The Marrowbone Marble Company (12 page)

An older man from corrugated came over and sat down between them. He said all this could be figured without the tough talk.

“I got it figured,” Ledford said. “There's a Mann Glass employee settin right over there on the bleacher, and his average was .350 in the colored leagues.” Ledford pointed to the Wells family, and the rest of the team looked. “If he tightens the belt by four holes, he can wear this invalid's uniform and keep the game movin.”

Nobody said a word.

Then, the mute batch attendant stood up. He stared for a moment at a bat someone had stuck through a hole in the chain-link. He grabbed it by the barrel, walked to the end of the dugout, and tapped it hard against a metal fencepost. From the bleacher seats, another man jogged over, and the mute batch attendant started telling him something in sign language. The other man, who had no shirt on and wore a wide surgeon's scar from his sternum to his bellybutton, said, “Jerry says the colored boy can wear his getup, and he'll put on the rich boy's.”

Ledford smiled. He nodded
thank you kindly
to both the scarred man and the mute.

“Forget it,” Charlie said.

“Forget what?” Ledford stood, his temper rising. “Forget that another man just offered to fix your problem? You tellin me you won't let a Negro
or
a mute wear your fat suit?”

Charlie stood to face him, but sat back down when his hamstring gave. He looked at the spit-soaked dugout floor and shook his head. “I won't let that nigger put on a Mann uniform. Don't care whose it is.”

Ledford knocked the older man from corrugated aside and went for Charlie Ball. The older man managed to grab him by the right shoulder, but with his left hand Ledford seized Charlie's throat and hooked in hard. He could feel the Adam's apple spasm against his palm. He could tell his fingernails were breaking skin. Charlie looked like his eyeballs might explode, and Ledford stared at them, teeth grit, willing them to do so. There was the sound of metal cleats gripping ground, and men circling and jostling for position and pulling and saying, “Whoa whoa whoa now.”

They pried Ledford off and Charlie sucked at the air like an upright vacuum. It sounded as if his throat had collapsed, the opening there crushed to the circumference of a termite hole.

The man with the chest scar laughed heartily. Harold Wells stood beside him now, fingers interlaced on the chain-link, the look on his face showing nothing.

Ledford was shuffled to dugout's edge. He caught sight of Harold and then the rest of the faces in the bleachers. He'd choked a man in front of them all, and he could not take it back.

The home-plate umpire was hollering about a disqualification for delay.

Ledford walked across the field to the nickel plant's team captain. He and the rest of the team hadn't left their dugout since the stretch. The man wore no expression, as if none of it had happened in the other dugout before his very eyes. Ledford said, “We might need a few extra minutes for a wardrobe change.”

The man's eyelids were like those of a bloodhound. He let his jaw drop open before he spoke. “We won't play against no team what fields a colored.”

Ledford sized him up. Bony. Slow. Backed by ten men with cocked ankles and fisted hands. Ledford smiled at them. Then at the man before him. “Will you play against a team that fields eight?” he asked.

“No sir.”

“Well,” Ledford said, “I reckon we've got ourselves a forfeit situation.” He walked to the pitcher's mound and stood on it. Looked up at the sky above for a plane. None flew. Both teams stared at Ledford and a few spectators got up to leave. He watched Lizzie Wells pull her boy away from the fence by his shoulders. Mack had already headed for the car. Ledford saw the back of Don Staples as he walked past the concession booth to the parking lot.

The umpire hollered, “Game's called on account of forfeet.” Ledford decided to stand on the mound until nobody was left. When they were gone, he looked down at his jersey, the black-felt letters stitched tight to the chest. Four of them, forming one word.
MANN
. Ledford began unbuttoning. He pulled off the jersey. The clouds had thinned and the sun felt good on his shoulders.

Next to his backpocket tobacco was his jackknife. He pulled it out and sat down on the mound and began to rip at the stitching of the last
N
. When he'd loosed nearly all of it, he gripped the big felt letter in his teeth and yanked his head back. It tore loose clean, as if it had never been there. Ledford spat out the
N
, stood up, and put his jersey back on. He was careful to line it up right, hole to button. He smoothed it with his hands and looked down.
MAN
it read across his chest.

 

“B
IG THINGS, BAD
and good, happen in threes,” Ledford's mother once told him. She'd been more talkative than usual, and was made somewhat numb by the three things that had befallen her in the winter of 1933. She'd lost her job at the grade school, Bill's hours at Mann Glass were cut in half, and she'd found a lump in her breast.

Now, three things were upon Ledford, almost all at once. Inside a week, he'd put in his notice at Mann Glass, filed business papers with the state tax department, and decided to move his family to Marrowbone Cut. The first two came relatively easy. It was the third, explaining such a change to Rachel, that worried him.

They lay in bed next to each other, quiet but breathing heavy from what they'd just finished. Even after three years of marriage and two children, they met in a controlled fury almost nightly. The only prompt necessary was the brush of one's skin against the other's under the sheets.

Ledford sat up and lit a cigarette. “I think we ought to move to the hills,” he said.

Rachel lifted her hand to his back. She rubbed at the scar there, to the left of his spine, where the shrapnel had come clean through. It was shaped like the letter Z, sloppy-edged, as if drawn by a pink crayon. “The hills?”

“I've had enough of town.”

She was quiet for a time. “Do you wonder about too many changes at once?” She reached around him for a drag off his cigarette.

“Yes, I've wondered that,” he said. “I've wondered mainly for your sake, and the children's. How would you all take to it. But to my mind, it couldn't come fast enough. These are things we should have done from the get-go.”

She wasn't sure she followed him, but she thought for a moment about living in the country. About walking out her back door and seeing no neighbors, and about taking strolls through the woods until a path was beaten. This made her happy. “I'm game,” she said.

Ledford turned to Rachel. She was smiling. He'd expected her to cry. Her eyes were mostly pupil in the low lamplight. “We'll have to sell the house,” he said. He watched for her expression to change. It didn't.

“I've always felt it was poorly constructed anyway,” she said. “Like Lincoln Logs stacked too fast.”

Ledford laughed. She was looking at him the way she had just minutes before, as he'd moved on top of her. It was a stare that possessed neither fear nor angle, only the want to be as one. “I love you,” he told her.

They talked for two hours. Rachel wanted to sell her parents' house too. It had been empty of people since her father died, its insides gathering dust. Now it had a purpose. She told Ledford they could use Mann money from the bank to help. There was a lot of it. She said she'd knit colorful little bags to hold the marbles he'd make. Said she was fast, and that her bags would be royal blue and red and sunflower yellow.

She went quiet when he told her that by settling in the hills, he meant the Bonecutter property. That he aimed to set up both shop and home there. She put her head on the pillow and looked at the ceiling when he told her he'd been out to visit the Bonecutters again and gotten their okay on things.

Men like those frightened Rachel, and she wondered, briefly, if this was all a mistake. She considered that she was running from something. Ledford was easy to figure—he'd been running from his past since the day she met him. But for Rachel, it may have been the future. She didn't want to join the Junior League or the PTA. She didn't want girlfriends, never had. She didn't even particularly want to go back to nursing, as it had brought little in the way of fulfillment. What she wanted was to raise her children up right, those she had and those to come. To bandage them when they were hurt, to teach them their lessons. To hold them pressed against her face for as long as they would let her.

It was decided. “I'll call the realtor tomorrow,” Ledford said.

S
ELECTING WAS BAD WORK
.
It was liable to strain the eyes, watching all those little glass jars come by on the belt. And it was loud. Always loud. Lizzie Wells, like all the other women on the lehr, sometimes found her eyes jumping left to right long after work was done.

She checked her wristwatch. Almost six a.m. She reached down and discarded a faulty medicine dropper. Across the room, Faye had a sneezing fit. She was the oily-haired one everybody said was crazy. When her sneezing subsided, Faye stood still for a moment, shoulders sagged. Lizzie noticed the tag at her collar was up, a little white square at the base of her neck. Then Faye shot out her arm and picked up a misshapen baby food jar. She reared back and threw it across the room. A couple women ducked the shattering ricochet. “Nobody cain't do this type a thing for fifty cents a hour,” Faye hollered. “No man would stand for it!”

Somebody told her to shut her mouth. Otherwise, none spoke a word. There was just the metal hum of conveyance.

Lizzie took quick glances and otherwise kept her eyes on the belt. A nice woman who was older than the rest patted Faye's back and pushed her along, back to her selecting spot.

The shattered baby food jar lay in a scatter at the far end of the room. Lizzie took note of its jagged condition, pictured Mack in his old duties, sweeping it into a dustpan. At least he'd had security then, she'd thought. Word was, the new owners were looking to lay off anyone they saw fit. A greed had come over the upper offices of Mann Glass, just as it had come over the rest of the white world. It was a greed Lizzie's father had foretold. Always, he had told her, after a time of hardship or war, the white man will seize the opportunity to reestablish his place on the throne.

As was usual, Lizzie walked home alone, right along the railroad tracks. She cut across at the overpass and walked through the empty lot behind the hardware store. She didn't pass a single house on this route, and that was how she liked it.

At home, she kissed Harold good morning. “Sleepyville,” she said, using her fingernail to scrape at the morning in the boy's eyes.

She kissed Mack at their crossing spot in the bathroom. “Got home fast,” he said. He stood on one foot and pulled a sock on the other.

Lizzie reached up and took a seashell from the tank lid on the wall. “Fast as I could,” she said. She took the pins from her hair and set them in the seashell. “You know that one girl who's plumb crazy? Well, she
went
plumb crazy today. Threw a jar against the wall, smashed it. Yellin about how men wouldn't do this work.” Lizzie sat down on the tub's edge. “That's life on the lehr,” she said.

Mack didn't respond. He finished dressing in the bedroom, then went downstairs to heat enough oatmeal for himself and the boy. Always, it seemed, they ran out of time. Harold had to be across town at 7:30. First bell at Frederick Douglass was 7:45.

When they pulled into the driveway of Lizzie's parents' home, Mack's wristwatch read 7:32. Her father, Mr. J. Carl Mitchum, sat in a highback wooden chair on the porch. He checked his own watch and stood. He was a big man, and he didn't like to be kept waiting, especially by his son-in-law. What he did like was to walk his grandson Harold to school in the mornings at a slow clip, and with conversations on God and demons. Douglass was only two blocks away.

“Morning sir,” Mack said. His father-in-law did not answer. Harold ran up and gave him a hug around the waist.

“You eat a good breakfast?” J. Carl's voice was low and commanding, like a sousaphone chirping. He had his hands on the boy's shoulders.

“Yessir. Two bowls a oatmeal.”

J. Carl rubbed his thumbs against the boy's collarbones. “Good,” he said. “But you still a scarecrow short on stuffing.”

Mack handed over Harold's lunch pail. “I've got to get to work,” he said.

J. Carl took the lunch pail and set it on the wide handrail. He pulled a small tuning fork from his pocket and handed it to Harold, who walked away, flicking it. J. Carl watched the boy. He didn't look at Mack when he spoke. “You know he can just stay here with us on weeknights. Make things a whole lot easier on you.”

Mack didn't answer.

He backed out of the driveway and watched the old man resume his seated post in the highback chair. He put the boy on his knee. Inside the screen door, Mack saw a shadow pass, then another. The whole family was most likely there. They all lived within a block of each other. Lizzie's older brother taught math at Douglass, and her sister taught music. Both had gotten master's degrees at Bluefield State.

J. Carl was the music director at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He didn't like his daughter living among poor West End white folks, and he didn't like her working at Mann Glass.

At the factory, Mack waved at Ledford, who was backing out the main doors, both hands on a cardboard box. It was his last day, and after three years in an office he'd never brought enough to fill a single box.

It occurred to Mack that the day was not shaping up. Lizzie's talk of the crazy woman on the line had spooked him. Harold hadn't spoken to him on the way across town. Ledford had left for good.

He put on his gloves and took his place on the main line. His hands moved from memory, sulphuring the blanks as the molten glass was drawn up.

Up above, less than five minutes after Ledford cleaned out his desk,
Charlie Ball moved into his office. The Toledo brothers were running things now, and they liked Charlie. What they didn't like were expenses allotted for company picnics or holiday parties or baseball teams. They didn't like employee fellowship or company newsletters, or unions, or Negroes.

Charlie stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and winked at Ernestine, who ignored him. “King of the hot end, Ernestine,” he said. “King of the hot end.”

Ernestine rolled her eyes.

Charlie walked the platform. He oversaw the lines now, and he intended to keep the men under watchful eye.

At noon, Mack Wells took his lunch break. He sat down alone in the cafeteria corner and had just forked in a mouthful of dumpling when Charlie Ball pulled up a chair across from him. Mack nodded and chewed.

“Word is, your wife is part of an uprising on the selecting line,” Charlie said. He pushed the salt shaker back and forth between his hands.

“Women who were happy to have work when the war started all of a sudden think they're makin slave wages. Now doesn't that seem strange to you?” He smiled and waited on an answer.

Mack finished chewing and swallowed. “Well, I don't know about any uprising Mr. Ball, and Lizzie—”

“Here's what's going to happen boy.” Charlie leaned in close. The salt shaker was squeezed in his fist. “Your wife is going to lose her job on the lehr for Communist insubordination. That, or you lose yours for insubordination as we sit here right now.” He waited for a reaction and got none. “Either way, I don't need two coloreds inside this plant. That's the bottom line. No Ledford here to say otherwise.” Charlie eased back and thumbed a clump of hair off his forehead.

Mack just looked at the younger man who'd called him boy. He wasn't sure he'd heard right, was contemplating lost dollars in his head. He felt the urge to reach across and use a handful of Charlie's hair to slam his face to the table. Instead, he sat still and said nothing.

“I didn't hear you,” Charlie said. He cupped his hand to his ear. A couple of men returning their trays had taken notice of the conversation. Charlie cocked his cupped ear at Mack. “What do you say? Your job or your wife's?”

Mack swallowed, stood, and took his tray to the return belt. He brushed against the gawking men as he went, and they moved along.

Charlie frowned and laughed a little. He watched Mack Wells walk away. “Back to work,” he said to no one in particular.

Mack kept walking. The words repeated in his ears.
Back to work
. He had other ideas.

 

W
HEN HE'D TYPED
it, slow and painful on the green Remington typewriter he'd picked up at a rummage sale, the words had seemed inspired to Ledford. Now, in the lantern light on the back stoop of Dimple and Wimpy Bonecutter's place, he wasn't so sure. He'd spilled coffee on the paper. The typeface was light.

Both brothers stood and read at the same time, Dimple with the lantern held above them. They squinted hard and moved their lips in whispered study. The top of the page read merely
The Plan
. Underneath, there were passages like
Ledford monies will be sufficient to run electric
,
H
₂
O
,
and gas
,
and decisions will be made co-operatively to consider vegetable gardens and farming endeavors.
Another part read
Home and dwellings shall be built with standard plans from US Department of Agriculture (24' x 10' A-Frame Cabin
,
for instance).

Wimpy looked from the paper. It took him a minute to locate Ledford, who'd sat down on the chop block. “Where you goin to git these federal plans?” he asked.

“Already got em,” Ledford said. “Library.”

They went back to reading. When they'd finished, they walked off to a lone fencepost and Wimpy leaned on it and they talked in hushed tones. It had gotten so dark that Ledford would not have known they were there save for the whispers.

After a time, Dimple picked up the lantern and they walked over to Ledford. He stood from the chopblock and brushed sawdust from the seat of his pants. “That's just a draft,” he said.

Dimple spoke. “We'd like to welcome you and yours to this land.” Ledford looked at the brothers, then down at the ground. A sense of relief had come over him. He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

“We don't see no problem with the house plans and what have you. And the hookup to power and gas and water—you know Mother and Dad B had it up at the main house.” Dimple pointed in the direction of the charred flat square. “Lines is already run. But do I figure right that you plan on buildin a glass factory on this ground?”

“Well, I envision a relatively small dwelling,” Ledford said. “Maybe a fifty-by-fifty-foot deal? High ceiling. I'd put a big furnace in, just to make the batches worth our while.”

“Mm-hmm.” Dimple rubbed at his stubble. He and his brother had never set foot in a factory. They didn't like the sound of the word.

From the woods came the sound of a deer traversing dry ground cover, snapping twigs. In response, Dimple's ears moved like a cat's. “And you say this marble idea come to you in a dream?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“A voice?”

“That's right.”

Dimple started to inquire further, but Wimpy cut him off. “What did the voice say?”

“Make marbles,” Ledford answered.

Now they both rubbed their stubble. Then, simultaneously, they stopped. Dimple put his hands in his pockets. Wimpy rocked on his heels, swinging the lantern in his grip.

The dream was enough for them. “Okay,” Dimple said. “There's one more thing,” Ledford said. “What's that?”

“I work with another man at the glass plant who may be losing his job. His wife too. I don't know for certain, but they might be interested in movin out here with us. Working. Raising their boy.”

“That'd be just fine,” Dimple said.

“Well, I ought to mention.” Ledford cleared his throat. “They're Negroes.”

“How's that?” Wimpy stopped rocking on his heels. The lantern kept swinging.

“They're Negroes.”

“Colored?” Wimpy asked.

“Yessir.”

The brothers nodded that they understood. Dimple said, “You do know this here's
Wayne
County?”

Ledford nodded that he did. “What's this fella's name?” Dimple asked.

“Mack Wells.”

“Has he ever worked for Maynard Coal?”

“Nossir.”

“Then I don't give a damn what color he is. He and his are welcome here.”

Ledford shook hands with both of them. They didn't invite him in. He got the impression they went to bed not long after sundown.