Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Lillian laid her hand lightly on his leg, but only a moment; as she began to speak, he drew it away. Her hand remained, unsupported, not much larger than a child’s. She returned it to her lap. “Mr. Warren ate at Momma’s again this week, visiting back home too.”

  “Yeah. How’s he getting along with his work.” It was an expression, not a question. Son, leaning against the tree, finished the lemonade, let ice fall into his mouth, then spit it repeatedly back into the jar. He did not want to hear what she was going to say. Lillian carefully tore bread crusts into small pieces and tossed them away; on nearby tree branches birds hopped excitedly, indecisively.

  “He’s doing good,” Lillian said.

  “Keeping somebody else’s books?” Son said; spitting ice, he wiped furiously at his chin.

  “What’s wrong with that?” She turned, arched, looked at him for the first time.

  “I’ll tell you what’s the damn-hell wrong with it.”

  “Don’t cuss.”

  “I’m not. Keep your mouth shut and I’ll tell you what’s the damn-hell wrong with it. I’m not going to spend my life working for some other son-of-a-bitch.”

  She put her hands to her mouth. “I don’t want to listen to all that.”

  “You’ll listen.” He emptied the ice, clapped the top on the jar, and said, “Come on.”

  She followed him saying, “But Mr. Warren likes keeping books in Delton. He likes it a whole lot. He’s already had a raise, and his company has a big picnic every year.”

  Son was already in the buggy and because of it, Ruby began to move. Lillian, tugging at her scant skirt, climbed up, half hobbling. Son flapped the reins across Ruby’s back in a way almost mean. Surprised, the horse’s ears stiffened and, with a look of listening, Ruby set off at a gait that bounced them unmercifully. They flew with a great rattling over the natural rise in the road, down the other side, past the shuttered little Negro school, on down the dusty, seldom-curving road. “Son-of-a-bitch,” Son said, his teeth clamped together.

  “Ruby! Whoa! Whoa!” Lillian called.

  The horse was exceeding itself and Son drew in on the reins. Ruby, snorting indignantly, rippled her sides and slowed immediately; foam, flying from her mouth, caught in her mane. At a walk they passed the elementary school where children with bland faces were returning from lunch and a pumpkin with a grinning jack o’lantern face watched them from a window with empty eyes. Again they faced the shadowed main road where the cottonwoods dropped their soft lint. And this was Mill’s Landing: the elementary school and twelve white houses with blue roofs, six on one side of the road and six on the other, the commissary-hotel building, a two-room building set aside for the doctor’s office, and another two-room building housing the post office and drug store: the clerks in one doubled as clerks in the other. On the opposite side of the road leading from the far-away highway into town was the mill, the blacksmith shop, an ice house, and beyond them, Niggertown. Everything the Rankins owned, from here to Delton, from the largest bank down to the smallest sharecropper cabin, was painted the same, white with a blue roof; recently, Mr. De Witt built his own mansion several miles away and painted it similarly. It was said those with Rankin blood did not like it, but there it stood, like a small castle, with a moat and drawbridge. Geese strolled the lawn, keeping the grass neatly clipped; the rumor was their heads were to be painted blue, also. Going along the road, between the houses, beneath the cottonwoods, Lillian stared ahead miserably. The mill blew its returning whistle, shorter, not so loud. The last returning mill hand left the commissary, the yellow string of a tobacco sack in his mouth while he rolled a cigarette. In a cackling frenzy, a chicken flew away from Ruby’s hoofs, leaving a feather in the road. Far, far away, Lillian heard the world. Feeling Son might lash her with the buggy whip when she spoke, she said nevertheless, “They’re still looking for a salesman at that company Mr. Warren told us about. The one in the building where he works. He still says he’d recommend you. Frank, we’d have to move to Delton.” Lillian had a momentary hallucination: an old story book had a beautifully colored picture of the Prince offering Cinderella the glass slipper; she erased the figures, saw not one castle but a city full, pastel-colored, with turrets of gold gleaming in the sun.

  Son, tying Ruby to the commissary’s hitching rail, said, “Lillian, I don’t want anybody trying to tell me what to do.”

  Poppa, in a white shirt, appeared like an apparition behind the dark screened door, until he pushed it open, saying, “Come here, children.” His face was flushed with excitement; his cheeks were two red spots.

  Making his second trip, Deal came from the store with a can of Prince Albert tobacco and said, “How do, Missus”; having touched his forehead with his cane, he hung it in his shirt pocket, where it swung.

  “How you, Old Deal?” Lillian said.

  “Too good. Overstayed my time,” he said.

  Son said, “Shoot, Old Deal. You telling me all those stories about when you was a roustabout, you better be glad you’re here, stead of where you might be going.”

  “Naw suh, I repented,” Deal said. “The Lord allows young folks a little something, don’t you think, Mister Henry?”

  “I don’t know, Deal,” Poppa said. “It seems to me like I never was young.” Just then Son came up the steps looking at him, laughing, his eyes as blue as the sky behind him. He stood out as if the sun struck only him, so alive, so strong and tan, it made Poppa want to gasp; hearing the echo of his own words he suddenly wanted to bring the boy to his breast hard and hold him, as if by treating him as a child he could give him the childhood he had never had. The boy had known too early about work. Twelve years old, he should not have been out having the part-time jobs; all the things that had been wrong for Son came back to Poppa now, turned inward, and he felt everything had been his fault: his fault Cally had to work, his fault she had to scrimp along and teach the boy too young the world was hard, that if you left a bite on your plate, you ate it cold before anything else, that you could work your tuckus off and somebody bigger could take your pay; and what kind of things had the boy learned out there in the business world, twelve years old? All he had known to do to fight back was run away, Poppa thought, wanting to bang his fist against the store post thinking of those people offering to adopt his son, his son; and he wanted to cry thinking of the better life they could have given him. They might have sent him back to school, helped him make something of himself. But what made Poppa suffer most was knowing they could not have given him a childhood he had never had. Before he was twelve years old, Son had helped in the store, helped Cally deliver cakes, scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor on Saturdays. Poppa could not remember him ever having a time of doing nothing, like a boy ought to have.

  “Poppa, you got your gas pain?” Lillian said.

  “No, I feel fine, daughter.” With a stricken face, he had tried to figure how to give childhood to this twenty-two-year-old boy, with a wife.

  Deal said, “I got to make tracks. Take care,” and waved the tobacco can. For an instant the austere bearded face on it looked at them behind the old Negro’s back. Deal’s cane went tap, tapping, poking at whatever came within reach, turned a leaf over, struck a cigarette butt in two, sent some cottonwood lint flying. Mr. De Witt, passing on his great clomping horse, looked at him out of the corner of an eye, and Deal slowed his way to work.

  The three on the steps, laughing, turned into the store. “What is on your mind, Poppa?” Son said, wiping his face; the store was a relief like evening after a hot day.

  Poppa took an envelope from his pocket and seemed as if he would dance a jig, he turned about so excitedly. “Listen!” Then too excited to remember what he wanted to say, he said, “Look!” From the envelope he took a printed circular and unfolded it; the words that leapt at them were FORD MODEL-T. There was a picture of it, black as and looking no more substantial than their buggy, with a canvas top folded back. The three bent over it exclaiming, seeing themselves up on those seats ridin
g through the golden autumn afternoons.

  “Poppa!” Lillian squealed like a banshee. “Are you getting one?”

  Poppa, extending his chest, drew in breath, then let it out. “Well, I’ve been saving toward it a long time. Son, when you made payments on the two hundred dollars, I said, ‘Henry, pretend the money that belongs to you is extra.’ I put it away. Sometimes I had to take a little out again if there was, well, too many doctor’s bills. But I’ve kept on putting away here and there without its hurting anybody. I don’t think?” He looked at them questioningly, half-afraid; quickly, they shook their heads, and Lillian said softly, “Oh, no”: they had not been deprived. “Sometimes I didn’t bring home the best cut of meat, you know. Little ways like that I saved. Cut down on tobacco. Didn’t hurt me any either,” Poppa said.

  Well, I’ll be damned, Son thought. He held the paper between his great thick hands, feeling a sudden strange sense of power. Never before had he been interested in mechanical things, but he peered at the automobile as if he could dissect it with his eyes, wanting to know every intricate piece of it, down to the last nut and bolt. He pondered the tires, the steering wheel, the brass horns on either fender, knowing he would polish them until his hands dropped off. He could not wait to get Lillian and go shooting off down the main street of Marystown. If they wouldn’t be something! It had gotten so he was embarrassed to take her in the buggy, so many people had autos: it had marked him as, made him feel like a country boy.

  Lillian with her mind on the same trip was deciding what to wear. An automobile at hand lessened immediately her pressing desire to move to Delton.

  Poppa showed them a letter, neatly typed, business-looking. “I been in touch with the agency in Delton handling the cars. Now the man says he’ll have one all gasolined up and ready to go next Saturday. I thought that would be the best day for you to take off and go get it. Then we can spend all Sunday riding. I haven’t told Cally. Do you think I ought to tell her, or let you come driving up in it?” At the mention of her name, Poppa felt as if his stomach had dropped down a well. His excitement had been so tremendous, he had not stopped to wonder about Cally. She would not take even the buggy reins into her hands, would certainly not drive the car, but surely it would please her. She had worked all these years to set them up a little, to get the extras he could not provide; now he was providing a big one: for her, for his whole family. He would not tell even Son he did not have all the money. Because of amicable relations with the auditor, and without Mr. De Witt’s knowledge, he had borrowed a little ahead on his salary; but he and the auditor had agreed his job here was money in the bank, so successful had he been at running the commissary, at pleasing Mr. De Witt, who liked a man no match for him.

  “Surprise her,” Lillian said.

  For another reason, Son agreed. He did not want Cally to mar ahead Poppa’s pleasure if she did not take to the idea.

  Carrying the thorn branch, Lillian went home. The dining room table was set and in the oven supper was ready. She unpacked and kept busy straightening their two rooms. Once she came again to look at her mother-in-law’s orderly quiet house, wondering if it had any physical appearance to explain a lady going alone to Delton to have her gall bladder drained.

  When Lillian left the store, Son told Poppa of Cally’s expedition. Poppa at noon had found his dinner set out on the kitchen table and thought Cally was at the drug store, at Mrs. Owens’, anywhere about. He said, “Gone to Delton to get her gall bladder drained? Do you think the woman means it?”

  “You got me,” Son said.

  “I guess we’ll see,” Poppa said, feeling cold all the way to his fingertips and toes wondering how much it would cost, this time.

  At closing, he found on the counter a small can of snuff Deal had bought and forgotten to take. Would Son run to the mill with it? When Son went out it was almost sundown, the sky brilliantly pink, touched with yellow. Deal was on a campstool outside the oven room and as Son came up, a man appeared in a window above, spit, and said, “Shorty says you bringing his snuff or not?”

  Deal looked up in surprise. Son, waving the can, said, “The old man forgot it. I’ll bring it.”

  “I sho thought I took that, Mister Son,” Deal said. “I sho did.”

  “It don’t make any difference. He got along without it,” Son said and went up the steps expectantly, glad of a reason to go; the mill, a busy shrill place, gave him a feeling of excitement the commissary never did. It was a place for men to work. Faces of the Negroes shone with sweat; muscles were apparent on their backs and arms. Son regretted again the hours he stood in the store. The mill had few windows but opposite the door he had entered was another and between the two was an alleyway of light alive with sawdust motes. Even when the day was dark and grey with rain the motes were alive there, dancing. Steel blades catching the remote light shone evil as shark’s teeth, devouring trees as if they were no more than kindling. Son gave the snuff to Shorty who quickly returned to work; it was dangerous to look up for long; Shorty’s hands directed logs to the lathe: swoop and swoop, the bark fell away as easily as an apple or a peach being peeled, fell to the floor in strips having exposed clean, sweet, surprisingly white wood. Son drew in again that familiar smell and went down the mill’s steps wondering what it would be like in an office in Delton.

  He stopped and spoke to Deal who was poking drifted sawdust to the rear of the ovens; it was safer there for the spitting, popping piles to burn. In the low room even Deal had to stoop; the ceiling was reinforced with railroad ties to support the mill’s floor above. Forgetting, standing erect, Deal bumped his head; he came out, showing his hand bloody from the cut he had touched. Dr. Owens was away; Son took Deal to the store. When the cut was bandaged, Poppa gave Deal a good drink of whisky from the bottle kept beneath the counter for emergencies and Christmastime and said Son better walk the old man home. He could close up alone.

  On the way, Son and Deal passed Mr. De Witt. For the hundredth time, Son listened to Deal say the reason Mr. De Witt rode that big white horse was because of old Mister Jeff riding Dixie Belle. They went on through Niggertown, between the rows of little houses that were all the same, with a privy in the back. Son, still restless, did not want to hear about Dixie Belle again. But Deal told again how when the horse died, he and Mister Jeff had eased her way on out, how she had shuddered her way out of life as she shuddered when she had eaten her full of oats. Son only half-listened and Deal told how that was the first time he had ever seen a white man cry, how he and Mister Jeff had spent the night, let dawn find them there, crying and talking about the horse, times they remembered this with Dixie Belle and that. Mister Jeff had said it was his time next and Deal had said, When the roll is called, ain’t you afred to go? Mister Jeff had said, No. For, then I will know what’s on the other side.

  As Son and Deal reached the house, Pearl came to the door. She had been straightening her hair and it glistened as if full of raindrops, just new. Inside, her jar of pomade was the brightest thing in the room: Miss Peacock: on the label was a tailspread bird, gaudy blue green gold. Excited, Pearl made Deal go right to bed. But before Son could leave, Deal had looked up from his pillow to continue his story: Mister Jeff had stood up on his old man’s thin shaky legs. A rooster crowed and dawn had come. There was a musky, dark smell in the barn; the horse lay on her great side as they had never seen her, still, and flies had already begun to gather. The other horses stood silent in their stalls, their heads hung, as if mourning too. Then Deal had found courage to ask the question always on his mind: Mister Jeff, when I get to heaven, will I be white?

  Son had moved toward the door; but he asked, as always, “What’d the old man say then?”

  “If I wanted to be,” Deal said.

  The knowledge had comforted Deal through life; he was not afraid to die. Son knew the old man wanted to teach him not to fear the hereafter either; but Son never thought about dying. In this room, caught up with old gone sorry things, he felt more than ever his life was
just beginning. He said, “Well, take care, old man. I got to hep Poppa.”

  Pearl opened the door and shooed away a porchful of chickens. “We both too old to be fooling with chickens,” she said. “How else you going to eat? Mister De Witt has things higher at that comm’ssary than they are in Marystown.”

  Son shrugged and was sorry, knowing she was right; but he wanted to get away from people being poor: something he was always surrounded by. He said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

  Pearl said, “Tell Old Miss and Miss Lillian hello.”

  Son went away, neither answering nor looking back. All the way down the hill, passing again between the identical little houses, he remembered the dark eyes watching him. Callous and young and knowing he was too, he put them from his mind. Ever since he had been in Mill’s Landing he had heard about Old Deal’s life. Now, he wanted to concentrate on his own.

  When steam obscured the train’s window and Son and Lillian could not see Cally, she could still see them. Their images remained in her mind all the way to Delton. She was glad a nice girl had married Son; there was a roughness about him Cally did not understand at all. But she had not wanted him to marry so young. Why did he keep making her mistakes when she had tried so hard to keep him from making just those mistakes? It was the curse of motherhood, she believed; it was what kept the tight hard lines she knew perfectly well were there about her mouth, made the wrinkles in her forehead, kept her awake at night. Thinking of insomnia, Cally added to her shopping list a large supply of aspirin.

  In Delton, she hurried through the station smelling in its various dark corners like urine, and took a street car to the doctor’s. She told how she felt, dizzy upon arising, better after hot water and lemon juice, was going full strength by noon but had a decided letdown after that. The gall bladder draining was postponed, new medicine prescribed, more visits appointed, and Cally left happy. She rode another street car through weed-filled countryside to the end of the line and got off. All around as far as she could see, land was divided by strings and stobs into squares; in their midst was a wooden hut out of which smoke came. She went toward it on narrow planks, balancing one foot before the other. A man, coming out to meet her, said, “Good afternoon, Missus.”