by Glenn Taylor
Ledford listened to the hum of the fan. He watched its silver propeller turn inside the cage.
Erm leaned into his highback leather chair. He put his feet on the desk. “Your man on television can say what he wants.” He spread his arms wide and faced his open palms in. “But white is over here, and black is over here.” He looked from one hand to the other, spoke slow and deliberate. “And that is how it will always be.”
Ledford leaned into his own chair. He fingered the brass nail heads that gathered leather taut across the armrest. Across from him, Erm set his cigarette in an ashtray and took out his front teeth. They weren’t as white as before. Looked more wood than porcelain. Erm dropped them into a glass of clear liquid on his desk. Ledford watched them clink and settle. He glanced down at his knuckles, the white scar from the punch that had taken Erm’s teeth. Ledford rubbed at the coffee-colored leather and contemplated his friend. He’d been right to hit him all those years ago, and he was of a mind to do it again. Instead, he said, “You’re wrong, Erm.”
“About what?”
“About black and white and how they will always be.”
Erm smiled. The empty space in front gave him a look of stupidity. Toothless for all his riches, he was a sight. “Whatever you say Ledford.”
Each man was troubled then, and each wore a grin that both showed and concealed such trouble. If they’d been in a Guadalcanal foxhole, they might have drawn short blades or choked one another. But they were here, wives and children walking and talking and breathing upstairs, babies newly cleansed by God, absolved of what would surely come. So Erm and Ledford sat and stared.
Erm was the first to look away. He shuffled a stack of papers, whirled the teeth circular in their bleach. “Listen,” he said. “We think different, me and you. We even drink different these days, now that you gone square on me. But that don’t matter. We’re friends, Ledford.” The fan shut off and the desk lamp cut out. Blackness enveloped the basement. “Goddamnit,” Erm said.
Upstairs, the fireplace set overturned and cast iron clanged loud. Willy cried out, but it carried the sound of fear, not injury. Mary joined in. Then baby Fiore. Ledford listened to the calm stride of Rachel above him. She walked blind to each of the children, her hands true and strong despite the darkness.
Erm tripped over a case of wine and cursed. He was looking for a candle.
Ledford stayed put, still rubbing at the armrest nail heads. He could hear everything in the dark. Down the alley, someone kicked over a trash can. Two floors up, Agnes called weakly for help. A mouse ran across the ceiling joist above his head, its tiny feet clicking splinters.
Erm struck a match and held it to the candle’s wick. He lit up yellow, all shirt front and forehead. “What the hell are you just sitting there for, Ledford?” he said.
Ledford laughed. “You’re yellow,” he said. “Too much chow-line atabrine.”
Erm tripped over the same case of wine. He cursed again, raised his foot, and brought it down hard. Thin pinewood split wide open, loud as a firecracker, and bottles popped and shattered. Their contents pooled and ran a wide trickle across the concrete, searching for the grate. Ledford closed his eyes to be rid of the candle’s glow. He listened to the wine moving slow across the floor. A perfect sound, like a low creek before sunrise, only slower. Wine slow, he thought, and then he thought of Jesus and Cana, how the Methodists of his father’s church had only drunk grape juice, had known Jesus’ wine was unfermented. He thought of Reverend Thompson and the Episcopal Church of his wife. The free-flowing, fermented wine they sipped. He thought of the man on the cross in his dream, the blood of the Christ in his Bible, the blood on the pages of his history books, the blood of the African slaves as it spilled from the ships that brought them here and into the cracks of auction blocks and platform parades and the dirt of the cotton field and the drain on the street. He thought of the blood of the sleeping Japanese boy with the thin mustache, how it surged and fell in sheets and spoke to him in the language of animals. He wondered how a man could ever get past such a sight and sound as that.
Erm switched on a right-angle flashlight and shined it in Ledford’s face. Then he trained it on the wine trail, which had routed itself between the legs of Ledford’s chair and was fast approaching the floor drain. Ledford turned and watched it follow the cracked contours of the foundation. Blood red but thin like water.
“Twenty dollars a bottle,” Erm said.
Rachel hollered for a little help. Ledford stood up and walked to the staircase. He stopped on the way and put his hand on Erm’s shoulder.
“You’re right Erm. We’re friends, always will be,” he said. “But I can’t use your money for what I’ve got to do.” He handed back the racetrack brochure. In the exchange, the flashlight’s beam wobbled between them. “We’ll be hitting the road tonight,” Ledford said. He ascended the stairs and gathered his wife and children.
IT WAS THE bottom of the seventh inning in the league championship game against International Nickel. Mann Glass was up 6 to 5. Ledford sat on the dugout bench and cleaned out his cleats with a Popsicle stick. Next to him was Charlie Ball, who whimpered like a child over the hamstring he’d pulled running down a fly to right. He’d made the catch and gotten them to the stretch. But now the top of the lineup was due at the plate. Ledford was batting lead off and Charlie followed. It was clear he wasn’t going to make the batter’s box, and they were already down to nine men after two machine boys had to leave in the sixth to report for Saturday C shift.
Ledford saw his chance to gain ground in a battle he’d lost at season’s beginning. Back then, the other men had voted down his proposal to integrate the team, ignoring his insistence that Mack Wells was a fine shortstop. Now, watching Charlie Ball’s ugly grimace, Ledford put in a plug of tobacco and said, “Charlie, your uniform’d fit Mack Wells just fine.” He nodded his head in the direction of Mack, Lizzie, and Harold, who sat on the far end of the left-field guest bleachers, ten feet between them and the other spectators. Mack had brought his brother and mother to watch the game. Harold was reading a book.
“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to crack jokes that isn’t funny?” Charlie said. He stopped bellyaching long enough to look at Ledford and spread his one-sided smile.
Ledford spat heavy on the toe of Charlie’s left cleat. “I look like I’m joking?” he asked.
Charlie rubbed at his hamstring with both hands. “You’re crazy if you think I’m lettin a dirty nigger wear my uniform.”
Ledford scrunched his lips and sucked in his cheeks. He worked up another load of tobacco juice and spat again, this time on the left pantleg.
“Hey!” Charlie Ball turned red.
“What you going to do Charlie?” Ledford asked him. He stuck his finger in the man’s soft stomach and said, “You’re too fat to get around on the fast ball anyhow, bench blanket.”
Charlie Ball showed his teeth then. He furrowed his brow and cocked back his fist like he might throw it at Ledford, who just smiled in response and said, “Let it fly rich boy.”
An older man from corrugated came over and sat down between them. He said all this could be figured without the tough talk.
“I got it figured,” Ledford said. “There’s a Mann Glass employee settin right over there on the bleacher, and his average was .350 in the colored leagues.” Ledford pointed to the Wells family, and the rest of the team looked. “If he tightens the belt by four holes, he can wear this invalid’s uniform and keep the game movin.”
Nobody said a word.
Then, the mute batch attendant stood up. He stared for a moment at a bat someone had stuck through a hole in the chain-link. He grabbed it by the barrel, walked to the end of the dugout, and tapped it hard against a metal fencepost. From the bleacher seats, another man jogged over, and the mute batch attendant started telling him something in sign language. The other man, who had no shirt on and wore a wide surgeon’s scar from his sternum to his bellybutton, said, “Jerry says the colored boy ca
n wear his getup, and he’ll put on the rich boy’s.”
Ledford smiled. He nodded thank you kindly to both the scarred man and the mute.
“Forget it,” Charlie said.
“Forget what?” Ledford stood, his temper rising. “Forget that another man just offered to fix your problem? You tellin me you won’t let a Negro or a mute wear your fat suit?”
Charlie stood to face him, but sat back down when his hamstring gave. He looked at the spit-soaked dugout floor and shook his head. “I won’t let that nigger put on a Mann uniform. Don’t care whose it is.”
Ledford knocked the older man from corrugated aside and went for Charlie Ball. The older man managed to grab him by the right shoulder, but with his left hand Ledford seized Charlie’s throat and hooked in hard. He could feel the Adam’s apple spasm against his palm. He could tell his fingernails were breaking skin. Charlie looked like his eyeballs might explode, and Ledford stared at them, teeth grit, willing them to do so. There was the sound of metal cleats gripping ground, and men circling and jostling for position and pulling and saying, “Whoa whoa whoa now.”
They pried Ledford off and Charlie sucked at the air like an upright vacuum. It sounded as if his throat had collapsed, the opening there crushed to the circumference of a termite hole.
The man with the chest scar laughed heartily. Harold Wells stood beside him now, fingers interlaced on the chain-link, the look on his face showing nothing.
Ledford was shuffled to dugout’s edge. He caught sight of Harold and then the rest of the faces in the bleachers. He’d choked a man in front of them all, and he could not take it back.
The home-plate umpire was hollering about a disqualification for delay.
Ledford walked across the field to the nickel plant’s team captain. He and the rest of the team hadn’t left their dugout since the stretch. The man wore no expression, as if none of it had happened in the other dugout before his very eyes. Ledford said, “We might need a few extra minutes for a wardrobe change.”
The man’s eyelids were like those of a bloodhound. He let his jaw drop open before he spoke. “We won’t play against no team what fields a colored.”
Ledford sized him up. Bony. Slow. Backed by ten men with cocked ankles and fisted hands. Ledford smiled at them. Then at the man before him. “Will you play against a team that fields eight?” he asked.
“No sir.”
“Well,” Ledford said, “I reckon we’ve got ourselves a forfeit situation.” He walked to the pitcher’s mound and stood on it. Looked up at the sky above for a plane. None flew. Both teams stared at Ledford and a few spectators got up to leave. He watched Lizzie Wells pull her boy away from the fence by his shoulders. Mack had already headed for the car. Ledford saw the back of Don Staples as he walked past the concession booth to the parking lot.
The umpire hollered, “Game’s called on account of forfeet.” Ledford decided to stand on the mound until nobody was left. When they were gone, he looked down at his jersey, the black-felt letters stitched tight to the chest. Four of them, forming one word. MANN. Ledford began unbuttoning. He pulled off the jersey. The clouds had thinned and the sun felt good on his shoulders.
Next to his backpocket tobacco was his jackknife. He pulled it out and sat down on the mound and began to rip at the stitching of the last N. When he’d loosed nearly all of it, he gripped the big felt letter in his teeth and yanked his head back. It tore loose clean, as if it had never been there. Ledford spat out the N, stood up, and put his jersey back on. He was careful to line it up right, hole to button. He smoothed it with his hands and looked down. MAN it read across his chest.
“BIG THINGS, BAD and good, happen in threes,” Ledford’s mother once told him. She’d been more talkative than usual, and was made somewhat numb by the three things that had befallen her in the winter of 1933. She’d lost her job at the grade school, Bill’s hours at Mann Glass were cut in half, and she’d found a lump in her breast.
Now, three things were upon Ledford, almost all at once. Inside a week, he’d put in his notice at Mann Glass, filed business papers with the state tax department, and decided to move his family to Marrowbone Cut. The first two came relatively easy. It was the third, explaining such a change to Rachel, that worried him.
They lay in bed next to each other, quiet but breathing heavy from what they’d just finished. Even after three years of marriage and two children, they met in a controlled fury almost nightly. The only prompt necessary was the brush of one’s skin against the other’s under the sheets.
Ledford sat up and lit a cigarette. “I think we ought to move to the hills,” he said.
Rachel lifted her hand to his back. She rubbed at the scar there, to the left of his spine, where the shrapnel had come clean through. It was shaped like the letter Z, sloppy-edged, as if drawn by a pink crayon. “The hills?”
“I’ve had enough of town.”
She was quiet for a time. “Do you wonder about too many changes at once?” She reached around him for a drag off his cigarette.
“Yes, I’ve wondered that,” he said. “I’ve wondered mainly for your sake, and the children’s. How would you all take to it. But to my mind, it couldn’t come fast enough. These are things we should have done from the get-go.”
She wasn’t sure she followed him, but she thought for a moment about living in the country. About walking out her back door and seeing no neighbors, and about taking strolls through the woods until a path was beaten. This made her happy. “I’m game,” she said.
Ledford turned to Rachel. She was smiling. He’d expected her to cry. Her eyes were mostly pupil in the low lamplight. “We’ll have to sell the house,” he said. He watched for her expression to change. It didn’t.
“I’ve always felt it was poorly constructed anyway,” she said. “Like Lincoln Logs stacked too fast.”
Ledford laughed. She was looking at him the way she had just minutes before, as he’d moved on top of her. It was a stare that possessed neither fear nor angle, only the want to be as one. “I love you,” he told her.
They talked for two hours. Rachel wanted to sell her parents’ house too. It had been empty of people since her father died, its insides gathering dust. Now it had a purpose. She told Ledford they could use Mann money from the bank to help. There was a lot of it. She said she’d knit colorful little bags to hold the marbles he’d make. Said she was fast, and that her bags would be royal blue and red and sunflower yellow.
She went quiet when he told her that by settling in the hills, he meant the Bonecutter property. That he aimed to set up both shop and home there. She put her head on the pillow and looked at the ceiling when he told her he’d been out to visit the Bonecutters again and gotten their okay on things.
Men like those frightened Rachel, and she wondered, briefly, if this was all a mistake. She considered that she was running from something. Ledford was easy to figure—he’d been running from his past since the day she met him. But for Rachel, it may have been the future. She didn’t want to join the Junior League or the PTA. She didn’t want girlfriends, never had. She didn’t even particularly want to go back to nursing, as it had brought little in the way of fulfillment. What she wanted was to raise her children up right, those she had and those to come. To bandage them when they were hurt, to teach them their lessons. To hold them pressed against her face for as long as they would let her.
It was decided. “I’ll call the realtor tomorrow,” Ledford said.
SEPTEMBER 1948
SELECTING WAS BAD WORK. It was liable to strain the eyes, watching all those little glass jars come by on the belt. And it was loud. Always loud. Lizzie Wells, like all the other women on the lehr, sometimes found her eyes jumping left to right long after work was done.
She checked her wristwatch. Almost six a.m. She reached down and discarded a faulty medicine dropper. Across the room, Faye had a sneezing fit. She was the oily-haired one everybody said was crazy. When her sneezing subsided, Faye stood still for a moment,
shoulders sagged. Lizzie noticed the tag at her collar was up, a little white square at the base of her neck. Then Faye shot out her arm and picked up a misshapen baby food jar. She reared back and threw it across the room. A couple women ducked the shattering ricochet. “Nobody cain’t do this type a thing for fifty cents a hour,” Faye hollered. “No man would stand for it!”
Somebody told her to shut her mouth. Otherwise, none spoke a word. There was just the metal hum of conveyance.
Lizzie took quick glances and otherwise kept her eyes on the belt. A nice woman who was older than the rest patted Faye’s back and pushed her along, back to her selecting spot.
The shattered baby food jar lay in a scatter at the far end of the room. Lizzie took note of its jagged condition, pictured Mack in his old duties, sweeping it into a dustpan. At least he’d had security then, she’d thought. Word was, the new owners were looking to lay off anyone they saw fit. A greed had come over the upper offices of Mann Glass, just as it had come over the rest of the white world. It was a greed Lizzie’s father had foretold. Always, he had told her, after a time of hardship or war, the white man will seize the opportunity to reestablish his place on the throne.
As was usual, Lizzie walked home alone, right along the railroad tracks. She cut across at the overpass and walked through the empty lot behind the hardware store. She didn’t pass a single house on this route, and that was how she liked it.
At home, she kissed Harold good morning. “Sleepyville,” she said, using her fingernail to scrape at the morning in the boy’s eyes.