For how many days he couldn’t be sure he lived with the snake lying upon his body. Sometimes it left him but soon enough it returned. During the periods of its absence he found no need to get up and piss or shit or even to teethe the hard cornbread or take a sip of water. Once they opened the door to look in on him, but seeing the big olive-colored, cross-hatched snake coiled on his chest the guard, a small muscular man named William Burden, cried out “Help me, Jesus!” and slammed the door shut, leaving him from then on undisturbed. He heard the LT say to let him go until they smelled him begin to rot. But he didn’t rot.

He drifted on a sea of time. And one day the snake slipped away and didn’t return, but Delvin didn’t notice.

When they came eventually for his body he was asleep on the floor, alone except for the bugs, and on that Sunday afternoon in October he was dreaming of riding up front in the professor’s van through the north Mississippi countryside where the leaves of hickory trees lay like yellow footprints on the red clay road and somewhere up ahead, but not yet, the Fall of Man was walking back into history. The sky was coral blue and the clouds were outlined in black ink that made them stand out.

The guards banged on the tin sides of the shed to scare the snake, but they were too late.

“Look at this crafty nigger with a grin on his face,” he heard the guard Jim Karnes say to another guard as they carried him out of the Bake House. He was sick near to death with malaria. They dumped him on the little porch outside the infirmary and left him for the medico to find.

Well, I’m better now, he thinks, watching Milo raise his long leg slightly to scratch along his thigh, better than I was.

2

Billy Gammon, boy lawyer, studied the notes Baco had prepared and then he walked out into the hot fall day where leaves twirled up and lay back down as a breeze smelling of cotton fields passed through the square. I better just make something up, he thought. Those boys are headed in one direction only. And he wondered if life seemed shorter to those who only moved along a single, fixed road. He nodded as he passed the townsfolk, but many didn’t nod back. Nor did many in the Red Rooster, where he had dinner with Davis Pullen.

“What you think?” he asked Pullen, one of the lead lawyers, a chatty, florid man who had come in last in his law school class at the university but was in no way hampered by this, practicewise or mouthwise.

Davis chewed the edge of a yellow biscuit, put the biscuit down on his plate of soupy rice and chicken gravy and looked Billy in the face. This was Davis’s big courtroom trick, the straight-in-the-face look. He had such a wide simple face that sometimes the juries, taken aback by the foolish openness displayed before them, forgot what it was they wanted to do and signed off on a not-guilty verdict. Davis had a good reputation as a lawyer who could get a man off.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

This was one of his stock courtroom responses.