Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  The next driver was young, not in the army because of asthma. The opportunity to start out someone young pleased Son. It certainly was an opportunity for the boy. If he tried, learned, he might end up taking over the whole business. Because now, Son was beginning to wonder who was.

  Week after week he went out with the boy and succeeded only in teaching him how to shoot the simplest stump. It was a year before he could believe the truth; the boy didn’t have the least ambition to do anything besides drive the truck. Son told Holston it was something he had known long before the year was up; had known but couldn’t believe.

  He had been working himself to the bone just when he ought to have been resting. And he couldn’t go like he use to. He got to coughing too bad. When he drove very long his chest ached. Finally, he said, Boy, I’ve had niggers working for me wanted to work harder than you do. Somebody’s going to push my truck down the road that wants to work. I can’t stand folks around me that don’t want to. Lazy, whew! he thought when the boy had gone. He put his feet on his desk thinking how glad he would have been to have had anything in the world offered to him when he was starting out and how nobody had ever offered him anything. Suddenly he put his feet down and picked up the telephone. Sweet and familiar her voice answered; he said, “Mrs. Ryder, I’m fixing to call up Mr. Ryder’s nephew Mace and ask him to drive my dynamite truck.”

  She said, “Mace don’t know anything about driving a truck.”

  “I’ll learn him,” he said.

  “He don’t know anything about dynamite either.”

  “Neither did I when I started out. I’ll learn him that too.”

  “He’s already got a good job,” she said.

  “Well I’m going to pay him so much he can quit it.” Mace never had a chance, Holston would say. Dynamite had it in his head somebody with Mr. Ryder’s blood could drive his truck, and Mace was going to drive it. Mace came because of the salary. He was twenty-three and had been a shipping clerk; his only qualification was he was used to lifting boxes. They started out, went east again toward Buzz’s job, and Son showed Mace how to shoot the top surface of dirt off gravel so it could be picked up and hauled away for road building. Tishomingo! he called the gravel’s name, shooting. He liked the names of a lot of things, sometimes said them over driving: Carolina Company, Snow Lake, Chickasaw Bluff. Going along the highway he ticked them off: Ouachita, Tallahatchie. He liked sections: South Miss’sippi, East Tenn a see, the Delta.

  His section of the state had always lagged behind in road building because of politics. When the war was over, politicians long in power no longer were. The county began to catch up. With business booming, Son had what he had always wanted, one that ran itself. Orders came without his having to look for them. To make money, he only had to sit in the office and answer the telephone; he figured that was what Holston was paid to do.

  At last he could sleep in the morning as long as he wanted. Waking, he would turn his pillow to the cool fresh side, close his eyes and lie thinking of all the spring summer and winter dawns he had started into, down some small highway in search of a gravel road or dusty path. Having daydreamed, he sometimes fell back to sleep. He got up when he wanted to, shaved, ate breakfast and went down to the office. He had all the time in the world to do anything he wanted; it seemed he did the same things he always had.

  He sat around the office until time for a late lunch; sometimes people dropped in. After lunch he sat around the office until four-thirty and went home; or he went over to the Engineers office and played Pitch. He said he was really catching up on his rest. When he retired at sixty, had found someone to take over the business, then he was going to travel, do some of the things he had always put off doing.

  When they moved into the new house, Kate had hired a maid named Sarah; he believed she was the best they ever had. She moved into a room off the garage. That summer Kate and Laurel took a short trip to look at colleges and Sarah was there to take care of the house and cook for him. Laurel did not like any of the colleges she saw. She wanted to go farther from home. He knew he didn’t know a thing in the world about colleges; she had to make up her own mind. While they were gone, he had taken a few short trips with Mace and found him willing; he liked to tell about the first stump Mace shot alone; having lit the fuse, he ran and Son was so mad he almost knocked Mace down. Never, he told him, run away from a blast. If you stumble and fall you don’t have a Chinaman’s chance; walk, always walk away, as fast as you can. Never investigate a misfired shot before an hour’s up was another piece of advice he gave. But Mace was left to find out alone, a long time later, there were proper ways to light a fuse. Mr. Wynn had always used the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and Mace did.

  Mace told that hard as the road was he travelled, he knew it had been smoothed. Doors stood open to him everywhere and Mr. Wynn had pounded them that way. He wondered if he was the only one who saw the toll it had taken. Mr. Wynn coughed so much he sometimes had to sit down afterward and breathe. Some places he went people said they wouldn’t give anything in the world for the opportunity of having known Dynamite Wynn; he was a character if there ever was. Other places people called him all kinds of names. Folks that had got themselves in the position of owing him money didn’t like him, Son said, laughing. Mr. Wynn, Mace said, took care of the people that worked for him though. Once he was sent in the truck to pick up dynamite a man had not paid for. When he walked into the man’s office asking for it, the man said get out or he’d beat him. Mace went down the road and telephoned Son. What should he do?

  “Go back,” Son said.

  “Go back?” Mace said. “Just go back?”

  When he got back, Son already had the man on the telephone. He told Mace afterward how it had gone. “If you touch that boy,” he said, “I’m going to come up there and kill you.”

  “I didn’t know the boy worked for you,” the man said.

  “He’s in my truck, isn’t he?” Son said.

  “He just walked in here and asked for your dynamite, I never had seen him before,” the man said.

  “Well, you shore must have thought he was a brave son-of-a-bitch,” Son said. “First, he steals my dynamite truck, then he tries to steal my dynamite.”

  Mace marvelled over the way Son, sitting in his office, could give him exact instructions about where he was going. He never needed a road map, Mace said. He kept a lavender comb in his shirt pocket. Listening, he sat combing his hair. Son would put his feet on his desk, lean back, and say, You take the Delta highway for thirty miles and turn off right at a filling station called Cotton-mouth Corners. Run on a couple of miles past a long stretch of Johnson grass and a bobbed-wire fence. You’ll see a old Negro cabin with some tall sunflowers upside it. Turn left past that cabin and go on to you hit a big dip in the road. Just beyond there’s a little bitty dirt road just wide enough for the truck. Turn left. Take that to the end, you’ll be at the landing where they want the dynamite. He’d follow Mr. Wynn’s directions: there’d be the Johnson grass and the bobbed-wire fence and the cabin and sunflowers; everything always exactly as he said. Mr. Wynn knew every fork in the road, Mace said, every rough place to watch out for. He knew every cotton patch. Every creek. He knew every dirt road to get down to go out to the levee. He knew the countryside like the back of your hand.

  Laurel decided on a college in New York City and he let Kate fly up there with her, sightsee for a week-end before school began. He thought it would do her some good, but when she came home she was worse. For the first time he spoke of it; not even he and Laurel had mentioned Kate’s drinking. Now he told Buzz it was about to worry him to death. Buzz said with Laurel gone he wouldn’t expect things to get better; for the first time in his life Son felt his hands were tied. She didn’t even play bridge much anymore. During the war she had been a USO volunteer, had been happy doing things for the boys. When that was over she had time on her hands. She met with a group of women to knit, then decided she was allergic to wool.

  T
hese were the years when what he called “the second go-round” was ending, the final years of enlargements, clearing, making use of old borrow pits, the years when those who had built the levee assured themselves it was as stable as they could make it. Will told Son that after all these years as an engineer, he had come to believe that changing the river and making it stay that way was an art, more than a science.

  When Laurel was home in the summer, Kate was all right. Cecilia came for a visit and the vacation seemed short. That fall, Laurel switched to another college in New York City; the cost was the same and that was all he knew about it. He just thought she ought to stick to something for a change. He made a few short trips, left at four every morning and was home for supper at six. Whupped too; by dark, he was in bed. It seemed to him like Kate made all the noise in the house she could, to keep him awake. He told Holston he was going to make her get up and fix breakfast at the hours he left; then she’d be ready to go to bed when he did. Did it work? Holston asked afterward.

  Hell no, Son said. She fixed breakfast but I heard them bed springs squeaking again before I got out of the driveway good.

  Daily he went to Arkansas on a final difficult job. Two borrow pits with a road between had to be drained into the river. Son had the road punched full of holes and shot a ditch through it; then the first pit drained into the second and the latter on into the river itself. When the job was finished, he went to the World Series with Winston. Buzz came from East Tennessee to meet them; just about all the boys were there and Son felt good, like old times. They even had a big crap game one night; he couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had that old feeling of excitement. He was in the game long past midnight when Buzz had gone to bed. Buzz told afterward Son woke him at some nearly daylight hour wanting money; he was out, Son said. Having emptied his pockets, Buzz fell back to sleep. Next, at six o’clock Son was shaking him awake, thrusting money at him. Hell, couldn’t he have waited, Buzz said, sleepy. Naw, Son said.

  When he was home again, an engineer called from south Mississippi wanting a ditch blown beneath a bridge. Could he do it without blowing up the bridge itself? He hadn’t been going to take on any more tough ones, Son said. But damn if he didn’t want to see if he couldn’t figure that one out. He had just come back from a trip and had to rest up, though. He told the man he had a lot of resting up to do to catch up on a lot he had missed. When he could he went, solved the problem by shooting the lower side and then the upper, leaving fifteen feet not blown at all. The water cut itself on through.

  That was the highlight of the fall. Things were quiet the rest of the time; then Laurel came home for Christmas and everytime he came into the house there was a bunch of boys in it. Kate would say he had to go sit in the bedroom. He never had expected not to be able to sit down in his own living room when he wanted; but it had been this way all through high school too. He said who were all those lugs? Kate said boys from some of the nicest families in Delton; she had always been glad about the people Laurel had known going to that country day school. He didn’t care who their families were; he just wanted to know why they didn’t have any more to do, great big grown boys, than sit around somebody’s living room. He talked to them about sports, then did not know anything else to say to college boys. That Christmas, the following summer when she was home, Laurel was in several weddings. He told Kate it looked to him like she ought to be thinking about one of her own. Kate said, “She’s got plenty of time to be married. Let her have a good time.”

  For her final two years of college she went to California. Maybe that was having a good time, jumping all around, he thought. He had said do what she wanted to, but it seemed like she was doing a lot of jumping around. She did not seem to listen. Also, he wondered why she always had to pick out the colleges farthest from home she could find.

  That winter Buzz stayed in town as much as he could and also Will and Martha; he guessed everybody was getting to the age they had to rest up. They played bridge or canasta every week-end, went out to eat often. He went along with as many plans as he could; Kate was better when other people were around. He had put a lock on the liquor closet and had the only key. But it seemed that was one of the reasons she did what she did; she could buy her own and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  Kate thought of that winter and spring as the time she began her walks. He had never talked to her about anything but business, not been interested in anything she did, and the house’s silence finally drove her outdoors. That Christmas Laurel had bought a poodle she saw in a pet store window. Now almost every afternoon and as the days got longer, sometimes after supper, Kate and the poodle, Tippy, set out. She followed one side or the other of the circular drive, alternating days; it gave her something to think about. She listened resentfully to the gravel crunching beneath her shoes, knew she should have had sense enough to tell him not to pave the driveway, then he would have. She turned one way or another, alternate times, down the narrow sidewalk put in only recently by the city. But the neighborhood was as serene still as countryside; she saw rabbits and quail, heard nothing. She went as far as a boulevard to watch the changing of traffic lights, people passing in cars, entered stores to browse. She returned home thinking only there was nothing to go for; often she looked back on all those weeks, Monday to Friday, when she had been alone, would think how gradually even when he was home on week-ends, she still felt alone. She had never learned a thing in the world in Bess, North Carolina. When she left home, she had not known exactly what to turn to either. But one thing she knew was that people who didn’t worry, lived on credit, were a lot better off than they were; people who went places, did things and had fun. She wondered if he ever was going to stop worrying about spending money.

  One night, entering the house from a walk, she found him in a rage about a two-hundred-dollar department store bill. It was a mistake. Someone had used their charge account. Look at the sales slips, Kate said. Nothing would even fit me. Ladies shoes size nine. Probably one of your girl friends charging, Frank.

  Hell! I never had no girl friend with big feet, he said. If it was a bra now, it might be a different thing. For once, he and Kate laughed together.

  That same spring he began renovating the office, said it was time they had room to cuss a cat in. He wrote Laurel how pretty it was; she’d have to come home now and take over the dynamite business. Sealing the letter, he glanced at pictures of blasts on the wall; all of them purty, he thought.

  Suddenly he rummaged in a bottom drawer. On his desk were hammer and nails he had used to put up the photographs. Calling Holston, he gave him two more things saying, “Boy, do me a favor, will you? I’m too tired to move. Hang these up there on the wall for me?”

  Holston read the fancy gold lettering, “Handy, Colorado. Where in the world is that?” he said.

  “Hell, I don’t know whether there ever was such a place. There never were such gold mines,” Son said. “Put those certificates up on the wall. I want to sit here and remind myself it’s possible to make mistakes.”

  While Holston hammered, Son told about buying the stocks, laughing. “I shore thought I had it made when I bought those,” he said, seeing back to that beautiful fall day exactly, himself going down to the bank happily, in the sunshine, his coattails flying.

  When Laurel graduated from college, he agreed to go to California by train, couldn’t make that haul across Texas in June. Since he had been a stock boy in all those jewelry stores, long ago, he had dreamed of going to San Francisco. There was one particular big firm he had done business with he had always wanted to see. Kate said, Well here we are. What is there to see?

  It was a grey stone building on a crowded narrow street. But he was thrilled, thought of the dreaming boy he had been who had never had any idea in the world whether he would make it out here or not. All that time as a boy, he had worked among all those beautiful things, not able to have a single one and had promised himself someday he would be able to buy what he wanted. That day had com
e. He took his wife and daughter inside, having said how much they could spend. Kate could hardly believe it; everything he had done on the trip had been in the best way; she had never expected to own jewelry too. She chose pearls and Laurel a watch. He said, “I’d like to have something inscribed on the back.” Laurel said she would too. What did she have in mind? She said, “From Daddy.”

  “That’s what I had in mind too,” he said. The salesman suggested they add the date; they agreed and he wrote, June 1951. Then Son did what gave him one of the biggest kicks of his life: paid the man in cash. “You should have seen that peckerwood’s eyes bugged out,” he told at home. “He thought we were country folks walking in there, but changed his mind quick!” He would throw back his head and roar, then sober, a little unsure. “Miss Kate now,” he would say, “was em-barrassed. She can’t see why I don’t pull out a check and pay like everybody else.” He told her, You’re all the time telling me I don’t know anything. It’s you don’t know anything. You know how many people there are would like to be able to pull that much money out of their pockets? Half those peckerwoods at that Country Club you and Laurel think are so hot never have seen that much cash. I know that for a fact. Take that fellow I buy my car from, always having his picture on the front page. He sees me on the street and acts like he don’t know who I am when I been buying cars from him twenty years and paying for them. Everybody in Delton knows he runs his business on credit. One time he was down in the hole just about as far as a man can get. I walked in there and paid for a new car in cash, pulled the money out of my pocket and said, Here, I thought I’d hep you out some.