Old Powder Man (7 page)

“Shoes?” Henry said, as if the word were foreign.

“Shoes!” Son said, his teeth clenched; he held the sound a long time, gave it a final hiss before letting it go, without saying the other word on the tip of his tongue.

“What about us if Poppa leaves?” Lillian said. She was ready to switch; they would not have the automobile, but they would be moving to Delton.

“What if Poppa doesn't leave?” Son said. His huge hands tightened on either side of his plate, his knuckles whitened. “Listen, Poppa has a surprise too. He's bought a Ford.”

“A Ford?” For a moment, they saw everything Cally was eating, then she swallowed with difficulty and said, “A Ford automobile? Why, Henry.”

He gave a little desultory wave with his fork. “It was a little surprise. If I'm going to change jobs, though, we'll have to let the automobile go, Son.”

“Well, we don't need a automobile in Delton,” Cally said. “The house is right near the street car line. But I declare.” She sat back with a pleased look. They had to smile back at her expression: Obviously she pictured herself as they had—riding down the road. “Wouldn't it kill Sudie Baker and Thelma Owens?” she said. They heard a slight hesitancy, then it was gone. “We need a house more than we need a automobile. Have you given them any money?”

“Not yet,” Henry said.

“I've made a down payment on the house.”

Lillian said again, “What's going to happen to us when you all move?”

“The house has two bedrooms,” Cally said. “You can rent one.”

“If we go, we'll get our own place,” Son said. “It's time Lillian had her own kitchen. Maybe we won't go. Maybe we'll stay. I could run the commissary and we'd have this whole house.”

A whole house, Lillian thought, looking at him affectionately; but he looked back with hard eyes. She knew he wanted to go—the success he talked of by implication meant leaving Mill's Landing—but he did not want to be told when to go. Suddenly, Lillian feared ending up with neither the car nor Delton.

Everyone in Mill's Landing went to work at the same time, and everyone went to bed soon after dark. Supper went on longer than usual. By the time Lillian and Cally had washed dishes, swept up, set the breakfast table, the town was in almost total darkness, and it was nine o'clock. In the railroad station a light was on. A bare bulb burned over the entranceway to the mill; Poppa had left on the one hanging over the cash register. At the drug store a small blue night light burned, but there were no street lights.

After the Wynns settled into bed, the house was silent. Son thought Lillian was asleep but could not tell; she breathed as unnoticeably in sleep as when she was awake; to have her beside him was like having a small warm animal—perhaps a rabbit—asleep there. Down the hall he could hear Poppa snoring faintly, with the regularity of a pump running; once he stopped, cried out, “Huh?” then was quiet again. Son knew Cally had pushed him until he turned over.

He thought of Betty Sue and how she had slept, as roughly as she lived, thrashed about, flailed her arms, kicked. It was a workout to have slept beside her; the times they had managed it, he had waked exhausted, but she woke as lively as ever. She had been coarse and too much like him; that was why, he guessed, he had not married her. When she ate, if she spilled, she did not even look down, just kept on eating. Lillian was dainty and yet, of the two, he sometimes thought Betty Sue had been more like a woman. She had plowed in the fields beside her Daddy, helped her Momma wipe the noses and bottoms of eight at home, kept her Daddy's grocery going when he was lying up in bed with a jug of whisky. She could hold her own whisky, too. Lillian had worked—but not really
worked
, not broken her back or gotten her fingernails dirty. It made a difference about what a woman expected, he was beginning to see. To make the money he wanted, he was going to have to leave Mill's Landing, but he was afraid of Delton, the place itself. It was so big. He was afraid of the men he would find there, educated men; they were all going to know a lot more than he. But he had a system he did not think could be beat. Going over it in his mind, he fell asleep.

In sleep he had the job. He was selling dynamite for the Delton company, the way Lillian wanted. Only he was out West doing it, pumping a handcar along a railroad track with the boxes of dynamite stacked up behind him. Wind rushed back against his face and pine trees whispered all around him, the ground beneath them brown and soft with dropped needles. He flew along the track until he came to its end and a great, faceless man said, But you brought the dynamite with you. You were supposed to have sold it along the way.

Cursing himself, he stood, wanting to hide. Then a white fury took hold of him and he cried out, Son-of-a-bitch! They would not beat him. He would make it. Country boy or not. Schooling or not. He would make it.

He fought back the only way he knew how, with his two great fists, beating the featureless face. Two things in the whole world he had no fear of, fighting and work. He would bet you right now it was the right system. All you had to do to make it was work.

He cried out telling it and woke to find Lillian bending over him. “Wake up, Frank,” she said. “You're having one of those dreams again.”

He was soaking wet as well as the pillow beneath him and the tangled sheets. Trailing a blanket behind her, Lillian went toward the sitting room to sleep on the couch. Hell, let her go, he thought, and it was the first time he had not called her back.

He lay back, his breath coming short, thinking now he would sleep with everything against him thought out, whipped. But suddenly he sat up, crying out to Poppa, to Cally, to Lillian, to the whole vast dark Goddamned world: “Listen! There's got to be a place in the world for a man as willing to work as me.”

There was silence before Lillian's voice came back. “Oh, go to sleep, Frank,” she said.

Despite the rainiest winter anyone could remember, Cally and Poppa moved after New Year's. Cecilia would continue at boarding school, and Son and Lillian moved into the tiny second bedroom. As always, the southern winter alternated with spring; one day it would be thirty degrees, the next seventy-five. Cally and Poppa sat on the new front steps warming themselves beneath the sun as beneath something furry, though the steps, being concrete, held winter still, were cold. Cally, busy settling the house, did not think about weather but talked continually of needing a back porch. Where would she put the daily things no kitchen could hold, newspapers, gardening shoes, canning jars empty and filled, the bushels of vegetables and fruits themselves, a churn she might someday use again? Quick, she caught in their faces a hint of acquiescence and repeated often, as if it were beyond belief, A house with
out
a back porch, making the family feel she bore the lack alone; aging, she must wash, cook, clean, cater handicapped. The matter, taking root as she had intended, was settled at the suppertable. Son swallowed and something difficult went down. He said, “Mammy, make your plans. I'll pay what Poppa can't to put the porch on.”

Poppa would not be able to pay anything; they knew that. He looked away a moment and the room's objects seemed colorless, almost indistinguishable. He assumed embarrassment caused it. Lillian's napkin fell to the table like something unbillowed and she thought how satisfaction became Cally. Her eyes and face had a new luster. Her smile, turned inward, seemed it would be enigmatic, then was not. It said she had won and they could understand winning. But they could not forgive the smile's briefness or their helplessness watching as her eyes turned thoughtfully to something else she wanted. She passed salad in a cut glass bowl to Son and he shoved the bowl past him hard, into Lillian's hands, as if the poked out edges of ornate glass could cut and hurt, it did not matter who.

In late spring, he and Lillian moved to a bungalow of their own, in an established neighborhood: the acme for most of its residents, the unsuspected end for many yet to experience the Depression. To Lillian, it was a stepping stone. The houses were the same, like giant turtles, she said: their roofs humped and overhung, their interiors were always dark. Oaks and maples lined the street. Beneath them were the favorite playgrounds of children; grassless plots were filled with toys, corroded or in the process, and old bent tablespoons, the implements for digging. Lillian longed for someone to fill the holes but, permanently, they provided mud pies and scratching places for dogs, frantic on a scent. In houses without grass there were few rugs and dark furniture with sagging springs. But Son, in a brief afternoon, scattered seed, raked, watered and soon had a lawn. He hired a Negro boy to cut the grass. Along with Lillian's aloofness, it set them apart. On the porch, in concrete urns shaped like Grecian vases, she put cannas, red and yellow. Every morning, watering them, she listened to traffic, a muted sound some distance away. Only the milk truck, the ice wagon, the laundry man travelled the street children deserted for school. Gladly, Lillian listened to the garbage truck break the morning's silence; it ground down wild sunflowers that sprang up large as saucers, taller than the back fence, and added a festive note to the Negro men doing their job. She watched them toss garbage cans lightly as balls and toss them back again—empty, joking, complaining of one another in a dialect so rapid it was unintelligible to any but of their own race. Summer induced the most intense smell of everything in the alley, weeds, grass, splintery unpainted fences, dirt road and spurious flowers, but the smell of garbage overlay it, and Lillian seldom went near. Imbedded in the dirt were countless pieces of broken glass, red blue green and plain-colored for diamonds; following the jewelled road, children peered into the privacy of otherwise unseen backyards: ran through Lillian's bushes in fits of laughter, having glimpsed her neighbor, Mr. Woolford, in his B.V.D.'s. Hanging up wash one morning, Lillian drew back a sheet and caught a covey of little faces watching her; then, beyond the morning glory vine twisted into the wire fence, she saw them go. Later, with candy and cakes, she tempted them, close, closer and finally every day, the children alleviating her loneliness as Son worked longer and later. Often Lillian roamed the small, dark, cleaned house and cleaned it again, twitching aimlessly with a dust cloth about the spotless rooms. Despite Son's continual proclamation that he would “defeat the s-o-b's,” uttered now frequently on a breath smelling of liquor, to which she listened as though attentively, her baby-soft eyes turned up to him, she began not to believe it. He had a steady job; the salary seemed adequate to start; but would it lift them, ever, beyond this street where the breadwinners came from the car line, slapping evening papers against their thighs, to enter the bungalows whose dark interiors were darkened more by black window guards and green awnings and already smelled of supper at five? Lillian's dreams were of a large house, of knowing the right people, her own car, and at their ultimate of membership in the Country Club. Her fear of never having any of them grew worse as Son continued to bring home men she had never expected to know, rough, uncouth, usually half-drunk, and twice his age. Disarranging the living room they spread on the floor to shoot craps the entire night. The Sunrise Club, they called themselves: noon Sad'dy to Sunday morning, Son said. To avoid them, Lillian went to bed early, stuffed her ears with cotton, but it was dawn, the last door slammed and the last car driven away before she ceased hearing their loud abandoned laughter and vile words. Coming in the morning to clean, she was sickened by the old odors, smoke and whisky and sweat, by a cigarette ground out on the floor, glasses scattered, and ties draped everywhere, forgotten. She saw herself middle-aged and gross like so many on the block, facing the morning eternally in a faded wrap-around, facing it even like the carpenter's wife next door, with a permanently shamefaced smile for the husband who lurched home every evening bringing, like an obedient school child, his empty tin lunchbox. Her heart felt for the woman in the kitchen early to make him another sandwich, pour his thermos full of milk, when on the previous evening the whole neighborhood had heard her scream in agony as he hit her. Didn't the woman wonder how her life had turned out this way, who once had been young and pretty? Don't let it happen to me, Lillian prayed. Why hadn't she told Son the second time not to bring those men home, told him not even to see them? And asking herself, she wondered why she bothered, already knowing the answer: she had no wile that worked. He did exactly as he pleased, always.

When she did mention the men, he said, “What's the matter with those boys? Not a thing in this world's the matter with those boys.”

And she said, “Boys! They're old enough to be your Daddy, that's partly what's the matter with them. And they're too rough, and they make you drink too much.”

“They're my customers,” he said. “I have to do what they want. Shoot some craps, drink some whisky. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the first thing I've learned, do what your customers want.”

“Well, I'd get me some new customers,” she said.

“Get me some new customers!” he said. “I'm damn lucky to have the ones I got. You know how many people there are in this town selling dynamite? You know how many people there are who want to buy any?”

If he told her again, she'd croak, she thought, and was about to tell him so when she saw Mr. Woolford, starting down the walk with his lunchbox, stop and look at their window, and she saw Mrs. Woolford, behind the screen, watching. The two houses were about an arm's length from one another, and she shut up.

Get me some new customers, Jesus Christ, he thought. All the way to his office, on the street car, the wheels on the tracks seemed to say the same, Get some new customers. That's all Lillian knew about it: just line up some folks on the sidewalk and say, You want to buy some dynamite? and pick out some new customers. Jesus Christ. You had to talk people into using dynamite and you had to do some talking. He'd found that out in a few months. Shoot, you had to win 'em: eat, drink, play some cards, stay with them. Now when he called Lillian from downtown and said he had to take folks out to dinner, for her to come on down, she would say no, she was too tired. Too tired to help him entertain his customers? Cally had stood on her feet all day to help out Poppa in the store when he needed it. He told Lillian she'd still be there waiting on tables in her Mammy's tea shop if it wasn't for him, and was this how she showed gratitude? It was something he couldn't understand for a woman to act like that. His friends, she had said, were too common for her to eat with.