Old Powder Man (11 page)

When Red was sitting in the car, he was like a bent straw, as long and thin from his hips up as from his hips out to his knees. He looked out at Son, into the dying daylight, which made his eyes water, and said, “Days are getting longer.” His old hands with brown spots as large as dimes trembled on the half-raised window. Son covered them with his own, verifying what the old man wanted to hear. “Spring's almost here,” Son said, and if it were that close, maybe the old man would see it.

About them was sundown, golden-orange; dusk was an instant away. “Shut-eye,” Son said, “you take this old man on home and don't let him get in no trouble, hear.”

Red's eyes watered, his lips trembled. “Shut-eye can't keep me from doing nothing I want to.”

“Oh, does this old man still think he's tough?” Son said.

“Yes suh, he still gives us a powerful lot of trouble,” Shut-eye said.

“Well, you get him home fore dark then,” Son said. “So long.”

As they drove away, the old man's voice fell back softly on the night, “We'll see you.”

Son had never taken a walk just to be walking but he did not want to go back into the house. It was as clouded with cigarette smoke as his head felt. He sat down on the front steps and suddenly dark came. The street lights came on as unobtrusively as if they had been on all the time, had become visible only with night. And he thought, Hell, he had some row to hoe.

When supper was ready, Lillian called and he came inside and she put the food on the table. But he went to the telephone and did not return for ten minutes. When they were eating, he said, “This damn food's cold.”

She said, “It's been on the table ten minutes. I thought you were coming right to supper.”

“I'll do the thinking around here,” he said. “You're not supposed to do any thinking. I had to call a man on the telephone. Now get this food on the stove and get it hot. Jesus Christ.” When they were eating again he said, “I don't want to eat any more warmed-up food, either.”

After supper, she said, “Can we go to the picture show?”

“I have to go out yonder to Mr. Ryder's and to the dynamite magazine,” he said. But he came back from the bedroom with his coat, into the kitchen where she was washing dishes, and said, “If you want to ride out yonder with me, we can go to the picture show afterward.”

He would not keep the man waiting though, he said, and Lillian had to come on, leaving the pans, her hands barely dried. In the car, she cried and said she couldn't stand to live with him anymore, the way he was.

He said, “Go to hell then.”

They continued in silence to Mr. Ryder's which was beyond the city limits where there were no street lights. Son left Lillian waiting in the dark for twenty minutes, with her feet cold. Finally he came out on the porch, the Ryders with him. Son took off his hat and shook Mrs. Ryder's hand. Mr. Ryder, pulling on his jacket just then, stopped and looked and then resumed. Mrs. Ryder, catching sight of Lillian's pale face peering out at them, came down to the car and said, “Lord have mercy. You must be cold. Mr. Wynn, why didn't you bring your wife inside. He didn't even tell us you was waiting.”

Some day, with easy grace, she would kill him, Lillian thought. The legs of Mr. Ryder's brand-new, as yet unwashed overalls swooshed together as he got in beside her, smelling of sweat and tobacco. Mrs. Ryder said, “You all come back to see us,” and Lillian, who had determined never again to shake the dry, rough hand of the woman who had come out in her old, felt bedroom slippers with one big toe cut out, said nothing. Son sped them to the highway and slowed only on the side road when they passed the Negro's cabin; inside, a man pulled back a torn lace curtain to watch them pass. They saw the mother and little boy at a table holding the cabin's only light, a coal oil lamp. A cow, disturbed by their noise, made a low soft sound into the night, then the only sound was rocks hitting beneath them, until they stopped and the headlights were on the blue-looking door. How funny, Lillian thought, to come up on a brick building out in the middle of nowhere. The men went inside and returned shortly with something that Son put on the shelf behind the seat. They stopped once again, short of the gate, and Mr. Ryder went into one of the smaller buildings and returned with something he put on the shelf too. They drove him home and Lillian waited expectantly for the lights and excitement of downtown to change her mood. At last she was standing happily on the pavement waiting for Son to lock the car. She smelled ribs being barbecued nearby and caramelized popcorn in a shop next to the movie. Music came from a radio somewhere and she felt like dancing. If only Son would take her dancing sometime, she thought: something pent-up might be gone. She saw his hand remove things from the car's shelf to the darkness of the seat. But at that moment, glancing across at Poppa's shuttered store, she remembered Cally's telephoning and told Son they had to go to dinner with her on Sunday.

It was not until he was buying tickets Lillian thought to say, “What were those things in the car?”

“Dynamite and some caps and fuse,” he said.

Her hands flew straight against her breasts. “Are you
crazy
?” she said.

People coming from the movie stared, and the ticket-seller pretended not to. “I'm not going home in that car,” she said.

“I don't want to get blowed up any more than you,” he said. “But Mr. Ryder says it's all right. He carries them together all the time.”

Absorbed in the picture, Lillian told herself not to think about it. At least she was here, in Delton, not stuck up in the country anymore.

But wouldn't it be better if you were here with someone else? Reason asked. Lillian thought, I can't think about that now. You'd have to have somebody else before you left him, though, or go back to your Mother.

Just then, Son leaned forward and then back, crossed and recrossed his legs and said, “Whew! I didn't know this was about love and ro-mance. I thought it was a shoot-'em-up.”

Lillian turned on him, furiously, in the dark and whispered, “I'm not going to leave,” but the picture was ruined. He squirmed until its end.

The next morning, wearing a leather jacket instead of his suit coat, he went out to the garage. Lillian thought he had gone to work on the car and was scrubbing the sink with bleach when she heard a thud, a slight boom, and the house shook. Thinking the furnace had exploded she was about to scream, realizing the next moment the house was not only intact but totally silent. Out the back window she saw a little cloud of smoke dispersing into nothing, dirt splattered around a large hole in the ground, and Son just coming around a corner of the garage, a smile turned up like a quarter moon across his face. Going down the back steps, she saw the Woolfords peering from a window and over the back fence the top of the orange garbage truck, the collector standing in it, a large garbage can in his hands, his mouth dropped into a perfect O. Seeing her, the Negro instantly disappeared and she thought, I can't even face the garbage man again.

Gleeful as a child, Son cried, “Did you see it? It went up just as pretty, just as eas-y as a airy-plane!”

She stared at the hole where the stump had been, realizing only now that it was gone, she had always set her clothes basket on it.

“Frank,” she said, “somebody'll call the police on you. The windows in our house, probably everybody's, almost shook out.”

“Woman, I can get new windows. And I can get out of jail,” he said. “Don't you realize I just blasted out my first stump. There isn't any way now another man can beat out my estimate.”

“Frank, you just can't blast off dynamite in your back yard in the middle of the city with neighbors right close up.”

“Hell,” he said. “I just did,” and with the smile as big as ever he got in the car and drove away.

Standing alone in the back yard, Lillian felt like a fool without exactly knowing why. She told herself it was not her fault he did all these wrong things, that his people ought to know just how many wrong things he did, and that it was not her fault.

All winter it had rained frequently over the whole lower Mississippi Valley and now, with March, it rained almost every day. From Cairo, Illinois, south to the mouth of the river, below New Orleans, a flood larger than any the valley had ever known seemed imminent. The river rose enormously the valley's length, the crest not in sight. Fear mounted, like the river itself. Radio programs were continuously interrupted for bulletins about the river's stages and people stayed home to hear.

On Sunday, at Cally's and Poppa's, Son opened the door to a smell of roasting beef rushing toward them on a shimmer of heat as if he had opened the oven door instead. The little bungalow was almost exactly like their own; they stepped into the living room and beyond was a dining room exactly the same; a hall ran the length of the two and at each end was a bedroom, called the front and back; the latter Cally had recently rented to a young woman from North Carolina who was a school teacher.

Cally came down a short pantry from the kitchen toward them, and Son wondered who the little old lady was. Seeing it was Cally, he was surprised at how stooped she had become. She wore heavy black oxfords that made her feet look as clumsy as a clown's. He knew they must be the new arch supporters she had asked Lillian to take her to town to buy: that had cost ten dollars. He had said it was the last damn pair he was going to buy. Cally had decided all the pains in her back came from her feet. Poppa was asleep on the sofa and woke to say he had been listening to the news, had only just dozed.

“What is it?” Lillian said. “We haven't heard any since early morning.”

Poppa looked blank and Cally said, “I could hear it all the way back in the kitchen. They don't have but one railroad to their name running up near Cairo, Illinois, and they're afraid the levee's going to break right over yonder in Wilson.”

“Wilson!” Lillian said. “Frank, that's not anywhere from Mamma.”

“She'll get warning in plenty time to get out,” he said.

Toward the end of dinner, Poppa said he wondered what was happening in Mill's Landing, and Son laughed. “Old man De Witt'll have niggers out slapping down sand bags,” he said. “I don't know how he'll do it but he'll pass that water on down to somebody else!” He stopped talking to laugh again and the others looked at him, not thinking funny all the devious ways people used to shunt high water away from themselves, to their neighbors, who in turn used any method to pass it on to those below them.

At their objections, Son said, “It's every man for hisself.” He did not necessarily think it was right; but there were a lot of things in life that weren't: that didn't change them any. “It isn't right folks in Washington don't go more than fifty-fifty helping us keep the river away from our doors. Shoot, it wasn't too many years ago the government wasn't paying even half to keep up the levees. Folks had to build their own and keep them up too. The whole country drains into the Miss'sippi and it ought to be the whole country paying to keep it in its bed. If this turns out to be as bad as it looks like it is, the whole country's going to hurt though. Farmers are going to be wiped clean out and I mean clean. Folks everywhere going to be looking for food and paying the price.”

After dessert, Lillian and Cally washed dishes. Son, picking at a tooth that always bothered him after eating, followed Poppa to the living room and turned on the news: Special trains, the announcer said, from the North loaded to capacity with old trench sand bags from the war were being rushed to Cairo and points south in an effort to stem the river that was at some points already overlapping the levee a foot.

“Oh hell,” Son said. “We got it now.”

Poppa, recalling all the floods he could, '03, '12, '13 and '22, said he did not remember such excitement, such precautions before. By the time the women came from the kitchen, warming their chapped-looking hands before them, the news was worse and they all sat hushed, communicating infrequently by lifting their eyes to one another as some word or phrase struck them each differently at different times. Unfamiliar words became familiar by the time the afternoon was over and would become a large part of their daily life in the weeks to come: breaches, inundations, evacuations. Over and over that afternoon in announcing that untold numbers of people had fled home and were either destitute or dead, that industries were paralyzed and crops flooded, what had happened to the people of the valley was declared to be a national disaster. Local authorities, losing no time, were already on the air to ask, Would the Federal Government at last commit itself to a definite program of flood control? Admit, at last, that only full Federal responsibility for building the levees would provide at least a
chance
of controlling the great river on a rampage?

It was later than usual before Cally said, “You all getting hungry again?” and she went to the kitchen, with Lillian following. By now the news was repetitive and, standing, Son turned off the radio. He had smoked all afternoon and the smoke remained, pushing against the ceiling. Poppa, as he had since noon dinner, was dozing. Shortly he would wake. Son went to the front door and opened it to the wet March night. Far off, farther away sounding than it really was, he heard a train and thought of it rushing away through the night, a sliver of dark patched with yellow. He was thinking how glimpsing the people and having them quickly gone made you feel left behind when Poppa said, “Son.”

As Poppa had known the night Son spoke his name before telling he was going to get married that it was going to be something important, Son knew it now.

“Close the door,” Poppa said.

That's not it, Son thought, closing it; he came back into a room as cool as the night now.

Poppa clasped his hands and said, “Boy, the store's not doing so good.”