The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  Everyone whooped and hollered and some of the anxiousness fell away. Wayne County white boys and Sixteenth Street black boys jumped the turnbuckles and shot their skinny arms forward and back, shadowboxing around the ring and laughing.

  Before he left, Jimmy Ballard gave his autograph to any who asked. At eight-thirty, Mack led a procession to the twenty-foot surprise. A patchwork cover was draped over what looked to be a giant Christmas tree in the Wells front yard. Lizzie and Rachel had stitched together moth-bit bedsheets and holey paint tarps to cover what waited beneath. The sun was setting, and its last rays peeked over the ridge, illuminating the faces of the children. They craned their necks and looked up, wide-eyed. Mack gathered a length of rope attached to the top. “All right, children,” he said. “I want you to count down from five.”

  They did so, gaining volume as they went. At the shout of “ONE!” Mack pulled the rope and the musical marble tree appeared. None knew quite what it was, but the young ones oohed and aahed anyway. “Orb,” Mack said. “You’re the birthday boy. You do the honors.”

  Orb stepped front and center. He looked up at the fixed wooden planks of the giant marble tree. They spiraled the thick center pole, jutting like dorsal plates on a dinosaur, thick and smooth. Mack and Herb pulled up a twenty-foot A-frame ladder. It seemed to sway at the middle.

  “Be careful,” Rachel said. Her hand was to her mouth. She couldn’t help but picture Orb falling from that height, his insides bleeding out.

  “I’ll stay right behind him,” Mack said.

  And he did. He followed the boy to the top, one hand on the ladder, the other waiting and open under Orb’s backside just in case. On Mack’s back was a heavy satchel. Inside the satchel were five giant marbles, hand-rolled by Ledford and weighing five pounds each. There were more down below.

  At the top, the two of them leaned over and braced against the uppermost leaf plank. Together, they held the satchel aloft and let the giant marbles fall, one at a time. Mack’s spacing was perfect, as was the angle of the planks. The marbles rolled and plunked and played a tune as they went, spiraling downward and singing out ploink ploink ploink as they went, deeper and deeper in pitch, faster and faster, like some giant xylophone.

  When all had dropped to the ground, there was a moment’s silence, and then the children ran forth to touch the marbles, big as softballs and swirled blue and green.

  Each of them took a turn, two at a time. They began to carry with them their own bags of Marrowbone marbles, dropping the small along with the big, bending their ears to the intricate differences in song, marveling that such an instrument was real.

  When it had gotten too dark to safely scale the ladder, all were called back to the tent, and the Radiant Light Gospel Choir took the stage. At the end of the first riser, Orb stood among them, the only one without a robe. In the audience, black and white stood shoulder to shoulder and listened as Herb ran the bow across his new fiddle and turned the pegs.

  J. Carl stepped to the microphone and said, “This state is the only one born of the Civil War, a war whose end saw the cessation of slavery.” His voice came from deep down, low and steady. “Tonight marks a hundred years since those times, and it reminds us how far we have yet to go.” It was quiet. Then, J. Carl said, “This one is for Medgar Evers.”

  He stepped back, turned to his singers, and raised his arms. Effie came in on piano, then Herb on the strings. And the robed singers lifted their heads and sang. Their sound inside the tent was immense.

  For the final verse, Orb sang solo, his eyes shut tight, his face to the tent’s pinnacle. Effie had assured the other singers he’d be fine.

  Orb sang of the time when people had been here for ten thousand years. He sang of us all, shining bright as the sun.

  It was the most beautiful rendition of “Amazing Grace” that any in attendance had ever heard. Women wept where they stood, and the TV cameraman forgot to roll film, his mouth agape, his breath caught. Mary filmed it all, imagined the silent footage of Orb’s lyric.

  By eleven, the crowd had thinned and the katydids could be heard again. Erm wandered drunk past a stack of folding chairs. He found Ledford coiling electrical cord in a loop. “You were right Ledford,” Erm told him.

  “How’s that?” Ledford was bent over, yanking at a length of duct tape on the plywood runner. He stood and kept coiling.

  “All those years ago, when I told you black and white could never come together, and you said they could? You were right. I can see it now.” He’d been at the flask all night, but after what he’d seen, he meant what he said.

  Ledford put his hand on Erm’s shoulder. “Well, I’m glad to hear you say that. Thank you, Erm.” It occurred to Ledford that he could no longer read his old friend. He knew not when the man was telling the truth. Maybe Erm himself didn’t know. Ledford asked him, “What were you and Charlie Ball talking about earlier?”

  Erm took another slug from his flask, twisted the cap, and returned it to his back pocket. “I told him I almost didn’t recognize him under all that fat. Told him when I build my first racetrack in West Virginia, he can resign as mayor and be the cigar girl.”

  At woods’ edge, Fury and Willy crouched in the brush. Fury produced a fat, lumpy cigarette. “This is what I was telling you about,” he said. “You never smoked a reefer before?”

  Willy shook his head no.

  Fury swung his silver Zippo across his thigh, popping its top against his blue jeans. He swung it back up, spinning roller to flint in the same spot.

  “Where did you learn that?” Willy asked.

  Fury didn’t answer. He was putting flame to paper. He drew deep and held it in, then blew smoke in Willy’s face and handed over the joint.

  Willy drew just as hard, but he coughed everything up and clutched his throat. Fury laughed at him and they passed it back and forth in this way until nothing remained.

  After a time, Willy lost his ability to speak, and he lay back against the ground and looked to the sky. The tree branches were moving above, and beyond them the stars seemed to pulsate. Fury was going on and on about his great-uncle Fiore, the power he wielded. “He once tore a man’s nose off his face with a pipe wrench,” Fury said.

  After a while, Fury asked, “Do you know what my dad does for a living?” He looked down at Willy, whose eyes were nearly shut.

  Willy wanted to answer bookie, but he couldn’t even manage the word. He wondered if this is what it was like for Orb. For Jerry.

  “He kills people,” Fury said.

  Willy began to see tiny men dressed in white, descending by parachute from the pulsating stars on high. They tilted to and fro as they fell slow to the earth, like seahorses dancing in a tank. Willy shut his eyes.

  THE TELEVISION AERIAL was planted near the top of the ridge. From it, a heavy-gauge cable ran for a quarter mile to Don Staples’ Philco set, the only television at Marrowbone. On Friday night at eleven, they all gathered around it for the local news. Staples’ living quarters in back of the chapel were anything but ample. Elbow room was hard to come by.

  The women sat on the twin bed pushed against a wall. Rachel knitted a toboggan for Orb’s growing head. She’d finished a pair of them that morning, black winter hats for the Bonecutter brothers. Lizzie and Effie laughed the way sisters do when reminiscing. And Mary petted the black-and-white cat on her lap and wondered how long until he bit her. Beside her stood her father. Orb sat at her feet. Harold was in the corner by the door, sifting through a crate of Staples’ record albums.

  Herchel was drunk, same as every Friday. He and Jerry played catch in the dark outside the chapel, Herchel humming “Amazing Grace” like so many had been all day. He stuck his head in the open door and asked, for the fifth time, “Is it on yet?”

  Nobody answered.

  Herchel hummed some more and tried to focus on the television. “They say that thing adds ten pounds,” he said.

  “Quiet,” Staples said. “Here it comes.”

  The anchorman�
��s glasses obscured his eyes, and his tie knot looked to be choking him. He said that not all the centennial parties were to be found in the capital. “Just outside of Huntington, in Wayne County, local entrepreneur Loyal Ledford and his Marrowbone Marble Company hosted an event complete with games for the children, a tour of the factory, and live music.”

  On the screen, the anchorman disappeared and in his place was a silent vision of the circus tent, folks milling around inside.

  “Those stripes just ain’t the same in black and white,” Herchel mumbled.

  The anchorman said, “The residents at Marrowbone believe in cooperative living, regardless of color. Negroes and whites work and live together.” There was a quick shot of Orb dropping his marbles atop the massive tree.

  “There you are Orb!” Rachel said. Everyone in the room cheered. Then came a blurry flash of the choir swaying onstage, followed by Ledford alone at the microphone, looking down.

  The anchorman said, “While some applaud this style of communal living and working, others have voiced concern that the Canaan Congregational Church, located on Marrowbone grounds, may be comprised of agitators engaged in Communist practices.”

  Staples laughed out loud.

  A commercial came on for triple-waxed Cut-Rite waxed paper. Ledford lit a cigarette and sidestepped Herchel to get outside. Herchel followed. He shook his head and said, “Communist my hairy ass.”

  Staples was glassy-eyed and nodding his head in agreement with someone who wasn’t there. “Folks saw it,” he said. “They aren’t stupid. Those in the know will come.”

  AUGUST 1963

  WILLY COULDN’T GET HIS pants off. He tried, with opposite foot, to loose the bunched blue jeans from his ankles, but it wasn’t to be. The jeans would stay where they were. Under him, Josephine Maynard had her arms and legs splayed across uneven ground. She moved them to and fro as if to make a dirt angel and said to him, “Go on and do it.”

  And so he did. With considerable trouble.

  There was trouble finding where to put it. Trouble with moving too fast once he did. It was as if his hips were piston-driven, unable to cease pumping until everything fell apart.

  The two of them had met there at noon. It was a patch of hard hillside near the top of Bonecutter Ridge. On the east face of the ridge there was a jutted rock—Big Shoe, they called it. The size of a truck. It hung over them, dark.

  Willy didn’t know what to say when he rolled off Josephine. He just went for those blue jeans at his ankles, buttoned up quick as he’d come undone. He pulled out his cigarettes, the pack squished, doubled back. He had to tear one in half at the crack to smoke it. He tore off half another one and offered it to Josephine. She shook her head no, was pulling up her own trousers.

  “Let me put a hickey on your neck,” she said. She was brushing the dirt off her back.

  “No.” It hadn’t been what he thought it would be.

  “Do you want to put one on me?”

  “No. Let’s go up top of the Shoe.” He clambered up the incline and she followed.

  You could see further away up there. You could see clear across the Cut. Willy figured whose house was whose. Out back of Herchel’s, Willy saw someone watering the tomatoes. “Flea-sized,” he said.

  Josephine kicked at loose rock. “Well,” she said. “I’ll see you.”

  Willy reached for her hand, but he had trouble looking at her straight. He kissed her on the cheek. “See you.”

  Josephine headed down the other side of the ridge. She sidestepped the rocky length until the grade leveled, and then she moved faster, worried her daddy would smell cigarettes on her clothes.

  Willy lit another half cigarette and started down his side of the mountain.

  When he got to the bottom, he cut across his own yard under cover of trees. He stopped behind a big oak and watched his mother through the kitchen window. She was hanging green beans on fishing line, tacking them to a ceiling joist. They hung heavy, their lengths lined up and pointing every which way. They swayed when she bumped her head against them, like wind chimes.

  Willy walked to Herchel’s. In among the wildflowers, at yard’s edge, he bent and smelled the thick buds he now knew to be marijuana. He broke one off and stuck it in his pocket.

  Herchel was still watering. Willy came up behind him. “Boo!” he yelled. Herchel didn’t twitch. “Got to do better than that, punchy,” he said. Willy wanted to tell Herchel what he’d done with Josephine. But he didn’t. “Tomatoes were picked three weeks ago at the big garden.” He pointed across the stream.

  “Different variety,” Herchel said. He hadn’t turned around yet. He had his thumb stuck in the hose hole to get a fan spray. When he’d given another once-over, he took the thumb out and had a drink. “Aaah,” he said. Turned and looked at Willy. “You want a drink?”

  “Shit Herchel,” Willy said. He stared at Herchel’s right eye, in which the white had been made red. “What happened?”

  “Bendy poked me with a two-prong turkey fork.” He cocked his head. “You look like you’re all hot and sweaty.” He stuck his thumb back in the hole and shot a jet stream at Willy’s face. He laughed and hollered after the boy as he ran. “Stay off that ridge young man, I know what you done up there.”

  From the kitchen window, Bendy looked out at her man. He was laughing hearty, bloody eyeball and all. She didn’t feel bad for sticking him. They’d been in the kitchen when it happened. He was washing, she was drying. When she’d again suggested that Jerry might finally move out, he’d told her, “Honey, you’ll hit the curb long before Jerry.” That’s when she grabbed for the turkey fork, so shiny where it lay drying on the dishrag. It shouldn’t have surprised her that her arm moved so quick. She’d stabbed a man before.

  Herchel walked across the yard to water his marijuana plants. He took note of the missing bud, shook his head. While he watered, he unzipped his fly and pissed on a ladybug traversing a lamb’s ears leaf. He farted, said, “Aaah” again, and spoke to the ladybug. “Forgive me,” he said, and she flew away.

  When he’d finished watering, he turned and saw Bendy in the kitchen window. He blew her a kiss.

  SEPTEMBER 1963

  MACK WELLS HAD BOUGHT the old school bus for three hundred dollars. He’d found it sitting on four flat tires in the scrapyard next to Ledford’s old house. Jimmy Ballard had told him about it—a 1942 Ford Short Bus. “Same year my son was born,” he’d told the scrapyard’s proprietor as they gazed upon it, still mostly black and yellow, its insides ripped out by hobos looking for a spot to bed down.

  It had taken Mack all of August to rebuild the engine and fasten seats to the floor. Stretch Hayes was his apprentice, rolling under the bus on a creeper board and listening as Mack pointed to and named brake line, fuel line, axles, and suspension. He’d set up a metal shop in back of the factory, and he taught Stretch to weld and cut. They outfitted the bus with a new fuel tank and hoses. They painted it blue.

  Harold had gone off to law school, and Mack found solace in the company of Stretch. Their work was fast, and it derived from necessity. After the local news covered the centennial celebration, folks had begun to show up. They were white, black, and in between, and they were looking for work and a place to live. Their children would need to get to school, and the road to Marrowbone was not on the district driver’s route.

  The new folks were country and city, young and old. They were willing to bend their backs and help raise a house. Seventeen of the new arrivals were children, and they ranged in age from two to thirteen. Eleven were white, four were black, and two were a little of both. Mack was to be their bus driver, and Ledford his copilot.

  At 7:00 a.m., on September 3rd, the children lined up and filed on board. Willy waved to them as he ran off down the road. It was four miles to school. He was training again and aimed to beat the bus.

  Rachel and Lizzie had repaired and refreshed many a child’s wardrobe for the occasion. They looked on, blowing sassafras tea steam from the rims of their m
ugs. Their faces were worried and proud. For on this day, almost ten years after Brown versus Board of Education, they watched a bus set out to integrate a Wayne County school.

  Mack pulled to the curb of Poke Branch School at 7:30. Word had gotten around, and there were two dozen on the lawn with signs they’d plagiarized from memories of Little Rock newspaper pictures. One read Race Mixsing is Comunism.

  Ledford stood in the bus’s aisle. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do like we talked about. Keep your eyes forward and hum your favorite song as you go.”

  Orb had sat in the back. He was the last to step off the bus. Ledford winked at him and rubbed his head. “You’ll like school,” he told him. “They know more math than me and your mother put together.”

  Only one woman in the crowd had the nerve to step in spitting distance. This was evidenced by the phlegm Mack wiped from his shoulder with his handkerchief. Afterwards, though it was his favorite red hanky, he threw it in the wastebasket outside the school’s double doors. Behind him, the woman kept at her insults. Her voice was hoarse from screaming at her children and her dogs and her husband and the mail carrier. “Antichrist!” she hollered. “Sodomites!”

  The children all crowded into the hallway outside the principal’s office. They stood tight in a pack, their eyes fixed on a bulletin board. It was sparsely tacked with class schedules and teacher names, sign-up sheets for bake sales and food drives. Poke Branch School enrolled grades one through twelve inside nine rooms. The gymnasium’s floor was rotting. In the wintertime, the furnace coughed black smoke through floor grates. When it rained for more than three hours, there were fifty tin pails at the ready to catch drips.

  Inside the principal’s office, Ledford and Mack were pleasantly surprised with the man’s demeanor. “Yes,” he said to them, “I’ll have Miz Buskirk sort out the new enrollee papers.” He’d suffered a burn on the right side of his face and he had to dab at his eye periodically on account of a faulty duct. “There’s ample room here for all your children, and our teachers are up to the task.” He looked at both Ledford and Mack when he spoke. “My brother is a pipe fitter for a chemical plant up in Baltimore,” he said. “He went to the March on Washington last week, called me afterwards, said he’d cried tears of joy. Now, here’s a man whose first wife grew up in the Klan.” He raised his eyebrows and ignored the duct welling up. It threatened to overflow as he looked from Ledford to Mack and back again. “You show me a body who says things aren’t changin, I’ll show you a damned fool,” he said. “Some of us aren’t as backwards out here as they make us out to be.”