Old Powder Man (28 page)

As bad as things had been when the water was high, he heard they were worse when it lowered and the thaw came. People, going back to the floodway after three weeks, drove ahead cattle through mud that reached the animals' chests. Some people had nothing to return to and went elsewhere, bitter. Everyone was bitter. He heard from the Colonel men hung around the levee road for days before they would believe the dynamite man was gone. They swore he better never show up around there again and Son knew he never would. The Colonel said he had gone to see the old man once. Several of the gravestones had been knocked down, broken and chipped, but the old man had repaired them; despite his family's protests, he was on the roof hammering and nailing, patching and painting; from there he could see the levee and on brightest days a sparkle, faint and quick, brief as a mirror's flash. It was the blew hole where the greatest force of the blast had come, through which the water had first rushed. It was great and round and deep. Water never left it.

At first, no one went near. Then little boys and Negroes crept there. Old people went next who usually held their grudges but the spring and summer days were long and there was little to do. Word spread. Finally everyone went except Samuel; he never did, never had cared about fishing anyway and the blew hole had the finest fishing anywhere. Always would, Son said.

The next week he was sent a copy of a St. Louis paper, the blast featured in the Sunday supplement, a reporter having taken pictures from a plane.
Life
Magazine had a picture as he was about to set off the blast, a picture of the blast itself, Son a tiny figure in the foreground walking away. It tickled him to death, even if you couldn't tell who he was.

He received a business-like letter from the head of Illinois telling him the company was proud. He was proud of that. He showed the letter to Holston saying, “That's some berries, ain't it?” While Holston read, he opened another company letter that had come in the same mail. From the first sentence he began to laugh. The letter was an enraged personal scrawl from the head of the company calling him every name in the world for a fool. On and on the man wrote about how the company tried to promote safety with explosives; then their own representative appears in a national magazine about to light his fuse, a cigarette dangling in his mouth. Suppose he had blown off a hand, fingers, his head? Did he use it to light the fuse too!

Tears ran down Son's face. With a yelp, he finally stopped laughing. He carried the letter around for weeks, showed it to everyone, then framed it. He had never thought of lighting a fuse any other way since the golf course job. But when you came down to it, he had to admit, he was the only bird he knew of who fooled with explosives as much as he did who hadn't lost at least a thumb.

That spring Joe and Cecilia moved down in Mississippi; another baby was expected and Joe felt the money would stretch farther in the country. That spring water stood over fields everywhere. Waking one morning, Son knew it was the exact time to start out promoting what he had thought about so long: ditch digging with dynamite. A selling point now was how long it would be before the ground was dry enough for a dragline to make one. After a struggle, he wrote an ad.
FARM DITCHING:
Dynamite was the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to make a drainage ditch. No spoil banks, nothing to clear away afterward. Frank Wynn would furnish supplies and do the blasting. Call day or night. He gave his home and office numbers. Afterward he told Laurel what they said about advertising was true: it paid. His telephone rang day and night. Having set up a week's itinerary, he got up at six o'clock the next Monday morning. Over and over he had to yell before he got Kate up to fix his breakfast and had to hear about it all the time she was cooking, until he set out with his juices churning. It was the same every Monday morning, he thought, as Laurel, awakened, thought too. He drove for miles, smoked half a dozen cigarettes before he could calm himself down, thinking of Kate's last words. He didn't show any interest in the world in her or Laurel, cared only about his business. What was he working himself to death for? he said.

She said, Because he liked to work.

He hit the Delta highway and forgot, thinking of it as his highway, would bet he could drive it blindfolded, he had driven it plenty. This week the other side of his business opened up; this week he began to teach the state of Mississippi everything there was in the world to know about dynamiting ditches. Farmers provided Negroes to carry boxes and Son taught them to punch holes and string fuses; but few wanted to stay around when he started handling the dynamite itself. He met one Negro not afraid and so interested, he told him to come on up to Delton, he'd teach him the whole business. All week he waded out of one field and into another, stayed over the week-end to shoot thirty miles of ditches on one man's plantation. He was as proud of that thirty miles as anything he had ever done and though he was about as tired afterward as he had ever been, he went on that Saturday night to see May. All these years, whenever he was in her part of the Delta he had seen May; she never had married. Then on Sunday night he checked into a hotel in Clarksdale. The first person he saw in the lobby was old man Woods' oldest son, Eddie. As far as he was concerned, he never had had any quarrel with Eddie, had eaten alone all week and would not mind some company. Would Eddie ride the train with him and eat? Hesitating less than a minute, Eddie said he would. His little boy, eight years old, was with him and he was expecting two dragline operators and left word he would be in Son's room. Having drinks, Son said, “Whew! This feels like the first time I've set down in a week.”

Eddie looked into his glass and over at his boy playing with dice Son had given him, then said, “Dynamite, I'm going to tell you something you'll know soon anyway. We're pulling out selling powder. Just going to sell equipment from here on out.”

He looked up to see if Son was going to ask why, saw he was not: he knew. Eddie had to grin himself watching Son's spread. Meeting him in the lobby he had noticed Son's eyes pale with tiredness; now they gleamed like a cat's. Dynamite was a rough, coarse son-of-a-bitch sometimes, Eddie thought, but you couldn't help liking him. He thought how he and Bull had started out in their old man's business; Dynamite, he understood, hadn't had a plug nickel. Another time Bull might beat him in a fight. It was the stuff inside driving Dynamite you couldn't beat. He had run them out fair and square. Eddie admired him for it.

Two down, two to go, Son thought. Raising his eyebrows, he had said, “Sho nuff? Well, we got to ride the train on that,” thinking, Two down, two to go. Michigan was pulling out, American had not put in another man when he left, only the big boys were left.

Eddie's friends came bringing a bottle and wanted to shoot craps. The men pitched in change and bought the dice back from Eddie's little boy. The game went smoothly until one of Eddie's friends accused the other of cheating. Picking him up by the collar, he stood the man on his feet saying they were going to fight. The man denied cheating, said he wouldn't fight, didn't like to, and didn't know how. Eddie and Son did not think he had cheated. Still the first man insisted on fighting and the second insisted he could not.

Standing, Son said, “Hell, I'll fight him for you.”

No one believed he would until he took off his shirt and started. All around the room they went, overturning furniture, broke a lamp. Once a porter opened the door and hastily closed it. Exhausted, they quit: stood opposite one another cursing, breathing heavily, and shortly started again; repeated the whole process several times, fought, rested, started again. “Just like two roosters,” Eddie said.

Son sent the man sprawling across the bed, breaking the springs; slats clattered to the floor. The little boy, clambering to the headboard, braced himself, and continued to watch until they quit. Washed, dressed, Son said, “You've fought a lot before.”

“I didn't get this nose drinking buttermilk,” the man said.

There were no hard feelings; they would go down and eat. The elevator boy, having heard from the porter, cast a wary eye sliding open the door. But he reported later the two who had been fighting went down peaceful to the dining room late at night followed by a little boy, not at all sleepy, jingling a pocketful of change.

The story reached Delton a week before Son. It was the wide-eyed little boy, running into his house, who told it first. All over town, having heard, men said it was just like him. Kate thought, it was all right for them to laugh; they didn't have to live with a roughneck. Buzz, Will, Winston Taylor were as nice as any people she ever wanted to know; they not only didn't act like Son, they didn't go around with the people who did. He was always saying you had to be rough. But you didn't have to be rough the way he was; he didn't understand differences. And an idea he got about her was because of Lillian. Kate told him she didn't care about joining the Country Club, knew they never could, didn't care about society people, only about nice people who knew how to do things. When she put candles on the table, he turned on the overhead lights: said he had to see what he was eating. Did he think she was trying to poison him?

She fixed fancy things, beans and almonds. Peanuts and beans! he said, made her take the dish off the table. Kate said finally the only thing there was to say, I just give up.

Others kept telling her how funny Frank was. Using his phrase, she thought, Funny as a crutch. Others said he was generous and she said generous to his customers but she could not get a penny out of him, bought her clothes often in the basements of stores. Though she would say one thing, when he bought something, he bought the best; if they went somewhere he did everything right. He had nothing to do with anything secondhand or second class; in some ways it was like his fear of the sort of food she put on the table; he had to have a lot and would eat nothing left-over. No matter how much money he made he raised the roof about bills. Out of her weekly grocery money, she managed music lessons and payments for braces for Laurel's teeth. Braces! He said it was the biggest waste of money he ever heard. But Laurel's front teeth had a space between them and Kate was determined they would not.

The morning after the fight, Son woke sore but started out into a day just begun. He drove to see Winston, arrived at his house late in the afternoon, hoped to convince him to clean out all the county's ditches, done every ten years, with dynamite. Winston, his wife, Leila, a retired doctor, Doc Barker, now a planter, were in the kitchen where Leila was making pimento cheese, grating half a hoop. She had pickled tomatoes all day; jars of them were cooling about the room. The men talked, drank, as she worked: discussed drainage ditches, the best breeding ground in the world for mosquitoes, and the Delta's need to improve ditches, to have more. Through Winston, Son had an ear to the ground around the Delta. Talking now, Son was aware of dusk creeping toward the house across the flat land, moving almost visibly across a vacant field opposite; cars passing mingled with the sudden dark, obscuring everything until they passed, and he waited for the sky to reappear. Over the Delta it seemed huge, possible to touch the stars appearing. The steamy feel of cooking, the smells of the tomatoes and cheese made him feel a boy again, back in Cally's kitchen. If he hadn't found out about peddling dynamite being a farmer in the Delta was what he would like to have been; farming was hard but the life here was easy, the people the nicest he had ever known. Having killed almost two fifths, they decided to eat. Leila got up to put the tops on the tomato jars. Son offered to help, went about the room and tightened the tops on them all. Winston telephoned a restaurant: “I'm bringing over a big dynamite man and a big planter, put me on the biggest steaks you got!” Already, Doc and Son argued over who would pay the bill.

“You all act like a bunch of kids,” Leila said as hilariously they went into the spring evening. Insect sounds that would continue until frost came shrilly from all directions. The moon, huge and bright, looked at them with a face quite cockeyed, the way they felt, and the sidewalks were wavery, white. They sped along gravel roads toward the paved one through town. Driving, Winston said, “That steamed-up kitchen give me the worse damn headache I ever had. Doc, what can I take?”

From the back seat, Doc said, “Take an aspirin.”

“I already took one,” Winston said.

“Take another,” Doc said.

“I took up all we had.”

“Hell, then swallow the bottle,” Doc said, and whooping with laughter they entered the restaurant. Unlike hill country where Baptists ruled, Sheriffs ruled in the Delta and it was possible to buy a drink. Did the Sheriff still get his two-dollar kickback on each case? Son said and Winston said at least, same as with slot machines, which were supposed to be illegal but lined the walls of every filling station and restaurant. Now across a rear wall they saw smudge marks from a row of machines recently removed. Doc said because the Grand Jury was in session; everyone locked their machines out of sight out of respect to it. “We sho better drink to the Grand Jury,” Son said.

Waiting for steaks, they had drinks, then Son ordered a second round; instead of the waitress returning, the proprietor came out, a fat Italian called Tiny, wearing a chef's hat. “I don't sell but one drink to a customer,” he said.

“Well I want another drink,” Son said.

“Just one to a customer,” he said. “I run a eating establishment, not a bar.”

“Well there's certainly not anybody going to tell me how many drinks I can have,” Son said standing, thinking, certainly not no Dago; he took his hat from beneath his chair and said, “I'm going around the corner to that little Greek joint I saw.”

As soon as he had gone, Winston said, “With that juice inside him he'll fight somebody yet that crosses him.” They were willing to pay for the steaks without eating them to follow. In the Greek restaurant only beer was sold but at least he had two when he wanted them, Son said, indicating the bottles on his table. “But for Christ's sake,” he said, holding out the menu. “Look at the stuff on this. You reckon that Greek could just rustle me up some ham and eggs?”