Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Having waked Son, Poppa went to the living room to read the morning paper, opened it as quietly as he could, had it hardly opened, when Cally’s voice came as he had known it would: “Henry.”

  “I’m coming,” he said. He edged forward, reading quickly.

  Cally cocked her head around the kitchen door and called down the hall: “Henry.”

  “Coming,” he said.

  “You’ve got to help me,” she said. “You’ve got to help me.”

  She did not need help, was quick as lightning in the kitchen; but she could not abide Poppa’s sitting to read the paper. To her, it was doing nothing at all. Poppa entered the kitchen as Son did and when grace had been said, Cally put before Son the plate he had used the night before. Her rule had always been he and Cecilia had to eat first anything left at a previous meal. On the plate was a small amount of mashed potatoes, congealed gravy and half a biscuit. When in the world was the last time this happened? Poppa wondered. His mind, running backward, could not remember. He had assumed the practice long forgotten and could tell from Son’s face he had thought so too. Last night, Son had received a telephone call from Lillian. By the time it was over, Cally and Poppa had left the table. Son did not return either, having so little left. So little, Poppa wanted to say.

  Son stared at Cally; his eyes, white with anger, were as colorless as hers. Poppa saw something else in Son’s eyes, alien to himself, and was not sure he wanted the boy to feel it either. Son’s manner partly apologized for a look of determination tinged with mockery and a certain sadness, making Poppa feel unworldly. Looking down at his plate, Poppa pondered again his own life and its end, wondering if he had done anything at all. Unexpectedly, Son ate, and Poppa, relieved, did not think about the same half-foolish, brazen, cocked grin he had seen again. He said, “Is Lillian coming today?”

  “Noon train,” Son said. In the silence afterward, they thought of her frequent absences. “If I can have extra time, I’m going to take her to the river for lunch.”

  Poppa nodded. Cally said, “It’s cool at the river.”

  “Not too cool,” Son said. “We can go one more time. Old Deal got me to caring about that river, maybe Lillian will too.”

  “It’s men love the river,” Cally said.

  Son said, “Speak of the devil, yonder’s the old man now.”

  “Uh, oh,” Poppa said, glancing out. Standing, he put on the black coat hanging on back of his chair.

  At that moment, the mill whistle, punctual as Deal, blew a long shrill time. Son watched the old Negro take elaborately from his pocket a large, gold watch, smooth and slim as a full moon, and thought of all the times he had heard its story: the watch had belonged to old Mister Jeff, the mill’s original owner, and had been willed at his death to the oldest employee; along with it went a job as long as Deal lived. Standing on the porch, Son watched the ice man come up the walk, carrying with dull tongs a large block. Behind him, its dusty length, the main road of town was pocked by a trail of water from his wagon and children on their way to school followed, begging ice in chips and pieces. Ice boxes were kept on the back porch where holes in the floor allowed water to drain under the house. People were furnished ice boxes, and ice, like everything, was charged to them by the year. Poppa came out. Going down the walk, he and Son faced Negroes coming from their houses to join Deal, forming their daily procession from the part of Mill’s Landing called Niggertown. Some Negroes were headed toward the mill, others toward the river and the woods. Son watched them all with envy, thinking restlessly of his day in the store. He saw a man stop Deal; the old man started then on his first trip of the day to the commissary. Son mimicked to Poppa what Deal would say: he was a trapped rat, running from one place to another, the others crying in his ears all day: Deal! get us boys some cold lemonade. Old Deal! you not doing nothing run mail me this letter. Deal’s job was to check on the Dutch ovens beneath the mill, ordinarily done by someone in a few spare moments; sawdust, the refuse, fell into the ovens and burned. Poppa said, “You enjoyed the old man’s stories at first, learned all about this countryside from him. You can’t just cast him off. We’re the only ones not too busy for him to talk to.”

  Son said, “Yeah, I guess so,” and watched Deal settle himself onto a bench at the commissary; this, the only two-story building in Mill’s Landing, had two doors fronting the road; the largest led into the commissary proper and was flanked on either side by plate glass windows with benches beneath. The smaller door, to the left, led to a hotel upstairs where migrant and unmarried mill hands lived or those who had left their families elsewhere, sometimes temporarily, sometimes not. Behind the stairway to the hotel, adjacent to the commissary, was the hotel’s dining room, a spacious, bare-looking room with a table in the center long enough to seat twenty people. Every effort was made to make eating there homey, and it was. At every meal the table was covered with a heavy white cloth. Every regular diner had his own napkin ring and a good large napkin, regularly washed. Three times a day the table was obscured by dishes. The men always had a choice of light bread, corn bread or biscuits and for breakfast there was bacon or smoked sausage and in season quail, not a luxury in those days. Early enough in the morning to clean them before breakfast, the two cooks went out and tramped the frosty woods some several hundred feet from the kitchen door. Through the quiet, still morning, the mill people would hear occasional shots, and the cooks always came back with enough of the frail little birds. In summer, when corn was fresh, it would be on the table in three different ways, on the cob, scraped from the cob and fried, or creamed, and there were black-eyed, crowder, field and tiny lady peas; tomatoes, fresh from vines near the back door, seemed bloody and ready to burst, a bite of one disappeared in your mouth. Son and Poppa, coming up the commissary steps, smelled ham and red-eye gravy, lifted their noses like hounds to sniff. Men in various attitudes of having just eaten, inserting or removing toothpicks, lighting or rolling cigarettes came from the dining room and spoke.

  A corrugated tin awning jutted from the building over the sidewalk, its length supported by thin iron poles. Often when Son and Poppa arrived Deal was there, sitting on a bench, waiting for the store to open. Recently he had taken to carrying a cane and walked tap, tapping it like a blind man, though his eyesight was as good as when he was twenty; he carried it to lean on when he sat, feet pointed out, cane between them, his hands clamped one over another on its silver head. His wife worried about his forgetting to button up. He couldn’t help being old, Pearl had said, but was not going to be one of those old men. She wiped his chin, kept him shaved, made him change his underwear every day. Sparse as a bird, Deal gave the appearance of roundness: had a round head full of thick curly white hair and his pants, too big as he shrank with age, tightly tied at the waist with clothesline, bagged out around his legs, balloon-like. At night, he was kept awake by the straws of their worn old mattress. But Pearl was big. He stuck a straw in her, it broke off, and she never knew the difference, he told Son. Her side of the bed had sagged long ago. In sleep, he braced himself. Times Pearl turned over he was lifted from the bed: bounce bounce bounce. When she was settled at last, he was. She called him Birdy: Birdy man! at their best times. Little or no, he always had done the job. But that had been over with some years now and to his surprise it had been something of a relief when it had gone, so intense had it been. It had tapered off, gone gradually, and left him with a kind of peace afterward. Pearl, younger, had not been ready. He had watched something in her wilt that brought a certain grumpiness, though she never said a thing. He had wanted to say, Girl, go and get it someplace else; he would not have minded that so much as the others knowing Birdy man had dried up. She lay beside him hoping, waiting, remembering. For a long time, out of a desire to please, he had tried to arouse the feeling again but it wasn’t there; it wasn’t anywhere. Son had said, “You’re lucky anyway, old man. You got a good woman who don’t complain.”

  Poppa unlocked the store. Son wondered if Deal were asleep. Someti
mes the old man pretended to be, so people passing would not bother him with talk of the weather—what it was like today and expected to be like tomorrow—or of crops or the mill. He had told Son none of it mattered: one of the advantages of old age. Rid of the world about him he thought of the past and the future when he would know what the reason for the past had been. One thing Son had found working in a little country store was you had time on your hands; lumped together, the times would add up to hours he and Poppa stood, staring into the road. That first year if Deal had not come in to talk, Son did not think he would have made it. But now he had heard all the old man’s stories over and over. In each of the other little towns they had lived, he had hung about Poppa’s store. But here Deal’s stories had taught him to care about the outdoors. This minute, Son drew in the dusty sweet smell of freshly cut wood Mill’s Landing was always full of: one of the few things Deal said was the same. Inside the mill, the smell floated about like the sawdust glittering there; early, Son had learned to hold his hand into the semi-dark and bring it down covered with a thin fine gold film. Reluctantly, he left the porch to follow Poppa inside.

  Never before had he had patience with old people; in fact, Son knew he did not have much patience at all. But since living in Mill’s Landing he had listened for hours to Deal talk about the past. Deal had been a roustabout on lumber barges, had sat at docks until a barge came in going someplace he wanted to go. Many times Deal came into Mill’s Landing and saw Mister Jeff, a barrel-chested man who always rode a big white horse. One day Mister Jeff had offered him a job at the mill; without knowing why, Deal took it. Pearl, eleven years old, was cooking for Mister Jeff then; that was when Deal met her. All around Mill’s Landing there had been one great world of trees. Taller than the highest building Deal had ever seen, trees had grown up as far as he could see. In those days, no one knew about draining land. In the swamps that stood, cypress and willow flourished in bent, scrawny, strange positions, like things from a world that had been and gone. And moccasins! Deal told how when you blew their heads off, they went on moving, headless, until they slid from wherever they had been sunning, back into the ugly, brown-green water. Whong. Deal’s hands would clutch his cane; he would pull the trigger again. But swamps were disappearing; these past few years people had begun to drain land, to farm. And cotton, Mr. De Witt, the mill’s manager, said, was going to be king. Acres of trees had been felled and tree stumps stood in rows as even as a crop. The sky where they had been, suddenly revealed, looked awkward, too bare and big, empty of tree tops.

  Deal had taught Son to chew the sweet gum’s sap, taught him to cover its sticky balls with tin foil, decorations for the Christmas tree he cut in the woods. Sometimes they repeated the names of trees wondering which they liked best: Sweet Gum. Maple. Sycamore. Oak. Pecan. Cottonwood. Hackberry: they liked them all. Deal told often a repeated dream: all the trees floated away toward heaven, dirt falling like brown rain from their roots; he called, Where are you going? but they were gone, gone with old Mister Jeff and the world to which he and Deal had belonged.

  Now the sun blazed on Mill’s Landing all day long if it wanted; in the summer evenings, twilight lingered till almost bedtime. But in Deal’s time, trees had been so thick that dark came early. Hunters, deep in the woods, would stop and listen in the late afternoon and way back home, down by the bayou, the womenfolk, taking turns, would ring a great iron bell. Clang clang clang through the still cold silence, through the dark the sound came, and shouldering their guns, calling the dogs, the hunters followed the sound home. Not until the last man was safe, walking the town’s road, would it cease. Those were the days of the Lord’s plenty, Deal said. He told about the men bringing home full-breasted turkey, their wattles red as fire even in the pale flickering light of a lamp one of the women would bring on the porch to see. Squatting on their haunches the men would compare their birds: quail, duck, geese. There would be rabbits, frozen with legs extended as if they were still running, and squirrels, their little legs lost altogether in a limp lump of fur and tail. Many nights, with the moon high, there were fox hunts, just to run the dogs. In Niggertown, they sat on their porches and listened to that far-off baying. Sometimes it came with a pressing urgency, with a sound more ghostly than real, that sent a chill down a Negro’s spine. In those days, even the river had been a half-mile further east. Like the rest of the world Old Deal had known, it had refused to remain unchanged. In sleep now, before the commissary, he dreamed and called, River, I know you! It seemed he stood on the bank this side, shaking his cane. Go back where you belong, case Mister Jeff come! Deal opened his eyes into blue ones. Son, having watched from inside the commissary, had come out to wake him. “Hey, Old Deal,” he said. “You must have been chasing a rabbit. You were setting here just a going.”

  The old man got up slowly and came through the door Son held open. “I come after something, Mister Son. But it slip my remembers.”

  “Sit down,” Son said. “You’ll remember after awhile.” They went to the dry goods counter, Son’s part of the store. Deal sat on a nail keg, and Son began to dust shelves almost to the ceiling lined with bolts of cloth. Later, he would set out boxes for the women to poke in, full of socks, thread, buttons. Above the shelves, two narrow windows admitted almost the only light; the plate glass ones were shaded by the tin awning. Through the small windows two shafts of sunlight, alive with motes, fell in unspectacular ways, making the commissary gloomy. On the opposite side, Poppa dusted equally tall shelves full of canned goods. On the floor were small bins of potatoes and onions, fruit and a few other vegetables; people ate food from their own gardens. The store sold flour, meal, lard. Shoes and boots hung from the rafters; down the center of the room a waist-high counter was full of heavy work clothes and underwear. About the room were racks of the shapeless, flowered cotton dresses the women wore year after year. Presently, Deal remembered it was tobacco he wanted and went to buy it from Poppa. It was only such small items the Negroes came in for regularly, candy, gum, cold drinks. Unexpectedly a child, shot up like a bean pole, had to be brought in for shoes or pants; a woman might run short of something inexplicably, for the Negroes shopped twice a year, spring and fall, bought their families clothes and supplies for six months of either cold or warm weather. In summer they might buy side meat or baloney, but in winter ate their own meat, kept in smoke houses. Everyone raised hogs and chickens, hunted, kept cows. The Negroes were encouraged to charge in the commissary and at the year’s end always owed money. For many years, few of them could read and it was true, as they suspected, that if they ever got out of debt, their accounts were juggled until they were back in it. Now, many had been to school and checked their accounts or paid cash. But Mr. De Witt, the manager, was a step ahead; he had their medical bills juggled; who could estimate what a doctor’s time or medicines were worth? No one was ever free enough of debt to quit the mill. A few men had run away.

  Deal left the store and several ladies came in to spend the morning talking to Poppa and looking at patterns. Son went out for air once, looked past the houses opposite, beyond cotton fields and toward the river where on clear, still days he could hear the Negroes yelling and cursing as they cut and loaded logs; they were put on the Rankin freight train that ran twice a day from Marystown to the river and back. Coming into town, the train stopped to unload mail and supplies for the commissary, then ran on to the river to be loaded with lumber for the mill. Extra logs were dumped into the bayou where they floated all winter long like somnolent brown alligators, bumping each other slightly. Loaded with cut lumber the train returned to Marystown; connections could be made from there anywhere, via Memphis, Delton or St. Louis. One year, the train was made up of a hundred flatcars, half loaded with sixty bales of cotton each, the rest with lumber. Between Marystown and the river were eight little villages; at all of them people came out to see the hundred flatcar train, to wave and yell.

  Two slow passenger trains a day ran the same route, the only ones in this part of Arkansas
. Begun by old Mister Jeff, the trains belonged to the Rankins too. Before them, people and logs travelled on the river. Today Son heard only lumber being stacked at the mill with a sound like, Clam. Clam: one plank being stacked on another.

  Throwing away his cigarette, turning back to the store, he glimpsed Cally in their yard. Stooped, she coaxed a fire under the black iron pot where clothes boiled and bubbled like a witch’s brew. As Son watched, she stuck a heavy, black cast iron skillet into the fire, squatted, balancing it. As long as the fire burned, the skillet would stay and by degrees its crinkled stubborn black crust would melt into the fire. Removed finally, the skillet would have the same shiny, blue-black look like coal it had had the day Cally bought it. She recoiled from a sudden spurt of coals, shielded her face, and standing, eased her back by pressing her hands into its center. She went inside and Son jerked open the commissary door, slammed it, and went angrily behind the counter, his face burning as if it had been thrust near the fire. That’s not going to be Lillian, he swore. It’s not going to be Lillian or any kids we ever have. Somehow, things had to be different.

  Like Cally, the knowledge had come too late he should not have quit school when he did. He had quit when he was fourteen years old, after the eighth grade, to run away from home: had done it to spite Cally, he guessed. She had drummed into him from the time he could remember that he had to finish high school. When he got ready to spite her that was the only way he knew how. From the time he was twelve, he worked every summer and Christmas vacation, earning his own way, and she took away most of his pay. One Christmas he had worked for a jewelry store, famous for finding old silver, that had a large mail order business; he worked in the receiving office and felt important because most of the business was with a dealer in San Francisco. At Christmastime the store was so busy he often worked till midnight, spent the night on a little cot the manager set up. At five-thirty he was up again; he was making ten dollars a week, adequate then. Cally said he was a young boy, liable to be reckless with the money; she took it to keep him from spending it. He believed her reason but one day knew she was not going to take his pay anymore. After work he went down to the south part of town and got on a freight train going to Kansas City, where he changed onto another going out West. It had been his dream as long as he could remember, and don’t ask him why, because he didn’t know, to go to Colorado and to climb Pike’s Peak. And he did.