Miss Bawnmoss came down the steps and stood beside him, wringing her hands in a white handkerchief.
“It’s her father,” she said.
“In the pictures?”
“No. But her father got killed by white men. Over in Mississippi.”
“They hanged him?”
“No, it wasn’t that.”
She didn’t go to the woman, who had stopped weeping and was standing now in the churchyard looking off into the distance.
What have I done? he thought.
“They drowned him,” Miss Bawnmoss said.
“Aie, Lord.”
She went to her friend. The two woman embraced. Celia’s right hand fluttered down to her side and hung there like something forgotten. She separated herself from her friend and came over to Delvin who stood now in the shadow behind the truck.
“Thank you for showing me your exhibit,” she said. “I guess I was just surprised by some of it.”
“I’m sorry about your daddy,” Delvin said.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, looking at him with a softness that Delvin could feel in his body. He wanted to take her in his arms, and would have and walked her away into the mustering dark and kissed her if she let him and would do this even though he knew it was the wrong time and place, but he was a few days or hours from knowing her well enough yet and that stopped him.
“Oh me,” she said, “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”
“Can I walk along with you?”
She looked lightly at him, a look like a flutter of lace in a summer window, and said, “I suppose.”
Delvin walked with the two women back to Miss Bawnmoss’s house. There was at first a little light talk from Miss Bawnmoss, but this died quickly and they walked in silence. Down the dirt street three boys played with a ball made of cloth scraps, tossing it high in the air and jostling each other to see who would catch it. On the front steps of a crooked house a little girl combed a small black dog with a hairbrush. A woman in overalls sat on a rough wood porch husking green corn. Smell of pine smoke. Dusk easing along.
A man leading a mule on a piece of cotton plowline passed. He tipped his white straw hat to the women. They both laughed with a gaiety that surprised Delvin. The next moment the two women began to run. Celia looked back at Delvin and waved, her expression a mix of mischief and melancholy. “Come by tomorrow,” she called.
He stood in the street watching them run. “Never saw anything like it,” he whispered, took a breath and whispered the words again, saying them because he had suddenly always wanted to in just this situation.
That night he walked through the half-lit gloom of the quarter to the edge of town. The quarter was separated from lush empty fields by a wide ditch grown up in gallberry scrub. On the other side and about a half mile down, close to the railroad tracks, was a hobo camp. Above him a scattering of stars were as hard and white as quartz chips. He was filled to the brim with thoughts of the young woman Celia. He went down into the little depression where the camp was and sat down by the fire. A few of the hoboes had visited the museum, including two white men who said they had been teachers and were now on the road. Last year the stock market had tumbled like a man falling down a flight of stairs and this year brought new travelers to the roads, but in the South the hobo life and bad times were long established. Dixie hadn’t come back from the Civil War, it had just kept going on the busted-up same. The white folks weren’t about to change and they didn’t let the negro folks change either, or tried to keep them from it. An antique asked if he wanted food but he thanked him and said no. The antique was a rough-looking colored man with a dent in his chin. Delvin accepted a cup of coffee, drunk from a partially crumpled tin cup the man offered him. They sat side by side on a downed chestnut branch with the leaves still on it. These trees were dying off, too, poisoned by blight. They talked about the state of the world and agreed that it was, as ever, going to hell.
After a while Delvin got up and walked around the camp. He thought he recognized a few of the men, but he wasn’t sure. These days he often saw folks he thought he had seem somewhere before.
