Old Powder Man (3 page)

Poppa unlocked the store. Son wondered if Deal were asleep. Sometimes the old man pretended to be, so people passing would not bother him with talk of the weather—what it was like today and expected to be like tomorrow—or of crops or the mill. He had told Son none of it mattered: one of the advantages of old age. Rid of the world about him he thought of the past and the future when he would know what the reason for the past had been. One thing Son had found working in a little country store was you had time on your hands; lumped together, the times would add up to hours he and Poppa stood, staring into the road. That first year if Deal had not come in to talk, Son did not think he would have made it. But now he had heard all the old man's stories over and over. In each of the other little towns they had lived, he had hung about Poppa's store. But here Deal's stories had taught him to care about the outdoors. This minute, Son drew in the dusty sweet smell of freshly cut wood Mill's Landing was always full of: one of the few things Deal said was the same. Inside the mill, the smell floated about like the sawdust glittering there; early, Son had learned to hold his hand into the semi-dark and bring it down covered with a thin fine gold film. Reluctantly, he left the porch to follow Poppa inside.

Never before had he had patience with old people; in fact, Son knew he did not have much patience at all. But since living in Mill's Landing he had listened for hours to Deal talk about the past. Deal had been a roustabout on lumber barges, had sat at docks until a barge came in going someplace he wanted to go. Many times Deal came into Mill's Landing and saw Mister Jeff, a barrel-chested man who always rode a big white horse. One day Mister Jeff had offered him a job at the mill; without knowing why, Deal took it. Pearl, eleven years old, was cooking for Mister Jeff then; that was when Deal met her. All around Mill's Landing there had been one great world of trees. Taller than the highest building Deal had ever seen, trees had grown up as far as he could see. In those days, no one knew about draining land. In the swamps that stood, cypress and willow flourished in bent, scrawny, strange positions, like things from a world that had been and gone. And moccasins! Deal told how when you blew their heads off, they went on moving, headless, until they slid from wherever they had been sunning, back into the ugly, brown-green water. Whong. Deal's hands would clutch his cane; he would pull the trigger again. But swamps were disappearing; these past few years people had begun to drain land, to farm. And cotton, Mr. De Witt, the mill's manager, said, was going to be king. Acres of trees had been felled and tree stumps stood in rows as even as a crop. The sky where they had been, suddenly revealed, looked awkward, too bare and big, empty of tree tops.

Deal had taught Son to chew the sweet gum's sap, taught him to cover its sticky balls with tin foil, decorations for the Christmas tree he cut in the woods. Sometimes they repeated the names of trees wondering which they liked best: Sweet Gum. Maple. Sycamore. Oak. Pecan. Cottonwood. Hackberry: they liked them all. Deal told often a repeated dream: all the trees floated away toward heaven, dirt falling like brown rain from their roots; he called, Where are you going? but they were gone, gone with old Mister Jeff and the world to which he and Deal had belonged.

Now the sun blazed on Mill's Landing all day long if it wanted; in the summer evenings, twilight lingered till almost bedtime. But in Deal's time, trees had been so thick that dark came early. Hunters, deep in the woods, would stop and listen in the late afternoon and way back home, down by the bayou, the womenfolk, taking turns, would ring a great iron bell. Clang clang clang through the still cold silence, through the dark the sound came, and shouldering their guns, calling the dogs, the hunters followed the sound home. Not until the last man was safe, walking the town's road, would it cease. Those were the days of the Lord's plenty, Deal said. He told about the men bringing home full-breasted turkey, their wattles red as fire even in the pale flickering light of a lamp one of the women would bring on the porch to see. Squatting on their haunches the men would compare their birds: quail, duck, geese. There would be rabbits, frozen with legs extended as if they were still running, and squirrels, their little legs lost altogether in a limp lump of fur and tail. Many nights, with the moon high, there were fox hunts, just to run the dogs. In Niggertown, they sat on their porches and listened to that far-off baying. Sometimes it came with a pressing urgency, with a sound more ghostly than real, that sent a chill down a Negro's spine. In those days, even the river had been a half-mile further east. Like the rest of the world Old Deal had known, it had refused to remain unchanged. In sleep now, before the commissary, he dreamed and called, River, I know you! It seemed he stood on the bank this side, shaking his cane. Go back where you belong, case Mister Jeff come! Deal opened his eyes into blue ones. Son, having watched from inside the commissary, had come out to wake him. “Hey, Old Deal,” he said. “You must have been chasing a rabbit. You were setting here just a going.”

The old man got up slowly and came through the door Son held open. “I come after something, Mister Son. But it slip my remembers.”

“Sit down,” Son said. “You'll remember after awhile.” They went to the dry goods counter, Son's part of the store. Deal sat on a nail keg, and Son began to dust shelves almost to the ceiling lined with bolts of cloth. Later, he would set out boxes for the women to poke in, full of socks, thread, buttons. Above the shelves, two narrow windows admitted almost the only light; the plate glass ones were shaded by the tin awning. Through the small windows two shafts of sunlight, alive with motes, fell in unspectacular ways, making the commissary gloomy. On the opposite side, Poppa dusted equally tall shelves full of canned goods. On the floor were small bins of potatoes and onions, fruit and a few other vegetables; people ate food from their own gardens. The store sold flour, meal, lard. Shoes and boots hung from the rafters; down the center of the room a waist-high counter was full of heavy work clothes and underwear. About the room were racks of the shapeless, flowered cotton dresses the women wore year after year. Presently, Deal remembered it was tobacco he wanted and went to buy it from Poppa. It was only such small items the Negroes came in for regularly, candy, gum, cold drinks. Unexpectedly a child, shot up like a bean pole, had to be brought in for shoes or pants; a woman might run short of something inexplicably, for the Negroes shopped twice a year, spring and fall, bought their families clothes and supplies for six months of either cold or warm weather. In summer they might buy side meat or baloney, but in winter ate their own meat, kept in smoke houses. Everyone raised hogs and chickens, hunted, kept cows. The Negroes were encouraged to charge in the commissary and at the year's end always owed money. For many years, few of them could read and it was true, as they suspected, that if they ever got out of debt, their accounts were juggled until they were back in it. Now, many had been to school and checked their accounts or paid cash. But Mr. De Witt, the manager, was a step ahead; he had their medical bills juggled; who could estimate what a doctor's time or medicines were worth? No one was ever free enough of debt to quit the mill. A few men had run away.

Deal left the store and several ladies came in to spend the morning talking to Poppa and looking at patterns. Son went out for air once, looked past the houses opposite, beyond cotton fields and toward the river where on clear, still days he could hear the Negroes yelling and cursing as they cut and loaded logs; they were put on the Rankin freight train that ran twice a day from Marystown to the river and back. Coming into town, the train stopped to unload mail and supplies for the commissary, then ran on to the river to be loaded with lumber for the mill. Extra logs were dumped into the bayou where they floated all winter long like somnolent brown alligators, bumping each other slightly. Loaded with cut lumber the train returned to Marystown; connections could be made from there anywhere, via Memphis, Delton or St. Louis. One year, the train was made up of a hundred flatcars, half loaded with sixty bales of cotton each, the rest with lumber. Between Marystown and the river were eight little villages; at all of them people came out to see the hundred flatcar train, to wave and yell.

Two slow passenger trains a day ran the same route, the only ones in this part of Arkansas. Begun by old Mister Jeff, the trains belonged to the Rankins too. Before them, people and logs travelled on the river. Today Son heard only lumber being stacked at the mill with a sound like, Clam. Clam: one plank being stacked on another.

Throwing away his cigarette, turning back to the store, he glimpsed Cally in their yard. Stooped, she coaxed a fire under the black iron pot where clothes boiled and bubbled like a witch's brew. As Son watched, she stuck a heavy, black cast iron skillet into the fire, squatted, balancing it. As long as the fire burned, the skillet would stay and by degrees its crinkled stubborn black crust would melt into the fire. Removed finally, the skillet would have the same shiny, blue-black look like coal it had had the day Cally bought it. She recoiled from a sudden spurt of coals, shielded her face, and standing, eased her back by pressing her hands into its center. She went inside and Son jerked open the commissary door, slammed it, and went angrily behind the counter, his face burning as if it had been thrust near the fire. That's not going to be Lillian, he swore. It's not going to be Lillian or any kids we ever have. Somehow, things had to be different.

Like Cally, the knowledge had come too late he should not have quit school when he did. He had quit when he was fourteen years old, after the eighth grade, to run away from home: had done it to spite Cally, he guessed. She had drummed into him from the time he could remember that he had to finish high school. When he got ready to spite her that was the only way he knew how. From the time he was twelve, he worked every summer and Christmas vacation, earning his own way, and she took away most of his pay. One Christmas he had worked for a jewelry store, famous for finding old silver, that had a large mail order business; he worked in the receiving office and felt important because most of the business was with a dealer in San Francisco. At Christmastime the store was so busy he often worked till midnight, spent the night on a little cot the manager set up. At five-thirty he was up again; he was making ten dollars a week, adequate then. Cally said he was a young boy, liable to be reckless with the money; she took it to keep him from spending it. He believed her reason but one day knew she was not going to take his pay anymore. After work he went down to the south part of town and got on a freight train going to Kansas City, where he changed onto another going out West. It had been his dream as long as he could remember, and don't ask him why, because he didn't know, to go to Colorado and to climb Pike's Peak. And he did.

In Colorado he worked for a timber outfit, a long way out from nowhere, and part of his job was to get on a handcar and pump it to the nearest little old town and collect the outfit's mail, then pump on back to the lumber camp. It was hard work, and in the summertime, the sun beat on his head as if it were a drum inside and sweat poured down over him like a bucket of water tossed. But if you didn't think that was a time for a kid, fourteen years old, flying along the railroad track, pumping that handcar, you had another thought coming, Jesus!

He stayed two years, with no one knowing where he was until he walked in home again, a day he would never forget. Cally was fixing for some big fancy society party and had baked two dozen or more angel food cakes, the thing she was famous for. She had them all over the house, on every flat place she could find, on every stick of furniture, cooling. He never had seen so many cakes in his life; the smell in the house was sweeter than a garden. Walking in, he had said, “Well, Mammy, I'm back.”

She had turned around. In her hand was a big spoon coated with white icing just come to the right stage. “So I see,” she had said.

He did not know why he had come back, except that it was home. He sure had liked it out West. He wished he had been born a cowboy instead of where he was. Nobody knew what had happened out there, though he had had it on his mind to tell Poppa. He had seen him bursting with questions. Coming back into the store, he decided to do it now.

“Poppa,” he said across the empty store. Poppa stood at the front window, looking out. “You know when I was out West? Was there anything you ever wanted to ask me about it?”

Poppa, having turned, held back the interest in his face. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” he said.

So Son told him the whole thing, climbed up on a stool, hooked his feet into the rungs, and Poppa sat on the nail keg. Son told about the freight to Kansas City and the train out West from there, about all the jobs he had applied for and the one he finally got, about the lumber camp and the handcar. He told about the man and his wife who had run the camp and how they had liked him so much they had wanted to adopt him. It was not until then they knew he had run away from home. Perhaps that was when he had decided to come back, when he had thought of never coming again.

“What was the country like, Son?” Poppa said, unable to wait any longer.

Son looked a moment out through the plate glass window at the town's dusty road, past the little houses, and at the dark green cotton field. All around its edges trees grew up as tall as you could want, but they did not seem as tall as the trees out West. Nothing here seemed as big or as wide or as beautiful. To gaze upon the flat land here for miles gave you the feeling there was nothing else, only the flat land going on without end, always the same. But in the West the mountains, like kaleidoscopes, continually changed, burst red with sunset, changed slowly into deep purple and disappeared altogether with night, all unexpectedly reappearing capped with snow. Son's mouth fell open and he was about to say how it was nothing like this flat muggy country. It was air you could breathe. He was going to tell about the mountains, purple at dusk, circled with clouds like rings of smoke, about snow falls, and the opportunity there for a man even if you were not so young. Poppa's face was closer now, waiting to hear, and instead of telling, Son shrugged. “It wasn't so much,” he said. “The mountains were pretty, but there was nothing to do with them. Just look. After awhile you forget they're there.”