The Marrowbone Marble Company (9 page)

“Your brother is a wise man,” Ledford said. “He's helped me a good bit.”

They'd turned off 152 and were doglegging a steep county road. Knob Drop, Bob had called it.
Do Not Pass
, the sign said. Everything out here was steep, and every place name was followed by the word
Branch
or
Fork
. They passed a house where a man sold tobacco from the open trunk of a dead automobile.

Bob slowed to twenty miles per hour. He pointed ahead. “Dead man's curve,” he said.

Ledford watched out his window as they rounded it. A drop-off of a hundred feet or more, no guardrail.

Some trees had emptied their color. Others were dotted here and there, red and yellow. Mostly, the hills of Wayne County were the color of mud, and it rolled down their inclines uncontained by streambeds. The mines had opened up new punctures, and folks had grown accustomed to what spilled forth.

“I aim to throw my hat in the ring,” Bob said. He'd slowed where muddy water crossed the road. The edges were crumbling away, the mark of habitual floodwater.

“Which ring?”

“Maybe Senate. Maybe governor.” The tires spun free for a moment, then found their footing. “She's going to need a wash after this one,” Bob said. “Should've brought the wagon.”

Ledford was thinking on senators and governors. It seemed to him they were usually white-haired and slicker than Bob. He looked down at the open file in his lap. Bob had told him to study up the case on the way. There was a letter from Maynard Coal & Coke dated February 1943 that read, in part,
It is our belief that your property includes coal reserves that would be conducive to the new surface mining methods of extraction
and
we encourage you to join your neighbors in the economic benefits that this offer represents.
There was a map of record from the county tax office. Tracts of land were sliced and numbered, lined and shaded. The Bonecutter tract was shaded the darkest gray, and it was the biggest plot by a longshot.
500 acre
somebody had penciled under it. The letters dated 1944 and onward employed increasingly threatening language. A handwritten one said,
You'll sell or you'll burn to the ground
. Another letter claimed the Maynards actually owned the Bonecutter tract, and that they had the deed to prove it.

Bob turned left on an ungraded road of dirt. Brown water rippled in potholes the size of tractor tires. Bob jerked the wheel right and left one-handed. He spilled coffee on his white shirt, cursed, and finished it off. Up and down they went, orchestrated by the thump and growl of axles and acceleration. “The Maynard boy that came up missing since the arson was bad from the get-go,” Bob said.

“Is that right?”

“The youngest boy, Sam. Was a Golden Glove welterweight at one point. But he drank. His daddy Paul is Wayne County sheriff. Good man.”

“Do the Maynards own their own outfit?” Ledford shut the file and gripped the dash.

“They do. One of the few operators who grew from nothing. There isn't a New Englander on the payroll, even at the tippy top.”

After a quarter mile, it seemed to Ledford that they'd been swallowed by the branches growing over the road. Up ahead, he saw an old barrier gate of the swinging variety. Wood with iron hinges and hardware. For a moment, Ledford felt that he'd been to this gate before.

“These are good people, the Bonecutters, but they'll put you on edge some at first.” Bob laughed a little. “Not even at first, really. More like all the time. But they're all right. And they just want to keep what belongs to them.”

Ledford hadn't mentioned his suspicion that he was somehow kin to the Bonecutters.

A man appeared from the brush behind the gate. He wore muddied brogans and blue jeans and a winter coat with the sheep's-wool collar up. On his head was a flattened engineer's cap whose grime had erased its stripes. The man undid a heavy chain and swung the gate open.

“I think that's Wimpy, but I can't be sure,” Bob said. He gave enough gas to push them through, then held up.

The man relatched the gate and walked slow to the driver's door. He stooped a little to peer inside. There was a rifle over his shoulder.

Bob said, “Mornin.”

Ledford nodded hello.

It was hard to know if the man nodded back or not. There was some movement, but it was subtle. The bones in the man's face were right-angle sharp and ready to bust through skin, and his eyes spoke to the mastery of fear, the willingness to end a problem before it started.

“This is Loyal Ledford, a friend of mine,” Bob said.

Ledford nodded again. He watched the man's face as the name registered. It was hard to read.

“You want to hop in and ride the rest of the way?” Bob's smile was timid, and he blinked double-time.

“Nossir.” Wimpy stood up straight and walked ahead through the ditched wet leaves lining the road.

They drove past him down the steep incline. Rounding a bend, Ledford beheld Bonecutter Ridge and his insides shuddered. The sight of it brought Guadalcanal straight back to him, the camelback cutting the sky at Bloody Ridge. Ledford's breathing seized and he smelled scorched gunpowder and the effluvium of blown-open men. He tried to take deep breaths, settle himself.

If Bob noticed, he didn't say so.

They came to the bottom of a long, wide hollow. It ran low through the mountains like a trench.

The home sat at the head of the hollow. It was a single pen house of flat-planked logs, all different shades of gray. A bear hide, head attached, was nailed to the side. There was a sturdy-built outhouse ten paces out. Behind the house was a half-rotted crib barn, and next to that was a small, square dwelling. Bob cut the ignition and pointed to a scorched patch a ways off. “That was the newer home,” he said. “The one that burnt down.” Then he pointed to the little square building. “That was the butcher's shop, I guess you'd call it. Where the hogs were quartered and all.” He pointed to the single pen house. “And this house here is original to the Bonecutter family. Built in 1798.”

Everywhere, chickens pecked the dirt. Big ones and bantams, none the same shade. There was a small burial plot, fenced. Its headstones were crooked. Behind it, a gray goat clacked horns with a black one.

They got out of the car. Ledford noted only a single window on the place, high up, square, and empty. One of the two doors opened and a man stepped onto the jutting rock foundation. He was identical to the one who'd greeted them, who now approached from behind. Same right-angled face bones, same eyes. Same engineer's cap.

“That's Dimple,” Bob said.

When they got closer, Ledford took note of Dimple's scars. Plentiful. Deep. Skin where stubble should have grown. There was one on his cheek in the shape of a star that was no doubt the source of his nickname.

Short introductions were made before they went inside and sat on four chairs in front of the big black cookstove. Wimpy sat closest and fed the embers. He blew through pursed lips until it caught, then pulled logs from their floor stack between the stove's cast-iron legs. He leaned so close he singed his eyebrows. You could smell it on the air.

“There's beans still hot if you're hungry,” Dimple said. He chewed on a long kindling splinter.

Both visitors said thank you, no. The water pot boiled up.

Wimpy poured coffees all around. Ledford scorched his tongue on the first swig.

They spoke about the Maynards, and Bob produced the file folder from his briefcase. He pointed to parts of the text and handed the folder to Dimple, who read intently.

“They never did have nothin to go on,” Dimple said after a while.

“And I don't give a flat damn what anybody says otherwise.” He closed the folder and handed it back.

“I believe you're right,” Bob said. “I believe Paul Maynard would agree with you. Seems to me he's lookin to leave well enough alone.” It was quiet. “That only leaves the matter of the arson, and this Sam Maynard that's gone missing.”

“Well,” Dimple said. “Paul Maynard knows better than to step foot out here, sheriff or not.”

“And no one's appeared to file a missing report on Sam.”

“I don't know about any of that.” Dimple worked his jaw in time with his heartbeat.

“Has any Maynard made further attempt to claim any part of your acreage since Sam's disappearance?”

“No.”

“Well, I wonder if the whole thing might just fizzle. If you two are content—what I mean is if they're content to…” Bob thought twice on speaking his train of thought aloud. He'd gathered enough about hill justice to know when to keep his mouth shut.

Wimpy looked at his brother, then poked at the cookstove with a skinny log. Sparks kicked around inside like lightning bugs dying.

Ledford watched the hot square and let his eyes blur before Wimpy closed it back up. He thought about his furnace-tending days, how it was to be in charge of all that heat.

Wimpy brushed his callused hands against each other. He leaned his elbows on his knees and cocked his head to Ledford. “We're kin to Ledfords,” he said.

It caught all of them off guard, as Wimpy had not said a word up to then.

“Yessir,” Ledford answered. “I was reading through some of my daddy's things, and I came across your family name.” His voice was weak. He cleared his throat.

Wimpy said, “Was your daddy Bill?”

“Yessir.”

The brothers looked at one another. Each was relaxed almost to sleep, one pitched forward, the other tilted back. Dimple had his hands clasped behind his head.

He said, “Bill's mother, your grandmother…” He stopped and thought. “Did you know your grandmother?”

“No, I didn't.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

Wimpy laughed and Dimple scoffed. He said, “Boy, you still growin, ain't you?”

“Still growin hair on his pecker,” Wimpy said.

The brothers laughed hard then, and Bob and Ledford joined them. When it quieted, Dimple spoke. “If I know right, your daddy's mother was Rose Coldsnow Bonecutter, my daddy's cousin.”

“That's right,” Wimpy said. He nodded and looked at his shoes, which he tapped softly on the floorboards. The light from the single window wasn't much. From inside, you'd hardly know if it was night or day. Firelight danced on the black bottoms of nail-hung cast-iron frying pans.

“Rose taught me in the second grade,” Dimple said.

Wimpy had a peculiar look in his eyes. “I can see her now,” he said.

“I was back in the woods a playin and I looked down and it was her funeral, and it cast a pall on ever thing. When you see something like that, it casts a pall, don't it?”

“She died of the cancer,” Dimple said. “Her husband was Alfred Ledford.”

“Your granddaddy,” Wimpy said.

“Al, they called him.” Dimple watched Ledford close. “You never knowed him.”

Wimpy said, “Al was from Mingo County, and he was visiting one day with Bill Butcher out here at Fort Gay.”

“Fine man, Bill Butcher, friend of my daddy's,” Dimple said.

“And Al had your daddy with him, must have been four or five years old.” Wimpy held his hand out over the floor to signify height. “And Al started to lay a hard whupin' on that boy and Bill Butcher stepped in front of him. They got into it and Al Ledford shot him.” He shook his head and poked the fire. “Them Mingo Ledfords were rough people.”

“Kilt him,” Dimple said.

Wimpy cupped his ear. “He what?”

“Kilt him.”

“Yeah, kilt him.”

Dimple's eyes chased an ember that jumped through a crack in the cookstove. “Al Ledford went to the penitentiary over that.”

“Died there a year later,” Wimpy said. “After that, your daddy lived out here for a time.”

Ledford's daddy had never spoken a word on such things.

Bob coughed and fidgeted. “We been wonderin when you might come out here to us,” Dimple said. He unclasped his hands and set the front legs of his chair to the floor.

Ledford didn't know what to make of the last words spoken. He didn't know what to make of anything. These men, it seemed, were his people.

Wimpy was nodding his head in agreement with his brother. “I knowed you would come,” he said.

Ledford wanted to ask if there had ever been a lake on their property. If they remembered him and his daddy fishing from a rowboat, like in his dream.

The words got stuck in his throat.

After a long quiet, Dimple asked Ledford if he knew that the Bonecutters were part Indian. Before he could answer, Dimple said, “Shawnee. Trace our blood straight back to Tecumseh. You know who Tecumseh is?” When Ledford said he did, Dimple stuck the kindling back in his teeth and chewed. Then he said, “Maynards think Indians wasn't nothin but animals. Most folks wouldn't argue em, I reckon.” He stared at the fire. Finished off his coffee and spat to the floor the remnants of his kindling splinter.

Outside, the Bonecutter brothers pointed to the land around them, the rising inclines on either side. The hollow, snaking north, fairly wide and cut by a stream, its endpoint the big camelback ridge. Each twin used one hand as a brow visor, the other a sweeping survey tool. For every divot and clearing, they had a name. “This here,” Dimple said, swinging his hand at the earth below their feet, “all this here we call Marrowbone Cut.” Their grandmother had once told them why. She said that the soil was rich like marrow, and that the Lord had dug deep here, just for them to settle on.

Their mother said different. Everybody thought she was crazy. “This here Cut in the hills,” she used to tell them, “it ain't from no God, and it ain't for you. It's for polecats and slugs, and it'll swallow ever one of us that stays.”

Ledford pushed his boot soles against the ground. The words repeated in his head—Marrowbone Cut. He took a long look at the ridge. What had happened to him upon first seeing it was over. Hills looked the same the world over. Ridges rose and fell, east and west. People gave them names. One was not the other.