Old Powder Man (24 page)

“Then she just don't have the stuff,” Carter said. “Will's at the river. Trying to figure how to bring in the barge with the Caterpillar.”

“I better get down there and see him then,” Son said and left the commissary pleased: Caterpillars were the first good dirt haulers to come along, were strong, had a good motor; but they were expensive and had to be acquired slowly. The old mule system had almost disappeared; now the skinners drove tractors; work was getting ahead faster than he had ever dreamed it could. He crossed the last expanse between river and levee, seeing a crowd ahead, Will among them, his hair shiny as ice frozen hard by a winter's sun; he turned as Son came up. “I been looking for you,” he said, shaking hands. “Frank, I'm sure in a mess. That barge can't land here with those willows growing right down in the water like they are. Can you blow them out?”

“I can sure try,” Son said. Tangle-eye came close; he and Son studied the job. In an hour Son asked Tangle-eye to bring hip boots from his car, to get his own. Another Negro in a wagon would bring dynamite from the storage house. “Ditching dynamite, boy,” Son said. “Can you read?”

“Yes suh, I can read some,” the boy said.

“Well don't come back here with nothing but what says d-i-t-c-h-i-n-g on the box, you hear?”

“Yes suh.” Raising the reins, the boy said, “Giddap,” and was gone.

Water would give the blast an extra lift; he needed quick acting, fast shooting, sensitive dynamite. “You boys rustle me up some sticks,” he said and Negroes went up and down the bank, looking. When Tangle-eye came back, he and Son waded into the water; with the biggest, stoutest stick, Son poked: found the bottom and tamped and tamped again; the depth to put the dynamite depended on the bottom's firmness; he had learned not to use this underwater method in sand. There were four ways he could place the dynamite. He chose a combination of two: studied the pattern of the trees and the river's flow. Water was swirling about his waist now. At least a cubic yard of material would be thrown out with each pound of ditching dynamite. The problem was not to have it all fall back and block up the landing as much as the trees had to start. It's got to all float down that river, he thought. A certain yardage of material, loosened, surrounding what he blasted, would have to wash away too; there was enough flow, volume to the river to wash it. If I shoot it right, he thought. Negroes were breaking open the boxes of dynamite. He had marked off an area twenty-five feet long for a test shot. He had decided on a line of loads spaced at equal intervals along a center line, with perpendicular cross rows located at every other hole. He notched a stick to measure each charge to the same depth in each hole; with the same notched stick he would space the holes uniformly; they had to be at an angle, not vertical. Gathering sticks from the Negroes he waded into the water and stuck them at intervals along the center line and loaded cartridges into the holes one above the other. He had to think about the depth to the top of the charge and the distances between and the number of pounds of dynamite every hundred feet. He cut off three feet of fuse, set it against the cap charge lightly, and crimped it with his teeth. Tangle-eye, having cut open a stick of dynamite, shook black powder into his hand, tossed it into his mouth and swallowed. Son said, “Tangle-eye, what in the name of Sam Hill are you doing?”

“I always eats me some powder, Boss,” Tangle-eye said. “It keeps you from getting that headache.”

For a moment, Son thought it might be worth trying. Then he said, “You better make tracks out of here,” lit his cigarette and touched it to the fuse. It always seemed a second, yet he had climbed the river bank and walked fast across the clearing beyond, toward the levee, where the others waited, when the blast came. A hundred and fifty feet high a screen of water, mud, muck rose after the one great muffled-sounding roar that had set off, through concussion, all the charges in the line. It was a system he had devised himself; and he was proud of that. Everything that had risen fell again, the sound against earth like a hard hail storm, in the river, splashes; then it was quiet. People had hushed watching, birds had flown, mules, grabbing a chance to rest, stood still. Slowly everyone went toward the river, stood on the bank and looked at the gap in the trees, at the river itself, that a few minutes before had sprayed higher in the air than any of them standing there looking at it had ever been; wider across than any of them could swim, opaque, calm, muddy, old, the river had restored itself already to its steady and silent flow, the way a bug, momentarily deterred by a straw thrust before it, goes on again as immediately as the straw is removed, in the direction it had always been going. Only now the river carried with it the debris they wanted it to.

He repeated, lined up the sticks, and Tangle-eye followed making holes, filling them with dynamite. With one main blast the trees were cleared as Will wanted; the screen of water and debris rose, five hundred feet in length, leaving no spoil bank, nothing to be cleared up afterward. In his wet clothes, Son stood looking at the cleared place where eventually the barge would land; every job, he thought, was exciting, big and little; you never knew just exactly whether it was going to work or not. When it did, you alone had done it; it made a man feel proud to have done something he set out to do. Now why couldn't he shoot in a field under water? He bet himself he could make a ditch just as purty and straight as a dragline could do.

“Mister Boss, could we have us those empty dynamite boxes?”

“Sure,” he said to the Negro women who asked. “You going to split you up some kindling?”

“Naw sir, we uses them as tables and stools in the tents.” The women went away carrying the boxes. Son and Will followed them to camp. It was pay day and they had to push through a crowd of Negroes to enter the commissary. Carter sat behind a table full of pay envelopes, a forty-five prominently displayed; Will told Son they had it there always, to avoid lip-trouble as well as any other kind. Rent was fifty cents a week for a single tent, a dollar for a family's; most of the Negroes borrowed money to live on during shut-down time, mid-December to the end of January; what they owed was taken out of their pay a little each week. Son wondered if they had anything left. Will said, “They'll all be here at the beginning of the week to borrow some more. They like owing you money, you know. It makes a Negro feel he's got the best of you. If they run off owing you money, they really think they're even then.”

As soon as the men got their pay, the women were waiting to spend it. They bought groceries, needed things, and as many luxuries as they could. Martha seemed to be trying to wait on everyone at once. Wine at a dollar a gallon went quickly. She glanced up once and said to Son, “Tell those boys not to drink up all that wine out there on my porch.” Son repeated the message and the one passing the jug laughed. “Come on here, Sweet Thing,” he said. The couple started away but Son saw Sweet Thing, and several other women stop, lift their skirts, and deposit money in the flat stomach pouches they wore suspended from a string about their waists. The women were in their brightest clothes and smelled of perfumes too enthusiastically imitating gardenias or violets. Couples headed out of camp in old wagons and cars; some walked the levee route, as in the old days, when the river bank was the shortest way anywhere, a place of meeting and one of promenade.

When Son went back inside, Martha, waiting on a middle-aged woman, said, “Sis Woman, don't go spending all your California money on the conjure woman again this week.”

“No'm, I'm just going to try one more bottle of pills,” Sis Woman said.

“I'm telling you there's not any pills going to get Tangle-eye to marry you,” Martha said; she looked at Son. “Sis Woman's been trying to save enough money to visit her family in California as long as I can remember and keeps spending it on foolishness every week.”

“No'm, this the last time, Old Miss,” Sis Woman said, going out. When the commissary emptied, Martha told Son to walk down to the dining tent with her; from there he could see the conjure woman. In the middle of the Negro section a large black Packard was parked. Beside it stood a Negro man in chauffeur's cap and whipcord leggings. In the back seat a woman sat, barely high enough for Son to see; she was a light-skinned and freckled Negro, with cheeks naturally pink, and a nose more like an Indian's; she wore a purple turban and a gold rope twisted about her neck, higher and higher, ending in a snake's head with ruby-seeming eyes. Negroes were crowded about the car. Martha said they came to tell her their troubles; she sold them cures: charms to tie around a sick baby's stomach and make it well, pills to bring back a lover, little sacks of herbs, tiny pieces of wood nailed into strange shapes. Her specialty the Negroes called aspidistry bags: a small leather pouch of herbs to wear nestled against the throat hollow to keep away disease; and the conjure woman sold almanacs.

The day had promised rain and now there was a phosphorescent yellow-green glow to everything; mimosa trees shook as the wind rose, smelling of cool and dust. As Martha and Son went in to supper lightning blinked twice, the wind changed, and the rain came closer. “Huh,” Emmie said; they stopped at the kitchen door. “That's the Lord for sho. You see yonder, Miss Martha. He sees Rosalita.” Son had already asked about the line of men reaching half across the Negro camp; Rosalita, Martha said, was half-Spanish; every year she came back to live in camp with someone different; but on pay night she ran her own little business: twenty-five cents for a man to enter her tent.

Son said, “Emmie, who you fixing to shoot?”

“Anybody tries to steal from me, Mister Frank,” she said. She told of her own pay night business; she sold homemade ice cream and sandwiches. On top of the freezer, Emmie had a revolver and now covered it with a clean dish towel. At supper, Martha said Emmie would shoot it too. From her business she collected at least a hundred dollars every week in small change, brought it to Will in a galvanized pail. He took it to the bank for her and exchanged it, at her insistence, for a hundred-dollar bill. She hid her money, trusted the revolver more than the bank, Martha said. Son liked these levee Negroes who worked and saved their money. Going out of the dining tent, he stopped and said to Emmie, “I'd like to hep you out selling them sandwiches. Wrap me up some.”

Carrying them, going up the path to his tent, he could hear the Negroes laughing, calling among themselves, could hear their music, half-wailed and all about love: good or bad, true or false, jealous lovers, unfaithful women, hard times, the singer thought in the end to have had his baby at all was worth it. Son fell asleep listening to the singing and woke once to hear it raining hard.

Morning was not clear. If it rained again, he thought, he'd never get that little buggy of his out of camp. Having packed his grip, he went out. Carter called from the commissary: everyone had eaten and gone to the levee; tractor turned up a body. An old skeleton, Son thought. The levee had long been a place where Negroes and whites hid crimes: in the old days, Son knew, bodies were shovelled under twenty-five yards of dirt and never even reported.

At the levee, he made his way through the Negroes and unexpectedly saw the Negro, killed the night before. “Arkansas toothpick done that all right,” Will said as Son came up. With a switchblade knife, the boy's throat had been slit from side to side. Above the terrible fresh wound was an old one, a necklace of healed cuts, raised bumps linked into one another like a chain. The sight made Son sick; to his surprise so did the thought of murder. All that singing going on while the boy was killed, buried alone out here in the rain and dark. Will was calm, steady before the Negroes; there was no time for grief. “Get back to work,” he said. Son stuck trembling hands in his pockets; there was nowhere to look except at the body being stretched out on Skinner's tractor, at Greaser covering it with two crocker sacks. “Get back to work,” Will said. Skinner turned the tractor toward camp; Cotton hopped on, would call the law. As terrible as the boy looked, Son, the others looked at him again. Tied to one exposed ankle was his dobie bag, a religious good luck medal; it hadn't done that boy much good, Son thought, but saw several of the other Negroes touch their own.

The familiar activity started; the tractors droned, the Negroes shouted, laughed; dirt was dug, hauled, dumped. Son walked to where Will stood giving directions. They shook hands, made a date for Son to come again and to play bridge in Delton soon with Martha and Kate. “Hope everything works out all right,” he said.

Will said, “Formality. The law don't care what happens out here as long as my Negroes behave in town.”

“I'll be seeing you then,” Son said. He could not eat breakfast and went to his tent. As he started up the steps something moved beneath his foot; he jumped back as a moccasin slithered into the grass, dark beneath the tent. Inside he sat down still shaky, still feeling sick, told himself to laugh instead. He remembered Will saying you couldn't show fear of Negroes. Out here you couldn't show fear of anything. Kate was all the time saying he thought it was smart to be tough. You had to be, like everybody, to get along. He'd found that out in a hurry. Carrying his grip, he went to the car and drove away as rain began, fought that car out of camp, slipping in the muddy ruts, and laughed telling himself, if the snake had a bit him, if he had swole up and died, another dynamite peddler would have come along, same as on the levee they went on without that boy; he heard the tractors in the distance. You had to keep ahead. And it seemed there was always something following him.

That night he slept desperately. But all night Kate kept getting up, saying the baby was coughing. He said the baby would be there in the morning; didn't she understand about a man's rest? She kept on until he finally got up and tried to shut her mouth; he fell back to bed and she was still talking about him being the meanest man she'd ever seen; why did he come home? In the morning he asked why she had had the whisky out. She said a drink helped her to sleep. He said she better leave that stuff alone.