That’s Sterling, she said to him, indicating with her elbow one of the men sitting at the table. They weren’t playing a game, they weren’t really sitting around the table, they were just near it. The man she indicated, a middle-aged stocky man with bushy hair mashed down under a forage cap, gave him a one-finger salute and said, We’re waiting on my sister’s boy. He grinned a grin of uselessness and amiable futility. Another of the men, an older fellow wearing a greasy black vest over a clean white collarless shirt, offered him a chair. Delvin slid in and joined the little confab. He was used to sitting with adults, listening to their talk. He had sat up in the viewing parlor or in the Home parlor on call for the bereaved who spoke in all kinds of ways, very often about things that had nothing to do with the dead. People, no matter what happened, kept their eye on the living side of things. The third man, a slim geezer with a fist-sized red rose pinned to the lapel of a yellow bathrobe he kept pulling tighter around himself, looked as if he might be joining the funeral list pretty soon. I’m Albert, he said, offering slim shiny fingers for Delvin to shake. Yes, he said, turning back to the group, my grandfather won that election fair and true. Eighteen seventy-four, he said, turning his narrow face to Delvin, Slidell — fair and true.
What for? Delvin asked.
Why, the US Congress, the man Albert said.
He went on to tell how his grandfather had served two terms before he was thrown out of office after the soldiers left in ’78.
They put it to him straight over the barrel of a Spencer rifle that it was not in his best interests to run for Congress, or any other office, again, he said.
Sho they did, the older man said. Happened all over this country down here. After the US government left.
He was a tall man, Albert said, six and a half feet. He had a natural bearing to him. A smart man, too. He proposed we open the southern part of the state with canals to help with trade — dig em straight to the Gulf — but nobody would vote for the measure. He never got over losing his office. He wound up living out on Mr. Roscoe Tillman’s farm.
Up here, Mr. Sterling said.
Sure. Out in one of the cabins down by the river. Just sitting out there on the front porch in a old rocking chair, like he was dreaming with his eyes open.
Did you know him? Sterling asked.
I did when I was a boy. He wore his Congress suit of black cloth, white shirt and a little black string tie. He was a handsome man.
I remember him well, the older man said. He came up here eventually to live with his sister, aint that right?
Yessuh.
They sighed and made soft sounds like swallowed humming and Delvin listened as the stories went around. The old man told a story about a magician who kept losing things. You know that magic’s just a trick, he said, but this fellow — lived over just outside Birmingham in a little crossroads settlement I believe it was, called Cherrytown, and he had a magic act at the Gifford show.
What you mean he started losing things? Albert said.
These objects that he made disappear, for his show act, he got so he couldn’t bring em back. First, so they said, it was a blue rubber ball. You know how they wave a cloth or some such thing and it’ll disappear? Well he waved his cloth over this blue ball and it disappeared, but when he went to wave it again it wouldn’t come back.
Where was it? Albert asked.
That was the thing. He didn’t know. He looked everywhere for that ball but it didn’t show up. He wondered about it, so they said, but he didn’t think too much of it. Maybe it had rolled off under the couch or something. Then a Mason jar filled with honeybees disappeared and was lost forever. Same way as the rubber ball. He waved the cloth over the jar and presto it was gone, but then it wouldn’t come back. That jar filled with bees — he’d punched holes in the lid so they could breathe and so the customers could hear the bees buzzing — was gone for good.
Haw, Sterling said. It had to be somewhere.
Well, where was it? Nobody saw it again. He tried the trick again, with a new silver dollar and. . wham!. . it vanished and was never heard from again. He couldn’t find it in any of the pockets it usually wound up in. He tried the trick on a little hairless dog and the dog vanished. Gone for good, though his little girl, whose dog it was, said she sometimes could hear the dog’s squeaky little bark, ghostly like, as she lay in her bed at night. Well, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether he had discovered a blessing or a curse. He tried it on a bushel of fresh peaches and lost all the cobblers his wife was planning to make for the lawn supper over at the church. He tried it on a pile of trash in the backyard and found a lazy man’s way to work.
It was gone too, Delvin said.
