In the passing nights, the old days — of youth already encrusted with memory and the peculiar visitations of dream time — in these short summer nights and fall nights when the dust was lifted from the dry fields and sailed in clouds before the moon, turning the moon to rose — more secured now — again he brought back Oliver, Polly and the Ghost, and brought back the streets of the Row where he was a prince of boys, a wanderer among familiar byways, poking into the unusual facts and alliances of a neighborhood built on the lives of patrimonial and historical mimicries. He caught himself coughing quietly, from no disease other than the heart’s tendernesses, and pressed his hand on the floor of the van to steady himself as he shook with dream tears over the days gone from tarrying in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Parker about her adventures as a freight hauler’s wife in Florida, or the times, at the end of short winter days, when he sprawled in the voluminous armchair in Oliver’s bedroom reading of the high kings of Scotland and Venice. From a silence that seemed to flow endlessly both backward and forward he reached toward the shade that was his mother — shade of lingering breath. On cold days his own breath seemed at times to be hers too. The extensions of himself, the remainders, and especially the folded notes he sometimes handed to visitors asking them to pass the notes on if they were ever to come on an aubergine-faced, beautiful, springy-haired woman talking about the lives of kings — these scraps haunted him, their messages of hope and descriptions of some adventitious moment, of pulling on an oversized red sock or eating supper with gypsies or of waiting at a railroad crossing on a clay road in the late afternoon watching a breeze pick up and sort through its scatterings of yellow leaves. As far as the scribbled notes went, he had no idea if they found her, but he told himself — sometimes — that they did. This was his homemade religion, as the roads and the little towns smelling of wet ashes and pork grease, their painted arches welcoming everybody — so they said — and their overfed trees and storefronts where he and the professor caught themselves reflected with the same articulation and clarity as any other passersby, were his religion, and the cookfires they built and the august and pilfering nights and the collection itself, the big portmanteau they hauled around like medieval peddlers rolling their creaking schooners of trade goods, all these, and on some days not only these but everything he saw, touched, smelled and chanced on like motherless foundlings beside the road, were his religion. He tried to remember them all in the prayers of his noticing and his footsteps, especially his mother Cappie, offering a nodding and insufficient worship. Meanwhile in sleep he wrestled so mightily that the professor told him he would put him outside under the truck if he didn’t quiet down. It took a long time to ease up in the dreams. But the professor never did put him out. It was a secret ministration he thought and he thanked him for it. The old man’s clucky, crusty ways did not interfere with his kindness. Raised around childless grownups, Delvin was used to the standard selfishness of the lonely and habitbound. He had been studying people all his life so far. “Some kind of lookout,” the professor said when he told him. “You could say that,” Delvin said. Out the truck window the wind stroked channels and currents through a field of yellowing barley as they talked.
