Son folded the paper and stood up. Lillian had called him to dinner but he stopped to answer the telephone. Buzz was calling with news he had just heard on the radio: the President was sending a Cabinet member to take direct part in rescue and rehabilitation, an act without precedent.
Several days later, having surveyed the area, Secretary of Commerce Hoover declared it to be the worst disaster of peacetime. Water had breached the levee in two hundred places and had inundated approximately twenty thousand square miles of Mississippi River bottomland. Still, the major cost of the flood was to be borne by the citizens. But Son, Red, most of the Engineers now thought that feeling was running so high the Government would have to recognize the unfairness of the valley spending its own millions to hold back the floodwaters of a nation and would relieve it of its long burden, at last.
Son always told that he certainly thought that was the extent of his interest, that he never had any more idea than a flea the flood would touch him personally. When the entire city of New Orleans was threatened, he was mostly interested because the Engineers wanted to blast a levee below it to draw away water. The blast would wipe out entirely one small country parish. There, a great protest went up from the farmers and fishermen, declaring it unfair they be ruined to save the city and its people. Let the city go under, they said. But permission came from Washington for the blast and the papers were full of pictures of angry farmers leaving their homes forever, carrying their most valuable possessions; these were cabbages and heads of lettuce for some, hastily pulled, loaded into bushel market baskets. Levee work for Son took on a scope and feeling it had not had before.
The first attempt at blasting the levee was unsuccessful. Only a small amount of water was forced through. Son went to bed that night after the radio announced the Engineers planned to try again. Much later, he answered the telephone to hear a voice, with an unfamiliar drawl, telling him something he could not follow until suddenly, understanding, he knew he had heard it all. The second attempt at blasting the levee had failed. The Engineers were desperate for dynamite to attempt a third time, and they needed it by morning. Delton was the closest source of supply and Son the only man they could reach at night; the voice, belonging to a Major General in the Corps of Engineers, apologized for the time of night. “Hell,” Son said. “I’m in business. How much powder you want? What train you want it on?”
“Thousand pounds,” the Major said, having no idea of the astonishment that filled Son. He was already out of bed and had removed his pajamas and telephoned Mr. Ryder as soon as the Major hung up, not even wondering whether Mr. Ryder would go to the magazine at this hour of the night. He heard surprise in Mr. Ryder’s voice and thought, Hell, he had to sell that dynamite and the man was working for him. “It’s Frank Wynn,” he said.
Mr. Ryder always spoke in a soft, faint voice; now it seemed fainter. “Mr. Wynn?” he said.
Son said, “Mr. Ryder, those folks down in New Orleans need some dynamite bad. The Army’s arranging for me to put it on the five o’clock train. They want a thousand pounds and, Mr. Ryder, I need to sell that dynamite. If I meet you out to the magazine, can we load the truck, can you take it to the depot? Hell, if you can’t, I will!”
They both laughed, Mr. Ryder removing his pajamas, neither having any idea the other stood naked, shivering, dreading entry into the cold pre-dawn and already on the way. Picking up his pants, Mr. Ryder said, “Yes sir, I’ll carry your dynamite,” and what propelled him forward without coffee, through the truck’s slow starting, into the night, and over the unlit and bumpy road was the boy’s calling him Mister. The others called him simply, Ryder. He was almost fifty years old, a country boy who had gone to work driving a dynamite truck because it paid more than he had ever dreamed of making and he thought of himself as just a truck driver because that was the way the other salesmen treated him. He had not thought Mr. Wynn any different the day Son leapt down off the street car; Mr. Ryder only thought him one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. The difference had come when Mr. Wynn came to his house. Not only had he lifted his hat to shake Mrs. Ryder’s hand but had come into their living room as if it were any place he was glad to be. And there was the boy’s urgency, like his had been. Over and over, driving, Mr. Ryder heard the boy’s voice say, Mr. Ryder, I need to sell that dynamite, and heard himself, Poppa, I’m not going to be no sharecropper.
At the magazine, Son had worked beside him for hours; like a nigger, like himself, Mr. Ryder thought: had loaded the truck and followed him to the depot too. Not, Mr. Ryder knew, because Mr. Wynn thought he might not get there. Mistrust had been done away with, leapt over, in the long two hours they had worked toward a dawn that broke wet and without sound, except for the steady thumps of the boxes being set into the truck and their struggle for breath which, when they found it, remained close, white puffs against the still grey morning until, starting their motors, they drove away, breaking the silence before them and restoring it behind.
The levee broke, the parish was gone and New Orleans saved. The next day, the paper told that the explosives had been rushed from Delton and gave Son’s name as distributor for American; as if American had had something to do with it, Son thought. But it tickled him to see his name in the paper; he bought all the copies the cigar stand had, then did not know what to do with them. He sent one to American and kept the rest on the car shelf until the day he threw them all away, except one. He received a nice letter from the head of American, congratulating him on the sale. He was pleased but disappointed more was not made of the personal aspect. American’s concern was the largeness of the order; he might as well have sent a thousand pounds of dynamite next door on a pretty afternoon. Strangely, he had the urge to sit down and write the man about how it had been, to tell about the dark and the day slowly growing light as he and the old man who had been a stranger before worked side by side, the old man like a horse though he must be fifty years old, and how afterward they had not been strangers, though they had hardly said a word. Son felt as if he had been part of something big. History was not a word that would ever have come to him and he never found the right one.
One day he started to write the letter, then decided it was silly, and threw the blank paper away, causing Scottie to look at him in surprise. At the month’s end, he received a commission; fat and juicy, he said. He bought the first stock he had ever owned, stock in American. He sat a long time looking at the paper with the fancy sort of pretty writing on it thinking, Damned if he hadn’t come already a long way from being a country boy.
At lunchtime, he went to the bank and for the first time, entering it, did not feel dwarfed by the marble colonnades, lofty domed ceiling, and palehanded men in dark suits who, sitting at desks in the lobby, watched when they were idle, everyone who entered.
Passing between them, he spoke to a woman in the rear who was more than pleased to rent him a lock box. It was like initiation into some long-sought fraternity as she led him down carpeted dark stairs and up to an iron door which, when it was opened, he passed through to be locked in with the same sense of elation a prisoner, barred, might feel passing out the other way, into freedom. Yes mam, he was glad to sign, to give her all the information and a check for rental; he had a great desire to confide to the woman not only that it was his first lock box but exactly what he was going to put in it: his share in American and the newspaper clipping with his name in it.
Coming late to the office, he shoved his hat to the back of his head and said, “Whoo-whoo, let’s ride the train!”
“I’ve already had a drink,” Scottie said and flung a letter on his desk, turning to the window while he read.
He said words shocking even to them which they could never remember afterward, though they tried, able to laugh finally over the afternoon the golf job went to A. W. Woods and Sons, representatives for Michigan Powder.
Son said nothing else; he was quiet for several days, though he would have told you anytime something was wrong with the man’s estimate; bu
t he could not have told you when he decided to do something about it. One morning he came in looking just as he had when he returned after the flu, that white. Scottie was about to ask if he had been on a toot the night before when he leaned back and said, “I talked to the fellow, Mr. Rollins. That son-of-a-bitch cut the price of dynamite.”
“Cut the price! Mr. Woods?” Scottie said and was silent. There was nothing else to say: Mr. Woods had been in the business as long as anybody, not only knew the rules, but had always obeyed them.
The southern spring had come suddenly with a force almost unbearable. Scottie closed her eyes against the windowglass, blinding, tinted by a sun too brilliant to behold; and, even above the city, the air entering through the half-open window had the sweetness of a child’s touch. On the river she heard a tug, sounding lonely or fog-bound, and opened her eyes to be startled by day.
“Get me old man Woods on the phone,” Son said.
It was described ever afterward as his cussing the old man up one side of the street and down the other. And if he wasn’t a old man, he told him, he’d beat the hell out of him. Then he was not talking to Mr. Woods, but to one of his sons who said not to cuss his old man out that way. Son said, “I can’t beat up your old man but I sure as hell can beat you up. I’m coming down there to do it.”
“Come on,” the boy said who had nothing to fear, having graduated two years before from the University at Sewanee, the finest full-back the school had ever had in the years of its finest teams, called Bull.
“Jesus H. God,” Scottie said when Son hung up. “You know who his boy is? You ever seen him?” And trying to think of a word larger even than Bull to describe him, she followed Son, who seemed unaware of it until they were way out toward the dog pound where, despite the pallet-like colors of the day, separate, distinct blues and greens, everything seemed grey, sidewalks, small factories, Negro houses and smoke rising above a switchyard.
“There she is,” Son said. Across one of the low grey buildings they saw Mr. Woods’ name in yellow. One half of his office was a warehouse for storing road-building equipment; instead of steps, a short ramp led up to the entrance. Son stopped directly in front of it. A door opened and young Woods looked out and started down the ramp. As he took two steps down, Son took two steps up. Opening his mouth, the boy drew in a breath: impossible to tell whether to speak or by instinct to receive the two blows that at that moment landed against his temple and his face, giving his nose not only the look but the feel of an overly ripe tomato, just smashed, the soft red pulp flying everywhere. Son, having drawn back his fist and shot it out, drew it back again, the three knuckles he had broken covered not with his blood but the boy’s. Losing consciousness, A. W. Jr. fell backwards. Scottie, just making her way out of the car, had one foot on the running board, the other on the curb, and looked confused as if she had lost direction, then realized that what she had come to see had already taken place, returned both feet to the car and closed the door. Re-entering it, Son drove away, like an animal licking his hurt softly.
By morning the hand was twice its normal size, but he did nothing about it. “Hell, I’ll put a little mentholatum on it sometime,” he said.
And by morning everyone in the business knew about the incident: those in the Army Engineers office across the river, levee people, road builders and equipment people. The dynamite men telephoned and thanked him for setting Mr. Woods straight. But there was something in their voices the same as when they spoke to Mr. Ryder and, hearing it, Son cursed them silently.
Later he was having a drink in the office, lessening the throbbing in his hand, when Mr. Rollins telephoned to say Mr. Woods could not sell the dynamite at a lesser price after all. Son had the job.
He put three fifths of whisky on his desk and opened them all. Anyone passing had to have a drink. Some people had one and went on. Others, having no place special to go, stayed to be eventually obscured from one another by twilight and smoke. It was Ulysses who, having hung about the door unobserved as long as he could stand it, finally turned on the lights.
“Come on in here, boy,” Son shouted and gave him not only a drink but a fifty-cent cigar as well. “You ain’t never had no ci-gar that smelled like that. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
It was Ulysses who, in a little while, having had a second drink, thought to say, “What you celebrating, Mr. Wynn?”
“Oh hell,” Son said, displaying his swollen hand. “I just had to make a Christian out of a fellow yesterday.”
“Mr. Wynn, when we going to get started on this golf course out here?” Mr. Rollins said.
From his office, Son looked out over rooftops dried of puddles for the first time in weeks. Refugees had been bedded in the Country Club and now were gone. Rain had delayed the starting date but now the ground was just wet enough. He didn’t want to make hay out of the other fellow’s trouble, he told Scottie, but he was lucky to have the ground soaked like it was. The sky drifted marvellously blue toward Arkansas, so bright the clouds, banked high, reflected the color; as far as he could see, it stretched unhindered. If you lay on the river bank at Mill’s Landing now, he thought, the sky would look the same.
“Monday morning,” Son said. “We’ll be out yonder at six o’clock.”
At that hour the woods were so beautiful, so still that he and the three Negroes entering them hushed; the city around them, quiet at that hour, seemed not to exist. Beau, one of the Negroes, put a foot against a tree trunk and stood one-legged, stork-like, his face brooding; the others stood silently, leaning on implements they carried, tamping stick, augers. Dew heavy as rain lay on the leaves and the sun, making its way through them, turned the drops iridescent. A mourning dove nearby sounded far away, deep down somewhere, calling over and over in a pattern unbroken. Except he’s going to get the shit scared out of him soon, Son thought; he said as much, and the Negroes laughed. Son started forward as the Negroes began to wonder about him.
After the long weeks of grey, rainy days that had seemed suffocating, threatening, like a hand at your throat, they were not used to the hot, clear May days. By ten o’clock Son and the Negroes had stopped wiping their faces, let sweat run over them, salty as tears. Laboriously, continually, like a line of ants working, the Negroes carried dynamite from the truck into the woods after Mr. Ryder’s arrival. Dovetailed, the boxes stood in neat rows, smelling even in the open air cleanly of their pine scent. Beside them lay implements, punch bar, tamping stick, auger, boxes of caps and coils of orange fuse. “You got anything to crimp the fuse to the cap? A cap crimper?” Mr. Ryder said.
“Shoo,” Son said. The Negroes, squatting, resting, looked at one another.
“I’ve always used my teeth myself,” Mr. Ryder said and laughed. “You always got those with you, if you’re lucky.” The Negroes looked at one another in amusement, silent still, resting. “You boys got your teeth with you?” Son said.
“Yes suh,” Beau said. They grinned, as if to show. Son tried to smile but his teeth ground together apprehensively.
“You ought to get you a good lift to the blast with the ground wet as it is,” Mr. Ryder said.
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Son said. But what if he didn’t? he thought. For a long time this morning he had restudied soil and stumps; heavy, he had said over and over under his breath, heavy soil; and wet as it was, he was figuring now on using even less dynamite than he had put in his estimate. The root system was shallow mostly: lateral roots. The classification of dynamite he had chosen was slower than what some might have picked; but he figured it would be better to shoot the stumps out slow, lift them up with the roots, too: not to blast them out fast, a piece here and there, maybe leaving the roots behind.
With augers, the Negroes had made bore holes beneath stumps Son had chosen: one evenly rooted stump (it was the roots going to give him trouble, not the stump, he told himself) had the pocket directly beneath it. Where the roots were heavily to one side of a tree, the bore hole was made off center. With a pocket
knife, Son cut, slashing straight, several lengths of fuse approximately three feet long. He inserted them as far as possible into metal caps, until they were in contact with the explosive substance. One after another he stuck them into his mouth and crimped the two parts tightly together. Having punched a hole in two sticks of dynamite, he imbedded a cap in each, well; then laced the fuse around the stick. With a knife he slit the exposed end of the fuse and smelled the dark powder, sharply. He put dynamite into the hole beneath each stump, a hole Mr. Ryder called the “blew pocket.” Into each he put twenty sticks, a short estimate. Suddenly, he knew how it would feel to be the last man alive. The others were a safe distance away, the distance he had to go while the fuse burned. Suppose he fell? Suppose some jar, some friction he didn’t know anything about caused the cap to detonate too soon? His tough luck he thought, and grinned despite himself. In his mind, clear as his own name, was the information about how to light the fuse; the book had illustrations, one two three four, of hands holding matches in certain ways, holding the fuse in relation to them. At the time he had thought it was kind of silly. Now, he did not. He felt like a one-handed man with too many things to hold. Only the initial flare of an ordinary match is hot enough to give sure ignition; he remembered that sentence well. Hold the match head on the exposed powder in the end of the fuse with one hand and strike the match head with the box in the other hand. He did that. Immediately, as the book had said, a spit of flame shot out of the fuse; like a child’s sparkler, only black, and over in a second. Next, smoke came, and the fuse was lit. He was already on his way to the other stump, had the match box and the match out ready. He struck it and as it flamed, sweat dropped from his chin, made it flutter, and its potency was gone. Instantly, he struck another match. Instead of flaming, it started as a tiny blue dot and began to grow; eternity he stared at its tininess, could not wait, and threw the match away. With fingers usually clumsy, he drew a cigarette from the package in his pocket, lit it, and had it to the fuse in the time ordinarily it would have taken him to draw one cigarette from a full package. So swiftly had he drawn on the cigarette that his lungs had filled with smoke and he coughed; tears filled his eyes but through them he forced himself to see the mating of the two tiny points. In the second the fuse spit, he was already walking away. Long gone, he thought afterward, the beating in his chest so enormous he thought once it was the blast itself, behind him. The two came, seconds apart, just before safety, though he was not hurt. Rocks and dirt rained around him. Having turned his head at the moment of the first dull rumble, he saw the earth twice rupture and spray upward.
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