by Glenn Taylor
It was two weeks prior that Shorty had gotten the anonymous letter. Your daughter is dating a Marrowbone boy behind your back, it read. Nothing more. Shorty suspected the strange Russian woman had penned it, and he suspected the boy she referred to was Willy Ledford. He wanted to see for himself.
Shorty had steered clear of Marrowbone ever since Ledford’s shoeless visit to his house. But Charlie and Noah Ball had lately been getting in his ear. They said he ought to seize full ownership of the Maynard Coal and Coke tract, to strong-arm old man Paul if he had to. Charlie was in the business of land development, dam or no dam, and he was promising money to Shorty. He told Shorty to bust the Marrowbone people on something, to seize their land, to use the old bogus property deed he kept in a safe deposit box in town. “Where there’s land, there’s money,” Charlie had said.
Shorty had friends in the state police. He knew a county magistrate who issued warrants on next to nothing. He could smell the office of sheriff. He could smell all that money.
There was a rustle in the trees down the hill. He looked, then put his eyes back in the binoculars. It took him a minute to relocate Josephine. What he saw made his throat seize. He rolled the focus wheel again to be sure. A black boy had stepped from the gym. He wore nothing but a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts, and Josephine walked straight to him where he stood on the lawn. She put her head to his chest. He wrapped his arm around her.
That was all it took. In Shorty’s mind, from that moment forward, it wasn’t Willy Ledford that Josephine was dating behind his back. It was Stretch Hayes.
He let the binoculars fall to his chest. He wondered if he ought to stick his finger down his throat to rid himself of this sickness. Then he wondered if he ought to come right down the mountain and shoot Stretch Hayes in the face.
It was the second idea that took.
Wimpy watched him unsling his rifle and start down the hill. “He’s got his gun out,” he told Dimple. “He’s on the move.”
They followed, their boot soles quiet against the ground.
Fifty yards down, Shorty found the source of the rustling sound. High up the trunk of a giant black locust tree, a family of black bears played. Shorty counted four young cubs. They circled each other, playing peek-a-boo around the thick tree’s middle. Behind some leaves, on a sturdy limb, their mother sprawled, tired in the shade. Her balance was magnificent. Shorty reckoned she must have weighed four hundred pounds.
A sow that size would make a prize kill.
He raised his rifle.
Up the ridge, Dimple and Wimpy had stopped moving when Shorty did. “What’s he looking at now?” Dimple asked.
It took ten seconds for Wimpy to locate the bears in his own eyepiece. By that time, Shorty had raised his weapon. “Oh hell,” Wimpy said. He dropped the binoculars to the ground and unslung his Winchester. As best he could through the tree cover, he centered the ivory bead on Shorty Maynard’s head.
“Hold on a minute,” Dimple whispered.
In Wimpy’s mind was a singular question. Could he rightfully kill a man over that man’s aim to kill a bear? It took only a second to know. If that bear was a mother of four, the answer was yes. Wimpy put his finger on the trigger.
“Hold on,” Dimple said. He’d picked up the binoculars and surmised the situation. “He lowered his gun.”
It was true. At the moment Shorty Maynard was about to squeeze his trigger, just before the moment Wimpy would have squeezed his, something had happened. The big sow had moaned and scratched at her eye with a paw. The way she sounded, the way she moved, somehow matronly and not unlike his own mother—it unsettled Shorty, and then it settled him back again. For a moment, his anger went missing. The smallest cub made its way to the sow. Shorty couldn’t fire. He didn’t have it in him.
He slung the rifle back over his shoulder and hiked up the ridge, where he’d crest and go down the other side, the picture in his mind playing over and over again—Stretch Hayes wrapped around his only daughter. He took out a half-pint of Old Grand-Dad and drank, fast.
Coming down the other side, Dimple and Wimpy didn’t speak. They’d decided to leave the bears be, though both had wanted a closer look.
Wimpy was on edge. Every chipmunk scurry pricked his neck hairs. Every birdsong rang sinister. They were halfway down when he said, “I believe I ought to have kilt Shorty Maynard just then.”
Dimple regarded the hillside creek. Its bed was the color of rust. “That ain’t the smartest thing you’ve said.”
“Well,” Wimpy answered. “Might’ve saved the world some trouble, if I had kilt him.”
“Might’ve,” Dimple said.
ORB WAS THE first to spot one. He was following the dogs as they sniffed the edges of the newly planted field. Tug wandered to the base of a nearby maple tree and started snouting something he’d found there.
The dog sneezed and shook his head. When Orb walked over to see what it was, he noticed that the tree trunk was covered in what looked like wood roaches. But these were a lighter brown, and they weren’t moving, except for one. He leaned in close. They were empty shells, split husks of some creature he’d never encountered. High up, one pulled itself from its shell and emerged a sickly pale color. It was red-eyed and cripple-winged.
Orb craned his neck. Up the trunk there were more, but these weren’t pale in color. They were black with golden wings. Their eyes were red as blood. Up higher, they were everywhere.
Orb had read Exodus. He’d listened to Staples preach on Moses stretching his hand over Egypt. To him, these bugs meant hell was about to break loose.
He ran and whistled for the dogs to follow.
Dimple was down the hill, working the foot pedal on a grindstone. He took swallows from a tin cup and spat water in a line to the sandstone. He touched the blade of his axe there and ground a new bevel. When Orb came running his direction, dogs trailing, Dimple laid off the pedal.
He thumbed the axe bevel and chunked it into the top of a fencepost he was mending. He regarded the boy, his strange hollering. When he got within ten yards, Dimple could make out what he said.
“Locust plague! Locust plague!”
Dimple put in a wad of tobacco. “Slow er down,” he said. The boy’s voice was cracking wild, his long legs clumsy as a foal.
The dogs were in a strange state. They preferred a calm Orb to an excited one. They whipped their heads and nipped at one another. Tug hadn’t stopped sneezing.
Wimpy was further down the hill, helping Mack split telephone wires. He heard Orb and ran up to him, shirtless. His chest hair had gone white. “You say you seen a locust swarm?” he asked.
“They invaded a tree.” Orb was out of breath.
“Show me,” Wimpy answered.
Dimple shook his head.
When they got there, Wimpy took his time examining the shells. He crouched and worked his way from the bottom up. He crushed an empty husk in his fingers and blew it to the wind. On his tiptoes, he reached for a live one and cupped it. It banged around inside his hand and called a fast chirp, low and steady.
“It’ll bite you,” Orb said.
“These ain’t locusts. These is cicadas.” Wimpy smiled as he opened his palm and the cicada walked slow to his fingertip. “Can’t hurt a thing,” he said.
“Where did they come from?” Orb had his hand to his brow. He searched the sky above.
“Wrong way,” Wimpy said. He pointed to the ground. “They come up through them holes. Happens ever seventeen years.”
Orb dropped to his knees and began sticking his finger in the holes he found. They were quarter-sized, some a little bigger. Mounds of dirt encircled their dark openings.
Above, more cicadas began to call. “This is only the beginning,” Wimpy said. “Couple weeks, you won’t be able to spit without hittin one.”
Orb wore an expression of marvel. He had found something besides marbles to pass the time.
He took off his shirt and had Wimpy hoist him to his shoulders. There, he scr
aped as many cicadas as he could reach into the shirt, cinched it, and headed for home. “I’ve got to make a box,” he said.
He passed Dimple on the way. He was sitting on a big flat rock, an open canteen in his hand. “Too old to play with bugs, Orb,” Dimple said.
JULY 1967
CHESTER WAS OUT AT the Ringer circle again. He’d had enough of Orb’s library book on cicadas. It had to be the most boring book ever printed, The Periodical Cicada. Orb hardly got his marbles out of the bag since he’d borrowed it. He spent most days inside the four-man tent he’d pitched on the lawn. Zippered up inside, reading his book, a hundred or more cicadas humming and circling him. They hung from the tent ceiling and absorbed the sun’s heat. They mated. They spoke to Orb, and he read aloud to them, words like singing apparatus and enlarged genital hooks.
He’d named his favorite, the biggest among them. Crawly Slowpoke Junior he called the cicada with a bent wing.
Chester toed the line and shot his taw. His game was solid. A boy from Beech Creek shook his head and knew he’d lose.
The VFW Marble Tournament was coming up in a week, and this was Chester’s last year of eligibility. Orb’s too. Neither had ever entered the tournament. Chester didn’t want to be the one to integrate it, and Orb had always said he just didn’t want to. Everybody had known for years that he could win easy and go to Nationals. Maybe win there too. But now his game was rusty on account of the cicadas, and he’d turned fourteen. By next year’s tournament, he’d be too old to compete.
Chester’s opponent watched his stranded shooter gleaming in the sun. He wasn’t allowed inside the circle as long as Chester kept up his streak. He’d been sticking kids for a week, running the table.
He shot the last of the marbles out of the circle, lined up the other boy’s taw, and knocked it clear to the grass.
“You’re damn near as good as Orb,” the boy said. He was barefoot and shirtless. Folks said he had bedbugs. He gathered his marbles, bagged them, and offered the bag to Chester.
Chester shook his head. “We ain’t playing keepsies,” he said.
The boy smiled. “You ever play against Ham Maynard?”
Nobody called him Hambone anymore. Just Ham. He was nose tackle on the Junior High football team. He’d won the VFW Marble Tournament three years straight. “No,” Chester said.
“He’s the best I’ve seen.” The boy picked his nose and flicked boogers at the Ringer circle. “He won fourteen dollars at Shuffie’s pool hall last week.”
Chester looked at the smoke from the factory stack. It was tinted red by the rays of the fading sun, thick but see-through.
“You hear about Ham’s sister Josephine?”
Chester didn’t answer. He bent to tie his sneaker lace.
The boy went on. “She got both her eyes blacked. Swole shut. Everybody says it was her daddy that done it.”
“The police man?” Chester said. The cicada chorus heightened. The boys had to shout to be heard.
“Mean son of a bitch,” the boy said. He tossed his marble bag in the air and caught it behind his back.
Chester said, “See you later,” and walked for Orb’s tent.
Over at the chapel, Harold and Ledford dusted the pews and swept the floor. Paul Maynard tended to Staples. He was in bed with a fever, and they didn’t want him getting up. They’d unplugged his television the night before. Riots raged in the streets of Newark, and Staples stared at the screen for hours, turning the knob and sweating through his nightshirt, muttering about the end of days.
He slept, and Paul Maynard sat in a ladderback chair reading the paper.
At four, on break from the furnace, Stretch Hayes brought by a Thermos of onion soup. He handed it to Paul. “I didn’t feel like soup today,” he said. Stretch’s mother had always claimed onions would sweat out a fever. She’d fed it to him as a boy, and now he made it for her each night, hoping to bring her back from where she’d gone. Deathbed, just like Staples.
Paul nodded a thank you. “Is he going to pull through?” Stretch asked. Behind him, the dogs ran free, snapping at the air, their teeth clacking a trail behind the wings of brave cicadas.
“Oh yes,” Paul said. He watched relief on the young man’s face.
“Don’t you worry Son,” he told him.
Harold finished sweeping and walked the length of the aisle. The lectern was chip-edged and wobbly. It was the same one he’d stood behind as a boy. Now he was back, thoroughly schooled, but more confused than he’d ever been on the ways of God and man. He stood at the podium and watched Ledford run a rag across faded pew seats. He was on his knees, wincing at the pain in his bad leg.
Harold wobbled the lectern and marveled at how small the chapel looked from up front. It had seemed so big as a boy. His parameters had changed. Inside a month, he’d been inside both the County Circuit Court and the State Supreme Court. He’d listened to the oaths bounce off the wide walls and vaulted ceilings. He’d been admitted to the practice of law.
In September, he’d be a general practitioner in the cramped Huntington office of Bob Staples.
Harold knew he’d be giving the sermon on Sunday, and he straightened his posture like he would when the seats were filled. Staples’ cough echoed through the wall behind him. It was a weak sound from an old man, the only one left at Marrowbone who truly believed in the words of peace that parted his lips. Harold no longer believed in what folks called passive resistance, though he still championed its virtues in public.
He watched Ledford stand and wince and limp to the door. He imagined the Ledford he’d seen at Smalley’s four years back, the muscles in his forearms popping as he pressed the cattle prod to the throat of a sinister man.
Behind him, Staples coughed some more. It mingled with the sound of the dogs barking outside, and the cicada calls crested again, and Harold couldn’t imagine a single thing of use to tell those who would soon come to worship with him.
SEPTEMBER 1967
STRETCH HAYES TIPPED A one-hundred-pound bucket of cullet into the hole. It roared and kicked a cloud of dust. He’d forgotten to put on his safety glasses.
Ledford watched from the corner, where he cleaned a handmade taw. He checked his watch. Forty minutes since the last load. Stretch was running slow.
Ledford walked over and said, “Why don’t you knock off early this evenin.”
“Thanks,” Stretch said. His eyes were bloodshot from crying, and his hands were shaky. It was only the day before that he’d buried his mother. It had been four days since she’d suffered an aneurysm and died before Stretch could get to the hospital.
Ledford watched him go. Then he turned and eyeballed the furnace. It didn’t take long to know it was too hot. There was no need to add striking colors. Every marble in this batch would have its color burnt out.
Ledford re-angled the fans and adjusted the line knob. He inspected the marbles coming off the rollers. They were dull. Some had cold rolls.
He’d let the factory get away from him.
He couldn’t even recall why he’d built it in the first place. It seemed secondary now, a day job. An office.
When he’d gotten the temperature right, Ledford sat in a folding chair and stared inside the belly of the furnace. His feet propped on a worktable, he reclined and let the heat from the hole radiate through the soles of his shoes. He unfocused his eyes like he had as a youngster, then closed them and watched the pictures dance. He imagined Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stepping into Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace and then stepping back out unscorched. Staples had once told their story so convincingly, but Ledford never truly believed such stories. They were made up to see folks through hard times.
The room around him hummed, fans and fire. On the workbench was a table lamp carved from driftwood. Wimpy had made it with his paring knife. It formed the face and long beard of a mountain man. When he’d accepted it as a gift, Ledford had asked, “Is it John Brown?”
“Hell no,” Wimpy had answered. “That’s big Ben
Chicopee.”
On the pegboard behind the lamp were framed pictures of Rachel and Mary and Willy and Orb. Harold too. Baby pictures and younger years. Everybody was smiling. The frames that held them were lined with dust, and the braided wire they hung on was frayed. Ledford had looked at these photographs every day for thirteen years, and each time he did, he remembered the empty walls of his Mann Glass office. Somehow, both places smelled the same.
He stood and stepped to the furnace hole. He held his hand so close that the hairs on his fingers curled, then ceased to be.
A cicada walked along the brick face of the furnace. Ledford wondered why it didn’t ignite and turn to ash. He wondered how it could still be alive, all the others having perished two months back, their life spans predetermined, predictable.
The cicada lighted on the chairback and went still. Ledford watched it watching him. There were black pinpoints in the middle of its red eyes. The gold legs matched the wings, tucked into a pyramid against the cicada’s back. One wing was bent, and it was the biggest cicada Ledford had ever seen. He had an idea.
It crawled onto his finger and he carried it to the workbench. There, it settled onto the hardwood surface. Ledford grabbed a jar full of brad nails and picked one out. It wasn’t much wider than a needle. He stuck it through the back of the cicada and tapped the top with a cross-peen hammer. It stayed put, working its tiny legs to gain ground that was no longer there. The bug was nailed down solid.
Ledford went to get his clay and boxwood tools. He would carve its likeness.
If it was to fit inside a playing marble, his cicada figure could be no larger than one half inch. He knew that most thought sulphides were useless as shooters, that the air bubbles around the figures inside caused cracking. But Ledford had mastered the art of making marbles by hand, and if he could pull this one off, Orb would have a taw that truly suited him, one that would bring him back to Ringer.