Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Kate’s roommates thought Son the most handsome man they knew; he was wildly jealous of Kate and they had long urged her to marry him. But something in Kate held her back; perhaps because she had felt bitter so long she was not without reservation about anyone; to hide numerous fears, she stayed aloof. She had dreamed of marrying someone of a finer nature than Son but did not believe that someone ever would choose her, so recently a hick. She was twenty-seven years old and did not want to teach as a career. Having imagined every place in the world, she had been nowhere but from Bess, North Carolina, to Delton, Tennessee. She was thrilled by the idea of going to New Orleans and thought it was over getting married. “Yes, let’s do,” she said.

  To Son, getting married was something people just did and ought to do as early as possible. It was living together for better or worse, like the man said. He worried only about making plans and said, “Well, when?”

  Kate said she had always wanted to be a spring bride. He said, “Hell, I can’t leave my business in the spring. Mister Will, other folks are started back to work good. We got to do it earlier, slack time.”

  Kate said, “We could go for Mardi gras.”

  He said, “No, I got to be back earlier than that too.”

  They finally agreed on January. Leaving the dining room, Kate thought two things: how pretty the candlelight looked and that she had to go to New Orleans in the dead of winter when nobody else did.

  Son meant to tell the news at breakfast but Cally sat alone, drinking tea. “Poppa still asleep?” he said.

  “He just fell asleep about dawn,” she said. “Something didn’t set right. He was up all night.” Son would be leaving for the week and after breakfast stopped at Poppa’s door, then went all the way into the room thinking, nobody just asleep was ever that white, whiter than the sheets. He felt Poppa’s breath against his cheek but barely; he could not wake him. He telephoned the doctor who sent an ambulance; Cally rode with Poppa and Son followed in the car. Cecilia had been called and met them at the hospital. Mr. Wynn was in a deep coma, the doctor said; that was all he could say for now. They had known it was coming, hadn’t they? He had expected it sooner, with Mr. Wynn’s condition.

  “Condition? His kidneys?” Cecilia said. She and Son talked to the doctor. Cally had forgotten the cane they had substituted for the mop and was sitting on a bench down the hall. “Kidneys yes,” the doctor said. “But I told Mr. Wynn some time ago he had Bright’s disease, that uremic poisoning was liable to set in. Now it has. I had no idea he wouldn’t have told you the seriousness.”

  “You didn’t know Poppa,” Son said.

  “He’s never wanted to be a bother,” Cecilia said. “But he’s going to be all right?”

  “I wouldn’t want to say that, young lady,” the doctor said.

  There was nothing to do but wait out the morning as there was nothing for Poppa to do but wait out his life. But his condition did not change. Son did not leave town, was at the office by eight o’clock every morning, kept in touch with customers by phone. Every day he went around town checking hotel registers to see if any contractors he knew were in Delton; if so, he invited them out to eat, gave them whisky, got up a card game. During visiting hours he went to see Poppa; Kate went with him regularly and willingly and Son never forgot that. Poppa regained consciousness and after a week went home but he could not work again. Son sold the store and invested the money except for what Poppa insisted on using to buy a little insurance: Cecilia’s husband sold it. Beyond what he had to carry on his house and car, Son did not believe in insurance, carried none on his life; he’d rather put his money some place it was working for him, he said. Try as he would, he could not cotton up to Cecilia’s husband, Joe. Besides being a Catholic and selling in-surance the man didn’t touch a drop of whisky and went into the kitchen at night with an apron on and dried the dishes; whew! Son said. When he told Poppa about marrying Kate, Poppa said, “She’s a sweet girl. I hope she’ll do better by you than Lillian did.”

  “It’nt any woman going to do me that way again,” Son said.

  Confused, Cally had already made the substitution; Lillian seemed to have slipped from her mind. Cecilia said she was glad, but told Joe privately she wished Brother had picked somebody who didn’t go along with his partying so much; and as far as she knew Kate hadn’t stepped foot in a church since coming to Delton, but she was dead-set on getting married in one. She and Son couldn’t afford a large wedding; her family did not have the means to come; but, clearly, Kate could not separate what her wedding would be from the vision in her head of what it ought to be. Endlessly, she thought of flowers and of what people would wear, even Joe as usher. Fearful of her decisions, she bought a blue suit to be married in then complained over and over afterward she should have chosen a beige one. When she was radiant with final plans, they could find no minister who would marry them because of Son’s divorce. Kate’s mouth went askew; she said, “I just give up.”

  They were married by a Justice of the Peace, the brightest object in the room a brass spittoon he used before the ceremony; all during it tobacco juice dangled like a dancing worm from his chin. Cecilia and Joe attended as witnesses. Afterward Son and Kate went out to the curb, got in the car, and headed for New Orleans. Kate did not complain about the honeymoon. If you were going to do something, do it right, Son felt, and for those few days was not tight with money. They ate everywhere, everything, spinach baked with oysters and fish in a paper bag. Son even drank some of the frothy concoctions Kate discovered there were to drink. They sure saw every nekkid gal there was to see in New Orleans, Son said when they got back.

  Before the trip, Son’s tenants had moved. He and Kate came back to the house furnished with the odds and ends Lillian had left. Son gave Kate an allowance and money to buy the furniture she could. What he couldn’t afford now, they would do without until he could, he said. Kate said why couldn’t they buy on credit like everybody else? Goddamn everybody else; there wasn’t any store going to have him in the position of owing them money again, he said.

  For a long time, when Kate’s friends came in the afternoons to play bridge, she turned her eyes in despair toward vacant corners saying, “I just give up. I’ll never have anything to fill them.” She had a maid; at three dollars a week almost everyone did. Son would not have let her work; she did not want to. There was nothing to do but play bridge and shop. Then shortly after the honeymoon, she was pregnant. By the middle of February, Will was in camp and others were setting up. One Monday morning, Son got up, packed his grip, and said he would be back Friday. “But I’m having a baby,” Kate said.

  “Well, hell, you’re not having it today,” he said, got in the car, and was gone.

  But Kate had to call him back before Friday. On Thursday Poppa went into his final coma. By Friday afternoon, he was gone. The next day they made the long day’s trip back to Vicksville: Cecilia and Joe, Son, Kate and Cally. On Sunday they laid Poppa to rest in the old churchyard next to the parsonage he had left long ago; trees, planted since, winter-stripped now, made the land look about the same as Poppa had always described it, bare, open, endless, the way Mill’s Landing had looked with the trees cut, Son thought; he wished again Mammy had left the old man there, who had been doing all right.

  The place from which Poppa had come received him again and Son shuddered, thinking with dread of death; fighting, work, his system wouldn’t be any good then. Turning, he walked away over frozen ground to the house, thinking Poppa had come full circle: he was back where he started from, without too much to show for having been away.

  Over and over they told Cally Poppa had died and thought she understood; but death seemed to have no more meaning than life. She only went to where he was laid out in the parsonage and held one of his hands a long time. Son said probably the best thing was if she didn’t know what was going on; he sure didn’t know what was going to become of her now.

  In the way of a small country town it made no difference that Poppa, having left
over thirty years ago, had hardly been back since. Everyone he had ever known came to the funeral. Afterward even the most remote member of the family gathered for homemade ice cream, cake, and the retelling of humorous incidents about the one who was gone: Remember the time Henry … someone would start, and someone else’s old eyes would glint with memory and a soft southern voice would add another bit to what emerged finally as almost Poppa’s whole life, because Uncle John went so far back as to when he and Poppa were five and were caught smoking corn silks in the barn. Now, what Poppa’s life had been was what people remembered, and Uncle John laughed so hard recalling that day his poor wizened arthritic hands seemed to have life again. Aunt Sally said, Only think, if you had known that day you’d be recalling it when Henry was buried; someone else wondered if you wanted to know how important a day was to you at the time. But Uncle John fell silent, realizing how long ago it all had been. Catching the thought, Aunt Sally said what so many of the old ones in the room were thinking, How time flies! Not even John, in his pain, guessed how short a time it would be before, regathered in this room, the family would talk of him: Remember John telling about him and Henry learning to smoke in the barn? Now, they’re both gone. And the day would become part of their legacy, for the youngest in the room, after the first hearing, went straight home and tried out corn silks; in turn, his sons and their children, overhearing the tale, stole matches at an early age and, learning to smoke in some secret place of their own, thought always of the two long ago boys, John and Henry. It was far more than Poppa ever dreamed of, whose fondest wish had been only to be spoken of occasionally after death. It was all he had asked of life, to be remembered.

  On Monday, the five returned to Delton and on Tuesday Son took out the grip from which he had removed dirty shirts and underwear, put in clean, and as he always said, lit out again. Cally went home with Cecilia; they would decide later what to do with her. Son could think of nothing but to put her in a home and wondered about the cost: having to pay for Poppa’s funeral had eaten into reserve again. Thinking of the money going out and the money coming in, he stepped on the accelerator and sped down the highway as fast as possible, into the sun just rising.

  On Friday he found that Cecilia, who was pregnant, had the same idea about Cally. She had located a Catholic home, with nominal fee, and Son had to agree, though it turned his stomach to think of Mammy there with all those women in black, the Sisters; they scared him and he stayed away altogether. Cecilia brought Cally home for Sunday dinner and he and Kate were there; afterward they took Cally for a ride. All she ever wanted to do was ride, not to any place in particular, just ride. All her old restless energy having no other outlet had focused on being in motion. Soon she was not satisfied with once a week and flew into such rages a Sister had to call Cecilia to take her riding often.

  Spring was busy. Gone from home, Son thought only of business, something he enjoyed. The first big work in a long time was to be let in Vicksburg, Son’s first big letting. Spring was rainy and the roads so bad the railroad put on a special coach to accommodate those going to the letting. Red Johnson announced he was going; it might be his last. But he was going as he always had and invited Son, Will and Buzz to drive with him. Shut-eye put on the floor of the car a tub of crushed ice and set-ups, had plenty of the sandwiches he was famous for: Cannibal, made of raw ham and sliced onion. He went to Arkansas for two five-gallon oak kegs of his own whisky, aged in the woods a long time, drove them to Delton as fast as possible, the theory being that sloshing whisky around aged it even better; all the way to Vicksburg he kept the accelerator to the floor, though the road was like a washboard and several times the younger men, finding it hilarious, had to get out and get the car unstuck. Going on, they downed more whisky and more Cannibal sandwiches and arrived in Vicksburg, as Son said, lit up like Christmas trees.

  Lights were on in every room of the hotel; the wide front verandah, the lobby were jammed with people trying to register; because of the crowd, rooms had to be shared. Shut-eye brought the second keg to Will and Red’s room, broke it open, siphoned it, and the whisky was there for anyone who wanted a drink. The actual letting of the work would be held in the Army Engineers office; for the two days prior all companies, wooing those who might win work, held open house; people roamed from room to room drinking whisky, eating food provided by the various dynamite, iron, wire rope, equipment, machinery, gravel companies and others Son never even got around to visiting. On the day of the letting, the salesmen would wait in the lobby where a blackboard was set up; as work was let, the information was phoned to the hotel and written on the board; as soon as the winning contractors returned, they would be set upon again.

  As Son registered, a man gripped his elbow and said, “Dynamite, remember me? Winston Taylor, Drainage Engineer, Spotsville County.”

  “Oh hell yeah,” Son said. “You peckerwoods decided to drain out your ditches using dynamite yet?”

  “There’s still a lot of opposition to it, but I didn’t come up to do no business with you, boy. They got my reservation lost and I’m looking for a room to get a cot set up in.”

  “Come on in with Buzz and me then,” Son said; he introduced the two, made arrangements about the cot, said he was about to starve to death, and they started for the dining room. Just outside it, Son recognized young Bull Woods who immediately looked away; but not before Son saw to his surprise and amusement the damage he had done to the boy’s nose had been permanent. Jagged as lightning a scar went across its bridge; the nose was not exactly in the center of his face.

  At the door of the dining room, they waited, looking into a room which was enormous. Wall sconces with light bulbs shaped like candleflames and glass chandeliers sparkling as truly as crystal imitated the period when the hotel was built. Table linen and waiters’ jackets were white and stiffly starched, the latter, cropped, fitted as skin-tight as vests. One mirrored wall reflected the diners who were in odd contrast to the furnishings, seeking to evoke the past. History held little interest for Son or these men; yet, like the rest, Son would feel compelled soon to visit the silent battlefield, study not with wonder but more with a professional interest the fertile hilly contours of land from which all vestiges of battle had disappeared except the flat markers and stripped cannon, greening, pigeon-smeared, pointing aimlessly. Scarcely seeing, Son, the other men, would pass beneath the guard on permanent and silent duty, the once white stone as greyed now as the uniform it had been fashioned to represent; the men would not mention war, would not think of it again until the next time when again instinctive duty would compel them between the iron gates; their already hot blood would be more so, momentarily, as they were forced to think of the enemy whose fault it had been: so that against the enemy’s descendants who retained speech, manner, habit different from theirs, Son and his friends harbored suspicion, scorn, pity, said of them, they were such damn fools they weren’t even going to tell them, would work with them thirty years or more and still sum them up, reduce them to one phrase which never changed and needed no explanation: somebody-who-thought-they-were-so-damn-smart: in short, a Yankee.

  Now, Son, Buzz, Winston followed single file behind the head waiter, thinking only of food. Will and Red joined them and all the time they ate others stopped to shake hands, exchange jokes and job information. Even during prohibition, Vicksburg was a free city; liquor could be bought anywhere but each man had his bottle under the table and intended to empty it before the night was over. Few wives came to lettings but there were plenty of women: local women and those who followed lettings, by prearrangement or to find a good time. Son had paid no attention to any women in the room; later, he said he did not even notice the woman who passed the table and then turned back. First he saw Buzz’s surprised look, then the woman who stood over him about to speak. At the moment he recognized her as Bull Woods’ wife, she began to call him names he did not expect any woman to use in public, not even Scottie. It was as if he were two people, the one who knew if it had been a ma
n talking to him he already would have killed him and the other who wondered what to do because it was a woman cussing him like he was a nigger fieldhand. Because of what he had done to her husband’s face, she said.

  Son had a reputation for not taking anything from anyone; men in the room were afraid of what he might do. Those close saw his face flush, fade, and his eyes turn white. He looked at her once and not again. Buzz noticed his hands for the first time and equated them to a bear’s paws: clenched, they rested heavily on the table. He was sure Son would swat her, was about to get to his feet to help her, thinking somebody had to. Having finished her tirade, she hushed as abruptly as she had begun and waited for Son’s reply. It seemed a long time, the room full of people waiting too. What was happening dawned on them all, and someone snickered. Mrs. Woods’ neck slowly turned purple, splotchy with rage; she did not know how to go or stay. Son’s grin had slipped to one side; only a line like chalk outlining his lips showed what he felt. He neither looked at her nor spoke. Bending to his plate, he began delicately to eat his apple pie.