Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  In the morning, Will said, “Boy, if you don’t get that hair cut I’m going to get the other niggers to hold you while I get the mule shears and do it.” Tangle-eye, Son, the other Negroes who would help him laughed at the younger one. Then Son said, “I don’t see but one way to do it.” He descended the bank, and as he entered the borrow pit a moccasin with evil eye slid from a log into the muck; he went on, hoping the Negroes had not seen. Ahead of him he pushed an opened box of dynamite; the Negroes, following, did the same. Son called, “Stick one, lay one long.” Plop, his box went ahead in the muck. Like echoes, the boxes of the Negroes made the same sounds, plop, plop, and afterward the sluicing sound of their bodies. “Stick one, lay one long,” Son called again. To the boy behind him, he said, “Seems like you all had some winter here.”

  “Whoo-ee,” the boy said. “This one winter I wished I lived three pairs of pants farther south.”

  Laughing, Son said, “That cold’ll toughen you up now. It’s good for you.”

  At last, like divers rising strangely from the sea, they came out, dripping and muddy. “Stick one, lay one long,” a Negro said. “Whew.” The work went on for days. Son blew a section; it drained; when it was dry enough the tractors moved out dirt. Steadily they droned until Son was ready to shoot and a shout carried warning of danger. “Dynamite!” the Negro nearest Son called; the next in line repeated the single word. “Dynamite!’ went the shout until someone close enough to those on tractors could make them hear; everyone sought shelter before the blast. No matter how many times they had seen it, they felt awe when the dull roar came and the dirt sprang into the air. Every time Son’s heart quickened. He had come a long way since the first time he had come out to Mister Will’s, a peddler, since the time he’d talked him into using dynamite and together they had found ways. The job was done. He was leaving and had walked up to Will on the levee to say goodbye when Sho Nuff, his hat flying, came shouting, “Boss! We out of water, we out of water!”

  Son would remember always that he was already too far behind Will, running, to ever catch up when Sho Nuff stopped shouting. Like shears, Will’s long legs parted and were together, quick as clipping. The pump had quit and the water barrels were almost empty; if the tractors could not run, the job would shut down. Tangle-eye was trying to fix the pump. In rage, Will shouted, “Where’s the water brigade?”

  “I ain’t started one, Cap’n. I been trying to fix the pump,” Tangle-eye said.

  “Barrels going dry while you’re fixing the pump. Get water started into the barrels then fix the pump,” Will said and cursed Tangle-eye again.

  From all directions men came, bringing anything that would hold water. Son, grabbing an empty oil can, joined the line that reached to Indian Lake, shining in the distance. Tangle-eye continued work on the pump and Will, helping, still cursed. At last the pump, having sputtered and died repeatedly, sputtered and caught; a relief as if it had been breath itself that had ceased and then begun. They faced one another, Tangle-eye’s bottom lip protruding. Helplessly, like a chicken beheaded, he fluttered his arms, waist high and down, again and again, slapping his thighs, mute and furious. Will, as equally furious, put his hand flat against Tangle-eye’s bottom lip and pushed it up, flap flap flap, saying, “If you want to cuss me, say it. But don’t stick that lip out at me.”

  Tangle-eye stuck it in, flapped his arms again in frustrated fury and went silently away. After supper Will, Carter and a new salesman, out of Helena, came to Son’s tent to play Pitch. Son said, “Suppose he had cussed you, would you let him?”

  Will said, “I told him he could. I would have had to let him. I reckon he knew better. But I still rather have a Negro cuss me, than stick out that bottom lip.”

  Son disliked the new salesman at first only because his face was covered as thickly with pimples as with prickly heat. Then he asked to see the cards after Carter shuffled. Son and Will said nothing, did not lift their eyes, not for the rest of the game: endured him knowing it was the first and last time. Will won the money and Son and Carter paid, but the salesman, saying he did not have enough cash, gave a check. When he went to his own tent, Will held up the check to tear it in two, saying he didn’t think it was worth the paper it was written on. “I don’t think so either,” Son said, “but I’m not going to let him get away with it. Sell it to me at face value. I’m going into Helena tomorrow, I’ll see if it’s good.” The next afternoon, he went to all the banks in Helena and the man had no account. He drove as a last resort to a little country bank on the edge of town and found it there, scratched out the name of the bank printed on the check and wrote in the correct one and cashed it. He drove on to Helen’s Isle to meet Buzz who was finishing up a job he had been on for months. Buzz was in a box car, overseeing his equipment being loaded on the train; he was staying there to escape the crowd of salesmen waiting for him. They knew he had just been paid off after months of work. “I told one fellow I’d buy some equipment from him if he’d get rid of all them other pests,” Buzz said.

  Son looked out of the box car. “What the hell they doing?” he said. The salesmen, in a circle, were shouting and laughing and looking at something on the ground. Son and Buzz came up and saw it was one of the salesmen, a little fellow from Magnolia, Arkansas, referred to as a hothouse flower; pale and delicate. The salesman whom Buzz had told to get rid of the others had started with the little fellow, telling him to leave or he’d whip him. To the amazement of all, the little fellow stretched out flat on the levee bank. Now the other salesman was walking around trying to make him get up. He circled him one way, then the other, occasionally nudging him with the toe of his shoe. “Get up, Goddamn it!” he shouted.

  “Naw,” the little man said, turning his head to look up, his cheek cradled in one palm. “If I get up you’ll just knock me down.”

  He was still lying there when Son and Buzz started to Delton, laughing. Son guessed they laughed all the way. When he got home his sides ached. He tried to tell Kate about the little fellow, about cashing the man’s check, about Mister Will standing there flapping that Negro’s lip in. She didn’t think any of it was funny; why did he think everything rough so funny? He guessed she didn’t understand either when that fellow whose check he cashed called the next night to say if he ever came in his county again he’d beat him. Son had been in bed reading a detective magazine. He put his feet to the floor and said he could start for Helena again right then. Kate, putting down her knitting, said, “Frank, are you crazy?”

  He said into the phone, “Hell yeah, I like to fight. I’d fight a circle saw if I had the chance. My wife hasn’t even unpacked my grip. Where am I going to meet you? Oh, you want to apologize?” He listened; then he slammed down the phone. “Hell,” he said and got into bed, “he would have to change his mind.”

  Coming in, Laurel said, “Look, Daddy.”

  “What’s that all about?” he said.

  “My first evening dress,” she said. “To play in my piano recital.”

  “Some other damn thing to spend money on,” he said.

  “Why, Frank,” Kate said. “You ought to be ashamed.” She got up and followed Laurel, who had gone. Well when he was twelve years old, he wasn’t thinking up ways to spend money, he was out making some. And he didn’t let up on Kate about bills, even though that summer his long-ago prediction came true; he looked back fifteen years to the night he had made it, sitting alone in that hotel room. For a long time now he thought he had seen it coming. All spring driving into dawn and at dusk up to some little hotel in some burg, he had thought: soon. Often he was so tired he hoped not to see anybody he knew, ate supper alone and went to bed. But coming into big places, Vicksburg, Helena, Little Rock, walking into a lobby, dropping his grip and registering, he always saw a familiar face or was called by a voice he knew, Hey, Dynamite! Many times, tired as he was, he was happy to break a long day’s silence, to have something to listen to besides the radio, even to hear his own voice after hours of disuse, dry with that, with dust
. But he would give nothing for those fifteen years, wanted to remember too the times he had thought he was too tired to make it, could barely drag that grip out of the car and across the hotel lobby or into his own house. There were compensations, travelling out of starry, insect-sounding southern nights and into the warmth of the little lobbies, smelling always of age and old magazines and carpets and polished wood and tobacco-stained old men who passed time greeting strangers; Hidy or Evening, they always said. And to himself he had said, Someday. Lately, he had said, Soon: because there was nowhere he could go they weren’t expecting him, having thought when they thought of dynamite of Dynamite Wynn. If there was any business he wasn’t getting, it must be so small he didn’t even want it, knowing there was not any; he had it all. So that maybe he was not even surprised when, coming into Delton one evening, he stopped by Mr. Ryder’s house and his wife came out in old felt bedroom slippers to greet him and behind her Mr. Ryder stood grinning shyly and said, “I don’t have but the one telephone in my house any more, Mr. Wynn. They taken out the two others today.”

  “You mean I’ve finally run out the big boys too?” he said, simulating surprise.

  Mr. Ryder seemed close to tears as if it were a long climb they had made together. Son stuck his nose into the glass of beer they had given him and for a moment could not look up. Mrs. Ryder said, “Could you take some supper with us, Mr. Wynn?”

  “Much obliged,” he said. “I hope you’ll give me a rain check but I been gone two weeks and I promised to take my wife out when I got home.” They never offered him a second beer; being Baptist, it was the only time Mr. Ryder drank at all. Mrs. Ryder kept two beers, in case Mr. Wynn came; when they were gone, she bought two more. He put down his empty glass and Mr. Ryder followed him to the car. Going out, Son thought back to when Mr. Ryder had met him with a team of mules and how this had been country; now it was part of Delton, just a street of little bungalows and street lamps at intervals; it could have been anywhere. As Delton had spread, he had twice had to move his dynamite magazine farther, by law having to have it so many miles from the city limits. Mr. Ryder bent to the car window; his voice seemed more frail, his eyes again seemed moist. Son thought the beer might have gotten to the old man, but he put his hand through the window and said, “Mr. Wynn, you been a fine fair man to work for all these years.”

  Son took his hand and himself felt the need to swallow. “Hell,” he said. “If you’d a got shot up in Cai-ro, I might not have made it either. You’ve eat up as much dust as I have, I appreciate it.”

  Mr. Ryder let go of his hand and abruptly went into the house.

  Coming into the living room after dinner, Kate twirled in her new dress.

  “Damn, if you don’t look like a dressed-up whore,” he said.

  “Frank, I swear, is that all you can say?” she said.

  “Hell,” he said, “that’s a compliment.”

  They were meeting Will and Martha, Buzz and his wife and a few other couples. After taking Laurel to spend the night with a friend, they drove to a club at the edge of the city. Its name was spelled in blue lights that cast a dim and eerie glow over the parking lot. Inside it was almost as dark; above the dance floor a glass chandelier whirled, casting vari-colored light like flecks of rainbow. When he got ready to drink, Son peered closely at the bottles on the table. Will drank Scotch; he did not want to get hold of any of that stuff by mistake. He danced once around the floor, pushing Kate backward as if she were a carton he were moving, then danced no more. Kate said it was all right with her, announcing he couldn’t tell the difference between Yankee Doodle and Dixie. Buzz’s wife did not dance either. But Buzz once had won a contest proclaiming him “The Vernon Castle of Hernando County.” Watching them, Son suddenly wondered why Kate had to buy that dress at all; she had some dresses. But he thought she was a good-looking woman still, had not started to fatten up on him like a lot of the wives; he never had liked a woman with too much meat on her.

  It was toward midnight, coming back from the men’s room, he saw a couple of fellows go out a side door and in a direction opposite from the parking lot, knew as well as he knew his own name where they were going. Buzz always said he could sniff out a game like a hound a coon; he guessed so. He gave a waiter a dollar, asking where it was, and the boy told. Taking his bottle, he went to the back of the building and into the basement. He did not have any idea how long he had been there when he quit, a winner, and came out as the night was ending; birds sang in the woods beyond as he stumbled along the path back to the eerie, blue-lit parking lot and finally found his car. He followed one narrow road from the club, through woods, until it ended at the highway back to Delton, almost a straight shoot to his front door. At this hour, free of traffic, the road was revealed beneath a pale grey, pre-dawn sky, and he drove slowly, knowing his condition. To the open sky and the open road ahead he said suddenly, I did it. Goddamn the big boys too! Inexplicably tears came to his eyes; he brushed the palm of his hand against them, turning too shortly into his drive, bumping one wheel over the curb and blaming the mistake on the amount of whisky he had drunk. Going into his own house, he shut the door hard, locking himself in, and shouted, “I got a right to get drunk if I want to,” and waited for an answer that never came. “I got ever right in the world,” he shouted loudly, thinking, any man had done what he had. Immediately, he fell into heavy sleep and the persistent shrill ringing of the door bell sometime later seemed part of that sleep until at last, opening his eyes, he heard the ringing consciously. A moment he lay looking at daylight on the ceiling, his brain twirling as the glass chandelier had, until he realized where he was. He went to a front window, opened it and yelled, “What the hell you doing waking me up this time of night?”

  “What the hell you doing going off and leaving your wife?” Buzz yelled back.

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Son said.

  “He’s talking about me,” Kate said. “Hush and open the door before you wake up the neighbors.”

  “I don’t give any Goddamn about the neighbors.”

  “Open the door,” Kate said.

  “Open the door you old drunk,” Buzz said.

  “Who’s drunk?” Son said.

  “Open the door,” Buzz said.

  “Open the door,” Kate said.

  “Keep your shirt on,” he said, turning the lock.

  “You ought to have a punch in the nose,” Buzz said.

  “You want to try to give it to me,” Son said.

  “What’d you want to go off and leave Kate for?” Buzz said.

  “Hell, I didn’t leave her,” he said. “I forgot she was there.”

  Kate slept in Laurel’s room. He had to have a couple of drinks to fall asleep again and when he woke was starving. He waited for Kate to fix breakfast and had to have a couple of drinks because of the way he felt. Ahead was the open road and the white dawn and the best friend he had wanting to punch him in the nose; against Buzz he could not have defended himself and he cried, Buzz! Ohhh Buzz …

  “Frank, will you hush,” Kate said, opening the door. “You been in here drunk, hollering, four days.”

  He turned on the tumbled, whisky-smelling sheets and said, “I’m just waiting for my breakfast.”

  “I offered you breakfast two hours ago,” she said. “You wouldn’t eat any.”

  “What day is this?” he said.

  “Thursday,” she said.

  “Hell, I thought it was Sunday,” he said.

  “It was Sunday after we came home from that nightclub and you haven’t been out of here since.” She went to the windows and let up shades, stabbing him with light. He felt as if he were on a merry-go-round; everything in the room went either up or down; in the bathroom he was sick. He looked into the mirror and saw his eyes were the same color, stared at a face he hardly recognized, covered with a beard he saw for the first time was tinged with grey. “Hell, I’ve got to be a ooo-ld man,” he said. “I might have to have a drink to that.�
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  “No, you’re not,” Kate said. He came back into the bedroom as she was changing his sheets. “You’ve got to get away from the house. Laurel and I are about to suffocate. I’ve had to keep the windows down so the neighbors won’t think you’ve gone stark, raving mad. Laurel says she’s going to run away from home and I wouldn’t blame her.”

  He was so weak Kate had to help him dress. There was something the matter with his stomach he said; but he thought he could eat a steak. He went into the living room where Laurel was playing the piano. An instant he put his arms around her and tears rolled down his face. “Your mammy says you want to run away from home. You wouldn’t leave me, would you?”

  “No,” she said. He went on out and Kate came saying, “He’s really had the wind taken out of his sails, hasn’t he?” Laurel watched them get into the car. It was the first time she could remember his ever letting Kate drive. He sat hunched and pale on the front seat; she watched them out of the drive, turned back to the house lonely and began to play again, thinking of the place she would go when she was grown where nothing would hurt.

  It was done. by the early forties the levee stretched, unbroken, from Cairo to New Orleans. Son termed what began then “the second go-round.” For the next ten years their work would be enlarging, rehabilitating, reinforcing work already done: clearing and grubbing, clearing borrow pits, making roads, draining swampland. The Engineers would widen, deepen and change the river’s channels, making more cut-offs, until the Mississippi River would flow the way men wanted it to, not the way it was intended. They would need as much dynamite as ever, if not more, Son said.