Hardscrabble Road

by George Weinstein

I should’ve continued my walk to the barn, but I had to see his pitiful face. I knelt beside the house and spied through the hole.

  Mr. Gladney sat with his back to me at the foot of the bed. He wore a sleeveless undershirt and boxers. Always a stout man, fat now lapped over the elastic band of his shorts and puckered the backs of his arms. Moles dotted the doughy skin of his neck and shoulders like leopard spots. His hands rested in his lap; he appeared to be showing Mama something.

  She stood in the doorway wearing a new store-bought dress of royal blue, knee-length and short-sleeved. Her arms looked so pale compared to her raw, work-reddened hands. Blond hair, unpinned and wild, framed her face with curls like tusks. A nasty smirk pulled up one side of Mama’s mouth as she stared at whatever he showed her. She drawled, “The least you could do is put a pillow on the floor for me.”

  He turned to get one from the top of the bed, his face splitting with a broad grin. His right hand stretched toward the bullet hole and me. In his left, Mr. Gladney gripped the base of the largest tallywhacker I’d ever seen. I gasped as Mama reached for it.

  I fell backward and thumped my head on the dirt. For a moment, the impact knocked the pictures from my brain.

  “What the hell?” The shutters flew open. With his thick chest and head framed in the window, Mr. Gladney stared back at me. His look of triumph—Mama’s same nasty smirk—melted into shame as I refused to turn my face from him.

  “What’s wrong?” Mama’s high-heeled shoes banged the floor, coming closer.

  “Nothing.” He reached through the window and grabbed the slats of the shutters, revealing sweaty thatches under his arms. Mr. Gladney looked away, giving in before I did. Pulling the shutters inward with a slam, he said, “Maybe it was a squirrel.”

  “Well it sure wilted you, Walt.” Mama snickered and said, “Let’s have that-there pillow.”

  I imitated Tom, crab-walking until I could get to my feet. Down the driveway and onto the dirt road, I strode. Maybe before last night I would’ve run crying with embarrassment and guilt and anger, but now I simply made up my mind. I’d had enough. Like Jay and Chet and even Darlene, I knew I had to move on.

  My father’s old place looked swept clean when I approached it, as if Stan and Arzula never existed. The outbuildings had been knocked down and harvested of all useable wood. I took a broken, mildewed board and paced off the yard, trying to remember the number of steps to the house and Eliza Jean’s grave. I imagined reaching down through the sand and finding what my father had buried but could never escape: the small, curled skeleton; a few scraps of disintegrating cloth; and the brown, sand-choked poison bottle and tarnished spoon. Before I left—forever, I thought—I packed the earth tight like a tucked-in blanket and planted the board as her grave marker. I carved her name and the year of her birth with my knife. Thinking of my Greek studies, I pulled the last coin from my pocket. I pushed the nickel deep in the sand, hoping it would pay for her passage in case she hadn’t yet made it across the Styx.

  *

  I knew that I could make up to Rienzi for my gross immaturity. However, she had left long before I reached her grandparents’ place. Her grandmother said, “She told us this crazy story about tricking you into giving her the keys and then stealing your truck. Don’t you young people beat all! Rienzi laughed about it one minute and then bawled her eyes out the next. This morning, she told her grandfather that she wanted to go back home, so he took her to the Trailways depot in Columbus.”

  “Please thank him for dropping off my family’s truck. Did she say when she’ll be back, ma’am?”

  “No, but she said that if you stopped by, I should give you this.” From her apron pocket, she took a tiny metal cup topped with glass. Rienzi had pried the compass out of my gift to her. “She told me to say that she knows you’ll find your way someday.”

  Standing on the shoulder of the highway, turning north with the compass and then south, I decided that I had only one choice. With no money, I couldn’t get to San Antonio to make amends with Rienzi; even hitchhikers and hobos needed to eat. There was no way I would go back to school either. Facing Mr. Gladney didn’t upset me; we both knew I had something on him now. But I didn’t want to see his wife lecturing from the front of the room every day. I didn’t want to try to make small talk as she tutored me so I could graduate early. I didn’t want to pretend that the man she had to lie with—the one who had given her children, the one who would reach for her in the night—wasn’t going to bed with the smell of my mother still on him and the triumphant smirk on his face.

  Skirting Colquitt, I tromped through barren fields and logged-out woods while I made my plans: I needed to get a fulltime job until the military would take me. Since I never wanted to spend another night under Mama’s roof, I had to find somewhere to live.

  Ramsey Lumber Company was still the biggest employer in the county. Mr. Ramsey had died the previous year, but his widow still owned the mill and let the managers run it, putting to rest any fears that it would close and force scores of laborers out of work. The Seaboard Railroad main line ran right past the business, and I followed the tracks to their back gate.

  The property consisted of long buildings in a U-shape that surrounded a huge lumber yard. Fifteen-foot-high towers of sawn boards cured in the outdoors like temples built to honor a sun god. The thud of wood being stacked in the yard provided a steady rhythm that punctuated the more distant screech of timber running through cutting and planing machines.

  Near the front entrance, a young Negro on a tractor called over the rumbling diesel engine, “It’s a sight, isn’t it. You looking for work?” I told him I was, and he directed me to the left arm of the U. “The one with the furnace stacks and boilers.”

  Getting a job turned out to be as easy as giving my name. While I talked to a clerk who stared at my birthmark, another man walked over to the paper-strewn desk, crossed his big arms, and said, “You kin to Jay and Chet MacLeod?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re my brothers.”

  “What’s Jay think of the Army?”

  “He likes almost everything about it, now that we won the war.”

  The man smiled and shook my hand. “I’m Gus Clayton, the foreman here. If you’re a relation of Jay and Chet’s, you got a job any time you want it.” As the clerk got busy, Mr. Clayton said, “You can start tomorrow in the yard. Eight in the morning, report to Calvin, the colored boy that rides around on the tractor.”

  “Could I work a half-day today?”

  “Today you need to go into town and buy some work clothes and brogans. You don’t wanna get turpentine on them fancy duds.” When I told him I had no money, he took a five-dollar bill from his pocket. “Your pay’s forty cents an hour. You’ll be working off this loan on your first day.”

  I thanked him and slid the money into my trousers. Trusting my confidence, I said, “I don’t want to wear out my welcome, sir, but is there somewhere in the mill where I could spend my nights?”

  He considered a moment and then pointed to the far end of the building. “Yonder in the furnace room, beside the boilers. You can sack out in there where the fireman starts his nightly rounds. Show up at eight tonight. If you make any problems for him, though, you’ll have to go.”

  Already in debt to my employer, I walked to Colquitt and bought used dungarees and coarse leather work shoes at the hardware store. It was noon, and I wandered around town with forty-one cents, a compass, and a buckeye in my pocket, and nothing in my stomach.

  When images of Mama and Mr. Gladney intruded into my thoughts, I focused on the warm sunshine and smells carried on the light breeze. I followed the aromas of grease and strong coffee to Dora’s, the Negro diner where Jerry Flynn treated me to breakfast each day. His bread truck was parked out front. Through the window, I saw Jerry’s back and hunched shoulders as he leaned over his plate at the counter, flanked by colored men on both sides. Facing them, Dora’s teenage daughter Trudy wiped crumbs and cigarette ashes from the countertop into her cupped h
and.

  A few of the customers glanced over their shoulders when I stepped inside. They all propped their elbows on the counter, arms pointed upward, cigarettes clamped between their fingers. Gray threads drifted from their smokestacks. Billie Holiday sang “Lover Man” from the jukebox and Trudy hummed along. She called to her mother who was flipping burgers, “Your pirate’s done come back from the sea.”

  Jerry turned and lifted his half-eaten burger in salute; the crescent moon of browned bun and pink meat smiled at me while his jaws worked on chewing. I took a stool beside him and said to Dora, “Cheeseburger and a RC, please.” I dropped my clothing purchases underfoot and put a quarter on the counter. Dora slapped down another pink disk of beef. As she cooked the sizzling meat, her backside swayed to the music.

  Trudy rang up my order. With a two-tone bell, the cash register drawer sprang open and struck the hip she’d turned to meet it. She gave an exaggerated bump to slide the drawer closed, earning some customers’ whistles. The whole world had gone into heat lately, myself included. After all, was I really any different from—

  “Apple don’t fall far from the tree,” Jerry said. “I sat next to yer daddy in here once, a few weeks before that night in Bainbridge, and he done the same thing as you, staring off into space. ‘MacLeod’s on his own little cloud,’ was what I thought. Me and him and you are the only white folks that ever come in here. The rest are missing a helluva meal and a good show to boot.” He took a sip of coffee while Dora slapped the cap off a cold RC and thumped the bottle in front of me before dancing back to my burger on the fry table.

  I apologized for missing work. Jerry shrugged and said, “You’re missing school too.”

  “I quit.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich. “You fixing to deliver bread for a living?”

  “Naw, just to get to Ramsey’s sawmill on Monday mornings. I got a job there today.”

  Dora put my sizzling sandwich in front of me. Yellow cheese dripped from the bun and mixed with the pink puddle of juice on the plate. The silky-voiced baritone of Billy Eckstein came on the jukebox with “Jelly, Jelly.”

  I said, “I was hoping that you could pick me up at the crossroads like usual and drop me at O’Neil Gowdy’s store across from the mill.” The smell of yeasty bread and charred meat and sharp cheese filled my nose and then the aromas joined the heat and flavors in my mouth. I chased it with a swallow of icy cola. Now, I seemed to taste things all the way down.

  Jerry said, “You gonna walk home?”

  “I quit there too. I’ll stay at the mill most nights and camp in the woods on weekends.”

  “Reckon you had a fight with yer mama.”

  “She’s got plenty of company—she won’t miss me.”

  Jerry finished his coffee and said, “Sure she’ll miss you. Her company ain’t got nuthin to do with you.”

  “No, not anymore.”

  *

  The night shift fireman’s voice had a deep, hollow sound, as if he stood inside one of the enormous boilers. “Mr. Clayton said he found some company for me.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me sleeping here.” In the furnace room, a pine table and chair nestled against one wall; on the floor, curly wood shavings and sawdust mounded, blown in from the planing mill during working hours by a pipe nearly as tall as me that thrust from a wall. The scraps were used to keep the furnace fired and maintain steam pressure in the boilers; warm hummocks of wood gave off a sweet aroma that smelled better than any bed I’d ever known.

  He said, “I’ll try not to wake you when I go on my rounds.” He took a key from his pocket and unlocked a box on the wall above the table. From inside, he removed a bulky time-clock and a small black pistol, which he pocketed.

  I nudged a pile of sawdust and shavings with the toe of my work shoe. “Are there snakes around here?”

  “I’ve never seen one.”

  “Then why the gun?”

  “Someone murdered the fella that worked here before me. Eased up and put a bullet in his head. The killer didn’t take anything; he shot the poor bastard and left.”

  “And he was never caught?”

  “Nope. Still out there.”

  I saw now that the chair had dark, uneven stains in the wood. The table too looked marred beneath a layer of sawdust. I said, “Uh, would you mind if I went with you on your rounds?”

  He awoke me every hour with a kick on the sole of my brogans. I stumbled after him, panning his flashlight as he made a tour of the darkened mills and the moonlit lumber yard where the towers could hide any number of maniacs. In designated spots, he handed me the pistol while he “punched” his clock with a key, to record on a paper tape when he’d done his job. Throughout the night I spent one-quarter of every hour half-awake and sometimes armed.

  A killer was still at large. I didn’t think the job could get any worse than that.

  CHAPTER 27

  When the steam whistle blew to start the workday, men in the yard had already begun stacking rough-cut lumber in fifteen-foot-tall wooden shelters so the planks could dry. They also took freshly sawn wood to the kilns for curing and carted seasoned boards to the planing mill for a satin-smooth finish. Mostly, they bent over and straightened and then paused to stretch their sore muscles, splinter-embedded fingers spread against lower backs like whalebone trusses.

  I liked the relative quiet of the lumber yard. A birdsong could sometimes be heard over the clatter of board-stacking, the roar of the giant circular saw cutting through felled trees under one roof, and the screech of the planer in the other building.

  “How do?” a Negro man called to me, stepping down from his tractor. A tow-behind trailer was loaded with large rectangles of wood and a keg of nails. He wore his gray felt hat low like a gunslinger, and a big hammer slung in the loop in his overalls, dangling like a six-shooter. I told him I was reporting for work, and he introduced himself as Calvin Chambers. “You’ll like working out here. The fall weather’s fine and you can hear a mockingbird now and again.”

  I told him my name and we shook hands. He led me to a nearby trailer half-full of planks from the sawing operation. With a clarity that my teachers would’ve admired, he explained how to stack the rough-cut boards so they’d dry correctly within the fifteen-foot-tall forms he built. After I demonstrated that I’d understood, he drew his hammer and shot me down. “Pleased to meet you, Roger.” Calvin blew off the imaginary gun smoke from the end of the handle.

  I discovered that if I bent from my knees instead of the waist, my back didn’t protest as much while I stacked the heavy lumber. Still, I had to take breaks to stretch and groan. Sometimes, I emulated the laborers who lay flat on the ground to rest their tortured spines.

  Calvin often built his forms nearby, using a single hammer blow to drive in each nail, as precise as a machine. He told about his ideas for building devices to do all kinds of work, steam-powered nail-guns, board-stacking machines, and such. It was a little like having Jay back from service overseas.

  When I asked him what we’d do for a living if machines took our work, he said, “You’d get to build the machines. Though I’ve read stories in Astounding Science about machines building other machines. Still, people would have to design all that.”

  “Before I quit high school, I was taking advanced classes,” I said. “But I don’t know near enough to do that. Sounds like you got a diploma and then some.”

  He set down his hammer. “You’re wrong there. I only finished the seventh grade.”

  “You quit school too?”

  “School quit me. There’s no colored high school in these parts. Grade school was as far as I could go—and had to walk miles to get there, starting at age six. Still, the school board didn’t pluck out my eyes after grammar school. I read everything I can get my hands on.”

  “I know how that feels,” I said, “having some magazine or book you haven’t opened yet: like pulling a treasure chest out of the sand and waiting a moment before you see what’s inside.”
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  “Savoring it, right. I’ll bring in some things that I think you’ll like.”

  Though I was always dog-tired by sundown, the watchman often found me on my pile of warm sawdust and wood curls reading Calvin’s books and magazines by lamplight. On Fridays I walked home after work. I’d slip into the barn, put the wages I’d saved into my tobacco cans, and grab a fishing rod and some cooking gear I’d stashed for a weekend on Spring Creek. Sometimes a car was parked near the house when I arrived—Mama seemed to have two rotating Friday-night visitors, neither of them Mr. Gladney—and sometimes the truck was gone. Wanda let me camp out in her parlor on rainy weekends, but mostly I sat alone and fished.

  I also wrote to Jay at his last posting, telling him not to reply to me because Mama would read any mail sent to the house. I asked him to get word to Chet, since I didn’t have his latest address. While sparing Jay from the details about why I left home and quit school, I did apologize: his and Chet’s sacrifices to keep me going until graduation had been wasted.

  Writing a letter to Rienzi proved harder. My newfound confidence sounded arrogant on paper. I’d gnaw on the fleshy pink of my pencil eraser and gaze at the living woods and the soft swells of Spring Creek, wanting to tell her how mannerly and respectful I would be with her. Soon, though, I decided that the power of words had their limits. Instead, I’d have to show her. I hoped that she would wait that long.

  *

  On the first of March, a teenager appeared at the lumber yard in the afternoon. I remembered him from school, a senior who I’d seen briefly before I quit. A town dude, Joe Don Murphy, dressed in nice trousers and a clean, starched shirt like Papa used to wear.

  I made him wait as I stacked more boards, just to show him I was doing important work. I wanted to tell him: “I ain’t slumming here like some no-count truant. I’m doing a man’s job.” Even if it cripples me, I’d never add. Finally, I wiped my hands across my gunny-sack apron and offered to shake.