Old Powder Man (25 page)

At the office, telling about the murder, he told mostly how the boy's pockets had been picked clean and his gold tooth gone. He, Holston and Buzz had a good laugh. He would tell them another thing, American Powder Company was going to give him a heavier car: he'd fought that little buggy out of camp like a baby mule that never had a bridle on.

It was a month before a representative from the company came south: then Son told him. The man said, “Our salesmen always have Fords, Mr. Wynn.”

Son said, “I go places those other fellows couldn't dream up in a nightmare. Pushing that little car's too much like work. I'm in it a week at a time, sometimes more. I need something with more comfort and heavy, like a Buick. Something that when I say Scat, can scat.”

“You'll have to drive a Ford,” the man said. “Our other salesmen all have Fords. This isn't a time when the company can buy new cars, much less Buicks.”

He was sitting on a straight chair in Son's office. Son was tilted back behind his desk in a swivel chair, his feet up. He looked at the man a long time out of eyes that narrowed. Slowly, he took his feet down, leaned forward to reach into his pocket, then threw the keys across the desk. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the man should take them.

The representative stood up, trying to laugh. “Now, Mr. Wynn,” he said. “You're not going to quit.”

“Naw,” Son said. “I already have.”

“Hot-head, you ain't got sense God give a flea,” Buzz said when he heard. “This is a depression. Folks are out looking for jobs, not quitting good ones.”

Kate cried, said they would be out selling apples too. Nobody in their right mind would quit their job to start their own business in the middle of a depression; was he crazy, like his mother?

You leave her out of this, Son said. The Sisters would no longer keep Cally; in a rage, she had flown at one of them brandishing her cane. Cecilia had a little girl, the house would be crowded, but she would take Cally. Son would pay her what he had paid the Sisters. Furious when her cane was taken, Cally had cut off her hair in a straight line around the top of her ears. Kate had knit a soft angora cap for Laurel; now she made one for Cally. All that winter she wore it, sitting on the edge of the front seat while Cecilia drove her around town. Cecilia said, I just get up in the morning, fill the tank with gasoline, and ride until it's empty. On the back seat little Cecilia sat patiently, her baby legs sticking straight before her. By spring, Cally's hair had grown, fuzzy and new, like a chick's. By summer Cecilia could comb it into the knot Cally had always worn. And by summer the sign across one half of Son's office read, Frank Wynn Incorporated. Inside on the door were the words, Representative, Illinois Powder Company. The afternoon he quit American, he had made an appointment with Illinois and went to Chicago two days later. Having learned you'd never make any money working for the other fellow, from here on out, he said, he was working for himself.

Illinois was a small company; he had picked it purposefully; they didn't have so much to lose, taking a chance on him. He was going to have his own company but he would sell Illinois's blasting supplies. In Chicago they said no other dynamite salesman in the country had a set-up like that. He already knew that. But he was going to have that kind. In a few years he would have run every competitor out of his territory too; if Illinois wanted to be the company left in there, take his offer before he took it some place else. Laughing afterward, Son would say, Those Yankees didn't have any idea in the world who I was walking in there. They thought I was just a country boy until they commenced looking at my sales figures. Before I left there that evening, I had everything signed up just the way I wanted it, just exactly.

Coming home, he thought it looked as if everything was going to be all right. Mr. Roosevelt, it seemed, was going to straighten the country out too. Over and over, he and the boys celebrated Mr. Roosevelt's election and never referred to him any other way. Not even at the height of revelry did they say FDR or Franklin. He was Mr. Roosevelt to the day of his death and beyond. Kate said it hadn't done any good for her to complain but, finally, all the wives were tired of Mr. Roosevelt being re-elected every Friday and Saturday night month after month. After one party, gigantic and final, Son staggered home saying, Well we shore elected Mr. Roosevelt. I shore hope the man appreciates it.

During the winter lay-off, when everyone was in town, he and the men found other reasons to celebrate: if someone got a job or to cheer up a man who did not. It was during this off season that Son maintained his closest customer contact; there was never any doubt in his mind or anyone else's that it was then he first began to pull ahead of his competitors. Every few days he went to every hotel in town and checked registers; men constantly checked in and out while their equipment was being overhauled or while trying to stall off creditors. As soon as Son saw a name he knew, he went to see the man, taking a bottle of whisky. As long as a man was in town, Son was ready to play cards, have him out to his house, sit in his hotel room if that was what the man wanted to do, take him out to dinner. To restaurants they had to take their own whisky and Son always said there was no sense lugging it back home; hell, if you couldn't drink up a fifth in an evening, why drink? No one drank cocktails; they drank to get drunk. Even when Prohibition was over, they drank whisky with something sweet as they had learned to do in the days when they had to kill its taste. Kate said about these years, Son never came home without bringing a bunch of men. She never knew how many people he would bring home to the dinner she had planned for three. And he never once warned her. On the other hand, half the time she had dinner ready and he didn't show up at all. Several years on his birthday she made a cake but he started celebrating at the office getting older and couldn't eat by the time he came home, if he came. She had added nothing else to the candy box but one of Laurel's first shoes. Sometimes, Kate thought, she ought to put in all the scraps of paper with names and phone numbers she found or his shirts and handkerchiefs with lipstick.

When Son recalled these years, he said way on into '35 and '36 folks were still looking for money; he laughed about some of the ways he made it. Probably not many but those along the river ever knew that 1930 was the beginning of a decade in which over the whole country there were more floods and drought than in the preceding hundred years. One Saturday, he was sitting in the office with Holston. It had rained abnormally; that winter and spring every river and creek in Arkansas and Mississippi had been in flood at one time or another. A muddy Arkansas car stopped in front of the office and two men came inside. “What can I do for you?” Son said; they shook hands but he realized they did not give their names. They wore hats pulled in city-fashion over their eyes, but too far; he knew they were farmers. One said, “We want five sticks of dynamite.”

Only recently, needing to sell dynamite any way he could, had Son broken open cases; the other salesmen would not, fearing they would never sell it off by the stick. In the shed behind the office, Son kept dynamite, against the law, but he worried more about not accommodating a customer than being arrested; if a customer wanted a few cases, he put them in the trunk of his car and drove them to him, threw the fuse in the back seat, and he wasn't never going to get out of jail if he got caught either, he said.

Hoping now for information from the strangers, he said, “I don't usually sell it but by the case.”

The man said, “We don't want to buy but five sticks.”

Son thought he better not lose even that little sale; if you accommodated a man he might come back for more. He said, “I reckon I could let you have them.”

“We appreciate it,” the man said. When Son brought the dynamite, wrapped in newspaper, the man paid in cash but in all denominations of change, like church collection. The men went away, having lifted neither their hats nor their eyes. Monday morning, Son came into the office already laughing, seeing Holston reading the paper he had seen at breakfast. “Jesus Christ, Frank,” Holston said. “You reckon if they catch those birds, you'll be in trouble too?”

“Hell, I'm just the peckerwood that peddles the dynamite. I don't ask a customer what he wants it for,” Son said. They laughed later telling Buzz how the men came in the muddy Arkansas car, acted strange, paid cash in small change, and bought just enough dynamite to blow up the stretch of levee blown up over in Mississippi County, Arkansas, Sunday night. Water flooding property on one side of the river now flooded it on the opposite side below. It was a pattern repeated all winter and spring, even to the wadded-up bills and the change being spread out over his desk. He and Holston, having sold dynamite, would race to the paper the following morning to see where a piece of levee had been blown. The only time Son worried was the Sunday Mr. Ryder called at two
A.M
. saying two car loads of men at his house wanted ten boxes of dynamite. “Five hundred pounds a lot of powder,” Son said. “They've got rifles and pistols,” Mr. Ryder said. “Hell, if they want it that bad, sell it,” Son said. Later, Mr. Ryder brought him the money, in two envelopes, even pennies, and dollar bills so old they were cracked and waxed-looking as if somebody had broken into what they had been saving a long time. The next day, Son thought that was a blast he'd like to have seen. A thousand sandbags piled on one side of a small intrastate river in Mississippi had caused flooding below but would no more.

In April, it was still raining. He and Kate went to Cecilia's for Easter. Kate had given Cally a new dress; sky-blue, the color of your eyes, she said, and Cally was pleased. She sat at her dressing table in the room she shared with her granddaughter. Cecilia had bought her a flowered straw hat and they left Cally dressing to help Laurel and little Cecilia find Easter eggs, hidden in the living room because of rain. When they were found, Son went to get Cally, having promised her a drive. “Mammy!” he said and could say no more. He turned around, calling Kate and Cecilia. “Mammy, why did you mess yourself up like that?” Cecilia said coming in. Cally turned toward them the face Son had seen, stark white, heavily and completely smeared with cold cream. “Mad because we didn't pay attention to her,” Kate said. “Mammy, we were coming right back.”

When Kate went back to the living room, Son had on his coat. He said, “I can't fool with her. I'll do everything in the world for her, but that.”

Rain continued over most of the country. Floods were everywhere. In the northeast heavy snows, melting, added to them and the Delton paper predicted 1936 would rank as one of the major flood years of the twentieth century. Son guessed it was the time he felt sorriest in his life for Cally when they put her into the ground with water standing over it. He had a horror of water seeping in on him, dead.

After Christmas she had had a stroke and required constant care. The day they left the cemetery leaving her behind, he said, “I shouldn't say it, but this is the biggest relief in the world to us all.” Kate said, “Why Frank, it's your mother.” He did not say anything else; but he couldn't help the way he had felt; she had made him so nervous he just couldn't be in the room with her. More and more Cally had flown into rages, whipped her cane toward people who did not do what she wanted. She just wants to get her way to the end, he had said. Kate said, Everybody has to do what you want; you don't get along because you're just like her.

Cally never did rest, he saw that; at the end she was still worried, had a new idea every time he saw her about how he could help Joe make money, wanted him to take Joe into his business. Kate said, Humor her. But he couldn't; he just had to walk away. One night she called Kate to say the Sisters had stolen everything nice she had. She had to have a new nightgown, blue satin with brown lace. Kate searched every store. When she and Laurel arrived with the package, Cecilia had discovered Cally would never wake up from her nap. They buried her in the nightgown.

Son did not know how Cecilia, with two girls now and all she had to put up with, could be as broken up as she was; he got tired of her telling him Cally could not help the way she had been, that her mind had been affected by the last operations.

He had had a long drive home when Cally died and was tired. After the funeral he had a few drinks. Kate said, “Wait now,” and hurried supper; but he did not want any. He just wanted to drink some whisky and sleep. He might not have wanted to be around her, he thought, but he had bought her everything in the world she needed; that was something he could do. Always he had known he would have to bury her and Poppa both; it was one reason he'd had to work as hard as he did; another was because nobody was going to take care of him, if he didn't. He had bought them good caskets to keep out rain. For a hundred dollars apiece, he had bought five lots in a cemetery opening up on the edge of town; he did not want Poppa left up yonder in Vicksville alone and would move him as soon as possible. The three other lots were for himself, Kate, Laurel. That was one worry off his mind. Still he could not sleep.

He remembered the dark muddy ground opened up beneath the grey January day, the flowers arriving bright and fresh and quickly ruined, the colors of the ribbons running in the misty day. He got up and went into the dark house, stumbled his way until he found a light. Kate was sleeping with Laurel. In the doorway, he said, “I feel sorry for Mammy all alone out there in the rain.”

Kate said, “Frank, it's two o'clock in the morning. Go back to bed.”

He said, “Don't you?”

She said, “You've waked Laurel. She's afraid.”

“Well, she'll get over it before she's married twice,” he said and went back to bed. What the hell did either of them have to be afraid about? They had somebody putting a roof over their heads. Hell, there ought to be somebody to talk to. He thought of old Winston Taylor; he sure 'nough could drink up whisky. Suddenly he called out “Will—Ohhh, Mister Will!”