Old Powder Man (16 page)

“I'm much obliged,” Son said. Will turned immediately back to the others. As Son went to his car for his grip, a man came to the door of the guest tent and called, “Mister Will, Carter, anybody going to join me for a toddy before supper?”

Will said, “Yes sir, we'll be there directly. That's Frank Wynn there. American Powder. Buzz Campbell, Mid-Valley Equipment.”

Son went inside and shook hands with Buzz Campbell who stood in his undershorts shaking out the dustiest pair of pants Son had ever seen. He said, “Looks to me like you've been through a Oklahoma dust storm getting here.”

Buzz said, “Hell, I rode a mule out here from town. I ain't tearing up the bottom of my car getting out to these levee camps. But I'll be glad to ride with you when you go back. I'll give a boy a dollar to ride this mule back to town.” He took from his pockets his overnight things, toilet articles and a fifth of whisky and put them on a small washstand beneath a flecked mirror. He said, “When Carter goes back to the commissary we can get us some Cokes.”

Son, changing clothes, looked at the men still talking, all the Negroes still waiting. He said, “Who are those other fellows; what's going on?”

“That there white-haired one is Cotton Riley, the head mechanic. The one starting to the commissary now is Carter Carrothers. Some of the niggers didn't show up this morning and the others say they've run off to the Number Two job up the river aways. Charley Holt's job. One of Mister Will's boys arranged it and got them more pay.”

“What'd he do that for?” Son said.

“Charley Holt paid him to send him some help.”

“Hell, I thought there was enough niggers in Arkansas to go around,” Son said.

“Cotton picking ones. Not levee ones.” Buzz said. “And there's a world of difference between the two. The levee ones don't have nothing to do with the ones that'll pick cotton, either. They don't know who's carrying the boys off and they're worried sick about not getting the job done on time if any more leave.”

When Carter went into the commissary, the Negroes crowded in. But most had left by the time Son and Buzz started there. They went out and the sun, perched like a ball on the farthest rim of trees, set as they watched. Its going cast shadows like dark paths to follow; the sun had long left the commissary and, going inside, they felt the day's first cool. Opposite the front door was a back one with a large desk in front of it and all around the room were shelves full of foodstuff. Shelves and counters were made in sections, to be folded when camp moved; then, everything went on barges—mules, people, tents, all the equipment used in building the levee. Explaining, Buzz said it was a sight to see. All that stuff floating down the river. Twenty times worse than moving a circus. Last February, he said, I was here when they brought in all this stuff and it was cold.
Cold
! The river bank here was revetted and so sloping they couldn't get the barges close enough. There was water between the barge and the bank. They threw off the bales of hay that fenced in the mules, for them to walk over. Talk about having to whup mules! Them were the worse damn mules in America. I thought they'd never get them off that barge. And they couldn't get the niggers to do nothing either. They were a dragging with the cold. Cotton said he'd get 'em started working, give him some whisky. Mister Will give him the only bottle he had at the time and Cotton got those boys in a huddle and got that bottle started around, drinking with them. They just had a couple of sips, just enough to warm 'em up and get 'em to feeling good. Then those boys got that gangplank to going, up and down, up and down, what we call the old roustabout shuffle. Tippety-tap, rippety-rap. I can hear it now, Buzz said.

Carter was standing behind the commissary's counter waiting on a Negro woman. She said, “How much your side meat?”

Carter said, “Three cents a pound.”

“I'll take three pounds,” she said.

“Anything else,” he said.

“No suh.”

Carter brought the meat, wrapped it and wrote out a ticket. The woman looked at it and said, “I'll take a quart of molasses.”

“You going to want anything else?” Carter said.

“No suh,” she said.

Carter brought the molasses and wrote another ticket with a new total. The woman looked at it then said, “I'll take five pounds of sugar.”

“I could have put all this on one ticket, you know,” Carter said.

“No suh, I never thought of that, Boss,” she said.

“Now you want anything else?” he said.

“No suh,” she said. She took the packages and the ticket with a new total and gave him the money. When she had gone, Carter laughed. “She does that to me every week. She knows how much money she's got to spend but she don't know how to add and she don't want me to know it.”

When Son had been introduced, they talked of Charley Holt. “What's Mister Will going to do to him?” Son said.

“Nothing. He's too mean to fool with,” Carter said. “Him and his wife both just as soon kill you as look at you; both of them have killed Negroes. He was the one got drunk one Saturday night and got bounced out of that showboat at Blytheville and come back with some of his Negroes early that Sunday morning, soaked it with gasoline and burned it down. Everybody knew he did it. The construction company he worked for paid the showboat owner fifty thousand dollars Monday morning.”

“Your good boys don't run off anyway, do they?” Buzz said.

“No, the good ones been with us since we been on the river,” Carter said. He explained to Son, “During the winter lay-off, they scatter. Go to De-troit, Chicago, New Orleans, all over. But when Will gets ready to start work in the spring, he sends word and it gets carried and here they come from all over the country. They like levee life as much as we do. Camp's a good place to hide out from the law, for white and colored. We just want to know who's carrying them boys off.” Son and Buzz bought Cokes. Carter was beginning to close up but said, “Here comes Cotton's wife.”

Carrying the youngest of their eight children, Mrs. Riley came in, her hair as white as Cotton's. “What you got good I can fix for supper, Mr. Carrothers?” she said.

“Got some pork chops,” Carter said. “Some tender greens.”

Mrs. Riley shifted the baby to her other hip. “No, I don't believe so today.”

“Pot roast,” Carter said.

“Too late to start a roast, I reckon,” she said.

“Chicken?” Carter said. “Nice fryers. Fresh garden peas.”

Mrs. Riley sighed. “I reckon it's too late to start anything,” she said. “Just gimme three pounds of baloney and two loaves of bread and eight sticks of this here candy.”

When she had gone, Carter said, “I don't know why Cotton puts up with that. She waits to the last minute every day to shop so she can say it's too late to cook.” A Negro at the screen door said, “You closed, Mr. Carter?”

“Come on in here, Tangle-eye,” Carter said. “What you want?”

“I need me three-fo' mo' bottles of Dr. Tishnor's, please suh,” Tangle-eye said. Coming in, he doffed his hat. “How you Mr. Campbell?”

Buzz, introducing Son, said, “You need to know anything about shooting dynamite, ask Tangle-eye. He's shot it for Mister Will.”

“Well, there's sure a lot I need to know,” Son said.

Tangle-eye said, “I be glad to hep you some.” When he looked at Son, one eye momentarily went another way and was the reason for his nickname. Every Negro in camp went by a nickname given by the other Negroes.

Carter said, “Tangle-eye, you cleaned me out of Tishnor's already this week. You better lay off that stuff anyway.”

“I rub it on my back. My back aching,” Tangle-eye said.

“You got a hangover,” Carter said. “You'll have to take vanilla.”

“I'll take me the large size,” Tangle-eye said. “And Greaser out in the yard wants six Co-colas.” He called to a Negro waiting outside in the shade of a large maple. “Greaser, come get your Cokes.”

Coming to the doorway, Greaser so filled it, the room darkened. Looking up, Son saw the largest man he had ever seen. Greaser was introduced as camp's best mechanic; he was respected not only because of his size but because he held the highest job a Negro could; he helped the white mechanic oversee the greasing and care of equipment. Almost before the introduction was over, Greaser had drunk two Cokes. In each hand he enclosed, completely, two more bottles and went out on the porch. Tangle-eye opened the vanilla and put the bottle to his mouth so eagerly, Son laughed. “Boy, it looks to me like you're in bad shape. Come on over to the tent. I'll give you a drink of some real whisky.” When they went on the porch Son said, “Greaser, you want you a drink?”

Tangle-eye said, “Greaser been saved. He don't do any drinking.”

Son looked again at the hands that completely enclosed two bottles of Coke and said, “I don't guess nobody messes with him no matter what he does, do they?”

Greaser said, “I don't look for no trouble.”

Going down the dusty path, back to the guest tent, Tangle-eye said, “Greaser don't do nothing wrong since he been saved. Work, saves his money, that's all.” When Tangle-eye had had his drink he admired the shirt Son had worn to camp; it lay over his cot. Son said, “I'll look at home. I got some shirts I can't wear anymore. I'm going to bring you some.” He realized from the way Tangle-eye left, quickly opening and closing the door, it was to keep out mosquitoes. He poured a little whisky into his hand and rubbed his ankles. He had scratched them until they were almost raw.

Carter, Buzz and Will came and while they drank, Son listened to insect sounds outside; the mingled cries were so loud that sometimes the men had to raise their voices to hear, though it was only variations in the tone they noticed. Once, they listened to a frog just beneath the tent and to a locust screaming in discord to the others. For an unaccountable moment, all the sounds ceased, the moment so strange, Mister Will started up, the others were motionless. As unaccountably, the sounds started up again and the men looked at one another with half-foolish grins and began to talk. If they lost any more boys, Will said, they could not finish on time; they would lose as much as two thousand dollars a day. Work went on seven days a week, from daylight to dark; there was no way to make up lost time. Part of a contractor's winning a job was his guarantee of when it would be finished; his bonding company guaranteed the date too. Reputations were important and had to be maintained. The Government was an exacting boss.

The supper gong called them into the warm evening. They went along the path between the rows of tents and Martha joined them as they went to eat. Families usually cooked in their own tents; only men sat at the long wooden tables. Emmie, the cook, was the only Negro who spent any time in the white's part of camp; during the winter lay-off, she cooked for the Carrothers in Delton. She looked up, her face the color of new copper, shining from the stove's heat; her grandfather, half-Indian, had operated one of the first ferries ever to cross the White River. Will said, “Emmie, here's Mr. Frank Wynn, never been to a levee camp before. What you got good to eat?”

“Got levee camp chicken tonight, Cap'n,” she said, indicating a bowl of molasses and water in which pieces of salt pork had been soaking all day. As they talked, she dipped pieces into another bowl of water then dropped them into a skillet full of grease. “If I'd knowed you had company, I'd have done you some better.”

Carter, passing, slapped Son on the shoulder. “This ain't no company,” he said. “Just another peddler come by.”

Buzz said, “Emmie, I been starving to death up and down this river. You the only one that feeds me right.”

Close at hand, at supper, Son smelled the sweet-crusted smell of the fried pork and with slight variations in the evening's breeze he caught a whiff of creosote coming from the privy back of camp, but mostly he smelled mosquito spray and he could see the floor soaked with it in large greasy spots. On almost every part of him he could name, he felt welts rising and tried to scratch them unnoticed. From one table to another, they talked of who had taken the Negroes to the other camp. Full dark had come before they finished and Emmie lit the lamps. The dark enclosed them, heavy and warm, like something solid against the screens. Specks of light in the far dark told where other tents were. Somewhere in the woods, toward the river, a wolf howled and the head mechanic's dog, waiting for him outside the tent, set up such barking the man rose and yelled “Hyar!” through the screen and the dog crawled under the tent to whimper. In the kitchen tent, Emmie stopped rocking and said, “Ooo wee, I hate that sound out there,” and everyone else hated it too and said nothing to comfort her. Leaving the tent, Will gave Buzz and Son flashlights and told them to play them around everywhere before they went to bed. When they set up camp, they had killed as many snakes as possible but many were still around; he told of a momma snake that had swallowed her young to move them away from a boy chopping brush; the boy had struck the momma snake a blow that killed her but she opened her mouth and released the young and they had never found a one. “Go on, Mister Will,” Buzz said; but Martha, walking beside Will, promised it was the Lord's truth.

As Will did, many other whites and Negroes had two tents connected by a screened breezeway; people sat there in the dark after supper because it was cooler and not having lamps lit discouraged bugs. Son heard Negroes singing, heard a guitar. He went back up the path and insects in the grass hushed until he had gone by. Martha went into her tent, but the men went back to the guest tent to play Pitch. Entering, Carter said, “Get that damn mosquito off your cheek,” and Son began to brush at it. Will said, “You can't brush 'em. Pull. Pull like a tick.” Then Son was holding between his fingers a mosquito as big as a wasp, squashed into a large spot of blood that was his own. “Jesus Christ, I thought them mosquitoes were about to tote me off,” he said.