The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

Little Willy had seen all the test runs. The furnace no longer impressed him. He regarded the boy with the circle of dirt on his face, stuck his tongue out at him.

  Bob Staples came through the open doors and greeted his older brother. He introduced his cameraman, who said, “Pleased to meet you. Is it all right to film in here?”

  “I don’t care if you do a dance and sing a song, son,” Staples told him.

  “Just don’t turn what you see here into something it isn’t.”

  Mary stared at the camera the young man held. She moved close to hear its sound over the hum of the fans. When the man went outside, she followed him.

  “You want to look at my camera?” he asked. His sideburns grew down past his ears and his accent wasn’t local.

  Mary nodded yes. He knelt and held the camera before her. She read the letters on its side. Sounded them out. “Pa-lard. Bow-lex,” she said.

  The young man laughed. “That’s right,” he said. “Close enough at least. How old are you?”

  “Seven,” Mary said.

  “Reading big words like it’s nothing.” He watched as she studied the camera close. “You’ll speak French by the time you’re ten,” he said.

  Later, four came from the Maynard clan, only one male among them. At the gate, Dimple and Wimpy greeted the truck on horseback and eyeballed the boy. He sat with his sisters in the truck bed. He was too young to rough up or even have words. His pretty sisters cowered, and up front at the wheel, his mother sat, a bowl of ham salad next to her on the seat. She nodded to the twins respectfully.

  No words were exchanged.

  Dimple used his shotgun to wave safe passage and spat on the ground when they passed.

  At two o’clock, Jerry and Herchel pulled a tarp off the marble circle they’d made for competitive games of Ringer. It was official size. Two-inch plywood, packed dirt on top. “C’mon up and grab you a bag a marbles,” Herchel said to the children among them. “Jerry here’ll show you how to knuckle down, shoot a little.”

  Lizzie handed out the little bags she’d come to know so well. The boy with the dirt-ringed face chose the candy-striped that Rachel had finished the day before. Lizzie pictured her friend on the porch, hands working the needles. They didn’t seem the same hands she’d seen that morning, still and pale across a hospital bedsheet.

  “What do you say?” one boy’s mother instructed.

  “Thank you,” the boy said, his eyes on his new bag.

  “You’re welcome,” Lizzie said.

  Mack brought out something he’d built in secret. He set it down on the flat patch next to the Ringer circle. “I call this the Marble Zigzag,” he said. A pair of two-by-twos ran vertical from a base, reaching four feet high. In between the verticals was a series of back-and-forth channels, scrap wood that Mack had bowl-gouged to carry marbles. He dropped one in the top and the children crowded to see it roll to and fro to the bottom.

  They lined up to try.

  The cameraman rolled film through all of it. He crouched and sidestepped, shooting faces wide and close. Mary followed him.

  Back at the gate, a tan Cadillac Coupe de Ville came to a stop. The brothers were astride their mounts on opposite sides of the road.

  Wimpy took in all that chrome, the way his reflection warped in the bumper. Boo’s reflection made her a dinosaur. He squinted at the windshield, but the sun’s glare obscured whoever sat inside.

  A man stuck his head out. His hair was slick and his skin was tan. “Afternoon gentlemen,” he said. “My name is Erm Bacigalupo. I’m an old friend of Ledford’s.”

  They stared at him. He had a boy in the passenger seat. “Don’t tell me he hasn’t mentioned me,” Erm said.

  Dimple regarded the car, the high starched collar of the man driving it. “He spoke of you. Said you was in the war together.”

  Erm held up his hands. “Got my proof of invite in my jacket pocket here gentlemen,” he said. “Don’t get itchy with those long guns, paper’s all I’m pullin.” He reached in and produced the invitation he’d received in the mail two weeks prior.

  “No need for that,” Dimple said. “But Ledford ain’t here.”

  The boy fidgeted in his seat. “I gotta pee-pee,” he said. He grabbed at the crotch of his trousers and rocked back and forth. He was five years old and looked like a miniature Erm.

  “Hold it in,” Erm said.

  The boy slunk in his seat and kicked the dashboard hard, left a mark. Erm turned to him and smacked him across the face. “Hold it in,” he said again. Then he turned back to Dimple. “Where is he?”

  “Hospital. Rachel had a baby. Came a month early and they had to cut him out. Nearly killed her.” Dimple watched the man’s reaction close. It seemed to be one of concern.

  “If I get back on 52 to Huntington, can I find the hospital?”

  Dimple nodded yes. He tilted his head and looked at the boy, who cried quietly, his hand on his red cheek.

  Wimpy had maneuvered Boo to the passenger window so he could get a look at the boy, too.

  As the Cadillac reversed to turn around, the twin brothers’ eyes met over its roof. For days, they’d discussed who might show up, who might be trouble. Neither had predicted the Italian from Chicago.

  They watched his whitewall tires kicking mud as he drove away. When the car was just a spot in the distance, it slowed and swerved to avoid a man walking. His tall frame sidestepped and came on. His edges were blurry. “Throw me the field glasses,” Dimple said.

  Wimpy rooted in his saddlebag and tossed them over.

  The eyecups were rough-edged and the lenses were scratched. Dimple did his best to re-locate the man through the worn prisms. When he had him dead center, he said, “Well ain’t that a kettle a shit?”

  “What?”

  “It’s Paul Maynard. Train your rifle.”

  Wimpy pulled his Winchester from the saddle scabbard. It made a dry sucking sound, barrel scraping leather. He tucked the butt plate to his shoulder, put his thumb on the hammer spur, and cocked it. He centered the ivory bead on Paul Maynard’s chest. He watched the man’s outline get bigger and clearer until he filled the rear sight’s V. That’s when Paul Maynard raised his empty hands over his head.

  When he got in shouting distance he said, “I’m unarmed. I’d just like a word.” He kept coming.

  “Anybody with you?” Dimple asked.

  “I’m alone.”

  Wimpy kept him in his sights until he got within five feet. “That’s close enough,” he said. Maynard stopped walking, hands held high.

  “Cover him,” Wimpy told his brother. Dimple raised the shotgun while Wimpy put his up and dismounted. He patted Maynard down, then stepped back and stood next to Boo.

  “You ain’t the law on my land,” Dimple said. “And even if you was, I wouldn’t give a flat damn.” He spat on the dirt. “What do you want?”

  “Just a word.”

  “Put your hands down,” Dimple said.

  Maynard did so and was then overtaken by a deep coughing fit. At its end, he managed “Excuse me.” He spat into the stickweeds lining the road. His eyes watered. “I come to say that if you two are able, I’d like to put trouble behind us. I know that’s a good bit to ask of you, considerin all that’s happened, but—” He coughed again, then righted himself.

  The three men found themselves in a predicament. Each knew but could not say out loud all that Paul referred to, but it was there. Paul’s son Sam had burned the Bonecutter place to the ground with five inside. Dimple and Wimpy had come home from town to find their family gone, and they’d not called on the law, the law being Paul. Instead, they tracked Sam Maynard, and then they took care of him.

  Maynard cleared his throat and spat again. Nerves had always produced in him an allergy and an abundance of phlegm. “You know as well as I that Sam was bad to the core. He was only ever good at one thing and that was fightin. The liquor took him from bad to worse.” He decided then that it was time to look the brothers in the eye. “I ain’t
makin excuses,” he said. “I just…well. I just met Loyal Ledford and his wife yesterday, and a few from our place already come over here this mornin, and I wondered if we might not use this thing you got here as a means to…” He couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Peace?” Wimpy said.

  Maynard swallowed, and then he nodded. “I reckon,” he said. Dimple tucked his shotgun in the crook of his elbow and dismounted. He stepped forward and held his hand out for Maynard to take it. He did. They shook. Then Wimpy stepped up and did the same.

  For a moment, the three men stood facing each other, not a word between them. Paul Maynard nearly asked about the living situation at Marrowbone. Nearly told them of the other Maynards, who, as his nephew had put it that morning, would never offer peace as long as niggers were in the mix. But he didn’t speak to this. Instead, he nodded, said “Afternoon,” turned, and walked away.

  They watched him go.

  When he was out of sight, there came the faint call of a child’s laugh from opposite direction, at the back of the Cut.

  “They’re rollin marbles,” Wimpy said. “Havin a big ole time.” Dimple tied Silver to the gatepost. He put in a wad of tobacco.

  “You want to go have a look-see?” Wimpy asked.

  “Better keep our post here. You go on if you want.”

  Wimpy looked across the Cut as far as his eyes would let him. He could smell the furnace smoke. Then, he could smell the chimney of his family’s home, no longer there.

  He sniffed the air some more. His mother’s biscuits. He cocked his ear. The laughter of his sister and his nephews, the high whistle of his father, the song of his grandmother on the wind.

  None of that was real. But there were other sounds. New ones. And there were homes dotting the land again. And the people who dwelled in them were righteous and hardworking, and they were bringing others into the fold.

  Maybe, Wimpy thought, it would work this time around.

  His grandmother had once told him that a man would come to Marrowbone. His name would be Ledford, she’d said. He’d always assumed it would be Bill, not his son. He looked over at the burying ground beyond the house.

  “I’d just as soon stand guard here with you,” Wimpy said. He watched a red-tailed hawk circling above. Its wingspan was wide and frozen in a balanced glide. Dimple looked up, and he, too, followed the hawk’s route, the two brothers craning and twisting their necks to see, waiting for the bird to spot a field mouse, and tuck its wings, and dive.

  II

  A HOUSE ON THE SAND

  Map of Marrowbone circa late 1960s

  JUNE 1963

  THE SLUG BELLIED OVER wet dirt, a stripe trail left behind. Its feelers had the look of tiny wet matchsticks. Four skinny tentacles reaching out to morning air, reading the sunlight above, sniffing the ground below. The feelers bent left and right. They retracted and extended. The slug came to the edge of a drop-off. It hesitated, then carried forth, vertical now, called below by smell. Other snails had set their compasses the same, and three were in stride with this one, intent on drowning. Nineteen of their brethren already lay dead at the bottom. They floated and sank, U-shaped, still and brown and bloated.

  Mrs. Wells bent to the trap and dug her fingers under its rim. She pulled it from the dirt, leaving a circle impression behind, three inches deep. Ledford had handblown these for her, extra-depth ashtrays, six of them. Sunken along the vegetable garden’s perimeter, they were slug death chambers. Every morning, she emptied them into a slop bucket.

  “Twenty-three,” she said aloud, counting the number of dead in her Thursday morning roundup. She knocked the glass trap against the side of her gallon bucket. An inch of beer swirled at the bottom, and the little wet bodies dropped like turds. “Plunk plunk plunk,” Mrs. Wells liked to call out as they landed.

  At the garden’s far end, Mary stepped lightly along a row of cabbage seedlings no bigger than clover. From her cupped palm she dropped black pepper dust onto the soil. It would keep the cats from pissing in the rows. They’d initially welcomed the unkempt felines, who proved their worthiness with gifts of dead mice. They’d sit at the front door with a limp tail between two teeth, hanging like a drowned nightcrawler. But lately they’d taken the vegetable garden as their personal toilet, and this would not do.

  Mary sneezed from the pepper’s rising dust cloud. “Bless you,” Mrs. Wells called to her. She nearly had to shout across the garden, which had grown this season to the size of a baseball field.

  Mary was barefoot. She wore a sundress stained by blackberry juice and a gardening belt made from a potato sack. Rachel had made it for her. “How many dead?” she hollered to Mrs. Wells.

  “Twenty-three. Two more than yesterday.”

  Mary tossed the last of her pepper.

  At seventeen, she’d already graduated high school and was enrolled at Marshall for fall. She would study political science, just as Harold had done before her.

  She wriggled her toes in the dirt and watched him. He was thirty yards off, tending to the chickens in his undershirt. He opened a door on the back of the coop and checked the nesting boxes. A broody hen squealed at him.

  Harold liked the chickens. Especially when they were quiet. He’d rub his knuckles against the backs of their necks and watch the sheen move across the brown feathers, like gasoline on a puddle.

  When the time came, he could snap one of those necks as easy as he could pet it.

  Inside the run, he threw grain with the same motion Mary had spread pepper. Chickens pecked at it all around him. He latched the door and looked to the garden. Shaded his brow with a hand. His eyes met Mary’s. He walked over, a gait like his father’s, only Harold was taller.

  “Sun’s hot already,” he said.

  “Tomatoes need it.” Mary flicked at pepper flakes caught in the lines of her hand.

  “You decided on that dormitory?” He took note of her calf muscles. Hard, already tan from working outside.

  “I’m going to stay out here.” Mary had trouble looking him full in the face. He’d grown a mustache. He’d grown handsome. She glanced at the old burn scar on his left biceps. It was oval and smooth, pinched at the edges.

  “I figured,” Harold said. “Same as I did. You won’t make many friends that way.”

  Mary shrugged. She wasn’t interested in friends. When she looked at people, she imagined them through the lens of her movie camera.

  Harold had lived at Marrowbone during his years at Marshall, but he’d joined the Civic Interest Progressives. In the CIP, Harold became known by everyone. “Your daddy tell you we’re picketing Smalley’s again tomorrow?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  Mrs. Wells walked over. “Morning Grandma,” Harold said. He kissed the top of her head. “I hear you say you’re picketing at Smalley’s again?” She set her bucket down and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Mrs. Wells shook her head. “I worked for those people for eighteen years,” she said, then she picked up her bucket and walked away.

  They watched her go. “She’s slowing down some,” Harold said. “Still murders slugs by the dozen though.” Mary smiled and watched the old woman amble. She considered what Mrs. Wells had said. She pictured her working all those years at Smalley’s Cafeteria, serving all those white faces, never once a black patron. Now her grandson and his fellow students had staged a sit-in at Smalley’s. And when they were banned outright, they’d started marching the sidewalk with signs.

  “Well, I’ll see you Mary,” Harold said. He reached out and brushed her arm as he left.

  In August, he’d be leaving for law school up at Morgantown. She wondered what she’d do then. Who she’d watch.

  Above her, in the high branches of a staghorn sumac tree, the birds jostled. Six hollowed-out gourds hung there, half-dollar holes their entryways. They were birdhouses, strategically placed by the garden to ensure the bugs didn’t take over.

  Mary watched Harold walk away and li
stened to the birds chatter. Up the Cut, a crowd of children had gathered. They stood around the dirt-and-plywood platform in silence as the wooden cross-rack was lifted from the center. It left behind thirteen marbles, three inches between each, their lines cutting an X on the well-worn surface. This was the game of Ringer.

  Two boys toed the pitch line and knuckled up. The fat one, Hambone Maynard, shot first. His taw quit rolling two inches short of the lag line. A couple of girls in the crowd whistled their approval. Then Orb Ledford unleashed his big sulphide shooter, a black-painted dog inside. His unorthodox release caused some to shake their heads, but those heads went still as the marble quit rolling half an inch short of the lag line.

  Orb knocked seven out of the circle before Hambone Maynard cleared one. The game was over quick. It was for keepsies, but when Hambone held out his banded clearie taw, Orb nodded no and walked away. His daddy had told him never rock the boat when it came to Maynards.

  It was time to let the dogs run.

  Orb was one week short of ten years old. He was tall for his age. Skinny as a rail and topped by a thick shock of black hair. He didn’t talk much, and he didn’t give or take affection, not from anyone. He’d always been that way.

  Orb was encouraged to always and everywhere be careful, for he had the kind of blood that ran and didn’t clot.

  He didn’t speak his first word, dog, until he was four. By that point, they’d long since known that he was different. Special. Slow, some would say. But when it came to singing, or a marbles circle, Orb was anything but slow. To him, music was an involuntary fire. It pulled from him what waited deep inside his belly. Orb could sing like Little Jimmy Scott. It was easy as chewing gum.

  And it was the same with marbles. He saw the lines and angles in the Ringer circle as if they were drawn there. He merely had to connect the dots. It had always been this way for Orb. He’d always been around church music, and he’d always been around marbles. He merely took them up.

  The dogs were different. He felt something for the dogs.