She didn’t know what to say. “I thought maybe you could get film of the whole place before it winds up underwater,” Ledford said. “Moving pictures of Marrowbone.”
Mary nodded.
In the corner, Herb Wells ran a bow across his fiddle. Jerry tuned the big Stella twelve-string, and Herchel plucked the clothesline on his gas-tank bass.
“Good people of Marrowbone!” Mack hollered. “The house band would like me to apologize in advance. They don’t know but one song, and it ain’t a Christmas tune.”
Mrs. Wells sat in a folding chair and ate an iced cookie. She watched her boys and smiled. Willy walked over and asked if she needed a refill on punch. She looked him in the face and said, “You got the same eyes now you did as a three-year-old child.”
“I do?”
“Yes indeed.” She nodded her head and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Matter of fact, I bet you still pee on a fire to put it out, don’t you?”
“Yes ma’am,” Willy said. He laughed. It felt good. He hadn’t done it in days, not since the phone call from Fury in Chicago. Erm had been found in his old bookie office, on the floor next to Loaf the associate. Their necks were cut, earlobe to earlobe. Willy told Fury to come back to West Virginia, that they were building a new place. Fury said he couldn’t. It was in his every syllable—he was shooting heroin again.
The three-piece started in on “Oil It Up and Go,” and folks tapped their feet in time with the bass. Even Dimple and Wimpy shuffled their shoes a little. They stood by the door with their arms crossed. Stretch stood next to them and did the same.
The old Ringer circle was gathering dust. Inside it, Harold danced with his mother. He dipped her, and then, halfway through the song, he hugged her and walked away toward the tree.
Mary watched him come, and when he asked if she cared to dance, she answered, “I’d be delighted.” They stepped to the circle and she lay her head against his chest and together they swayed, slow, though the song was fast.
When it was quiet again, the door opened, and Bob Staples came in carrying a store-bought fruitcake. “What are you people doing?” he called. “Turn on the damned television.”
Jerry pulled the knob and sat on the floor. Orb sat down next to him. The two of them often sat together. The mutes of Marrowbone. Jerry wished the boy could remember the signs he’d once taught him, but it wasn’t to be.
On the screen was a gray-white curve of light. A voice spoke the words, “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water.”
Dimple and Wimpy walked over from the door. They’d never looked at a television before. “What is that?” Wimpy asked.
Bob Staples said, “It’s the surface of the moon.”
Wimpy shook his head to be sure he wasn’t dreaming. “Good Lord in heaven,” he whispered.
The remaining people of Marrowbone gathered in front of the television and stared at the horizon of the moon. Ledford knew for certain that he would leave the RCA behind. He would never turn on a television again. The broadcast of the Apollo 8 astronauts would be the last thing he ever watched.
They read from Genesis as they orbited. “Merry Christmas,” one of them said. “God bless all of you. All of you on the good earth.”
JANUARY 1969
IT WAS NEW YEAR’S Day. In twenty-four hours’ time, the Corps of Engineers would own the land. Mary walked the grounds of Marrowbone, her new camera in hand. She stood in front of the burnt-down factory, a place they’d all avoided since July. She filmed the circle of glass on the dirt. Snow fell.
Beside her, Ledford knelt and tapped his hooks on the thick glass. “Go get your ice skates on and have at it,” he said.
Mary smiled. She filmed her daddy. He looked up at her, said, “Shut it off.”
Across the Cut, the Bonecutter brothers rode Silver and Boo at woods’ edge. Saddlebags hung full over the horses’ haunches.
“Put your camera on those two,” Ledford said. “That’s the last you’ll ever see of em.”
The brothers had said their goodbyes the night before. They would not elaborate on their plans, only said they were leaving Marrowbone for good. Riding to the hills. Living off the land and moving on when the time came. “It’s how we were meant to live,” Wimpy had told Ledford. “It’s what the bugs and critters have been tellin us, what my mother always said. This Cut ain’t meant for brogans to tread.”
Mary filmed them as their horses cut a path through the empty trees. Up the mountain they went. Ledford watched them just as Mary did, until they’d disappeared. He was still bent to the ground. Its clay was the color of rust. There was a hole by his boot the size of a half-dollar. He stuck his hooks inside, imagined the coming flood, the cicada holes filling up and channeling someplace hot and deep. He imagined the underground plumbing filling with water until the pipes exploded. The coffins too.
Ledford stood and surveyed the place.
Chickens pecked dirt, near and far. Harold had turned them loose Christmas morning.
The vegetable garden was gray and fallow. Cat droppings lined the rows. A hundred or more slugs hid in root holes.
Orb ran past the old dog pen and into a patch of dry stickweeds. Ledford watched the boy go, the shoulder-high weeds bending before him and waking like water behind.
Ledford knew things then that he never had before. What he’d thought was a boyhood memory had turned out to be a vision. It wasn’t him who’d run through weeds or fished in a rowboat with his daddy. It was Orb. All along, it was his own boy.
He thought of Staples’ words on the foolish ways of man.
Ledford was no fool.
He had come to know a great many things in his short time. He’d killed boys halfway across the world, and then he’d come home to raise his own. He’d done the best he could.
Ledford knew that Wimpy had been right. Marrowbone Cut was not meant for people, except maybe the Indians, and they were killed off in another life. Men would always set their compass on killing. They’d kill over the color of skin. They’d kill over land, and in time, they’d make the land into water. Then they’d stock the water with fish so they could catch and kill those too. And Ledford would sit with that. He’d sit in a rowboat with his littlest boy, who was now the size of a man, and who could not speak a sound. Together, oars angled at the sky, they’d fish. An open boat on the trickle. A spot of peace in the world.
Acknowledgments
In this book, I wrote of many things that I can never truly know or understand. In making the attempt, I consulted the books of several authors who did in fact know and understand, and I cannot thank them enough. The same goes for the expertise of a couple kind souls who put up with my phone calls full of questions.
I am not a glass man, and so I appreciated the wealth of knowledge in Calling to Memory…The History of the Owens-Illinois Huntington, WV Plant #2 by the KYOWVA Genealogy and Historical Society. I also consulted the online source Batch, Blow, and Boys: The Glass Industry in the United States, 1820s–1900, particularly Batch recipe book of D. J. Crowley, ca. 1890s. In addition, for all of his help, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Jim King, a real marble man in Sistersville, West Virginia.
I have never been to war, and so I owe a debt of gratitude to The Story of World War II by Donald L. Miller, Guadalcanal by Richard B. Frank, Goodbye, Darkness by William P. Manchester, and Blood for Dignity by David P. Colley.
I was not yet born at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and so I would like to acknowledge At Canaan’s Edge by Taylor Branch, Selma 1965 by Charles E. Fager, The Library of America’s Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two, particularly “Letter from Selma” by Renata Adler, and Steven Kasher’s The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History. Also, Bruce A. Thompson’s master’s thesis, An Appeal for Racial Justice: The Civic Interest Progressives’ Confrontation with Huntington, West Virginia and Marshall University, 1963–1965 was of great help. I consulted the archives of the Charleston Daily Mail, the Charleston Gazette, and the Herald-
Dispatch as well (thanks to my friend Bob Brumfield for pointing me in the right direction on the Keith-Albee incident). And, for both his profound knowledge and lived experience of the time, I humbly thank C. Michael Gray, fellow Huntingtonian.
I offer my gratitude to Huey Perry, for his book They’ll Cut Off Your Project. It was the basis for so much herein, and it was immeasurably helpful and inspirational in writing about those folks who most choose to forget.
There are several other books that have, in various and odd ways, influenced me over the last couple of years, and without them, I could not have possessed the necessary wisdom for an endeavor such as this. They are, The Telltale Lilac Bush by Ruth Ann Musick (for “Hickory Nuts”), Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia by Anthony Cavender, Concise Guide to Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour, and Horseplayers by Ted McClelland.
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my consultation of The Periodical Cicada by Charles V. Riley and Handbook of Severe Disability by Walter C. Stolov and Michael R. Clowers.
To my marvelous agent, Terra Chalberg, I thank you. For so many things. To everyone at Ecco who worked on this book, I appreciate it. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge Ginny and Dan, who simply do things right. Dan, you’re the man, and I thank you.
To Dot Jackson, I say thank you, for everything, for being who you are.
I’d like to thank my family—all of them, by blood or by marriage, from kinfolks who are gone to those still here, from my sisters to my sons—and a special thanks to my parents, Maury and Carol. My wife, Margaret, is beyond thanks. She is, simply, the best.
About the Author
GLENN TAYLOR was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. His first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a Fall 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Taylor lives in Chicago with his wife and three sons.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
ALSO BY GLENN TAYLOR
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
Credits
Jacket design by Allison Saltzman
Jacket illustration courtesy of The New York Public Library
Map by Caroline Towson Morgan
Copyright
THE MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY. Copyright © 2010 by Glenn Taylor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199358-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
Glenn Taylor Page 35