Old Powder Man (10 page)

After breakfast, he said in a half-shout, “Old man Red Johnson's coming over here!” as if she might argue.

From behind organdy curtains they watched the old man arrive, in a black Cadillac with a Negro chauffeur. On the sidewalk Red stood as frail, as brittle, as thin all over as a grasshopper. The old man was eighty and had made a million dollars twice, Son said, having lost it the first time. He had been to school only three days in his life and said those were to answer “present” for his brother when he was home with mumps. Most of his adult life had been lived in a tent on the levee; he had brought his wife to it and raised three children there. But when he made money, his wife wanted a house. He bought one of the city's finest and she furnished it with authentic and spindly antiques. Red had to use the back door and could not put his feet on the footstools. One afternoon, looking out the window, Mrs. Johnson saw two Negro men erecting the old levee camp tent in the back yard. At that moment Red passed her carrying a few possessions and did not return to the house for ten years, except at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“Come on in, old man,” Son said, opening the door. “You want Shut-eye to put you on the couch?”

The old man looked down at it, his eyes brimmed with tears as he laughed. “I wouldn't never get up off of there,” he said. Shuteye helped him into a chair instead. Red walked leaning against Shut-eye's shoulder, his feet coming ahead first.

“Shut-eye, you want you a little something in the kitchen?” Son said.

“Naw suh, I got to shine the car,” Shut-eye said. When he had gone, the old man laughed and again cried. “I just keep that car for Shut-eye,” he said.

Son fixed Red a toddy, corn whisky and Coke; then Red said, “What kind of dirt you got, Frank?”

“That's what I'm damned if I know,” Son said. “There's maples and poplars and oaks in it …”

“Don't worry,” Red said. “You got oaks, you got good dirt. It'll behave for you.”

Instantly, Son felt himself in those woods again, knew the look, feel, smell of that dirt was with him forever now. He would always know good dirt and he imagined it already swooshing up, a beautiful brown blast.

Red's hand trembled toward his whisky glass; he picked it up between unbent fingers, as if he were not holding it at all, yet brought it to his lips, drank and lowered the glass; whisky remained on his lips an instant, glistening, before he licked them dry. “Frank, you got to play it a lot by ear,” he said. “There's not so many set rules. That's what makes it hard. A man's experience and judgment, alone, will determine how much dynamite he should use for any given stump. Write this down. If the diameter of a stump one foot above ground is six inches, you use two cartridges of dynamite for green wood, one and a half for old wood, and one for wood that's partly rotted. If it's twelve inches, double it and so on. Take that as a little guide, but there'll be times when it don't work that way.”

Son looked up from his paper. “I'm much obliged,” he said.

Red spoke again about the lay of the land; after blasting you had to be sure the rain ran off. “Now that little table I told you, is if you got firm soil. You got light soil you use you about one-fifth less dynamite …”

“One-fifth?” Son said.

Red leaned carefully forward and took Son's pencil. Over and over that afternoon, he showed Son how to use simple fractions. Once he laughed. “This may not be the way they teach you if you go to school, though,” he said. “It's my own way of figuring, but the answer comes the same.”

“Then it's good enough for me,” Son said. Learning to go your own way was something he'd have to learn, he thought.

Red told how much dynamite he had seen shot in a day and how long he had seen a good man work; Son mentally added on to both for his estimates. Then he sprang on Red the idea that had come to him in the two nights of his feverish dreams. He was going to shoot the dynamite himself, something no other salesman had ever done: they hired professional handlers of explosives. Son said, “That's the only way I see I can be sure I'm low man. I'll do the shooting free, myself, and save him the price of hiring somebody; those fellows get a lots of money for shooting dynamite.”

Red said he could do it; Shut-eye had learned, had shot off dynamite on several small jobs.

“Well, by God,” Son said, laughing. “If that boy can learn to shoot dynamite, I can.”

Red, sipping his whisky, thought Son would do all right. He had already become a favorite of several contractors, because he did not act like a big shot, the way most salesmen did. He tried to accommodate his customers. Son, when they had finished work, said, “Old man, you realize when I come over here to Delton to start working for American, I never had seen a stick of dynamite.”

He and Red sat back, laughing. Red said, “How'd you come to know it?”

Son said he had asked his predecessor where he could see dynamite and the man had told him to phone Mr. Ryder. Mr. Ryder drove the dynamite truck and was also the warehouseman, shipper and receiver for all the four dynamite companies in the mid-south area. In his house were four telephones, a private line for the salesman of each company. Mr. Ryder had sounded a little surprised at Son's request, as if it might be a joke; but he had said he would pick Son up at the end of the Carolina Street car line at two o'clock on the following Sunday. When Son got off the street car, Mr. Ryder met him with a wagon and team. They headed south out of the city at the mules' slow plod. Son had asked Mr. Ryder if he shot dynamite and Mr. Ryder had said only when he had to, though it paid twenty-five dollars a day. Blasting gave him too bad a headache.

“Headache?” Son had said.

“Dynamite headache,” Mr. Ryder had said. “Worse kind there is.”

Well, that was something he didn't have to worry about, Son had thought; he'd never had a headache in his life.

Mr. Ryder, in dusty overalls, had been gardening and said when he got too old to haul dynamite, he was going to haul vegetables. As they left the city behind, Son removed his tie and high-crowned felt hat and sat back, glad to listen again to the hollow clop clop of slow mules, to smell cityless air. They had turned off the highway into back country, down a road that was two tracks through weeds which, bent by the on-coming of the wagon, sprang up after them with little pings against the wheels. Sometimes the mules shook themselves and their harness jangled, their hooves plodded on the ground; the only other sounds were that of the countryside in any warm season, insects in the grass, the occasional bellow of a cow starting on a low note and ending on a high waver causing its bell to clunk, and a dog's barking: so much a part of the landscape that if asked, the men in the wagon would have said everything about them was quiet. They passed no houses until Mr. Ryder turned down a lane and stopped at a Negro's cabin. From its dark interior a little boy came, stretched his legs to their utmost, and climbed by way of the wagon's wheel into its bed, grinning in delight, though too shy to answer when Mr. Ryder said, “Hey, boy, what you been doing?”

Shortly he had stopped before the wooden gate of a barbed wire fence leading away in either direction as far as Son could see. Jumping down the little boy ran to open it, climbed one slat up, slid the bolt, and swung wide and free to the gate's full opening. He had returned to collect the nickel Mr. Ryder handed down and when Son looked back had already closed the gate and was running home. The wagon had seemed to tilt dangerously toward a valley as they followed countryside as hilly and wild as it had always been, except for the barely visible road and the barbed wire providing boundaries. When they passed two small brick buildings set close to the road, Mr. Ryder said, “Those there are the detonator magazines where the caps and fuse is kept.”

At last they were in the valley they had overhung so long, having descended bracing their feet, the mules shifting their weight backwards to brace themselves too; at the road's dead-end Son saw a larger building like the small ones they had passed, red brick with a corrugated tin roof. When they stopped, a mule had reached up to scratch its nose against the blue-looking steel door, set dead-center in the otherwise totally unadorned building. In the wagon, they had been only slightly higher than the bottom of the door; up to it from the ground was the full stretch of a man's leg. Mr. Ryder, standing in the wagon bed, had unlocked two heavy padlocks and stepped into the single room that was the magazine, with Son following. The only light came through the propped-open door and air vents set close to the ceiling. Son's first impression had been of the darkness, but his second was of two things he could not have separated, the coolness, as if he had been in a springhouse or a cave, and the sweet scent of freshly shaved pine from which the boxes were made, so simply as to be splintery. The boxes were in stacks. Lifting one, Mr. Ryder had held it against him and was turning when Son had called, “Hey!” Turning back, Mr. Ryder said he had known what he would see and saw the silent disappearance of a snake's tail. “Should I kill him?” Son said.

“Might's well let him go,” Mr. Ryder had said. “They're always in here. Come in out of the woods to the cool. I kill the bad ones but that's just a little old black.” He had brought the box to the light by the door and from his back pocket took a small claw hammer and pried up a corner of the box saying, “There's your dynamite, Mr. Wynn.”

His hands in his pockets, Son had come forward as if it might be a box of black snakes as well as anything else and having seen still did not know what to say. In a box full of sawdust he had seen, individually wrapped in brown paraffin paper, perhaps a hundred sticks of what Mr. Ryder said was dynamite. Lifting out a stick, he had judged it to be about eight inches long and said, “What is it, a inch thick?”

Avoiding the wagon, Mr. Ryder had spit out the door and said, “Inch and a quarter.”

Son had turned it between his fingers like a man judging a good cigar, then because he had no other ideas had put it back, carefully, where it had been. With two swift blows, Mr. Ryder hammered the top down and returned the box to the stack. “I wouldn't slide a box about now,” he had said. “But you don't have to ever be afraid of dynamite. Just respect it.”

Standing in the doorway, Son had surveyed the rocky path down which they had come, wondering how those mules were going to make it up again and had looked at the surrounding woods out of which repeatedly at measured times a bobwhite called his own name, wondering how a man went about learning all he needed to know. Would time answer everything? He hadn't known you had to keep dynamite cool. Mr. Ryder had told him the attic of the magazine was insulated. When they were in the wagon again, the door padlocked twice behind them, Mr. Ryder had urged the mules on to crest the hill; afterward, he had turned them in the direction from which they had come, saying of the other way, “Down yonder's where the other three dynamite magazines are. I got in all now about a hun'dert and eighty thousand pounds of explosives.”

“Jesus Christ,” Son had said. “One of us boys better start selling some powder.”

The little boy had been at the gate. “He always hears me coming,” Mr. Ryder said. They passed through and when the boy had climbed into the wagon, Son paid him the nickel. It took as long as it was to his cabin for the little boy to gather courage to say, “Thank you,” then he had gotten down and run.

Inside the rusty screen door of the cabin, visible only because of her light-colored cotton dress, his mother had stood, staring.

“How do,” Mr. Ryder had said, whipping the mules on.

“How do,” Son had called back.

“All right,” she had said.

Son told Red the story as it had happened. Only he did not tell all the questions he had asked Mr. Ryder the long slow way back to the street car. “One cap will shoot …”

“A couple tons,” Mr. Ryder had answered. “One stick is a half pound. One stick'll shoot about a thousand pounds.”

Drawing on his memory of
The Blaster's Guide
and the diagram in it of how to shoot a stump, Son had questioned Mr. Ryder closely: a man who'd shot a stump himself, he believed, had a whole lot more to tell him than any book stuck under his nose. Mr. Ryder had verified it, just as Red had today. “You can read all you want about blowing up a stump,” Mr. Ryder had said, “and you might get your stump blowed, don't you know what I mean? But the thing is there's always one way that's the best that day. You got your different conditions each time, don't you know what I mean?” He had spit carefully to the side of a mule's rump and said, “Course that's not your worry. You just got to sell the dynamite. If a stump don't get blowed right, it's not the fault of the dynamite now.”

Sit and wait, Son had been told. Business would come to him. One of the country's oldest manufacturers of explosives, American's name brought customers. Business was all right, but Son wanted more. He had asked his predecessor if he ever went out looking for business. The man had said, Why, that little Ford coupe's in as good condition as the day I got it! and handed over the keys, proudly.

When Son finished telling Red the story, he said, “Mister Red, I got it in mind just to get in that little car and hit the road, looking for business.” Red said, “It wouldn't be no bad idea, Frank. Things aren't going to stay the way they are now forever. Farmers are already hurting, have been for some time.” Thoughtfully, Son sucked on a back tooth and poured in ginger ale to help the taste of the bootleg whisky. Red said he had to go and Son called Shuteye who came in through the back way. Son said, “Shut-eye, don't you want you a little something to drive home on?” Shut-eye accepted half a glass of whisky and Son said, “Don't you want you a little chaser?”

Shut-eye said, “Naw suh, I don't see no sense starting a fire, then putting it out.” He drank the whisky straight and Son said, “Phew,” making a face for him.