading blue, blue almost gone to gray now, but the world around the two of them was turning on to black.
They surprised us naked in the woods, the old man said.
Sir?
Old George Thomas’s boys. We was bathing in a creek off from Chickamauga — it was before the big fighting began — and they came upon us washing ourselves. Must of been at least a dozen of us stark naked when they rushed from the woods. They was trying to capture us. I got away but it was without clothes or any weapon. I walked thirty miles through the night and all the next day before I got back to this farm and I was a naked man the whole way. Once or twice I could have maybe got some clothes off of this or that farmstead home but I didn’t, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the dogs, maybe I was ashamed, maybe I just didn’t care. A fit of some kind. I arrived here in the dawn of September twentieth, 1863, last day of that battle that was the last fight we ever won, and I walked up the back steps of that house up yonder naked as a jaybird and there I found. .
His voice trailed off.
Yessir?
The old man looked at him out of eyes that continued to hold the limitless attachment irremediable and without effort on his part. He made little squeezy sounds in his throat and then he was silent.
After a while he said, You better go on, boy.
