He returned to the yard behind the store. The sky was touched up here and there by a few high clouds like smears of white. The day would be hot. He took a seat on a crate under the camphor tree. There were camphor trees in the negro section of the municipal cemetery in Chattanooga. He wondered who was on the funeral list. Mr. O studied the paper and listened to stories from the neighborhoods of Red Row and kept a list, sometimes on a sheet of linen stationery in his bedroom, sometimes simply in his head, of the ones who would most likely be needing his services soon. He never spoke up ahead of time, but he was ready when the day came. Often before he was called. Mrs. Turnipseed was on the last list he’d seen, a middle-aged widow dying of bowel cancer. Her whole house smelled of shit, somebody said. One of the boys he smoked cigarettes with in the alley. And Rufus Wainwright who had taken to his bed with rheumatism. He lay in a room wallpapered with newspapers, listening to band music on the radio, reading the headlines out loud. And they said little Eustace Rogers, eleven, who had fallen off the roof onto the sharp palings of an old wooden fence his father was keeping around, hoping to set it up in his yard, wouldn’t recover. There were others, the sick and the aged mostly, occupants of the waiting room, Mr. O called them, and Delvin had pictured them sitting in the colored-only room outside the heavenly office, their straw suitcases and carpetbags closed with string at their feet, old people and young, children too, some weeping, others stoical, others not understanding why they were there and maybe only slowly figuring it out. What was the weather like outside the window? There had to be a window. He pictured himself in that room. He would be looking out the window at whatever was growing in the yard. Probably mallow bushes and mock banana, a few straggly corn plants, a rosebush dripping pink blooms, tomato vines lying on the ground. He was coming to love the smell of the fields.
A little boy threw open the screen door and rushed out into the yard.
Don’t hit me with that switch, he cried to the woman who chased behind him. She was carrying a long, limber elm switch.
The little boy circled the yard, coming in close to Delvin under the tree. He shot him a glance of humiliation and regret and ran on by. The woman — his mother, Delvin assumed — stood just outside the doorway waiting for him. The little boy stopped on the edge of the ravine and looked at her.
You gon come here, Stacy? the woman said.
I aint coming to take no whipping, the boy said.
Well, if you don’t then you don’t get to come home at all.
The woman stared at the boy a moment longer and then wheeled and vanished back into the store. The little boy, six or seven, squatted and began to cry. Delvin watched him. After a while the boy dried his eyes with the bottoms of his hands, straightened up and came over to Delvin.
What you doing? he asked.
Waiting.
For what?
The bus.
Aint no bus come back here.
It’s a different kind of bus.
You think my mama’s gon whip me? the boy said with an almost saucy air.
Sure does look like it.
Well, she won’t. I’ll just wait out here til she gets lonely for me then I’ll mosey on home.
How long will that be?
Oh, bout five minutes. He scratched his arms. Delvin could see the faint raised red circles of ringworm on his tan arms.
Shouldn’t scratch that, he said.
I don’t see how you can keep from it.
That what your mama’s after you for?
That’s it. He began to cry again. That doctor, he sniffed after a minute, wants to shave my head bald and paint it with grease that stings like fire.
That bad?
Sure is. I seen it done.
But those worms’ll eat you alive.
He scratched mournfully at the rings. It’s a problem that’s got me in a vise grip, he said.
Just then the boy’s mother pushed the screen door halfway open. Here’s a strawberry drink, honey, she said, her voice light and tender. Come on now.
You gon beat me, the little boy said.
Come on sugarbite, his mother said, and the boy walked to her and took the drink and she put her hand on his shoulder and steered him into the store.
After a few minutes Delvin followed the boy inside. The pair were gone, but some men were sitting at a corkboard table set on a crate in a cleared space off to the side in back. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if she didn’t know him. Then in a blink she did. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
