Free Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith Page B

tied into a little blue wagon and Billy Batts who wore his engineer’s cap at all times and sang sorrow songs as he dug holes in his yard searching for confederate gold and Mrs. Opel and Mrs. Crawford, the former dancing twins, not dancing this afternoon, and a couple of the Pursleys who all looked exactly alike and Mrs. Vereen carrying on a big tray several of the fruit pies she baked and sold at the market over on Leopardi street on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and he checked off Mr. Campson who was home sick from the grocery store he owned at the edge of the chinese quarter, and Biddy Comber, the retired boxer, once a sparring partner for Jack Johnsonand father of James who loved only the piano, Biddy standing in the center of his yard staring up into a pecan tree as if from there the Second Coming might commence. Hello and hello and hello. Hidy, yall, he said, checking each one off.
    He already felt trailed—hunted really—by the boy loping behind him. He wished he hadn’t said anything to him. The Ghost. He gave him an angry look. Elta Napier, a girl his age, stood out in her yard stringing ragged shirts on the washline. She wore a white shift that dragged up her thighs as she reached to pin a fluttering gray shirt. Delvin wanted to leave his self-appointed duty and go speak to Elta. Her thick hair was tied around with a pale blue cloth. His heart took a leap; it was a day, he thought, for heart leaping. He wanted to rush across the yard and push Elta to the ground. He wanted to fly to her and kneel on the packed and swept dirt at her feet. He slowed down, stopped and gave her a wave; Elta waved back without looking at him.
    The boy came and stood close enough behind so Delvin could smell him.
    “I thought you was going to show me a place.”
    “We’re on our way to it now,” he said without looking at him. “I thought I told you to hang back.”
    “I got to lie down.”
    “Well come on then.”
    He led him to the shed and piled a bed of straw for him in one of the unused stalls. As Delvin worked, the boy watched without offering to help, an impatient, grieving look on his face. The two horses shifted uneasily. The big gray nickered at him and Delvin stroked his nose. “Yall be friendly,” he said to the pair.
    “You can camp here,” he told the boy. “I’ll go up to the house and get you something to eat.”
    Willie and the yardboy Elmer were nowhere about and Delvin wondered where they’d gotten off to. No one was in the kitchen either. Delvin went into the pantry and made up a basket of food from the array of delectables they had received from the two funerals Oliver had presided over earlier in the week. The pantry was alwaysstocked with a bounty—layer cakes and big yellow hams and roasts in gelatin and eggy puddings and covered casseroles and blueberry and huckleberry pies and tureens of soup covered with cheesecloth. Delvin made a couple of ham and roast beef sandwiches on thick slices of white bread he cut from a long loaf. He filled a bowl with Brunswick stew made by Mrs. Constable Brown to serve at the funeral of her husband Harry J, the bullying boss of a negro road crew working out on the Capital highway.
    Where was everybody? He went out to the dining room and stood listening. In the big enameled tin plates propped along the chair rail Delvin could make out his distorted reflection. No sound in the house except for the hollow ticking of the big clock in the hall and the finches Mr. Oliver kept in the big cage in his office. The birds peeped and rustled and the familiar sound seemed the sound of the house itself. Then he picked up the low sound of voices coming from the workrooms downstairs. He went back through the pantry into the kitchen and down the back stairs where he met Mrs. Parker coming up. She was wiping tears with her apron.
    “Lord,” she said, “they done hung another one.”
    Delvin felt a hard exacting chill.
    “Help me up these stairs,” Mrs. Parker said.
    He took her arm