Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  “Hell, I’m just the peckerwood that peddles the dynamite. I don’t ask a customer what he wants it for,” Son said. They laughed later telling Buzz how the men came in the muddy Arkansas car, acted strange, paid cash in small change, and bought just enough dynamite to blow up the stretch of levee blown up over in Mississippi County, Arkansas, Sunday night. Water flooding property on one side of the river now flooded it on the opposite side below. It was a pattern repeated all winter and spring, even to the wadded-up bills and the change being spread out over his desk. He and Holston, having sold dynamite, would race to the paper the following morning to see where a piece of levee had been blown. The only time Son worried was the Sunday Mr. Ryder called at two A.M. saying two car loads of men at his house wanted ten boxes of dynamite. “Five hundred pounds a lot of powder,” Son said. “They’ve got rifles and pistols,” Mr. Ryder said. “Hell, if they want it that bad, sell it,” Son said. Later, Mr. Ryder brought him the money, in two envelopes, even pennies, and dollar bills so old they were cracked and waxed-looking as if somebody had broken into what they had been saving a long time. The next day, Son thought that was a blast he’d like to have seen. A thousand sandbags piled on one side of a small intrastate river in Mississippi had caused flooding below but would no more.

  In April, it was still raining. He and Kate went to Cecilia’s for Easter. Kate had given Cally a new dress; sky-blue, the color of your eyes, she said, and Cally was pleased. She sat at her dressing table in the room she shared with her granddaughter. Cecilia had bought her a flowered straw hat and they left Cally dressing to help Laurel and little Cecilia find Easter eggs, hidden in the living room because of rain. When they were found, Son went to get Cally, having promised her a drive. “Mammy!” he said and could say no more. He turned around, calling Kate and Cecilia. “Mammy, why did you mess yourself up like that?” Cecilia said coming in. Cally turned toward them the face Son had seen, stark white, heavily and completely smeared with cold cream. “Mad because we didn’t pay attention to her,” Kate said. “Mammy, we were coming right back.”

  When Kate went back to the living room, Son had on his coat. He said, “I can’t fool with her. I’ll do everything in the world for her, but that.”

  Rain continued over most of the country. Floods were everywhere. In the northeast heavy snows, melting, added to them and the Delton paper predicted 1936 would rank as one of the major flood years of the twentieth century. Son guessed it was the time he felt sorriest in his life for Cally when they put her into the ground with water standing over it. He had a horror of water seeping in on him, dead.

  After Christmas she had had a stroke and required constant care. The day they left the cemetery leaving her behind, he said, “I shouldn’t say it, but this is the biggest relief in the world to us all.” Kate said, “Why Frank, it’s your mother.” He did not say anything else; but he couldn’t help the way he had felt; she had made him so nervous he just couldn’t be in the room with her. More and more Cally had flown into rages, whipped her cane toward people who did not do what she wanted. She just wants to get her way to the end, he had said. Kate said, Everybody has to do what you want; you don’t get along because you’re just like her.

  Cally never did rest, he saw that; at the end she was still worried, had a new idea every time he saw her about how he could help Joe make money, wanted him to take Joe into his business. Kate said, Humor her. But he couldn’t; he just had to walk away. One night she called Kate to say the Sisters had stolen everything nice she had. She had to have a new nightgown, blue satin with brown lace. Kate searched every store. When she and Laurel arrived with the package, Cecilia had discovered Cally would never wake up from her nap. They buried her in the nightgown.

  Son did not know how Cecilia, with two girls now and all she had to put up with, could be as broken up as she was; he got tired of her telling him Cally could not help the way she had been, that her mind had been affected by the last operations.

  He had had a long drive home when Cally died and was tired. After the funeral he had a few drinks. Kate said, “Wait now,” and hurried supper; but he did not want any. He just wanted to drink some whisky and sleep. He might not have wanted to be around her, he thought, but he had bought her everything in the world she needed; that was something he could do. Always he had known he would have to bury her and Poppa both; it was one reason he’d had to work as hard as he did; another was because nobody was going to take care of him, if he didn’t. He had bought them good caskets to keep out rain. For a hundred dollars apiece, he had bought five lots in a cemetery opening up on the edge of town; he did not want Poppa left up yonder in Vicksville alone and would move him as soon as possible. The three other lots were for himself, Kate, Laurel. That was one worry off his mind. Still he could not sleep.

  He remembered the dark muddy ground opened up beneath the grey January day, the flowers arriving bright and fresh and quickly ruined, the colors of the ribbons running in the misty day. He got up and went into the dark house, stumbled his way until he found a light. Kate was sleeping with Laurel. In the doorway, he said, “I feel sorry for Mammy all alone out there in the rain.”

  Kate said, “Frank, it’s two o’clock in the morning. Go back to bed.”

  He said, “Don’t you?”

  She said, “You’ve waked Laurel. She’s afraid.”

  “Well, she’ll get over it before she’s married twice,” he said and went back to bed. What the hell did either of them have to be afraid about? They had somebody putting a roof over their heads. Hell, there ought to be somebody to talk to. He thought of old Winston Taylor; he sure ’nough could drink up whisky. Suddenly he called out “Will—Ohhh, Mister Will!”

  “Frank, will you hush,” Kate said from the doorway. He told her what she could do with herself. She went away saying, “Why do you come home. I wish you’d just stay gone.”

  He called, “Why don’t you get out?’

  “Because you wouldn’t let another woman leave you, and you know it,” she said. “But I feel sorry for Laurel.” She shut the door.

  In the morning, he would have left town, gone down to see old Winston, but he could not. He had to have another drink: could not make it. He had to have some more. He kept on until he was sick and weak as a kitten. Then one morning he got up and got dressed, ate what he could and went to the office. Buzz and Holston were there. Having no pretenses all his life, Son walked in and said, “What’s been going on while I was laid up drunk a week?”

  “Rain,” Holston said.

  Buzz told how it was; he had just come back from up yonder. Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky. The Ohio River its whole length, Pittsburgh to Cairo, was at flood stage and the crest not in sight. All that water was pouring into the Mississippi, already bursting its seams. Son thought of old Red’s long-ago warning: some day all rivers might flood at the same time. Jesus, he thought, suppose the time is now?

  Above and below Delton every river in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi was swelling the big river. It was a test of the work he, Will, and the contractors had been concentrating on the past ten years. The past six, Will, others had been constructing cut-offs in the middle reach of the Mississippi to speed flood waters to the Gulf. If they work, Will had told Son, it’s a whole new phase in flood control engineering. If they don’t, it’ll prove true what the most engineers have believed for two hundred years. Cut-offs are the worse way possible to treat flood control.

  The uncompleted levees along the Mississippi had so far held the water; the Ohio was the threat. Opposite Cairo, where the two rivers came together, the fuse plug levee had been built on the Missouri side. From the time when it had been commissioned, under the act in 1928, Son had tried to make sure he understood it. When water reached a certain height, the plugs would be released; water, let out, would cover a floodway behind the levee; the Mississippi would be lowered. He said, “Suppose they ever release the plugs in that levee below Cairo. What’ll happen to the folks living in the floodway?”
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  “They got to get out. The Government bought the land but it’s rich and folks stayed, hoping it’d never have to be used as a floodway,” Buzz said. “But folks up that way are running like jack rabbits from high water. I drove up to one filling station and the owner was boarding her up. Said he had to get his mother-in-law to high ground. Then his family come out the back of the station where they lived, all dressed up. Turned out they was stewing about getting the old lady to high ground to bury her!”

  It was Saturday and Son went home early; the paper boy had just thrown the afternoon paper. Plucking it from the shrubbery Son went inside reading. Sixty were known dead in the flood and fifty thousand were homeless. At the Kentucky State Reformatory fifteen convicts were killed rioting when water seeped into their cell blocks, but they were not counted as flood victims.

  He entered the house, sheepish about that week at home. After supper he said he would take Laurel and Kate to the picture show. What did they want to see?

  “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” Kate said.

  “What’s that all about?” he said.

  “Jean Arthur’s in it, Daddy,” Laurel said.

  “Hell, get your hat,” he said.

  It had rained, as near as he could figure, for twenty-nine days and nights. In his seventy-five years, Samuel Beggs could not remember so much rain. Now, here toward the end of January, it had begun to snow and sleet; he told everyone neither could he remember a Missouri winter so cold. But it was no usual winter; floods were everywhere. The Ohio, just down the road, over the levee, threatened them all. He could not remember when that river had acted so bad and it pleased him he had so much to remember.

  The wind drove sleet like needles, but he looked ahead at a small cemetery neatly defined into a square by four white posts at its corners. From the road, three steps of the same white stone led up to it. Carved into the top riser, in the script Pap had wanted, was their name: BEGGS. TO read the gravestones was a story Samuel often read to himself. His Pap and Mam lay under one large stone, Amos and Mary; their dates could barely be read. Pap had settled here, worked his way from the east to Cincinnati, stayed briefly, then moved to Cairo; but the rich land in the shadow of the Mississippi and Ohio drew him across the river, into Missouri. He bought fifty acres cheap and later fifty more. Now the Beggs’ owned close to a thousand.

  Beside the large white stone were four small ones, straight, like soldiers’ graves; Infant Daughter, Infant Son … He, Samuel, had been the only one of five children of Amos and Mary to survive. That, he believed, had taken Pap and Mam both to early graves. His own first child lay here, born dead; beside it the mother who had not lived much longer. He had known Sally so short a time, he remembered her most as the girl he had courted. Next to her plot was his; beyond that lay Mary Lee, a second wife fifteen years younger whom he had not expected to outlive. Burying her five years ago, Samuel had knelt, praying not to outlive any more of his own people.

  His past was in the cemetery, his future down the road from where he had just come. Before he left the neat house there, his three grandsons had clamored to ride Huck. Aggie, his daughter-in-law, had said, Not in this weather! Grandpap, you don’t have any business out in it either. He and the boys had been disappointed but he had said, Mind your Mam, and rode away sitting straight, knowing they watched. In the barn his son had been pitching hay and waved; he gave the boy a salute in return. From the road, he looked on one side at his cattle huddled, gazing out of faces that were frosty. On the other side were acres of fruit trees carefully pruned, branched against the grey-white sky as if etched in charcoal. When flood danger was over, Samuel thought, he, his son, the boys had to think of fertilizing. His face was full of sleet but he rode thinking of spring when he and Huck roamed his acreage. In far fields he never saw in winter he put cotton, corn and beans. His family urged: Pap, get you a little secondhand car and oversee everything comfortable.

  He said, Old folks don’t have any business out driving automobiles. He might make a mistake; Huck wouldn’t.

  This year his son had said Huck might not be able to help slipping on the road. But Samuel had said they had to get outdoors. He had been told snow on the levee was a foot deep but here in the floodway behind the levee, he did not believe it was so high. He and Huck went slowly; the roads were slippery but also the wind was unbearably cold, going fast. Passing the cemetery he had looked through frozen eyelashes as if through tears. Huck snorted; his breath shot ahead like the puffs of a cannon; his hoofs went delicately as if to avoid contact with the frozen road. The animal needed no rein, turned opposite into the driveway, toward the house where the wide front verandah overlooked the cemetery and the orchard around it. Often he sat on his big porch, overlooking his people and his land. When he was buried, his son would have the house; they would have to build two more. There was plenty of land and plenty of Beggs’ to work it, and that was a piece of satisfaction to a old man, Samuel thought, arriving home.

  It was that moment the airplane became visible. He was aware then he had heard it for some time, like a giant mosquito in the clouds, annoying the quiet. It seemed insect-sized, came out of the east, dipped a wing and flew so close his heart caught; he thought it would crash. Equal to that astonishment was his difficulty in handling his own horse; for the first time ever, Huck tried to rear. The airplane righted, flew off over his roof, leaving in the air a flurry as thick as snow of falling white papers. Nothing else moved, only the falling papers and the plane itself circling in the distance to fly over his son’s house. Dismounting, Samuel picked up a paper. Without his reading glasses, he could make out only the large heading: WARNING. His hand trembled holding the paper and he led the horse to the barn. As he had expected, when he returned, the telephone was ringing. He wasn’t going to answer any more than he was going to read that paper, he thought. Not even realizing it, he had crumpled the paper but could not make himself throw it away. All over his yard they lay, mud-splattered, wet, or blowing away in the wind. He had had on his mind a whole lot to tell and now here was another thing, if he just knew who to tell. Somebody ought to know it was against the law to fly over folks’ property dropping trash.

  The telephone rang off and on. He did not answer, knowing his son would come when his chores were done. He was eating a little bit of early supper when the car stopped outside. He listened with pleasure to the familiar footsteps crossing the old wooden porch. He was eating when his son came in. “Pap, we got to go this time. They been fair, waited as long as they could. They let us keep them from it twice. This time is it,” his son said, nodding toward the crumpled paper, not knowing it was unread.

  Samuel broke corn bread into his glass of buttermilk and ate it with a spoon. His son sat opposite. He had not turned on lights when he came from the barn; they saw one another by the late grey twilight where snow twirled. Samuel’s eyes watered, fixing on his boy, veins were apparent. The son thought, Pap’s old and I’m not young enough to start over again either. He ran a hand over a face warm despite the day saying he just wondered how things would turn out.

  Samuel said, “Whose fault is this? Who’s to blame?”

  His son said, “Nobody. Unless you want to call the Ohio rising God’s fault.”

  “No, I ain’t blaming nothing on God,” Samuel said.

  “Well then,” the boy said.

  “You eat supper?” Samuel said.

  “Aggie’s waiting it on me,” the son said.

  “Well I ain’t going,” Samuel said.

  “You got to or be flooded out,” the son said. “And neither me or the U.S. Engineers are fixing to let that happen. We got to fill the wagon and the car and the truck, drive what cattle we can and hope to keep them. People been driving cattle over the levee all week and leaving them.” Out the back window, squinting, they could make out the dark shape of the secondline levee. Between it and the frontline one, along the Mississippi itself, was a narrow flat area with a few houses and a general store.

  Samuel clattered h
is spoon into his empty glass. “It’s somebody’s fault,” he said. “Who decided? Mr. Roosevelt?” If so, disappointed in the man, he regretted the two times he had cast votes for him.

  “The Engineers in Cairo decided,” the son said. “And they take orders from Delton. Not anybody you know decided.” He said he had to go home and eat supper and start packing. Pap would have to go, he thought, if they had to chloroform him.

  They went out on the porch and saw the first, going: some were headed to Cairo, some to Kentucky, but most to camp on the narrow strip of land between the Mississippi and the secondline levee.

  “They going so soon?” Samuel said.

  “Soon!” his son said. “It’s the next day or so.”

  Then Samuel sat down like something the air had been let out of, knowing he was not going. Next month, maybe even next week, but not in the next day or two. You don’t pick up and move off the land you had lived on always that quick, he said.

  “Pap, it ain’t quick,” his son said. “They been talking about dynamiting the levee, letting the water in the floodway, almost since this time last Saturday. Some folks left then. We decided to wait and see, now we seen.”

  “They’ll never do it,” Samuel said.

  “Nobody believed they would,” the son said.

  Cold, Samuel knew the boy was cold too but he could not stop watching his neighbors turn their heads and wave as they passed, leaving. He thought of when the Government had bought the land as a floodway, paid everyone a hundred and twenty-five dollars an acre. Mary Lee had said maybe they ought to leave then, like a lot of folks. Leave! he had said. He wouldn’t sign anything; the Government condemned his land and paid him anyway. But he, nobody, had believed these ten years the Government would ever flood them out, no matter what the Mississippi River did. He said, “We held ’em off twice,” and thought how they must have looked, a straggly bunch of farmers carrying anything that would shoot, wearing any kind of clothes to keep warm enough, marching toward the levee. The National Guard turned them back. But the local man going to shoot the dynamite had been afraid to and hardly anyone had left the floodway. He said again, “We held ’em off twice.”