Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  “Come on in here, Tangle-eye,” Carter said. “What you want?”

  “I need me three-fo’ mo’ bottles of Dr. Tishnor’s, please suh,” Tangle-eye said. Coming in, he doffed his hat. “How you Mr. Campbell?”

  Buzz, introducing Son, said, “You need to know anything about shooting dynamite, ask Tangle-eye. He’s shot it for Mister Will.”

  “Well, there’s sure a lot I need to know,” Son said.

  Tangle-eye said, “I be glad to hep you some.” When he looked at Son, one eye momentarily went another way and was the reason for his nickname. Every Negro in camp went by a nickname given by the other Negroes.

  Carter said, “Tangle-eye, you cleaned me out of Tishnor’s already this week. You better lay off that stuff anyway.”

  “I rub it on my back. My back aching,” Tangle-eye said.

  “You got a hangover,” Carter said. “You’ll have to take vanilla.”

  “I’ll take me the large size,” Tangle-eye said. “And Greaser out in the yard wants six Co-colas.” He called to a Negro waiting outside in the shade of a large maple. “Greaser, come get your Cokes.”

  Coming to the doorway, Greaser so filled it, the room darkened. Looking up, Son saw the largest man he had ever seen. Greaser was introduced as camp’s best mechanic; he was respected not only because of his size but because he held the highest job a Negro could; he helped the white mechanic oversee the greasing and care of equipment. Almost before the introduction was over, Greaser had drunk two Cokes. In each hand he enclosed, completely, two more bottles and went out on the porch. Tangle-eye opened the vanilla and put the bottle to his mouth so eagerly, Son laughed. “Boy, it looks to me like you’re in bad shape. Come on over to the tent. I’ll give you a drink of some real whisky.” When they went on the porch Son said, “Greaser, you want you a drink?”

  Tangle-eye said, “Greaser been saved. He don’t do any drinking.”

  Son looked again at the hands that completely enclosed two bottles of Coke and said, “I don’t guess nobody messes with him no matter what he does, do they?”

  Greaser said, “I don’t look for no trouble.”

  Going down the dusty path, back to the guest tent, Tangle-eye said, “Greaser don’t do nothing wrong since he been saved. Work, saves his money, that’s all.” When Tangle-eye had had his drink he admired the shirt Son had worn to camp; it lay over his cot. Son said, “I’ll look at home. I got some shirts I can’t wear anymore. I’m going to bring you some.” He realized from the way Tangle-eye left, quickly opening and closing the door, it was to keep out mosquitoes. He poured a little whisky into his hand and rubbed his ankles. He had scratched them until they were almost raw.

  Carter, Buzz and Will came and while they drank, Son listened to insect sounds outside; the mingled cries were so loud that sometimes the men had to raise their voices to hear, though it was only variations in the tone they noticed. Once, they listened to a frog just beneath the tent and to a locust screaming in discord to the others. For an unaccountable moment, all the sounds ceased, the moment so strange, Mister Will started up, the others were motionless. As unaccountably, the sounds started up again and the men looked at one another with half-foolish grins and began to talk. If they lost any more boys, Will said, they could not finish on time; they would lose as much as two thousand dollars a day. Work went on seven days a week, from daylight to dark; there was no way to make up lost time. Part of a contractor’s winning a job was his guarantee of when it would be finished; his bonding company guaranteed the date too. Reputations were important and had to be maintained. The Government was an exacting boss.

  The supper gong called them into the warm evening. They went along the path between the rows of tents and Martha joined them as they went to eat. Families usually cooked in their own tents; only men sat at the long wooden tables. Emmie, the cook, was the only Negro who spent any time in the white’s part of camp; during the winter lay-off, she cooked for the Carrothers in Delton. She looked up, her face the color of new copper, shining from the stove’s heat; her grandfather, half-Indian, had operated one of the first ferries ever to cross the White River. Will said, “Emmie, here’s Mr. Frank Wynn, never been to a levee camp before. What you got good to eat?”

  “Got levee camp chicken tonight, Cap’n,” she said, indicating a bowl of molasses and water in which pieces of salt pork had been soaking all day. As they talked, she dipped pieces into another bowl of water then dropped them into a skillet full of grease. “If I’d knowed you had company, I’d have done you some better.”

  Carter, passing, slapped Son on the shoulder. “This ain’t no company,” he said. “Just another peddler come by.”

  Buzz said, “Emmie, I been starving to death up and down this river. You the only one that feeds me right.”

  Close at hand, at supper, Son smelled the sweet-crusted smell of the fried pork and with slight variations in the evening’s breeze he caught a whiff of creosote coming from the privy back of camp, but mostly he smelled mosquito spray and he could see the floor soaked with it in large greasy spots. On almost every part of him he could name, he felt welts rising and tried to scratch them unnoticed. From one table to another, they talked of who had taken the Negroes to the other camp. Full dark had come before they finished and Emmie lit the lamps. The dark enclosed them, heavy and warm, like something solid against the screens. Specks of light in the far dark told where other tents were. Somewhere in the woods, toward the river, a wolf howled and the head mechanic’s dog, waiting for him outside the tent, set up such barking the man rose and yelled “Hyar!” through the screen and the dog crawled under the tent to whimper. In the kitchen tent, Emmie stopped rocking and said, “Ooo wee, I hate that sound out there,” and everyone else hated it too and said nothing to comfort her. Leaving the tent, Will gave Buzz and Son flashlights and told them to play them around everywhere before they went to bed. When they set up camp, they had killed as many snakes as possible but many were still around; he told of a momma snake that had swallowed her young to move them away from a boy chopping brush; the boy had struck the momma snake a blow that killed her but she opened her mouth and released the young and they had never found a one. “Go on, Mister Will,” Buzz said; but Martha, walking beside Will, promised it was the Lord’s truth.

  As Will did, many other whites and Negroes had two tents connected by a screened breezeway; people sat there in the dark after supper because it was cooler and not having lamps lit discouraged bugs. Son heard Negroes singing, heard a guitar. He went back up the path and insects in the grass hushed until he had gone by. Martha went into her tent, but the men went back to the guest tent to play Pitch. Entering, Carter said, “Get that damn mosquito off your cheek,” and Son began to brush at it. Will said, “You can’t brush ’em. Pull. Pull like a tick.” Then Son was holding between his fingers a mosquito as big as a wasp, squashed into a large spot of blood that was his own. “Jesus Christ, I thought them mosquitoes were about to tote me off,” he said.

  Buzz gave him alcohol to rub on his itching welts and Will said, “You got to keep something on you all the time.” He meant kerosene or a spray. “Clothes don’t help. They bite right through.”

  They did not play cards long and no one drank; it was too hot and they had to get up too early, work too hard. When the others had gone, Buzz and Son used a tree outside, sprayed the tent, looked for snakes and went to bed. The moonlit trees were close and still, the night had little breeze, and beneath him Son felt the cot grow steadily wetter as he perspired. In the woods an animal called and before he could ask the question, Buzz answered it: “Wildcat.” Buzz said the woods around here were so wild that earlier in the spring two salesmen coming out on mules were lost in them for three days. He fell asleep, snoring lightly, but Son lay watching the silver play of moonlight over everything, realizing how tired he was, that it had been a long day; he looked back at himself meeting the Negro in the cotton field and to the moment when he was finally shooting along the levee, saw himself di
p down and struggle on out to camp. Mister Will’s face freed itself of the day’s other impressions and Son thought of the moonlight silver on his silver hair and the now familiar sprinkling of freckles in the corner of each eye; it seemed he had known him always. Carter, Buzz, Tangle-eye, Greaser: it seemed he had known them all a long time. What seemed strange was his life away from here. He had not thought of Lillian once. Cally was a faint, nagging worry that underlay everything. Poppa he thought of comfortably and fell asleep wishing he were there.

  Morning was the sun shining through dew-wet cobwebs all around the screens and a mourning dove calling in the distance answered by another in the opposite direction; ooo-oo went one and the other responded at longer intervals, oooo-oooo: over and over, all day. The sun at a level with the screens was already hot and lay over him with the warmth of a light blanket. The first pair of eyes he met were two black ones in a pointed face. Seeing Son, the racoon, which had been on the steps eating something between front paws, put them down and went away without hurry. A thud and two groans were Buzz getting up; he stood, rubbing his buttocks, and said, “That may be the last Goddamn mule I ever ride.”

  In the tent nearest the tree they chose, Cotton Riley’s wife fried pork rind. A child with a tangled head of hair stood in his cot and watched them with unsurprised eyes; they shot their water at a frog which belched when Buzz hit it and the child cried the news excitedly back to his family.

  Behind the dining tent the path was crowded with Negroes going to work; already many were milling about the commissary. The foreman sopped his plate clean with half a biscuit and reported no more men were missing. But Will still had a look of worry that was more than usual. He said he had dirt in a borrow pit he wanted to show Buzz and Son. After breakfast, they followed him to the commissary where a Negro named Sho Nuff held mules. Like almost all the Negro men, Sho Nuff wore a large floppy straw hat and a pair of overalls pinned together at the shoulders with safety pins. His four upper front teeth were gold; his lower jaw had been knocked permanently to one side. As they went along on the mules, Will told how it had happened. Another year, on someone else’s job, Sho Nuff had gotten into a fight with another Negro; when the white boss tried to break it up, Sho Nuff sassed him. Will said, “Sho Nuff had the nerve because he knew the white man was afraid of him. You can’t show fear of Negroes. They can smell it every time.” Then, the white man had picked up a willow root and tried to beat Sho Nuff but slipped and fell. Sho Nuff stuck into his leg the knife he had been trying to stick into the other Negro.

  “How’d he get out of that?” Son said.

  “Run off,” Will said. “Had to. He came to me then and been with me ever since.”

  “You don’t think he’ll stick a knife in you?” Buzz said.

  “No, he knows I’m not afraid of him,” Will said.

  The borrow pit they approached was ten acres. But before they saw it, they smelled it. First they smelled themselves, sweating, then the sticky wet hides of the mules, the customary dust and the long dry sun-browned grass before, Will having said nothing, Son and Buzz stared at one another in surprise and later told it this way: riding a old Arkansas mule down what back country Arkansas called a road, they all of a sudden smelled the sea. Salt water, Son would say, having never seen the ocean. But Buzz told, I be damned if it didn’t smell just like the Gu’f Coast.

  Before them a panorama of Negroes, mules and equipment laboriously moved the dirt, like ants, working steadily and small in comparison to their undertaking. Harness-worn, many of the mules, despite the good care they received, had sores, and flies and gnats followed them in swarms. The mules were worked in pairs. From a distance one seemed always a shadow of the other, stuck close. They pulled wagons and slip scrapers which were big pans on wheels, pulled by two to four mules, and slipped over the ground to fill with little more than a yard of dirt at a time. Bottom dump wagons were pulled by twelve to sixteen mules and had trip doors worked by a hand crank. On one elevating grader, dirt travelled up a belt until the wagon was full. The scraper’s bottom, the mules’ hooves packed the dirt once it was on the levee. But all Son and Buzz could think about was the pit. His own mouth had fallen open and Son saw Buzz had to close his before speaking; then all he could say was, “I’ll be damned.” The dirt, black, shone like asphalt just rained on, though there had not been rain for weeks. They sat on mules covered with dust, dust settled on everything about them, and in the borrow pit dirt was being dug, dumped, hauled and not a particle flew anywhere. Leaving the mules, they walked to the mud; close up, it had a greenish cast and steamed up at them with its thousand-year-old smell of the sea and things that had belonged to it. “The Gulf,” Will said, “used to reach up here and on to Cairo. We came across this pocket by accident. Just started digging and here it was. Come here, close.” The others stooped as he did, watched as he dug his hand into the dirt and broke it open. For an instant they saw tiny petrified sea fossils, little shells, but as soon as the air touched them they were gone, turned to dust, and all Will held was the dirt smelling as if it had come from an outhouse, inescapably around them. “It’s the most wonderful dirt to move I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The quickest moving and it don’t stick to anything.”

  Borrow pit land was abandoned once the dirt was removed, left to fill with rain water and eventually form another of the numerous muddy fishing ponds dotting the Southern landscape. “Liable to be good cat fishing here someday,” Will said, and they all wondered if they would see.

  Buzz spoke to Will about buying equipment. Son tried to sell Will dynamite, said he would do all the blasting free. “Yourself?” Will said in surprise. All morning they followed Will who oversaw everything, even a mule the head skinner reported sick, and Son talked about his theories of using dynamite in levee work, about all the ways he thought dynamite could be used in swamps, for clearing, to make drainage ditches, ways it had not been used before. And he began immediately to learn from Mr. Will. He said, “Frank, I’ll tell you something that’s my system. The other contractors don’t use it, but I think it’s the best way.” Son knew then he would try it. “I only have the trees cleared as far ahead as I’m going to work that day. Because the trees drink the water. If you do it that way, you’ll have a better job.” At noon, work ceased as abruptly as if a signal had been given though none was: fill, dump, back and forth, the pattern was broken; the jangle of mule harness ceased, the rattle of wagons, the roar of tractors, dust settled. Those who had not worked Will’s black mud were covered with dust; white and Negro, they trooped back to camp for noon dinner, sweating and smelling and baked by the sun. Son had kept on his hat but knew his eyes were bloodshot; he entered the shelter of the tent and had a moment of adjusting; things flashed in yellow, like sparklers against night; for one instant he saw the whole levee panorama as if it were on the head of a pin and himself there too. Walking in, sitting on a bench at one of the long tables, opposite Will, he looked about at the grimy, burned, uncomplaining faces of the men who were laughing and talking quietly, as if purposefully guarding their strength to go again into the blazing afternoon, to the work as backbreaking as any Son had ever seen a Negro do. At that moment, he realized he had found his life’s work and it was something he liked to do. If there was anything else in the world a man could be luckier about, he didn’t know what it was.

  Will drank his iced tea and said, “Frank, I been thinking about what you been saying about dynamite. I don’t know whether your ideas are right or not. But if I win any big work when we have another letting, I’d be willing to experiment with you just a little.”

  Son said, “Mister Will, just let me try. Just let me show you. I know I’m right.”

  Will said, “Well, if you’re going to do all my shooting free, I ain’t got nothing to lose.”

  Buzz looked at Son. “Boy,” he said, “you might as well get you a old floppy straw and a pair of pinned-together overalls.”

  Will’s eyes met Son’s. He said, “Yes sir, I believe Frank’s
a good one. He’s like the rest of us, not afraid to work.”

  Son had been going to say he never had been afraid to work, had always had to; his nose was enclosed in his glass of tea and he was draining the last sweeter gulp at the bottom, had been about to lower the glass when Will, standing abruptly, almost knocked it from his hand. At the same moment, Emmie came screaming from the kitchen, “Greaser gone crazy. Fixing to kill us!”

  Everyone stood. From behind the screen, they looked out at Greaser who had run up from the Negro section and stood outside, looking crazy. Enraged, he struggled to speak and only saliva slid from his lips. Veins stood on his forehead prominently, knotted as rope; his hands swung, back and forth, open, itching to take hold of something. Will opened the door and went out and Son heard Martha call him back softly.

  Will stood perfectly still and said, “What’s the trouble, Greaser?”

  Watching, Son could only think of Greaser’s enormous body sustained by the tiny thing beating within it. Greaser sucked powerfully, found breath and said, “I’m going to kill him.”

  Other Negroes, having followed, stood in a semicircle behind camp’s invisible dividing line, looking scared. Will said, “What’s happened?”

  “Gone. Gone. Carried my money. Carried my gun.” Greaser’s voice broke with rage and grief.

  “Who done?” Emmie said, before anyone else could. Her own money was hidden in a dark corner of the kitchen; she went to check it.

  “Booker T.,” someone said. The name echoed around the semicircle; Greaser’s breath still came in a spasm. Son saw his arms were so long, his hands were just short of his calves; still they swung, back and forth, back and forth.

  Tangle-eye, holding his hat against his chest, stepped forward. “Doll seen Booker T. slipping around Greaser’s tent this morning. Greaser come in and found his mattress cut up, his money he had inside gone. A gun too.”

  “Loaded,” someone else said. “Booker T. knowed it too.”