He rose up qualmous and shaking, abruptly overfretted in his mind. No not that exactly — scared he had for a second lost his sense of where he was, like the time he’d dreamed a moment longer than he needed to and almost pitched headfirst off the ladder of a Baton Rouge — bound freight car.
He set the book down (he had been by now sitting on the lowest of the van’s two back steps, out in the air) and staggered across the dust-charged street into a field grown up in plantains and pokeweed. He thrashed through these greeny drifts and pulled up in a little cleared space where somebody had once made a campfire. Some wanderer. “That is what I am,” Delvin said. Said and slumped to his knees and over, passed out, like somebody graved into by the heat.
He came to with the professor man dripping cold water in his face.
“Come on boy, you’re not all right but you will live.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Delvin said.
The man rocked back on his heels and laughed. He raised the white china bowl that now contained water. “Here.” He held the bowl to Delvin’s mouth and let him drink. The water tasted pleasantly of cantaloupe.
He told Professor Carmel that he had for many years worked — was raised actually — in a funeral home, and when the prof asked which one and he told him he said with a broad smile that showed off his fine large teeth that he knew old Oliver well.
“A bit spendthrift with his emotions, but honorable and a fine consistency of service,” he said.
It made Delvin less lonely to hear this. He had been lonely for several days, maybe longer. Riding freights was generally a social activity of a kind, but due to a sweep by railroad detectives along the Southern line, he’d had to lay low in a canebrake by himself for three days before catching a local freight out of Metusa, a rattling train empty of cargo but for some loads of furniture and no other rail companions.
“You know something about the departed,” Prof Carmel said in a friendly way.
“I know something about how to prepare a body.”
“Fancy up the meat,” Carmel said.
“Most folks consider it showing respect for what’s coming. Don’t want to meet the Lord in your work clothes—”
“Worms and beetles are what’s coming,” the prof said.
Delvin believed pretty much the same thing, cosmologically speaking, but he didn’t generally like anybody else pressing on him in some righteous way that he had to believe this too. It didn’t matter what side of the theological fence people were on, they got hard-shelled about it quick enough. But the professor had given his correction or opinion in a genial way.
“Yall photograph up there?” he said.
“You mean the deceased? No, we don’t. Some do it by their own arrangements, but we don’t encourage it.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t discourage it either, but I think Mr. Oliver would rather people mourn by way of living memory. He’s not pushy about it though. He just doesn’t promote the service.”
“People are interesting no matter what shape they’re in, don’t you think?”
“Yes I do.”
“Look at these,” he said and pulled a long drawer out from a flat cabinet under the table.
Attached to big sheets of thick black paper were photographs of negro men hanging from the limbs of trees by their necks. Here we add to the number, he thought. Here we add to it. He wanted to turn away again. A nausea gripped him. Good lord, good lord. That boy out in the country, hanged and chopped and burned half away. It had been too much. It was still too much. This was too much.
