Old Powder Man (39 page)

He did not see how things were going to get any better and thought of the times she had said she would leave him if she hadn't known he wouldn't let two women do it without scandal and mess. She had tried to save Laurel that. He thought one midnight, Laurel was gone, let Kate go too; he could get along all right. He wrote to Cecilia and told her when she came, he had decided to get a divorce. What he thought was, he would buy a big house down there in the Delta, have only a small part, and Joe and Cecilia could have the rest if she would run it for him. Cecilia said, “Brother, Joe's managed to finish paying on that little house we have. The girls are grown and married. We're set for the first time. I can't ask Joe to give up what he's worked for so long to live in a house you buy. And what's going to happen to Kate?”

“That's what's about to worry me to death,” he said. “Now that Laurel's settled, it seems like I could stop worrying if I just knew what's going to happen to Kate if anything happens to me.”

Cecilia promised to come as often as she could. The last morning she walked through the silent orderly house where everything gleamed, was waxed, polished, dusted. Kate had made the house beautiful and seen it was kept that way; why couldn't they have been happy in it? Cecilia wondered: knew how Brother had been but knew if Kate had been different, he might have been different too.

However it ended, she prayed it was in peace, had always done so. Hearing him come slowly down the hall, she picked up her suitcase. She had said as much to Buzz once; he had said no matter what, they had stayed together and there had to be a reason for it.

Kate had opened her eyes to say Goodbye, then closed them. He passed Cecilia, went out the back door, the car keys catching the sun to gleam. Following, Cecilia stopped, turned back to the kitchen where Sarah ironed. They stared a moment, hearing the car start, sharing the same knowledge. Cecilia tried to find words then did not need them. “I'll do the best I can,” Sarah said.

“Thank you,” Cecilia said.

In the car, she said, “Brother, can't you see again if that doctor can't do something about that cough?” He was having another check-up tomorrow. He let her out, did not have breath to park and walk back to the station with her. Standing on the curb, Cecilia said, “What are you going to do now?” As long as he was dressed, he'd go on down to the office. She said again she would come back more often. Then she stood holding the suitcase he could not carry, watching him drive away.

Holston said, “Boy, I thought you'd decided to let the dynamite business go down the drain.”

He just hadn't felt like dressing and coming down. “What's been going on?” Holston threw a check for two dollars on the desk and Son laughed. “So he finally paid off?” Only Holston compared how much he had spent on post cards to the cost of the fuse. “One more,” Son said. “That doctor-fellow down in Grenada owes me for four hundred pounds. I've written him all I'm going to. I'm going to call him on the phone and get rough when I get rested.”

Mace, coming in from a trip, said Mister Will had sent word he would be home as much as possible this winter, would see Son soon. “How's the old man getting along?” Son said.

“Mrs. Carrothers finally was able to talk him into driving around the levee. He just couldn't walk from one place to another. How old is that old man?”

“Lord, past seventy,” Son said.

“Tangle-eye, Sho Nuff, the old boys are still with him,” Mace said, but there were differences. Contractors usually rented houses in the nearest towns for their help; even all the Negroes had cars and roads were good; easier to have them drive back and forth than to set up a big camp. The owner, the foremen, a few who had never lived anywhere but in a levee camp still had their tents. Even if he felt like travelling, Son thought, it wouldn't be the same. But he felt so good after talking to Mace he called the doctor in Grenada, told him what was going to happen to him if he didn't pay off. He drove home feeling better than in a long time, admitted maybe there was some truth to what Kate said, getting out and seeing folks did him some good.

When he came into the house, he said to Kate lying on the bed, “You know some of these nights I've been sitting up thinking, I was thinking that if I could get to feeling better, I wouldn't mind going over there and seeing what It-ly looks like.”

Kate said, “It's too late to go on a trip like that now and you know it.”

He stood a moment, then turned around and went out, guessed he had known it but had not been sure anyone else did. In the living room he sat down to wait for supper. The afternoon paper came and he read it. Turning on television at random, he called, “Groucho's on!” but no one answered and no one came. Tippy's toenails clicked across the kitchen floor and he whistled. Tippy came and he watched the program, occasionally rumpling the dog's ear, saying Boy, ooold boy …

After supper, he felt tired; having had more activity than usual he thought he would sleep. He watched television as long as possible, until he felt sleepy, and went to bed thinking he would sleep. Then he lay staring into the dark, wondering when.

It seemed a long time until Thanksgiving but George and Laurel came. Kissing him, Laurel thought how much smaller he seemed. Her arms went around him; she felt the larger. She spoke of it to Kate who said, “People always shrink up when they get old.”

“But he's not old. He's not even sixty.”

“Well I'll be glad when he is so he can stop talking about it,” Kate said. “It seems to worry him. He can't get over being almost sixty.”

For the few days George was there, they talked. Laurel asked about what. “Football, baseball, money, his business,” George said. “He told me about going to Cairo and having to be protected by the militia. About men with wads of small bills and change buying sticks of dynamite to blow up levees and flood other people; how he knew it but had to sell dynamite any way he could during the Depression. He just needs somebody to talk to, to listen.”

“Yes, but a man,” she said. “Mother says that's another sad thing about men having to stay home. They never see anyone but women. For so many years, he paid no attention, never talked to me, that now I don't know anything to say to him. I don't know anything he knows and vice versa.”

“He's easier to talk to than Kate,” George said. “She's got a wall a mile thick around her. I tried to talk about Frank's being an invalid, said she had to start planning the house around that.”

“He's not an invalid!”

“That's just what Kate said, in just that way.”

“Well he's not,” she said.

“He's the next thing to it, Laurel,” he said. “He will be.”

“No, he couldn't be an invalid. If he had more to think about, he might be better. And he told mother what to do all those years, she can't just start telling him.”

“She's going to have to.”

“She can't. He wouldn't let her anyway. You don't know the way it was.”

George was on the plane and she thought him still wrong, thought everything would be all right. Maybe he wouldn't get better, but he wouldn't get worse. And her baby would be a boy, to make up for her not having been. He would “toughen the little sucker up,” make him a man. She did not know how when she was in California; in her dreams, she never was. She knew of positions in southern universities she thought would be better for George; she would somehow get him to move. She had thought of coming back to Delton, then she would see again that semi-dark early morning room where the sheets smelled of whisky and were rumpled as he turned to give her the only piece of advice he ever had, about a rolling stone. Because of that she had had to stay with George. But if he came to Delton, everything would be fine.

George had said, When will you be home? and she had answered, Two weeks, knowing that when the time was up she would extend it.

Regularly now he went to the doctor, one morning asked Laurel to drive him. Having spoken and before she could reply, he began to cough. Smoke from the cigarette he had inhaled, spit back, tumbled through the air on gusts of his breath. He seemed about to strangle. Having stood, he held to the back of the chair and shook like a mechanical toy, coughing, short, hard, sharp, so relentlessly he could not catch his breath between. Saliva appeared at the corners of his mouth. He stopped, exhausted, his eyes apologized, his face was pale. He sank his weight to one leg and slurped, recovering the saliva, then took out his handkerchief and blew his nose with a hard, blaring sound. Slowly his face regained color but seemed deflated; the skin hung in soft folds, like something punctured. He seemed a concave standing, his chest in, shoulders bowed. Staring at the floor, he quieted. Then in an attitude that missed being defiant, he threw back his head and his eyes held defeat.

“I believe it's going to kill me,” he said.

Everything was still, they, the house, the outdoors. He moved a hand slowly to his chest and held it there flat. Following the movement, Laurel thought his hands seemed smaller too and they had always been so large and strong. Kate often had said, Like paws. With those big thumbs, he can't do a thing in this world with them, and he would look apologetic. From all his years in the open, his hands were permanently tanned to the wrists where his shirt cuffs had ended, as if he wore mittens. His nails were shiny and well-shaped; a thin gold hair, fine as a duckling's, lay along the back of his hands and they always seemed freshly scrubbed, to smell of soap, felt cool to the touch, like the hidden ends of grass. It was only a moment they were silent, but she thought too, I've got to remember everything about him, memorize it; thought, still, she did not believe he would die soon. She said, “That's not what the doctor said. You're just going to have to give up smoking, that's all.”

He did not answer and went down the long hall. Halfway, he had placed a slender chair to rest in and stopped now. Then they were at the doctor's and Son said, “I want to do everything I can to hep myself.” Dr. Phillips suggested a therapeutic girdle. Laurel drove him to the shop, waited in the room of portentous things, oxygen tanks, iron lungs, braces, crutches, supports, while he was fitted. He wore the girdle home and after dinner went away from the table holding his stomach saying, “Wheww.” In his room, he took the girdle off, put it in his underwear drawer and never took it out again. “That thing like to cut me in two,” he said coming back.

Laurel was irritated that he gave it up so quickly. She wanted to will into him her own feeling of hope, wanted him not to sit for hours his head hung, seeming to have given in. Sometimes, passing his door as he sat, she was unable to think of anything to say, went on by. It was the relationship he had established the years he was busy; she thought of it resentfully. But she softened, thinking he had been the way he had because he had not known better. He had mellowed with age, like most rough men, had begun to sense mistakes, too late. She was gone, Kate was beyond reach. It seemed he had put all his eggs in one basket; now it was empty. She wrote George saying so and he wrote back he had seen it happen to many self-made men when they reached the top. It was as if they had hammered at one door all their lives and when it finally opened, no one was there.

To bring the house alive, she made as much noise as she could, talked along the center hall to Sarah or Kate, let doors slam, called loudly to Tippy. She thought Dr. Phillips, knowing more, could make him wear the girdle and went to see him. “Young lady, I found out in a short time I couldn't tell your daddy what to do,” he said laughing, to her surprise, in admiration.

She protested and he cut her off. “It's only to make him more comfortable. He's the judge of whether it does. It's not going to cure him, Laurel.”

She thought, driving home, that he was the braver after all. Simple and country maybe but without pretense. Her college-educated friends would have clapped the girdle on telling themselves it would do some good. She urged him to try the Mayo Clinic, a doctor in New York, another climate. He said he was better off at home, Dr. Phillips knew as much as those birds, she was like his mammy, always wanting to jump around.

The things she had come home for had been sent to California and arrived. George wanted to know when she was coming. She had to go. Having told about the baby, she said she would come back after it was born and from the plane window stared out thinking how many times she had, with the same regret: it was too late to turn back. He leaned against a post, one hand to his chest. Kate stood off alone; her voice had broken saying goodbye and Laurel had gone to the plane unable to look back, until now.

When the doctor in Grenada ordered another four hundred pounds Son told Holston to send it, sure he would pay off after that telephone call. Several times in the next month he went to the office and wrote the doctor each time. It was the only fellow who ever got the better of him that way. He hated to let the business go with even that one debt outstanding; but there was no reason to hang on anymore, the shape he was in, not even another year until he was sixty. In his best years he had averaged selling about a hundred and thirty-nine thousand pounds of powder a month. When he started in the business, if he sold a thousand he was doing good. That record was one thing he didn't have to be sorry about.

He wound up everything the first of the year, got on the plane and flew to Illinois. Leaning toward the man behind the desk he said, “Fifty thousand dollars. That's my price,” living through now what had been so long a dream. If some things hadn't worked out, this was. The man had said they wanted to buy use of his name, wouldn't do as much business in that part of the country without it. Son said, Sho nuff?

Selling of property and fixed assets had been agreed on without trouble; his name was the last point and the man had to argue. Son thought, Hell, he had waited all these years, he could wait some more, hoping they would give him a watch with an inscription, For Thirty-five Years Service.