The Marrowbone Marble Company (10 page)

He studied the ridge, its empty trees packed tight and reaching skyward. He almost asked Bob if they could stay and climb to its pinnacle. It called to him. But they both had wives and children in town. And it would be unwise to climb the ridge. The Maynards were on the other side, mourning the one who'd come up missing.

 

A
DREAM VISITED
Ledford that night, and in it, the Bonecutter brothers walked the chalk lines of a baseball infield, and an airplane flew overhead. When it passed, the brothers turned for the visitors' dugout and sat down on the bench. They said something he couldn't make out. He read their lips. “You couldn't even afford an ankle,” they said, and pointed to the outfield. Ledford turned and looked to where they pointed. A man with a camera took pictures of another man, who had been crucified. He was skin and bones and wore an unkempt beard. His wrists and ankles were bound with twine to the skinny crucifix. It was made from braided vine, and it leaned against an outfield fence fashioned from chickenwire. All at once, the fence buckled under, and the man on the crucifix went down with it. Ledford looked away. A terrible feeling came over him. The dugout went dark inside. There were sinister movements from its floor. Ledford knew he was dreaming then, but he could not pull himself awake. He could not sit up in bed. His father's voice spoke clearly: “Raise your hand to your chest, boy. Put your hand on your heart.” Ledford could not open his eyes. He could not raise his hands from the bed. It occurred to him that he was paralyzed, that even his breathing had stopped. There was panic in his blood vessels, silent and without motion. There was the sensation of being eight feet underground, shoulder to shoulder with things he could not turn to see. He could hear them sighing. Then, another voice came. It told him
Make marbles
, and then his hand came to his chest and he breathed in deep and sat up straight and waited for his heart to blow open from the pressure.

The voice that had spoken the two words was one he'd not heard in five years, but it was unmistakable. It was the voice of McDonough. It was Sinus from Chalmette.

Ledford went to the nursery and watched his children. They slept in white-railed cribs against opposite walls, Mary on her stomach and Willy on his back. Arms sprawled wide and mouths open. He placed his hand on their chest and back to feel them breathe.

It seemed to Ledford then that something had changed. That he could no longer go on as he had been to now. He would live for his children. He would make something real for them.

In the basement, he opened the big trunk's lid. He knew that under the swastika quilt, there was nothing but the past, an empty impression of a bottle of Ten High. He closed the trunk and turned to the little desk he'd built against the wall. He sat down at the desk, pulled from its drawer a pencil and a blank-paged, leather-bound journal. He'd bought it a week prior, upon noticing its likeness to his father's.

Ledford stared at the empty page before him. His fingers trembled a little. They steadied when he pressed lead to paper. He wrote one word.
Marbles
.

T
HEY SAT TOGETHER ON
the west steps of Old Main, the cold concrete numbing their tailbones. The campus sidewalks were salted. “See her?” Don Staples said, pointing with his emptied pipe. Across the green, a woman walked fast and determined. “She's the new director of physical education for women. Can't recall her name.”

Ledford squinted for a better look. “Pretty,” he said.

Staples nodded. “I believe I'd let her direct my physical education any old day of the week.”

“I believe you would.”

“She could measure my growth.” They laughed. Staples said, “I'm not as old as you think I am.”

Marshall's campus was shaping up. Folks talked about it going from college to university status.

Staples pointed his pipe at another walking the cross-cut path. “See him? That little son of a bitch is the one that stirred the pot on me fall semester. Said I offended his morals.”

“How?”

“I can't remember.” Both men looked at their shoes. Staples continued, “He didn't like something I said about marching tanks through downtown to commemorate Armistice Day.”

“What did you say?” The young man in question was coming their way.

“I can't remember.” Staples watched the young man approach, his spotted bow tie sharpening with each step, his scarf tucked just so into his lapel. “I may have said something that to his ears was unpatriotic. He may have thought me a Communist.” He straightened his back and stuck his pipe in his pocket. “Hello there young fella,” he said.

The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs. He'd wanted to move past them without altercation. “Hello Professor Staples.”

“I can't recall your name.”

“A. P. Cavendish.” With a leather-gloved hand, he pulled out his pocketwatch and checked it.

“Cavendish,” Staples repeated. “How could I forget a name like that? Your old French ancestor discovered hydrogen, didn't he?”

“I'm not aware of any such thing,” Cavendish said. Another boy hollered from across the green and Cavendish smiled momentarily, waved, then went straight-faced again. His complexion was splotched.

“Well, sure you're aware,” Staples said. “You're full of more hydrogen than most, aren't you Cavendish?”

“Professor Staples, I've got to—”

“You blow hot air from both holes, don't you son?”

Cavendish had crested a step to keep moving, but stopped dead at this comment.

“Let me introduce you to my
comrade
here, Loyal Ledford,” Staples said.

The two shook hands and nodded. “Cavendish is both managing editor of the
Parthenon
and president of the Inter-Fraternity Council.”

“Is that right?” Ledford said.

Cavendish nodded affirmative.

Staples said, “Wrote an article, if memory serves, advising President Truman not to integrate the military.”

“It would be disastrous, in terms of security,” Cavendish said.

“Is that right?” Ledford said. A bell sounded inside the building behind them.

“Ledford here is a glass man,” Staples continued. “A fire-eater. Raised by Indians. You know all about fire-eating, I'd imagine?”

Cavendish did not respond. “What with your hydrogen ancestry, and hot air rising and all. You ever put flame to your flatulence, Cavendish?”

There was an awkward silence, as Cavendish looked from one man to the other, both seated yet towering, both boring holes with their hooded eyes. The wind picked up. “I've got to get to class,” Cavendish said.

“By all means.” Staples pointed his open arms up the stairwell, designating a clear path. “Walk the path of enlightenment young man.”

They watched the doors close behind him, then looked at one another and shared a laugh.

Neither spoke for some time. “Dreams after you lately?” Staples stared out beyond the college gate at Sixteenth Street. A car sounded its horn.

“Some.” Ledford lit another cigarette.

“Any more with McDonough?”

“No.”

“Your daddy?”

“No.” Ledford squirmed at the thought of how much he'd shared with the man. It both frightened and freed him. He watched the traffic turn on Third Avenue, gray exhaust dancing on the frozen air. He said, “But the other night, I woke up and Rachel wasn't in bed with me. I walked to the nursery and the cribs were there, but the rails were all broken and splintered and they were empty inside. I went back to bed, laid down, shut my eyes, opened em again, and there was Rachel. And I went back to the nursery, and sure enough there was Willy and Mary, cribs just fine.” He cleared his throat.

“Well, you weren't awake the first time. You were dreamin.”

“Sure didn't seem like it.”

Staples nodded. He knew the feeling. “Your job?”

“I'm liable to kick a hole in the office wall. It's all scheduling and getting on the phone with men who think the dollar is salvation. And now, the old man up in Toledo has died, so his sons are taking ownership, and word is they play golf with Charlie Ball.” Along the bricks, a lone squirrel scurried. It cut across the grass and climbed the trunk of an oak tree, spiraling its length as it went. Ledford wondered why it wasn't in its nest. He went on, “I'd rather be back at the furnace.”

“Maybe you ought to be back in school. Get your doctorate. Teach.” Ledford laughed and thumbed up the stairs behind them. “I'll join ole Cavendish in the fraternity house. Get on as delivery boy for the paper.” He wiped his nose with a coatsleeve. “No. I'm done with school, just like I'm done with the Marine Corps.”

Staples thought hard about what to advise. The younger man at times seemed a contemporary of himself. “Whatever you do, don't ever fancy the idea of politics like my brother.” The race for governor was on, and Bob Staples was a longshot.

“Is it not going well?”

“He thinks of me as his advisor on matters of faith, and right now I'd advise him to remain who he is. He's tampin out his fire, got his compass set to some direction I can't figure.” The wind picked up. Staples pulled his lapels. “It isn't righteous or noble, that's for certain.” He tapped his shoe soles against the stone and shook his head.

“I was afraid something like that might happen,” Ledford said.

“Yes, yes. My brother.” Staples changed gears. “Well, I have thought a little on it, and maybe you
ought
to do this marble company idea.”

“That's what I'm thinkin.”

Staples patted Ledford on the back. “I wish I could tell you how to go about all of it,” he said to him. By
it
he meant life. “I know it's got something to do with holding on to the ones you've got, and if you can, on top of that, make a little music and have a little fellowship. Build something.” He thought for a moment on the word
build
. “But not like they do nowadays,” he said. “I mean
build
, like they did before all this.” He took his arm away and waved it toward Sixteenth Street, Third Avenue, the mill, the boxcar foundry. “You got to do what you know is right,” Staples said. They looked at each other then. “And I mean right by your family, not by you alone. And your family, in the end, is everybody.” He often spoke this way. He called it soapboxing. “Or, you can do right only by yourself, like most do these days. And Mack Wells' child will grow up to hate your child and both of them together will grow up to hate the little Russian children, and a few silver-spooners like Cavendish there, and a whole lot of regular boys will run off shortly to Korea, and you know what happens then.”

Ledford nodded. He knew.

T
HE RETURNS WERE IN
The
Daily Mail
's Evening Edition ran photographs of the primary winners, stone-faced and staring at something beyond the camera lens. “Why don't any of these men smile?” Rachel asked. She bit into an apple. Baby Willy was at her breast, half asleep. He was big at eight months, and most young mothers would have long since weaned their babes from the breast, if they'd ever breast-fed at all. But not Rachel. To her, such separation seemed wrong. “Bob Staples would have smiled,” she said. Her feet were crossed on the opposite kitchen chair. Mary sat beneath her mother's legs, a kitchen tent of sorts, under which she whispered secrets to her one-legged Raggedy Annie.

“Bob Staples didn't even come close,” Ledford said. He was leaning against the counter's edge, swirling the beer in his can. His tie was undone. Just home from work. “He played the big boy's game and lost.”

Mary laughed at something she'd whispered to Raggedy Annie. A strand of her hair tickled the back of Rachel's knee. “Well, no one was going to beat Okey Patteson,” Rachel said, “and Bob's a good man, Loyal.”

“If you say so.”

“He is and you know it.”

“I
did
know it. Not no more.”

“Not
any
more,” Rachel said. She'd eaten her apple to the core, spitting out the seeds as she went. She pushed the little seeds around on the tabletop.

“Uh-huh,” Ledford said. He finished his beer and threw it in the trash. “Anymore, no more, same thing. That man talked a big game, but when it came down to it, he balked.” Ledford got to his knees on the linoleum. “Hello,” he whispered to Mary, then the same to Raggedy Annie. They ignored him. He winked anyway, kissed his daughter's cheek, and stood back up. As he did, his vision went black and he nearly fell over.

“What do you mean he balked?” Rachel said.

Ledford steadied himself against the counter. His vision came back, starry, then whole. “What I mean is, he said he was dedicated to the Negro's cause, to equal pay, to housing reform. Did he forget? He hasn't even spat a word about the half-assed decision the Supreme Court just handed down.”

“Well, he tried his best Loyal.”

“He did nothing of the sort. What he tried was to get votes. And a man doesn't get votes unless he sells out his principles.” He opened the fridge and cracked another beer.

Baby Willy rolled, open-mouthed and asleep, away from his mother's breast. She looked down at him, the curl of his little lip. The way it still searched, sucking though nothing was there. Rachel looked up at Ledford. She hoped that, like her, he'd be staring at the boy, but he wasn't. He had his back to them. Hands at the sinktop, braced and straight like tentpoles. He spat in the disposer.

“Not a good day at work?” she asked.

“Is there such a thing?” He didn't turn when he spoke.

 

T
HE
D
IAMOND
T
dump truck was rust-colored and well used. The stencil on the doors read
Mann Glass Co. 10 Ton Limit
. Mack Wells drove it as he had on past deliveries, one-handed and carefree, as if the dented bed behind him didn't carry 16,000 pounds of broken glass. As if Route 2's center line were a barrier wall, protecting oncoming vehicles from his tendency to weave.

He looked at the river outside his window. It followed the road like a serpent. Or rather, the road followed it. Here and there a coal barge churned along, slow and dirty. Each one pushed a mighty load, flat and stacked side by side, front to back. Black mounds rose in skinny ridges from each pallet as if mountains had grown from the water and learned to swim. Tug horns sounded and stacks pumped gray tails that disappeared on the river air. The water these behemoths cut was dark muddy brown. A V-shaped ripple, churning, on its surface a reflective film.

Ledford had the passenger window down. He held his open hand against the wind, then closed it in a fist.

Mack Wells took note. He said, “You'll never catch it.”

“How's that?”

“The wind. Ain't no man can gather it in his fists.” Mack turned back to the road ahead. “Proverbs.”

Ledford nodded. He made his hand flat and extended his fingers. The wind's resistance subsided and his fingertips cut the air quiet. He considered Mack's knowledge of the Bible, his ability to quote and name verse. “I've always liked that passage,” Ledford said. “Can't say I've understood it, but it sounds about right.”

Mack nodded. The speedometer read sixty. “Means we're fools,” he said.

Ledford rolled the window up so he could strike a match. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Mack. On the bench seat between them sat a pair of lunch pails and coffee Thermoses. Ledford's had a rotted seal, and at each pothole, coffee trickled from the lid. He watched it trace the upholstery stitching on the seat, searching out the holes there, soaking into the popped stuffing.

Mack had made plenty of these Saturday delivery runs. The pay was decent, and he usually rode alone. It gave him time to think, something that proved alternately fruitful and damning. On Tuesday, Ledford had told Mack he'd like to ride along on this particular run. Mack had told him it would be good to have the company, though he wasn't sure he meant it. “Why you want to go anyhow?” he'd asked. Ledford had answered that he was interested in the destination, the factory at Marble City. Mack had told him, “Well, you know we just dump the cullet and go on our way?” Ledford had talked of staying a little longer, having a look at the place. When Mack had asked him why he was so interested in a marble factory, Ledford told him, “Because a voice in a dream told me to make marbles.”

They traveled Route 2 in relative silence. After a time, Ledford asked Mack about his Army unit. Conversation came easier. Mack told of a college boy he'd learned under, how in a year's time, he'd become proficient in fixing damn near any mechanical thing that broke. “They could've given me a degree in engineering for all the shit I done fixed,” he said.

Ledford laughed. “Sounds like they ought to have.”

Beyond place names, neither man broached the subject of combat. They were in the town of Friendly by noon, the sandwiches and coffee long gone. Marble City had opened its factory doors in Friendly two years prior, and it now produced so many marbles, both industrial and gaming, that folks had taken to calling the whole town by the name of the company. The factory had brought jobs just as miners had started to lose them. Men who had spent twenty years underground now found themselves sitting on buckets, sorting green glass from blue.

A dwarf in maroon slacks swung open the factory's service gate. Mack eased the big truck through. The sign on the fence pictured a smiling red marble, backgrounded by the silhouettes of skinny buildings and chimney stacks. This was Marble City.

Mack nodded to the little man, a gesture that was not reciprocated. Instead, the man frowned and eyeballed Mack all the way through the gate. Even ten yards in, when Mack checked his sideview mirror, he had his stink-eye locked in.

“Guess they ain't too friendly here in Friendly,” Mack said.

“Guess not.” Ledford watched as another man emerged from the factory doors. He stood in front of the truck and walked backwards, guiding them with hand signals as if on an airstrip. Ledford thought of Henderson Field, how he'd watched men do the same there, easing patched-up Hellcats off the broken apron.

They hit their mark and got out of the truck and stretched.

When Mack turned the crank, the winch made a popping sound and the cable groaned as if protesting the weight of its haul. Glass shifted and tinkled on top of the stack. Like a swarm of silver minnows, Ledford thought. When the truck bed went forty-five degrees, there was a rush of sound and dust and the glass began its quick descent to the waiting ground below.

Twenty sorters emerged and surrounded the shining mountain. They gripped five-gallon buckets in each hand, stacked three deep. They sat on metal stools and milk crates and began what seemed to Ledford an impossible job.

The dwarf walked a circle around the sorters, his arms crossing his chest, his brow still furrowed. Ledford cut off his path and asked where he might find Mr. King, the man in charge. “Check furnace three,” the man told him.

Inside, there was a familiar smell. Sulphur-like and old. But there were other smells Ledford couldn't categorize. Sounds too. Men rolled handtrucks stacked with full buckets to three awaiting furnaces. At the back, they poured in the glass. At the front, a machine worked, cam-operated and precise. Ledford could see the thin neon trickle there as it drained into a metal box and came out perfectly round, a glowing molten ball riding a chute to the rollers below. On the floor was a wooden cooling barrel, half full.

A wide-backed man wearing suspenders stooped beside an industrial fan. He closed an eye and aimed it at the opening in furnace three. Ledford approached him. “Mr. King?” he shouted over the fan's roar.

The older man turned and sized up Ledford over the brim of his steel-framed glasses. They sat on the bulb of his sweating nose. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

Ledford introduced himself and they shook hands. Mr. King was glad to give him a tutorial. They walked the length of furnace three, back to front. King pointed at the metal box from which the molten balls emerged and said, “That's the head. A shear cuts it to size inside and it comes down the chute there to these rollers.” The finger he pointed with was stained a permanent gray. Blistered at the tip. “See how those rollers are in motion? That insures they're perfectly round.”

“How many do you make in a day?” Ledford was mesmerized by the man's operation.

“Oh, that depends. Last year we made four hundred thousand.” Ledford tried to picture four hundred thousand marbles. He wondered how many it would take to fill the dumptruck.

“It'll be a million when we get these new furnaces built, get these new machines put together.” Mr. King whistled loud at a teenaged boy who was tipping a batch of yellow cullet into a hole. The boy looked at his boss. “Don't pour quite so fast,” King told him. “Slow er down some.” He winked and smiled, and the boy heeded the advice. “That hole he's pouring into is the crucible,” Mr. King told Ledford. “It's where you add your striking colors.” He began to walk away. “C'mon,” he said.

“Let me show you some finished product.”

On the way to his office, they passed an unlit furnace, its machinery gathering dust. Ledford asked, “What about this one?”

Mr. King regarded it with nostalgia. “Built that in 1931,” he said. “See how the shear's chain operated?” He ran a finger along the rusted links. “Had to service it more than I would've liked. New ones save us a lot of money.”

The walls of his office were covered in framed photographs of employees and family alike. Men and women with their arms around each other, their hands gripping blowpipes and punty rods. Children knelt at circles drawn in the dirt. They had marbles at the ready, their thumbs the triggers. Ledford walked in a square around the small room, eyeballing their faces, the wrinkles of their joy. At his waist, in custom-built display cases lining the walls, were handmade, oversized marbles of all colors and designs. There were clear crystal paperweights with tiny flowers inside. There were handblown ashtrays like the ones his father had once made.

“Kids love to play Ringer,” Mr. King said. He'd taken a seat at his desk and was watching Ledford closely. “And now that folks have a little money to spend, they want games, collectibles, you name it. Back when I started in marbles, there wasn't demand at all. Folks were lucky to put food on the table.”

Ledford turned and faced him. “If you don't mind me askin, what do you plan to do with the old machine out there?”

“The chain-driven? Why do you ask?” He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Ledford sat down in the only other chair. “Well,” he said, “I reckon if it's for sale, I'd like to buy it.”

Mr. King laughed a little. Then he said, “You know, I like the cullet we buy from Mann Glass. The coefficiency mixes real well with what we buy from up the road here. But I hear that pair of Toledo brothers that's bought you out is cuttin the fat, maybe movin to a cheaper batch. There truth to that?”

“I believe there is,” Ledford answered.

“Even heard they're lookin to cash in quick, turn right around and sell the whole caboodle to Illinois Glass. I don't suppose you know if there's any truth to that?”

“Wouldn't surprise me. I've heard rumbles.” Ledford watched the older man nod and work his lips together in thought. He wondered what mechanisms turned inside King's big head. He wondered how Mack was faring outside.

“Well,” Mr. King said. “Let's talk.” He opened a desk drawer and took out pen and paper.

The ride home was relatively quiet. Ledford told Mack that Mr. King was a smart and honest man. That he was privy to the inner workings of Mann Glass management, and that things might change for the worse at the factory. When Mack didn't say anything in response, Ledford said, “I'm lookin to get out while the gettin's good.” Still nothing from Mack in return.

The sun was setting over the treetops ahead. Its glow cut through their skinny tips and danced atop the river's churn. Ledford had his elbow out the open window. It was cold from the wind. He looked at the wide river rolling past, marveled at how different it looked from that morning. Purer. Wiser somehow. After a while, Ledford said, “I'm lookin to start up my own thing. An outfit that doesn't run on the idea of money alone.” He waited a moment, then said, “Be honored to have a man with engineering skills along.”

“Well,” Mack said, “I'll keep it in mind.”