A Garden of Earthly Delights (19 page)

When he got to the house he could feel sweat running off him. On the big veranda with its peeling paint and broken boards he talked to a youthful woman with a ruined, blemished face. She kept staring off over his shoulder as if every word he said pained her. “We need money here,” she said, whining, “we don't have nothin to do with anybody who—”

“Where did he go?”

“He had that room two other times he was in town,” she said. “He never made no trouble, I liked him. His business was his own business.”

“Where did he go?”

She fumbled with the neck of her dress. Her lower lip protruded in thought, then relaxed. “You can look in his room,” she said. “I ain't fixed it up yet. I heard him drive out last night, real late—I was in bed—”

Behind her a man was shouting something. The woman stared over Carleton's shoulder as if the voice were coming from a great distance. Then she turned sharply and yelled back through the screen door: “You shut your mouth an' keep it shut!” When she turned back to Carleton her face was already composed and she was moving. They went down the rickety steps and around to the back of the house. In the soft morning light of this land everything was softened by moisture, even the rotting wood of the house. There was a pile of lumber around the corner, some of it propped up against the house as if children had been playing with it. Carleton and the woman walked in the driveway, which was rutted and wet. Two cars were parked in it, at angles. One of the cars looked as if it had been there for quite a while. Carleton thought he could get it going, maybe, if it was his own car. The only trouble would be getting it out of that mud.

She showed him the room. A flood of sunlight fell onto the bare floor and partly onto the bed. Carleton looked around. The very bareness of the room satisfied him. He knew it was still too soon to find her. “Where does he go after he leaves here?” he said.

“Why, he drives to Savannah. I think. To Savannah maybe,” she
said pleasantly, as if offering Carleton a gift. “I don't know why I know that.…”

“What does he look like?” Carleton said. His eyes moved slowly around the room. He saw a film of dirt on the window. The room was so empty he might get lost in it, somehow fall in its secret silence and be unable to get out. He kept looking around as the woman described that man, again pleasantly, like the young man and the waitress leaning a little toward him as if about to offer him some of their energy as well as their truthfulness. When she stopped, he felt his mind jerk like a muscle. He jumped forward and began tearing the bedclothes off.

“Here,” the woman said nervously, “you don't want to get hot this early in the day—”

When he was outside again he felt better. At first the woman did not want to sell him that car because the kids played in it, and because the man who owned it might be coming back someday; her forehead creased with honesty. Carleton had the eerie, unreal feeling that this morning everyone was sympathetic with him as they had never been before in his life; it might have been that they believed his life was over. But he took out his money and counted it patiently. “Well, maybe you got a hand with cars,” the woman said, looking at his money. “It'll maybe start an' maybe won't.” Carleton said nothing. She laughed breathlessly and went with him over to the car, tiptoeing and hopping in the mud. “The keys are inside there,” she said. Carleton got the creaking door open and slid inside. The broken fake-leather seat was hot as acid from the sun. “This'll do just fine, I thank you.”

It took Carleton a while to get the motor started. A small crowd had gathered by the time he backed the sputtering car out of the rutted driveway. A mile away was a gas station, he turned the shuddering car into it where a bald-headed boy was standing staring at him with an amazed smile as if he'd been waiting for him, Carleton Walpole. The boy stared at the car as if trying to place it. He moved slowly with the hose, filling Carleton's gas tank. Carleton asked, “Which way to Savannah?” and the boy said some words in a quick mumble Carleton didn't catch, and went to fetch him a road map. Carleton opened the damn map that was so large he could hardly
see it and his heart lurched at the challenge it was: an infinity of lines of differing, coded colors and small-print names of towns, cities, counties, rivers. Carleton laughed, an angry laugh. All he needed now was his eyes going bad: old-man eyes.

“This'll do just fine. I thank you.”

There was a river he was crossing on a high bridge with an open wire floor through which you could see the water below and the bridge was vibrating and humming like an electric chair as the current was thrown: his eyes took in a name that was Indian-sounding ending in -
oochi
but he had no idea what it meant. Many times he'd crossed the Mississippi River but he didn't believe this was the Mississippi for it wasn't so wide, and he was in another part of the country—wasn't he? Sunlight flashing on the water below like flame.

Didn't believe in God, it was all a crock of shit, yet God might be laughing at him now.
Seek and ye shall find.
He was seeking her, but he had not found her. Yet. Because the sun had shifted in the sky and was assaulting his aching eyes from another, new angle.

Even the Mississippi River had looked shallow in places. That was deceptive. You have to know that there are undertows, swift currents in some places, like slithering snakes; in others, the water appears muddy and no-account. Carleton, Sr., cautioned his sons to preserve their strength as men for things that were
of account.
He had been a blacksmith and a farmer and had not gone to school beyond a few grades but he had eyes in the back of his head, nobody could put a thing over on him. Carleton laughed aloud—“That old man ain't dead.” Suddenly he knew. And knew, too, that the farm had not been sold: that was just to fool him, and to punish him. Because he'd gone so far from Breathitt County. And he'd never repaid that debt.

His pa had said much in life is
no-account
, and a whole lot of that is a
crock of shit.
It passes without leaving any impression like clouds in the sky. What is
of account
—getting born, dying, buying property, getting married and having children and honoring your father and mother and defending the honor of your family—are all that matters.

Everything else was no-account. Carleton's life was adding up to
no-account.

Stopped at a filling station paying in dollar bills, nickels and dimes. A penny that slipped through his shaky fingers, he bent to pick it up but the gas station attendant, a lanky kid, was quicker.

Which was the route to Savannah?

Savannah what? Florida, or Georgia?

Carleton thought it was Florida, maybe. Or, if it was Georgia, maybe the other was on the way.

You trusted to the sun, as a picker. In the field you can gauge the time by the sun in the sky. Even if it's overcast, you feel it.

He was back in the car and driving. “Now what?”—God was laughing at him. He'd maybe taken a wrong turn. He had not known there was more than one Savannah. So a map could not help, one hundred percent. But if one was on the way to the other, then it might. Hours passed. It was night, and another day, and again morning and he had not slept; or, if he'd slept, it was in his car with his mouth agape like an old man, snoring so hard he woke himself in a panic. And then he was driving into the sun: saw a clock in a barber shop window: eight-twenty. But which eight-twenty, day or evening? And which day, and which month?

Wasn't sure if he was still in Florida. Maybe he'd crossed the state line without knowing. YOU ARE LEAVING FLORIDA THE SUNSHINE STATE COME BACK SOON!

This was confused with God commanding him as God had commanded him once.
All the corners of the world shall ye seek and one day ye shall find.

Except his skin, he'd be judged. His skin was white. Yet the Klansmen had been scornful of him. A white man and an American like them except they'd kicked him in the groin as you'd kick a dog, and one of them had struck his face with a rifle butt when he'd lain writhing in pain. Now he favored his left leg. He was not an old man but sometimes walked like an old man. What they'd done to Bert, he had not seen. Like you'd castrate a hog it was said.

There was a sign—CUMBERLAND ISLAND 19 MILES. Cumberland!

But he guessed it wasn't what he wished. He kept driving.

Stopped in a place called Brunswick. At least he was headed
north on route 17, and he was headed for Savannah, Georgia. His head was pounding so, almost he couldn't get out of the car. Outside, the air was steamy, worse than in the car. Hugging close to his body in a kind of halo. Inside the diner that was also a tavern, a few flies buzzed lazily. No one at the counter and no one behind it. Carleton sat on a stool and waited. Folded his battered scabby hands and waited.
Seek. Ye shall find.
There were festive sounds from the kitchen, laughter, a hammer pounding. After a while Carleton went to peer through the doorway and saw that the kitchen was cluttered and messy but there was a floor fan going and at a table sat a fat, shirtless man wielding a hammer. A nerve in Carleton's eye twitched when the fat man struck the table with the hammer— “Gotcha, fucker!” A girl in a soiled waitress's uniform was leaning against a stove, giggling. Her cheeks bounced with hilarity. The fat man struck again at the table and she giggled louder. Carleton saw that for all his fat, the man had a deft aim: he'd mashed maybe a dozen flies on the table.

Still, Carleton was served. Had a cold bottle of Coca-Cola to soothe his nerves, tried to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye, but the ball of tiny snakes in his guts was acting up. He decided to take the sandwich along to eat in his car. No knowing when he would eat again. He smiled to think—“A sandwich can outlive who tried to eat it.”

W
ELCOME
T
O
S
AVANNAH
his eye discerned without comprehending at first. So tired … Saw a clock in a billboard sign: two-thirty. But maybe it was a painted clock and not real. He could not have said which of the blond-haired girls he was seeking: the one named Pearl, or the one named Clara.

Had to wonder: Does God keep a promise?

He parked his car, had to piss so bad. Behind a boarded-up warehouse. A long shaky steamy-hot stream of piss like poison. When he was finished he swayed on his feet. Flies moved in.

Bitch just like your mother.

Why he said those things he did not know. In fact it wasn't Carleton who said them but some drunk with his mouth. He would ask to be forgiven, he hadn't meant to hit her. (Maybe he hadn't hit her.
His own girl. It wasn't like Carleton to hit a woman let alone a girl his own daughter who adored him.) He was walking somewhere looking for his car he'd parked by a— He would remember when he saw it.

“Clara.” That was her name.

He was walking, and he was favoring his left leg. That bad knee. His skull pounded. Hammer-hitting: whack-whack! A nerve twitched in his eye. He understood that God was mocking him more directly, openly. Yet he had his dignity, you didn't look up to acknowledge it. Always he would have his white skin, that was a fact.

Time was slowing down for him. Never before in his life had time slowed down so you could feel it, like melting tar. This meant that the rest of his life would stretch out before him like that long hot highway to this city whose name he'd already forgotten. He did not think that he could bear it, unless it had already happened and was finished.

Came to a church. A church! Remembering that the girl had been taken to a church. He'd begun to lose her, then. And he had not even known at the time.

This church was made of dark red stone, and it was a big old church nothing like the small tidy white shingle board with the cross at the top where he and the little blond girl who'd hardly come to his shoulder had been married. His eye took in
Gethsemane
vague as a word glimpsed through water. He was stumbling inside, into the relative cool of the stony interior.

A strange place. Like a mausoleum. A high ceiling like no church ceiling he had ever seen. He squinted up at it, and could not see where it ended. In the half-light, rising from the stony floor, figures stood motionless observing him. He believed he heard a soft murmur.
There he is.
Seeing then that the figures were statues. Tall, garishly costumed statues, more than life-sized. They were wearing long robes, but their heads were bare. Their hands held no visible weapons. One of them was Jesus Christ contorted on his cross like a worm on the hook, spikes through his bare white feet graceful as a woman's feet. Carleton stared, and shuddered. The sweat on his body was turning clammy. Like a man losing his vision he groped
his way along the pews, intending to approach the altar. For you were drawn toward the altar in this church. But the altar was far away, floating in white. White drapery, tall white candles. White flowers in vases. Above the altar was a stained-glass window. He had to sit suddenly, his left knee pounded with pain. Turning then to look behind and seeing how the statues were spaced through the church so that each section of pews might be observed. So that the church was never empty. If you half-shut your eyes, the statues seemed to move. There were low excited murmurs
There! there he is.
In this shadowy place like a mausoleum something seemed to draw everything upward, toward the altar and the stained-glass window that was a perfect egg shape. In the sides of the stone walls were other stained-glass windows, smaller and narrower. They were like eyes. Unblinking eyes. Carleton was the only figure in the church not moving, because he was being observed. In the windows the eye-aching colors—vivid reds, blues, yellows, greens—glowed and faded, sinking back into themselves then pulsing up again as if behind them a heart was beating. Everywhere there were vertical lines and juttings, arches high up the walls, that vibrated as if about to come to life. The shadowy ceiling might not even be a ceiling but the entrance to some other world. Ghostly and quivering the close, stale air was filled with invisible shapes like birds' wings. Spirits. Carleton was shivering, he did not believe in the spirits of the dead returning. He did not! Shut his eyes to ignore them seeing a melting-tar highway stretching off to the horizon, sun-baked. Sunshine State and God laughing at him and crushing him under His foot that was a fuckin cloven hoof.