Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  Didn’t he know anything about the way other people did things? she said. He didn’t care what the other fellow did, he said, he did the way he wanted to.

  That’s just the trouble, Kate said.

  Loaded, the truck pulled away from the house about noon. He followed in his car and Kate and Laurel in hers, piled high with things Kate had been afraid for the Negroes to touch. He told her she looked like an okie pulling up; he could always get her goat telling her she looked as if she had just come from the country; she couldn’t get over the fact that once she had.

  Kate said she never had expected to have such a pretty house, and thought maybe in it, things would be different. She had an opportunity to buy some of the nice things she had always wanted; but having to make so many decisions alone made her nervous. Only a drink made her able to face painters, rug salesmen, furniture stores without qualms. On New Year’s Eve they invited almost everyone they knew to a party, to see the new house. Ever since they had been married, he had started celebrating New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve at the office; they always went to parties on those nights and always came home in an argument; the holidays had long been ones Laurel dreaded. This year Kate begged him not to start celebrating until the party began. He did not mean to. He had had only a couple of drinks and was leaving for home when the phone rang. It was two contractors he had kept in business, lending them money during the Depression. Mr. Will, nobody else liked him doing it; they thought these two were unreliable, dishonest and gave contracting a bad name; to Son it had been a business deal. But he liked the fellows too, thought others didn’t because they had both started at the bottom, way down, driving bulldozers. They had gone to Oklahoma some years ago, told him when he met them down at the Andrew Johnson, they had become millionaires. He tried to tell Kate that, arriving home. She only burst into tears and said he had ruined the night again. She went into the kitchen and had a drink herself, thinking that was one way she could get back at him, match him. And it would help her to relax, face the party alone; he had to go to bed and slept halfway through it. That night Kate slept in the extra bedroom again. It had always been her habit to go there when she could not sleep, when she was mad; she had begun to leave things there, her night cream, hair net, a night gown and robe in the closet. Gradually she moved altogether. His snoring kept her awake, she said.

  The time was longer each year before Mr. Wynn came back after the holidays, Mr. Ryder told his wife. This year was the longest of all.

  The war had begun but would change little about Son’s business. Government work continued on the levee and farmers were more important than ever. He had a “C” card, as much gas as he wanted, did not travel as much because he no longer intended to. He had always been working toward the time when he did not have to work so hard. And that time had come. But for the third year he went back to Will’s river curve. Will added cement to the dirt, having no more clay, the binder; they built a dike of dirt out in the river itself and had no more trouble. It was pay day when they came back to camp. Son saw Carter sitting outside at a table with a ledger. Negroes, coming out of the back of the commissary, stopped beside him.

  Before Son could ask, Will said, “Mrs. Roosevelt again.” Since she had started seeing about the underprivileged Negroes in the South, he had become a Republican. The law passed the contractors called Eleanor’s: a boss could no longer take what a Negro owed out of his pay; he had to receive his salary in full in a sealed envelope. Will pointed out the Army Engineer corpsman in camp to see the law was followed. Son said, “You mean the Negroes walk in the front door, get their pay, walk out the back, open it and pay Carter?”

  “That’s right,” Will said. “What would you do?”

  “Lord, the same,” Son said. Their eyes met and they laughed; there seemed always a comical side, despite everything.

  By the war’s end, Negroes working on the levee were making from eighty to a hundred and fifty dollars a week. Commissary prices were high but tent prices remained always the same; electricity costs were fifty cents a month for each appliance; everything that could be kept low was and medicine that most of the Negroes needed was free; regularly the mobile unit arrived, preceded by individual cards of notification. Always, Martha would exclaim in exhaustion, putting up mail, they come the same day as the Sears catalogues! Son urged the Negroes he knew to save; they were making good money now, he said. Still every Monday, after pay day on Friday, there was a line of Negroes at the commissary wanting to borrow money and Will always lent it.

  In the South there was no labor union for levee workers. “Union country,” Will described it, “is past the mouth of the Ohio.” But the labor leaders were working south slowly. Son was in Cape Girardeau when men came on the levee, trying to force Negroes to join; when they refused, the men, having rifles, ran them off the job. Many Negroes stayed away, many came further south to safety. These days, Martha told Son, they were wary of strangers, though there was one kind you could always recognize. If a man in a black suit, carrying a suitcase, got off a train and asked for the Unity Church, you knew he was in town to teach the Negroes Communism. Mind over matter, the church taught. Its motto: The Brotherhood of Man over Fatherhood. It was some time after Son returned from Cape Girardeau before the labor leaders got to his part of the country. In a town near Will’s camp there was a meeting at the Labor Temple; afterward several of the leaders were drinking in a cafe and talking about going to the levee camp and taking over, having had no cooperation. The cafe’s owner telephoned Will and told him they were on their way. When the car drove into camp with three strange men Will knew exactly who it was. He made Son wait in his tent; he was close enough to hear, to come if Will needed him. Will said he was scared but he was going to have to run their bluff. Again, it struck Son: you couldn’t afford fear. A man getting out of the car told Will they had come to take over camp. Son saw Will pull himself to his tallest. “You better bring more than three if you want to take over,” he said.

  “I’m telling you again, Carrothers, if your Negroes aren’t going to join our union, you’ve got to hire our union men,” the man said.

  “I’ve got all the men I need,” Will said.

  “You got to get rid of them.”

  “Are your men trained?” Will said.

  “You bet your boots.”

  “Your union men are all Northerners. Are they all white men?” Will said.

  “Yes sir, they’re all white men,” the man said.

  “So,” Will said. “You want me to hire your white men. And you want me to fire my Negroes.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and put his face close to the man’s. “Mister,” he said, “if you don’t clear out of here, I’m going to wire Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  The man got back in his car and slammed the door so hard, Son thought he heard glass crack. After a final curse, a threat of return, he drove away fast and only an instant Son and Will saw the red tail light bobbing away. “You reckon he’ll be back?” Son said.

  “I don’t think it’s likely. They’ve found out we down here don’t scare,” Will said.

  Son drove home, his scorn for Yankees deepened. But something underlay that, a sense of age. Often now, driving along, he thought back, something he had never expected to do, and it seemed he had a lot to look back over; everywhere now he saw boys in uniform, about to go off to war, who looked like kids. He wished there was something he could do for them. He had been kidded to death about something that happened in the grill at the Andrew Johnson; a table full of young sailors had asked him to buy them a beer. For several hours he was there eating and ordered round after round; the boys came to his table and picked up the bottles. Leaving, he was happy to pay the bill, almost fifteen dollars. He stopped to say goodbye and the boys pressed money on him, explaining. They had plenty of money but were not old enough to order beer. Son laughed at himself and waved their money away. It was something he could do.

  During the second year of the war, Mr. Ryder had a heart attack. Mrs. Ryder
phoned to say he was hospitalized though it did not seem serious. But he had a truck load of dynamite to drive in the morning; twenty-four hours’ notice had to be given to ship by train, a box car specially inspected and placed in the middle. Son saw nothing to do but drive the order himself, said he guessed he wasn’t ever going to get any rest. At daybreak, he left his car at Mr. Ryder’s and picked up the truck. The way to the magazine was the same, though now the highway was lined with motels and ice cream stands and, leaving pavement, he travelled a smoothed gravel road. The Negro cabin still stood, though long abandoned; he thought of all the years the little boy had greeted him, swung wide on the gate, how he had raised him to a dime each way. Having closed the gate, he drove on through the silent winding country, remembering the first time Mr. Ryder brought him, with a team of mules, to see a stick of dynamite. He sure had learned a lot about business since that time; the business had changed and he wondered if he had.

  Negroes met him to load the truck; he filled an empty case with sawdust and buried in it several boxes of caps and fuse wrapped in newspaper, placed it on the floor of the cab and covered it with an old piece of tarpaulin. Frequently, this way, they managed to have their caps and fuse arrive with the dynamite, and when he drove boxes of dynamite in the trunk of his car, he still threw caps and fuse in the back seat. If the truck was stopped for any reason, no one thought of looking for anything under the old piece of floor covering.

  Sitting forward, his arms hugging the wheel, his foot to the accelerator, grinning through the windshield of his big red truck, he sped off down the highway. Past lunchtime he found a restaurant where he could stop, away from any congested area. It turned out to have the best barley soup he had ever eaten; he had two bowlfuls and drove on he guessed too full and happy because he drove through the next town when he was supposed to always go around them. Arrested, he was told to come to the courthouse and pay his fine. He would have to have the dynamite unloaded first; the policeman followed him where he was going. The man he was to meet and his Negroes were not there. Son said, “Well, if you want me to pay that fine it looks like you’re going to have to unload the truck. I’m sure not going to.”

  The policeman, though young, was still winded when they came out of the courthouse some time later. “Much obliged,” Son said again, touching his hat, and drove away.

  The farmer he met had been told by the Drainage Engineers what kind of ditch he had to have, how wide and deep. He said, “Mr. Wynn, do I need a ditch that big?”

  Son said, “You going to pay for it or the county?”

  “I am,” the old man said.

  “All of it?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Hell naw, you don’t need a ditch that big.” Son shot it the way he saw it, saving the man a lot of money. A few days later, as he had expected, he received a letter from the Engineers’ design department saying it was the last Government work he’d have in that county. Tearing up the letter, Son said he never had been in the position of making money off an old man who didn’t have any and the ditch he gave him would do the job.

  He had felt good about the ditch when he drove off that day; he stopped for lunch at Cecilia’s and was glad to see her but the house was too full of women for him; there were four girls now. Early and comfortably, Cecilia had slipped into middle-age. As a young woman she had been gaunt, but having filled out now, she had begun to resemble Cally. Her hair had long been grey and she wore it the same way Cally had, skinned back as Lillian had always said, and in a knot at the nape of her neck. Kate said her hair would look so pretty with a blue rinse but Cecilia said she had always been plain and was used to it; she could not imagine trying to fancy herself up. But when she smiled, Son thought, she actually looked pretty; she had the same dark skin that he did and though she wore no make-up she did not look sallow, as Cally had. Soon after eating, Son drove on to Clay to meet Winston for supper. Walking into the restaurant, he sensed right away a game was going on in back; but Winston would not let him go near; said the Sheriff was playing and he was a plain artist with the dice; besides that, he was the only one who stayed sober and always cleaned up. Though drinks were sold people often had their own bottles; just trying to be a big shot, Winston said about the Sheriff’s deputy who came out of the back room and told them they couldn’t have whisky on the table; he was going to have to confiscate it. With one accord, Son and Winston stood up. The fact that boy wanted the whisky for himself was plain as day and they told him if they couldn’t have it, he wasn’t: walked out of the restaurant and emptied two fifths into the gutter. Son said it was worth watching them two fifths of Old Granddad wasted just to see that boy’s face, watching too. On the way to Winston’s they bought more. Waking the next morning, Son knew the time had passed when he could go like he use to and get up in the morning. “I’m just not twenty-five years old anymore,” he said.

  Winston suggested hair of the dog but Son said he wasn’t starting out on the road with whisky on his breath, even if his truck was empty. It was late afternoon when he drove into Mr. Ryder’s. He had a funny feeling arriving without welcome, without Mrs. Ryder coming forward in her old felt slippers to meet him, Mr. Ryder trying to hide his pleasure. With age, Mr. Ryder’s voice had become even softer, had a faint, far away sound. Son could hear now the way he said, Mr. Wynn, with a dropping of the final sound. The house was dark and he knew they were at the hospital. At home he would not take a drink, tired as he was, not wanting to visit the old man smelling of it. But when he and Kate went to the hospital Mr. Ryder was under sedation, had had a more serious attack in the hospital. Son did not think he looked good at all; there was something to the slack, pale face, a touch of old-age pink to his cheeks, that reminded him of Poppa’s face the morning he had found him in a coma, near death; so that maybe he was already as prepared as he was ever going to get when Mr. Ryder’s nephew phoned at seven o’clock the next morning to tell him the old man had passed away; slept on beyond them, Mrs. Ryder said.

  He began to drink the afternoon before the funeral; when it was time, he could not go; Kate would have to. When he could, he went to see Mrs. Ryder. Hat in hand, he came into the living room and said, “Mrs. Ryder, I just couldn’t make it to the funeral because …”

  She said, “That’s all right.”

  He said, “I couldn’t make it.”

  She said, “That’s all right.”

  He said, “I’m just as sorry as I can be.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  He was sorry about everything, sorry he had caused so much hell. The only way he got over it was that Kate took him to a sanatarium; then in half a day realizing it, he faced the four walls confining him and telephoned Laurel. “Are you going to let them keep me here? Are you?” he said.

  “No,” she said, beginning to cry. “Mother will come.” She had been practicing the piano; she came back to it and began to tremble; her fingers slid from keys that gradually became wet. Having played the piano so long, there suddenly seemed no reason to. She got up. She was disappointed when he came home that he did not speak, went on by into his bedroom. She heard him get into bed. If it were only just him but it was both. Yesterday she had to thread a needle for Kate, too unsteady to. When her teacher telephoned, they knew she had stopped music. She had no reason. Well, I’d be ashamed to just quit, he said. She was not ashamed of that. He had come home once, staggered from the garage to the house; standing in the door she had said, Hurry, hurry, thinking the neighbors would see. He said, You’re ashamed of me!

  She said she was going to take up painting. He said she wasn’t ever going to get anywhere painting pictures. He would not give her the money but remorseful coming from the sanatarium had given her and Kate fifty dollars each. For several years that money paid for classes at a local recreational center; then she gave up painting too.

  He tapered off but stayed in bed reading detective magazines; finally said he guessed he would have to advertise for a driver; it meant he’d have to
get out and teach the man the business. Kate said it would do him good; not travelling, he had nothing to do but sit in the office waiting for the telephone to ring. He said he was catching up on his rest as he had always intended.

  Hauling dynamite paid more than hauling most things; a lot of men, not eligible for the army, answered his ad. He chose a middle-aged married man who seemed steady. When the man only delivered dynamite, Son stayed in the office. Other times he met the driver at his destination, gradually taught him to shoot ditches and stumps. Then, one of the toughest jobs he ever had to figure out came along, blasting for a road through a cypress slough. There was no bottom to the slough at all, only mush. Son stuck dynamite all through the bad dirt and shot it. The heavy, good dirt on top sank and the bad dirt on the bottom sluiced out the sides. He repeated this over and over until all the mush was gone and the good dirt solidly packed.

  Finished, he grinned. “When you know how to do that, you know how to shoot off dynamite.” A Negro standing by said, “Mr. Frank can shoot ’em. He can shoot ’em. He can sho shoot ’em.” Sometimes, driving along, sitting alone at the office, Son would say the little phrase like a melody to himself: Mr. Frank can shoot ’em, he can shoot ’em, he can sho shoot ’em …

  Toward the war’s end, he sold a hundred and twenty-five thousand tons of dynamite to the Government for an airfield, cut out of solid rock. Directly from the front, men would be flown in and taken to a nearby veterans’ hospital. There was a certain amount of luck to his life; it hadn’t been all hard work. Whatever else had gone wrong, his business had gone right; he just happened to be the man where the airfield was going to be built. Most of the dynamite went by rail but several times he had to send the truck. Twice someone phoned to see when it would arrive; each time it already should have. The third time Son put down the phone, put on his hat and walked out of the office. He got in his car and started over the driver’s route. He drove a hundred miles, stopping at every restaurant along the way where the driver could stop, had driven fifty more before he found the right place. There was a swarthy-faced blonde behind the counter he knew was the right one before he asked. Yes sir, she said, she had seen a dynamite truck parked outside sometimes, she believed. She didn’t remember what the driver looked like, there were so many … He said something he didn’t usually say to women and tell him one more thing, Did the driver drink beer while he was sitting here? She guessed so, she said, not seeing the connection. He arrived home long past dinner time, Kate not having had the faintest idea where he was. The next day he was in the office when the driver got back. As soon as he walked in, Son gave him his pay, plus two weeks; the only reason he gave him that was because he had kids and don’t let him ever see his face around the office again. He’d spent twenty years building up a reputation no bogus sonofagun was going to tear down in six months. Get on out.