Old Powder Man (2 page)

When the train had left town, Poppa went down the one short block home, having decided to tell Cally at supper. Cecilia was home for the week-end. After grace she had said, “Where was Brother going so spruced up?”

“To get married.” Having poured thick gravy onto a slice of white bread, Poppa had watched the bread soften until it was almost nothing. It took Cally that long to find her breath. It seemed she could have died breathless it took so long. She even half rose out of her chair then sat down again with an audible plop and said, “Get married! He doesn't have any money. How can he get married?”

“I gave him money,” Poppa had said.

The women had begun to cry. Poppa guessed partly because they had not been told, had been left out, but he saw, too, and somewhat to his surprise, it had not occurred to Cally she was going to lose him. Her face had turned a very red color, except in its wrinkles, and they had turned intensely white. Her colorless eyes were cold steel grey and tears the same no color had run one after another down her cheeks. Suddenly she had banged her fist to the table and Poppa could tell she had wanted to cry more than anything, But I didn't want him to get married! and that her practical mind told her she had no right to. She did say, “He's too young!”

It was Cally they consoled but Cecilia who had felt abandoned. A tall, plain girl, she did not begrudge her brother's looks but loved him. She had tried to be a good sister; why hadn't he told her? she had thought mournfully.

Poppa had said, at least Betty Sue hadn't made Cally's mistake; she was as old as Son. Cally had said, “Yes, but she's … He could have done so much better.”

Poppa had felt relieved. It was the first remark she had ever made concerning the boy's appearance and he had wondered if she were blind to it and why. “Well,” he had said, and picking up his knife, had held a crust and with his fork pulled away bread and begun to eat. Cecilia, excited, had said, “Where will they live?” And they had discussed the practical aspects of what they thought of as reality, knowing if Son had said he was going to get married, he would, just as Poppa had known when Son asked to be lent money he would pay it back. Some of the money he had given Son had not been his own and Poppa would think about it later.

Son and Lillian had come in a buggy on Monday in time for Son to go to work. Cally and Poppa, knowing Betty Sue, had made no preparations for a new daughter-in-law. When Son opened the door, closed it, and said, “Here's Lillian, my wife,” they had stared in embarrassment. Cecilia, waiting for the noon train, had seen a contemporary, felt foolish in her schoolgirl clothes, and knew her first fear of being an old maid. Laughing, Son had pushed Lillian into the room, and the family had come one by one to hug her.

Beautiful, with a round face and an enormous dimple in each cheek, when she smiled, which she did frequently and spontaneously, Lillian showed perfect, even teeth and the dimples spread and deepened in a way no one could find anything but enchanting. Her hair was brown and close to her face she had made several locks lighter, almost blonde, but even Cally, won over, never complained. Cecilia, her hair similar, began immediately to experiment with her own color.

In the next few days, Son and Lillian had turned the spare bedroom into a sitting room and had exchanged his single bed for Cecilia's double one, arrangements which seemed to content Lillian. Her background made her fit in well; she had known only moderate means, grace at the table, and had never seen anything but her mother's muscatel wine drunk at home. She had spent her time in the kitchen with Cally, learning to cook. On Saturday nights, Son took her back to Marystown. In Mill's Landing, the only entertainment white people had was to enjoy vicariously fun the Negroes had in their cafe. On warm evenings, sitting on front porches, white people listened to their laughing, yelling, and loud thumping music; the sounds came down the path, past the mill, down the road of town, high and low, like sounds being manipulated, all night, into Sunday. It would seem to be a high laughing voice and the next moment a roomful of voices high with glee, with music always as an undertone: passionate, sensual music that made Son's heart and blood beat with its beat.

When spring came the young people went again to the river and on steamboat parties, though Son said he was tired of watching people dance and would seldom go, despite Lillian's pleading. In summer, people came from everywhere to swim in the bayou and Son finally had persuaded Lillian into the water, though she feared snakes and the water's muddiness. It was only Mill's Landing to which she could not seem to reconcile: their first and continuing argument had been over the place. “But you knew I lived in Mill's Landing,” Son had said in despair. Hadn't she accepted him knowing it?

“But I didn't know it was
nothing
,” Lillian would say and begin to cry. Rather than wanting to comfort her, Son had to get away, crashed out of the house to pace the porch or the road, while a temper he had no idea how to direct flailed in all directions. Nor could he rationalize the reason her words so angered him was because they expressed his own feelings. What, after all, was Mill's Landing? What could he succeed at, here? His torment was relieved only by temper and his reputation for having one had begun to grow. He had had several slight skirmishes at the Marystown Tavern and was increasingly short-tempered with Lillian and Cally. Once, in a fit of frustration, he had kicked at Cecilia. He excused his attitude toward Cally; she always found a doctor to agree with her diagnosis of a new illness, leaving the family nothing to say, and he resented the way she kept Poppa's nose to the grindstone, paying medical bills. Except for them, he believed Poppa could have gotten a little ahead in this world.

Poppa, having come farther into the room to wake Son, thought a second time, No, there was not much for a young woman to do in Mill's Landing; still, Lillian should have stayed here this past year more than she had. Now, he stood close to the bed and looked at Son. To Poppa, he seemed always a small child in sleep. His face against the pillow was dark; he tanned at the first appearance of the spring sun and kept the color until November. His hair was dark blonde, not particularly thick but it lay close, emphasizing high cheekbones and a narrow, well-shaped head. His eyes were amazingly blue, his nose prominent and strong-looking but slender at the tip. Above each nostril were indentations Cally enraged Son by calling dimples, and since he had been thirteen no female of comparable age or older had looked at him without reacting to such a degree that Poppa always had to laugh, to tease him too.

Having waked Son, Poppa went to the living room to read the morning paper, opened it as quietly as he could, had it hardly opened, when Cally's voice came as he had known it would: “Henry.”

“I'm coming,” he said. He edged forward, reading quickly.

Cally cocked her head around the kitchen door and called down the hall: “Henry.”

“Coming,” he said.

“You've got to help me,” she said. “You've got to help me.”

She did not need help, was quick as lightning in the kitchen; but she could not abide Poppa's sitting to read the paper. To her, it was doing nothing at all. Poppa entered the kitchen as Son did and when grace had been said, Cally put before Son the plate he had used the night before. Her rule had always been he and Cecilia had to eat first anything left at a previous meal. On the plate was a small amount of mashed potatoes, congealed gravy and half a biscuit. When in the world was the last time this happened? Poppa wondered. His mind, running backward, could not remember. He had assumed the practice long forgotten and could tell from Son's face he had thought so too. Last night, Son had received a telephone call from Lillian. By the time it was over, Cally and Poppa had left the table. Son did not return either, having so little left. So little, Poppa wanted to say.

Son stared at Cally; his eyes, white with anger, were as colorless as hers. Poppa saw something else in Son's eyes, alien to himself, and was not sure he wanted the boy to feel it either. Son's manner partly apologized for a look of determination tinged with mockery and a certain sadness, making Poppa feel unworldly. Looking down at his plate, Poppa pondered again his own life and its end, wondering if he had done anything at all. Unexpectedly, Son ate, and Poppa, relieved, did not think about the same half-foolish, brazen, cocked grin he had seen again. He said, “Is Lillian coming today?”

“Noon train,” Son said. In the silence afterward, they thought of her frequent absences. “If I can have extra time, I'm going to take her to the river for lunch.”

Poppa nodded. Cally said, “It's cool at the river.”

“Not too cool,” Son said. “We can go one more time. Old Deal got me to caring about that river, maybe Lillian will too.”

“It's men love the river,” Cally said.

Son said, “Speak of the devil, yonder's the old man now.”

“Uh, oh,” Poppa said, glancing out. Standing, he put on the black coat hanging on back of his chair.

At that moment, the mill whistle, punctual as Deal, blew a long shrill time. Son watched the old Negro take elaborately from his pocket a large, gold watch, smooth and slim as a full moon, and thought of all the times he had heard its story: the watch had belonged to old Mister Jeff, the mill's original owner, and had been willed at his death to the oldest employee; along with it went a job as long as Deal lived. Standing on the porch, Son watched the ice man come up the walk, carrying with dull tongs a large block. Behind him, its dusty length, the main road of town was pocked by a trail of water from his wagon and children on their way to school followed, begging ice in chips and pieces. Ice boxes were kept on the back porch where holes in the floor allowed water to drain under the house. People were furnished ice boxes, and ice, like everything, was charged to them by the year. Poppa came out. Going down the walk, he and Son faced Negroes coming from their houses to join Deal, forming their daily procession from the part of Mill's Landing called Niggertown. Some Negroes were headed toward the mill, others toward the river and the woods. Son watched them all with envy, thinking restlessly of his day in the store. He saw a man stop Deal; the old man started then on his first trip of the day to the commissary. Son mimicked to Poppa what Deal would say: he was a trapped rat, running from one place to another, the others crying in his ears all day: Deal! get us boys some cold lemonade. Old Deal! you not doing nothing run mail me this letter. Deal's job was to check on the Dutch ovens beneath the mill, ordinarily done by someone in a few spare moments; sawdust, the refuse, fell into the ovens and burned. Poppa said, “You enjoyed the old man's stories at first, learned all about this countryside from him. You can't just cast him off. We're the only ones not too busy for him to talk to.”

Son said, “Yeah, I guess so,” and watched Deal settle himself onto a bench at the commissary; this, the only two-story building in Mill's Landing, had two doors fronting the road; the largest led into the commissary proper and was flanked on either side by plate glass windows with benches beneath. The smaller door, to the left, led to a hotel upstairs where migrant and unmarried mill hands lived or those who had left their families elsewhere, sometimes temporarily, sometimes not. Behind the stairway to the hotel, adjacent to the commissary, was the hotel's dining room, a spacious, bare-looking room with a table in the center long enough to seat twenty people. Every effort was made to make eating there homey, and it was. At every meal the table was covered with a heavy white cloth. Every regular diner had his own napkin ring and a good large napkin, regularly washed. Three times a day the table was obscured by dishes. The men always had a choice of light bread, corn bread or biscuits and for breakfast there was bacon or smoked sausage and in season quail, not a luxury in those days. Early enough in the morning to clean them before breakfast, the two cooks went out and tramped the frosty woods some several hundred feet from the kitchen door. Through the quiet, still morning, the mill people would hear occasional shots, and the cooks always came back with enough of the frail little birds. In summer, when corn was fresh, it would be on the table in three different ways, on the cob, scraped from the cob and fried, or creamed, and there were black-eyed, crowder, field and tiny lady peas; tomatoes, fresh from vines near the back door, seemed bloody and ready to burst, a bite of one disappeared in your mouth. Son and Poppa, coming up the commissary steps, smelled ham and red-eye gravy, lifted their noses like hounds to sniff. Men in various attitudes of having just eaten, inserting or removing toothpicks, lighting or rolling cigarettes came from the dining room and spoke.

A corrugated tin awning jutted from the building over the sidewalk, its length supported by thin iron poles. Often when Son and Poppa arrived Deal was there, sitting on a bench, waiting for the store to open. Recently he had taken to carrying a cane and walked tap, tapping it like a blind man, though his eyesight was as good as when he was twenty; he carried it to lean on when he sat, feet pointed out, cane between them, his hands clamped one over another on its silver head. His wife worried about his forgetting to button up. He couldn't help being old, Pearl had said, but was not going to be one of those old men. She wiped his chin, kept him shaved, made him change his underwear every day. Sparse as a bird, Deal gave the appearance of roundness: had a round head full of thick curly white hair and his pants, too big as he shrank with age, tightly tied at the waist with clothesline, bagged out around his legs, balloon-like. At night, he was kept awake by the straws of their worn old mattress. But Pearl was big. He stuck a straw in her, it broke off, and she never knew the difference, he told Son. Her side of the bed had sagged long ago. In sleep, he braced himself. Times Pearl turned over he was lifted from the bed: bounce bounce bounce. When she was settled at last, he was. She called him Birdy: Birdy man! at their best times. Little or no, he always had done the job. But that had been over with some years now and to his surprise it had been something of a relief when it had gone, so intense had it been. It had tapered off, gone gradually, and left him with a kind of peace afterward. Pearl, younger, had not been ready. He had watched something in her wilt that brought a certain grumpiness, though she never said a thing. He had wanted to say, Girl, go and get it someplace else; he would not have minded that so much as the others knowing Birdy man had dried up. She lay beside him hoping, waiting, remembering. For a long time, out of a desire to please, he had tried to arouse the feeling again but it wasn't there; it wasn't anywhere. Son had said, “You're lucky anyway, old man. You got a good woman who don't complain.”