The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  Mary grunted again. “She’s hungry,” Rachel said. “Hand her over.” Ledford did so, kissing the little one once more as he passed her to Rachel. Then he walked into the kitchen and opened another beer. Church of the Air was coming through the radio, but Edward R. Murrow would be on at one-forty-five.

  Through the Philco, the preacher asked, “How long has it been since you labored in the field of God? How long since you bathed in his majestic waters?”

  “Too long,” Ledford answered. He cleared his throat and spat in the kitchen sink.

  The preacher’s words stirred in Ledford a memory he’d not had in years.

  There was a field, and he’d run through its weeds as a boy. Shoulder-high, the weeds seemed to know he was coming, bending before him and waking like water behind. There was a barn and an old preacher woman with a clay pipe in her teeth.

  There was the lake from his dream, and his daddy, fishing from the rowboat.

  Ledford went to the basement and looked at the half-full bookcase he’d built. It wasn’t plumb to the ground. He stared at two books, side by side. The Growth of the American Republic and the Holy Bible. Both had belonged to his father. He picked up the old King James and looked for penciled underlinings. The marks of Bill Ledford’s study. The marks of a man who could never outrun the engine in his head, but who would damn sure try. Ledford located one such passage. He took a belt off his beer and read the words, I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the holy. Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? Who hath gathered the wind in his fists? Ledford liked that last line. He said it aloud. “Gathered the wind in his fists.”

  The phone rang. He slid the Bible back to its designation and picked up the receiver. It was Erm. He had a tip on a horse in the eighth at Pimlico. “This is the overlay of overlays, Leadfoot,” he kept saying. “Don’t back off the gas now.”

  He told Erm to put him down for another five hundred and hung up. Stood in the center of the basement and looked around. His shinbone was acting up. Like someone had taken a hot poker to it. But Ledford would not sit down and prop it up. He’d ignore it.

  Everything salvageable from his old house had ended up in the basement. There was a full tail fan of turkey feathers, gathered at the base in a knot of quills. It had come from his father’s father. It sat on top of the bookcase, next to handblown blue bottles and three big glass scraps shaped liked diamonds. Against the wall there was an old brown trunk with quilts inside, one of them covered in swastikas. It was made by his great-grandmother, who, according to his father, had been half Indian. You’d always had to hide such a quilt, even before the second war, on account of Hitler. But Ledford’s daddy told him that the quilt’s true meaning was luck. Or love. One or the other, he’d never been sure.

  The burn in his shinbone flared. He sat down on top of the trunk and picked at a shoot of splintering wood. Checked his watch again. Murrow would be coming on. He’d not listen today. He didn’t want the news.

  Above him, the floorboards gave as Rachel carried little Mary to her crib. He listened as Rachel stepped light from the nursery and across the living room. He cupped his ear and picked up the sound of her knitting needles sliding and clacking. Ledford stood, opened the trunk, and felt beneath the swastika quilt. He pulled out a pint of Ten High. It was three-quarters full.

  He tilted back, drained the bottle to a quarter, and put it back, next to the flat little box that housed his Purple Heart. He never opened that box. It may as well have housed a Cracker Jack prize. Next to the box he kept a burlap sack full of marbles his daddy had made for him. The shooter was black like tar, as if rolled and frozen in ice. “One of these days,” his daddy had said, “little boys and girls will line up and lay down every tooth-fairy penny they ever made for a marble like that there.”

  Ledford stuck a piece of Beeman’s in his mouth and stood in front of his crooked bookcase, smiling and looking for something to read. The pain in his leg subsided. He closed his eyes and fell asleep standing.

  When he opened them again, the bookcase shelves were made of mud. Empty. Their surfaces cracked with tiny crooked lines like wrinkles in a roadmap. Ledford traced the cracks with his fingertip. He brought the finger to his mouth and tasted it. Dirt. Copper penny. Blood. There was a tickle on the palm of his hand, and there, worms wriggled forth from a hole the size of a button. Ledford pinched their ends and tugged, and the worms tore at the middle and whipped themselves side to side, split but still alive. He set them on the muddy shelves and watched them struggle to slide away. On the bottom shelf sat a single photograph, flipped, showing only its cotton white back. Ledford reached for it and turned it around. There was the fat Kentucky toddler in her white walker shoes. A hole had been burnt where her face should have been. Ledford smoothed the black ash with his thumb and the photograph roared at him. He fell on his tailbone and covered his ears, and the worms in his palms slid inside and burrowed deep, all the way up to his sinuses, and Ledford shook his head like a dog in water to loose them.

  He awoke in this state on the hard basement floor in front of the bookcase. His fingertips were plugged up his nose-holes, and he lay flat on his backside like someone had knocked him out cold.

  He crawled to the trunk for his Ten High. Tomorrow was a work-day. He’d need to brave sleep again. He’d need to get through.

  Upstairs, Rachel had frozen mid-stitch. The tips of her needles quivered as the baby grunted and banged against the crib rails in the nursery. “Please,” Rachel whispered. “Please stay down.”

  Ledford’s screams had come again, but she’d not go check on him this time. His nightmares were his alone. What he’d seen and done were not for her to question.

  It was the baby she’d see through. It was Mary she’d listen for inside all the other noise.

  JUNE 1946

  WHEN MACK WELLS HAD returned to his janitorial duties at the Mann Glass Company, it was with little fanfare. Unlike the other GIs, his return was not featured in the company newsletter. Though he’d taken Honningen with the 394th, he was not allowed to sail stateside with them after V-E Day. He’d been sent back with his service unit to an ill-lit port yard at four in the morning. No parades, no flashbulbs.

  It was a Tuesday of his first week back on the job that Mack Wells made eye contact with Ledford. They remembered one another from their time before the war, and they recognized in one another’s eyes the remnants of a shared shitstorm. They convened in Ledford’s new office to talk over lunch. Each preferred the egg salad of the other’s wife. They didn’t speak much on the war. But as for life after its end, Mack Wells was not being offered what Ledford was, not by a longshot. Mann Glass liked its janitors black, the Federal Housing Authority liked their vets white, and neither party made an effort to hide such things.

  Ledford didn’t take to such small thinking. As a younger man, like everybody, he’d played the game of white over black, but college had changed all that. History’s study will sometimes enlighten the present. Theologians will sometimes speak openly in classrooms. At Marshall, Ledford had met such a man in Don Staples, professor of philosophy.

  In Ledford’s office, the rotary fan hummed metallic. He shut it off. Noises had begun to get under his skin.

  Across the desk, Mack Wells had just asked about a new job. “You want off the swing shift?” Ledford ran his fingers along the desk’s beveled edge.

  “That would help,” said Mack Wells.

  “You want mold shop or hot end?”

  “I think I’d make a okay flint.” Mack cleared his throat. He looked at the picture of baby Mary, stuck with a silver tack to a press board panel. Nothing else was hung on the wall.

  “Mold maker it is.” Ledford took out a Mail-o-Gram pad and made a note to personnel. “I’ll speak to somebody in the 75 about you.”

  Mack shook his head no. The Local 75 would sooner deunionize than offer membership to a black man. “We could hold off on that,” Mack said. He wondered about Ledford’s ways. Couldn’t figure
if the white man before him was on the level. “But my wife will be lookin for work. My boy starts first grade this year and she was wonderin if selecting had a spot.”

  The selecting department was all women. All white. Ledford said he’d check into it.

  They stood and shook hands, and each wanted to ask the other about what they’d seen over there. Neither could do so. Mack Wells nodded and put on his flat cap. He closed the heavy door behind him.

  Ledford put his feet on the desk and lit a cigarette. He looked at the memo to personnel. Thought of all the men he knew at the plant who would spit at Mack Wells’ feet if he wasn’t pushing a broom. A knot took shape in his belly. He looked at the blank brown walls around him and rubbed his hands against his slacks. It was not yet ten a.m. Time to walk the floor, he decided. Time to watch the lava pour.

  It was loud down there, but steady. Inside the sounds of a factory floor, there was the quiet that comes from constancy. The batch attendant unloaded the mixes. He wore the same split-leather gloves Ledford had worn years before.

  Ledford nodded to the man, who he’d heard was a mute, but the gesture wasn’t noticed.

  When he turned to walk away, he knocked against the young man approaching. It was Charlie Ball, Lucius’s nephew, who had been hired out of college as a supervisor. Charlie’s father was county commissioner. His grandfather had been governor. “Morning,” he said. His grin was of the shit-eating variety. His tie knot was fat and perfect.

  Ledford had hated Charlie Ball from the moment he’d met him. “Morning.”

  “Loud, isn’t it?” Charlie’s eyes were set too close, and they looked right through you when he talked, on out to some empty designation beyond.

  “It is.” Ledford glanced at his breast pocket to be sure he’d remembered his cigarettes. He had. He looked back at Charlie Ball, not much more than a boy, pudgy cheeks. Freckles. He had a face that stirred in Ledford the urge to whup him.

  “You see the new blonde in corrugated yet?” Charlie’s grin spread. He shuffled in his loafers. It was the third time he’d asked that particular question in an hour. He mistakenly thought such conversation ingratiated him with other men.

  “I haven’t,” Ledford said.

  “Titties the size of footballs.” Charlie cupped his hands in front of his chest to elaborate.

  “Uh-huh,” Ledford said. He stared sufficient to make Charlie squirm, and then he moved on.

  Ledford walked past the flow line and through the side doors. It was warm out. Humid and cloudy. He sidestepped a stack of shipping palettes and lit a cigarette. Freight cars sat quiet on the line, waiting to be loaded. Ledford walked along the rail as if on a tightrope, his arms outstretched, his lips gripping his smoke. He fell off and kicked at shale rock between the ties. Picked one up and spat on it, rubbed it with his thumb. It reminded him of the pocketstone he used to carry for sharpening the dogleg jackknife. The knife he’d long since put away in the big trunk.

  In the sunlight, the rock seemed to house glass, a shine inside the dust.

  He threw it high at the batch tanks, above them the steaming chimney stacks. Through the steam, he could make out the green hills. They gathered up and cinched the valley shut. They were perfect.

  It was quiet for a time. Then a shift whistle sounded to the east and Ledford’s neck hairs stood on end. Every part of him seized up tight like a watch spring. The whistle, like the fan, had become an irritant of his soul.

  When he got back to his office, Ledford tore off the Mail-o-Gram, walked to his secretary’s desk, and said, “Ernestine, I’ve got a note for personnel.” He watched her read it and nod her head. She wore a flower in her hair and a five-year service pin on her blouse collar. “I’m feeling poorly,” Ledford told her. “Taking the rest of the day off.”

  She watched him walk away, pulling on his crooked tie knot and unbuttoning his shirt collar.

  He gassed up the Packard and stopped at the ABC, where he bought two fifths of Ten High, a couple RC Colas, and a tin of cut plug for the trip.

  At the house, he kissed Rachel and Mary hello. He phoned Erm, shoved a change of clothes into his gray leather grip, and kissed Rachel and Mary goodbye.

  Rachel did not look him in the face. If this was the last time she was to see him, she’d just as soon remember another Ledford.

  Backing out of the driveway, he saw her silhouette through the window blinds. She still had that spike straight posture, whether she toted the baby or not. Most times she toted. He wanted to go back in and hold them both. Tell them he loved them. But he didn’t. His foot found the clutch and his eye found the road.

  On Route 52, Ledford rolled the window down and stuck his head out as he drove. He let the wind in under his eyelids.

  His wristwatch read noon. He could be in Chicago by midnight.

  THE PAPERWEIGHT WAS ten inches of steel, the sawed-off end of an over-under shotgun barrel. Ledford stared at its two openings. From where he sat, slumped and fighting sleep, the glow of the desk lamp illuminated the gun barrels’ insides, so that he watched a spider there, walking its tightrope. It was magnificent. The kind of thing he’d taken to noticing more of late. “Hello,” he whispered to the spider. He wanted to lean forward and stick his finger in the barrel, but he was too drunk to move.

  The air inside Erm’s bookie office was stale. Wallpaper glue gone bad, whiskey molding in the floorboards. When the doorknob turned, Ledford’s breathing seized. His back was to the door.

  “Wake up Erminio,” someone said.

  Erm jerked to attention in the slatback chair across the desk from Ledford. Erm swiveled and whirled and nearly fell to the floor. The creak of the chair seized Ledford by the nerve endings. He thought about grabbing the paperweight. It made a fine weapon. Instead, he stood and turned to face whoever had entered.

  It was Loaf, the giant associate from the racetrack. Uncle Fiore’s bodyguard. His nose was red and swollen, and the buttons on his vest were mismatched. “You going to sleep while your uncle gets an ulcer?” he said.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” Erm answered. He fumbled with the papers on his desk as if to look useful.

  Loaf sized up Ledford. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. His breath was rotten from four feet off.

  “Ledford. We met at Hawthorne last summer.”

  Loaf knew who he was. The question was a customary greeting.

  “Yeah. Ledford.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped at snot and sweat alike. Loaf had little regard for his face.

  On a leather love seat against the far wall, a naked woman shifted under the afghan that half-covered her. The curve in her spine was something to behold. There was a birthmark on her hip. She sighed.

  Ledford sat back down and looked at the gun barrel and wished he hadn’t felt the impulse to use it for clubbing the head of an unknown man. The spider was gone. The glow from the lamp’s green hood lit Erm a seasick hue. He coughed hard and spat in the trashcan at his feet. “I’m on it,” he said to Loaf. The door closed.

  “Half-wit son of a bitch,” Erm muttered. “You want breakfast?” They walked to the diner on Ashland in silence. Both ordered coffee and corned beef hash and eggs. Erm kept coughing and spitting, this time on the dirty linoleum. He smeared it with his wingtip.

  Ledford looked out the window. Chicago had not given him what he was looking for. The booze worked as it always had, but he wouldn’t lie down with another woman. This didn’t sit right with Erm. And that morning, at two a.m., a phone call had come that threw a switch in every happy man at the card table and the bar. The phone call made mugshots out of smiles. Erm’s cousin had been hit by a car and killed.

  The cousin, Uncle Fiore’s favorite son, was a book-smart street enforcer with a straight job for appearances. A plumber who left behind a wife and three girls.

  The waitress refilled their coffees. “Listen to this,” Erm said. He had the newspaper quartered in his left hand, coffee cup in his right. The diner was getting crowded. Erm took quick looks at the f
ront door over Ledford’s shoulder. He tongued his bridge of porcelain teeth between swallows. He read aloud. “Louis Bacigalupo, thirty-four years old, a union plumber, was injured fatally Tuesday morning just two days after his wife and three daughters had honored him with a Father’s Day luncheon in his home.” Erm took a drink. “What the hell does injured fatally mean? Who ever heard of injured fatally?” The waitress put their plates in front of them and Ledford said thank you. Erm kept on reading. “The auto driver was charged with reckless driving and released under fifty dollars bond.”

  Ledford knew what came next. It had been in the whispers that started after the two-a.m. phone call. It had been in the face of an associate who’d taken Erm aside at the basement card game. They’d left soon after for Erm’s crowded bookie office, with Ledford down two hundred, his ace hand still on the way.

  The naked woman had appeared from the hallway, lay down without a word, and slept.

  There were meetings in the office corner to which Ledford was not invited, but he knew the good word. Murder was on the tongues of these men.

  The “auto driver” was out on bond. He’d be dead inside a day.

  The corned beef hash steamed. “I’m going to hit the road after breakfast,” Ledford said. He picked up his knife and fork.

  Erm set the paper down. “You just got here Leadfoot.” He broke bacon into little pieces and stabbed them with a fork.

  “Yeah.”

  Erm looked out the window at a couple walking by. They held hands and smiled. “You feelin uneasy? This kind of shit make you squirm these days?” He watched the couple turn the corner.