The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  Fury grimaced and clutched at his stomach. “Where’s the restroom?” he managed.

  Mack pointed to the back. Fury hopped down from the table and ran. When Ledford kicked open the door two minutes later, Fury was sitting on the floor with his belt around his biceps, a needle stuck in the crook of his arm. He smiled with his eyes closed.

  STAPLES WAS BEDRIDDEN, didn’t have much breath left to draw. But he liked to be kept abreast of developments. Rachel, Mary, and Lizzie tended to him most, alternating blocks of hours, watching him sleep and wheeze and waste away.

  On a Monday afternoon, it was Lizzie’s shift. She pressed a cold washcloth to his forehead and said, “So, Ledford explained to the young man that dope isn’t allowed out here. He and Mack searched the car, the duffel inside it, the clothes. They flushed what they found and stomped on his needle plungers.”

  Staples nodded. “Good,” he managed. “Good.”

  Lizzie looked out the window. A cold front was coming in. The tree limbs swayed. “I mean, can you imagine? That young man showin up with drugs, after they hauled Herchel outta here?” She shook her head. “They’ve got him locked up in Willy and Orb’s room. Keepin a watch on him, lettin him sweat out the demons.”

  Staples’ chest rose and fell slow. “What’s happening with the case?” he asked.

  “Nothin,” Lizzie said. “Your brother has done a fine job. Harold is learning from him every day.” Wind whistled through the doorjamb. She turned to him. “Bob thinks that warrant was bogus. He thinks the raid, Herchel’s arrest, all of it will be thrown out just like they threw out Stretch’s.” Harold had subpoenaed police department shift logs and proved that Shorty Maynard was not approved for ride-alongs, much less baton swinging. Stretch was cleared of all charges.

  “Good,” Staples said. “Law.” He believed in it.

  He closed his eyes.

  Lizzie felt the washcloth. It was no longer cold. She stood and ran water in the sink. Looked out the window again.

  Up the Cut, inside Willy and Orb’s room, Fury had awakened. He was naked, a film of dried sweat on his skin. He was alone in the room.

  The door was locked. He tried the window. It gave. He’d waited long enough.

  Dimple and Wimpy were the first to spot him. Fury leaped from the window to the porch roof, then rolled off and hit the ground hard. He got to his feet and ran past the dog kennel at a speed none knew he possessed. He wore no clothes, his parts exposed and jostling for all to see. Dimple gathered his reins and turned Silver to the west. “That boy’s naked as a jaybird,” he said.

  He made a clucking sound and took off across the footbridge, Wimpy in tow on Boo.

  They got to him at woods’ edge. Dimple rode close and kicked Fury to the ground. He got up and they circled him. Wherever he turned, they blocked his route. “Give it up,” Wimpy told him.

  After a while, he did.

  That night, the worst came. When they’d secured Fury on the bed again, a fever gripped him. The Ledfords watched him through the night, twitch-fits grabbing hold and cold sweats coming every half hour. Rachel melted six ice cubes on his head and neck alone. Mary cinched more in a dishrag and pressed it to his belly. Willy and Orb watched from the open doorway to their bedroom. Fury was red-streaked, diagonal. Like war paint, Orb thought. Zebra stripes the color of scabs.

  Down the hall, Ledford slept hard. He’d been up two straight nights with Fury. Had felt it was his duty. “He’s my godson after all,” he’d told Rachel.

  Now, while the rest of the family tended, Ledford got locked inside a nightmare. Fury’s talk of gook ears and land mines had brought it on. Never had Guadalcanal visited him like this. He could smell it, and he could feel it on his skin. Effluvium, rotten fish, mildew. “Atabrine! Atabrine!” someone shouted incessantly. Then there was McDonough, who was dressed in civilian attire. White shirt, collar buttoned tight, the veins in his neck swollen and pulsing. “I can’t breathe,” McDonough said. “Put a hole in me.” Then he laughed and his face turned dark and he said, “Have you kneeled at the feet of the Lord? Have you called on him since they nailed him up there?” He pointed and Ledford turned to look. There was nothing but a hillside of mud, a hundred or more people crouched on its face. “Asses and elbows,” McDonough said. It was all you could see—bent backs, bottoms of feet. The people wobbled and twitched. They were digging holes in the ground.

  Ledford asked what they were digging for and got no answer. He turned back to McDonough, who said, “Dig for ticks.” Then, just as it had on the banks of the Matanikau River, McDonough’s face exploded.

  Ledford screamed and sat up in bed.

  Down the hall, Fury sat up in the same instant. His eyes were shut and he mumbled something about rain. Rachel pressed him back to the bed. His skin was hot to the touch, his voice hoarse and dry. “Shhhhhh, shhhhh,” Rachel said.

  Tears welled in Mary’s eyes. She walked to the hall and sat against the wall. The ceiling fixture hummed above her. There were air bubbles behind the wallpaper.

  Willy and Orb went to the kitchen and came back with a pillowcase full of marbles. An hour prior, they’d drenched it in tap water, filled it with old marbles and stuck it in the icebox. Orb had come up with the idea. Now it crackled and unstuck as they rolled it onto Fury’s chest, frozen glass spreading like chain mail. Fury wheezed.

  Ledford stepped into the room. There was hatred in his eyes. He stepped to the bedside and leaned in close on Fury. He studied the young man’s face. Sniffed him. He took a wad of Fury’s beard in his fingers and began to sift through. It took only a minute before he found it on the chin, swollen to the size of a grape, its head burrowed deep. “Get me my tweezers from the hall closet,” Ledford said.

  When he yanked the tick, blood burst and dotted Ledford’s fingers. It dripped from the ends of Fury’s beard and gathered at his collarbone.

  Ledford set the tick down in an oversized yellow-glass ashtray on the nightstand. Fury grit his teeth and his fever surged again.

  Ledford said, “Willy, go to the Bonecutters. Tell them how it’s gotten.”

  Willy ran hard. His sneakers pounded cold ground and the thump of his heart reminded him of training days. A board on the footbridge cracked under his weight.

  Something caught his eye at the edge of Herchel’s garden. There was a glint in the moonlight, and Willy stopped dead to eyeball it. Ground-cover rustled, and someone ran for the woods. For a moment, Willy thought about running after them, but Fury was burning alive, and he’d have to let it go.

  Dimple said he’d ride the ground’s perimeter. Wimpy mounted Boo bareback and Willy swung on behind him.

  When they got there, Wimpy dismounted and walked quick to the backyard. At the dogwood tree, he took out a Buck knife and a tin cup. Scraped at the bark until he had enough.

  In the kitchen, he boiled water and infused the dogwood scrapings. He followed Willy to the bedroom, the tea balanced gingerly in a soup bowl.

  They all watched as Fury choked and gasped on the steaming concoction, Wimpy forcing it on him. It seemed that more spilled down his jaw than got inside, but Wimpy assured them it would do. Mary turned away. She wouldn’t watch a man drown in a scald of bitter water.

  When he’d finished with the tea, Wimpy stood. He took both of Fury’s hands in his own. “My grandmother was a fever doctor,” he said. “I seen her do this more than once.” He looked at each of them. “If you don’t like it, leave.” Wimpy closed his eyes and squeezed Fury’s hands until the knucklebones knocked together. He seemed to shudder just as his patient did.

  Willy stood in the open doorway, Rachel and Mary just inside. Orb moved closer to watch. He held his daddy’s hand.

  Wimpy tucked his chin to his chest. He made a grunting sound. Then, looking up at the ceiling, he said, “There came a angel from the east bringing fire and frost. Go in, frost. Go out, fire.” His voice grew louder. “In frost, out fire.” It seemed to reverberate off the windows and walls. “Go in, frost. Go out, fire.”r />
  They watched as the crimson stripes disappeared. The color of Fury’s face went from red to almost pale. His wheezing seemed to settle and the tendons in his neck relaxed.

  “Good Lord,” Rachel said.

  Mary had her hands to her face. For a moment, she thought Wimpy had killed the young man.

  “How did you do that?” Orb asked. He was squeezing Ledford’s hand so hard his fingertips went numb.

  Wimpy did not answer. “Leave him be now,” he said. “He’s got to sleep for a day or more.” He did not tell them that the fever was the hottest he’d encountered, nor did he tell them of his fear that when Fury awoke, he’d not be the same man. Wimpy looked at the dead tick in the yellow ashtray. “You burn that,” he said. “I don’t care how dead it is. You burn it.”

  The insects of Marrowbone were coming after them now. Wimpy was certain of it. Out of the ground and the trees they came, marking the land and its people with their signs.

  APRIL 1968

  THE WALRUS-TUSK KNITTING NEEDLES had been snapped in two. Like dry branch kindling, they’d broken and splintered so as never to be repaired. Rachel bent to the ground and thumbed the sharp edges. She found them this way, out of the bag where she’d left them when the kitchen phone rang. In pieces on the back lawn next to her rocking chair. She’d taken to sitting out back instead of out front. She’d just as soon watch the trees and birds as the people, whose numbers had shrunk considerably. Now her tools had been sabotaged, her grandmother’s walrus needles rendered useless by an unknown entity. She looked into the woods. Listened. There was nothing but the usual, katydids and crickets, an ebb and flow, a melodious din.

  It was April Fool’s Day. The air smelled of a skunk.

  Rachel wondered if the ruined knitting needles were someone’s idea of a joke.

  “Rachel?” Wimpy had come up behind her.

  “Good Lord,” she said. Her hairs stood on end, her heart electrified. He laughed at how she’d jumped. “Almost came out of your shoes, didn’t you?” he said.

  Rachel smiled at Wimpy. Noticed something wrong in his eyes. “I brung you somethin,” he said. He handed her a mess of newspaper tied with twine. It was the funny pages, and Wimpy had put something inside. Paper flared at the top like a hard candy wrapper.

  “Well thank you Wimpy,” she said. “Should I open it now?”

  “If you want to.”

  She tore the paper with her fingernails. Inside was a tiny, drawstrung pouch fashioned from hide and sinew. She emptied its contents into her open palm.

  It was the redbird’s feet.

  Wimpy had lacquered them and attached hooks made from thin wire. “They’re earrings,” he said. “I don’t know if that gauge is too big, but…”

  Rachel was horrified. She stared at the missing toe, fought the urge to drop the feet on the ground. “I’m not sure what to say. Did you kill him Wimpy?”

  “No. That’s what I come to talk to you about. You remember that redbird?”

  “Yes. I could never forget it.”

  “Well, he never come to visit me this year. And then, last week, I found those.”

  “Earrings?”

  “No, his feet. Just perched on a gatepost, pretty as you please, no body in sight. No feathers, nothin.” Wimpy still could not rectify that picture in his mind. He’d tried to shake it loose, but it had begun to visit his dreams.

  “What happened to his body?”

  “Don’t know. Best we can figure, something ate it.”

  Rachel didn’t know what to think, but she was newly glad about the earrings. Found it thoughtful of Wimpy to give them to her.

  “I’ve spoken to you on my talks with the bird,” Wimpy said. He motioned to the dogwood tree. “I’d like to lean,” he said.

  “Do you want a chair?” For the first time, she noticed he was an old man.

  “No, I’d like to lean.” They walked to the tree and Wimpy put his back against its trunk. “I believe,” he said, “that the bird come to warn us, but something got him fore he could.” His eyelids were heavy. “I believe it’s them cicadas that got him.”

  Rachel wondered if his mind was fading. “What was he coming to warn us about?” she asked.

  “That’s what I can’t figure. But you’ll see it if you look hard enough. It’s in all of them.” He swept his hand in the air as if to mark something.

  “All of them?”

  “Birds, bugs, snakes. It’s in the way they’re comin out of their nests and holes and runnin scared. Zigzag, like something has shook them.”

  For a moment, it seemed to Rachel that Wimpy might cry. He’d sunken so far into the tree that he almost seemed a part of it. His chin was to his chest.

  He watched a black oil beetle crawl across his boot top. It stopped and looked up at him. It roared.

  AN HOUR AFTER the news report that Martin Luther King had died, Don Staples drew the last of his shallow breaths.

  Ledford was with him when he went, holding the old man’s hand in his own. He did not cry. Instead, he remembered the words Staples had spoken to him again and again in his last months. “When I go,” he’d said, “I want you to open my desk drawer. In it you’ll find my papers. You do what’s written.”

  Ledford let go the cold hand and stepped to the little oak desk next to the broken television. He opened the middle drawer. A thick stack of lined yellow paper had been folded and tied in twine. For Ledford was scrawled across the front.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and split the twine with his daddy’s dogleg jackknife. He would read it with Staples next to him. It would only take a moment to know that the man’s words were sage and true. He’d written them in black ink, slow and neat.

  Most men are fools. They unknowingly ruin their sons, who get a good start in life from the nurturing of their mothers, women, who are not fools. Why do men ruin their sons? Because their fathers ruined them. Why did their fathers ruin them? Because once upon a time a foolish man tried to claim a square of dirt as his own, and another man took issue. We accepted this as how things worked. The wool was pulled over our eyes, and we’ve yet to tear it away. Instead, we went on claiming those squares of dirt, stealing oxen and sheep, coveting our neighbors’ houses. And the squares of dirt got bigger and bigger, heartily planted with crops or laid with factories by the hands of the black slave and the white poor. We went on killing over those claims and crops and factories, and the poor were tricked into killing one another, and whenever one of us called for cessation, he was labeled less of a man. But this is a lie. The great lie, as I once explained it to you, Ledford. I put my hand to you and told you what a real man is, what a real man does. His heart must be cleansed of the lie of violence, and his hand must not wield war. A man like you has the chance to use heart and hand for peace, for helping those that need it most. You are on this path. Do not step away from it, even as the world falls apart around you, as it surely will in the days to come. There will be fire. There will be riot in the streets. You must not let it ruin you or what you have begun to build. You must keep peace in your heart and hand.

  TWENTY-FIVE WERE PRESENT at the Bonecutter burying ground to watch Don Staples lowered into a hole. Jerry had built his coffin from scrap wood. The women cried.

  The wind blew through the Cut and the people huddled together. Harold stood before them in a black suit and tie. There was a lump in his throat. He held a sheet of yellow paper in his hand. It trembled. Staples had wanted Harold to give his eulogy, and so it was done.

  He looked down at the words and read. “Don Staples left behind a son.” Harold looked at the people and continued. “A man who lives and works in California. Beyond these facts, he knew nothing of the grown child he once abandoned. He asks that all of you look to your children today. Hold them and teach them the laws of Moses and the model of Jesus, who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. Remember the words of the Book of Malachi—‘and the Lord will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their f
athers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.’”

  Harold folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket.

  Jerry, Stretch, Willy, and Chester pulled the ropes taut and scooted the coffin above the hole. They let lengths of rope out, inches at a time, sliding across their work gloves with a whirring sound, and the box sank in increments to its designation.

  Mary shivered, her arms crossed in front. She’d worn a green dress, refusing black. Staples had liked her in green.

  Harold looked at her, then back at the hole in the ground. He closed his eyes and listened to the thump of dirt on wood. Shovelfuls. Loud at first, then muted.

  Mary was the first to walk away. Her mother followed, calling her name. Their heels sunk with each step into a ground made soft by spring rain. Mary wiped at her eyes and ignored her mother’s call.

  It was quiet inside the community center. Mrs. Wells had come out to pay her respects. She poured Dixie cups of her Rum-Tum-Goody Punch. Rachel had made ham salad on saltines, Staples’ favorite. Fury handed out plates and cups, nodding graciously. He wore one of Ledford’s old suits. He’d gained fifteen pounds. Trimmed his beard and put his hair in a ponytail. As Wimpy had predicted, Fury was a changed man after the fever broke, but the change was for the better.

  The television was on. The newsman said 300,000 were in attendance at the funeral of Martin Luther King. Orb and Chester sat on the floor and watched as Mahalia Jackson sang a few lines of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Then the newsman said riots were raging in the nation’s capital. They were raging too in Baltimore, and in Louisville. In Kansas City and Chicago. Orb’s eyes scarcely blinked. He watched buildings smolder, their windows blacked and jagged. Soldiers stood on street corners, their rifles slung over their shoulders.

  Fifteen remained at Marrowbone full time. The rest had left.

  The Corps of Engineers had posted a date on which everyone had to be out. That date was January 2nd, 1969.