Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  He repeated, lined up the sticks, and Tangle-eye followed making holes, filling them with dynamite. With one main blast the trees were cleared as Will wanted; the screen of water and debris rose, five hundred feet in length, leaving no spoil bank, nothing to be cleared up afterward. In his wet clothes, Son stood looking at the cleared place where eventually the barge would land; every job, he thought, was exciting, big and little; you never knew just exactly whether it was going to work or not. When it did, you alone had done it; it made a man feel proud to have done something he set out to do. Now why couldn’t he shoot in a field under water? He bet himself he could make a ditch just as purty and straight as a dragline could do.

  “Mister Boss, could we have us those empty dynamite boxes?”

  “Sure,” he said to the Negro women who asked. “You going to split you up some kindling?”

  “Naw sir, we uses them as tables and stools in the tents.” The women went away carrying the boxes. Son and Will followed them to camp. It was pay day and they had to push through a crowd of Negroes to enter the commissary. Carter sat behind a table full of pay envelopes, a forty-five prominently displayed; Will told Son they had it there always, to avoid lip-trouble as well as any other kind. Rent was fifty cents a week for a single tent, a dollar for a family’s; most of the Negroes borrowed money to live on during shut-down time, mid-December to the end of January; what they owed was taken out of their pay a little each week. Son wondered if they had anything left. Will said, “They’ll all be here at the beginning of the week to borrow some more. They like owing you money, you know. It makes a Negro feel he’s got the best of you. If they run off owing you money, they really think they’re even then.”

  As soon as the men got their pay, the women were waiting to spend it. They bought groceries, needed things, and as many luxuries as they could. Martha seemed to be trying to wait on everyone at once. Wine at a dollar a gallon went quickly. She glanced up once and said to Son, “Tell those boys not to drink up all that wine out there on my porch.” Son repeated the message and the one passing the jug laughed. “Come on here, Sweet Thing,” he said. The couple started away but Son saw Sweet Thing, and several other women stop, lift their skirts, and deposit money in the flat stomach pouches they wore suspended from a string about their waists. The women were in their brightest clothes and smelled of perfumes too enthusiastically imitating gardenias or violets. Couples headed out of camp in old wagons and cars; some walked the levee route, as in the old days, when the river bank was the shortest way anywhere, a place of meeting and one of promenade.

  When Son went back inside, Martha, waiting on a middle-aged woman, said, “Sis Woman, don’t go spending all your California money on the conjure woman again this week.”

  “No’m, I’m just going to try one more bottle of pills,” Sis Woman said.

  “I’m telling you there’s not any pills going to get Tangle-eye to marry you,” Martha said; she looked at Son. “Sis Woman’s been trying to save enough money to visit her family in California as long as I can remember and keeps spending it on foolishness every week.”

  “No’m, this the last time, Old Miss,” Sis Woman said, going out. When the commissary emptied, Martha told Son to walk down to the dining tent with her; from there he could see the conjure woman. In the middle of the Negro section a large black Packard was parked. Beside it stood a Negro man in chauffeur’s cap and whipcord leggings. In the back seat a woman sat, barely high enough for Son to see; she was a light-skinned and freckled Negro, with cheeks naturally pink, and a nose more like an Indian’s; she wore a purple turban and a gold rope twisted about her neck, higher and higher, ending in a snake’s head with ruby-seeming eyes. Negroes were crowded about the car. Martha said they came to tell her their troubles; she sold them cures: charms to tie around a sick baby’s stomach and make it well, pills to bring back a lover, little sacks of herbs, tiny pieces of wood nailed into strange shapes. Her specialty the Negroes called aspidistry bags: a small leather pouch of herbs to wear nestled against the throat hollow to keep away disease; and the conjure woman sold almanacs.

  The day had promised rain and now there was a phosphorescent yellow-green glow to everything; mimosa trees shook as the wind rose, smelling of cool and dust. As Martha and Son went in to supper lightning blinked twice, the wind changed, and the rain came closer. “Huh,” Emmie said; they stopped at the kitchen door. “That’s the Lord for sho. You see yonder, Miss Martha. He sees Rosalita.” Son had already asked about the line of men reaching half across the Negro camp; Rosalita, Martha said, was half-Spanish; every year she came back to live in camp with someone different; but on pay night she ran her own little business: twenty-five cents for a man to enter her tent.

  Son said, “Emmie, who you fixing to shoot?”

  “Anybody tries to steal from me, Mister Frank,” she said. She told of her own pay night business; she sold homemade ice cream and sandwiches. On top of the freezer, Emmie had a revolver and now covered it with a clean dish towel. At supper, Martha said Emmie would shoot it too. From her business she collected at least a hundred dollars every week in small change, brought it to Will in a galvanized pail. He took it to the bank for her and exchanged it, at her insistence, for a hundred-dollar bill. She hid her money, trusted the revolver more than the bank, Martha said. Son liked these levee Negroes who worked and saved their money. Going out of the dining tent, he stopped and said to Emmie, “I’d like to hep you out selling them sandwiches. Wrap me up some.”

  Carrying them, going up the path to his tent, he could hear the Negroes laughing, calling among themselves, could hear their music, half-wailed and all about love: good or bad, true or false, jealous lovers, unfaithful women, hard times, the singer thought in the end to have had his baby at all was worth it. Son fell asleep listening to the singing and woke once to hear it raining hard.

  Morning was not clear. If it rained again, he thought, he’d never get that little buggy of his out of camp. Having packed his grip, he went out. Carter called from the commissary: everyone had eaten and gone to the levee; tractor turned up a body. An old skeleton, Son thought. The levee had long been a place where Negroes and whites hid crimes: in the old days, Son knew, bodies were shovelled under twenty-five yards of dirt and never even reported.

  At the levee, he made his way through the Negroes and unexpectedly saw the Negro, killed the night before. “Arkansas toothpick done that all right,” Will said as Son came up. With a switchblade knife, the boy’s throat had been slit from side to side. Above the terrible fresh wound was an old one, a necklace of healed cuts, raised bumps linked into one another like a chain. The sight made Son sick; to his surprise so did the thought of murder. All that singing going on while the boy was killed, buried alone out here in the rain and dark. Will was calm, steady before the Negroes; there was no time for grief. “Get back to work,” he said. Son stuck trembling hands in his pockets; there was nowhere to look except at the body being stretched out on Skinner’s tractor, at Greaser covering it with two crocker sacks. “Get back to work,” Will said. Skinner turned the tractor toward camp; Cotton hopped on, would call the law. As terrible as the boy looked, Son, the others looked at him again. Tied to one exposed ankle was his dobie bag, a religious good luck medal; it hadn’t done that boy much good, Son thought, but saw several of the other Negroes touch their own.

  The familiar activity started; the tractors droned, the Negroes shouted, laughed; dirt was dug, hauled, dumped. Son walked to where Will stood giving directions. They shook hands, made a date for Son to come again and to play bridge in Delton soon with Martha and Kate. “Hope everything works out all right,” he said.

  Will said, “Formality. The law don’t care what happens out here as long as my Negroes behave in town.”

  “I’ll be seeing you then,” Son said. He could not eat breakfast and went to his tent. As he started up the steps something moved beneath his foot; he jumped back as a moccasin slithered into the grass, dark beneath the tent. Inside he sat down
still shaky, still feeling sick, told himself to laugh instead. He remembered Will saying you couldn’t show fear of Negroes. Out here you couldn’t show fear of anything. Kate was all the time saying he thought it was smart to be tough. You had to be, like everybody, to get along. He’d found that out in a hurry. Carrying his grip, he went to the car and drove away as rain began, fought that car out of camp, slipping in the muddy ruts, and laughed telling himself, if the snake had a bit him, if he had swole up and died, another dynamite peddler would have come along, same as on the levee they went on without that boy; he heard the tractors in the distance. You had to keep ahead. And it seemed there was always something following him.

  That night he slept desperately. But all night Kate kept getting up, saying the baby was coughing. He said the baby would be there in the morning; didn’t she understand about a man’s rest? She kept on until he finally got up and tried to shut her mouth; he fell back to bed and she was still talking about him being the meanest man she’d ever seen; why did he come home? In the morning he asked why she had had the whisky out. She said a drink helped her to sleep. He said she better leave that stuff alone.

  At the office, telling about the murder, he told mostly how the boy’s pockets had been picked clean and his gold tooth gone. He, Holston and Buzz had a good laugh. He would tell them another thing, American Powder Company was going to give him a heavier car: he’d fought that little buggy out of camp like a baby mule that never had a bridle on.

  It was a month before a representative from the company came south: then Son told him. The man said, “Our salesmen always have Fords, Mr. Wynn.”

  Son said, “I go places those other fellows couldn’t dream up in a nightmare. Pushing that little car’s too much like work. I’m in it a week at a time, sometimes more. I need something with more comfort and heavy, like a Buick. Something that when I say Scat, can scat.”

  “You’ll have to drive a Ford,” the man said. “Our other salesmen all have Fords. This isn’t a time when the company can buy new cars, much less Buicks.”

  He was sitting on a straight chair in Son’s office. Son was tilted back behind his desk in a swivel chair, his feet up. He looked at the man a long time out of eyes that narrowed. Slowly, he took his feet down, leaned forward to reach into his pocket, then threw the keys across the desk. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the man should take them.

  The representative stood up, trying to laugh. “Now, Mr. Wynn,” he said. “You’re not going to quit.”

  “Naw,” Son said. “I already have.”

  “Hot-head, you ain’t got sense God give a flea,” Buzz said when he heard. “This is a depression. Folks are out looking for jobs, not quitting good ones.”

  Kate cried, said they would be out selling apples too. Nobody in their right mind would quit their job to start their own business in the middle of a depression; was he crazy, like his mother?

  You leave her out of this, Son said. The Sisters would no longer keep Cally; in a rage, she had flown at one of them brandishing her cane. Cecilia had a little girl, the house would be crowded, but she would take Cally. Son would pay her what he had paid the Sisters. Furious when her cane was taken, Cally had cut off her hair in a straight line around the top of her ears. Kate had knit a soft angora cap for Laurel; now she made one for Cally. All that winter she wore it, sitting on the edge of the front seat while Cecilia drove her around town. Cecilia said, I just get up in the morning, fill the tank with gasoline, and ride until it’s empty. On the back seat little Cecilia sat patiently, her baby legs sticking straight before her. By spring, Cally’s hair had grown, fuzzy and new, like a chick’s. By summer Cecilia could comb it into the knot Cally had always worn. And by summer the sign across one half of Son’s office read, Frank Wynn Incorporated. Inside on the door were the words, Representative, Illinois Powder Company. The afternoon he quit American, he had made an appointment with Illinois and went to Chicago two days later. Having learned you’d never make any money working for the other fellow, from here on out, he said, he was working for himself.

  Illinois was a small company; he had picked it purposefully; they didn’t have so much to lose, taking a chance on him. He was going to have his own company but he would sell Illinois’s blasting supplies. In Chicago they said no other dynamite salesman in the country had a set-up like that. He already knew that. But he was going to have that kind. In a few years he would have run every competitor out of his territory too; if Illinois wanted to be the company left in there, take his offer before he took it some place else. Laughing afterward, Son would say, Those Yankees didn’t have any idea in the world who I was walking in there. They thought I was just a country boy until they commenced looking at my sales figures. Before I left there that evening, I had everything signed up just the way I wanted it, just exactly.

  Coming home, he thought it looked as if everything was going to be all right. Mr. Roosevelt, it seemed, was going to straighten the country out too. Over and over, he and the boys celebrated Mr. Roosevelt’s election and never referred to him any other way. Not even at the height of revelry did they say FDR or Franklin. He was Mr. Roosevelt to the day of his death and beyond. Kate said it hadn’t done any good for her to complain but, finally, all the wives were tired of Mr. Roosevelt being re-elected every Friday and Saturday night month after month. After one party, gigantic and final, Son staggered home saying, Well we shore elected Mr. Roosevelt. I shore hope the man appreciates it.

  During the winter lay-off, when everyone was in town, he and the men found other reasons to celebrate: if someone got a job or to cheer up a man who did not. It was during this off season that Son maintained his closest customer contact; there was never any doubt in his mind or anyone else’s that it was then he first began to pull ahead of his competitors. Every few days he went to every hotel in town and checked registers; men constantly checked in and out while their equipment was being overhauled or while trying to stall off creditors. As soon as Son saw a name he knew, he went to see the man, taking a bottle of whisky. As long as a man was in town, Son was ready to play cards, have him out to his house, sit in his hotel room if that was what the man wanted to do, take him out to dinner. To restaurants they had to take their own whisky and Son always said there was no sense lugging it back home; hell, if you couldn’t drink up a fifth in an evening, why drink? No one drank cocktails; they drank to get drunk. Even when Prohibition was over, they drank whisky with something sweet as they had learned to do in the days when they had to kill its taste. Kate said about these years, Son never came home without bringing a bunch of men. She never knew how many people he would bring home to the dinner she had planned for three. And he never once warned her. On the other hand, half the time she had dinner ready and he didn’t show up at all. Several years on his birthday she made a cake but he started celebrating at the office getting older and couldn’t eat by the time he came home, if he came. She had added nothing else to the candy box but one of Laurel’s first shoes. Sometimes, Kate thought, she ought to put in all the scraps of paper with names and phone numbers she found or his shirts and handkerchiefs with lipstick.

  When Son recalled these years, he said way on into ’35 and ’36 folks were still looking for money; he laughed about some of the ways he made it. Probably not many but those along the river ever knew that 1930 was the beginning of a decade in which over the whole country there were more floods and drought than in the preceding hundred years. One Saturday, he was sitting in the office with Holston. It had rained abnormally; that winter and spring every river and creek in Arkansas and Mississippi had been in flood at one time or another. A muddy Arkansas car stopped in front of the office and two men came inside. “What can I do for you?” Son said; they shook hands but he realized they did not give their names. They wore hats pulled in city-fashion over their eyes, but too far; he knew they were farmers. One said, “We want five sticks of dynamite.”

  Only recently, needing to sell dynamite any way he could, had Son broken open cases;
the other salesmen would not, fearing they would never sell it off by the stick. In the shed behind the office, Son kept dynamite, against the law, but he worried more about not accommodating a customer than being arrested; if a customer wanted a few cases, he put them in the trunk of his car and drove them to him, threw the fuse in the back seat, and he wasn’t never going to get out of jail if he got caught either, he said.

  Hoping now for information from the strangers, he said, “I don’t usually sell it but by the case.”

  The man said, “We don’t want to buy but five sticks.”

  Son thought he better not lose even that little sale; if you accommodated a man he might come back for more. He said, “I reckon I could let you have them.”

  “We appreciate it,” the man said. When Son brought the dynamite, wrapped in newspaper, the man paid in cash but in all denominations of change, like church collection. The men went away, having lifted neither their hats nor their eyes. Monday morning, Son came into the office already laughing, seeing Holston reading the paper he had seen at breakfast. “Jesus Christ, Frank,” Holston said. “You reckon if they catch those birds, you’ll be in trouble too?”