The afternoon had slipped quietly away. The evening star was out in the east, trembling as if it had been struck with a hammer. He stopped at the section of the garden where they’d planted strawberries. The fruit time had passed, but all the berries hadn’t been picked; some had withered on the bushes. On the north side of the garden were a few apple trees. The little striped apples soon would be ready for picking. He felt a strange emptiness. It had come so quickly it was as if he had stepped unnoticed from one body into another. The old white man had spent his life in love with the woman he called Fletchy. That was the story he had not quite told. But now he lived in a little house in a pine wood. And the woman, a colored woman, lived with her husband, a colored man, in the ample farmhouse up the hill. But Delvin did not especially care to think on these things. The world was an odd place. He only wanted to stand in the sandy path, smelling fennel and the light dry smell of the broom grass and feeling what was happening to him. The emptiness; as if everything he depended on was gone. As if it never was. He felt as if he could see a hundred miles. As if the rough pasture that ended in a buff dirt road, and the distant cotton field, and the line of pine trees beyond were not there, or if they were they were really miles and miles away. As if in ordinary calculations the ordinary miles or so between him and the horizon were filled with hundreds of miles of dirt and trees and bushes and wild hay. No, it wasn’t emptiness he was feeling, that was the wrong word. It was lack. As if who he was had vanished. As if he was simply a floating heedfulness, not hovering or lying in wait but simply present in a space and time that was so full of variety and mixes and complications that the ordinary measures of space wouldn’t fit it. The trees were a mile away and they were a hundred miles away. He lived in an endlessness in which everything was also confined. A sense of quiet unchangeableness was all around him. Nothing was required. As he rested in this state gradually it passed, fading slowly like a long twilight. When he stirred again the ordinary world had regained its normal proportions. No residue of special arrangements or tricks remained. Without his noticing lightning bugs had risen from the grass. They swayed and flickered, holding their yellow-green lights aloft. He wished he had a jar to catch them in. His mother once in the backyard had caught a handful and tried to keep them in a big handkerchief she tied around her head, but the tiny lights faded and it was only dead bugs she shook from the cloth. She had given a half sob and laughed in a peculiar way that he could feel in his belly. Coolmist had stroked her arm and he wanted to say something, but he didn’t; sometimes even around his mother he was shy.
For supper that night they had hominy and thin slices of salt ham cut from a large ham hanging in the pantry and tomatoes stewed with okra and for dessert hot soda biscuits slathered with salted butter with cane syrup poured over them. Mr. Beall had come in from his afternoon trip. He looked at Delvin in an odd way, not unfriendly, almost sad. Delvin asked about the old white man down in the vale, but neither of them would go very far into it. He was their tenant, Mr. B said, a man who had once worked this land but was now retired. Delvin studied Mrs. Beall’s face as best he could without being rude, but she showed no special feelings about the matter. She didn’t ask after the man.
