By dinnertime they had made a dollar and fifty-five cents off a first-grade class from the little deckleboard school behind the waterworks. The teacher had to snap her fingers at him as if he was a schoolboy to get his attention on the presentation articles. The professor called him on his distractedness, but in a friendly way. Delvin had mentioned that a young woman might be coming over. They ate noon dinner at a slabwood table by the church garden. Bees tumbled among poppy flowers and floated over the big puffy hydrangeas.
“It’s a miracle I guess that these Methodists allowed themselves even to plant a garden like this,” the prof said, indicating the colorful array of blossoms. “They are so hard on themselves about appreciating any beauty but that of their lord and savior. It is the most foolish response to the truth that I am aware of in these parts.”
“What do you mean by that?” Delvin, only half listening, inquired.
“Anybody who tarries long enough in the quiet of the day will shortly see that the most profound world is intangible. Invisible,” he said, laughing his wheezy one-horse laugh. “Like in that photograph you like so much.”
“Which one?”
“The one of that shady road and that wagon climbing the hill.”
“Invisible?”
“You know what I am talking about. We love being under big trees, in their shade, because they return us, partway at least, to the mysterious world.”
“How come we knuckle down so hard in this one? Everybody I know is trying to make a killing right here.”
“Looks that way, dudn’t it?”
“In the funeral business you see the ones who gathered the most headed out in the slickest style.”
“Still we wonder where they head out to.”
“I wonder about it all the time.”
“All you got to do is slow yourself down a little. Put aside this grasping.”
“You mean like right now?”
“Well, right now you have the hidden world appearing in its most concentrated form. Or about to. Or you hope it will.”
“You mean. .”
“Exactly. She is the most familiar representation of this other world — or at least what we feel about such as her is.”
“I feel so jumpy I am about to crash out of my skin.”
“Pretty likely.” He looked off toward a large blossoming crape myrtle. “How you doing with those books I gave you?”
“Right well. I been reading
The professor looked up at the sky that was so clear by now it was almost white, summer white.
“What kind of life?”
“He doesn’t clearly say. He just recommends that we vacate the premises.”
“Yes.”
Delvin looked off toward the van. “I guess we pretty naturally are living that way right now.”
“Our ambling way of life, you mean?”
“Yessir. Traveling from town to town.”
“It’s a splendid life, I agree, but it doesn’t appear to be for everybody.”
“It pretty much suits me.”
“You are one in a thousand, my boy.”
It was difficult under the circumstances to keep up his end of the conversation but he felt it was his duty to, and besides, at least on most occasions, their talks excited him. But today his spirit lay sunk in longing and the afternoon was a parched plain spread around him and the food he ate unidentifiable. He kept getting up to go check the street in both directions; the professor had to call him back to the table.
Just before sunset, stepping out from under the blue shadow cast by a big box elder down the street, Celia appeared. She came with her friend. Delvin, his throat so thick he first had to step around the side of the van and hack and take deep breaths, showed them around the premises. Miss Bawnmoss held back, allowing that she was not at all impressed, but Celia — she said to call her that — wept a quiet seep of tears before a stack of pictures of suffering and degradation, of hangings and burnings. Delvin did not interfere. He had learned from Mr. Oliver that there was a proper distance to allow grievers to express themselves without them feeling that they too were being urged into the pit. She leaned with her hand propping her body against the long table. Before her men with blood gleaming on their backs knelt under the whip hand. She swayed slightly. Her face gleamed with tears. She cried without making a sound. He wanted to touch her. Just before his hand rose she turned blindly from the helpless bodies, first toward the front of the van and then, catching herself, turned back and stumbled by him and out into the fading light. He followed her to the door and then down the steps.
She crossed the sidewalk and stood in the grass beyond it. The sky looked like a piece of pale gray silk stretched tight. The trees had darkened almost to black. Between them a few sips of color, of peach and cherry, shone through.
