The Marrowbone Marble Company (19 page)

Orb had never cried. Not since a newborn, on the night he came home from the hospital.

Rachel read onward, and Orb sat, his little fingers interlocked across his belly. His tailbone pressed into her thigh. His head was to her breast-bone. When she took a breath, she smelled dried sweat in his hair.

Rachel never contemplated the words she read aloud. Not anymore. While reading to Orb, she was able to ponder the laundry and the weather and the payroll balance. She planned her days and organized her thoughts while some other part of her brain took care of sighting and spouting words. On the last page, she read, “And he shook Dan's hand. ‘I have a new name for you. We'll call you Doctor Dan, the Bandage Man.' And they do so to this day.” Rachel closed the book and set it on the table. She said, “So we will too.” She picked up a piece of breadcrust and ate it. With her other hand, she stroked the patch of skin behind Orb's ear. “Sweet boy?” she said. “You going to finish your crust?”

There was no answer.

Rachel took Orb by the shoulders and turned him to face her. His body complied, but not his head. The eyes were wide and glazed over. Gaze fixed on the back of the stovetop—the mantel clock.

“Orb!” Rachel said. She snapped her fingers and pinched the end of his nose. She waved her hand in front of his face. “Orb!” she shouted.

He came out of it.

This happened once in a while. They called them his “episodes.”

“I don't feel good,” Orb said. “I'm tired.”

“All right sweet boy,” she said. She pulled him to her and rocked. Rachel had always loved the moments just after an episode. They were the rare spaces in time where he would let her hold him.

She tucked him in bed and pulled down the window shade. He breathed through his mouth, dead asleep in seconds. The sun cut through the space between shade and sill. It illuminated his chin, his little mouth. The too-big front teeth stuck out like Chiclets, crooked and white. Rachel watched him sleep for a moment before pulling the door shut.

Downstairs, she washed and dried Orb's plate and poured herself a whiskey. She drank it fast, rinsed the coffee mug, and stuck it back in the cabinet. The whiskey pint she tucked below the sink in a basket, under the Ajax can. There was a slow drip from the sink trap. Rachel leaned in for a closer look. Two Band-Aids wrapped around the pipe at the spot where the water drops sagged and fell. She smiled. Thought of Orb's brain, the way it worked to right wrongs. She left the Band-Aids where they were and stood back up.

Orb had been a puzzle from the get-go. Even for the doctors. He'd been small, of course. Fragile. Reverend Thompson had baptized him at the hospital, for fear that he'd die before he made it out the door. Rachel remembered the day they brought Orb home. How everyone, including her, wondered if he was meant to make it. Dimple and Wimpy had seen this kind of baby before. They sat Ledford and Rachel down, insisted that they contemplate a certain old way of doing things, a way that had kept many a sick baby alive. And Rachel had gone along with it. Orb swaddled against her, she'd followed the twins to the crib barn, and inside, Wimpy had led Boo the mare from her stall. While Dimple rubbed Boo's muzzle and hummed to her, Wimpy positioned Ledford and Rachel on either side of the horse. Orb cried, loud and raspy. “Now,” Wimpy had told Rachel, “I want you to pass him under Boo, clear across to Ledford. Ledford, you take him, then pass him back. I want you all to do this three times.” And they did as they were told. And Orb ceased to cry.

When he was two, he fell and split his forehead wide open on a coffee table corner. It was Christmas Eve. The blood refused to clot, and Orb was drained to a pallor the likes of a ghost. Ledford wrapped and rewrapped the boy's head, using first his own shirt and then Willy's. At the hospital, the doctor said the boy had hemophilia. Later, another doctor said that was hogwash, that the boy had von Willebrand disease. None could figure over the years why some of Orb's cuts and scrapes clotted and others didn't. The only thing they uniformly agreed upon was that internal bleeding was to be feared, and that the boy ought never be jostled hard, as one might be in a fall from a height or an automobile crash.

Rachel had looked at her husband when this was spoken. His blank face told of the thoughts inside. Thoughts of his own family's end in an automobile.

By five years old, it was clear that brain doctors could not figure out the boy's episodes. They spoke of electrical currents, explosions in his mind that rendered him useless, but there was no evidence of seizure.

Orb was a mystery child. The only thing they knew was that he couldn't read worth a damn, and that he didn't belong in regular school. So, Rachel had kept him at home, where she and Ledford let him be who he was. Turned out he could shoot the daylights out of a marble and sing like an angel from heaven.

The light in the kitchen shifted. Rain clouds were moving in. Rachel walked out back to unpin her wash. She'd just reached for the bedsheet corner when something caught her eye. Wimpy was thirty yards off, at woods' edge, and he was talking to someone who wasn't there. Rachel took a few steps in his direction.

At the foot of a sumac tree, Wimpy regarded the redbird, perched on a high branch, side-stepping and wagging its head. “I don't know,” Wimpy said. “You tell me.”

The bird whistled back, “Whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit,” and Wimpy laughed out loud.

Rachel got within twenty yards when Wimpy and the redbird turned and looked at her. She stopped, thought about turning around. Instead, she raised a hello hand and quickened her pace. Wimpy smiled nervously and turned back to the bird. He said something she couldn't make out. When she got within a few feet, the redbird shot from its perch and disappeared into the woods. Rachel stopped. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“It's all right.” Wimpy started to walk away.

“Wait.” She didn't know what to say after that. In her bones she knew this to be the same bird that had stared her down and dive-bombed her more than ten years before.

Wimpy turned and looked at her like he'd done something wrong. “I think I know that bird,” Rachel said.

Wimpy cocked his head and regarded her. He stepped in close. “I've knowed him for twenty years,” he said. “Now what kind of cardinal lives for twenty years?”

“How do you know it's the same one?”

“Cause he's missin the middle toe on his right foot and his eyes is twice the size of most.” Wimpy used his tongue to excavate a clump of snuff from his jaw. He spat it on the ground. “What do you mean you know him?”

“About ten years ago, that bird dive-bombed me in the backyard over here.” She pointed back at the house.

Wimpy laughed. “He had the horn for you, I reckon,” he said. “Was it in April?”

Rachel felt momentarily as if she were in a dream, as if this conversation could not occur in waking life. “It was April Fool's Day,” she said.

“Well, there you go. He was foolin with you.”

Rachel felt faint. “I need to sit down,” she said. And she did, right there on the dirt and grass.

Wimpy sat across from her. “Maybe it's that whiskey I smell on your breath.” He winked at her. Then he looked to the woods, where the bird had disappeared. “Dimple thinks I'm touched in the head for how I feel about that bird, but he's been visitin me so long, talking to me like he does, that I just don't care what Dimple thinks.” He pulled at a hunk of crabgrass and tossed it over his shoulder. “As I recall, that bird used to visit in April, then it was May the next year, then June. He comes every year, and he tells me things.”

“What does he tell you?”

Wimpy pulled the leaves off a crabgrass shoot and stuck it in his teeth. He sized Rachel up before he spoke. “When he's happy, he weets and whoits and dances, like he done today. That tells me there'll be no flood, no deaths in the family and what have you.” He watched her react. There was nothing there but genuine interest. Belief even.

Rachel swallowed. Her throat was dry. Lips the same. “And when he's not happy?”

“Well, then he chips.”

“Chips?”

“Chips.” Wimpy proceeded to imitate the bird's unhappy sound.

“And he don't dance, and he stares at you a good bit.”

“Has he ever flown at you?” Rachel asked.

“Can't say that he has.” Wimpy stood up. “But I ain't a beautiful creature like yourself.” He reached down and helped Rachel to her feet.

“Redbirds is horny for women that smell good and keep a little money in the breadbox.” He laughed. Rachel joined him. “I got to git,” Wimpy said. He tipped his hat and walked away.

 

S
TAPLES STOOD BEFORE
them, his Bibled hand raised above his head. The pews were nearly filled. In the back sat Paul Maynard and his family. Paul had combed his hair and trimmed his mustache for the service.

“How many here know the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?” Staples asked. He waggled his Bible and watched the hands raise before him. There were only three. Ledford, Lizzie, and Paul Maynard.

Staples spread his Bible on the podium and combed his fingers through his beard. “When Nebuchadnezzar had a giant golden statue erected in Babylon, he made it law that all should fall down and worship it upon hearing the sound of a musical instrument. Those who did not obey this law would be thrown in a furnace and burned alive.”

In the very first pew, Jerry sat at attention. His hymnal was in his lap, and upon it were paper scraps and a pencil. Jerry had long ago begun to take notes at the Land of Canaan Congregational. He hung on every word that split Don Staples' lips, and he'd come to like church more than anything else in his life. With his pencil, he wrote,
Nebakudazzer?
and vowed silently to crack open his Bible that evening back at home. He checked his wristwatch. It was nearly eleven. Herchel was still in bed, no doubt snoring, too hungover to keep his word and come to church.

Staples said, “But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were wise, and they knew when man's law was foolish. They knew that when God's law conflicted with man's, only one could be obeyed. And so it was that they refused to fall down and worship the golden statue, and so it was that Nebuchadnezzar had them thrown into the furnace, which he'd stoked to seven times its normal temperature.”

Ledford looked out the window at the smoke rising from his own furnace. He wondered if Stretch Hayes was eyeballing the fire as he should. Wondered if the temperature was too high or low, if the batch on the rollers would be prone to cracks.

Staples leaned forward on his elbows, the podium seams creaking under his weight. He pulled his spectacles from his shirt pocket and put them on. “The three were not burned,” he said. “They walked from the furnace just as they went in.” He put his finger to its designation on the thin, greasy page and read, “And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king's counselors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed, neither their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.” Staples looked out at his congregation over the bridge of his spectacles. His bad eye rolled wide, then he blinked and found his focus. “And Nebuchadnezzar blessed their God who had delivered his servants, for these men had yielded their bodies and changed the king's law.” Then Staples, as he was prone to do, slammed shut his Bible on the podium and removed his spectacles. The thud emitted would awaken any drowsers among them, and he would search out their dozing eyes with his own. “Why do I tell you of this story?” he asked. “Why today?”

None knew the answer to this question better than Ledford, who had ceased to look at the column of smoke out the window. He knew that the lesson was meant for him especially, as Staples had taken him aside after the cattle prod incident at Smalley's. He'd questioned Ledford's discipline for nonviolent protest. Staples had told him, “We will never find the change we seek if we give in to our baser instincts.” He'd gone on to say that Ledford might need some soul-searching, that he might need to reconcile his past. His parents, his brother, the violence that took them away. The war, what it had done to him. Staples had tapped Ledford on the chest and said, “Son, you'll never make it unless you turn all that war inside you into something else.”

Now he looked at Ledford where he sat. He smiled to the younger man before continuing. “I tell you this story today because I was reminded of it by a magazine article. I'm a subscriber to the magazine, and in last week's issue, I read one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I've ever come across. Its author was Dr. Martin King, who Ledford and I had the privilege of meeting a few years back at the First Baptist Church in Charleston.”

Paul Maynard shifted in his seat and pulled at the crotch of his slacks. He sighed and worked his jaw. He'd sat his family closest to the door on purpose. They'd taken to attending services about a year prior. The rest of the Maynards had not followed suit. When Staples got to talking like he was now, about King and his cause, Paul always got up and walked out. On this morning, he did not.

“While imprisoned in Birmingham Alabama a few months back,” Staples went on, “Dr. King penned a letter in the margins of newspapers and on smuggled-in scraps. That letter was addressed to the six Alabama clergymen who had denounced his tactics of direct, nonviolent action.” Sweat gathered in Staples' graying eyebrows. He wiped them with his thumbs. “In the letter, he points out that such nonviolent stances against the unjust laws of man trace back to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and that the acts of civil disobedience we see practiced by oppressed Negroes today serve to remind us all of what many have forgotten.” He looked Paul Maynard dead in the face, and then he looked over all of them, his brow furrowed, his jaw set. “That the immoral ways of segregation and the oppression of the poor must be met head-on with the strength of God's moral law, and if done peaceably, with yielded bodies, the unjust kings on their bloodied thrones will no doubt change their ways.”