Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  In Colorado he worked for a timber outfit, a long way out from nowhere, and part of his job was to get on a handcar and pump it to the nearest little old town and collect the outfit’s mail, then pump on back to the lumber camp. It was hard work, and in the summertime, the sun beat on his head as if it were a drum inside and sweat poured down over him like a bucket of water tossed. But if you didn’t think that was a time for a kid, fourteen years old, flying along the railroad track, pumping that handcar, you had another thought coming, Jesus!

  He stayed two years, with no one knowing where he was until he walked in home again, a day he would never forget. Cally was fixing for some big fancy society party and had baked two dozen or more angel food cakes, the thing she was famous for. She had them all over the house, on every flat place she could find, on every stick of furniture, cooling. He never had seen so many cakes in his life; the smell in the house was sweeter than a garden. Walking in, he had said, “Well, Mammy, I’m back.”

  She had turned around. In her hand was a big spoon coated with white icing just come to the right stage. “So I see,” she had said.

  He did not know why he had come back, except that it was home. He sure had liked it out West. He wished he had been born a cowboy instead of where he was. Nobody knew what had happened out there, though he had had it on his mind to tell Poppa. He had seen him bursting with questions. Coming back into the store, he decided to do it now.

  “Poppa,” he said across the empty store. Poppa stood at the front window, looking out. “You know when I was out West? Was there anything you ever wanted to ask me about it?”

  Poppa, having turned, held back the interest in his face. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” he said.

  So Son told him the whole thing, climbed up on a stool, hooked his feet into the rungs, and Poppa sat on the nail keg. Son told about the freight to Kansas City and the train out West from there, about all the jobs he had applied for and the one he finally got, about the lumber camp and the handcar. He told about the man and his wife who had run the camp and how they had liked him so much they had wanted to adopt him. It was not until then they knew he had run away from home. Perhaps that was when he had decided to come back, when he had thought of never coming again.

  “What was the country like, Son?” Poppa said, unable to wait any longer.

  Son looked a moment out through the plate glass window at the town’s dusty road, past the little houses, and at the dark green cotton field. All around its edges trees grew up as tall as you could want, but they did not seem as tall as the trees out West. Nothing here seemed as big or as wide or as beautiful. To gaze upon the flat land here for miles gave you the feeling there was nothing else, only the flat land going on without end, always the same. But in the West the mountains, like kaleidoscopes, continually changed, burst red with sunset, changed slowly into deep purple and disappeared altogether with night, all unexpectedly reappearing capped with snow. Son’s mouth fell open and he was about to say how it was nothing like this flat muggy country. It was air you could breathe. He was going to tell about the mountains, purple at dusk, circled with clouds like rings of smoke, about snow falls, and the opportunity there for a man even if you were not so young. Poppa’s face was closer now, waiting to hear, and instead of telling, Son shrugged. “It wasn’t so much,” he said. “The mountains were pretty, but there was nothing to do with them. Just look. After awhile you forget they’re there.”

  Poppa said, “But what about Pike’s Peak? What about when you climbed there?”

  “Poppa, shoot. You couldn’t have breathed halfway to the top. I thought I was going to give out. It’s just a country some folks like to talk about. It’s not much.”

  Son had averted his eyes lying but now looked back. He saw he had not fooled Poppa. On his face was a look of wonder mingled with longing and excitement, then Poppa said, “I got to go get up a canned goods inventory.”

  Half a mile away the noon train whistled. Son went out and stood on the front steps. Glancing to his right, he saw Sudie Baker, the postmistress, putting up mail that had come on the morning freight. He called back, “Mail’s puttin’ up.”

  Poppa came more hurriedly than usual and went next door. Mrs. Owens, having crossed the road, caught up with him on the post office porch. “Henry, you look like you’re expecting some big something.”

  “No mam.” Standing aside, Poppa held the door for her. “I don’t get no kind of mail but doctor’s bills.”

  Down the road others were coming, and down the road at the elementary school, the doors opened, and children, pouring homeward for lunch, slivered the country stillness with high-pitched thin voices, startling birds from trees. Old people sitting on their porches turned expectant faces toward the sounds, speaking in their faded voices when the children came up the walk to home. Jumping on and off the post office porch, Sudie Baker’s children cried, “Ma, we’re here! We’re here!”

  “Coming,” she called from inside and came out shooing mail readers before her and locked the door. Those who had not made it in time turned away disappointed until one o’clock.

  Poppa, looking pleased, stood a moment finding gum in his pockets for the Baker children. Son, whistling, went down the steps, his hands in his pockets; he started to the station as the mill’s noon whistle split the world in two. It caught Mrs. Owens with her mouth open; she stood so while it blew, then finished telling Sudie what she had been telling. Son ceased whistling, the sound by contrast small and useless. An old man who had shouted through the whistle, not realizing it had stopped, kept on shouting to another man as Son passed. The train’s noise seemed like a toy’s by comparison. Son saw Lillian through the window an instant before she waved and came, a small person, down the train steps. She held up her face to be kissed. “Is everything all right?” she said.

  “Sure. Everything’s the same. How’s your Mammy?”

  “Don’t call her …” she said, but her eyes grew round, and she stared past him in surprise.

  Turning, he stared in surprise too. Cally, dressed for travelling, came toward them carrying a needlepoint shopping bag, black with a cluster of red cabbage roses. As if everything were ordinary, she kissed Lillian, then went on past to the train’s steps, turned and called, “Tell Poppa I’ll be home for supper. It’s already cooked. I’ll be here to put it on the table.”

  She was wearing, Son saw, not just better than everyday clothes, but her very best clothes, a heavy black crepe dress, black oxfords, a wide black hat, the severity relieved only slightly at the V-neck of the dress by a large cameo set in a heavy gold mounting. Cally had been pretty, and could have been still with any effort; but she wore her hair pulled straight back, “skinned” Lillian called it, from her face and twisted into a tight knot. Her hair had been dark auburn but greying was the color of sand and with her colorless skin made her nondescript. She would hear nothing of applying artificial coloring; though on Sundays she powdered her face heavily with corn starch. Lillian, gathering courage, once suggested she wore too much. Cally had shrugged saying, Oh it’ll blow off by the time I get to church.

  “Mammy, where on earth are you going?” Son said.

  “Marystown to get the train for Delton,” she said, pulling herself up the steps. Son and Lillian glanced at one another; he reached the train as she started into the coach. “How are you getting back from Delton tonight?” he said.

  “With the people of one of the girls at Cecilia’s school,” she said. “They’re driving me to Marystown, and I’ll get the evening train home.”

  He stepped back, not needing to ask, but Lillian came forward to say, “Why are you going to Delton, Mammy?”

  “To get my gall bladder drained,” Cally said and entered the coach.

  The train, like some medieval dragon, snorted, sending puffs of steam from its undersides; Son and Lillian, stepping back, could not see Cally through the steam-obscured window. “Do you think she’s really going to get her gall bladder drained?” Lillia
n said.

  “Jesus if I know,” he said. “Let’s go to the river. I got the buggy all spruced up. It’s over to Old Pete’s.”

  All around them mill hands, white and Negro, who had stayed to watch the train, were moving on home for noon dinner, now that the train was going. In the hotel’s old wooden dining room lights were on and several men were going in the side door. A cluster of Negroes passed close, laughing, jostling one another, and Son took Lillian’s arm and held her close. They went the length of the mill to the blacksmith’s, a dark little shop, where Old Pete, sitting up on a buggy, waved a sandwich and said, “It’s out yonder, ready.”

  The horse, tied in the shade of a great maple, had its head sorrowfully hung. “What’s the matter, old lady?” Son said, swatting the animal’s rump. He untied it and Lillian, twitching her nose in distaste, climbed with difficulty into the buggy, clutching, pulling at her tight skirt. Son got in and Ruby, the horse, deliberately mischievous, set out at a pace too fast.

  “Frank!” Lillian cried, clutching his arm, but he grinned mischievously too and let the horse run on, its ears flat back, eyes walled till nothing showed but their whites. “What’s the matter?” he said. In a burst of hilarity, he laughed until tears came.

  Her voice shaken by the buggy’s bouncing, Lillian called, “I haven’t been in a buggy since I left. Automobiles …” but she gave up; it was too hard.

  “We’ll have us one,” he said shortly and stared ahead, letting Ruby continue in her headstrong way. Hearing the commotion, several women came to their front windows, peeked at them passing, and confirmed to themselves what they had already suspected: the Wynn boy was a wild young buck.

  Going down the main road they passed between two rows of cottonwoods. In the latter part of summer and all through the fall, the trees dropped a white lint that scudded in fluffs when the wind blew and lay otherwise like a light snow over the ground. They met Negro children going home from school, the smallest being pulled in rusted wagons, their short legs stuck out before them. Little girls wore enormous hairbows like magnificent butterflies atop heads that seemed hairless, so tightly was the hair drawn in three places into plaits that stood out from their scalps. With the sun behind them, the little faces looked darker, the clearest feature the whites of their eyes. Their teacher, in a buggy, touched the whip to his hat and Son called, “Brother Roy!” in acknowledgement. The children had gone to school two months of the hot summer, July and August, and now were released to pick cotton until Christmas. Those passing in the buggy chanted, “No more lessons, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks,” and Lillian saw several pairs of eyes peeping at them, the children, like small wild animals, thinking because of their own stillness, they were not being seen.

  Ruby went now at a genial trot. They watched in silence the road ahead, so bright beneath the sun as to make them squint. Occasionally the road swung one way or another into a curve so wide it was almost unnoticeable, but it never altered direction, went always straight ahead, sometimes between dense woods, sometimes between woods which had been thinned and had sunlight entering them, sometimes between fields thick now with cotton bloom. The land visible between the rows was black as coffee, alluvium-rich, virgin still to farming. Above them, the sky hung with that suddenly vacated, almost surprised look. Negroes in relief against it, bent-backed, with slow rocking motions chopped and pulled back, chopped and pulled back, straightened altogether and stood leaning on their hoes to watch the buggy as it passed. A half-mile from the river the land rose once naturally and from the crest of the slight hill they glimpsed the river, looking as blue and as sparkling as the ocean. Ruby, hurrying despite herself, ran down the slope on the other side, had hardly time to catch herself up again before they arrived at the river’s bank. “Back yonder,” Son said, “is where a levee ought to be.” He half-turned and waved slightly at the rise behind them.

  “But why would you want another levee?” Lillian said, staring at the bank before them; it was matted heavily with willow branches for protection.

  “Shoot, what about ’12 and ’13?” Son said. “We get another flood like those, the willows won’t do any more good than a feather in a fire. You need a secondline levee. Something between here and town.” Once he had said as much to Mr. De Witt and could tell by the way Mr. De Witt answered too loudly he saw the validity of the idea. It’s all we can do to keep up the damn levee we got, he had said. There lay the problem: money. You get the s-o-b Federal Government to do something. Get it to build and maintain the levees instead of every man for hisself, and we’ll build another one. Mr. De Witt had cursed more vividly the Federal Government and sent Poppa, with a scarlet face, to the back of the store. But Son had only stood watching him in admiration, laughing. Mr. De Witt was prosperous and determined; they seemed to Son the marks of success. Mr. De Witt had gone onto the porch, spit through a space in his teeth, and said, When the water rises, we’ll put down more willow mattresses. We’ll hold the Goddamned river! His boots were a mahogany-colored leather, so fine, so mellowed, so polished, they flashed, reflecting the sun. He had mounted, putting the crop to his horse’s rear with such force it would seem he hated it, though he loved it more than anything in the world. Cantering off, he had scattered small children playing in the soft dust drifted to the center of the road. When he was gone, everything had seemed quieter, the commissary darker and smaller, and Poppa, standing in the store, seemed smaller too, his black, flowered galluses seeming to slice into his thin shoulders. Hell, Son had said that day, having to go behind the dry goods counter.

  At the river, Ruby snorted and shuddered all over, as if shaking from memory her recent run. Son sat forward and held the reins loosely. Ruby, taking them one turn of the wheels forward, bent to nibble at dry grass around the clearing where they had stopped, her upper lip, soft as moss, lifted delicately. Mesmerized, Son and Lillian stared down silently at the great rushing river, at the wide unbroken view of its sweep above and below them. The distance across was such that while they could see quite clearly the white sand bar that was Tennessee, it was only indistinctly they could see three Negroes stretched out on it fishing. When they spoke at last, it was to guess whether it was three men or two and one woman. Close up, the water held no hint of blue as it had from a distance and flowed swiftly; when clouds parted, the water was colorless-looking beneath the sun’s bleaching, but moving slowly, the clouds came together and the water, shaded, took on its true color and swept on past them southward, a light, watery-looking brown. The water would seem suddenly to overtake itself and instead of flowing would come in a series of foamy ripples like miniature breakers, then again would flow smoothly, carrying with it sometimes a log or a branch and once some indistinguishable whiteness that, speculating, Son and Lillian decided was cotton lint. Above them the river came in one straight course, curving only slightly around the end of the sand bar, but below them, having altered its once straight flow, it curved now toward the bank opposite, eating away again year after year the levee it had formed depositing sediment to pile up in the years of its unconfined overflow. The river made no sound; all around them was silence. The Negroes stood up and moved about, threw in their lines or pulled them out; labelless tin cans in which they had their bait sometimes caught the sun and shone out like signals from the opposite bank, but their voices were lost in the distance between. Cows grazed nearby, lifted their heads to chew, chewed silently and looked at them with seeming depth in their dark eyes. Trees behind the sand bar screened from view the farmland beyond, but they heard shots there now, short, dull, muffled sounds lingering after themselves like thunder rumbling harmlessly across a humid summer night’s sky. Then crows, scattered from corn, flew up, something moving and black above the tree tops, against the shining sky, and one of the Negroes, leaping up, ran after them a long way down the white sand waving his hat while their deep-throated, jeering, raucous cries filled the countryside.

  Ruby lifted her head and started forward, but Son caught the reins and
held her back. “Whoa, girl,” he said softly. The crows having hushed or gone, the silence had returned, but it was not the same, having been broken.

  Lillian shifted about several times. “Shall we go back? What about your lunch?”

  “Got it with us.” Son leapt from the buggy and took a brown paper sack from beneath the seat. Poppa had made them baloney sandwiches, filled a jar with ice and lemonade. Lillian got down and followed Son across the clearing toward a shade tree, watching in dismay as dust clung to her recently polished new kid shoes. “Watch that,” Son said as she almost sat; he drew from beneath her a branch broken from a thorn tree, the thorns as large and as thick as his fingers. He started to toss it away, but Lillian took it and said, “I’ll give it to Mammy. She uses these thorns as stilettos for her punch work.”

  Son passed her the lemonade jar; she drank from it and gave it back to him. They ate the sandwiches in silence. She was beginning to find that he never talked much. He found they had less to say after her trips home. It caught him back from what he was going to say when he saw her look around as if, all over again, she could not believe she lived in Mill’s Landing. He had told her repeatedly, and was beginning to see she did not believe it, that even if they stayed in Mill’s Landing, he would save her from Mammy’s, even from her own mother’s way of life: no wife of his would ever have to work.