Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Old Red Johnson warned still, the last time Son saw him, that the river could still win. No matter what we do, he said, the big flood can still come. A few days later, Shut-eye went to wake him and could not. Some years before he had moved back into the house but had kept the levee tent always. From all over the territory familiar to Son, men came to Red’s funeral. He was old times gone, even to the young men. Negroes he had known stood behind his white friends; hats in hands, everyone looked freshly scrubbed. Walking away behind Will, Son noticed a pinched old man’s look to the back of his neck, a faint hesitancy to his walk, and thought, We’re the old timers; no work anyone here would do again would be as hard as the work they had already done. They had come a long way together and had not too much farther to go.

  The final big section of work was to be let in Little Rock after Red’s funeral; once only small jobs were left, people would not drive from all over the territory to lettings. But everyone had come to this because it was the last. Son saw even the hothouse flower. After supper, entering the hotel lobby, he got on the elevator with Son, Buzz, Winston and Will who were heading for a game on the top floor. No one wanted to when the elevator boy asked if they wanted to meet a girl, until the little fellow got off; then Winston gave the boy money, told him to send a girl to the little fellow’s room; he had been too shy to ask. Son gave him another bill. “Get that big Rosie you got,” he said describing roundly with his hands; the girls belonged to a chain of hotels spread across the state, moved from one to another, were known to all the men whether well or not. As they got off, a Little Rock contractor with a hotel girl went into the room next to theirs. Shortly after the game started, Buzz telephoned the room. “Desk Clerk, sir,” he said. “Your wife got into the elevator and is on her way up.” They listened to thumps in the next room as if people hurried; the door opened, heels crossed the doorsill, a woman brushed by. Laughing, they went back to the game. Son regretted these good times soon being over.

  The next day it rained. Impatiently he waited in the lobby for the bids to be in. The major work being let was in East Tennessee, involved rock blasting and quarry work, things with which he was unfamiliar. A dynamite salesman from that part of the state had come to the letting, told Son he expected to get some of the business, his speciality. Son said that was mighty fine, wondering who he was going to get it from; but having a little competition made him feel like a young man again, he said. From the way Buzz burst into the lobby, Son knew he had won the big job which put him in the big time. Everyone said so, congratulating Buzz, began to woo him buying drinks. Son, having a bar in his room, had little time to circulate. It was almost daylight when the crowd thinned out and Winston, coming in, said he heard Buzz had bought some dynamite from the other salesman. What motivated him, Son called his juice; he felt it boil. “Boy, don’t come in here with no tales,” he said.

  “That’s just what I heard,” Winston said. “I carry rumors too.”

  Everywhere Son went looking for Buzz, he heard it was true. People tried to tell him Buzz was too drunk to know. Son said it didn’t make any difference; even full of bug juice he didn’t expect his best friend to do him thataway. He was madder than ever, circling back, to find Buzz in his own room. He had already made plans, had ordered a hundred pounds of crushed ice dumped into his bathtub. He stripped Buzz to his underwear and put him in. Before Buzz could yell, before he could even flail ice, Son had him face up under the running faucet, ducked him under again and again. Struggling, now flailing ice everywhere, Buzz realized in a deep layer of consciousness he was truly about to drown; only as he began to lose consciousness did Son let him out. Shivering, Buzz said, “Jesus Christ, you like to drowned me.”

  “You ought to,” Son said. Dried, wrapped in a towel, Buzz went into his connecting room to bed; all night he sank gloriously into darkness, told at breakfast he had had the most beautiful, wonderful dreams he had ever had in his life, in color; then, in amazement said again, “That old man really like to drowned me.”

  Two things happened after the letting. On his way home, a salesman Son knew had a heart attack, pulled to the side of the road and was found by a stranger. What Son remembered most was that after lettings the old man toured cemeteries copying names off gravestones to put on his expense account. Son had a drink to him feeling sorry about the old man dying out on the road like that, just a salesman all his life.

  Secondly, he received a letter from Shut-eye who had told him at Red’s funeral he was coming to the letting. The letter said he had started out but could not make it: the roads were tore to pieces. But I would like to have see your loving face. I got stalded on the road. My heart got full and I feel like I want to shout. Be a good man till I sees you again if life lastes. In one corner it was signed with an x; in the opposite corner it read, Dictated but not read over. Son thought someday he was going to stop over in East Delton and see the old man; he lived there in his own house, well provided for by Red’s will.

  Still it rained and still he rose with dawn and was on the road when daylight came. He crossed Tennessee to Buzz’s job, going through gutted red hills and on into pretty mountainous country thick with trees. As if it were a gift, he carried the joyful news that he had been invited to join the Shriners, something he had long wanted; it gave him a good feeling, belonging. He wanted as quickly as possible to buy a diamond lapel pin of the Shriners’ symbol, to put Buzz up for membership. The white men on Buzz’s job were staying at the same motel. For three days while it rained, they played cards, at night ate in the nearest town’s one cafe. There was a waitress there Son got to know pretty quick.

  The fourth morning was a grey still day, cool for the time of year. Everyone came to breakfast in tight pants and boots to their knees. Would the Negroes show up? Buzz said, “I told them to the first morning it quit raining if it went on forty days and nights.” As the men went to work, the sun came out, at first like a winter sun in some far north place, wispy and moon-white, its edges mingled fuzzily into the pearlized sky. Meeting, the workers spoke unconsciously in lowered voices, realizing only when the sun grew stronger they had felt themselves in someplace mysterious. They were used to heat, trusted it; as the sun grew stronger, the dirt warmed and the smell of ragweed drying overpowered the smell of everything else green and growing. With fifteen Negroes, Son started across a field single file, each man with a box of dynamite on his shoulders. At an old drainage ditch, now full of water, they could not cross, set down their boxes to search until someone found a log long enough to reach, and they started across, one by one. Halfway Son slipped, felt the dynamite box glance off his leg, falling behind him. He came up cursing, waded out pushing the box and laughing, not at himself but at sight of those dark faces and widened eyes peering down at him, the Negroes afraid to laugh until he did. They helped him; one carried the dynamite box and another said, “I seen one foot slip, I know Cap’n going,” another said, “Splash.” Along the line laughter passed again; they went on and Son spent most of the day working in damp clothes.

  The following morning they began blasting. One of the hardest things he found about rock blasting was the white silt afterward. More than anyone, he seemed choked by dust as if his lungs could not get enough air. Dusted white, all the men stared out of round-looking eyes. Even in Son’s ears the word rang excessively all day long; others said afterward they hardly remembered anything else about the day: Dynamite! Hardly had the sound of the blast receded, the smoke cleared when the word came again and then again, Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite!

  At six o’clock that evening the Negroes gathered about him, quit. “You boys know how much powder we shot up today?” Son said. “Two tons and a hun’ert pounds. Eighty-two cases. That’s the most dynamite I ever shot in a single day and I been shooting it a long time.” Everyone went home talking of the large amount. At the motel Son told them to wash up; he was buying everybody a steak. He had to celebrate. They had gathered back in his room, having changed, and had started celebrating when a knock
came at the door. Over the noise no one heard it until it had come again and again; then Buzz, the closest, threw open the door, about to shout greetings, and hushed instead. They all hushed seeing the white-haired woman in the doorway, one arm in a huge bandage. “Who’s the fellow shooting that dynamite off that’s blowed windows out all over town?” she said.

  “Phew,” Son said, sinking to the bed, his head fell forward but he could not help laughing, on top of whatever was to come; those eighty-two empty cases had put him there. The woman held up her arm. “I reached up to pull down my window shade and the whole glass fell out on me. I been at the doctor’s hours getting splinters picked out. He’s sending you the bill.”

  Son stood. “I was in the limits of the law where I was doing that blasting at,” he said. “If the concussion got carried into town, that’s the wind, and I’m not about to be responsible for the wind.”

  “All I know is, the bank’s wall got a crack and more windows than mine fell out,” she said.

  Son said he reckoned he’d be seeing her in court. He took everyone out to eat steak anyway, the only difference being he did not ask the waitress to go out afterward, his mind on business now. He stayed on in East Tennessee until the case came to court. An Act of God, the wind, was responsible. Having won, he came out of court to tell the woman he was sorry as could be about what had happened, and he’d pay half her doctor’s bill.

  All the way back to Delton the sun was in his eyes. At home, Kate put drops in them and fixed cold compresses. Why in the world didn’t he wear sunglasses? she said. He never had thought about it, he said; hell, when he was twenty-five years old the sun didn’t bother his eyes. She said, Frank, I swear. Several days later he faced the sun again starting out to Will’s, stopped and bought dark glasses, though it seemed as if he were giving in to something he should not be. His way of thinking had always been if you were cold, you were supposed to be, if you were hot stay that way, if the sun was in your eyes, make the best of it. But the glasses helped. Driving into Will’s new camp he noticed it was set up in a grove of trees which Martha had long begged for; but Will chose a spot closest to the road, not for comfort. “The old man getting weak in his old age?” Son said, walking into the commissary. “How’d you talk him into settin’ up in the shade?” Martha laughed. “Luck. This pecan grove just happened to be close enough to the road to get in and out when the weather’s bad.”

  Word had reached Delton of Greaser’s death. Son said, “I sure was surprised to hear about that big strong buck just dying thataway.”

  “Frank, it like to killed Will. He hardly spoke to anybody for three days. Greaser had been with him always; we didn’t even know he had any other family but we located a sister down in Mississippi and took him all the way down there to be buried. Will just sat rigid during the funeral. I knew he wanted to bawl. Greaser was driving his tractor. Will said he pulled up to him, started to say something, then just fell off dead. The doctor said his heart must have been bad a long time; not even Greaser knew it.”

  “Forty-six years old too,” Son said. It brought death closer. “I reckon it could happen to any of us.” Several Negro women waiting said in wonder and agreement, Um-mmm. A crowd of Negroes entered to shop and Son went out as Tangle-eye passed. “Boy, I finally remembered to bring you them shirts I promised,” he said, handing him a sackful.

  Tangle-eye, removing his hat, grinned. “I thank you,” he said. Looking inside, he brought out a white shirt with whiter stripes. “I’m going to wear this here one to get married.”

  “Tangle-eye, you ain’t gettin’ no married,” Son said.

  “Yes suh, Sis Woman come back from California and ketch me.” Proudly, he took from his pocket a round metal disc and handed it to Son. “What’s that all about?” Son said.

  “I got the license,” Tangle-eye said. “Preacher sells ’em to us for a dollar and it’s two up at the co’thouse.”

  Giving it back, Son said, “Well, that’s mighty fine.”

  “Yes suh.” Tangle-eye, clapping on his hat, went away.

  At supper, Son said, “How long that preacher been selling them old dog licenses to get married on?”

  “Long as I can remember,” Will said. “He buys them up at the end of every year. Gets by with it as long as the Negroes can’t read.”

  Son dared speak of Greaser. “Did cocaine kill him?”

  “No sir,” Will said, and Son felt that sudden rigidity too; Will’s hands lay perfectly still on the table; then, as if deciding he would someday have to speak his friend’s name, he said, “Almost all the boys I’ve known on the levee take cocaine but I’ve never known a one become an addict; they work too hard, sweat too much, I believe. Greaser had a packet on him when he died, like the doctor out in town sells them; but it’s half ground-up chalk. It’s white powder, that’s all the Negroes know.”

  It was time for him to start trying to catch up on his rest, Son said then. He was going to do a lot of advising, let the contractors have their own men do the actual work. For the second year, he and Will had tried to stabilize a bank where the river curved; each time after the June rise, it began to wash away. “Think it will again next year?” Will said as Son was leaving the next day.

  “Well, if it does, I’ll be back,” Son said. “There it’nt anything we haven’t figured out yet, Mr. Will.” He drove home hurriedly, two things on his mind. A teacher had suggested Laurel be sent to a private school; she could continue music for which she had a talent and she had made a high grade on some kind of test—he didn’t know what that was all about—but she needed a smaller place; she was so quiet, shy, even fearful, the teacher thought. He guessed he never had paid much attention to Laurel; he had left her bringing up to Kate and maybe that had been a mistake. He thought Laurel was going to turn out exactly like her; all the time she had her nose stuck in some book. She had been a pretty little girl and he thought her still pretty, though she just stood around too much biting her fingernails; he told Kate so and she said well, they both had inferiority complexes and she guessed Laurel did too. If anybody had asked him he probably would have said Laurel looked just like her mother. Many people thought so but just as many thought she looked like Son; somehow she was an exact cross between the two; her skin was not as dark as his but darker than Kate’s; when she wore certain colors her eyes looked blue but at other times they were hazel, closer to Kate’s dark eyes; sometimes they seemed even to have flecks of yellow. Her hair had never been the color of sunlight, like Kate’s, but it was blonde, almost as dark as Son’s. Something about the smallness of her face helped to make her seem so shy.

  Driving, he decided she could go to the school. He didn’t mind putting his money out for education: maybe it would keep her from making any mistakes. The second thing on his mind was buying a house. He had always been going to buy a big pretty house when he could. For the past several Sundays the three of them had driven around looking. For the first time, he felt he knew the city as well as he knew the country roads surrounding it. He liked a large one-story house set at the end of a circular drive, out from the city. Kate said they would never see anybody living way out there; he said he saw enough folks. When he decided to buy the house, Kate said she hoped he’d have the gravel drive paved; it would ruin the tires and every pair of shoes she had. He said he wanted it gravel, to remind himself of all the country roads he’d been over. To celebrate buying the house, they went downtown to eat and to see a picture show. It was a war picture with a long printed explanation of what all the shooting was about; whispering, he said, Why didn’t they make the writing in picture shows big enough to read? They do, Kate said. Can’t you read it? He shook his head and she said he needed glasses.

  That was something to think about the rest of the show. Monday morning he went to see Willard Owens who had grown up in Mill’s Landing and gotten to be big stuff as an eye doctor, Kate said; she saw his name in the newspaper all the time. Son found him about the same. Sitting in the dark cubicle, the pinpoint
of light probing his eyes, he and Willard talked about how far they had come, to have started out country boys. Willard’s mother still lived near Mill’s Landing; occasionally he went back. The mill had burned fifteen years ago and now the Rankins farmed the land; the two rows of houses and the commissary stood, for the tenants.

  Willard said Son did need glasses, mostly for seeing at a distance. Since Son was on the road so much, Willard prescribed a pair slightly tinted. On another floor Son picked out rimless gold frames, then crossing the building’s lobby, on impulse, went into a photographer’s studio where he was fitted in without an appointment. His proofs would be ready the same day as his glasses, and he kept the pictures a secret. From then on he divided his life into two parts, before he wore glasses and after. When he arrived at home in them, the proofs in a brown envelope, Kate exclaimed over both; they were the best pictures she had ever seen anyone have taken. She had one enlarged and put in a heavy gold frame. Eventually, in the new house, she put it on a long table in the entrance hall. When anyone came, Son would say, “See that. That was taken when I was still a young man, before I put on spectacles and got old.” He would laugh, explaining. If he wore the glasses for a long stretch of time, they left a red mark across his nose. Kate finally accepted that mark as part of him; a long time she urged him to have the glasses readjusted; he said it wasn’t worth bothering the man about.

  He told Kate he didn’t know a thing in this world about what you needed to make a house look pretty but get what she needed, within reason, and don’t ask him any questions; he’d pay the bills. On moving day Kate was awakened at six o’clock and looking out saw two Negro boys directing Mr. Ryder up the driveway in the dynamite truck. “Ye Gods and little fishes,” she said as Son got up, “is that how we’re going to move?” He hadn’t seen any sense hiring a truck when he had one, he said. What’s the matter?