The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  “You’re the squirmy Ermie,” Ledford said. “I’m just Loyal.” They both laughed a little, Erm’s cut short. Ledford went on. “Look, I been thinking too much lately. And now the baby and Rachel.” He felt like talking to Erm instead of just pushing bullshit back and forth, the only thing they’d ever done. He felt like telling Erm that he wanted to read books again like he had after the war, that a theology professor was on his mind, a man who’d told him of William Wilberforce and Mohandas Gandhi, that his mind was on God and birth and death, on Mack Wells and those who shared his skin color. He wanted to tell Erm that they’d been sold bad goods. That they didn’t have to claw and tear and hate and kill and always, everywhere, win. But Erm wasn’t the kind of friend you said such things to. Ledford had never wanted that kind.

  He split an egg yolk with his fork. “It doesn’t have to be this way Erm,” he managed.

  Erm looked at him, frowned. Then he said, “Fuck you Ledford,” and got up and licked his thumb. He pulled two dollar bills from a thick fold and dropped them on the chipped red laminate.

  A leather strap of beat-up Christmas bells hung on the doorknob. It sounded as he walked away.

  LEDFORD STOOD IN the dark and looked at them. Mother and baby. He’d come in so quiet that Rachel hadn’t stirred. She slept with her arm across her forehead, her chest rising slow and even. Mary lay beside her, on her back, both arms up over her head as if stretching. She was a tiny thing. Ledford smiled. He’d hold them more, he thought. Tell them that he loved them. He’d make a change.

  THE HOT DOGS at Wiggins were fifteen cents apiece. Ledford sat at the countertop on a swivel stool, wiping chili from the corners of his mouth. The Very Reverend C. Rice Thompson sat to his right. He marveled at how young Ledford had eaten four hot dogs in the time it took him to put down two. “You’ve got no problems with your appetite,” he said.

  “Never have.” Ledford watched the proprietor move from the cash register to the counter-back. He pulled two cigars from an opened display box of White Owls. They were for the fat man in overalls paying his check. The elastic bands cut an X across the fat man’s back. Ledford watched him breathe heavy at the register. “Most times my stomach can hold its own,” he told the Reverend, “it’s my ears and brain that have been getting to me.” He finished off his second Coke and put the bottle on the counter. Looked at the White Owl box again. Next to it was a stack of Doublemint chewing gum, and next to that, a hanging display of powdered aspirin. Ledford could always use the aspirin.

  “I hope that talking will help with that,” Reverend Thompson said.

  “Rachel had the right idea sending you my way.” He took off his glasses and wiped at their lenses with his napkin. “But I believe I know someone you might speak a little freer with than myself.” He put the glasses back on and turned to Ledford, who stifled a burp. “He’s just over at the college here. You may have met him in your time there. Don Staples?”

  Ledford shook his head in recognition. “I had him one semester. Best teacher in the place.”

  “Then you know he’s a genuine theologian. Used to be with the Episcopal Church but he broke away and went to work for the CCC in the thirties. He’s dedicated his study to the work of William Wilberforce.”

  Ledford nodded. “He spoke a good bit on Wilberforce in class.”

  “Did you know he published a book on him?”

  “No.” Ledford wondered why Staples had not laid claim to such a thing.

  Reverend Thompson leaned in and spoke soft. “The man is more committed to securing rights for Negroes than anyone you’re likely to meet. Wears his beard lately in the style of John Brown. A true eccentric.”

  “You think I ought to bother him?”

  “Oh sure. He’d enjoy your company, just as I have. But he’d speak your language a little more fluent than I can, I’d imagine.” The Reverend, though older than Ledford, had not seen what the younger man had. He’d not lost so much for so long. He cleared his throat and signaled for the bill.

  “How’s that?” Ledford looked at the circle-shaped smears on the Reverend’s lenses.

  “Well, he spent time overseas in the First War, and he knows a great deal about a great many things.” He left it at that. It seemed enough.

  After they shook hands, Reverend Thompson walked back to his church, and Ledford walked the length of Fourth Avenue to campus. He appreciated Rachel making the appointment with her Episcopalian man. The Reverend was a good sort, the kind who did not judge on attendance at God’s Sunday meeting.

  At Sixteenth Street, Ledford nearly knocked over a small boy selling newspapers. He wore no shirt, just a full satchel, bandolier-style. He squinted at the sun. Ledford bought a paper and walked on. A woman crossed in front of him, holding something wrapped in butcher paper. She smiled at him, and when he looked back to see her from behind, she looked back too.

  It took three people to correctly navigate his path to Professor Staples’ office. Its location was the basement of Old Main, just beyond the furnace room. An orange light emitted from the half-open door. Ledford knocked.

  “Come on in.”

  He pushed on the heavy steel door and stepped inside. “Professor Staples?”

  “Just call me Don, son.” The man looked at Ledford over spectacles worn low on his nose-bridge. His beard was full and long. Blocked in black and gray like the coat of some animal. In his hand was a book. Everywhere were books. Stacked in rows on his desk, the floor, in front of the full bookshelves. “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “Reverend Thompson from Trinity Episcopal said I might speak with you.” Ledford had trouble reading the man’s eyes, which were locked on him but elsewhere simultaneously. The left one was lazy, off kilter.

  “The Very Right Reverend,” Staples said. “The crème de le crème, the cream of the cash crop.” He kept up his staring, sniffed hard. “Oh, Thompson is a good man of God. I’m only pullin your leg.” He smiled.

  “I had you in class once before?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Here.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ledford.”

  Staples thought for a moment. “You have people in Mingo?”

  “Yessir. My grandfather was from Naugatuck.”

  “You have people in Wayne County?”

  “I believe I might.”

  “Ledford,” the older man said, considering the surname. He sniffed again, then set his book down and wiped at his nose with his thumb. “I knew a Franklin Ledford up at Red Jacket.”

  “My great uncle, I believe. Dead.”

  “Oh yes, dead. Matter of fact, all the Ledfords in those parts are long dead, aren’t they?”

  “That or moved away.” He was still holding the door’s edge in his hand. “You’re from Mingo?”

  Staples shook his head no. “Spent some time there as a young man. But I’m a McDowell County boy. Keystone.” He smiled again. “Come on in and sit down. Just move those books off to the floor there.”

  Ledford did so and sat. The seat of his chair was half-rotten. Under his backside, it felt as if it might go any time. “I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said.

  “Depends on what you’re here for.” Staples leaned back and crossed his long legs. He took off his glasses and folded them shut. Held them two-handed across his belly.

  “Well,” Ledford said. “That’s…” He couldn’t spit it out. “I…” Staples did not move an inch. He sat and stared and breathed slow but noticeable through the nose he kept snorting. It whistled. The lamplight flickered under the orange scarf he’d laid across it.

  “I have questions about God. And man.” Ledford cracked his knuckles against his thighs.

  “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm,” Staples said. “And the Very Reverend, he didn’t give you answers on those?”

  “Well, he thought maybe I’d understand them a little better if they came from you.”

  “Is that right? Well…” He came forward
suddenly, slapped both his shoes on the floor. From his desk drawer he pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch. “What’s the weather doin?”

  “Sunny. Hot.”

  “You want to go for a walk?”

  “Sure. Yessir.”

  It was Sadie Hawkins Day, and coed girls chased boys across the green like they’d heard a starter gun salute. Staples ignored them and walked at a quick clip and talked with his teeth clamped around his pipe, which looked to be on its last leg. “Are you married?”

  “Yessir.”

  “How long?”

  “A year next month.”

  “Child?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

  “Have you kept your pecker in your pants otherwise?” He did not break stride. They cut across the grass, dry and patchy.

  “Yessir.”

  “Good.” Staples stopped dead and pointed to a big maple tree ten yards off. “This is the tree,” he said. The skin on his hand said he’d seen a good bit of sun. Long fingers. He was roughly Ledford’s size, and he’d not stooped with age.

  Ledford followed him to the tree. Staples sat down Indian-style next to a surfaced root. Ledford looked around. A Sadie Hawkins girl squealed and hurdled a green bench. In the distance, the GI dormitory trailers sat quiet and squat, brown rectangles in the sun. Ledford took a seat on a wide root.

  Staples knocked his pipe on the tree trunk. “You were overseas, I’d imagine?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Pacific or Atlantic?”

  “Pacific. Guadalcanal.”

  “Navy?”

  “Marine Corps.”

  Staples looked down at the black ash and made a strange shape out of his mouth. He’d not figured the young man for a Marine. He cleared his throat with a booming cough. “You weren’t drafted?”

  “I enlisted.”

  “Your mother and daddy were okay with that?”

  “They died in ’35.”

  Staples had stuck his thumb in the mouth of his pipe. He shook his head. “I am sorry son,” he said. “You want to talk about booze now or save that for another day?” He pocketed the pipe in his jacket. Before Ledford could answer, Staples said, “You read much Ledford?”

  “I do some.”

  “What are you reading now?”

  “The Bible some. And a book called The Growth of the American Republic.”

  Staples nodded and stood up. He’d gotten a case of the fidgets. “Let’s walk a while,” he said, “and then you’ll accompany me to my office, where I’ll load you up with some new reading material.” He brushed off the seat of his brown slacks. “How’s that sound to you, Ledford?”

  Ledford stood and brushed himself off in the same manner. He nodded as the older man had. “Sounds good,” he said.

  SEPTEMBER 1947

  THE CHILD WALKED UNSTEADY from one end of the little porch to the other. Her gait possessed a wild, untested confidence. Rachel stood guard, her foot on the first of three porch stairs. Boards were warped and nailheads surfaced. Rachel worried on splinters—Mary’s feet were soft, though she’d been walking for over a month. She lifted her knees to right angles and pounded against the half-rotten boards. Ledford pushed open the screen door with the box he carried. He let Mary pass before him, winked at her, and stepped down from the porch. The Packard’s trunk was up, Bill Ledford’s blowpipe and punty rod jutting out the back. The suicide doors were swung wide open. A single spot remained among all the boxes crammed inside, and Ledford slid the last one there. He’d marked it Attic Junk, and its contents, mostly old books, had nearly caused him to sit down in the dark reaches of his boyhood home and reminisce one last time. But Mack Wells and his family were on their way over. The home had to be emptied.

  Ledford slammed the Packard’s heavy doors tight against its contents. Inside those boxes were the remnants of a childhood in two parts—the first recalled in photographs, the second in pay stubs and grade cards that no one ever saw.

  There was a sound from the porch. “Oh dear,” Rachel said.

  Ledford turned to see her bent and picking up Mary, who was on all fours, crying.

  He pulled out his handkerchief on the way.

  Little droplets of blood emerged round from the checkerboard scrape on her knee. “Watch,” Ledford told her. He pressed the white hanky against the skin and pulled it back, showed it to her. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Mary quit crying and stared at the crimson mark on the white square.

  “That’s a big girl,” Rachel said. She tickled Mary where she held her by the armpits, and the laughing came, harder than the crying. Ledford dabbed once more and the bleeding quit. He bent and brushed his fingers against the porch boards where she’d fallen. A truck backfired, then rumbled past on the street. Its muffler dragged. Ledford watched it stop at Sixth Avenue, and then, still kneeling, he looked back to the porch boards. To the corner, where they met up in a chipped V. He pictured his father’s white buckskin mitt there, just as it had been all those years before, torn to hell by the dog. Then came McDonough’s face. Ledford shook his head and stood up. Mary walked a circle in the frontyard square of crabgrass. Rachel stood by the curb with her hands on her hips. She was turned so that he could see her belly in profile, stretched to full with another child. Best they could figure, she’d gotten pregnant around New Year’s, and here they were, on the precipice of another one.

  A car turned off the boulevard and rumbled toward them. “That’s Mack,” Ledford said. He stepped off the porch, picked Mary up, and stood next to Rachel. He waved as the car pulled up the curb, and then he rubbed at the small of Rachel’s back. She’d strained it pushing the stroller over railroad tracks.

  Mack Wells stepped from the old Plymouth and nearly slammed the door on his boy, who had hopped the front seat to follow his father. The boy ran around the back of the car and opened the passenger door for his mother. She stepped out and thanked him kindly. For a month, he’d opened all doors for his mother. “That’s what a gentleman does,” his grandfather had told him.

  Mack put his hand to his flat cap and nodded. “Ms. Ledford,” he said.

  “Hello Mack.” Rachel stepped toward them. “You must be Elizabeth.” She held out her free hand to Mack’s wife in greeting.

  “Yes. Everybody calls me Lizzie.” Lizzie wore a rust-colored blouse and matching hat, tilted on her head.

  The women shook hands. “This Harold?” Ledford asked. “This is him,” Mack said. He rubbed the boy’s head from behind. “Good to meet you Harold,” Ledford said. “Pleased to meet you.” Harold looked up at the white family before him. The baby drooled, and he watched it stretch well past her chin, then give and fall to the sidewalk. It made a quiet splat.

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Mack inhaled deep through his nose. “Mmm,” he said. “Smell that.”

  “Bread factory,” Ledford said. “You’ll smell it everyday.”

  Lizzie Wells sniffed the air and smiled politely. She looked mostly at the ground.

  Rachel took Mary from Ledford. “Let me show you the space in back for a garden,” she said. Lizzie nodded and followed, leaving the men and the boy by the car.

  “If it isn’t the bread smell stirring your stomach, it’s the scrap metal clanging in your ears,” Ledford said. He turned and walked to the house, motioned for them to follow. His limp had come back with all the box hauling. He ignored the burn radiating up his shinbone.

  Mack looked back at Harold. He knew the look on the boy’s face. It was fear. Mack felt it too. There wasn’t a black family for a mile in the West End, and he could scarcely believe he’d agreed to rent the house. But when his home loan had fallen through, and his mother had sold her house to move in with his brother, Mack had acted fast. Ledford had told him over lunch one day, “I got a place in the West End you could rent real cheap.” Mack had quit chewing, looked at him like he was crazy. Ledford went on. There weren’t many neighbors, he’d said. There was the sc
rapyard and the bakery. There was the filling station on the corner, whose owner, Mr. Ballard, was not a hateful type. He had a Negro in his employ, Ledford had told Mack. It had all seemed natural, what with Ledford’s need to hold on to his old house and Mack’s troubles with the Federal Housing Authority. Inside a week, they’d drawn up a lease and shaken hands on it. There’d been some looks in their direction, but neither man paid much mind. They’d become friends, as much as a black man could be with a white one. Mack was the only welcome visitor inside Ledford’s office, the only glass man interested in hearing what Professor Staples had been teaching his young pupil.

  The screen door squealed as Ledford opened it and stepped in. “Gas and water and electric are all on and in your name,” he said. The staircase before them sagged at the middle of each riser. It would be good to have a boy running up and down again. Ledford smiled, “Wasn’t always that way with the water and electric. We used to barrel-catch rain and heat it.”

  “I know about that,” Mack said. He surveyed the living room. “You ain’t taking that big chair?”

  “It’s yours if you want it.” Ledford regarded the wide upholstery. It had been his father’s drinking chair. On payday, he’d pass out cold and spill all over it. The smell still turned Ledford’s stomach.

  Young Harold walked over past the chair. He looked at the builtin bookcase, the few books left there. He whispered, sounding out the spines.

  “Book on baseball there. Go on and grab it,” Ledford said.

  Harold took down the skinny book and opened it. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and turned pages.

  “He’s reading like a older child already,” Mack said.

  “You like baseball?” Ledford asked the boy.

  Harold said, “Yessir,” without looking up from the book.

  “Good.” Ledford smiled. “That’s your book then. But if that baby in Mrs. Ledford’s belly comes out a boy, I may borrow it back from you down the line.”

  “Yessir,” Harold said, and then he went back to sounding out the words. “The Red…Head…ed…Out…field,” he whispered.