The Marrowbone Marble Company (36 page)

I
T WAS
N
EW
Y
EAR'S
Day. In twenty-four hours' time, the Corps of Engineers would own the land. Mary walked the grounds of Marrowbone, her new camera in hand. She stood in front of the burnt-down factory, a place they'd all avoided since July. She filmed the circle of glass on the dirt. Snow fell.

Beside her, Ledford knelt and tapped his hooks on the thick glass. “Go get your ice skates on and have at it,” he said.

Mary smiled. She filmed her daddy. He looked up at her, said, “Shut it off.”

Across the Cut, the Bonecutter brothers rode Silver and Boo at woods' edge. Saddlebags hung full over the horses' haunches.

“Put your camera on those two,” Ledford said. “That's the last you'll ever see of em.”

The brothers had said their goodbyes the night before. They would not elaborate on their plans, only said they were leaving Marrowbone for good. Riding to the hills. Living off the land and moving on when the time came. “It's how we were meant to live,” Wimpy had told Ledford. “It's what the bugs and critters have been tellin us, what my mother always said. This Cut ain't meant for brogans to tread.”

Mary filmed them as their horses cut a path through the empty trees. Up the mountain they went. Ledford watched them just as Mary did, until they'd disappeared. He was still bent to the ground. Its clay was the color of rust. There was a hole by his boot the size of a half-dollar. He stuck his hooks inside, imagined the coming flood, the cicada holes filling up and channeling someplace hot and deep. He imagined the underground plumbing filling with water until the pipes exploded. The coffins too.

Ledford stood and surveyed the place.

Chickens pecked dirt, near and far. Harold had turned them loose Christmas morning.

The vegetable garden was gray and fallow. Cat droppings lined the rows. A hundred or more slugs hid in root holes.

Orb ran past the old dog pen and into a patch of dry stickweeds. Ledford watched the boy go, the shoulder-high weeds bending before him and waking like water behind.

Ledford knew things then that he never had before. What he'd thought was a boyhood memory had turned out to be a vision. It wasn't him who'd run through weeds or fished in a rowboat with his daddy. It was Orb. All along, it was his own boy.

He thought of Staples' words on the foolish ways of man.

Ledford was no fool.

He had come to know a great many things in his short time. He'd killed boys halfway across the world, and then he'd come home to raise his own. He'd done the best he could.

Ledford knew that Wimpy had been right. Marrowbone Cut was not meant for people, except maybe the Indians, and they were killed off in another life. Men would always set their compass on killing. They'd kill over the color of skin. They'd kill over land, and in time, they'd make the land into water. Then they'd stock the water with fish so they could catch and kill those too. And Ledford would sit with that. He'd sit in a rowboat with his littlest boy, who was now the size of a man, and who could not speak a sound. Together, oars angled at the sky, they'd fish. An open boat on the trickle. A spot of peace in the world.

In this book, I wrote of many things that I can never truly know or understand. In making the attempt, I consulted the books of several authors who did in fact know and understand, and I cannot thank them enough. The same goes for the expertise of a couple kind souls who put up with my phone calls full of questions.

I am not a glass man, and so I appreciated the wealth of knowledge in
Calling to Memory…The History of the Owens-Illinois Huntington, WV Plant #2
by the KYOWVA Genealogy and Historical Society. I also consulted the online source
Batch, Blow, and Boys: The Glass Industry in the United States, 1820s–1900
, particularly
Batch recipe book of D. J. Crowley, ca. 1890s.
In addition, for all of his help, I'd like to offer my sincere thanks to Jim King, a real marble man in Sistersville, West Virginia.

I have never been to war, and so I owe a debt of gratitude to
The Story of World War II
by Donald L. Miller,
Guadalcanal
by Richard B. Frank,
Goodbye, Darkness
by William P. Manchester, and
Blood for Dignity
by David P. Colley.

I was not yet born at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and so I would like to acknowledge
At Canaan's Edge
by Taylor Branch,
Selma 1965
by Charles E. Fager, The Library of America's
Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two
, particularly “Letter from Selma” by Renata Adler, and Steven Kasher's
The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History
. Also, Bruce A. Thompson's master's thesis,
An Appeal for Racial Justice: The Civic Interest Progressives' Confrontation with Huntington, West Virginia and Marshall University, 1963–1965
was of great help. I consulted the archives of the
Charleston Daily Mail,
the
Charleston Gazette,
and the
Herald-Dispatch
as well (thanks to my friend Bob Brumfield for pointing me in the right direction on the Keith-Albee incident). And, for both his profound knowledge and lived experience of the time, I humbly thank C. Michael Gray, fellow Huntingtonian.

I offer my gratitude to Huey Perry, for his book
They'll Cut Off Your Project
. It was the basis for so much herein, and it was immeasurably helpful and inspirational in writing about those folks who most choose to forget.

There are several other books that have, in various and odd ways, influenced me over the last couple of years, and without them, I could not have possessed the necessary wisdom for an endeavor such as this. They are,
The Telltale Lilac Bush
by Ruth Ann Musick (for “Hickory Nuts”),
Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia
by Anthony Cavender,
Concise Guide to Self-Sufficiency
by John Seymour, and
Horseplayers
by Ted McClelland.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my consultation of
The Periodical Cicada
by Charles V. Riley and
Handbook of Severe Disability
by Walter C. Stolov and Michael R. Clowers.

To my marvelous agent, Terra Chalberg, I thank you. For so many things. To everyone at Ecco who worked on this book, I appreciate it. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge Ginny and Dan, who simply do things right. Dan, you're the man, and I thank you.

To Dot Jackson, I say thank you, for everything, for being who you are.

I'd like to thank my family—all of them, by blood or by marriage, from kinfolks who are gone to those still here, from my sisters to my sons—and a special thanks to my parents, Maury and Carol. My wife, Margaret, is beyond thanks. She is, simply, the best.

Jacket design by Allison Saltzman

Jacket illustration courtesy of The New York Public Library

Map by Caroline Towson Morgan