Old Powder Man (18 page)

Greaser said, “I'm going to kill him,” but Son thought he heard the first hesitancy. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw Greaser had leaned back against the seat; the hands that had been at all times ready to choke Booker T.'s neck rested on his knees. He stared ahead instead of searching by-ways. Son said, “Let the law take care of it, Greaser.”

Martha said, “That's right, Greaser. You listen now.”

They drove up to camp just before full dark; Son parked where the car would be shaded from even the early morning sun. Greaser had said nothing else all the way, though Son and Martha had continued to talk about keeping his saved soul. When he got out of the car, Greaser turned as if he were going to speak. Instead, he smiled. Forever afterward, telling the story, Martha would say it had been a smile just like an angel's, lit up, beautiful, gigantic, before he disappeared into the dark.

Son and Martha started toward the center of camp, tired and silent. Then Son gripped Martha's arm and they were still; still, they were not noticeable among the shadows. They looked at one another in instant understanding, peering toward the rustling bushes; talking softly, men crept there; they stood when they were out of camp and hurried down the road. One remained, in silhouette only the floppy straw and the sagging pinned-together overalls. Turning, he crept back to camp. From their vantage point, Son and Martha glimpsed, in disbelief, Sho Nuff.

“Sho Nuff!” Will said. Suddenly his chin stuck out and he straightened. Martha saw it hurt him as much as it had her, the difference being that Will would try not to show it. He told Son his father had taught him from the time he could remember a nigger is a nigger and he had never believed it until now, forty-odd years later, Sho Nuff had put him in the position of having to; he had to teach him a lesson because of the others. Son saw it was as if Will were at the top of a carefully built pyramid, and Sho Nuff was loosening a bottom block; to reprimand or fire him was not enough. Though, Will said, he only went so far. He had to laugh, repeating what one of the Negroes had told Carter: they liked working for Mister Will because “he'll whup us but he won't kill us.”

Carter said too, in disbelief and sorrow, “Sho Nuff!” then his lips set too. The next afternoon Martha went into the tent, held the baby, and did not look at Carrie. Son and Buzz went for their evening drink, drank up almost a fifth and never found anything funny. The Negroes left work silently. In the way that always happened, word had spread without anybody knowing who had known it first, and with Sho Nuff the last to know.

The day ended and Sho Nuff stopped work; suddenly Carter and Will were beside him. Will nodded, once, in the direction of the mule corral. Sho Nuff said, “Cap'n,” and Will's lips set and he nodded again. Sho Nuff started walking and they came behind. Skinner, in the corral, took one look, threw down a bucket, and ran. Inside the shed, in the close, hot, mule and hay-smelling place, Sho Nuff said, “Please, Cap'n.”

Will said, “Take off your pants.”

“Naw sir, Cap'n,” Sho Nuff said.

“Take off your pants,” Will said.

Sho Nuff let down the pinned-together straps and having on nothing underneath, stood naked.

Will said, “See that bale of hay? Lie down.”

Sho Nuff went to the bale and lay across it. From nails on the wall, Carter had taken down two mule belly straps. He gave one to Will and they began to strike him: struck him twenty times, ten times each, alternately, until it was twenty. Then it was done. Will said, “Put on your pants,” and Sho Nuff did. He picked up the straw hat from the floor where it had fallen, put it on his head, and went out and out of the corral, closing the gate behind him. Will and Carter came the same way and saw him, still walking; they stood and watched and he went on as far as the levee in the distance, clambered up the bank and was still going, across the top of the levee. Once he took off his hat and wiped his forehead, then put back on the old floppy straw and that was the last they saw of him, against the setting sun.

The next morning, hung-over, Son and Buzz went back to Marked Tree. At his car, Buzz said, “Where you going now?”

Son said, “Up the road, to hit every camp between here and Cape Girardeau.”

In Cape Girardeau, he ran into Buzz again who introduced him to a blonde-headed woman and they got drunk together and had a time, all night. That week he kept in touch with the office by telephone and once Scottie said Lillian had been trying to reach him. “What's the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” Scottie said. “She just said she wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh hell,” he said. He certainly did not see any reason to run up your phone bill talking to your wife. He received only a few small orders. But he accomplished something of what he set out to do. People who had not known him before, did now. He was not just another voice on the telephone. Day after day he was on the levees, exposed beneath a wide sky to the sun from which there was no hiding place. He gave a man an estimate right there, looking over the work with him, tried to convince people of using more dynamite, in different ways. A few times he shot dynamite Mr. Ryder delivered. At night, he fell into bed as grimy, sunburned, exhausted as the workers themselves and believed those birds had some respect for him because of it. He saw his road ahead, a long way, a repetition of these days without let-up. But he would bet his bottom dollar, now, someday he would have run every bit of his competition out of this territory, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Missouri. He suddenly determined to do it, sitting one night in a little fleabag hotel. One of the first things he had learned about this travelling life was you got lonesome. He had had some drinks and he was tired and tight. He got up and looked at himself in the bureau mirror, his eyes pale and his grin cockeyed, two things that always happened when he was tight. He swore at that moment, Someday I'm going to run ever one of those birds right straight plumb clean out of this territory.

He had another drink and got into bed thinking about how he would do it. There was only one way, to offer better service; dynamite was all the same. He would build his reputation on service. The day would come when nobody would think of dynamite without thinking of Frank Wynn and he'd tell those other peckerwoods if they wanted to sell any dynamite in this territory they better go up and down the levee the day before him, because it sure wasn't going to do any good if they went the day afterward.

He stretched his feet toward the end of the bed and planned his retirement. He set the age at sixty. Then, he would like to travel and see some of those places nobody but he knew he ever thought about seeing, some of those foreign places. He would not get up in the morning until he wanted, something he had not been able to do even as a boy. He would have time just to do nothing, maybe even play some games.

It was a set pattern. He left at dawn every Monday and returned at evening every Friday. He told Lillian to have his supper on the table when he drove in the driveway; he would be ready to eat. All Saturday and Sunday the house was full of his friends; sometimes the Sunrise Club met, sometimes the men brought their wives or women who were not; at night they went out, always a crowd, to eat and drink, gamble, sometimes to dance; whatever they did ended on a wild note, with a fight or a prank, always with everyone drunk. Lillian complained that she had been home all week and he came home and went to bed. On Fridays, at least, she wanted to go out with her friends, to some place that was quiet and nice. He said, “Woman, I been out beating my tail all week, I got to rest sometime. Seeing those customers helps get our groceries on the table so keep your mouth shut.”

It was getting harder and harder to find those groceries too, he would tell you. And not only did he have to worry about business for himself, he had to worry about Poppa's too. He had borrowed money to set Poppa up in a little hole-in-the-wall store, barely getting along, but it was what Poppa wanted, close enough to home to walk, with a room in the back where he could nap. Poppa sold some groceries but it seemed to Son he had it mostly stocked with candy; cases were full and barrels of it sat on the floor. One barrel, particularly, brought children to the store. It was full of chocolates with different colored centers; even Poppa did not understand how, but he could guess accurately the color inside. If a child asked for a nickel's worth of greens, his sack contained them when he bit into the candies one by one to see.

One Saturday morning, Son went to the store to talk to Poppa; Lillian had reported the night before Cally had a tumor which had to be removed. Son entered the store as children, taking candy, left pennies on the counter; no one had seen Poppa. Hell of a way to run a business, Son thought, leave in the middle of the morning. He went to the back, pulled aside the curtain separating the two rooms and could no longer be annoyed, looking at Poppa asleep there; easy to see he had not sought sleep but that sleep itself had been the aggressor. Poppa lay as if flung back, his hands trailing off the cot on either side, his mouth open, and was captive still when Son had waked him: groggy and pale. He sat up, reached for a glass of water and took several pills. “How you getting along? Your kidneys acting up again?” Son said.

“I'm not worth killing around here,” Poppa said. “How you getting along?”

“Just scratching around trying to make a living,” Son said.

Poppa confirmed what Lillian had said; Cally had been truly in pain and the doctor was reliable. The operation had to be immediate and was set for Monday morning. Son said, “Well, I'll give you whatever your in-surance don't cover.”

Poppa said, “Son, it's going to be all right after this. She was still too weak to even want this operation. She had gotten so she just wanted to feel good.” They went out into the store and a customer came asking for a small checker set; Poppa looked high and low but could not find them. “My wife was in here last week helping me unpack a new shipment,” Poppa said. “I don't see how in the world I sold them all that fast.” Son told the man they would keep looking if he would drop in again. He left the store and drove to see Cally.

Since graduating from high school, Cecilia had lived at home, sleeping on a cot in the living room, her feet hanging off the end; anyone but Cecilia would have complained. Her time was taken up mostly with Cally and the house but she taught Sunday School and went to prayer meetings on Wednesday nights. She did a little bookkeeping for the church, was not paid very much, but the compensation was that she could do the work at home. She came out on the porch to meet Son and said the doctor had just left; he felt Cally was weak for an operation but that the operation was necessary; it was the one before she should not have had. And, Cecilia said, Kate had confided that one reason she was moving was because when she read late at night Cally took the fuses out of the box in the basement, said Kate wasted electricity sitting up at night reading. Son and Cecilia had to laugh though neither one of them understood why Kate was always going to the library and coming home with an armload of novels. Going inside, they stopped at her door. She was bent over, fastening her suitcases, and when she looked up her face, usually pale, flushed bright red; her hair, cropped short, just covered her ears and she pushed back the waves on either side of her face, leaving streaks of dirt; but she looked pretty just the same, Son thought. She said, “There's one big carton in the closet I'm leaving on purpose. It's something of your momma's she asked me to store.”

“Well I certainly can't imagine what,” Cecilia said. She went into the closet and came out, perplexed. “You know what's in there? A whole lot of checker sets.”

“Sam Hill,” Son said. He went into Cally's room and asked why in the world she had taken them from the store. Cally sat up as if with all her old strength and said, “Foolishness! Grown-up people playing games. It wastes time. I don't want Poppa having any part of it.” Without saying anything, Son took the sets back to the store when he left. On Monday he waited until the operation was over and declared a success, then set out again.

During the week he called Mr. Ryder one night but he was not at home; he called Lillian to ask her to deliver the message early the next morning but she was not at home either. He wondered where she could be that time of night, but had forgotten about it by the time he drove home on Friday. Then, before he even had supper, Lillian said, “Frank, I'm going to leave you. I want to have some children, but I'm not going to bring up any around the sort of people you bring home and with all the gambling and drinking going on here.”

His first thought was, he was about to starve to death and did she have supper on the table? Then he put his grip down, felt too tired even to take off his coat, looked at her and said, “Lillian, there isn't any woman going to walk out on me.”

She did not say anything else; she stayed in her room all Saturday night while the poker game went on. The next afternoon they went to see Cally, then out with Buzz and others to eat steak. On Monday, he left again.

As soon as he turned onto the block that Friday, he saw the house was dark. It gave him a feeling of emptiness and fear, as if somebody had taken his house away. He came up the steps, barely able to drag his grip he was so tired, thinking maybe Cally was sick and Lillian had rushed off there. He went straight to the telephone and turned on a light as he picked up the receiver. Without its reaching his ear, he put the receiver down again. It was his house, he knew that; he had had the key and let himself in. But the living room was almost bare. Even the rug was gone. The furniture left was a few worthless pieces they had taken from Cally's attic. He went about the house and everything was the same, except that Lillian's clothes were gone. He did not know what else to do and he went about the house again. He walked through the few rooms looking at knickknacks, not seeing them any more than he ever had. He stood in the living room looking at where the rug had been, outlined by the floor waxed darker around its edges. He cursed not only Lillian but the department store and the salesman and everybody else he could think of who had had anything whatsoever to do with that rug; because it was not only gone, it was not even paid for. Son-of-a-bitch, he said again.