The Marrowbone Marble Company
Glenn Taylor
A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.1941. Orphan Loyal Ledford lives a very ordinary life in Huntington, West Virginia. By day a History major, by night a glass-blower at the Mann Glass factory where he courts the boss's daughter Rachel. Preferring to read rather than talk about the war raging in Europe, he focuses his mind upon work and study. However when Pearl Harbour is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel, but he chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, unconnected from the present and haunted by the memories of war, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory town becomes a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must not only fight for his family but also the community he has worked so tirelessly to forge.Returning to the West Virginia territory of the critically acclaimed The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, M. Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community. A beautifully-written and evocative novel in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, The Marrowbone Marble Company takes a harrowing look at the issues of race and class throughout the tumultuous 1950s and 60s.
THE MARROWBONE
MARBLE COMPANY
A Novel
GLENN TAYLOR
Copyright (#ulink_2214629d-b6c1-542d-b28c-3d7a92e975e8)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Glenn Taylor 2010
Glenn Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-742328-6 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-00-735907-3 (Trade Paperback)
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007369393
Version: 2015-10-28
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Black ground was fenced for men to till. The dead of Gauley own this hill.
—Louise McNeill
Contents
Cover (#u16f36af3-7118-5ffb-832e-7bdcc70f1f83)
Title Page (#u4bc33803-e16e-5d62-ae8e-7eb399af635d)
Copyright
Epigraph (#u2e8d2aeb-de3d-5131-b1fe-df0f431fb607)
Prologue - January 1969
I - A Line in the Dirt
October 1941
November 1941
December 1941
August 1942
September 1942
October 1942
November 1942
August 1945
May 1946
June 1946
September 1947
October 1947
November 1947
February 1948
May 1948
July 1948
September 1948
November 1948
April 1949
October 1951
June 1953
II - A House on the Sand
June 1963
August 1963
September 1963
December 1964
February 1965
March 1965
April 1965
May 1966
June 1966
February 1967
June 1967
July 1967
September 1967
October 1967
February 1968
March 1968
April 1968
July 1968
December 1968
January 1969
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Glenn Taylor
Author’s Note
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue January 1969 (#ulink_0761b8ec-c449-51fe-a0ca-4c58d8963e41)
THE GROUND WAS THE color of rust. Holes the size of half-dollars were every where, some encircled by tiny mounds of dirt. This was hard earth, nearly frozen. Dried-up leaves and spruce needles turned brown. A hush had befallen the land, as still as the inside of a coffin. Such quiet recalled a time before timber had framed houses and a church, before plumbing hooked in hot and cold, before electricity snaked conduit. The trees slept. The creek was iced over.
At the back of the hollow, there was piled ash and shingle. Sheet metal lengths. Two-by-fours at peculiar angles, their surfaces bubbled and cracked and black. There was a furnace stack, fifty feet high and made from fieldstone. It towered above all that fire had taken, but its mortar was crumbling. A strong wind would soon enough knock it down and stir the ash and frayed black picture-frame wire and lampshade bones below.
Snow came. It landed silent on a thick sheath of glass, the size and shape of a backyard pond. This glass had run molten, but now it was cooled, its edges rounded, frozen in rolls. A woman walked a circle around it. She held in her hands a Bolex 16mm movie camera. She filmed the glass. Thought for a moment she had seen a fish eye looking up at her from beneath.
This tract of land had known many names. Bonecutter Ridge, Marrowbone Cut, the Land of Canaan.
A German hog butcher named Knochenbauer had settled it in 1798. He’d entered into common-law marriage with an Indian woman and they’d raised children and grandchildren and made their surname Bonecutter. The Bonecutters lived on these five hundred West Virginia acres for 150 years. They were hard, proud people who prospered some times and went hungry others. They witnessed love and murder, fire and flood, until only two remained. It was left to them to hold on to the land. They did so with the sure grip that hill people possess.
Loyal Ledford came to this place in 1948, and for a time people again walked the ground. They followed paths beaten by the feet of those who’d walked the same routes before them. House to church to meeting hall to woods’ edge, and back to house. The people here made something real and good. They built with their hands. They put down roots. Ledford put his in deep. But his blood carried memories and his temper ran hot. In his dreams, hollows were flooded and people hid in holes they’d dug in the ground.
Ledford was apart from this world, and yet the people followed him. “Tell you what,” he once said to them. “We can stir the creek and wake up the trees. We can be a people freed.”
I A Line in the Dirt (#ulink_d29e52e7-5986-5b3d-97bc-00ad036113f4)
October 1941 (#ulink_31938800-c558-59a7-a8dd-1db33da8eb60)
SIX BRICK CHIMNEY STACKS stood at a hundred feet each. This was the Mann Glass Company, a ten-acre factory tract straddling the C&O Line at Huntington’s western edge. Machine-made wide- and narrow-mouth bottles had been blown inside since 1915, and later, prescription and proprietary bottles. Eli Mann had opened the doors of a handblown specialty shop here in 1908. Now, at ninety, he owned a factory with one thousand employees and two 300-ton furnaces.
Inside, Loyal Ledford worked the swing shift, four to midnight. He’d done so since graduating high school in June, and before him, his father had done the same.
Ledford was a long, sturdy young man with big hands. At thirteen, he was a Mann Glass batch boy. At eighteen, he bid on and got his job as furnace tender. It suited him. He was careful to respect the fire, as heat will sometimes break even a young man down. Inside a glass factory, a furnace roared at 3,000 degrees.
Ledford squinted hard. Checked the gauge and eyeballed the furnace fire one last time through the barrier window. As was his custom at the end of a shift, Ledford stared at the fire until his peripherals went white. Then he closed his eyes and watched the little swirls dance across the black stage of his eyelids. He pushed his scoop shovel into the corner with his boot tip and walked blind down the dark east aisle. The wall bulbs had surged again. Popped open like fireworks, muted by the rest of the racket inside. Ledford clocked off at a minute past midnight.
Saturday turned into Sunday, and Ledford sat alone in the dark in front of his work locker. The sweat sheen on his body dried up. His wetcollared shirt turned cold and stuck to him. He coughed. Pulled off his split-leather work gloves. They rode high, all the way to the elbows.
Inside the factory cafeteria, Ledford looked for Rachel. She was the plant nurse on the four-to-midnight shift, and they’d been eating together for two months. Rachel’s mother was Mary Ball, formerly Mary Mann, Eli Mann’s daughter. Rachel’s father was Lucius Ball, plant manager.
She was three years Ledford’s senior. She’d grown up easy in a big house on Wiltshire Hill. He’d grown up hard in a little one next to the scrapyard on Thirteenth Street West.
She was easy to spot. Her posture was spike straight and her hair was coal black. Ledford followed her from the milk bin to the table, put his tray down across from hers. “What say, Jean Parker?” he said.
“What say, Pittsburgh,” Rachel answered. They’d had a date to see The Pittsburgh Kid a week prior. After, she told him he looked like Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid himself. He told her she looked like Jean Parker, only younger. They’d kissed.
“Tired?” he asked.
“A little.” She wore a purple flower on the breast of her nurse’s uniform. Her silver watch was loose on her wrist, thin as twine.
“Hungry, I take it.” Ledford cut his steak, as she did hers. They always ate the same meal. Steak, eggs, chocolate cake. It was the second thing he’d noticed about her.
“Did you read about the Navy destroyer? The torpedo attack?” Rachel chewed while she talked, blocked his view with her napkin.
“Off of Iceland? Didn’t sink it though, did they?”
“No.”
She liked to talk about the war raging in Europe and in China. He didn’t. Always, with wars, Ledford had liked to read, not talk. And so he did, in the paper, each day as he ate breakfast before class. But mostly, his reading came by way of books. History books, like the big old red one that had been his father’s. The Growth of the American Republic it was called, and Ledford had read it thrice before enrolling at Marshall College as a history major.
The sound of stacked glass shifting echoed loud from the kitchen. Mack Wells walked past. He was the swing-shift janitor and the only black man at the plant. He nodded to them and they nodded back. Rachel had bandaged his hand the night before. He’d been scorched by a valve exhaust.
“Mack Wells’ wife is pregnant,” Rachel said.
“How do you know?”
“He told me while I wrapped his hand. She’s due at springtime.”
“Is that right?” He shook hot sauce onto his eggs. “Yes.” She’d stopped chewing and clasped her hands together on the table. “I think springtime is the finest of the seasons for a baby, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t look up at her. His pinbone sirloin was cut to gristle.
“What season were you born? I know you’ve told me, but I’ve forgotten.”
“July the eighth,” he said. He looked over at Mack Wells, who sat alone, his back to them. A line of sweat traced the spine of his coveralls.
“A summer baby,” Rachel said. “Your mother must have hated carrying that weight in the heat.”
Rachel wanted to get married and she wanted to have a baby. Sometimes, she talked in ways that betrayed those facts. But when it went quiet, as now, she quit her talking and let it lie. They didn’t yet speak on serious things. She hadn’t told him of her mother’s cancer, and she knew not to ask much on his family, his boyhood. He’d asked her on their first date if she knew what had happened to his mother and father, his older brother. Yes, she’d answered. “Well,” Ledford had told her, “good. We don’t have to talk about it then.”
By all accounts, Bill Ledford had been a good husband and father, a baseball star and a glassblower from Mingo County who gave what he could to his wife and children and gave the rest to the bartender and the bootlegger.
In August of 1935, Bill Ledford killed his wife and oldest son when he fell asleep drunk at the wheel of his Model A Pickup. Young Loyal had liked a hard wind, and so he rode in the bed. His brother preferred the warm space between his parents in the closed cab. One boy was thrown free and one wasn’t. Loyal was thirteen when it happened. Eli Mann, his father’s old boss, promptly bought the Ledford home from the bank. He told them keep their mouths shut about it, and he told the same to people poking around about the boy who lived there alone. Eli Mann gave Ledford a job, something to get up for every morning.
Ledford picked up the bone he’d been staring at and gnawed it. Rachel had walked away. She bussed her tray and approached Mack Wells, who stood and said, “Miz Ball.”
“No need to get up, I just wanted to check on that hand.”
“It’s just fine. That salve done the trick.”
She told him to change the dressing when he got home, and then she came back over to Ledford.
“You eat like a caveman,” she said.
“You chew with your mouth open.”
She smiled and her eyelids got heavy. Ledford wiped his mouth and loosed a cigarette from its pack. The matchbook was damp with sweat, and it took four swipes to flame.
“I can make us a pot of coffee,” Rachel said. She had a new apartment on Eleventh Avenue. Lucius Ball had wanted her to stay under his roof, but after nursing school and a couple of Mann paychecks, she’d packed her things.
“Watered down or thick?” he asked.
She watched him through the smoke. Everything about Ledford seemed older than he was. “I bought a percolator just yesterday, and I’ll make it any way you like.”
He winked.
Outside, the rain was picking up. It beat a chorus on the roof above them, and the people eating raised their voices to hear one another, and the dishwashers slept standing up.
LEDFORD STOOD IN the entryway of the small apartment. He hung his wet coat and watched as she walked away barefoot on the hardwood. The place smelled of women’s powders and hand cream. Such a scent reminded him of his mother’s room and the small cracked mirror she sat in front of all those years before. Putting her face on, she called it. As a boy, he’d sneak up behind her when she sat in front of her mirror. But she always heard him and scooped him into her lap and tickled him. She claimed that the ticklish among us were guilty of crimes. Over his laughter, she’d ask, “You been stealin sugar, sweetie?” and then she’d hug him to her neck, and all was still and safe.
Rachel brought him a hand towel to pat dry. It was fancy, monogram-stitched, and Ledford hated to use it. She turned from him again and walked past the sofa to the kitchen. “Should I take off my shoes?” he hollered.
“If you want to,” she said.
He did not. He walked to the fireplace mantel and studied the photographs there. They were lined up for the length of it. They told a story. Babies dressed in christening gowns and men with sly grins and bunnyeared fingers behind the heads of their gentle wives.
“Do you like music?” Rachel asked him. She’d started the percolator and was crouching at the cabinet beside him.
“I reckon.”
Her Philco had a phonograph right on top. She pulled a record from the cabinet and set the needle down. “Do you like Claude Thornhill?”
“Never heard of the man,” he said. Piano keys tinkled soft over the quiet hum of clarinets. Ledford’s neck and ears were getting hot.
When the horns came in, he nearly jumped out of his socks. She laughed at him, brought her hand to her mouth to stifle it. He rested his elbow on the mantle, knocking over two framed photographs. When he went to fix them, Rachel grabbed his hands in hers. “Do you want to dance with me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
When she laid her head against his chest, it seemed to Rachel that she’d danced with Ledford a hundred times before.
Ledford was trying not to upchuck his steak and eggs and chocolate cake. He’d not held a woman the likes of this one before.
“Do you know what this song is called?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but only swallowed instead.
“It’s called ‘Snowfall,’ ” Rachel told him. They swayed. He looked at her hand in his, then down the length of her.
Barefoot in her nurse’s uniform, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever beheld.
November 1941 (#ulink_e031a77d-6ad7-527a-8761-29d8e368e856)
THE CLASS WAS CALLED “History of the Revolutionary War,” and its professor was dull as drizzle on a windowpane. Inside the lecture hall, Ledford sat back row left. Try as he might, he could not stay awake. Swing shift will do that to a man.
Those who surrounded him were not of his kind. They were the variety of young people who, when they got smart-lipped in high school, Ledford had punched in the mouth. Young men wore neckties and argyle sweaters. Young women wore their boyfriends’ jackets and spoke in tongues of Alpha and Omicron and Pi. When these students left the lecture hall, it was in groups of eight or more, hip to hip and laughing astride the downed top of a deluxe V-8 convertible. They drank beer.
Ledford walked alone from campus to Mann Glass, and if he drank, it was going to be whiskey.
But he’d long since decided not to go bad to the bottle, and truth be told, he liked his routine. Ledford had learned early to exist without friends, and his work and school schedules, though they’d run an average man down, gave him much-needed purpose. Besides, he liked glass. Especially in its molten form. To watch the stuff glow and channel outward from a 300-ton pot was a sight. He’d once watched his father, a real free-blower, puff up and shape that very material, and he remembered what he’d been told. “Glass ain’t nothing but the earth under your brogans, boy.” As his father had said this, he gripped his blowpipe in one hand and his punty rod in the other. He set them aside and scored a hot green ashtray with his dogleg jackknife. “That there is sand, limestone, and ash,” he’d said.
Back in front of the furnace, Ledford watched the gauge needle blur and wobble. He smacked himself to stay alert. Late nights with Rachel were catching up to him.
There was a sting at the base of his neck. He turned to find Lucius Ball before him in black safety goggles. “You want little babies to starve?” Lucius asked. Spittle flew. Landed on Ledford’s cheek where the heat evaporated it.
“How’s that?”
“Baby food jars. Isn’t that what we make here son?” Sweat ran from the crease of Lucius’s double chin, and his hair tonic smelled sour.
“I reckon it’s one of the things we make, Mr. Ball.”
“You can bet your last bits on that. And if that fire isn’t tended right, then we don’t stay on top of that quota board, do we son?” Lucius Ball liked to ask questions and not wait for answers. “This plant outproduces Los Angeles and Oakland, did you know that? Did you know we outproduce Waco, Texas? I bet you didn’t. I bet you take your eyes off the fire just as regular as you please.”
It wasn’t about the fire. It was about Rachel. The man neither cared for nor understood his daughter’s suitor, and he made no effort to hide it. Lucius Ball was an angry, greedy man. His father-in-law, the head honcho, was dying, and now it seemed that his wife Mary was dying too, unless they’d cut out all the cancer this time.
Lucius didn’t like to look the young man in the eyes. Something was there that made him uneasy. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor.
Ledford turned and tended the furnace.
When he turned back around, Lucius Ball had walked to the flow line, where Mack Wells had apparently missed a spot sweeping. Mack got an earful on dust and its potential to wreck all that is good and mechanized inside a factory’s beating heart. Lucius walked away, shaking his head.
Ledford hollered for Mack Wells to come over. When he got there, Ledford said, “I bet I can guess what he told you.”
“Man says the same things every week,” Mack said.
“Gave me a new one today. I reckon he used the same on you.”
Wells pulled out his handkerchief and blew. “Dust take the durable out of duraglass?”
“No, but I like that one,” Ledford said. Behind him, a batch boy pushed a hand truck loaded with broken glass. Its peak rose from the stacked gallon buckets, cranberry-colored. Ledford said, “Son of a bitch told me if I take my eyes off the furnace, the little babies’ll starve.”
Mack Wells smiled and nodded. “Suppose he thinks there wasn’t no food fit for babies before the jar.” He wiped the back of his neck with the handkerchief. Ledford did the same with his glove, sulfur streaks left behind. Down the line, an operator screamed at a machine boy.
Ledford wanted to tell Mack congratulations on his wife’s pregnancy, but didn’t. They stood awkwardly for a moment, then nodded and went back to work.
Operators sulphured the blanks. Corrugators steamed the paper. Shippers stacked the boxes. Everywhere were hisses and clangs, roars and thuds. And Ledford wiped at his sweat and thought of his history professor and the way he stood silent in front of them all, waiting for an answer to questions like, “What percentage of colonists backed the Crown?” And Ledford thought of Rachel, and how no one but him knew that she’d kiss a man on the mouth after only four dates, that she’d invite a man over after five.
He eyeballed the temperature gauge. He eyeballed the clock on the wall. He knew he was meant for something other than this.
December 1941 (#ulink_c4cf1d34-cec6-53ab-a9c1-d638d0ae1b66)
RACHEL WATCHED HIM PACE back and forth in front of the fireplace. Once in a while, he’d stop and stoke the embers, but mostly he checked his wristwatch.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a fire going in the middle of the day.
On the Philco, a man told any ladies listening that Lava soap would get their extra-dirty hands shades whiter in only twenty seconds.
Outside, a car engine roared, then cut out. Ledford could tell it was Lucius Ball’s Lincoln Zephyr, but he walked to the window anyway. “Your daddy,” he said.
“Well, what’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.” He walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He closed it without having gotten anything, came back to the living room, and said, “But he’d better not talk over this broadcast. So help me, if he interrupts the president—”
The doorknob turned and in came Lucius. He took off his fedora and brushed at the snow before he acknowledged either of them. Then the same with his overcoat. When he’d hung everything up and slapped his driving gloves against the end table to announce his presence, he shot his cuffs and said, “Let’s see what old Roosevelt’s got to say on this one.”
Ledford walked back to the kitchen and stared inside the refrigerator some more.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed Ledford?” Lucius Ball hollered. “Aren’t you on the clock in three hours?”
When the broadcast started, Rachel turned the volume knob as high as she ever had. She sat back down on the sofa with her knees pulled to her chest. Ledford poked at the fire, and Lucius stood with his arms crossed. His nose ran, and he sniffed hard every ten seconds.
The president’s words were carefully chosen, and his voice carried vengeance and sorrow. The three in the small room were as still as the congressmen who watched their man before them. There was a cough through the radio’s grate. There was a pop from the wet hickory in the fire.
Then Roosevelt said, “Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.” Something had moved inside Ledford’s gut, and now it surged upward as the congressmen beat their hands together like they never had as one. “No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion,” Roosevelt went on, “the American people in their righ teous might will win through to absolute victory.” The roar from the Philco caused Rachel’s eyes to tear, and her heart seemed, for a moment, to stop.
She knew before looking at him that Ledford was gone from her.
He hung the poker on the cast iron holder and slowly turned. His teeth were grit behind his lips and his nostrils flared wide. He looked to Lucius, who was dumbstruck, unable for once to speak his mind. “Mr. Ball,” Ledford said, “I quit.”
He put on his coat and told Rachel he’d ring her later. With his hand on the knob to leave, he stopped. She was crying on the sofa. Her father did not console her. He’d walked to the window and was watching the snow fall. It had picked up since earlier.
Ledford stood in the doorway and thought of their dance. Their song. He spoke her name and she looked up at him. He winked and was gone.
August 1942 (#ulink_8030eba6-fa64-5025-b246-4f498b471bf9)
HE HAD JOINED THE Marine Corps.
On December 10th, Ledford had walked into the recruiting station with a birth certificate altered by a Mann Glass secretary for a fee of five dollars. In the station’s filthy bathroom he’d pissed in a test tube. Passed his physical. He was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, where he found the weather utterly suitable to his demeanor. He watched the ocean any chance he got. He followed every syllable his drill instructor spat at him, as if the man was God himself. Ledford thrived on discipline. He got a reputation as a hard charger who didn’t shoot the breeze.
When the men were issued their 782 gear, Ledford felt that old, joyous feeling from childhood Christmases. He loved his M1, and in no time he could fieldstrip and reassemble it like most never would. He grew to love the strain of calisthenics, whether at 0500 or midnight under floodlights. Drills became second nature. Hand-to-hand combat with short blades, plunging fixed bayonets into dummies—these acts were honed to reflex.
Ledford earned the designation of Sharpshooter on the rifle range. Even at five hundred yards, his targets came back Swiss cheese.
He smoked and played hearts with the other men, finding a peace in card playing he’d never lose. He traded insults, dimes, and nickels most often with a hard Mac from Chicago named Erminio Bacigalupo.
Erm, they called him. Nobody could tell whether Ledford and Erm liked or hated each other. In truth, neither could the young men themselves.
Ledford wrote to Rachel twice a week.
Nights, he slept like the dead.
Once, drunk on his ass against the barracks wall, Ledford’s drill instructor, an old Devil Dog from Alabama, had let his guard down. He’d seen action in the Great War. “Enemy’ll break, but only if you cut him,” he said. Ledford and Erm were the only men in listening distance. “My CO taught me that. What you do is git inside their tent while they sleep in, cut one’s thoat and leave the other one to find him at sunup.” His words ran together. His eyes might have welled up. “Must’ve done four or five Kraut boys thataway at Belleau Wood.” He fell asleep, then woke up. He looked at Ledford and Erm like he’d never seen them before. “Take a picture, why don’t you, you sons of a fuckin whore,” he said. “It’ll last longer.”
In May, Ledford had boarded a troop train to San Francisco and seen the sights and then walked up the zigzag incline of the ten-thousand-ton transport ship. Aboard the Navy’s vessel, sleep came interrupted, just as it would in New Zealand and in Fiji. A knot formed in the intestines. On August 7th, that knot came up the windpipe and nearly choked Ledford as he jumped over the side of the landing craft into the surf. He waded to the mud-colored sand of what they were calling Beach Red. He crossed it at a jog with the rest of his battalion. They could scarcely believe the quiet. It unsettled Ledford, and as he came to the jungle’s edge, the knot broke loose, and he threw up the smallest bit of bile before swallowing it down again.
Back on the beach, palm trees grew as high as Mann Glass chimney stacks. They curled like fingers, waving the men inland with the wind.
This was Guadalcanal. The enemy was not to be found. Only silence. And in that silence, Ledford finally felt the weight of the last six months. He knew now what that time meant, what it had amounted to. Ledford was not Ledford any longer. He was just another Mac with an M1, First Marine Division, First Raider Battalion, B Company.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
MEN SAT SHIRTLESS, their backs against the vertical wood slats of the pagoda. Henderson Field was a flat, hot wasteland of a place. A wide cut airstrip in the middle of a jungled Pacific island. Nervous Marines walked around the pagoda, looking sideways at those without a helmet or a shirt, those able to enjoy their smokes and never look at the sky above them or the choked forest on all sides.
Like every other Marine, Ledford had become convinced that the Navy had left them on the island to die, that food and ammunition would never again be ample. By day, he repaired bomb craters left in the airstrip’s grass and dirt runways. He leaned on his shovel and smoked and shot the breeze. He looked at that camelback ridge of mountains in the distance. From far off, it reminded him of home. But at night, in the jungle camp, the mosquitoes reminded him of where he truly was, and so did the Japanese fliers in the blackness overhead, dropping 250-pound bombs within spitting distance.
It was a Tuesday. Lunchtime with rations running short. Ledford slept alone on the dirt with his helmet over his face. He was dog tired and bug-bitten, from inside his ears to between his toes. He sat up, took out his Ka-Bar, and cleaned his fingernails. A skinny boy with a pitiful beard walked over from the shade of the pagoda’s overhang. “Ledford? You tryin to fry yourself?” His name was McDonough and he was from Chalmette, Louisiana.
Ledford didn’t answer or look up from his fingernails.
“You want to get somethin to eat?” McDonough blinked his eyes at two-second intervals. He was seventeen years old.
“I’ll eat with you, McDonough,” Ledford said, “if you promise not to talk with your mouth full.”
But McDonough was one of the nervous ones, and when they sat down inside, he talked with his mouth full of canned fish and rice for ten minutes straight. “Ain’t had that sinus infection a day since maneuvers in Fiji,” he said, after chronicling his lifelong battle with a clogged nose and headaches. “It’s like I been waiting my whole life to come breathe this air in the Pacific.”
Ledford didn’t even nod to show he was listening. At that moment, it seemed he’d do most anything to have steak and cake instead of fish and rice.
“My mother said I got the bad sinuses from her, and she got them from her daddy, and so on and so forth, back to my great grandfather, who stuck an old rotary drill up his nosehole one day and had at it until he killed hisself trying to unclog all of it.”
Ledford laughed a little with his mouth full of rice, but then he stopped, thinking such laughter might disrespect the dead.
“It’s all right,” McDonough told him, smiling. “It’s a story meant to be funny. But it is true.” He held up his hand to signify Scout’s honor or stack of Bibles both.
Ledford liked McDonough.
Back at camp that night, he looked over at the boy before lights-out. McDonough was flat on his bedding, looking up at the tent’s sagging roof. The rain that pelted there came harder and harder until the sound of it drowned all others. A roaring quiet. A rain not seen or heard by any American boy before, even one like McDonough, a boy from the land of the hurricane. He just lay there, his finger stuck up his nose so far it almost disappeared.
Ledford thought of Mann Glass and Rachel. Of steak and eggs and the sound of West Virginia rain on the cafeteria tin roof. His chest ached. His gut burned. A drip from the tent’s center point landed on his Adam’s apple. He stared up at its source, a tiny slit at the pinnacle. The rain roared louder, its amplitude unsettling. Ledford opened his mouth and called out, “Gully warsher boys,” but no one could hear him. He turned his head and watched McDonough dig for gold a while longer, then fell off to sleep.
In his dreams, there came a memory. He was a boy, and he fished on a lake with his daddy. The two of them sat in a rowboat, oars asleep in their locks, their handles angled at the sky. Father and son bent over their casting rods and spoke not a word. There was only stillness and silhouette, quiet as a field stump.
Twice Ledford was awakened by the sound of Japanese Zeros zipping overhead. The rain let up. The bombs came down. He jolted when they hit, and in between, he wondered about the dream. He could not remember any lake near Huntington, nor could he remember ever fishing with his daddy. And the quiet. Why had it been so quiet?
In the morning, the men waded through calf-high water outside the tents. It had gathered in the middle of camp, channeling the makeshift road they’d fashioned. Oil barrels floated by on their sides. A dead spider the size of a hamburger spun slowly, emitting little rings of ripples as it went. McDonough ran from it, got himself to higher ground at the muddy base of a giant palm tree. He had a deathly fear of spiders. The men laughed and pointed at McDonough, who, like many of them, had gotten the dysentery bad. The sprint from the spider had stirred things inside him, and he dropped his trousers right there at the base of the tree and let rip.
It was a sight. Ledford laughed heartily and shared a smoke with Erm from Chicago, who told him, “You think that’s funny, just wait till the malaria eats him up.”
September 1942 (#ulink_b738d6a5-2a5b-54bb-b8f6-f83da0364ddb)
THE RATIONS HAD GROWN a pelt of mold. Nightfall had come to resemble a wake, the men’s mood shifting with sundown to gloom and the inevitability of death. Fever shivers gripped more than half, and on that Monday, orders came down that they all swallow Atabrine at chow time. Some said it would turn men yellow.
Saturday found them on the ridge Ledford had admired from a distance. Camel Ridge, some were calling it. They had no way of knowing that its name would soon change, and that the new name would be one they could never forget.
Bloody Ridge was high and steep.
They’d scampered through the jungle and then the ravines, on up through the head-high kunai grass that clung to the slopes, thick and tooth-edged. It sliced men’s fingers and stung like fire. But they’d been told that the ridge would provide ease, a place away from the airstrip bombings.
Ledford’s platoon dug in at the crest of a knoll. He and McDonough and a fellow named Skutt from Kentucky shoveled a three-man foxhole quick and quiet. Skutt got low, on his knees, and cut a shelf inside. He took a photograph of his daughter from his coverall breast pocket, set it gingerly on the ledge. He smoothed the dirt away from it with his bloody fingers. The girl was no more than two, fat like a little one should be. There was water damage at the corner, so that her stiff white walkers bubbled up at the ankle. Skutt licked his thumb and smoothed it.
“That your little one?” Ledford asked.
“That’s my Gayle.”
“She a springtime baby?” Saying those words nearly caused Ledford to smile.
“Summer.” Skutt coughed. Once he started, he couldn’t stop, and it became irritating in a hurry. The foxhole’s quarters were tight. McDonough seemed to wince at every sound.
Night came, and with it the air-raid alarm. Bettys and Zeros filled the sky above the ridge, and they littered the hillside with daisy cutters. At first, it didn’t seem real. The airstrip bombings had been one thing, but in this new spot, the feeling of exposure was almost too much. The earth quivered. The nostrils burned.
Ledford pressed his back against the foxhole’s bottom and dropped his helmet over his face. Beside him, McDonough did the same. They waited.
But such waiting can seem endless inside all that noise, and some men can’t keep still. After a time, Skutt leaped from them and ran, screaming, maybe firing his weapon, maybe not. He was cut to pieces.
When the raid was over, they surveyed the dead and wounded. All but two were beyond repair. Skutt was splintered lengthwise, groin to neck. Ledford’s insides lurched. He turned back to the foxhole. He saw the picture of the baby girl on the dirt shelf. Somehow, she hadn’t blown over.
The Marines were pulling back to the southern crest now, digging in there for more. Holding position.
Ledford looked at the picture again and left it where it sat. He followed.
JAPANESE FLARES WITH strange tints lit the sky overhead. Underneath, the enemy scampered ridgelines, closing quick on freshly dug Marine fox-holes, where grenades were handed out, one to a man. Bayonets were at the ready. Brownings ripped through belts of ammo, humming hot and illuminating machine-gunner faces locked in panic or madness or calm. Mortars made confused landings, and everywhere, men screamed and cursed, and many of them, for the first time, truly wanted nothing more than to kill those they faced down.
Ledford wanted it. He bit through the tip of his tongue. He hollered and swallowed his own blood and stood and lobbed his grenade at the onslaught. Then he sat back down inside the hole. McDonough panted hard and followed suit.
After a while, Ledford climbed out again and got low. He set the butt of his rifle to his shoulder and looped the sling around opposite arm. Bellied down and zeroed in, he watched under the glow of a flare as a thin Japanese soldier ran across the ridgeline ahead. Ledford led him a little, shut an eye, and squeezed. The man buckled sharp, like a rat trap closing, and a black silhouette of blood pumped upward. Immediately, a hot sensation flooded Ledford from head to belly. A wave of sickness. A swarm of stinging blood in the vessels. He rolled back into his hole. His head lolled loose on his shoulders and he lurched twice. Killing a man had not been what he’d anticipated. “God oh God,” he said. “God oh God.”
SUNDAY-MORNING DAY BREAK BROUGHT the battle to its end. The Marines had held. Their horseshoe line bent but never broke.
Ledford walked the ridge with McDonough at his side. Neither spoke. They looked at the bodies covering the ground like a crust. Hundreds of them. Nearly all had bloated in the sun. Their eyes were open, glazed, burning yellow-white in their staredown with the sky. Some of their faces had gone red. Others were purple or a strange green-black. The smell was too much for McDonough. He cried to himself and covered his face with a handkerchief and muttered about his sinuses, blaming everything on his bad pipes. Ledford tried not to breathe. He felt for the boy from Louisiana. This was too much for him to bear. He’d known it since McDonough had pissed himself in the foxhole. The smell had gotten bad, and McDonough had apologized. Ledford had told him, “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” He’d vowed in his mind to watch over the boy.
TWO WEEKS LATER , Ledford watched McDonough climb the sandbar west of the Matanikau River. The boy turned back to stare at the water’s surface, suddenly wave-white, alive with the plunk and stir of hand grenades, mortars kicking mud. He looked Ledford in the eyes, confused, and then his face exploded. His body sat itself down on the embankment, almost like he still had control of it and had decided to rest his legs. McDonough rolled the length of the embankment into the water and bobbed there, knocking against a tree root that had caught the collar of his coverall.
After that, when Ledford went flat on his bedding at night, he saw it: McDonough’s confused face and the way it was instantly changed into something no longer a face, into something Ledford’s brain could barely comprehend. His memory held no pictures such as this one. The only thing that came close was a sight he’d beheld as a boy. He’d come upon his father on the front porch, the dog whimpering and held off the ground by the scruff of its neck. His father swung a switch at the dog’s backside, just as if it was a boy who’d done wrong. At the corner of the porch, where the chipped floorboards came together, sat a heap of ruined leather. His father’s white buckskin mitt lay there, mauled almost unrecognizable. He’d kept it oiled regular since his time in the Blue Ridge League in 1915. Now the dog had gotten a hold of it and it was ragged-edged and wet and ripped from the inside out. Same as McDonough’s face.
Ledford played a little game with his brain for six straight nights in late September of 1942. The game played out on the backs of his eyelids, where the furnace fires had set his mind on visions. Now he’d lay down, shut his eyes, and here would come McDonough’s ragged-edged noface and his daddy’s exploded buckskin mitt and the squeal of the dog and the crack of the switch on short-haired hide. All of it would amplify against those eyelids until it became so loud that Ledford could not be still. He’d open his eyes and the sounds would quiet. But no man can hold open his eyes forever, and when they closed again, Ledford’s heart beat against his breastplate double-time, and he sat up bone straight for fear his own mind and body were killing him. On it would go like this until he got up from his bunk and swallowed sufficiently from his own pint or somebody else’s. Whiskey was the only thing to save him.
Erm Bacigalupo had won enough poker hands to own what little liquor the men had left. Some of it was Navy-smuggled, some of it was swiped from bombed-out Japanese camps. Either way, Ledford owed Erm for liquor. It was all written down on paper scraps Erm kept in his cigarette tin.
On the seventh night, the whiskey finally killed the pictures and howls in Ledford’s head. Rendered them temporarily gone.
He woke up the next day a new man. His voice had changed, gotten deeper. There was a whistle in his left ear. But from that morning on, Ledford was no longer visited by McDonough’s exploding face.
In the days to come, he saw other men suffer similar fates to McDonough’s. The enemy took to staking American heads on sharpened bamboo poles. It wasn’t long before a Marine returned the favor.
After a time, Ledford found a quiet space inside the whiskey bottle. It was the same place his daddy had once found.
Ledford listened to the woods. He watched the treetops sway. He slept easy and ate well.
Rachel’s letters saved him. He could get a hard-on just picturing the pen in her hand, moving across the paper he now held. I love you, she wrote, and he wrote it back.
October 1942 (#ulink_fa3e62eb-0b6a-56e8-acca-525a6e6b1e97)
HE AWOKE IN HIS foxhole at 0300 hours. It was black and quiet. The dreams had visited him again, but already they were gone. At the mouth of his hole, Erm crouched, smoking a cigarette. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ledford stood. He slugged hard from Erm’s flask.
In front of him, Erm covered ground in silence. They put five miles behind them at a quick clip. Stopped, breathed, slugged the flask. Tucked themselves into the ridge folds west of the Bonegi and crept, then belly-crawled toward a small camp of sleeping Japanese. The rain beat in torrents. Its sound allowed them to move unheard. Its curtain allowed them to advance unseen. Single-file, they belly-crawled, stopping now and then to survey. Each gripped his .45. The mud sucked at their bellies and hips and knees.
Behind the enemy’s line, Erm looked for sleeping pairs.
He found two such men tucked inside a makeshift tent of bamboo shoots and canvas. He peeked inside the open flap, then signaled for Ledford to stand watch. Erm slipped inside. Ledford kept his head on a swivel, once or twice glancing at the sleeping men inside. Each had dropped off while eating a tin of rice, now emptied and atop their chests. Ledford watched the slow rise and fall. He listened to the snore, recognized the exhaustion. The rain kept up. There was no sign of movement on the perimeter. Erm reached from the tent and tapped his shoulder. Your knife, he mouthed. Ledford holstered his .45 and fished the dogleg jackknife from his breast pocket. It had been his father’s before him. Pearl-handled and well made. Thackery 1 of 10 etched by hand on the flat. He’d spent hours honing the bevel on a pocket stone.
Ledford watched Erm crawl between the two men. One of them wore a thin mustache, the other was clean-shaven. They were rail thin. Young as McDonough. Ledford looked at the lids of their closed eyes, barely discernible in the low glow of their lantern, its oil nearly spent. He watched the eyeballs rolling wildly underneath. It was deep sleep. Dream sleep. He wondered for a moment what haunted these men, and then he watched Erm looking from one to the other and back. He chose the one on the left, put his hand over his mouth and drove the jackknife into his jugular vein, pulling it across the throat with all the muscle his forearm could muster. Blood came fast and heavy, surging in time with the young man’s heart. Erm waited out the few soft gurgles, his eye on the other soldier, who continued to snore. He wiped the blade across the dead man’s still chest, one side and then the next, so that it made a red X next to the empty rice ration. He folded the blade shut and handed it to Ledford.
They left the tent and maneuvered back to blackness. On their way, Ledford considered the young soldier they’d left alive. He envisioned him stretching awake come morning, wiping the sleep from his eyes and turning to face his comrade. What horror the young man would experience—what confused detriment to arise to such a sight. This type of warfare could not be measured. It was more than payback for McDonough, more than putting a chopped head on a stick. More than taking a father forever from a baby girl whose picture he carried. This was what their drill instructor back in boot had told them would win wars. The man had sat in earshot until daybreak just to hear the screams of German boys echoing across the French forest. The awful screams. “Nothing like it for defeatin the enemy,” he’d told them. That was so long ago now. Now here he was.
Before him, Erm walked in silence and thought of his cigarettes, dry inside a tin in his foxhole.
Ledford trailed behind. The jackknife jostled in his breast pocket as he walked. He thought of his father scoring glass.
He wondered how he’d come to follow such a man as Erm.
Rain beat his shoulders numb. Its sound was everything.
ON ASATURDAY, in front of the pagoda at Henderson Field, Erm Bacigalupo said something he shouldn’t have. What followed would confuse every eyewitness, for it showed them that in wartime, friends and enemies are difficult to discern.
Erm enjoyed messing with those he deemed “country.” It was a hundred-degree afternoon, the last day of October, and Erm had picked a heavyset seventeen-year-old from Mississippi who’d just sailed over from Samoa with the Eighth Regiment. Three men sat on the skinny bench against the front wall, watching Erm size up the new boy. He up-and-downed his utility uniform, fresh-issued. “Look at the sharp dresser,” Erm said, fingering the coat’s buttons. Like everybody else, he knew the boy only wore the coat to hide his baby fat, and Erm wanted him to take it off so he could make his life more miserable than it already was. “Look at the buttons on this thing. Anybody told you about the copper pawn, Country?”
“Huh-uh.” The pits of the coat were sweated straight through in circles the size of a phonograph record.
Ledford was under the pagoda’s corner, his reading spot. He closed his Bible and slid out. The Bible’s bookmark was a letter he’d gotten from Rachel that morning. Eli Mann, her grandfather, was dead at ninety-one.
Ledford propped his elbow on the dirt and watched the men on the porch.
Erm kept at it. “Copper pawn’ll give you ninety-five cents a button. You know how to get there?”
“Huh-uh.” He tried to remember what he’d been told about this kind of northern talk from this kind of northern man.
“It’s at the top of Mount Austen, but they’re only open from midnight to two a.m.”
Somebody laughed and somebody else told Erm to shut up. Ledford stood up and started to walk inside.
The boy from Mississippi said, “Mount Austin, Texas?” and everybody laughed at him. Ledford looked at the boy’s face, the way it wore a confused, familiar look. He stopped and stood behind Erm.
“This one isn’t even worth it,” Erm said. “This one’s dumber than Sinus.” Sinus was what some of the men had called McDonough, as he never shut up about his sinus problems. “You watch out, Country,” Erm said, tearing the copper buttons off the boy’s coat one by one. “Sinus ended up on a Jap spit with an apple stuck where his mouth used to be.” All but one of the men quit laughing. Erm stuck the buttons in his pocket and turned to the two still seated. “Old Sinus doesn’t have to worry about his clogged head anymore, does he?” he asked them. “Japs opened it up wide.”
Ledford grabbed Erm by the back of his neck, just as his father had done the dog that day on the porch so long ago. With a fistful of shirtcollar, he lifted the other man an inch or more from the ground and slammed him, face first, into the dirt. Then he took a knee next to the Chicagoan with a smart mouth and rolled him over, blood already thick with dust, front teeth already broken. Ledford raised his fist as high as he could and brought it down square on Erm’s face. He got in two more before they pulled him off, the other man half-asleep and gagging on sharp little pieces of tooth, bitter little rivers of blood.
November 1942 (#ulink_d2ebef7d-d61f-5680-8fec-0f915c1a4644)
IF THERE WERE ANY boys among them, Bloody Ridge and Matanikau had made them men. Bayonet-range fighting will do that, quick. Ledford didn’t worry on the enemy any longer. If he kept an eye open, it was for Erm. The sureness of death’s liberation had sunk in. Someone was coming for him, and it didn’t matter much whether that someone was his comrade or his enemy.
When a man accepts that he will no doubt die, he is free to live.
The pagoda’s shade was cooler. The rice rations tasted better. The whiskey was like drinking the sun.
Ledford grew accustomed to seeing things he’d not imagined stateside. One Marine safety-pinned six enemy ears to his belt. Heads stuck on a pole were not uncommon. Erm had joked of the sight, and now Ledford knew why. It was just another thing to look at while you smoked.
Still, Erm never spoke to or looked at Ledford after having his top teeth knocked out. He didn’t speak much to anyone. He’d developed a noticeable lisp since the fight. The man’s tongue knew not where to go.
Once, he’d gotten excited about a rumor that was spreading. “The division is about to be relieved,” he’d said, lisping all the way. “We’ll be parading in Washington by Christmas.” The next day, his eyes were back to staring blank at nothing, all pupil. Black as jungle mud.
Some said Erm was shooting morphine he’d won in a stud game.
Ledford felt guilty for what he’d done to the hard Mac from Chicago. In some ways, he hated the man, the secret they shared of a maneuver in darkness. In others, he admired him. It crossed Ledford’s mind to apologize, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak on much of consequence to anyone in those days of preparation. They were to push the Japanese out of the airstrip’s artillery range.
Ledford found himself uncharacteristically hungover on the morning he marched toward Kokumbona on the heels of an Air Fleet strike. Positions were to have been secured and the movement through the jungle was to have been a safe one, but something was not right. Ledford felt it in his headache and in his bones. He looked at the Marines around him. They felt it too.
It was quiet. Ten yards to his right was Erm Bacigalupo. He looked as though he might vomit. His cheekbones stuck out. His lips were in a pinch.
Then came the hard clap of a single Japanese rifle, and Ledford’s every muscle seized. He dropped and rolled toward a thicket of green, but the noise had got to him this time. A burst of machine-gun fire originated somewhere too close, and then the thump of a mortar shell blew out his eardrums. All was still. Then ringing. His vision went seesaw. He stood, and just before another mortar landed before him, he made eye contact with Erm, who was running in his direction. Then another thump, and then silence. Ledford was aware of hurtling through the air. Something had gone through him, and he lay on his back, touching at a torn spot on his chest. Air emanated to and from this spot. It had gone clear through, and he breathed from it. He was deaf, but he could hear it plain as day, in and out, pfffffffffff-hooooooo. The left shin was also torn, smoking gray wisps and spilling black blood on the ground cover.
The thought came. This is it.
But then a corpsman was there, and he stuck in a shot of morphine. And then there was a stretcher and some movement, and then nothing.
The night ahead was something Ledford would never forget. He lay in a wounded dugout, eight feet deep, at Henderson Field. The heat inside the earth there was too much to take, and the men were packed shoulder to shoulder. They screamed. The smell induced gagging. Ledford tried to keep deaf, but his eardrums were healing. He tried to shut his eyes, but the swirls on the black stage of his eyelids erupted like they never had. His stomach jumped and his throat crawled up his tongue. He breathed through his mouth, labored, like a dog.
Once, before passing out, he turned and saw Erm, three men away from him, his forehead wrapped in bloody gauze. He stared at Ledford, and a corpsman came by and stuck Erm with morphine, and he smiled, toothless.
The next morning they were flown out to a Navy hospital. Espiritu Santo it was called. It was there that Erm said to Ledford, “I told you we’d be home by Christmas for the parade.”
The USS Solace carried the men to New Zealand. On board, an infantryman younger than Ledford cried with joy in his bunk. Everyone ignored him. They all spoke upwards, to the ceiling. Loud. Some perched on an elbow to see their surroundings. It didn’t seem real that they could be out of the jungle.
“Think they’ll have any KJ billboards up back home?” somebody said.
“What’s a KJ billboard?” It was the teary kid. “Ain’t you had your eyes open doggie?” Ledford said. He was drunk and delirious. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. There’s one plastered across every piece of plywood in the Solomons.”
The kid shivered. Jungle disease was in his blood. “I’m done with killin,” he said. “Japs or no Japs.” He looked down at his shaking fingertips. “I just want my fingernails and hair to start growing again,” he said. As dysentery came, such growing went. The jungle blood could rot you inside out.
“Yeah,” Ledford said. “You’re done with it all right doggie. You go on and turn soft. Let those nails and hair grow real long.”
A couple Marines laughed. Another one said, “Damned pansy Army dogs.”
Erm Bacigalupo said, “Put some panties on while you’re at it and bend over.” Everyone laughed hearty. There was no longer any room for soft. A code needed to be kept. Among men who’d done what they’d all done together, none could ever speak of going soft again. To do so would invite their nightmares to the waking world.
That night, Ledford made his way on crutches to Erm’s bunk. He apologized for knocking his teeth out. “I’m truly sorry for it,” he said. He held out his hand and they shook. Ledford pledged that once stateside, he would buy his friend some new teeth.
August 1945 (#ulink_4858e2e1-040f-5ac8-86d4-7eeffd45c574)
IT WASMONDAY, the sixth. The grandstand at Washington Park Race Track was filled. Elbow to elbow they sat and waited, Southside Chicagoans and out-of-towners together. They’d come for the match race between Busher and Durazna, for which the purse was twenty-five grand.
Under the grandstand overhang, Ledford and Erm swilled from their respective flasks. They studied their short forms in silence. A fat lady in a flowered hat sat down in front of them and Erm made a farting sound. She turned, frowned, and fanned herself with a program. “Excuse you,” Erm said to her. He flashed his smile and winked at her. His teeth were white as ivory, set solid and paid in full. When the woman left to find a more suitable seat, Erm hollered, “Keep fannin honey, you don’t know from hot.” He stood for no reason and wobbled a little on his feet. He sat back down. “Did you see that broad? She was wide as she was tall.”
They were drunk. Had been so for three straight days, nine hours of sleep in total.
“What’s the skinny on Durazna’s trainer?” Ledford said.
Erm didn’t answer. He was eyeballing the suits down front. “Look at these cocksuckers,” he said. “I paid good money for these seats. I gotta look at these silver-haired bastards all day?”
Ledford licked his pencil and drew a circle around the words Oklahoma bred.
“What’s the point in standin? There’s twelve minutes to post, for cryin out loud.” Erm’s ears were turning red. He got like this, and there was no point in trying to stop it. “Look,” he said. “See how they all hold their binoculars with their pinkies out? How much you think they paid for those binoculars?” He stood up again. “Hey, Carnegie. Hey.” The men down front knew not to turn around. They recognized that kind of voice.
“Carnegie came from dirt,” Ledford said. He didn’t look up from his Racing Form.
“What?” Erm thought about sitting back down, but didn’t. He ground peanut husks with the soles of his Florsheims.
“Carnegie came from poor folks. He was a philanthropist.”
“Philanthra-who-in-the-what-now?” Erm cleared his throat and spat on the ground. “Pipe down, college boy.” He kicked popcorn at the empty seatback in front of them and sat down. “Choke those fuckin suits with their binocular straps,” he mumbled.
Ledford said he wanted to go to the paddock and see the horses running in the fourth.
Erm looked at his wristwatch. “You go on,” he said. He’d set up a three-thirty meeting with his uncle and needed to be in his seat.
Down by the paddock, the horseplayers tried to blow their cigarette smoke above the heads of the tourists’ kids. It was hot and drizzly. Undershirt weather. A track made soft by summer rain. Ledford was in the bag and it wasn’t yet three o’clock. He drew another circle around the number nine in his short form, put it up over his head like a rain canopy, and walked inside, away from the paddock. He chewed cutplug tobacco. “Homesick Dynamite Boy,” he said as he walked. It was the name of the number nine horse, and at 7 to 1 it was an overlay if he’d ever seen one. He looked at his short form again. His left shoulder knocked against the side of a pillar, so he sidestepped, and his right shoulder knocked against a man in a black shirt and matching derby hat. There were no Excuse me’s. This was expected. Ledford felt the man’s eyeballs on him as he walked away.
He had a fifty, three twenties, and a ten left in his billfold.
Since the war, Ledford had been lucky at the races. He’d once paid a semester’s tuition with a single day’s payout. Erm had helped him along with tips from men with no names. Ledford didn’t ask questions. He stayed drunk much of the time. He’d finished college and proposed to Rachel and taken a desk job at Mann Glass. His life was a game of forgetting.
Housewives from Homewood were logjamming the betting lines. Ledford chewed the plug hard between his eyeteeth and studied his form while he parted all of them, instinct taking him where he needed to go. He stepped up to the counter and said, “Five dollars to win on the nine.” There was no response.
Ledford looked up. A kid in a green golf hat looked back at him. His voice cracked when he spoke. “This is the popcorn cart,” the kid said.
Ledford tried to recollect the previous half hour of his life. He remembered sitting inside a stall on a toilet that had seen too much action, drinking the last of the bourbon in his pint flask. But, like all memories, this one was a sucker’s bet, because once he was in the bag, time and place were wiped and gone. He ended up wagering on three-year-old geldings at popcorn stands.
“Did you want some popcorn?” the kid asked. A red-rimmed whitehead pimple on his nose threatened to blow wide open of its own accord.
Ledford thumbed at the bills in his hand. The dirt under his nails reminded him of Henderson Field, digging. “I’m a college graduate,” he told the kid, who was getting nervous because the man in front of him was relatively big and radiating alcohol and possessed eyes that had seen some things. “Getting married on Saturday,” Ledford told him. “Beautiful girl.”
He looked at the people going by. So happy. So unaddicted to booze and playing horses. So empty of parasitic memories. A short woman with legs like a shot-putter’s rolled by a handtruck carrying a beer keg. It was held tight with twine. “Hell of an invention, the handtruck,” Ledford said to no one in particular. “Dolly, some call it. Roll three buckets a cullet around with one, no problem.” He watched the stocky woman go, her beer destined for some bubblegum-ass in the VIP Room.
As he walked away from the popcorn stand and the acned teenager who could no longer hold eye contact with him, Ledford’s insides ached. He spat heavy.
He walked to the betting line and made it to the window with one minute to post. “Five dollars to win on the nine,” he said.
He held the ticket between his thumb and forefinger. Kissed it. “Come on, Homesick Dynamite,” he said, wedging himself through the crowd, jackpot sardines with dollar signs in their eyes. Ledford stood tall at the rail and waited.
Homesick Dynamite Boy came out of the clouds on the three- quarter turn only to falter at the wire. He placed by a head length.
Ledford littered his ticket for the stoopers to pick up.
Back at the seats, he was introduced to Erm’s uncle Fiore, a short man with bags under his eyes and a tailored black suit. He had a large associate called Loaf.
“Erm tells me you busted his teeth out,” Uncle Fiore said.
“Yessir,” Ledford said.
“And you’re from Virginia?”
“West Virginia.”
“You like to play the horses?”
“Yessir.”
“All right, son.” For the entirety of this exchange, Uncle Fiore had been grasping Ledford’s hand, looking him hard in the eyes. He finally let go and said, “I’m a patriot, by the way. I got the Governor’s Notice for helping secure the port docks.”
Ledford nodded.
“How’s the shin? Erminio tells me you took some shrapnel bad.”
“It’s healed up fine. Little limp left.”
“Good. Good. My nephew’s brain I’m not so sure about, but that didn’t have nothing to do with the shrapnel.” Erm tapped the scar on his forehead where it spread beneath his hairline. They all laughed, except Loaf the associate. He had his hands crossed in front of him and kept shifting his stance. His feet were too small for his frame. “Anyway, son, you stick with Erminio around the track. He knows a little something about ponies.” Uncle Fiore winked, and his eyebags seemed to disappear for a moment. He embraced his nephew, whispered something to him, and was gone.
Erm convinced Ledford to put everything he had on Busher in the mile race. Both men emptied their wallets, and both men cashed in fourfigure tickets. They walked out of the racetrack feeling as good as two medical discharges living on military pensions could feel.
They hit a nightclub, then Erm’s mother’s place for a meal. In the driveway was an Olds Touring and a red Packard sedan with suicide doors. After she had kissed him six times, called him “country handsome,” and complimented his appetite, Ledford asked Erm’s mother how much she wanted for the Packard. Without missing a beat, she answered, “Five hundred cash for a marrying man.” It was a done deal. Instead of taking the train back to Huntington to be married, Ledford would ride in style.
Before he left the next morning, he phoned Rachel. She sounded tired. “Well, we’re in the money,” he told her. Said he’d be home earlier than planned, and that he had a surprise.
“Me too,” Rachel said. “I’m pregnant.”
Ledford didn’t know whether to howl or have a heart attack. But he smiled, and told her he was doing so. Then he told her he loved her. He meant it.
“A springtime baby,” she said.
“Nice time of year.”
He fired up the Packard and waved goodbye to Mrs. Bacigalupo. In the passenger seat, Erm nodded off within three city blocks. He was coming to West Virginia to be Ledford’s best man.
Crossing the flat expanse of Indiana, there was peace inside the car. Neither of them knew that across the world, the city of Hiroshima had already been erased by the atom bomb. Gone, all of it. One hundred thousand men, women, and children had been evaporated.
The war was nearly over.
* * *
THE RECEPTION’S BUFFET table was as long as a limousine. Folks who’d grown accustomed to rationing during the war lined up to get their fingers greasy. Here was a spread not grown in any victory garden. There was an apple and salami porcupine, chicken livers and bacon, cocktail sausages, dried beef logs, bacon-stuffed olives swimming in dressing, salami sandwiches, shrimp with horseradish, pineapple rounds with bleu cheese pecan centers, roast salmon on the bone, and anchovies with garlic butter. Ledford bit into the last of these and winced. This was partly on account of his toothache, but it was more than that. The little anchovies called to mind those long-forgotten fish-and-rice rations, stolen from the dead hands of the enemy. Ledford swallowed and smiled to a skinny old woman he knew to be Rachel’s kin. He turned from the buffet table and bumped into Lucius Ball, his new father-in-law.
“How do you find the spread?” Lucius asked. His neck fat quivered as he hollered over the trumpet’s blare.
“Plentiful,” Ledford said.
The man had spared little expense to host his only child’s wedding in his own backyard, and he wanted it acknowledged.
Lucius tried to be friendly. He was nervous about the money Eli Mann had left to Mary in his will. Money she’d be doling out in short order. “How’s the leg?” he asked. The band finished a fast Harry James number. They’d only played three songs, but already they pulled their silk handkerchiefs as if choreographed, mopping sweat before the bride and groom’s dance.
“It’s just fine.” Ledford answered. “Excuse me.” He’d spotted Erm talking up a curvy brunette he knew to be fifteen, if that.
Ledford walked away. He didn’t care if it was rude. His father-inlaw was fishing for gratitude, and he wasn’t going to get it. Not so long as he was the way he was. Lucius Ball had never been able to keep his pecker in his pants, not even with a dying wife. Such things had kept right up. Everybody knew of his transgressions, and Lucius didn’t give a damn. And now, the house on the hill was done up in grand fashion for the reception. If the church was dark and humble, this was whitelinen and bulb-light flashy. Ledford had seen too much of nothing to be impressed by so much everything. He looked up at the tent’s ceiling as he walked. There was a rust-colored water stain at the center post. A blemish amidst all that white. It called to mind the hole in his tent at Guadalcanal. That drip against his Adam’s apple. McDonough.
He came up quiet behind Erm and kneed him in the leg. “I see you met Rachel’s cousin Bertie,” Ledford said. “Bertie’s a freshman in high school.”
Erm didn’t care how old she was. He started to say so when the bandleader came over the PA. “About one minute now, if we could gather up the bride and groom.”
Erm’s dress blues had been in a box for three years. It showed. Ledford wore a store-bought black tuxedo, and that morning, when he’d asked his best man why he didn’t do the same, Erm pointed to his brass belt buckle and grabbed his crotch. “Eagles and anchors,” he’d said. “She spreads eagle, I drop anchor.”
Ledford stepped from the crowded tent and looked up at the bedroom window. A light was on.
He nodded hellos and fake-smiled his way through the strangers on the porch, climbed the stairs inside and knocked before opening the door.
Rachel sat on the bed beside her mother, whose complexion was not unlike the white of her old hobnail bedspread. There was a coughedblood stain on the hem of her bedsheet. Underneath, her shoulder and hip bones stuck out like stones.
Both women smiled at him.
In the glow of the table lamp, Rachel looked so tan and young next to her mother. Rachel pulled pins from the bun in her hair. Her veil sat next to a red glass bottle of codeine.
“Crowded down there?” Mary Ball’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, but Ledford listened to her every syllable. He’d come to love and respect his new mother-in-law. Once, when he’d come up short on tuition money, she’d stuck a hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket and told him, “Any man who takes a degree in history needs a little help.” Then she’d laughed.
There was none of that now. Laughing always brought up the blood.
“Yes ma’am. It’s packed to the tent poles,” he answered. He sat down next to Rachel and took her hand. “They’re calling us for our first dance.”
“Open the window wider,” Mary Ball told them, lifting a bony finger. “I want to hear your song.” Ledford did as she said. She called him back over to the bedside. Looked him in the eye and squeezed his hand. “You do right by Rachel,” she said.
“I will.”
“You don’t ever forget what you’ve promised in marriage.”
“I won’t.”
It worried the old woman that Ledford had no people there, no kin to speak of at all.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rachel wiped her tears before they went back out. She blew her nose and breathed in deep and kissed her man. “I almost told her I was pregnant,” she said.
He nodded. “I think she might know it anyhow.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” She laughed a little. Dusk had gone to dark outside the French doors behind her. Her gown looked almost silver against it. “Still as hot out there?”
He nodded again. Stared at her.
“What?” she said. “Are you drunk?”
“No.” Seeing her in the dress made him nearly as clumsy as the first time he’d gone to her apartment and knocked over picture frames. “Can you dance in those?” He pointed to her high-heeled shoes.
“If I can’t, I’ll take em off.”
Though it wasn’t as good as Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, the band did a nice rendition of “Snowfall,” and Rachel laid her head against Ledford’s chest, and she knew they’d do what they’d pledged to do earlier that day. Richer or poorer. Sickness and health. This was forever. And Ledford looked down at the length of her and smiled at how the wedding gown could just as soon be the nurse’s uniform he’d beheld four years before. For the length of that song, neither of them could see the people stuffing their faces at the buffet table, nor could they see Erm swallowing a highball glass of scotch in one swig, eyes shut, saying to woman after woman what he always said—“How do you do?” Even the white linens and lights and cover of tent that had seemed in excess for a people at war, even these, for the length of that song became nothing more than snow falling all around as they closed their eyes and swayed. It was ninety-two degrees inside the tent, but the newlywed couple had ceased to sweat.
Above them, Rachel’s mother nearly got up and came to the window. She knew better. Instead, she swigged her codeine and moved her fingers to the music and pictured them in her mind, just as they were outside. Her only daughter. The man she’d chosen. So much pain in him, but equal parts strength and virtue. She thought of her own husband, whose small storage of such righ teous qualities had long since disappeared. He’d not been faithful to her, and that was unforgivable. She thought of her last will and testament, the changes she’d made unbeknownst to anyone, and she smiled.
Mary Ball would hang on for another day, long enough to see them off on the honeymoon. Long enough to read in the Sunday paper of a second bomb dropped, this one more powerful than the first. The smile she’d had from the music through her window was no longer. Her mouth wrenched downward at the corners. She mourned for man and wished only that she’d died the night prior. Her focus blurred, eyes shutting down like the rest of her. The last thing she ever saw were the words Nagasaki wiped clean from the earth.
May 1946 (#ulink_249ecc94-f467-5cba-840c-f45660178f73)
LITTLEMARYESTELLELEDFORD squirmed in the crook of her father’s arm. She had gas, and she couldn’t yet pass it with efficiency. Ledford laughed at her grunts, the faces she made. Her eyebrow hairs were fine but dark and nearly connected to the hairline at her temples. He kissed her face all over. He sang to her a song that his mother had sung to him. Was an old mouse that lived on the hill, mm-hmmm. He was rough and tough like Buffalo Bill, mm-hmmm.
Rachel walked in from the kitchen. She eyeballed the beer bottle on the end table. Wondered how many he’d had. The throw rug under his feet stretched and tore with each step of the made-up dance he did with his infant girl. Their home was new, but their furnishings weren’t.
Lucius Ball had gotten to keep his home after Mary died, but that was all he’d gotten.
As it turned out, the Federal Housing Authority liked to help out war vets. They’d only had to spend four pregnant months in Ledford’s beat-up old house next to the scrapyard. In that time, Ledford had fixed things like cracked door thresholds and rotten windowpanes, but in the end he was glad to move into a new place. There were memories left behind in his boyhood home, but he hadn’t yet sold it. He’d kept it as a place to go to on his own once in a while. These visits were less and less, as Ledford was skilled in the art of pushing on from the past.
His mother-in-law had been right about a man with a history degree. He hadn’t done much with it. But, his mother-in-law had also left her family stake in Mann Glass to Rachel, and that meant a good deal. For one, Ledford had gone back to work. Not as a furnace tender, but as hot end manager. Desk job. He didn’t care for the work, of course, but he could close his door even on the likes of Lucius Ball, who was now a broken man with the same pension to look forward to as everybody else. Rachel had sold the factory to a Toledo glass man who’d been a friend of her grandfather’s. She and Ledford had put the Mann money in the bank for something they didn’t yet understand. Rachel spoke to her father some, but only on the phone. He hadn’t yet met his granddaughter, and she was three weeks old.
Mary grunted again. “She’s hungry,” Rachel said. “Hand her over.”
Ledford did so, kissing the little one once more as he passed her to Rachel. Then he walked into the kitchen and opened another beer. Church of the Air was coming through the radio, but Edward R. Murrow would be on at one-forty-five.
Through the Philco, the preacher asked, “How long has it been since you labored in the field of God? How long since you bathed in his majestic waters?”
“Too long,” Ledford answered. He cleared his throat and spat in the kitchen sink.
The preacher’s words stirred in Ledford a memory he’d not had in years.
There was a field, and he’d run through its weeds as a boy. Shoulderhigh, the weeds seemed to know he was coming, bending before him and waking like water behind. There was a barn and an old preacher woman with a clay pipe in her teeth.
There was the lake from his dream, and his daddy, fishing from the rowboat.
Ledford went to the basement and looked at the half-full bookcase he’d built. It wasn’t plumb to the ground. He stared at two books, side by side. The Growth of the American Republic and the Holy Bible. Both had belonged to his father. He picked up the old King James and looked for penciled underlinings. The marks of Bill Ledford’s study. The marks of a man who could never outrun the engine in his head, but who would damn sure try. Ledford located one such passage. He took a belt off his beer and read the words, I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the holy. Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? Who hath gathered the wind in his fists? Ledford liked that last line. He said it aloud. “Gathered the wind in his fists.”
The phone rang. He slid the Bible back to its designation and picked up the receiver. It was Erm. He had a tip on a horse in the eighth at Pimlico. “This is the overlay of overlays, Leadfoot,” he kept saying. “Don’t back off the gas now.”
He told Erm to put him down for another five hundred and hung up. Stood in the center of the basement and looked around. His shinbone was acting up. Like someone had taken a hot poker to it. But Ledford would not sit down and prop it up. He’d ignore it.
Everything salvageable from his old house had ended up in the basement. There was a full tail fan of turkey feathers, gathered at the base in a knot of quills. It had come from his father’s father. It sat on top of the bookcase, next to handblown blue bottles and three big glass scraps shaped liked diamonds. Against the wall there was an old brown trunk with quilts inside, one of them covered in swastikas. It was made by his great-grandmother, who, according to his father, had been half Indian. You’d always had to hide such a quilt, even before the second war, on account of Hitler. But Ledford’s daddy told him that the quilt’s true meaning was luck. Or love. One or the other, he’d never been sure.
The burn in his shinbone flared. He sat down on top of the trunk and picked at a shoot of splintering wood. Checked his watch again. Murrow would be coming on. He’d not listen today. He didn’t want the news.
Above him, the floorboards gave as Rachel carried little Mary to her crib. He listened as Rachel stepped light from the nursery and across the living room. He cupped his ear and picked up the sound of her knitting needles sliding and clacking. Ledford stood, opened the trunk, and felt beneath the swastika quilt. He pulled out a pint of Ten High. It was three-quarters full.
He tilted back, drained the bottle to a quarter, and put it back, next to the flat little box that housed his Purple Heart. He never opened that box. It may as well have housed a Cracker Jack prize. Next to the box he kept a burlap sack full of marbles his daddy had made for him. The shooter was black like tar, as if rolled and frozen in ice. “One of these days,” his daddy had said, “little boys and girls will line up and lay down every tooth-fairy penny they ever made for a marble like that there.”
Ledford stuck a piece of Beeman’s in his mouth and stood in front of his crooked bookcase, smiling and looking for something to read. The pain in his leg subsided. He closed his eyes and fell asleep standing.
When he opened them again, the bookcase shelves were made of mud. Empty. Their surfaces cracked with tiny crooked lines like wrinkles in a roadmap. Ledford traced the cracks with his fingertip. He brought the finger to his mouth and tasted it. Dirt. Copper penny. Blood. There was a tickle on the palm of his hand, and there, worms wriggled forth from a hole the size of a button. Ledford pinched their ends and tugged, and the worms tore at the middle and whipped themselves side to side, split but still alive. He set them on the muddy shelves and watched them struggle to slide away. On the bottom shelf sat a single photograph, flipped, showing only its cotton white back. Ledford reached for it and turned it around. There was the fat Kentucky toddler in her white walker shoes. A hole had been burnt where her face should have been. Ledford smoothed the black ash with his thumb and the photograph roared at him. He fell on his tailbone and covered his ears, and the worms in his palms slid inside and burrowed deep, all the way up to his sinuses, and Ledford shook his head like a dog in water to loose them.
He awoke in this state on the hard basement floor in front of the bookcase. His fingertips were plugged up his nose-holes, and he lay flat on his backside like someone had knocked him out cold.
He crawled to the trunk for his Ten High. Tomorrow was a workday. He’d need to brave sleep again. He’d need to get through.
Upstairs, Rachel had frozen mid-stitch. The tips of her needles quivered as the baby grunted and banged against the crib rails in the nursery. “Please,” Rachel whispered. “Please stay down.”
Ledford’s screams had come again, but she’d not go check on him this time. His nightmares were his alone. What he’d seen and done were not for her to question.
It was the baby she’d see through. It was Mary she’d listen for inside all the other noise.
June 1946 (#ulink_bb4b530a-2016-5084-a3b5-70f101660cfd)
WHENMACKWELLS HAD returned to his janitorial duties at the Mann Glass Company, it was with little fanfare. Unlike the other GIs, his return was not featured in the company newsletter. Though he’d taken Honningen with the 394th, he was not allowed to sail stateside with them after V-E Day. He’d been sent back with his ser vice unit to an ill-lit port yard at four in the morning. No parades, no flashbulbs.
It was a Tuesday of his first week back on the job that Mack Wells made eye contact with Ledford. They remembered one another from their time before the war, and they recognized in one another’s eyes the remnants of a shared shitstorm. They convened in Ledford’s new office to talk over lunch. Each preferred the egg salad of the other’s wife. They didn’t speak much on the war. But as for life after its end, Mack Wells was not being offered what Ledford was, not by a longshot. Mann Glass liked its janitors black, the Federal Housing Authority liked their vets white, and neither party made an effort to hide such things.
Ledford didn’t take to such small thinking. As a younger man, like everybody, he’d played the game of white over black, but college had changed all that. History’s study will sometimes enlighten the pre sent. Theologians will sometimes speak openly in classrooms. At Marshall, Ledford had met such a man in Don Staples, professor of ph ilosophy.
In Ledford’s office, the rotary fan hummed metallic. He shut it off. Noises had begun to get under his skin.
Across the desk, Mack Wells had just asked about a new job.
“You want off the swing shift?” Ledford ran his fingers along the desk’s beveled edge.
“That would help,” said Mack Wells. “You want mold shop or hot end?”
“I think I’d make a okay flint.” Mack cleared his throat. He looked at the picture of baby Mary, stuck with a silver tack to a press board panel. Nothing else was hung on the wall.
“Mold maker it is.” Ledford took out a Mail-o-Gram pad and made a note to personnel. “I’ll speak to somebody in the 75 about you.”
Mack shook his head no. The Local 75 would sooner deunionize than offer membership to a black man. “We could hold off on that,” Mack said. He wondered about Ledford’s ways. Couldn’t figure if the white man before him was on the level. “But my wife will be lookin for work. My boy starts first grade this year and she was wonderin if selecting had a spot.”
The selecting department was all women. All white. Ledford said he’d check into it.
They stood and shook hands, and each wanted to ask the other about what they’d seen over there. Neither could do so. Mack Wells nodded and put on his flat cap. He closed the heavy door behind him.
Ledford put his feet on the desk and lit a cigarette. He looked at the memo to personnel. Thought of all the men he knew at the plant who would spit at Mack Wells’ feet if he wasn’t pushing a broom. A knot took shape in his belly. He looked at the blank brown walls around him and rubbed his hands against his slacks. It was not yet ten a.m. Time to walk the floor, he decided. Time to watch the lava pour.
It was loud down there, but steady. Inside the sounds of a factory floor, there was the quiet that comes from constancy. The batch attendant unloaded the mixes. He wore the same split-leather gloves Ledford had worn years before.
Ledford nodded to the man, who he’d heard was a mute, but the gesture wasn’t noticed.
When he turned to walk away, he knocked against the young man approaching. It was Charlie Ball, Lucius’s nephew, who had been hired out of college as a supervisor. Charlie’s father was county commissioner. His grandfather had been governor. “Morning,” he said. His grin was of the shit-eating variety. His tie knot was fat and perfect.
Ledford had hated Charlie Ball from the moment he’d met him. “Morning.”
“Loud, isn’t it?” Charlie’s eyes were set too close, and they looked right through you when he talked, on out to some empty designation beyond.
“It is.” Ledford glanced at his breast pocket to be sure he’d remembered his cigarettes. He had. He looked back at Charlie Ball, not much more than a boy, pudgy cheeks. Freckles. He had a face that stirred in Ledford the urge to whup him.
“You see the new blonde in corrugated yet?” Charlie’s grin spread. He shuffled in his loafers. It was the third time he’d asked that particular question in an hour. He mistakenly thought such conversation ingratiated him with other men.
“I haven’t,” Ledford said.
“Titties the size of footballs.” Charlie cupped his hands in front of his chest to elaborate.
“Uh-huh,” Ledford said. He stared sufficient to make Charlie squirm, and then he moved on.
Ledford walked past the flow line and through the side doors. It was warm out. Humid and cloudy. He sidestepped a stack of shipping palettes and lit a cigarette. Freight cars sat quiet on the line, waiting to be loaded. Ledford walked along the rail as if on a tightrope, his arms outstretched, his lips gripping his smoke. He fell off and kicked at shale rock between the ties. Picked one up and spat on it, rubbed it with his thumb. It reminded him of the pocketstone he used to carry for sharpening the dogleg jackknife. The knife he’d long since put away in the big trunk.
In the sunlight, the rock seemed to house glass, a shine inside the dust.
He threw it high at the batch tanks, above them the steaming chimney stacks. Through the steam, he could make out the green hills. They gathered up and cinched the valley shut. They were perfect.
It was quiet for a time. Then a shift whistle sounded to the east and Ledford’s neck hairs stood on end. Every part of him seized up tight like a watch spring. The whistle, like the fan, had become an irritant of his soul.
When he got back to his office, Ledford tore off the Mail-o-Gram, walked to his secretary’s desk, and said, “Ernestine, I’ve got a note for personnel.” He watched her read it and nod her head. She wore a flower in her hair and a five-year ser vice pin on her blouse collar. “I’m feeling poorly,” Ledford told her. “Taking the rest of the day off.”
She watched him walk away, pulling on his crooked tie knot and unbuttoning his shirt collar.
He gassed up the Packard and stopped at the ABC, where he bought two fifths of Ten High, a couple RC Colas, and a tin of cut plug for the trip.
At the house, he kissed Rachel and Mary hello. He phoned Erm, shoved a change of clothes into his gray leather grip, and kissed Rachel and Mary goodbye.
Rachel did not look him in the face. If this was the last time she was to see him, she’d just as soon remember another Ledford.
Backing out of the driveway, he saw her silhouette through the window blinds. She still had that spike straight posture, whether she toted the baby or not. Most times she toted. He wanted to go back in and hold them both. Tell them he loved them. But he didn’t. His foot found the clutch and his eye found the road.
On Route 52, Ledford rolled the window down and stuck his head out as he drove. He let the wind in under his eyelids.
His wristwatch read noon. He could be in Chicago by midnight.
* * *
THE PAPERWEIGHT WAS ten inches of steel, the sawed-off end of an overunder shotgun barrel. Ledford stared at its two openings. From where he sat, slumped and fighting sleep, the glow of the desk lamp illuminated the gun barrels’ insides, so that he watched a spider there, walking its tightrope. It was magnificent. The kind of thing he’d taken to noticing more of late. “Hello,” he whispered to the spider. He wanted to lean forward and stick his finger in the barrel, but he was too drunk to move.
The air inside Erm’s bookie office was stale. Wallpaper glue gone bad, whiskey molding in the floorboards. When the doorknob turned, Ledford’s breathing seized. His back was to the door.
“Wake up Erminio,” someone said.
Erm jerked to attention in the slatback chair across the desk from Ledford. Erm swiveled and whirled and nearly fell to the floor. The creak of the chair seized Ledford by the nerve endings. He thought about grabbing the paperweight. It made a fine weapon. Instead, he stood and turned to face whoever had entered.
It was Loaf, the giant associate from the racetrack. Uncle Fiore’s bodyguard. His nose was red and swollen, and the buttons on his vest were mismatched. “You going to sleep while your uncle gets an ulcer?” he said.
“I’m up, I’m up,” Erm answered. He fumbled with the papers on his desk as if to look useful.
Loaf sized up Ledford. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. His breath was rotten from four feet off.
“Ledford. We met at Hawthorne last summer.”
Loaf knew who he was. The question was a customary greeting. “Yeah. Ledford.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped at snot and sweat alike. Loaf had little regard for his face.
On a leather love seat against the far wall, a naked woman shifted under the afghan that half-covered her. The curve in her spine was something to behold. There was a birthmark on her hip. She sighed.
Ledford sat back down and looked at the gun barrel and wished he hadn’t felt the impulse to use it for clubbing the head of an unknown man. The spider was gone. The glow from the lamp’s green hood lit Erm a seasick hue. He coughed hard and spat in the trashcan at his feet. “I’m on it,” he said to Loaf. The door closed.
“Half-wit son of a bitch,” Erm muttered. “You want breakfast?”
They walked to the diner on Ashland in silence. Both ordered coffee and corned beef hash and eggs. Erm kept coughing and spitting, this time on the dirty linoleum. He smeared it with his wingtip.
Ledford looked out the window. Chicago had not given him what he was looking for. The booze worked as it always had, but he wouldn’t lie down with another woman. This didn’t sit right with Erm. And that morning, at two a.m., a phone call had come that threw a switch in every happy man at the card table and the bar. The phone call made mugshots out of smiles. Erm’s cousin had been hit by a car and killed.
The cousin, Uncle Fiore’s favorite son, was a book-smart street enforcer with a straight job for appearances. A plumber who left behind a wife and three girls.
The waitress refilled their coffees. “Listen to this,” Erm said. He had the newspaper quartered in his left hand, coffee cup in his right. The diner was getting crowded. Erm took quick looks at the front door over Ledford’s shoulder. He tongued his bridge of porcelain teeth between swallows. He read aloud. “Louis Bacigalupo, thirty-four years old, a union plumber, was injured fatally Tuesday morning just two days after his wife and three daughters had honored him with a Father’s Day luncheon in his home.” Erm took a drink. “What the hell does injured fatally mean? Who ever heard of injured fatally?” The waitress put their plates in front of them and Ledford said thank you. Erm kept on reading. “The auto driver was charged with reckless driving and released under fifty dollars bond.”
Ledford knew what came next. It had been in the whispers that started after the two-a.m. phone call. It had been in the face of an associate who’d taken Erm aside at the basement card game. They’d left soon after for Erm’s crowded bookie office, with Ledford down two hundred, his ace hand still on the way.
The naked woman had appeared from the hallway, lay down without a word, and slept.
There were meetings in the office corner to which Ledford was not invited, but he knew the good word. Murder was on the tongues of these men.
The “auto driver” was out on bond. He’d be dead inside a day.
The corned beef hash steamed. “I’m going to hit the road after breakfast,” Ledford said. He picked up his knife and fork.
Erm set the paper down. “You just got here Leadfoot.” He broke bacon into little pieces and stabbed them with a fork.
“Yeah.”
Erm looked out the window at a couple walking by. They held hands and smiled. “You feelin uneasy? This kind of shit make you squirm these days?” He watched the couple turn the corner.
“You’re the squirmy Ermie,” Ledford said. “I’m just Loyal.” They both laughed a little, Erm’s cut short. Ledford went on. “Look, I been thinking too much lately. And now the baby and Rachel.” He felt like talking to Erm instead of just pushing bullshit back and forth, the only thing they’d ever done. He felt like telling Erm that he wanted to read books again like he had after the war, that a theology professor was on his mind, a man who’d told him of William Wilberforce and Mohandas Gandhi, that his mind was on God and birth and death, on Mack Wells and those who shared his skin color. He wanted to tell Erm that they’d been sold bad goods. That they didn’t have to claw and tear and hate and kill and always, everywhere, win. But Erm wasn’t the kind of friend you said such things to. Ledford had never wanted that kind.
He split an egg yolk with his fork. “It doesn’t have to be this way Erm,” he managed.
Erm looked at him, frowned. Then he said, “Fuck you Ledford,” and got up and licked his thumb. He pulled two dollar bills from a thick fold and dropped them on the chipped red laminate.
A leather strap of beat-up Christmas bells hung on the doorknob. It sounded as he walked away.
LEDFORD STOOD IN the dark and looked at them. Mother and baby. He’d come in so quiet that Rachel hadn’t stirred. She slept with her arm across her forehead, her chest rising slow and even. Mary lay beside her, on her back, both arms up over her head as if stretching. She was a tiny thing. Ledford smiled. He’d hold them more, he thought. Tell them that he loved them. He’d make a change.
THE HOT DOGS at Wiggins were fifteen cents apiece. Ledford sat at the countertop on a swivel stool, wiping chili from the corners of his mouth. The Very Reverend C. Rice Thompson sat to his right. He marveled at how young Ledford had eaten four hot dogs in the time it took him to put down two. “You’ve got no problems with your appetite,” he said.
“Never have.” Ledford watched the proprietor move from the cash register to the counter-back. He pulled two cigars from an opened display box of White Owls. They were for the fat man in overalls paying his check. The elastic bands cut an X across the fat man’s back. Ledford watched him breathe heavy at the register. “Most times my stomach can hold its own,” he told the Reverend, “it’s my ears and brain that have been getting to me.” He finished off his second Coke and put the bottle on the counter. Looked at the White Owl box again. Next to it was a stack of Doublemint chewing gum, and next to that, a hanging display of powdered aspirin. Ledford could always use the aspirin.
“I hope that talking will help with that,” Reverend Thompson said. “Rachel had the right idea sending you my way.” He took off his glasses and wiped at their lenses with his napkin. “But I believe I know someone you might speak a little freer with than myself.” He put the glasses back on and turned to Ledford, who stifled a burp. “He’s just over at the college here. You may have met him in your time there. Don Staples?”
Ledford shook his head in recognition. “I had him one semester. Best teacher in the place.”
“Then you know he’s a genuine theologian. Used to be with the Episcopal Church but he broke away and went to work for the CCC in the thirties. He’s dedicated his study to the work of William Wilberforce.”
Ledford nodded. “He spoke a good bit on Wilberforce in class.”
“Did you know he published a book on him?”
“No.” Ledford wondered why Staples had not laid claim to such a thing.
Reverend Thompson leaned in and spoke soft. “The man is more committed to securing rights for Negroes than anyone you’re likely to meet. Wears his beard lately in the style of John Brown. A true eccentric.”
“You think I ought to bother him?”
“Oh sure. He’d enjoy your company, just as I have. But he’d speak your language a little more fluent than I can, I’d imagine.” The Reverend, though older than Ledford, had not seen what the younger man had. He’d not lost so much for so long. He cleared his throat and signaled for the bill.
“How’s that?” Ledford looked at the circle-shaped smears on the Reverend’s lenses.
“Well, he spent time overseas in the First War, and he knows a great deal about a great many things.” He left it at that. It seemed enough.
After they shook hands, Reverend Thompson walked back to his church, and Ledford walked the length of Fourth Avenue to campus. He appreciated Rachel making the appointment with her Episcopalian man. The Reverend was a good sort, the kind who did not judge on attendance at God’s Sunday meeting.
At Sixteenth Street, Ledford nearly knocked over a small boy selling newspapers. He wore no shirt, just a full satchel, bandolier-style. He squinted at the sun. Ledford bought a paper and walked on. A woman crossed in front of him, holding something wrapped in butcher paper. She smiled at him, and when he looked back to see her from behind, she looked back too.
It took three people to correctly navigate his path to Professor Staples’ office. Its location was the basement of Old Main, just beyond the furnace room. An orange light emitted from the half-open door. Ledford knocked.
“Come on in.”
He pushed on the heavy steel door and stepped inside. “Professor Staples?”
“Just call me Don, son.” The man looked at Ledford over spectacles worn low on his nose-bridge. His beard was full and long. Blocked in black and gray like the coat of some animal. In his hand was a book. Everywhere were books. Stacked in rows on his desk, the floor, in front of the full bookshelves. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“Reverend Thompson from Trinity Episcopal said I might speak with you.” Ledford had trouble reading the man’s eyes, which were locked on him but elsewhere simultaneously. The left one was lazy, off kilter.
“The Very Right Reverend,” Staples said. “The crème de le crème, the cream of the cash crop.” He kept up his staring, sniffed hard. “Oh, Thompson is a good man of God. I’m only pullin your leg.” He smiled. “I had you in class once before?”
“Yessir.”
“Where you from?”
“Here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ledford.”
Staples thought for a moment. “You have people in Mingo?”
“Yessir. My grandfather was from Naugatuck.”
“You have people in Wayne County?”
“I believe I might.”
“Ledford,” the older man said, considering the surname. He sniffed again, then set his book down and wiped at his nose with his thumb. “I knew a Franklin Ledford up at Red Jacket.”
“My great uncle, I believe. Dead.”
“Oh yes, dead. Matter of fact, all the Ledfords in those parts are long dead, aren’t they?”
“That or moved away.” He was still holding the door’s edge in his hand. “You’re from Mingo?”
Staples shook his head no. “Spent some time there as a young man. But I’m a McDowell County boy. Keystone.” He smiled again. “Come on in and sit down. Just move those books off to the floor there.”
Ledford did so and sat. The seat of his chair was half-rotten. Under his backside, it felt as if it might go any time. “I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said.
“Depends on what you’re here for.” Staples leaned back and crossed his long legs. He took off his glasses and folded them shut. Held them two-handed across his belly.
“Well,” Ledford said. “That’s . . .” He couldn’t spit it out. “I . . .”
Staples did not move an inch. He sat and stared and breathed slow but noticeable through the nose he kept snorting. It whistled. The lamplight flickered under the orange scarf he’d laid across it.
“I have questions about God. And man.” Ledford cracked his knuckles against his thighs.
“Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm,” Staples said. “And the Very Reverend, he didn’t give you answers on those?”
“Well, he thought maybe I’d understand them a little better if they came from you.”
“Is that right? Well . . .” He came forward suddenly, slapped both his shoes on the floor. From his desk drawer he pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch. “What’s the weather doin?”
“Sunny. Hot.”
“You want to go for a walk?”
“Sure. Yessir.”
It was Sadie Hawkins Day, and coed girls chased boys across the green like they’d heard a starter gun salute. Staples ignored them and walked at a quick clip and talked with his teeth clamped around his pipe, which looked to be on its last leg. “Are you married?”
“Yessir.”
“How long?”
“A year next month.”
“Child?”
“Yessir.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“Have you kept your pecker in your pants otherwise?” He did not break stride. They cut across the grass, dry and patchy.
“Yessir.”
“Good.” Staples stopped dead and pointed to a big maple tree ten yards off. “This is the tree,” he said. The skin on his hand said he’d seen a good bit of sun. Long fingers. He was roughly Ledford’s size, and he’d not stooped with age.
Ledford followed him to the tree. Staples sat down Indian-style next to a surfaced root. Ledford looked around. A Sadie Hawkins girl squealed and hurdled a green bench. In the distance, the GI dormitory trailers sat quiet and squat, brown rectangles in the sun. Ledford took a seat on a wide root.
Staples knocked his pipe on the tree trunk. “You were overseas, I’d imagine?”
“Yessir.”
“Pacific or Atlantic?”
“Pacific. Guadalcanal.”
“Navy?”
“Marine Corps.”
Staples looked down at the black ash and made a strange shape out of his mouth. He’d not figured the young man for a Marine. He cleared his throat with a booming cough. “You weren’t drafted?”
“I enlisted.”
“Your mother and daddy were okay with that?”
“They died in ’35.”
Staples had stuck his thumb in the mouth of his pipe. He shook his head. “I am sorry son,” he said. “You want to talk about booze now or save that for another day?” He pocketed the pipe in his jacket. Before Ledford could answer, Staples said, “You read much Ledford?”
“I do some.”
“What are you reading now?”
“The Bible some. And a book called The Growth of the American Republic.”
Staples nodded and stood up. He’d gotten a case of the fidgets. “Let’s walk a while,” he said, “and then you’ll accompany me to my office, where I’ll load you up with some new reading material.” He brushed off the seat of his brown slacks. “How’s that sound to you, Ledford?”
Ledford stood and brushed himself off in the same manner. He nodded as the older man had. “Sounds good,” he said.
September 1947 (#ulink_447252ca-7e0a-5b5a-b08d-9ea80a9966fd)
THE CHILD WALKED UNSTEADY from one end of the little porch to the other. Her gait possessed a wild, untested confidence. Rachel stood guard, her foot on the first of three porch stairs. Boards were warped and nailheads surfaced. Rachel worried on splinters—Mary’s feet were soft, though she’d been walking for over a month. She lifted her knees to right angles and pounded against the half-rotten boards. Ledford pushed open the screen door with the box he carried. He let Mary pass before him, winked at her, and stepped down from the porch. The Packard’s trunk was up, Bill Ledford’s blowpipe and punty rod jutting out the back. The suicide doors were swung wide open. A single spot remained among all the boxes crammed inside, and Ledford slid the last one there. He’d marked it Attic Junk, and its contents, mostly old books, had nearly caused him to sit down in the dark reaches of his boyhood home and reminisce one last time. But Mack Wells and his family were on their way over. The home had to be emptied.
Ledford slammed the Packard’s heavy doors tight against its contents. Inside those boxes were the remnants of a childhood in two parts—the first recalled in photographs, the second in pay stubs and grade cards that no one ever saw.
There was a sound from the porch.
“Oh dear,” Rachel said.
Ledford turned to see her bent and picking up Mary, who was on all fours, crying.
He pulled out his handkerchief on the way.
Little droplets of blood emerged round from the checkerboard scrape on her knee. “Watch,” Ledford told her. He pressed the white hanky against the skin and pulled it back, showed it to her. “What’s that?” he asked.
Mary quit crying and stared at the crimson mark on the white square.
“That’s a big girl,” Rachel said. She tickled Mary where she held her by the armpits, and the laughing came, harder than the crying. Ledford dabbed once more and the bleeding quit. He bent and brushed his fingers against the porch boards where she’d fallen. A truck backfired, then rumbled past on the street. Its muffler dragged. Ledford watched it stop at Sixth Avenue, and then, still kneeling, he looked back to the porch boards. To the corner, where they met up in a chipped V. He pictured his father’s white buckskin mitt there, just as it had been all those years before, torn to hell by the dog. Then came McDonough’s face. Ledford shook his head and stood up. Mary walked a circle in the frontyard square of crabgrass. Rachel stood by the curb with her hands on her hips. She was turned so that he could see her belly in profile, stretched to full with another child. Best they could figure, she’d gotten pregnant around New Year’s, and here they were, on the precipice of another one.
A car turned off the boulevard and rumbled toward them. “That’s Mack,” Ledford said. He stepped off the porch, picked Mary up, and stood next to Rachel. He waved as the car pulled up the curb, and then he rubbed at the small of Rachel’s back. She’d strained it pushing the stroller over railroad tracks.
Mack Wells stepped from the old Plymouth and nearly slammed the door on his boy, who had hopped the front seat to follow his father. The boy ran around the back of the car and opened the passenger door for his mother. She stepped out and thanked him kindly. For a month, he’d opened all doors for his mother. “That’s what a gentleman does,” his grandfather had told him.
Mack put his hand to his flat cap and nodded. “Ms. Ledford,” he said.
“Hello Mack.” Rachel stepped toward them. “You must be Elizabeth.” She held out her free hand to Mack’s wife in greeting.
“Yes. Everybody calls me Lizzie.” Lizzie wore a rust-colored blouse and matching hat, tilted on her head.
The women shook hands.
“This Harold?” Ledford asked.
“This is him,” Mack said. He rubbed the boy’s head from behind.
“Good to meet you Harold,” Ledford said.
“Pleased to meet you.” Harold looked up at the white family before him. The baby drooled, and he watched it stretch well past her chin, then give and fall to the sidewalk. It made a quiet splat.
No one spoke for a moment. Then Mack inhaled deep through his nose. “Mmm,” he said. “Smell that.”
“Bread factory,” Ledford said. “You’ll smell it everyday.”
Lizzie Wells sniffed the air and smiled politely. She looked mostly at the ground.
Rachel took Mary from Ledford. “Let me show you the space in back for a garden,” she said. Lizzie nodded and followed, leaving the men and the boy by the car.
“If it isn’t the bread smell stirring your stomach, it’s the scrap metal clanging in your ears,” Ledford said. He turned and walked to the house, motioned for them to follow. His limp had come back with all the box hauling. He ignored the burn radiating up his shinbone.
Mack looked back at Harold. He knew the look on the boy’s face. It was fear. Mack felt it too. There wasn’t a black family for a mile in the West End, and he could scarcely believe he’d agreed to rent the house. But when his home loan had fallen through, and his mother had sold her house to move in with his brother, Mack had acted fast. Ledford had told him over lunch one day, “I got a place in the West End you could rent real cheap.” Mack had quit chewing, looked at him like he was crazy. Ledford went on. There weren’t many neighbors, he’d said. There was the scrapyard and the bakery. There was the filling station on the corner, whose owner, Mr. Ballard, was not a hateful type. He had a Negro in his employ, Ledford had told Mack. It had all seemed natural, what with Ledford’s need to hold on to his old house and Mack’s troubles with the Federal Housing Authority. Inside a week, they’d drawn up a lease and shaken hands on it. There’d been some looks in their direction, but neither man paid much mind. They’d become friends, as much as a black man could be with a white one. Mack was the only welcome visitor inside Ledford’s office, the only glass man interested in hearing what Professor Staples had been teaching his young pupil.
The screen door squealed as Ledford opened it and stepped in. “Gas and water and electric are all on and in your name,” he said. The staircase before them sagged at the middle of each riser. It would be good to have a boy running up and down again. Ledford smiled, “Wasn’t always that way with the water and electric. We used to barrel-catch rain and heat it.”
“I know about that,” Mack said. He surveyed the living room. “You ain’t taking that big chair?”
“It’s yours if you want it.” Ledford regarded the wide upholstery. It had been his father’s drinking chair. On payday, he’d pass out cold and spill all over it. The smell still turned Ledford’s stomach.
Young Harold walked over past the chair. He looked at the builtin bookcase, the few books left there. He whispered, sounding out the spines.
“Book on baseball there. Go on and grab it,” Ledford said.
Harold took down the skinny book and opened it. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and turned pages.
“He’s reading like a older child already,” Mack said.
“You like baseball?” Ledford asked the boy.
Harold said, “Yessir,” without looking up from the book.
“Good.” Ledford smiled. “That’s your book then. But if that baby in Mrs. Ledford’s belly comes out a boy, I may borrow it back from you down the line.”
“Yessir,” Harold said, and then he went back to sounding out the words. “The Red . . . Head . . . ed . . . Out . . . field,” he whispered.
Ledford fished the front- and backdoor keys from his pants pocket. His finger through the keyring, he whirled them a few times, Old West style, catching them mid-rotation with the snap of his hand. He held them out for Mack Wells to take.
The women came in the back door, Mary in the lead. She dropped to all fours on the cracked ribbon tile and picked at a loose piece of grout. Before she could get it in her mouth, Rachel reached down and snatched it.
“Harold used to put everything in his mouth,” Lizzie said. “I caught him eating mud more than once.”
In the backyard, Rachel had asked her about having more children, and Lizzie had explained she was no longer able. I’m sorry, Rachel had said, and it seemed to Lizzie that unlike some white folks, she meant it.
“Mary hasn’t yet sampled mud, but I figured early I sure can’t set out mouse traps.” They laughed together. They watched Mary pull herself up by a loose drawer handle.
“Strong,” Lizzie said.
Rachel pointed out the range’s unsteady leg. She showed Lizzie how to bang on the refrigerator’s monitor top if it quit running. “Loyal put some work in the kitchen over the years,” Rachel said. “Nothing’s new, but everything’s fixed.” She ran her finger over a long, glued crack in the table’s porcelain top. It pinched at her insides to think of him alone in that house back then, still a boy, doing a man’s job and a woman’s too. She rubbed at her round belly through the silk.
Lizzie was used to some age on her things. The hand-crank wringerwasher next to the sink was the same one she’d grown up with, same one she still used. It was possible that Mack had not been crazy when he’d agreed to rent this place.
When Lizzie knew it wasn’t obvious, she stole hard looks at Rachel’s face. It seemed the woman was kind and genuine. She suspected the only black folks Rachel knew growing up were those who cleaned her house, those who followed the orders of her parents, but it was possible that such ways had not rooted in her.
“Loyal raised himself alone from age thirteen in this house,” Rachel said. She’d knelt to Mary, who was at the windowsill, pulling at an edge of unstuck wallpaper. She blurted something over and over that vaguely resembled “flower,” the paper’s pattern. Rachel looked through the windowpane, her eyes glazing over. “I know he hopes your family will find the house suitable.”
Lizzie did not answer. She listened to the baby girl talking in her own language. Down the hallway, Mack and Ledford laughed at a joke. From the scrapyard there came an extended squeal and crunch. Lizzie’s knees nearly buckled and her forehead popped with sweat. She was thinking how dangerous all this was. Her new job had come by way of Mr. Ledford. Her family’s new home, the same. White folks. Those whom her father had raised her to be wary of. And here she was, talking kitchens and children, vegetable gardens and barren wombs, all as if the expectant woman across from her had been born into the same world as she.
CHARLIEBALL WAS eager to hand out the cigars he’d bought. He walked the factory floor, sidling up to every man in sight with his box of White Owls, lifting the lid like it was a treasure trunk. “It’s a boy,” he said. “Little William Amos Ledford. Saturday morning. Mother and baby are just fine.” Most men took a cigar and stuck it in a coverall pocket, then went back to work. Fishing for conversation, Charlie said to more than one, “I’m not real sure where that middle name comes from, but to each his own, I guess.”
The name came from the Bible, a book Ledford had read yet again. Ledford arrived at half past noon. It was Tuesday, the last day of the month, and he needed to get a few things done now that Rachel and the baby were home from the hospital. Her aunt, a retired schoolteacher, was helping out.
Charlie caught him as he walked toward the office door. “There he is,” Charlie said, loud. His hair carried too much Royal Crown at the front. It clumped in spots. “Cigar for the proud papa?” He opened the box with flair.
“Thank you Charlie,” Ledford said. He pocketed the thing as the others had.
“How’s Rachel faring?”
Charlie spoke about his cousin as if he knew her. Ledford didn’t care for such talk. “She doesn’t complain. Tough as ever,” he said. He moved past the younger man and stepped into his office. Charlie followed.
Ernestine poked her head in the door. She’d just come back from lunch and carried a doggie bag. “Congratulations Mr. Ledford,” she said.
“Thank you Ernestine.”
Her smile was genuine.
Charlie watched her hips, and when she was gone, he leaned across the desk and whispered, “How old is that gal?”
“What can I do for you Charlie?” Ledford hung his jacket on the back of his desk chair. The air smelled damp and old.
Charlie straightened back up. “My uncle would like to know when he might stop by and see his new grandson.” Lucius had officially retired. He spent his days drunk at Chief Logan’s Tavern. Nights he was in bed by seven.
“Well, he hadn’t hardly come by for the first one, has he?” Ledford was running short on sleep.
“You can understand the excitement over a boy child, Ledford.” There was nothing but the sound of his own swallowing. “Can’t you?”
“Sure Charlie. Tell him his daughter will phone him.”
Ernestine poked her head in again. “Mr. Ledford,” she said, “there’s a man here to see you. Says his name is Admiral Dingleberry.”
Ledford laughed. Ernestine didn’t, and neither did Charlie. It occurred to Ledford that they weren’t familiar with the term. “Well by all means, send in the admiral,” he said.
Erm stepped through the open door. He spread his arms wide, brown-bagged bottle in the left one nearly knocking Charlie in the head. “Private Leadfoot,” Erm said.
“Squirmy Ermie,” Ledford answered. He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, and he didn’t know why. The two had not spoken in more than a year, not since their awkward parting at the Chicago diner. “What the hell are you doin here?” Ledford came around the desk and they shook hands, clapped shoulders as if to injure.
“Visiting my old friend is what I’m doing.” Erm hadn’t acknowledged Charlie, who stood by the hat rack and swallowed and smiled wide. “Who’s the broad?” Erm asked, motioning with his head to Ernestine’s desk in the hall. His breath smelled of gin and chewing gum and cigarettes. He wore a new scar across his right eyebrow.
“That’s Ernestine,” Charlie said.
Erm looked at him as if he’d insulted his mother. “How old would you guess she is?” Charlie’s voice was pinched. Erm squared up on him. He cocked his head and smiled. “Eightyseven,” he said. “What’s your guess?”
Charlie laughed, then looked down at the cigar box. He opened it, looked in Erm’s general direction, and said, “Cigar, Mr. Dingleberry?” His voice cracked on the last syllable.
“No, it’s Admiral Dingleberry, kid. And yes, I wouldn’t care to partake of your smoking pleasures.” Erm kept his expression straight. Ledford did the same beside him, though the urge to laugh was strong. Erm still hadn’t reached for a White Owl. He said, “That your position in this dump? You the cigar girl?”
With that, Ledford laughed out loud. “All right, Erm,” he said.
Charlie frowned and closed the box.
“Hold it now, Kemoslabe,” Erm said. “Big Chief White Owl want smokem.”
Ledford interceded. “Charlie here is handing out cigars on account of Rachel giving birth Saturday.”
Erm spun his head. “No foolin. You son of a bitch.” They shook hands again. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy. William, after my daddy.”
“How about that? Big Bill Ledford. I bet he’s a biggin. Hung where it counts like his old man.”
Charlie laughed.
Erm glared at him. “Let’s have at it then. Open er up and fire the torch.”
The three of them stood and smoked and Erm uncorked his gin and passed the bottle. Ledford couldn’t bear to tell him how much he’d cut back, so he sipped light instead. He explained how they were doing just fine, careful not to badmouth his job too much in front of Charlie. “Renting out the old house,” Ledford said.
“Yeah, to a nigger,” Charlie said. He laughed and took another swig off the bottle.
Ledford stared Charlie down and breathed slow and even. He contemplated his response.
Erm said, “Well Sally, you just jump in anytime.”
Now both men stared at him, and Charlie set the bottle on the desk and excused himself.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Erm said. “Who the hell was that pansy?”
“That’s Rachel’s first cousin. Her daddy’s nephew. Pain in my ass.” They both reached for the bottle at the same time. Laughed and exchanged after you sirs.
Erm sat down and explained he was passing through on business he had in Baltimore. He got quiet after that. Neither spoke of their last meeting. Of Ledford’s serious talk, of Erm’s fuck you admonition, of the inevitable end of the auto driver who’d run over the wrong man.
Ledford still owed Erm six hundred on a straight play from the previous November, when Army had blanked West Virginia. The spread was two touchdowns. The final score was 19–0. Erm even made him pay the vig.
Ledford had been laying off the gambling like it was the sauce.
After a long silence, Erm said, “I got married.”
“I’ll be damned. When?”
“Last Thursday.” He looked around at the empty walls, tapped his shoes on the floor.
“Well . . . congratulations Erm.” Ledford nodded his head to convince himself such a move was wise for his friend.
“Yeah,” Erm said. “She’s got a bun in the oven.”
Ledford raised his eyebrows. “Congratulations again.”
“A toast to married life,” Erm said. They drank again, and Ledford was about to ask what her name was when Erm hopped out of his chair and said, “I gotta hit the road, but I’ll be coming back through real soon.”
Ledford stood. He smiled uneasy. There was something in Erm’s demeanor, something that said he was running from trouble. Ledford would not protest the abrupt departure. It was the way things were for Erminio Bacigalupo. Always, he was running. Don Staples had been talking to Ledford about such movement through life. Away from things. Toward them.
“Listen,” Erm said. He was making sure his shirt cuffs stuck out beyond his jacket. “I got something I need you to hold on to for me.” He pulled a fat-stuffed leather envelope from his inside pocket. “Just make sure it stays where nobody gets their hands on it.” He held it out, but Ledford didn’t reach. “It isn’t a bag of dogshit Ledford. It’s dough. And a book.”
Ledford laughed and took it. Rubbed his thumb across the gold snap button holding it shut. “I got a safe spot in the basement at home.”
“Good. And for your trouble, we’ll wipe your paysheet clean. Get you out of my left column, back on the right.” Erm winked. Then he leaned forward. “But listen,” he said. “If I don’t make it back from Baltimore, you see that money gets to my old lady.”
An alarm sounded from the factory floor. Erm stuck his fingers in his ears. “Some job you got here,” he hollered.
“It’s just a backup on the flow line,” Ledford hollered back. He looked at the half-full gin bottle, wondered if his friend would be leaving it behind.
“Whatever you say.” Erm licked his pointer and pinky fingers, then smoothed his eyebrows. “For Ernestine on the way out,” he said. He turned, was gone, then stuck his head back in the office. He yelled, “I’ll be back in a week or two.”
The alarm shut down, and from outside his door, Ledford could hear the low murmur of Erm’s voice, then Ernestine’s giggle. The leather envelope in his hand was squared off, worn at the corners by whatever it held. It was smooth cowhide, a deep brown. Ledford wondered why Erm might not make it out of Baltimore alive. He wondered how much money was in his hands. He put the envelope in the middle drawer of his desk. In the bottom right drawer he set the gin bottle on its side. Then he sat down and stared at the pile of paperwork before him. At home, Rachel would be nursing or napping. Mary would be playing with her great-aunt. Ledford looked at Mary’s photograph on the wall. He’d need to get one up of William.
October 1947 (#ulink_26ec3c65-8ae8-5e11-88a2-6d67846da400)
THEY WERE CALLING HIM Willy within a week. Sometimes Ledford called him Willy Amos. He slept just fine in the daylight hours, but at night he fussed and fought his swaddling. Rachel was too tired to rise every time, so Ledford took to walking the house with the boy. He sang to him and he danced with him. He stared at the boy’s eyes and how they locked on to an unknown point and stayed there regardless of swaying, all iris and pupil, black as cast iron. He had a darker tint to him than Mary. He was bigger than she’d been.
Ledford one-armed little Willy in the basement early Sunday morning. It was not yet four a.m. He pulled the lightbulb chain hanging from the rafters, and the boy squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s all right,” Ledford told him. “Just a lightbulb.”
Willy cried some, so Ledford lifted him high and sniffed directly at the seat of his diaper. It smelled only of powder. “That’s a boy,” he said. “You just stay that way until your mother rises and shines.”
He strolled the length of the basement floor, pointing to and naming the tail fan of turkey feathers, the glass scrap shaped liked diamonds, the map of the world he’d hung. He put his fingertip to the map and said, “This here green chunk is the United States of America, and right here, West Virginia, is where we live.” He slid the finger to the right. “And if you take a boat or a airplane across all this blue water, and you cross this pink Spain and over all these different colors in Africa, you get to here,” he tapped his finger against it, “to these little specks of nothing on the blue ocean, to where your daddy was for a time.” Willy’s head wobbled from his propped vantage point on Ledford’s shoulder. He liked the tapping sound of his father’s fingers on the paper map.
Ledford laughed. “All right, little one,” he said. They stared at one another for a moment, and Ledford kissed him on the forehead. Then he looked back to the map.
He took a deep breath and told his boy that he’d not ever have to go to the little specks on the ocean, nor any other place like them. He put his hand on the boy’s chest, his fingers nearly wrapping around the girth of him, and he said, “I will protect you from all of it, William Amos.”
When the boy fell asleep, Ledford set him on a cushioned desk chair from the old house. He began unpacking the last of the boxes. Attic Junk it read on the side. In the box, an old black album of photographs popped and cracked when he opened it. With each turned page, it shed little black corner frames. Ledford gathered them as they fell. The photographs themselves were lined and chipped with age. They were not in the order they’d been intended. Their look made them his daddy’s people, the Ledfords of Mingo, mostly tall and thin. Unsmiling faces and cheekbones that cast shadows. There were dates in faded pencil on the backs of some. Names like Oliver and Homer and Eliza and Wilhelmina. In one photograph, Ledford’s daddy swung on a rope hung from a tree limb. He looked to be about six, his T-shirt dirty, loose around the neck. His head a blur of black hair and bared teeth.
Ledford picked up the other album. There wasn’t much inside. Four pages filled out of twenty. An old woman who looked to be part Indian sat in a rocking chair and smoked a clay pipe. There was no name or date on the back. A baby picture of a child with eyes big and dark like his own children. On the back, somebody had written Bonecutter.
He picked up another book, leatherbound. It was small but thick, the size of a good Bible. It was his daddy’s batch book from the early days at Mann Glass. Pages were organized by color. White Batch and Opal and Best Opal and Shade Batch White. There were penciled-in measurements of hundreds of pounds of sand and soda. Lead and arsenic. Ounces counted for borax and manganese. Bones. Bill Ledford had figured out how to make a transparent green by adding copper scabs. Every shade of green may be obtained, he wrote.
In the back pages, the batch book became an account of disparate times in his life. Bill Ledford had written in it almost daily, it seemed, from the years 1916 to 1925. There were passages about his days playing ball in the Blue Ridge League for the Martinsburg Blue Sox.
Lefty Jamison threw at my head today on account of me running off at the mouth last night when the likker oiled me up. I believe I had poked at his stomack to show how fat it was, and I may have called him a bench blanket.
The baby shifted and grunted on the seat cushion. Ledford eyed him a minute and knew he wasn’t long for sleep. He flipped fast through the journal’s pages, looking for something. In all those years alone in his house, he’d never been able to look. He’d feared doing so would make everything worse than it already was. But Ledford was the father now, and fear had been replaced by the single-minded need to keep his wife and children above ground. He’d protect them all.
On the next-to-last page the handwriting was easier to read, as if written slow. It read,
January 12, 1924, I am twenty-six today. Last night I dreamed the same dream again. I can’t pick my feet up so I look down and I’ve got no feet. They are inside the ground. I fall forword and my legs bend the wrong way. A cracking sound and a feeling of my bones breaking. I’m unable to put here in words what it is, but it is bad. Then comes the roaring sound like a glass furnace and I’m holding my punty rod in one hand and my blowpipe in the other. I get to my knees and I’m all cut up as I’ve been laying on cullet. It is raining and I have to keep my eyes shut. That’s what the voice is hollering at me, not to open my eyes up. But I do, to see who’s hollering in that awful familur voice, and when I look, it is our littlest one. Loyal. Nearly two now. And he puts the fear of God in me because his mouth don’t open when he talks and his hands are afire.
Willy screamed out sudden. Ledford dropped the book back in the box and stood. The hair on his arms and neck was pricked and he couldn’t get enough saliva to swallow. He held little Willy and felt his own heart race against the child’s side, pressed to him. He could not understand what he had just read. The mind was not made to know such words as those from his daddy’s pencil. Ledford breathed deep and looked out the single-pane window. The ground there was warming, sunrise gathering in its well. He watched a dwarf spider navigate the glass and wondered why he opened the books. He’d been getting by all right as of late, drinking less on the advice of Don Staples. Dreams visited Ledford with less frequency, their horrors dulled. But what he’d read had stirred anew the unquiet. He looked at his boy, no longer screaming but not yet settled, his eyes like those in the photographs.
SEVEN-CARD STUD was the only game allowed in the home of Don Staples. Straight poker and five-card draw had no place. If a man tried to force such a variation, Staples would walk away from the table and hit the light switch on his way to bed. The group had changed over the years but had never topped five men. Its exclusivity was born in the idea that those light on brains and nickels, while always welcome in Staples’ office or home, were not permitted to pull a chair to his round-top mahogany card table. In the fall of 1947, the group was down to three: Don, his younger brother, Bob, and Ledford. An exception to custom was made on the final Friday of October, Halloween night, when Ledford phoned ahead that Erminio Bacigalupo was passing through on his way back from Baltimore, and that he was a fine poker man. Staples said bring him.
Before they left the house, Rachel spoke very little to Erm. She had always mistrusted him, though not as much since her wedding night, when he’d told her, “Ledford is the brother I never had, and I’d take a bullet for him.” Still, when he was under her roof, she watched him, close.
In the basement, Ledford pulled Erm’s leather envelope from under the swastika quilt in the trunk. Erm opened it and pulled a hundreddollar bill from the stack. “For your trouble,” he said. “And if you want to double it, look at the over-under on Maryland tomorrow. Now let’s go play some poker.”
Staples’ house was small, dark inside. From the record player in the corner, Louis Armstrong’s “Big Butter and Egg Man” played. The acorn ceiling fixture gathered smoke from below.
Each of the card table’s four legs carried an ashtray. The men sat slouched over their elbows. They eyeballed the cards face up on the table and lifted the corner of those faced down. Ledford folded after Fifth Street, Bob after Sixth. Erm dealt in a manner bespeaking experience. The cards flipped from his finger and thumb and turned a singular revolution before landing flat. He was showing a pair of Jacks. Staples, a pair of sevens.
“Check,” Staples said. He tossed in a nickel, and down came Seventh Street. They showed their five and Erm took the pot, again.
Bob shook his head. He was ten years younger than Don, yet everything about them seemed identical—voice, movements, eyes, laugh. Bob was a less-wrinkled, clean-shaven version of his brother. He scooted his chair back. “I gotta hit the head,” he said.
“Magnifying glass is in the top bureau drawer,” Don said.
Erm laughed and raked in his dollar seventy-five.
Staples packed his pipe and lit it. “Ledford tells me you’ve recently married.”
“That’s right.” Erm’s nod was loose on the hinges, and his eyes were shrinking fast. “She’s a looker, but she’s goofy up top, you know?” He tapped his temple with a finger.
Staples laughed. “I know,” he said. “Ain’t we all?”
The clock on the wall read ten past midnight. They’d been playing for three hours. Ledford looked from the clock to his quarter-full rocks glass. He’d gone as easy as he could, but it was harder with Erm around.
The cornet sang a sad tune from the corner.
Bob sat back down and sighed. “I’m about busted,” he said. He’d checked his pocket watch every ten minutes for an hour. Bob was a trial lawyer with a wife and three kids and his eye on public office. And though he’d gotten on fine with Erm that evening, he’d just as soon not know him past midnight. Like his big brother, Bob was a man of God, though he’d not taken the philosopher’s path to knowing him, and he’d not wrecked his marriage and children along the way. He loved Don dearly, but he’d not gone overseas like his older brother. He’d never understood the demons.
“Looks like you can ante and stick for a few rounds.” Erm pointed to the little pile of nickels in front of Bob.
Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. He breathed in deep through his nose. “I reckon I could play one more.”
“Big Bob,” Erm said. “Big Bob, Big Butter and Egg Man.”
“Like the song says.” Staples stole a look at Ledford. They’d spent a little time in the office talking on Erm.
It was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that comes when a record has stopped playing and one man is drunker than the rest.
Bob shuffled the deck slow. Erm declined to cut. He poured another whiskey and sat back in his chair. “Ledford tells me you’re a scholar and a man of the cloth.”
Staples smiled easy. “I’ve lived in both worlds. Even tried to mix the two.”
“Flammable is it?” Erm studied Bob’s dealing motion, a habit of the suspicious.
“It can combust, if that’s what you mean,” Staples said.
“I don’t know what I mean half the time.” Erm laughed. It was loud. “But if somebody had told me I’d be at a Virginia poker table with a preacher, a lawyer, and an office jockey, I’d have told him to climb up his fuckin thumb.”
“You’re in West Virginia Erm,” Ledford said. He peeked at his down cards.
“That’s what I said.”
“You said Virginia.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
The Staples brothers looked at each other the way they always had when a card game went south. It was quiet, each man surveying what he had.
“Potato, potahto,” Erm said. Then, “Shit or get off the pot, Preach. We got to go church in the morning.”
“I fold,” Staples said. His chair whined when he leaned back in it.
Ledford raised a dime and wished he hadn’t told Erm about Willy’s baptism the next day. Truth be told, he’d wanted to ask Don or Mack to be the boy’s godfather, but one was lapsed and the other was black. Then Erm showed up, and without thinking Ledford had asked him.
Erm saw the dime and raised another. Bob folded. He dealt the rest of the hand in silence. Erm took the pot and kept his mouth shut for once.
Bob stood and stretched. He said, “Well gentlemen.”
Don stood and followed his brother to the kitchen. On the way, he asked about a case Bob was trying. “Any more on the Bonecutter dispute?”
Erm slapped his hand on the table. “Drink with me Leadfoot,” he said.
Ledford ignored him. He was tuned in to the Staples brothers. Bone-cutter, they’d said. It was the name from the back of the photograph. He got up and walked to the kitchen.
Don washed and dried his glass, his back to Bob, who leaned against the range, arms crossed. He was talking about arson.
“What was that name you used just now?” Ledford asked.
“Bonecutter,” Bob said. He yawned. “They’re a wild bunch out in Wayne County. Trouble. Had a land dispute with Maynard Coal for years, and I’ve done some work for them, pro bono. Now all hell’s broke loose.”
Bonecutter. It seemed to Ledford a name he’d known all his life.
“Well who set the fire?” Don wiped his hands with a yellow dish rag. He still wore his wedding ring, though he’d not seen his wife in fifteen years.
“Looks like the bad Maynard boy did it. He’s come up missin since.”
“That’s mass murder he committed,” Don said. His eyes were wide. He held the dish rag at his side, fisted, like he was trying to squeeze something out of it.
“What do you mean?” Ledford asked.
Bob cleared his throat. “Five people died in that fire,” he said. “It was in the paper.”
Staples just shook his head.
“Who died?” Ledford asked.
“The elders,” Bob said. “I knew them a little. Mother and Daddy B is all they’d be called. They lived in the old ways.” He shook his head just as Don had. “And their oldest girl, Tennis they called her. She was going on sixty herself. Burned in the house with them, along with her two grown children, who I didn’t really know. Men, both of em. In their thirties, I believe.”
In the other room, Erm stood up and walked to the record player. He put the needle down unsteady. “Big Butter and Egg Man” started up again.
Ledford cringed at the volume. He spoke louder. “Who’s left then?”
“The twins,” Bob said. “Dimple and Wimpy. A little younger than Tennis was, maybe fifties.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Put it back in his pocket. “They are tough to figure. Hard men. Real hard. Part Indian is what they’ll tell you, among other things. But they will look you in the eye, and they will die before they give that land over to Maynard Coal.”
Erm stepped into the open kitchen doorway. He leaned against the jamb and smiled. His glass was full again. “What time saloons close in West Virginia?”
The other three didn’t answer. Erm had walked in at the wrong time.
Staples hung the dish rag on a hook next to the sink. “Like you said, Erminio, church is bright and early.”
Erm nodded in that loose motion again. “Yes,” he said. “Church is early. Big Bill’s big day. Big-balled Big Bill’s baptism.”
Ledford laughed despite himself.
Erm continued. “Big Bill will no doubt be a big butter and egg man like his Uncle Erm.”
Staples looked at Ledford. He wished the young man hadn’t enlisted his Chicago friend as godfather. He wished he’d taught him a little more on life. There hadn’t been time yet.
Erm kept up. “Or like Big Bob over here.” He motioned with his drink hand and spilled. He tapped his foot in time with the piano keys from the other room. “You got the kind of money that folds, don’t you Bob?” Erm laughed, said he was only fooling. Then he looked directly at Don and said, “Where you get this music anyway?”
“Louisiana,” Don said.
“Louisiana?” Erm said the word as if he’d never heard it before.
“Louisiana,” Don repeated. “This is Louis Armstrong, the finest musician we have today.”
Erm turned to Ledford. “Leww-weeeez-eee-anna,” he said. “Ain’t that where Sinus came from?”
“Can it Erm,” Ledford said.
“Ooooo, yes sir.” Erm had straightened at the command, pried his eyes alert. He smiled at the Staples brothers. Then he paused and said, “Armstrong’s dark meat, isn’t he?”
Nobody answered him. Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. Both he and Don straightened from their lean-tos. They’d not been talked to in this way by a younger man before.
Erm wore a look of contentment. He said, “Ledford rents his house to dark meat,” and looked from one to the next, fishing for a response.
Ledford started to speak, but Don cut him off. “Erm—can I call you Erm?”
Erm’s grin spread one-sided and he nodded yes.
“Your friend Ledford rents the home he grew up in to Mr. Wells because the federal government doesn’t see fit to help out a Negro GI the way they might have helped me out, or the way they’ve helped you out, Erm. You follow?”
Erm didn’t move a muscle.
“Well, see if you can follow this,” Staples said. “You noted earlier that I’m both a man of scholarship and a man of God. An astute observation on your part. And do you know what I’ve come to learn from both? What is more clear to me now than ever?” He did not wait for an answer. “That the poor, most especially the Negro poor, have suffered long enough, and that we are at a crossroads, right now, at this moment. And if we do not right our wrongs against them, a mighty eruption will come.” He started to continue, but didn’t. Instead, he stared down the young Chicagoan, whom he suspected of carrying a pistol in his sock. He asked him again, “You follow?”
Erm stared back and let his grin spread both ways. “I follow,” he said.
“Good,” Staples said.
His brother let out a held breath. Ledford did the same.
Staples pulled the dish towel from its hook and threw it across the kitchen. Erm caught it with his free hand. “Now,” Staples said, “clean up the shit you spilled on my linoleum.”
On the drive home, Erm passed out in the Packard. Before going inside, Ledford took off his overcoat and spread it across his friend. He left him there.
On his knees in front of the box labeled Attic Junk, Ledford picked up his father’s batch book again. He’d not done so since reading of the dream, but now he scanned the pages for one word, Bonecutter. He soon found it.
June 5TH. Old man Bonecutter showed up at the door agin today. I will not do what he asks. I wanted to tell him it is his fault nobody will come out to Wayne and re-settle. He run them all off just like he did my mother. I will not leave the city of Huntington to return to the old ways. Something is not right out there.
Ledford read it three more times. He tried to remember his father as a man who might write such things, but nothing came.
He shut the book and put it under the quilt in the old trunk. It was a perfect fit inside the square where his Ten High used to be. As he closed the trunk’s lid, he wondered if Erm kept his Purple Heart under a stack somewhere. He wondered why the two of them didn’t keep in touch with anybody else from B Company. Why they’d never go to the VFW, or see about a First Marines reunion.
He supposed it had something to do with memory.
Ledford went to bed. Morning would get here quick, and Willy was to be baptized in front of the eyes of the church. He would have two Godparents. His Great-aunt Edna, a retired schoolteacher, and his Uncle Erm, a drunken criminal.
November 1947 (#ulink_5397d15f-2074-5d2e-9fed-426a181147a6)
IT HAD TAKEN TWO months for someone to burn a cross in the front yard of Mack Wells and his family. At five in the morning, he was pouring a bucket of water on the last cinders when Lizzie asked him, “Why did they wait so long to do it?” She pulled the lapels of her robe tight across her chest. She wore Mack’s work boots on her feet, unlaced. In the yard, he was barefoot. He hadn’t answered her question. “You’ll catch your death out there Mack,” Lizzie told him. “No shoes on your feet.”
“The ground is warm,” he said. He stared down at it, watched an ember die. Tucked into the cinched waistline of his bluejeans was an Army-issue .45.
It occurred to Lizzie that whoever had done it might still be watching them, under the cover of early-morning dark. But the street was quiet. Only the bakery was awake, its assembly line humming, its slicers cutting loaves.
Mack looked around too. He had a mind to draw his pistol and fire at the first sign of movement. There wasn’t any. He looked back at his house. In the upstairs window, Harold pressed his forehead on the pane. The hall bulb behind him flickered. He knew what had happened. He’d awakened just as his parents had, confused by the dancing light from outside. “Stay inside,” was all Mack had said to the boy.
Lizzie shivered on the porch. Her breath turned to condensation on the air. “Mack?” she said.
Again he did not answer her. He stared up at his son’s silhouette until his vision blurred. “We’d better telephone Ledford,” he said.
AT MIDNIGHT ON the eve of Thanksgiving, Rachel sat down on the love seat for the first time that day. She’d been on her feet for sixteen hours. Willy was finally down and Mary could be counted on to sleep through the night. The stuffing was made and the half-runners strung. Rachel looked at her watch. She stretched for the radio dial. The tuner spun loose and she couldn’t pick up a signal. There was a hole in the grille cloth where Mary had punched the leg of a baby doll through. Rachel stuck her finger inside and for a moment wondered if she might be electrocuted.
She looked at the telephone, thought about how it had rung so early the morning prior. How it had awakened the baby. How Ledford had grabbed it and put his feet on the floor hard and said, “When?” What they’d all known might visit the Wells family had visited them in the form of a fiery cross. The West End was white, and Ledford had changed that.
Now the Wells family was joining them for Thanksgiving dinner, at Ledford’s request. Don Staples too. Rachel rubbed her temples and counted silently to herself, wagering that the telephone would ring again in twenty seconds. She got to sixty. Then one hundred. Ledford had gone for chewing tobacco at eight. “Right back,” he’d said, like always. And, like always, he’d stayed gone.
She reached down beside the love seat and grabbed her knitting bag. It had been her mother’s before her. From it she pulled her latest work, a half-finished sweater that would fit Willy next winter season. It was blood red and hooded with brown toggle buttons. She picked up the straight needles that had been in the family for two generations. Her pointer fingers found the taper. These were not metal needles, like so many. Nor were they wood. They were walrus tusk, brought back from Alaska by her great-grandfather, a fisherman.
Rachel’s hands bony and worn. Her nails were chipped and her fingertips dotted with tiny cuts. She pulled the yarn’s tail and looped, and soon found herself in a void of mechanical movement, orchestrating in her mind the tiny, scraping sound of the bone needles. She hummed, in time with the scraping, “Amazing Grace.” Always, it was “Amazing Grace.”
Downtown, on Fourth Avenue, Ledford was stride for stride with Staples. Their fedoras were pulled low and their coat lapels high. It was dark, save the headlights of a passing car or the office lights above the storefronts. The Keith-Albee and the Orpheum were both running late pictures. A woman in a purple pillbox hat locked the ticket booth and walked west. Ledford thought he recognized her. He’d taken Rachel to see Crossfire the week before. Afterwards, they’d run into Mack and Lizzie, as they filed down from the balcony with the rest of the black patrons.
They walked up Tenth Street, past the darkened doors of Chief Logan’s Tavern. On the sidewalk, there was a splatter of vomit in the shape of a daisy. They stepped around it.
The two walked fast and spoke to one another about the books Staples loaned him. The American Indian was up for discussion. Ledford had not known such thought and conversation possible until meeting Don, and ever since, it seemed to him that his mind was expanding faster than it had in all the years prior, combined. They’d had conversations, like this one, that lasted five or six hours. Don had waxed knowingly on the laws of the Confederacy of the Iroquois. He spoke of the Indian League of Nations and their General Council’s democratic ideals. He liked to say that nothing was new, that we spent our days committing the mistakes of those who came before us because we forgot to remember them. He liked to say, “America will grab hold of the scientist’s lab coat, and they will hold on for dear life as he rockets us straight to Hades.”
On this cold night, he answered Ledford’s question on work. On deeds. Staples said, “Look here. ‘Thou art the doer, I am the instrument.’ And this is real important for you, Ledford, because you’re the type that needs to keep himself busy.” The tip of his nose was red from the chill, and there was pipe ash caught in his beard. “Now, busy like a businessman isn’t going to cut it. Nossir. You’ve got to be busy like a bee, in the ser vice of something besides I. See what I mean?” He grabbed Ledford by the coat sleeve and kept walking. “You will only beat back what’s chasing you if you forget about yourself. You work for your family, for your God, for those around you that need it most. Never for yourself.” He put his hands back in his pockets. “Should’ve worn my gloves,” he said.
Ledford flicked the cherry off his cigarette one-handed and stuck the butt in his pocket. “But what if the work a man does isn’t real?”
“How’s that?”
“Office work,” Ledford said. “I’m not workin for anybody but those whose pockets is already lined, as far as I can figure.”
“Then quit,” Staples answered. “You don’t strike me as the type to fall in with the scotch-and-bridge crowd, Ledford. Get out while you can.” They were coming up on Fifth Avenue, Rachel’s Episcopal church. “Let’s double back on Sixth,” Staples said.
The younger man had questions. “Were you ever—”
Staples had stopped walking.
Ledford turned back to him. Staples was squint-eyed and studying the church. Ledford looked there and saw, huddled against the double doors, the outline of a man.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Staples said. He ascended the staircase. Ledford followed. The man’s hand protruded from his shirtsleeve at a peculiar angle, pale and knuckled against the concrete. His neck bent hard against the door, and his winter coat lay beside him in a heap. “That’s a dead man,” Staples said as they got within five feet.
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