The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  She kissed Mack at their crossing spot in the bathroom. “Got home fast,” he said. He stood on one foot and pulled a sock on the other.

  Lizzie reached up and took a seashell from the tank lid on the wall. “Fast as I could,” she said. She took the pins from her hair and set them in the seashell. “You know that one girl who’s plumb crazy? Well, she went plumb crazy today. Threw a jar against the wall, smashed it. Yellin about how men wouldn’t do this work.” Lizzie sat down on the tub’s edge. “That’s life on the lehr,” she said.

  Mack didn’t respond. He finished dressing in the bedroom, then went downstairs to heat enough oatmeal for himself and the boy. Always, it seemed, they ran out of time. Harold had to be across town at 7:30. First bell at Frederick Douglass was 7:45.

  When they pulled into the driveway of Lizzie’s parents’ home, Mack’s wristwatch read 7:32. Her father, Mr. J. Carl Mitchum, sat in a highback wooden chair on the porch. He checked his own watch and stood. He was a big man, and he didn’t like to be kept waiting, especially by his son-in-law. What he did like was to walk his grandson Harold to school in the mornings at a slow clip, and with conversations on God and demons. Douglass was only two blocks away.

  “Morning sir,” Mack said. His father-in-law did not answer. Harold ran up and gave him a hug around the waist.

  “You eat a good breakfast?” J. Carl’s voice was low and commanding, like a sousaphone chirping. He had his hands on the boy’s shoulders.

  “Yessir. Two bowls a oatmeal.”

  J. Carl rubbed his thumbs against the boy’s collarbones. “Good,” he said. “But you still a scarecrow short on stuffing.”

  Mack handed over Harold’s lunch pail. “I’ve got to get to work,” he said.

  J. Carl took the lunch pail and set it on the wide handrail. He pulled a small tuning fork from his pocket and handed it to Harold, who walked away, flicking it. J. Carl watched the boy. He didn’t look at Mack when he spoke. “You know he can just stay here with us on weeknights. Make things a whole lot easier on you.”

  Mack didn’t answer.

  He backed out of the driveway and watched the old man resume his seated post in the highback chair. He put the boy on his knee. Inside the screen door, Mack saw a shadow pass, then another. The whole family was most likely there. They all lived within a block of each other. Lizzie’s older brother taught math at Douglass, and her sister taught music. Both had gotten master’s degrees at Bluefield State.

  J. Carl was the music director at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He didn’t like his daughter living among poor West End white folks, and he didn’t like her working at Mann Glass.

  At the factory, Mack waved at Ledford, who was backing out the main doors, both hands on a cardboard box. It was his last day, and after three years in an office he’d never brought enough to fill a single box.

  It occurred to Mack that the day was not shaping up. Lizzie’s talk of the crazy woman on the line had spooked him. Harold hadn’t spoken to him on the way across town. Ledford had left for good.

  He put on his gloves and took his place on the main line. His hands moved from memory, sulphuring the blanks as the molten glass was drawn up.

  Up above, less than five minutes after Ledford cleaned out his desk, Charlie Ball moved into his office. The Toledo brothers were running things now, and they liked Charlie. What they didn’t like were expenses allotted for company picnics or holiday parties or baseball teams. They didn’t like employee fellowship or company newsletters, or unions, or Negroes.

  Charlie stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and winked at Ernestine, who ignored him. “King of the hot end, Ernestine,” he said. “King of the hot end.”

  Ernestine rolled her eyes.

  Charlie walked the platform. He oversaw the lines now, and he intended to keep the men under watchful eye.

  At noon, Mack Wells took his lunch break. He sat down alone in the cafeteria corner and had just forked in a mouthful of dumpling when Charlie Ball pulled up a chair across from him. Mack nodded and chewed.

  “Word is, your wife is part of an uprising on the selecting line,” Charlie said. He pushed the salt shaker back and forth between his hands.

  “Women who were happy to have work when the war started all of a sudden think they’re makin slave wages. Now doesn’t that seem strange to you?” He smiled and waited on an answer.

  Mack finished chewing and swallowed. “Well, I don’t know about any uprising Mr. Ball, and Lizzie—”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen boy.” Charlie leaned in close. The salt shaker was squeezed in his fist. “Your wife is going to lose her job on the lehr for Communist insubordination. That, or you lose yours for insubordination as we sit here right now.” He waited for a reaction and got none. “Either way, I don’t need two coloreds inside this plant. That’s the bottom line. No Ledford here to say otherwise.” Charlie eased back and thumbed a clump of hair off his forehead.

  Mack just looked at the younger man who’d called him boy. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right, was contemplating lost dollars in his head. He felt the urge to reach across and use a handful of Charlie’s hair to slam his face to the table. Instead, he sat still and said nothing.

  “I didn’t hear you,” Charlie said. He cupped his hand to his ear. A couple of men returning their trays had taken notice of the conversation. Charlie cocked his cupped ear at Mack. “What do you say? Your job or your wife’s?”

  Mack swallowed, stood, and took his tray to the return belt. He brushed against the gawking men as he went, and they moved along.

  Charlie frowned and laughed a little. He watched Mack Wells walk away. “Back to work,” he said to no one in particular.

  Mack kept walking. The words repeated in his ears. Back to work. He had other ideas.

  WHEN HE’D TYPED it, slow and painful on the green Remington typewriter he’d picked up at a rummage sale, the words had seemed inspired to Ledford. Now, in the lantern light on the back stoop of Dimple and Wimpy Bonecutter’s place, he wasn’t so sure. He’d spilled coffee on the paper. The typeface was light.

  Both brothers stood and read at the same time, Dimple with the lantern held above them. They squinted hard and moved their lips in whispered study. The top of the page read merely The Plan. Underneath, there were passages like Ledford monies will be sufficient to run electric, H2O, and gas, and decisions will be made co-operatively to consider vegetable gardens and farming endeavors. Another part read Home and dwellings shall be built with standard plans from US Department of Agriculture (24’ x 10’ A-Frame Cabin, for instance).

  Wimpy looked from the paper. It took him a minute to locate Ledford, who’d sat down on the chop block. “Where you goin to git these federal plans?” he asked.

  “Already got em,” Ledford said. “Library.”

  They went back to reading. When they’d finished, they walked off to a lone fencepost and Wimpy leaned on it and they talked in hushed tones. It had gotten so dark that Ledford would not have known they were there save for the whispers.

  After a time, Dimple picked up the lantern and they walked over to Ledford. He stood from the chopblock and brushed sawdust from the seat of his pants. “That’s just a draft,” he said.

  Dimple spoke. “We’d like to welcome you and yours to this land.” Ledford looked at the brothers, then down at the ground. A sense of relief had come over him. He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

  “We don’t see no problem with the house plans and what have you. And the hookup to power and gas and water—you know Mother and Dad B had it up at the main house.” Dimple pointed in the direction of the charred flat square. “Lines is already run. But do I figure right that you plan on buildin a glass factory on this ground?”

  “Well, I envision a relatively small dwelling,” Ledford said. “Maybe a fifty-by-fifty-foot deal? High ceiling. I’d put a big furnace in, just to make the batches worth our while.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Dimple rubbed at his stubble. He and his bro
ther had never set foot in a factory. They didn’t like the sound of the word.

  From the woods came the sound of a deer traversing dry ground cover, snapping twigs. In response, Dimple’s ears moved like a cat’s. “And you say this marble idea come to you in a dream?” he asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “A voice?”

  “That’s right.”

  Dimple started to inquire further, but Wimpy cut him off. “What did the voice say?”

  “Make marbles,” Ledford answered.

  Now they both rubbed their stubble. Then, simultaneously, they stopped. Dimple put his hands in his pockets. Wimpy rocked on his heels, swinging the lantern in his grip.

  The dream was enough for them. “Okay,” Dimple said. “There’s one more thing,” Ledford said. “What’s that?”

  “I work with another man at the glass plant who may be losing his job. His wife too. I don’t know for certain, but they might be interested in movin out here with us. Working. Raising their boy.”

  “That’d be just fine,” Dimple said.

  “Well, I ought to mention.” Ledford cleared his throat. “They’re Negroes.”

  “How’s that?” Wimpy stopped rocking on his heels. The lantern kept swinging.

  “They’re Negroes.”

  “Colored?” Wimpy asked.

  “Yessir.”

  The brothers nodded that they understood. Dimple said, “You do know this here’s Wayne County?”

  Ledford nodded that he did. “What’s this fella’s name?” Dimple asked.

  “Mack Wells.”

  “Has he ever worked for Maynard Coal?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Then I don’t give a damn what color he is. He and his are welcome here.”

  Ledford shook hands with both of them. They didn’t invite him in. He got the impression they went to bed not long after sundown.

  NOVEMBER 1948

  NO ONE THOUGHT TRUMAN had a chance. The Chicago Daily Tribune had even printed the headline dewey defeats truman, but that was a bald-faced lie. Truman had triumphed. “I’ll be durned,” Ledford said. He stared at the newspaper and wondered if Truman would live up to the promise of Mr. Hubert Humphrey’s speech.

  He lit a cigarette and read onward. The article predicted price controls and an increase in minimum wage. Next to it, Truman himself spread his arms wide and smiled, his hat in one hand, his patented wave in the other. Nowhere were the words civil rights. Ledford’s breath condensated on the cold morning air. He sat cross-legged on a tarp just outside the front flaps of his tent, reading the newspaper that Jerry the mute had brought from town. For almost a month, Ledford had been sleeping four nights a week inside the square of canvas. Days he spent building his family’s new home, all the way at the back of Marrowbone Cut. In their backyard was a hillside covered in oak trees and ash and poplars. In their side yard, a mountain stream. Ledford was happy.

  He stood up and stretched. Jerry the mute and his cousin Herchel the scarred had already gotten a fire going. A straight-seam coffeepot sat on one of the rocks circling the pit. It jiggled as its contents boiled. Herchel used a sweat rag to pick it up and pour. At his ankles was a Plott hound pup. It had been born two months prior to a bitch belonging to his uncle, an East Tennessee man who knew hunting dogs. Herchel was calling the pup Jack Dempsey.

  Ledford held out his cup and Herchel poured. They stood and sipped and sighed. Ledford bent and petted Jack Dempsey’s little head. The pup took his wrist between its two little paws, cocked its head, and bit his finger. Ledford pulled loose, stood, and laughed. Shook the sting from his hand. He stepped around his tent and beheld the nearly finished home they’d erected. It was a fine house. A two-story A-frame with a covered front porch and spruce siding. A tin roof and ten windows. Fifty yards east sat an identical one, only it was one-story. It too was nearly finished, and it was to be the Wells family home. Both sat at the back of the hollow, nearly out of sight from Dimple and Wimpy’s dwelling.

  Ledford watched Herchel pour another round of steaming coffee into Jerry’s cup. He could hardly believe his good fortune at having hired on these men. After the baseball forfeit, he’d approached Jerry at work, asked him if he’d be interested in a new job. A construction job. Dollar an hour. Jerry wasn’t deaf, he’d simply never spoken. He’d listened and nodded yes. He’d written on a scrap of paper that his cousin Herchel, the one with the scar on his belly, was out of work, and that he owned a Ford tractor with a backhoe attachment. The three of them had worked hard together after that, along with Mack and Dimple and Wimpy. And now, Jerry and Herchel would stay on permanently as employees of the unnamed future marble company. They would help build its factory, and at the same time, they’d build a house for themselves.

  Jack Dempsey had the cuff of Jerry’s blue jeans in his bite. The little dog got back on his haunches and whipped his head side to side. Jerry paid him no mind. He held the tin cup in his teeth and signed something to Herchel, who nodded lazy.

  There was a shotgun blast from the woods. Jack Dempsey let go of the blue jeans and took off like a shot, tail-tucked and dropping turds all the way. He whimpered while he ran, high-pitched and patterned like a wolf whistle, and hid in the recesses beneath the new Ledford porch.

  Herchel laughed so hard that coffee came out his nose. “Did you see that damn dog dropping his mess?” he said. “If he gets lost, he can follow his own crumbs back.”

  Ledford thought this was the funniest thing he’d seen and heard in years. And the little dog possessed true speed. “I tell you what,” he said, “he ran so fast he burnt the wind.”

  There was another shotgun blast. Dimple and Wimpy had gone out early to hunt rabbit.

  LIZZIE’S FATHER STOOD on the front porch with his big arms crossed. He did not uncross them to recognize her departure, nor did he come down from the porch as her mother and sister and brother strolled along the driveway, waving goodbye. Mack and Lizzie waved back from inside the car. It was loaded with the last of their things.

  The Plymouth’s front windshield was streaked in mud. Lizzie watched her girlhood house get smaller as they backed away. Tears had welled in her eyes, and everything looked rounded. Her father’s squared stance even softened at the edges. She wiped her eyes and looked for Harold.

  Behind big J. Carl, where his mother and father could not see him, Harold cried harder than he had in some time. He pressed his face against his grandfather’s double-holed leather belt and stuck his fingers in his ears. That way he wouldn’t hear his parents drive away.

  It had been decided that Harold would live with his grandparents during the weekdays. There was school to be considered. His aunt and uncle were down the street, and they were in the classroom too. Their children, Harold’s cousins, were eager playmates. On the weekends he’d stay out at Marrowbone Cut.

  J. Carl kept his arms crossed and let the boy cry. He did not watch the Plymouth as it drove out of eyeshot, trailing a Packard driven by a white man he couldn’t figure. J. Carl shook his head. He turned, knelt, and pulled Harold tight against his shoulder. His big hand pressed the boy’s head there and cupped it, so small and perfect. “It’s all right son,” J. Carl said. “Sometimes mothers and daddies got to do foolish things before they find a righteous path.” In his mind, he prayed that his youngest daughter would someday cease forever testing his patience. Unlike his other two, Lizzie had always chosen what he forbade.

  Inside the Plymouth, Lizzie let herself go. She bent her head to her knees and shook. Mack rubbed her back between shifting gears and kept his eye on the Packard. It started to rain. “It’s not that bad now,” Mack said. “We’ll be seeing him. Every few days we’ll see him.”

  She sat upright. “Every few days? He’s our son, Mack.” She wasn’t taking the time to breathe right. She put her hands out, pointing ahead. “Why are we following them,” she said, “when they are back there?” She swung her arms back toward Sixteenth Street.

  He didn’t have an answer. “Loyal Led
ford is not some different breed of white folk,” Lizzie said. “He’s been trained like the rest of em, eyes shut and ears plugged. Have you thought about that?” She smacked her hands against her lap.

  Mack had thought about it. It seemed all he thought about was the uncertain future, and when he did so, he’d get to thinking on the past. Always, it was the past. Alone on the road, he’d thought long and hard on Lizzie, how she’d not been the same since Harold was born and the doctor told her she would not bear another child. Her state since had been one that seemed, to Mack, only half awake. Her mood could turn on a dime. He also thought about how he’d run away from his wife and baby boy and the world they had to face. He had run to the Army and served his country, fixing roads and bridges and trucks and tanks. And after a while, when black men could fight alongside white, Mack had hugged his rifle tight and rocked on train and truck wheels across France and into Germany. When they arrived, he saw the look in those white boys’ eyes on the banks of the Rhine. It was a look of utter confusion, and later, for many, it was a look of camaraderie. Mack had crossed the Rhine with his new comrades in the Ninety-ninth. He’d charged German nests while emptying his M1. Some in the Ninety-ninth were even white boys from Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia. He’d celebrated alongside all of them when they reached Leipzig. But as quick as it had appeared, the look in those white soldiers’ eyes was gone when they stood at the door of the Leipzig rec hall and said, “No niggers allowed.” And then, Mack was shipped back to his engineers unit, and everything was the same as it had been before. So it was that he’d decided then, as he had again and again in his life, to hate all white folks.

  He’d returned to face their world with his wife and son.

  And then, at Mann Glass, he’d looked in Ledford’s eyes.

  The windows were fogging inside the car. Mack took out his handkerchief and wiped in a circle before him. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve thought about it.”