by Glenn Taylor
SEVEN-CARD STUD was the only game allowed in the home of Don Staples. Straight poker and five-card draw had no place. If a man tried to force such a variation, Staples would walk away from the table and hit the light switch on his way to bed. The group had changed over the years but had never topped five men. Its exclusivity was born in the idea that those light on brains and nickels, while always welcome in Staples’ office or home, were not permitted to pull a chair to his round-top mahogany card table. In the fall of 1947, the group was down to three: Don, his younger brother, Bob, and Ledford. An exception to custom was made on the final Friday of October, Halloween night, when Ledford phoned ahead that Erminio Bacigalupo was passing through on his way back from Baltimore, and that he was a fine poker man. Staples said bring him.
Before they left the house, Rachel spoke very little to Erm. She had always mistrusted him, though not as much since her wedding night, when he’d told her, “Ledford is the brother I never had, and I’d take a bullet for him.” Still, when he was under her roof, she watched him, close.
In the basement, Ledford pulled Erm’s leather envelope from under the swastika quilt in the trunk. Erm opened it and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from the stack. “For your trouble,” he said. “And if you want to double it, look at the over-under on Maryland tomorrow. Now let’s go play some poker.”
Staples’ house was small, dark inside. From the record player in the corner, Louis Armstrong’s “Big Butter and Egg Man” played. The acorn ceiling fixture gathered smoke from below.
Each of the card table’s four legs carried an ashtray. The men sat slouched over their elbows. They eyeballed the cards face up on the table and lifted the corner of those faced down. Ledford folded after Fifth Street, Bob after Sixth. Erm dealt in a manner bespeaking experience. The cards flipped from his finger and thumb and turned a singular revolution before landing flat. He was showing a pair of Jacks. Staples, a pair of sevens.
“Check,” Staples said. He tossed in a nickel, and down came Seventh Street. They showed their five and Erm took the pot, again.
Bob shook his head. He was ten years younger than Don, yet everything about them seemed identical—voice, movements, eyes, laugh. Bob was a less-wrinkled, clean-shaven version of his brother. He scooted his chair back. “I gotta hit the head,” he said.
“Magnifying glass is in the top bureau drawer,” Don said.
Erm laughed and raked in his dollar seventy-five.
Staples packed his pipe and lit it. “Ledford tells me you’ve recently married.”
“That’s right.” Erm’s nod was loose on the hinges, and his eyes were shrinking fast. “She’s a looker, but she’s goofy up top, you know?” He tapped his temple with a finger.
Staples laughed. “I know,” he said. “Ain’t we all?”
The clock on the wall read ten past midnight. They’d been playing for three hours. Ledford looked from the clock to his quarter-full rocks glass. He’d gone as easy as he could, but it was harder with Erm around.
The cornet sang a sad tune from the corner.
Bob sat back down and sighed. “I’m about busted,” he said. He’d checked his pocket watch every ten minutes for an hour. Bob was a trial lawyer with a wife and three kids and his eye on public office. And though he’d gotten on fine with Erm that evening, he’d just as soon not know him past midnight. Like his big brother, Bob was a man of God, though he’d not taken the philosopher’s path to knowing him, and he’d not wrecked his marriage and children along the way. He loved Don dearly, but he’d not gone overseas like his older brother. He’d never understood the demons.
“Looks like you can ante and stick for a few rounds.” Erm pointed to the little pile of nickels in front of Bob.
Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. He breathed in deep through his nose. “I reckon I could play one more.”
“Big Bob,” Erm said. “Big Bob, Big Butter and Egg Man.”
“Like the song says.” Staples stole a look at Ledford. They’d spent a little time in the office talking on Erm.
It was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that comes when a record has stopped playing and one man is drunker than the rest.
Bob shuffled the deck slow. Erm declined to cut. He poured another whiskey and sat back in his chair. “Ledford tells me you’re a scholar and a man of the cloth.”
Staples smiled easy. “I’ve lived in both worlds. Even tried to mix the two.”
“Flammable is it?” Erm studied Bob’s dealing motion, a habit of the suspicious.
“It can combust, if that’s what you mean,” Staples said.
“I don’t know what I mean half the time.” Erm laughed. It was loud. “But if somebody had told me I’d be at a Virginia poker table with a preacher, a lawyer, and an office jockey, I’d have told him to climb up his fuckin thumb.”
“You’re in West Virginia Erm,” Ledford said. He peeked at his down cards.
“That’s what I said.”
“You said Virginia.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
The Staples brothers looked at each other the way they always had when a card game went south. It was quiet, each man surveying what he had.
“Potato, potahto,” Erm said. Then, “Shit or get off the pot, Preach. We got to go church in the morning.”
“I fold,” Staples said. His chair whined when he leaned back in it. Ledford raised a dime and wished he hadn’t told Erm about Willy’s baptism the next day. Truth be told, he’d wanted to ask Don or Mack to be the boy’s godfather, but one was lapsed and the other was black. Then Erm showed up, and without thinking Ledford had asked him.
Erm saw the dime and raised another. Bob folded. He dealt the rest of the hand in silence. Erm took the pot and kept his mouth shut for once.
Bob stood and stretched. He said, “Well gentlemen.”
Don stood and followed his brother to the kitchen. On the way, he asked about a case Bob was trying. “Any more on the Bonecutter dispute?”
Erm slapped his hand on the table. “Drink with me Leadfoot,” he said.
Ledford ignored him. He was tuned in to the Staples brothers. Bonecutter, they’d said. It was the name from the back of the photograph. He got up and walked to the kitchen.
Don washed and dried his glass, his back to Bob, who leaned against the range, arms crossed. He was talking about arson.
“What was that name you used just now?” Ledford asked.
“Bonecutter,” Bob said. He yawned. “They’re a wild bunch out in Wayne County. Trouble. Had a land dispute with Maynard Coal for years, and I’ve done some work for them, pro bono. Now all hell’s broke loose.”
Bonecutter. It seemed to Ledford a name he’d known all his life. “Well who set the fire?” Don wiped his hands with a yellow dish rag. He still wore his wedding ring, though he’d not seen his wife in fifteen years.
“Looks like the bad Maynard boy did it. He’s come up missin since.”
“That’s mass murder he committed,” Don said. His eyes were wide. He held the dish rag at his side, fisted, like he was trying to squeeze something out of it.
“What do you mean?” Ledford asked.
Bob cleared his throat. “Five people died in that fire,” he said. “It was in the paper.”
Staples just shook his head. “Who died?” Ledford asked. “The elders,” Bob said. “I knew them a little. Mother and Daddy B is all they’d be called. They lived in the old ways.” He shook his head just as Don had. “And their oldest girl, Tennis they called her. She was going on sixty herself. Burned in the house with them, along with her two grown children, who I didn’t really know. Men, both of em. In their thirties, I believe.”
In the other room, Erm stood up and walked to the record player. He put the needle down unsteady. “Big Butter and Egg Man” started up again.
Ledford cringed at the volume. He spoke louder. “Who’s left then?”
“The twins,” Bob said. “Dimple and Wimpy. A little younger than Tennis was, maybe fifties.
” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Put it back in his pocket. “They are tough to figure. Hard men. Real hard. Part Indian is what they’ll tell you, among other things. But they will look you in the eye, and they will die before they give that land over to Maynard Coal.”
Erm stepped into the open kitchen doorway. He leaned against the jamb and smiled. His glass was full again. “What time saloons close in West Virginia?”
The other three didn’t answer. Erm had walked in at the wrong time.
Staples hung the dish rag on a hook next to the sink. “Like you said, Erminio, church is bright and early.”
Erm nodded in that loose motion again. “Yes,” he said. “Church is early. Big Bill’s big day. Big-balled Big Bill’s baptism.”
Ledford laughed despite himself.
Erm continued. “Big Bill will no doubt be a big butter and egg man like his Uncle Erm.”
Staples looked at Ledford. He wished the young man hadn’t enlisted his Chicago friend as godfather. He wished he’d taught him a little more on life. There hadn’t been time yet.
Erm kept up. “Or like Big Bob over here.” He motioned with his drink hand and spilled. He tapped his foot in time with the piano keys from the other room. “You got the kind of money that folds, don’t you Bob?” Erm laughed, said he was only fooling. Then he looked directly at Don and said, “Where you get this music anyway?”
“Louisiana,” Don said.
“Louisiana?” Erm said the word as if he’d never heard it before.
“Louisiana,” Don repeated. “This is Louis Armstrong, the finest musician we have today.”
Erm turned to Ledford. “Leww-weeeez-eee-anna,” he said. “Ain’t that where Sinus came from?”
“Can it Erm,” Ledford said.
“Ooooo, yes sir.” Erm had straightened at the command, pried his eyes alert. He smiled at the Staples brothers. Then he paused and said, “Armstrong’s dark meat, isn’t he?”
Nobody answered him. Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. Both he and Don straightened from their lean-tos. They’d not been talked to in this way by a younger man before.
Erm wore a look of contentment. He said, “Ledford rents his house to dark meat,” and looked from one to the next, fishing for a response.
Ledford started to speak, but Don cut him off. “Erm—can I call you Erm?”
Erm’s grin spread one-sided and he nodded yes. “Your friend Ledford rents the home he grew up in to Mr. Wells because the federal government doesn’t see fit to help out a Negro GI the way they might have helped me out, or the way they’ve helped you out, Erm. You follow?”
Erm didn’t move a muscle. “Well, see if you can follow this,” Staples said. “You noted earlier that I’m both a man of scholarship and a man of God. An astute observation on your part. And do you know what I’ve come to learn from both? What is more clear to me now than ever?” He did not wait for an answer. “That the poor, most especially the Negro poor, have suffered long enough, and that we are at a crossroads, right now, at this moment. And if we do not right our wrongs against them, a mighty eruption will come.” He started to continue, but didn’t. Instead, he stared down the young Chicagoan, whom he suspected of carrying a pistol in his sock. He asked him again, “You follow?”
Erm stared back and let his grin spread both ways. “I follow,” he said.
“Good,” Staples said.
His brother let out a held breath. Ledford did the same.
Staples pulled the dish towel from its hook and threw it across the kitchen. Erm caught it with his free hand. “Now,” Staples said, “clean up the shit you spilled on my linoleum.”
On the drive home, Erm passed out in the Packard. Before going inside, Ledford took off his overcoat and spread it across his friend. He left him there.
On his knees in front of the box labeled Attic Junk, Ledford picked up his father’s batch book again. He’d not done so since reading of the dream, but now he scanned the pages for one word, Bonecutter. He soon found it.
June 5th. Old man Bonecutter showed up at the door agin today. I will not do what he asks. I wanted to tell him it is his fault nobody will come out to Wayne and re-settle. He run them all off just like he did my mother. I will not leave the city of Huntington to return to the old ways. Something is not right out there.
Ledford read it three more times. He tried to remember his father as a man who might write such things, but nothing came.
He shut the book and put it under the quilt in the old trunk. It was a perfect fit inside the square where his Ten High used to be. As he closed the trunk’s lid, he wondered if Erm kept his Purple Heart under a stack somewhere. He wondered why the two of them didn’t keep in touch with anybody else from B Company. Why they’d never go to the VFW, or see about a First Marines reunion.
He supposed it had something to do with memory.
Ledford went to bed. Morning would get here quick, and Willy was to be baptized in front of the eyes of the church. He would have two Godparents. His Great-aunt Edna, a retired schoolteacher, and his Uncle Erm, a drunken criminal.
NOVEMBER 1947
IT HAD TAKEN TWO months for someone to burn a cross in the front yard of Mack Wells and his family. At five in the morning, he was pouring a bucket of water on the last cinders when Lizzie asked him, “Why did they wait so long to do it?” She pulled the lapels of her robe tight across her chest. She wore Mack’s work boots on her feet, unlaced. In the yard, he was barefoot. He hadn’t answered her question. “You’ll catch your death out there Mack,” Lizzie told him. “No shoes on your feet.”
“The ground is warm,” he said. He stared down at it, watched an ember die. Tucked into the cinched waistline of his bluejeans was an Army-issue .45.
It occurred to Lizzie that whoever had done it might still be watching them, under the cover of early-morning dark. But the street was quiet. Only the bakery was awake, its assembly line humming, its slicers cutting loaves.
Mack looked around too. He had a mind to draw his pistol and fire at the first sign of movement. There wasn’t any. He looked back at his house. In the upstairs window, Harold pressed his forehead on the pane. The hall bulb behind him flickered. He knew what had happened. He’d awakened just as his parents had, confused by the dancing light from outside. “Stay inside,” was all Mack had said to the boy.
Lizzie shivered on the porch. Her breath turned to condensation on the air. “Mack?” she said.
Again he did not answer her. He stared up at his son’s silhouette until his vision blurred. “We’d better telephone Ledford,” he said.
AT MIDNIGHT ON the eve of Thanksgiving, Rachel sat down on the love seat for the first time that day. She’d been on her feet for sixteen hours. Willy was finally down and Mary could be counted on to sleep through the night. The stuffing was made and the half-runners strung. Rachel looked at her watch. She stretched for the radio dial. The tuner spun loose and she couldn’t pick up a signal. There was a hole in the grille cloth where Mary had punched the leg of a baby doll through. Rachel stuck her finger inside and for a moment wondered if she might be electrocuted.
She looked at the telephone, thought about how it had rung so early the morning prior. How it had awakened the baby. How Ledford had grabbed it and put his feet on the floor hard and said, “When?” What they’d all known might visit the Wells family had visited them in the form of a fiery cross. The West End was white, and Ledford had changed that.
Now the Wells family was joining them for Thanksgiving dinner, at Ledford’s request. Don Staples too. Rachel rubbed her temples and counted silently to herself, wagering that the telephone would ring again in twenty seconds. She got to sixty. Then one hundred. Ledford had gone for chewing tobacco at eight. “Right back,” he’d said, like always. And, like always, he’d stayed gone.
She reached down beside the love seat and grabbed her knitting bag. It had been her mother’s before her. From it she pulled her latest work, a half-finished sweater that would fit Willy n
ext winter season. It was blood red and hooded with brown toggle buttons. She picked up the straight needles that had been in the family for two generations. Her pointer fingers found the taper. These were not metal needles, like so many. Nor were they wood. They were walrus tusk, brought back from Alaska by her great-grandfather, a fisherman.
Rachel’s hands bony and worn. Her nails were chipped and her fingertips dotted with tiny cuts. She pulled the yarn’s tail and looped, and soon found herself in a void of mechanical movement, orchestrating in her mind the tiny, scraping sound of the bone needles. She hummed, in time with the scraping, “Amazing Grace.” Always, it was “Amazing Grace.”
Downtown, on Fourth Avenue, Ledford was stride for stride with Staples. Their fedoras were pulled low and their coat lapels high. It was dark, save the headlights of a passing car or the office lights above the storefronts. The Keith-Albee and the Orpheum were both running late pictures. A woman in a purple pillbox hat locked the ticket booth and walked west. Ledford thought he recognized her. He’d taken Rachel to see Crossfire the week before. Afterwards, they’d run into Mack and Lizzie, as they filed down from the balcony with the rest of the black patrons.
They walked up Tenth Street, past the darkened doors of Chief Logan’s Tavern. On the sidewalk, there was a splatter of vomit in the shape of a daisy. They stepped around it.
The two walked fast and spoke to one another about the books Staples loaned him. The American Indian was up for discussion. Ledford had not known such thought and conversation possible until meeting Don, and ever since, it seemed to him that his mind was expanding faster than it had in all the years prior, combined. They’d had conversations, like this one, that lasted five or six hours. Don had waxed knowingly on the laws of the Confederacy of the Iroquois. He spoke of the Indian League of Nations and their General Council’s democratic ideals. He liked to say that nothing was new, that we spent our days committing the mistakes of those who came before us because we forgot to remember them. He liked to say, “America will grab hold of the scientist’s lab coat, and they will hold on for dear life as he rockets us straight to Hades.”