The Marrowbone Marble Company (7 page)

Erm looked at him as if he'd insulted his mother.

“How old would you guess she is?” Charlie's voice was pinched. Erm squared up on him. He cocked his head and smiled. “Eighty-seven,” he said. “What's your guess?”

Charlie laughed, then looked down at the cigar box. He opened it, looked in Erm's general direction, and said, “Cigar, Mr. Dingleberry?” His voice cracked on the last syllable.

“No, it's
Admiral
Dingleberry, kid. And yes, I wouldn't care to partake of your smoking pleasures.” Erm kept his expression straight. Ledford did the same beside him, though the urge to laugh was strong. Erm still hadn't reached for a White Owl. He said, “That your position in this dump? You the cigar girl?”

With that, Ledford laughed out loud. “All right, Erm,” he said. Charlie frowned and closed the box. “Hold it now, Kemoslabe,” Erm said. “Big Chief White Owl want smokem.”

Ledford interceded. “Charlie here is handing out cigars on account of Rachel giving birth Saturday.”

Erm spun his head. “No foolin. You son of a bitch.” They shook hands again. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. William, after my daddy.”

“How about that? Big Bill Ledford. I bet he's a biggin. Hung where it counts like his old man.”

Charlie laughed.

Erm glared at him. “Let's have at it then. Open er up and fire the torch.”

The three of them stood and smoked and Erm uncorked his gin and passed the bottle. Ledford couldn't bear to tell him how much he'd cut back, so he sipped light instead. He explained how they were doing just fine, careful not to badmouth his job too much in front of Charlie. “Renting out the old house,” Ledford said.

“Yeah, to a nigger,” Charlie said. He laughed and took another swig off the bottle.

Ledford stared Charlie down and breathed slow and even. He contemplated his response.

Erm said, “Well Sally, you just jump in anytime.”

Now both men stared at him, and Charlie set the bottle on the desk and excused himself.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Erm said. “Who the hell was that pansy?”

“That's Rachel's first cousin. Her daddy's nephew. Pain in my ass.” They both reached for the bottle at the same time. Laughed and exchanged
after you sirs
.

Erm sat down and explained he was passing through on business he had in Baltimore. He got quiet after that. Neither spoke of their last meeting. Of Ledford's serious talk, of Erm's
fuck you
admonition, of the inevitable end of the auto driver who'd run over the wrong man.

Ledford still owed Erm six hundred on a straight play from the previous November, when Army had blanked West Virginia. The spread was two touchdowns. The final score was 19–0. Erm even made him pay the vig.

Ledford had been laying off the gambling like it was the sauce. After a long silence, Erm said, “I got married.”

“I'll be damned. When?”

“Last Thursday.” He looked around at the empty walls, tapped his shoes on the floor.

“Well…congratulations Erm.” Ledford nodded his head to convince himself such a move was wise for his friend.

“Yeah,” Erm said. “She's got a bun in the oven.”

Ledford raised his eyebrows. “Congratulations again.”

“A toast to married life,” Erm said. They drank again, and Ledford was about to ask what her name was when Erm hopped out of his chair and said, “I gotta hit the road, but I'll be coming back through real soon.”

Ledford stood. He smiled uneasy. There was something in Erm's demeanor, something that said he was running from trouble. Ledford would not protest the abrupt departure. It was the way things were for Erminio Bacigalupo. Always, he was running. Don Staples had been talking to Ledford about such movement through life. Away from things. Toward them.

“Listen,” Erm said. He was making sure his shirt cuffs stuck out beyond his jacket. “I got something I need you to hold on to for me.” He pulled a fat-stuffed leather envelope from his inside pocket. “Just make sure it stays where nobody gets their hands on it.” He held it out, but Ledford didn't reach. “It isn't a bag of dogshit Ledford. It's dough. And a book.”

Ledford laughed and took it. Rubbed his thumb across the gold snap button holding it shut. “I got a safe spot in the basement at home.”

“Good. And for your trouble, we'll wipe your paysheet clean. Get you out of my left column, back on the right.” Erm winked. Then he leaned forward. “But listen,” he said. “If I don't make it back from Baltimore, you see that money gets to my old lady.”

An alarm sounded from the factory floor. Erm stuck his fingers in his ears. “Some job you got here,” he hollered.

“It's just a backup on the flow line,” Ledford hollered back. He looked at the half-full gin bottle, wondered if his friend would be leaving it behind.

“Whatever you say.” Erm licked his pointer and pinky fingers, then smoothed his eyebrows. “For Ernestine on the way out,” he said. He turned, was gone, then stuck his head back in the office. He yelled, “I'll be back in a week or two.”

The alarm shut down, and from outside his door, Ledford could hear the low murmur of Erm's voice, then Ernestine's giggle. The leather envelope in his hand was squared off, worn at the corners by whatever it held. It was smooth cowhide, a deep brown. Ledford wondered why Erm might not make it out of Baltimore alive. He wondered how much money was in his hands. He put the envelope in the middle drawer of his desk. In the bottom right drawer he set the gin bottle on its side. Then he sat down and stared at the pile of paperwork before him. At home, Rachel would be nursing or napping. Mary would be playing with her great-aunt. Ledford looked at Mary's photograph on the wall. He'd need to get one up of William.

T
HEY WERE CALLING HIM
Willy within a week. Sometimes Ledford called him Willy Amos. He slept just fine in the daylight hours, but at night he fussed and fought his swaddling. Rachel was too tired to rise every time, so Ledford took to walking the house with the boy. He sang to him and he danced with him. He stared at the boy's eyes and how they locked on to an unknown point and stayed there regardless of swaying, all iris and pupil, black as cast iron. He had a darker tint to him than Mary. He was bigger than she'd been.

Ledford one-armed little Willy in the basement early Sunday morning. It was not yet four a.m. He pulled the lightbulb chain hanging from the rafters, and the boy squeezed his eyes shut. “It's all right,” Ledford told him. “Just a lightbulb.”

Willy cried some, so Ledford lifted him high and sniffed directly at the seat of his diaper. It smelled only of powder. “That's a boy,” he said. “You just stay that way until your mother rises and shines.”

He strolled the length of the basement floor, pointing to and naming the tail fan of turkey feathers, the glass scrap shaped liked diamonds, the map of the world he'd hung. He put his fingertip to the map and said, “This here green chunk is the United States of America, and right here, West Virginia, is where we live.” He slid the finger to the right. “And if you take a boat or a airplane across all this blue water, and you cross this pink Spain and over all these different colors in Africa, you get to here,” he tapped his finger against it, “to these little specks of nothing on the blue ocean, to where your daddy was for a time.” Willy's head wobbled from his propped vantage point on Ledford's shoulder. He liked the tapping sound of his father's fingers on the paper map.

Ledford laughed. “All right, little one,” he said. They stared at one another for a moment, and Ledford kissed him on the forehead. Then he looked back to the map.

He took a deep breath and told his boy that he'd not ever have to go to the little specks on the ocean, nor any other place like them. He put his hand on the boy's chest, his fingers nearly wrapping around the girth of him, and he said, “I will protect you from all of it, William Amos.”

When the boy fell asleep, Ledford set him on a cushioned desk chair from the old house. He began unpacking the last of the boxes.
Attic Junk
it read on the side. In the box, an old black album of photographs popped and cracked when he opened it. With each turned page, it shed little black corner frames. Ledford gathered them as they fell. The photographs themselves were lined and chipped with age. They were not in the order they'd been intended. Their look made them his daddy's people, the Ledfords of Mingo, mostly tall and thin. Unsmiling faces and cheekbones that cast shadows. There were dates in faded pencil on the backs of some. Names like Oliver and Homer and Eliza and Wilhelmina. In one photograph, Ledford's daddy swung on a rope hung from a tree limb. He looked to be about six, his T-shirt dirty, loose around the neck. His head a blur of black hair and bared teeth.

Ledford picked up the other album. There wasn't much inside. Four pages filled out of twenty. An old woman who looked to be part Indian sat in a rocking chair and smoked a clay pipe. There was no name or date on the back. A baby picture of a child with eyes big and dark like his own children. On the back, somebody had written
Bonecutter
.

He picked up another book, leatherbound. It was small but thick, the size of a good Bible. It was his daddy's batch book from the early days at Mann Glass. Pages were organized by color.
White Batch
and
Opal
and
Best Opal
and
Shade Batch White.
There were penciled-in measurements of hundreds of pounds of sand and soda. Lead and arsenic. Ounces counted for borax and manganese. Bones. Bill Ledford had figured out how to make a transparent green by adding copper scabs.
Every shade of green may be obtained
, he wrote.

In the back pages, the batch book became an account of disparate times in his life. Bill Ledford had written in it almost daily, it seemed, from the years 1916 to 1925. There were passages about his days playing ball in the Blue Ridge League for the Martinsburg Blue Sox.

The baby shifted and grunted on the seat cushion. Ledford eyed him a minute and knew he wasn't long for sleep. He flipped fast through the journal's pages, looking for something. In all those years alone in his house, he'd never been able to look. He'd feared doing so would make everything worse than it already was. But Ledford was the father now, and fear had been replaced by the single-minded need to keep his wife and children above ground. He'd protect them all.

On the next-to-last page the handwriting was easier to read, as if written slow. It read,

Willy screamed out sudden. Ledford dropped the book back in the box and stood. The hair on his arms and neck was pricked and he couldn't get enough saliva to swallow. He held little Willy and felt his own heart race against the child's side, pressed to him. He could not understand what he had just read. The mind was not made to know such words as those from his daddy's pencil. Ledford breathed deep and looked out the single-pane window. The ground there was warming, sunrise gathering in its well. He watched a dwarf spider navigate the glass and wondered why he opened the books. He'd been getting by all right as of late, drinking less on the advice of Don Staples. Dreams visited Ledford with less frequency, their horrors dulled. But what he'd read had stirred anew the unquiet. He looked at his boy, no longer screaming but not yet settled, his eyes like those in the photographs.

 

S
EVEN-CARD STUD
was the only game allowed in the home of Don Staples. Straight poker and five-card draw had no place. If a man tried to force such a variation, Staples would walk away from the table and hit the light switch on his way to bed. The group had changed over the years but had never topped five men. Its exclusivity was born in the idea that those light on brains and nickels, while always welcome in Staples' office or home, were not permitted to pull a chair to his round-top mahogany card table. In the fall of 1947, the group was down to three: Don, his younger brother, Bob, and Ledford. An exception to custom was made on the final Friday of October, Halloween night, when Ledford phoned ahead that Erminio Bacigalupo was passing through on his way back from Baltimore, and that he was a fine poker man. Staples said bring him.

Before they left the house, Rachel spoke very little to Erm. She had always mistrusted him, though not as much since her wedding night, when he'd told her, “Ledford is the brother I never had, and I'd take a bullet for him.” Still, when he was under her roof, she watched him, close.

In the basement, Ledford pulled Erm's leather envelope from under the swastika quilt in the trunk. Erm opened it and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from the stack. “For your trouble,” he said. “And if you want to double it, look at the over-under on Maryland tomorrow. Now let's go play some poker.”

Staples' house was small, dark inside. From the record player in the corner, Louis Armstrong's “Big Butter and Egg Man” played. The acorn ceiling fixture gathered smoke from below.

Each of the card table's four legs carried an ashtray. The men sat slouched over their elbows. They eyeballed the cards face up on the table and lifted the corner of those faced down. Ledford folded after Fifth Street, Bob after Sixth. Erm dealt in a manner bespeaking experience. The cards flipped from his finger and thumb and turned a singular revolution before landing flat. He was showing a pair of Jacks. Staples, a pair of sevens.

“Check,” Staples said. He tossed in a nickel, and down came Seventh Street. They showed their five and Erm took the pot, again.

Bob shook his head. He was ten years younger than Don, yet everything about them seemed identical—voice, movements, eyes, laugh. Bob was a less-wrinkled, clean-shaven version of his brother. He scooted his chair back. “I gotta hit the head,” he said.

“Magnifying glass is in the top bureau drawer,” Don said.

Erm laughed and raked in his dollar seventy-five.

Staples packed his pipe and lit it. “Ledford tells me you've recently married.”

“That's right.” Erm's nod was loose on the hinges, and his eyes were shrinking fast. “She's a looker, but she's goofy up top, you know?” He tapped his temple with a finger.

Staples laughed. “I know,” he said. “Ain't we all?”

The clock on the wall read ten past midnight. They'd been playing for three hours. Ledford looked from the clock to his quarter-full rocks glass. He'd gone as easy as he could, but it was harder with Erm around.

The cornet sang a sad tune from the corner.

Bob sat back down and sighed. “I'm about busted,” he said. He'd checked his pocket watch every ten minutes for an hour. Bob was a trial lawyer with a wife and three kids and his eye on public office. And though he'd gotten on fine with Erm that evening, he'd just as soon not know him past midnight. Like his big brother, Bob was a man of God, though he'd not taken the philosopher's path to knowing him, and he'd not wrecked his marriage and children along the way. He loved Don dearly, but he'd not gone overseas like his older brother. He'd never understood the demons.

“Looks like you can ante and stick for a few rounds.” Erm pointed to the little pile of nickels in front of Bob.

Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. He breathed in deep through his nose. “I reckon I could play one more.”

“Big Bob,” Erm said. “Big Bob, Big Butter and Egg Man.”

“Like the song says.” Staples stole a look at Ledford. They'd spent a little time in the office talking on Erm.

It was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that comes when a record has stopped playing and one man is drunker than the rest.

Bob shuffled the deck slow. Erm declined to cut. He poured another whiskey and sat back in his chair. “Ledford tells me you're a scholar and a man of the cloth.”

Staples smiled easy. “I've lived in both worlds. Even tried to mix the two.”

“Flammable is it?” Erm studied Bob's dealing motion, a habit of the suspicious.

“It can combust, if that's what you mean,” Staples said.

“I don't know what I mean half the time.” Erm laughed. It was loud. “But if somebody had told me I'd be at a Virginia poker table with a preacher, a lawyer, and an office jockey, I'd have told him to climb up his fuckin thumb.”

“You're in West Virginia Erm,” Ledford said. He peeked at his down cards.

“That's what I said.”

“You said
Virginia
.”

“Tomato, tomahto.”

The Staples brothers looked at each other the way they always had when a card game went south. It was quiet, each man surveying what he had.

“Potato, potahto,” Erm said. Then, “Shit or get off the pot, Preach. We got to go church in the morning.”

“I fold,” Staples said. His chair whined when he leaned back in it. Ledford raised a dime and wished he hadn't told Erm about Willy's baptism the next day. Truth be told, he'd wanted to ask Don or Mack to be the boy's godfather, but one was lapsed and the other was black. Then Erm showed up, and without thinking Ledford had asked him.

Erm saw the dime and raised another. Bob folded. He dealt the rest of the hand in silence. Erm took the pot and kept his mouth shut for once.

Bob stood and stretched. He said, “Well gentlemen.”

Don stood and followed his brother to the kitchen. On the way, he asked about a case Bob was trying. “Any more on the Bonecutter dispute?”

Erm slapped his hand on the table. “Drink with me Leadfoot,” he said.

Ledford ignored him. He was tuned in to the Staples brothers.
Bonecutter
, they'd said. It was the name from the back of the photograph. He got up and walked to the kitchen.

Don washed and dried his glass, his back to Bob, who leaned against the range, arms crossed. He was talking about arson.

“What was that name you used just now?” Ledford asked.

“Bonecutter,” Bob said. He yawned. “They're a wild bunch out in Wayne County. Trouble. Had a land dispute with Maynard Coal for years, and I've done some work for them, pro bono. Now all hell's broke loose.”

Bonecutter
. It seemed to Ledford a name he'd known all his life. “Well who set the fire?” Don wiped his hands with a yellow dish rag. He still wore his wedding ring, though he'd not seen his wife in fifteen years.

“Looks like the bad Maynard boy did it. He's come up missin since.”

“That's mass murder he committed,” Don said. His eyes were wide. He held the dish rag at his side, fisted, like he was trying to squeeze something out of it.