by Glenn Taylor
“What do you mean he balked?” Rachel said.
Ledford steadied himself against the counter. His vision came back, starry, then whole. “What I mean is, he said he was dedicated to the Negro’s cause, to equal pay, to housing reform. Did he forget? He hasn’t even spat a word about the half-assed decision the Supreme Court just handed down.”
“Well, he tried his best Loyal.”
“He did nothing of the sort. What he tried was to get votes. And a man doesn’t get votes unless he sells out his principles.” He opened the fridge and cracked another beer.
Baby Willy rolled, open-mouthed and asleep, away from his mother’s breast. She looked down at him, the curl of his little lip. The way it still searched, sucking though nothing was there. Rachel looked up at Ledford. She hoped that, like her, he’d be staring at the boy, but he wasn’t. He had his back to them. Hands at the sinktop, braced and straight like tentpoles. He spat in the disposer.
“Not a good day at work?” she asked.
“Is there such a thing?” He didn’t turn when he spoke.
THE DIAMOND T dump truck was rust-colored and well used. The stencil on the doors read Mann Glass Co. 10 Ton Limit. Mack Wells drove it as he had on past deliveries, one-handed and carefree, as if the dented bed behind him didn’t carry 16,000 pounds of broken glass. As if Route 2’s center line were a barrier wall, protecting oncoming vehicles from his tendency to weave.
He looked at the river outside his window. It followed the road like a serpent. Or rather, the road followed it. Here and there a coal barge churned along, slow and dirty. Each one pushed a mighty load, flat and stacked side by side, front to back. Black mounds rose in skinny ridges from each pallet as if mountains had grown from the water and learned to swim. Tug horns sounded and stacks pumped gray tails that disappeared on the river air. The water these behemoths cut was dark muddy brown. A V-shaped ripple, churning, on its surface a reflective film.
Ledford had the passenger window down. He held his open hand against the wind, then closed it in a fist.
Mack Wells took note. He said, “You’ll never catch it.”
“How’s that?”
“The wind. Ain’t no man can gather it in his fists.” Mack turned back to the road ahead. “Proverbs.”
Ledford nodded. He made his hand flat and extended his fingers. The wind’s resistance subsided and his fingertips cut the air quiet. He considered Mack’s knowledge of the Bible, his ability to quote and name verse. “I’ve always liked that passage,” Ledford said. “Can’t say I’ve understood it, but it sounds about right.”
Mack nodded. The speedometer read sixty. “Means we’re fools,” he said.
Ledford rolled the window up so he could strike a match. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Mack. On the bench seat between them sat a pair of lunch pails and coffee Thermoses. Ledford’s had a rotted seal, and at each pothole, coffee trickled from the lid. He watched it trace the upholstery stitching on the seat, searching out the holes there, soaking into the popped stuffing.
Mack had made plenty of these Saturday delivery runs. The pay was decent, and he usually rode alone. It gave him time to think, something that proved alternately fruitful and damning. On Tuesday, Ledford had told Mack he’d like to ride along on this particular run. Mack had told him it would be good to have the company, though he wasn’t sure he meant it. “Why you want to go anyhow?” he’d asked. Ledford had answered that he was interested in the destination, the factory at Marble City. Mack had told him, “Well, you know we just dump the cullet and go on our way?” Ledford had talked of staying a little longer, having a look at the place. When Mack had asked him why he was so interested in a marble factory, Ledford told him, “Because a voice in a dream told me to make marbles.”
They traveled Route 2 in relative silence. After a time, Ledford asked Mack about his Army unit. Conversation came easier. Mack told of a college boy he’d learned under, how in a year’s time, he’d become proficient in fixing damn near any mechanical thing that broke. “They could’ve given me a degree in engineering for all the shit I done fixed,” he said.
Ledford laughed. “Sounds like they ought to have.”
Beyond place names, neither man broached the subject of combat. They were in the town of Friendly by noon, the sandwiches and coffee long gone. Marble City had opened its factory doors in Friendly two years prior, and it now produced so many marbles, both industrial and gaming, that folks had taken to calling the whole town by the name of the company. The factory had brought jobs just as miners had started to lose them. Men who had spent twenty years underground now found themselves sitting on buckets, sorting green glass from blue.
A dwarf in maroon slacks swung open the factory’s service gate. Mack eased the big truck through. The sign on the fence pictured a smiling red marble, backgrounded by the silhouettes of skinny buildings and chimney stacks. This was Marble City.
Mack nodded to the little man, a gesture that was not reciprocated. Instead, the man frowned and eyeballed Mack all the way through the gate. Even ten yards in, when Mack checked his sideview mirror, he had his stink-eye locked in.
“Guess they ain’t too friendly here in Friendly,” Mack said.
“Guess not.” Ledford watched as another man emerged from the factory doors. He stood in front of the truck and walked backwards, guiding them with hand signals as if on an airstrip. Ledford thought of Henderson Field, how he’d watched men do the same there, easing patched-up Hellcats off the broken apron.
They hit their mark and got out of the truck and stretched.
When Mack turned the crank, the winch made a popping sound and the cable groaned as if protesting the weight of its haul. Glass shifted and tinkled on top of the stack. Like a swarm of silver minnows, Ledford thought. When the truck bed went forty-five degrees, there was a rush of sound and dust and the glass began its quick descent to the waiting ground below.
Twenty sorters emerged and surrounded the shining mountain. They gripped five-gallon buckets in each hand, stacked three deep. They sat on metal stools and milk crates and began what seemed to Ledford an impossible job.
The dwarf walked a circle around the sorters, his arms crossing his chest, his brow still furrowed. Ledford cut off his path and asked where he might find Mr. King, the man in charge. “Check furnace three,” the man told him.
Inside, there was a familiar smell. Sulphur-like and old. But there were other smells Ledford couldn’t categorize. Sounds too. Men rolled handtrucks stacked with full buckets to three awaiting furnaces. At the back, they poured in the glass. At the front, a machine worked, cam-operated and precise. Ledford could see the thin neon trickle there as it drained into a metal box and came out perfectly round, a glowing molten ball riding a chute to the rollers below. On the floor was a wooden cooling barrel, half full.
A wide-backed man wearing suspenders stooped beside an industrial fan. He closed an eye and aimed it at the opening in furnace three. Ledford approached him. “Mr. King?” he shouted over the fan’s roar.
The older man turned and sized up Ledford over the brim of his steel-framed glasses. They sat on the bulb of his sweating nose. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Ledford introduced himself and they shook hands. Mr. King was glad to give him a tutorial. They walked the length of furnace three, back to front. King pointed at the metal box from which the molten balls emerged and said, “That’s the head. A shear cuts it to size inside and it comes down the chute there to these rollers.” The finger he pointed with was stained a permanent gray. Blistered at the tip. “See how those rollers are in motion? That insures they’re perfectly round.”
“How many do you make in a day?” Ledford was mesmerized by the man’s operation.
“Oh, that depends. Last year we made four hundred thousand.” Ledford tried to picture four hundred thousand marbles. He wondered how many it would take to fill the dumptruck.
“It’ll be a million when we get these new furnaces built, get these new
machines put together.” Mr. King whistled loud at a teenaged boy who was tipping a batch of yellow cullet into a hole. The boy looked at his boss. “Don’t pour quite so fast,” King told him. “Slow er down some.” He winked and smiled, and the boy heeded the advice. “That hole he’s pouring into is the crucible,” Mr. King told Ledford. “It’s where you add your striking colors.” He began to walk away. “C’mon,” he said.
“Let me show you some finished product.”
On the way to his office, they passed an unlit furnace, its machinery gathering dust. Ledford asked, “What about this one?”
Mr. King regarded it with nostalgia. “Built that in 1931,” he said. “See how the shear’s chain operated?” He ran a finger along the rusted links. “Had to service it more than I would’ve liked. New ones save us a lot of money.”
The walls of his office were covered in framed photographs of employees and family alike. Men and women with their arms around each other, their hands gripping blowpipes and punty rods. Children knelt at circles drawn in the dirt. They had marbles at the ready, their thumbs the triggers. Ledford walked in a square around the small room, eyeballing their faces, the wrinkles of their joy. At his waist, in custom-built display cases lining the walls, were handmade, oversized marbles of all colors and designs. There were clear crystal paperweights with tiny flowers inside. There were handblown ashtrays like the ones his father had once made.
“Kids love to play Ringer,” Mr. King said. He’d taken a seat at his desk and was watching Ledford closely. “And now that folks have a little money to spend, they want games, collectibles, you name it. Back when I started in marbles, there wasn’t demand at all. Folks were lucky to put food on the table.”
Ledford turned and faced him. “If you don’t mind me askin, what do you plan to do with the old machine out there?”
“The chain-driven? Why do you ask?” He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Ledford sat down in the only other chair. “Well,” he said, “I reckon if it’s for sale, I’d like to buy it.”
Mr. King laughed a little. Then he said, “You know, I like the cullet we buy from Mann Glass. The coefficiency mixes real well with what we buy from up the road here. But I hear that pair of Toledo brothers that’s bought you out is cuttin the fat, maybe movin to a cheaper batch. There truth to that?”
“I believe there is,” Ledford answered.
“Even heard they’re lookin to cash in quick, turn right around and sell the whole caboodle to Illinois Glass. I don’t suppose you know if there’s any truth to that?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve heard rumbles.” Ledford watched the older man nod and work his lips together in thought. He wondered what mechanisms turned inside King’s big head. He wondered how Mack was faring outside.
“Well,” Mr. King said. “Let’s talk.” He opened a desk drawer and took out pen and paper.
The ride home was relatively quiet. Ledford told Mack that Mr. King was a smart and honest man. That he was privy to the inner workings of Mann Glass management, and that things might change for the worse at the factory. When Mack didn’t say anything in response, Ledford said, “I’m lookin to get out while the gettin’s good.” Still nothing from Mack in return.
The sun was setting over the treetops ahead. Its glow cut through their skinny tips and danced atop the river’s churn. Ledford had his elbow out the open window. It was cold from the wind. He looked at the wide river rolling past, marveled at how different it looked from that morning. Purer. Wiser somehow. After a while, Ledford said, “I’m lookin to start up my own thing. An outfit that doesn’t run on the idea of money alone.” He waited a moment, then said, “Be honored to have a man with engineering skills along.”
“Well,” Mack said, “I’ll keep it in mind.”
JULY 1948
ERM BACIGALUPO HAD BOUGHT his family a Hallicrafters television set with swinging mahogany doors and a picture tube he dusted with his handkerchief. On the last, hot Chicago night of the Ledford family’s visit, he dusted it five times inside an hour. Everyone watched the screen. Even Rachel had her eyes on the television.
The favor of godparenting had been returned, as that morning, Ledford had stood at the altar inside St. Mary of Perpetual Help, renouncing Satan and all his works and pomps. He was now a caretaker of the soul of baby Fiore, Erm’s son.
Erm’s new place was a two-story red-brick rowhouse in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. There was crystal on every flat surface in the place. Brandy decanters in every room, half full and circled by balloon glasses. Ledford noted the fine glasswork, but he didn’t pick them up. The contents of such craftsmanship were hell on a man sticking only to beer.
Erm’s wife Agnes had been a nightclub singer—a canary, Erm called her. She didn’t say much, and she slept when she pleased. As she had for much of the Ledfords’ visit, she lay alone in her upstairs bedroom. The rest of them crowded around the television down below. Little Fiore cried in his Moses basket astride the bar. Erm didn’t notice. The wall-mounted phone in the kitchen rang, and he went to it.
Rachel picked up the baby, her own boy crawling free on the floor. She swayed and bounced on the balls of her feet and sang, “Mama’s little baby loves shortenin shortenin.” She longed for the drive home the next morning.
Willy reached up and grabbed at the fireplace set. Soon he was standing, steadying himself with two fistfuls of cast iron. Poker in the right, broom in the left. “Loyal,” Rachel said.
Ledford had Mary on his shoulders and was doing a little dance to keep her happy. He eyed Willy, bent his knees, and snatched him up around the waist. Ledford made the sound of a plane throttling, one-handing each of his children, whose laughter came up from the belly and shook their little bodies. Ledford kept his eyes fixed on the television as he spun. It amazed him that such a thing was possible. A moving picture, as it occurred, so that a body in Chicago might see what those inside the picture tube were seeing, at the same instant, in real flesh and blood in Philadelphia. He watched the delegates fanning themselves, the gray screen blurring their features so that each fat man in attendance looked identical to the next. Folks sat talking and laughing, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and mopping sweat. This was the Democratic National Convention, and a speaker was approaching the podium.
Rachel had gotten baby Fiore to sleep, and she placed him back in the Moses basket on the bartop. He’d felt good in her arms, and she wondered when she’d have another one that size. She eavesdropped on Erm in the kitchen. He was talking loud with a cigarette in his lips, something about a wheel.
Ledford set Willy on the floor and pulled a satchel of marbles from his back pocket, one of the dozens of bags he’d bought in recent months. He emptied them on the rug by the boy’s fat feet.
“You watch him close,” Rachel said. “He’s liable to choke.”
“Hasn’t put one in his mouth yet, has he?” Ledford swung Mary down and faced her to her brother. Both children began grabbing at the little glass globes, Mary with precsion, Willy with bad aim. Ledford glanced at them every so often, but he was enraptured with the man on the television. Hands clutching the podium, this mayor from Minnesota commanded attention. He said he was speaking on behalf of a minority report on civil rights. There was a howl from the audience. Some of it good, some of it bad. Ledford leaned in and spun the volume knob. The man’s voice raised and he said “vicious discrimination” and he spoke of Jefferson and the freedom of all colors of men and the Democratic Party’s dedication to such. He said that there would be no watering down when it came to civil rights. He began to shout and shoot his fist toward the ceiling. “The new Emancipation Proclamation,” he boomed.
Ledford forgot where and when he was as he stared at this little man on the box before him.
“To those who say we are rushing this program, I say we are one hundred and seventy-two years late,” the man said. Ledford felt a rising surge behind his ribs, and it was as if he was back at Rachel’s
apartment in 1941, in front of the Philco.
There came a chuckle from behind. Ledford turned to find Erm, stabbing a cigarette into an ashtray he held level. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
Ledford tried to tune him out and put his eyes back on the man with the strange pronunciation who had stirred his very soul. The speech was wrapping up. Erm shouldered past him and rolled down the volume. “Got to be a ball game on,” he said.
On the floor, Willy kicked his sister hard in the thigh and she cried. Ledford picked her up and rubbed her back. He took her to Rachel. Willy stared at the marbles before him as if they might move unassisted, then kicked at them wildly with his feet.
“C’mon to the basement with me Ledford,” Erm said.
In the basement, they smoked and Erm poured a whiskey and a beer. He pulled a brochure from his desk and handed it to Ledford. Charles Town Race Track it read. “I like this little West Virginia track,” Erm said.
“I’m going to get in on the ground floor, stable a couple horses there, maybe own my own track someday.” He regarded Ledford through the smoke. “There’s money to be made for you and that business you’re starting up.”
Ledford wished he hadn’t told him about the marble company. “Listen, I saw your face upstairs,” Erm said. “Your college-boy face.” He bugged his eyes and hung open his jaw. “Them politicians get your motor runnin, like your buddy the professor.” Erm shook his head. “You got slow down on that dinge horseshit, Ledford.”
“Dinge?”
“Niggers,” Erm said. The lamp on his desk flickered and hummed. It was dark down there, the paneling a deep amber, the ceiling low. “Don’t get me wrong, I work with em. Just got off the phone with one who runs a wheel in Bronzeville. Dresses first class, got a billfold full a spinach.” He stopped to light another cigarette, the flame dancing purple under his hollowed eyes. “But he lives in the black belt, he runs his numbers in the black belt, and he keeps to the dinge canaries chirping in the Black Belt clubs. You know why?” It was quiet. They breathed hot mildew, stagnant basement air. Erm switched on the table fan. “Because the second he steps out of Bronzeville lookin for a house to buy, he’s a dead man. The first customer he calls on outside of Bronzeville, he’s a dead man. The first white broad walkin down Halstead he does a double take on, maybe stares a little too long? He’s a dead man.”