Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Cally said, “Oh, if only you had been church folks. If only you had listened. Whom God hath …”

  Poppa led her away, saying, “Come on, Boss. It’s time for your medicine. Time for you to go to bed.”

  Cecilia brought Son’s supper saying, “Brother, ever since that operation, Mammy’s been like a child. Do you think her mind’s going to be right again?”

  “She’s probably just got it on some other damn way for Poppa to spend money,” Son said.

  “Listen,” Cecilia said. “Poppa never has had all that money. And wouldn’t have made what he did if Mammy hadn’t pushed him. What would we have now, this house? Anything? if Mammy hadn’t worked. Standing over that stove like she did, to feed other folks and us too. Don’t forget it.” She hushed, hearing Poppa. He came in and said, “That medicine makes her sleep awhile, then she gets up and just roams around all night.”

  “Maybe she needs a new medicine,” Cecilia said.

  “Hell, let her roam,” Son said harshly, his mouth full of corn bread. Suddenly, everything stuck in his throat, them, the food, Lillian and all that had happened. He wanted to be some place drinking whisky and seeing his friends; and how was he going to tell them? A moment, he closed his eyes and all around him in the dark he heard the buzz: Frank’s wife’s left him.

  When he went out to his car he realized for the first time he had to go home alone. Kate had just gotten off the street car and was going down the block, her hair the color of sunlight. He always had liked yellow-headed gals, he thought; her hair came forward in two deep waves over her cheeks. She came closer and it occurred to him that she was nearer his age than Lillian. He put his head out the car window and said, “You want to go to the picture show?”

  “Me?” she said.

  He said, “My wife’s left me. You want to go to the picture show?”

  She said, “Why, I think it would be fun.” She got in the car and he smelled faintly a scent of perfume but something that was even nicer, just the smell of her skin; he thought suddenly of walking down a country road that was sun-baked; she had a line of freckles along either cheekbone and her eyes were as predominately dark as his were blue. She did not ask him any questions at all about Lillian and he was grateful. She said, “This is the latest I’ve ever started out to a picture show. I grew up on a tobacco farm fifteen miles from any town and daddy’s a Baptist and didn’t approve of picture shows. But there wasn’t anybody to take me anyway. I took up teaching to get into town.”

  “You like teaching?” Son said. “Ain’t you afraid of ending up a old maid school teacher?”

  She said, “Better than ending up a farmer’s wife some place the size of a cotton patch. I have twin sisters that both married tobacco farmers. But the only thing in my life I ever wanted was to get away from there. I don’t know why I had to be born there.”

  “What difference does it make? You’re away now,” Son said.

  “There’s so much I never had a chance to learn,” she said. “There’s so much I’ll never do or see.”

  He said, “Well I’ll show you around Delton. Want to go down to the Andrew Johnson on Sunday and eat some lunch.”

  She said, “Oh but everybody goes at night, when there’s candles on the tables and music. I’ve heard about it.”

  He said, “Well I go down there and eat lunch on Sunday. You want to come?”

  Kate sighed and said, “Yes.”

  On Saturday morning, he telephoned Buzz and a couple of others he played cards with regularly and said, “We got to find some place else to play this afternoon. My wife’s walked off and left me and took the furniture!”

  When they got together at Buzz’s several men slapped Son on the back and several kidded him; then they dropped all mention of Lillian, never letting on as long as they knew Son that they saw anything at all of the hurt in those eyes that turned from bright blue to almost white as surely and gradually as their Saturday turned into Sunday morning.

  He stayed home on Monday long enough to have the locks on the doors changed; there were already window guards and he felt safe, leaving. Maybe that was why it hit him harder than ever when he drove in again Friday and found the house broken into. Lillian had taken everything worth anything except their bedroom suite which had been Cally’s. He stood, unable to believe any woman would do what she had done and that it had been done to him, because that was not even all. When he went through the mail there was nothing but bills, bills she had run up the last month before leaving him, one from almost every department store in town for clothes and one for a permanent wave for twenty-five dollars: in all, a thousand dollars’ worth of bills. He saw no way in the world he was ever going to be able to pay them. Mrs. Woolford was next door hanging up wash and he made himself go and ask, embarrassed as he was, if she had seen anybody moving his furniture out. She said, “Yes sir, she came; there was a white man and a couple of Negro boys in a pick-up and they moved things out. They fooled around at the back door a long time till one of those boys got the lock busted. Wednesday it was, I reckon.”

  He did not see Lillian again. But when the divorce came to court her lawyer asked that he pay her thirty dollars a month. Son did not even think about where he was; he just stood up and said, “Judge, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pay that woman a damn cent.” He told his side: how she had broken in and taken the furniture; he showed the bills and told just about how long it was going to take him to pay them off, too. The judge decreed Son did not have to pay anything, beyond the bills. Son had the feeling everybody in court was as disgusted with Lillian as he was. When he came out of the courthouse to a cold icy day, no longer married to Lillian, he thought the sort of thing had been done to him nobody was going to do again. And never again would he be in the position he was in now, owing money to every soandso up and down Main Street; credit offices were already sending threatening letters. He had been working about as hard as he thought a man could work; but he had to work harder. His car was at the curb, his grip packed. He got in, put his foot on the gas pedal and did not take it off until he got to Vicksburg after midnight that night. He had an appointment at six o’clock the next morning with a plantation owner who was thinking of using dynamite for ditching.

  He never saw Lillian again but once in his life, though they lived in the same town always; shortly after the divorce, he was walking down First Street and did not see her until she caught his arm. “What the hell you want?” he said; he thought he hated her but her face and touch made him feel the way he first had felt about her; all he wanted to say was, Lillian, come back: because he wanted her and because only that, her coming back, would heal the hurt inside that was always there, unhealed: having to face himself and others, a man whose wife had left him.

  Lillian said, “You shouldn’t have kept on seeing all those men and drinking so and going off with them on week-ends when you could have been home. It was you who did all the wrong things and your family thinks so too.”

  He had been going to go on, not even listen. He turned. “Who?” he said.

  “Cecilia said you shouldn’t have done all the things you did.” He turned and walked off. Lillian, at that last glimpse thought, He was handsome and he had seemed so young, hurt; her heart wanted to break. She wondered if she had done the right thing. A week later she married Mr. Singer. When it was announced in the paper, Cecilia called Son. It was the first time he had spoken to her since talking to Lillian: repeating the conversation, he said, “I never did expect any member of my family to take somebody else’s side against me.”

  Cecilia drew in her breath sharply. “Brother, Lillian is deliberately trying to make trouble telling you that. She called up one night and talked on and on about what you did that she didn’t like. It was before the divorce. I didn’t know she was even thinking about one. I was just trying to be nice, agreeing with her. She said you stayed out all the time gambling and drinking and I said, ‘No, he certainly shouldn’t do that.’ That’s all I said.”

&nb
sp; But his hurt over Lillian was so deep, he could not forgive Cecilia’s saying even that. Before hanging up, she said, “Do you do all that drinking Lillian says you do?”

  He said, “I have to drink with my customers. That’s the kind of business it is.”

  She said, “Well, I’d certainly get into some other kind of business. Mammy doesn’t even know you drink at all.”

  Hanging up, he thought that was the last he wanted of Cecilia trying to run his business. She thought just the way she would have if she were still in Mill’s Landing, small town and country; he could not feel the same about Cecilia and when she told him she was going to get married all he could say was, “Is that so?” He thought it didn’t matter what he said because there’d never be but one way he’d feel about somebody who wasn’t one marrying a Catholic. He said to Poppa, “What in the world did she want to go and fall in love with a Catholic for?” But Cally and Poppa felt it was better than if she married someone not religious at all; and they said Joseph Kelley was a nice boy from a good home and had a good job. Next, Son heard Cecilia was going to become a Catholic and said, “Whew.” He did not know a thing in the world about the Catholic religion except that you were supposed to have a lot of babies; but it was strange to him, out of the ordinary, different.

  A few weeks before the wedding Cally disappeared. Son was down in Tunica doing some clearing for a man when Poppa telephoned to tell him. She had been gone when he and Cecilia woke up; it was almost suppertime and she had not come back. Son started home and walked in about eight to hear Cally had called. She had gone to Memorial Hospital for a thorough check-up and had been waiting all day for lab reports. She was ready to come home. They were all without patience and Son said, “Call her back and tell her she wanted to go to the hospital, get a room and stay there. I’m not going anywhere else in that car tonight.”

  Poppa phoned. Despite Cally’s protest, he arranged for her to stay all night. After supper he showed Son the batch of bills she had run up going from doctor to doctor and the medicine shelves of drug stores. The only way they saw out of it was to put a notice in the paper they were no longer responsible for her debts. The next morning Son phoned the newspaper and afterward brought Cally home. Then he went on back to Tunica. He had met a gal down there named May who reminded him of Betty Sue, only she was a lot younger. She was just a little old farm gal without any kind of education at all. But she sure was sweet talking, he told Poppa. Poppa said, “What about Kate?”

  “She’s sweet talking too,” Son said. “I been seeing her every week-end.”

  He had taken over the payments on Poppa’s house; he would live there when he was in town and hire a good Negro woman to come by the day. He had rented his house and would move when Cecilia married. That was in spring, unbelievable May, the dogwoods starry white blossoms against the soft and bright blue sky. And something else happened then, he and others in the valley had waited for so long. During all the long months of controversy many men Son knew had been going back and forth to Washington, appearing before committees, pleading for Federal flood control. Son guessed he would never forget the date Congress passed what those along the river called “The Flood Emancipation Act of the Mississippi Valley”; in Washington, “The Jadwin Plan”: May 15, 1928. The government had committed itself to a definite program; flood control now was almost entirely under the direction of the United States Engineers. That morning, Son drove across the river to the Engineers office; people would gather all day, talking. “Right here in this valley,” one of the Engineers said, “they going to spend three hundred and twenty-five million dollars in ten years.”

  “Whew,” Son said. “I ought to be able to sell somebody some powder.”

  “Dynamite, you going to have plenty of chances to try,” an Engineer said; coming in, he brought a map. They bent over it. “The majority of the work’s going to be right here where we are. They going to fix levees from Cape Girardeau down yonder to Head of Passes, Louisiana, in the old St. Francis River Valley in Missouri and Arkansas, build an emergency reservoir at the mouth of the White, dams and reservoirs to protect the Yazoo Delta in Mississippi.”

  “Hell, that’s enough to keep you busy ten years,” Son said. “What about all those floodways.”

  “Five in all,” someone said.

  An Engineer pointed on the map. “The first one’s going to be up here on the west side of the river between Birds Point and New Madrid, Missouri, to protect Cairo. It’ll reduce flood heights the levees in this stretch of the river are liable to be subject to. If you get a real high flood stage like we just had, the flood waters going to enter the floodway through what they call fuse plugs: and the water will go back into the river again, just here, above New Madrid.”

  “They figured the floodways to carry an amount of water twenty per cent greater than this flood we just had, in ’27,” another man said.

  It sounded safe, Son thought. Everyone was satisfied; no local contribution to these projects was required; local interests were to provide the necessary rights of way and maintain the works when completed. Son drove back across the river that May day feeling a lot was about to happen. Later, he saw Buzz who said, “No stopping us now, boy.” All up and down the river people talked of the work to come and of being millionaires. But Son wondered how they expected to get rich and spend the way they did too. In the Delta, even more so in the hill country, he saw farmers who were hurting: bad, he said. It was a bad year for the weevil and though poison was cheap, the farmers did not seem to be able to get ahead. People warned the construction boom was over but since it was not the kind of construction concerning Son or his friends they paid little attention. All that spring and summer Son travelled hard and was beginning to pull ahead; by the end of the summer he had the department store bills almost paid off; another six months and he would be free. Never again would anyone be able to threaten to take him to court for not paying a bill, by God. And by fall, he was lonesome. He decided to buy May a pair of teddies, all soft and shiny, you could see through; five bucks, he said; he showed them around first and took a lot of kidding, but he liked to tell afterward that they had tickled that little country gal to pieces. But somehow, afterward, he felt even more lonesome; maybe he did not want a girl he could give a pair of teddies to after all. When he was away, he had begun to think about Kate. He had gotten use to her being taller than he liked a woman to be; and he had decided she was even prettier than Lillian; the more he thought about her, he decided Kate was one of the prettiest girls he had ever known and she was thin; he never had liked a woman with too much meat on her. One thing, there wasn’t any time Kate wasn’t ready to pick up and go, go anywhere; though, like Lillian, she was all the time wanting to dance.

  That fall, he was able to buy another little piece of stock, some A.T.&T.; it seemed like a good steady thing to him and that was what he was interested in, growth, not getting rich quick. He wanted something to retire on. Stock was expensive but everything seemed to be going nowhere but up. Other fellows kidded him about the kind of safe investments he made. Everyone else was taking flyers, held on to things about as long as a feather in a fire. Buying and selling, that was all anyone talked about, and getting rich quick. He took out waitresses in a couple of little towns and even they were talking about getting rich quick; he tried to tell them they better hold on to some of their money, but no one listened. Others traded, but he was sitting on what he had.

  And then that fall day—he didn’t know why it was such a pretty day but it was one of the prettiest he could ever remember—he was walking down a side street and there was an office on the ground floor of one of the buildings, the kind that had a new business located there every few months and even so, he stopped and looked at a big ad in the window about buying land down in Coral Gables, Florida, cheap. Next to it was another ad about buying shares in a gold mine in Colorado: Bull Dog Gold Mine, Handy, Colorado; he figured that probably wasn’t far from where he’d worked in the timber outfit when he was a bo
y; maybe that was what sold him. He believed if you could get rich quick it would be through finding oil or gold. Before he could stop himself, he went in and gave the man a check for five shares, about the same as buying his two of A.T.&T. Then he walked back out into that glorious fall day, crisp as apples, and even the buildings and sidewalks shone in the sun and if he didn’t feel like something, walking down Main, owning shares in a gold mine!

  He went straight to the bank and put the certificate in his lock box. He wasn’t even going to tell the boys; he wasn’t going to tell anybody. He was just going to let his ship come in.

  Later on he did something else he had never expected to do, voted for a Republican. He just could not bring himself to vote for any Catholic, even though Mr. Al Smith’s running mate was from right here in this part of the country, Arkansas, and he knew some of his people. Casting his vote, he hoped this Hoover fellow knew what he was talking about. If so, it looked like gravy from here on out, all gravy. But he sure needed to hep the farmers like he promised, Son said. When the election was over he took Kate down to the Andrew Johnson for dinner, at night, so she could get it out of her system about eating by candlelight and listening to some fellow scratch around on a violin; he said he hoped her pain was easy because he couldn’t see a damn thing he was eating and this was the last time he was going to eat in the dark. He travelled often to places like Vicksburg, Little Rock, Helena and he had begun to eat in the best places everywhere. He had learned when walking into these fancy ho-tel dining rooms to give the Captain a little something to get a better table. He liked to be able to order anything on the menu he wanted and to think back to the time when he couldn’t. But usually he had a well-done steak and this Sunday Kate said, “Why don’t you ever order anything different? Something you can’t have at home.”

  “I like steak,” he said. “But I’m going to have to have me a dozen of these oysters on the half-shell,” he told the waiter. Then he sat back, pleased; he was glad that he knew about oysters and liked to eat them; he knew by the expression on Kate’s face she was not sure exactly what they were; he talked her into ordering some. He had learned about seafood on a trip with Buzz to Biloxi, “the Miss’sippi Rivy-era,” Buzz called it. On the way down they had bought whisky from an old man who kept his jugs wrapped in gunny sacks and hidden in the Pearl River, and for a week that’s what they had done, drunk whisky, gambled and eaten things he had never eaten before, shrimps, lobster, oysters. Unexpectedly he had sold half a car load of dynamite to the man he had gone along with Buzz to see; that topped off everything. He told Kate about it now, watching as she ate her oysters, swearing she liked them. But he could tell she did not from the way her eyes popped and turned almost the same wettish grey color as the oyster when she swallowed; she ate them because tobacco farmers she knew did not. Son said the next thing he wanted to do was drive on down the Rivy-era and see what New Orleans itself was like. Buzz had told about gal shows in the French Quarter he’d like to see himself. Suddenly he thought of doing everything alone and knew he did not want to. He said through the candlelight, “How about us getting married and going down yonder and seeing all those things on a honeymoon.”