Around them the great fields of cotton stretched away in every direction, the last fields in the last big cotton county before the mountains. The split bolls leaked white fiber and on a clear night the earth seemed covered with small showy stars. As the stories went around a feeling grew in Delvin that his life’s journey had begun. He had not thought of journeys in particular, not his or anyone’s, outside a book, but the strong feeling came that he was beginning on a journey of journeys. Not just this little jaunt down the road from C-town, but on from here (even if he was already on the way back to his birthplace) farther and farther. He wanted to ask Mr. Sterling when they would be leaving. He was afraid to, what with his circumstances; he got up, went over to the corner and sat down beside some stacked boxes of canned beans. In a few minutes he had drifted into a light sleep. He dreamed of a boy tussling with another boy who was as tall as a giant, and of leaping off a viney bridge into a great green river, and of dancing in front of a pretty girl, and of washing long yellow rolls of cloth in a barbecue restaurant kitchen, and of a dog that understood everything he said. He could still hear the voices of the men droning on. They were trying to top each other’s stories. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake or asleep. He started to say something and then Mr. Sterling was shaking him by the shoulder. He jumped to his feet. In only a few quick minutes he was out front in bright sunshine tossing his bindle into Sterling’s dusty Chevrolet pickup and the two of them were headed out of town.
He rode turned away from the man — older, with ragged gray hair under a gray felt hat and above a dark-complected face — because he had an erection. It came up shortly after they got in the car. Sterling had glanced at him and Delvin thought he saw his minor predicament. The town flowed away from them and they were in the country. Tall red spires of sumac flowers by the road, cattails in the ditches spilling their stuffing. In front of a squashed-looking white house, lumberous oaks with dark green leaves. The trees made the house look small and lonely. What was it he had been dreaming about? He remembered: fights and friendly dogs, and something else, something muted, stepping from a stillness that didn’t want to stay still. His plans seemed silly now as he traveled through the farmed countryside. What of the old man in the cottage? Would he just sit on his porch waiting for the woman until he died? Was there a contest, fight of wills and desire and hopes going on without cease on that farm? Did the Bealls lie awake at night struggling with loss and consequences, decisions made that changed everything? The path down into the piney woods was well traveled. By whom? It hurt that he would never know.
Delvin’s familiar erection passed. He didn’t know where these traveling erections came from, what they were about. He wasn’t charged up by sex right now. They hung around then drifted off like some corner rogue who’d thought of something else. A streak of high white cloud narrowed in the west. The fields were planted with cotton mostly, some with barley, some with hay grass. Mr. Sterling talked of his family — a wife and two boys who were mostly grown. The boys worked in town at the Easy Buy Tire store, fixing flats and putting new tires on trucks and tractors. In houses they passed — isolated farmhouses, tenant shanties, farmworker cabins in a row under sycamore trees — tragedies, commonplace occurrences, religious makeovers, births, nonsensical familiar arguments, were taking place. A wife threw boiling water at her hateful son and missed him. An old man lay in bed choking on a radish. A little boy with a pale white scar on his heel stood on the seat of a hay rake, tottering, about to fall into a harrow’s teeth. A man spoke on the party line to his brother, wondering what they should get Mother for her birthday. A tea caddy? his brother asked. A young woman who had lost her husband’s gold-plated watch cried in her bedroom, sorry she had ever married and left her home. An aging ne’er-do-well, father of eight, paused on the back steps to look back at a field of flowering purple vetch, thinking that the beauty of the world was endless.
