Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  “I still don’t see why you couldn’t have paid by check,” Kate said.

  “Oh hell,” he said.

  He went down to the hotel bar and had several Gibsons; he’d just found out about those. He thought of the time Kate had run up a hundred-dollar bill in a neighborhood shop. He gave her a single bill and told her to go pay it. Every bill he got he paid the day it came in, did not wait even for a month’s worth to accumulate. Whoever sent him a bill had his money the next day. Kate came back embarrassed, said the saleslady had been so excited, run all about the shop saying she’d never seen a hundred dollar bill before.

  I don’t reckon she was embarrassed to take it, he had said. He couldn’t understand anybody being embarrassed to walk in somewhere with money to pay a bill they owed. If there was any woman he never was going to understand, it was Kate.

  “Boy, I better have another one of those with a onion,” he said. After several drinks the boy Laurel brought along to supper looked a lot better. There wasn’t anything the matter with George; he had graduated from college with Laurel and was a nice enough boy, way over six feet tall and sandy-haired, though he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he took off when he spoke and put back on to hear what you were going to say; it was just that he did not seem to know what he was going to do, now that he had been to college, any more than Laurel did. Laurel said he was going to go to school some more. He said, Whew. Kate wondered if Laurel was going to marry George. He said he’d like to know what they were going to live on if she did. He certainly wasn’t going to support some big hunk of boy too lazy to get out and start learning a business when he was twenty-one years old and was still going to school, Jesus Christ. The next day, Laurel and Kate went to ride the trolley car. It wore him out walking up and down all those hills. He said he had to wait for the mail, see if there was anything Holston wanted to know about. But there was only a short letter from him saying everything was running along fine without him, stay as long as he wanted. There was a post card from Sarah, saying the house and Tippy were fine but she got lonesome at night with no lights on. All those onions had kept him awake. In the night he had decided what he was going to do and now did it. He was back in the hotel when Laurel and Kate came back, sitting in the room, looking like the cat that ate the canary, Kate said.

  “What’ve you done?” she asked. “Bought me a light,” he said.

  “A light?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  He stuck his hand straight before him, wearing a heavy ring with a diamond center. “When I was a boy I worked around all those pretty things and couldn’t have any of them. I promised myself some day I was going to buy me a diamond ring. Now I have.”

  “Frank, I swear to my soul, men don’t wear diamond rings,” Kate said.

  “What the hell they make ’em for if men don’t wear them,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve known plenty men wore them. Lots of men on the levees wore ’em so they could scratch up another fellow’s face if they got in a fight.”

  “That’s just what I’m talking about,” she said. “It’s tacky.”

  “Tacky my foot,” he said. Just because nobody in that wide place in the road she came from could afford a diamond ring she thought men didn’t wear them. He told Laurel later, Your mother doesn’t have any sense, never has had. Laurel only thought, Even now, even at my graduation, they couldn’t stop.

  Back in Delton, he went to the doctor about his cough, told him he didn’t have the breath to get up and down a one of those hills in San Francisco. The doctor found nothing wrong, said it was probably a cigarette cough, to cut down on smoking. Not too much was going on in the office during the hot weather and he stayed home a lot the rest of the summer, getting up when he wanted to. One morning he was eating a late breakfast while Laurel ate lunch; he noted her fingernails were bitten to the quick, as always; and she had gotten too thin out at that school, he thought. Her hair had always hung straight to her shoulders but in San Francisco she had had it cut short; it swung against her cheeks, just covering her ears, and he thought she looked even more like Kate. He said, “Now what are you going to do?”

  “Today?” she said.

  “I’m talking about from now on,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ve been to all the employment agencies. There aren’t any jobs.”

  He had been cutting up two fried eggs, crisscrossing his knife and fork rapidly across the center of his plate. He stopped, reared back, his wrists settled to the table edge and his silverware stood upright. “That’s the silliest damn statement I ever heard in my life,” he said. “I told you I could get you a job down yonder to the bank. That’s one place in this town somebody knows who I am.”

  The table was beside the window; they had to squint to bear the day. His eyes, blue, seemed to reflect the bright late summer sky. “I took out all the loans I ever took out for my business down at that bank. And I met all the notes early. I did that on purpose, to establish my credit. I took them all out through Mr. Gordon sits there in that first desk in the lobby. I could walk in there today and get any kind of loan I wanted in a minute. I believe if I asked Mr. Gordon he’d get you a job as one of those messenger girls they have there in the lobby.”

  “But, Daddy, I don’t want a job as a bank’s messenger girl,” she said. “I want a job that has something to do with what I majored in at college, English.”

  “English?” he said. “Whew! Did you have to go to college for four years to learn English?” He sucked a bite of egg from his fork thinking how he had wanted her to go to college. She hadn’t been interested in getting married and he figured the more education a woman had, the less likely she was to make mistakes. He had wanted her to learn how to make something of herself, remembered telling her when she left, Now, see if you can find out some of the things I never could. But he didn’t believe she had. And what got his goat was, she didn’t seem to have learned one damn thing to help her get out in the world and earn a living. He ate some more, wondering what all that money had gone for. Stacking his cup and saucer into his plate, he pushed them away, lit a cigarette, but began as soon as he inhaled to cough.

  Laurel said, “I thought the doctor told you to quit smoking.”

  Taking out his handkerchief, he blew his nose with a hard blaring sound. His mouth cocked into its crooked, tough, still handsome grin. “That’s what the man said,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you?” she said.

  His eyes opened wider, in astonishment. “Because,” he said, “not a man alive’s going to tell me when to smoke and when not to.” He looked at her expectantly, laughing. When she did not laugh, he stopped. He stood up, narrowing his eyes against smoke twisting toward him. It was Sarah’s day off. He picked up dishes and carried them to the kitchen as Kate came in the back door, her heels making mice-like squeaks across the polished linoleum floor. With two thuds, a sigh of relief, she set down grocery bags. Laurel, having picked up her dishes, came into the kitchen too. Son was backing rear first from the ice box holding a large container of ice water. He put it to his mouth and drank in long gulps, his Adam’s apple jumping. Kate, taking things from the grocery sacks, turned in disgust. “That’s supposed to be for everybody to use,” she said.

  Without answering, he returned the bottle almost empty.

  Kate said, “I hope you had a nice sleep while I was off at the grocery and lugging in these heavy sacks.”

  Laurel said, “I would have helped, I didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “I bet,” Kate said.

  Son crossed the room, belched and looked relieved. “She’s too lazy to even get a job,” he said.

  “You talk about lazy when you sleep till noon every day,” Kate said.

  “Kate, are you trying to run my business again?” he said.

  “You don’t have any to run,” she said. “That’s what’s the matter.”

  A long moment, he stood staring; then he said, “I worked
thirty years so I wouldn’t have any business to tend to, so I could sleep late in the mornings if I wanted. And nobody’s going to tell me any different, you hear?”

  “I hear,” she said.

  He stared at her out of eyes turned white. Skin sagged like jowls along his face. “I don’t want to have anything to do,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Kate said. Her back to them, she kept sorting groceries.

  He stared as if she faced him, once would have hit her, now only looked as if he would like to. Too much juice, he thought, had gone out of him. Laurel wondered why Kate, who so often had wanted him to change, intentionally antagonized him now that he had. Kate crossed the room, storing things. He said, “I told her I could get her a job as a messenger girl down yonder at the bank. But she can’t start at the bottom. She’s been to college.”

  “She doesn’t have to know what she wants to do yet,” Kate said. “She’s only been home a month.”

  He pressed a hand against his chest and caught his breath, as if needing to store it to say what he wanted. “She’s got stock in her name in that bank,” he said. “She’ll appreciate that some day. That bank’s going to be one of the biggest in this part of the country, the way Delton is growing.”

  “Oh, Frank, that’s not the point,” Kate said.

  “Well, I don’t know what the point is then,” he said.

  He dug a toothpick from the breast pocket of his bathrobe and picked at a back tooth. The pick bobbed up and down; he sucked occasionally, keeping it in place and said, “That stock split two for one not long ago.” For the first time he spoke directly to Laurel. “Do you realize that?”

  “No,” she said. She was washing lettuce and had no idea what a stock split meant. Her stomach had knotted resentfully at the way they had spoken about her as if she were not there.

  “Two for one!” he said happily. His grin returned; his eyes were full of delight. Sucking juicily at the toothpick, he shifted it across his mouth. “All I know is,” he said, “I’d have been a happy son-of-a-bitch to have had somebody offer to help me out when I was starting out, fourteen years old, to look for work. She’ll find out what earning a living’s like someday.” At the back door, Tippy whined to get in. Son opened the door. Shimmying his rear in delight, Tippy came through. Son said, “It was a booger, boy. A booger.”

  Kate said, “Frank, are you going to stay here again all day without even getting dressed?”

  He said, “Kate, I told you not to try to run my business.” Turning, he went out and down the long hall slowly, to his room at the end. He would get dressed, though he had not been going to until Kate started in on him.

  Laurel said, “Mother, all those girls do at the bank is stand all day in the lobby until someone has a message to deliver.”

  “I know it,” Kate said. “But I don’t know what you are going to do.”

  When he came back dressed, they were silent. “I bought that stock at twenty-nine, too,” he said, coming in. “Now it’s worth sixty-one.” Neither Kate nor Laurel understood stocks and said nothing. He said, “I guess I’ll have to go on down and get me a haircut and see about what’s going on at the office.”

  He went out and down the back steps and slowly across the yard toward the garage. Kate said, “Will you tell me what he’s going to do the rest of his life, sit here and me sit here and watch him?” She threw a bunch of celery at the drainboard and suddenly crushed a paper sack so hard her knuckles stood out white and separate. “Oh, you don’t know what it’s like having everything turn out wrong. Him just sitting here and a daughter who’s the only one of her crowd not married, a home you never want to come home to.”

  Laurel thought, Why does she think I want to stay here? I’ve always been going to find a place where everything is different. Silent, she watched him out the back window; from the rear he looked like an old man; the back of his neck was narrow, his shoulders went forward and his clothes hung on him as if they were a larger man’s; the sleeves seemed empty. Stopping at the garage, he held one hand against a door post.

  In the car, he stared ahead at the wall where garden tools hung, smelled the cool damp smell of the concrete floor, listened to himself breathe. You never gave a thought to something like breathing until you couldn’t do it so good anymore, he thought. The time was almost here to do some of the things he had put off, to have some fun with his money Kate said they never had had. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do. But he knew one thing, he had to get to feeling better before he did it.

  He went to the office off and on until Christmas; during January when Buzz was in town, he went every day. On the first, Buzz had looked at him in surprise. “Ain’t you lost some weight, boy?” he said.

  “I ain’t doing a damn bit of good,” Son said.

  “Probably your damn meanness coming out,” Buzz said.

  “Hell, I ain’t even mean anymore,” Son said. “Until I fell off the wagon Christmas, I hadn’t even had a drink in six months.”

  “You are sick,” Buzz said. They were laughing, then suddenly Buzz was not. He sat down and said, “Old man,” and his voice had no inflection; it was as if he were trying to hold it on one straight note. “I’ve gone broke, busted, on that job up there.”

  Son tilted back; one leg crossed the other; his hands gripped hard the arms of his chair. “Whew,” he said.

  Buzz said, “Every red cent I had was tied up in that job. First my machinery broke down and it rained four days out of every seven. Naw. First I underbid the job.”

  “Whew,” Son said again. “Last thing I knew you was a millionaire, now you’re broke. Don’t you have no money put away anywhere for a rainy day?”

  “You know I never have been able to save nothing,” Buzz said.

  “Old man, it looks to me like you’re in a hell of a mess. I thought when you took on that job you was getting to be a pretty big operator. I can’t imagine any grown up man not having money put away. Miss Kate now, she’s always been on me about putting everything I made into stocks. But the way I feel, what if I had to be out on the road still, trying to make a living?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Buzz said.

  “Damn if I know. I’m not suppose to know anything except how to sell powder. And the doctor-fellow can’t find anything the matter with me either. I have a bad cough. What’s going to happen now?” Son said.

  “My creditors are fixing to take my machinery,” Buzz said. “If they do, I ain’t got a snowball’s chance in June. Would you lend me some money?”

  Son said, “It looks to me like I’m going to have to bail you out this time.”

  They discussed the amount and Son’s terms. “I’ll go down to the bank this afternoon and get a bond,” Buzz said.

  “I don’t want no bond,” Son said. “I take your word.”

  “Not even for that amount?” Buzz said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I couldn’t stand to see no old man go to jail,” Son said. With a little effort, he rose; they shook hands. “This is enough, for all that?”

  “It’s enough,” Son said.

  “Old man, you ain’t as tight with your money as they say you are,” Buzz said, laughing almost in his old way.

  “I can be,” Son said.

  “How’s Miss Kate and Laurel doing?” Buzz said.

  “They’re both about to worry me to death,” he said. “I think sometimes that’s what makes me feel so bad. Miss Kate is just the same. Laurel don’t seem to be able to settle down. She’s had two or three little jobs around Delton, and quits them. She’s not doing anything right now but she’s talking about going up yonder to New York to work.”

  “Can’t you make Kate quit that,” Buzz said.

  Son said, “I thought she’d quit when Laurel came. I just don’t know what to do.”

  In February when Buzz went back to East Tennessee, Son thought he missed the old soandso like he had missed few people; still he would not lend him money a second time. You could make a mi
stake once. There had been only a few old boys in town that winter staying around at the hotels, nothing like it used to be. He got around to seeing everybody, had them out to the house, shot craps once, not like it used to be either. That spring, Buzz called from his job. “Cliffs,” he said. “Just solid rock two hundred feet straight up. I got to get the side shot off, to flatten it out wide enough for a roadbed. Frank, nobody can do it but you. Come on up here. It’ll do you some good.”

  He started out a few days later for the Smokies. Kate said, “Thank goodness, he’s got something to do.” Maybe it was something to do, he thought; maybe it would do him some good; but what nobody could see was he just didn’t have the stuff anymore. “I’m wore out,” he told Buzz when he got there. “I’m going to have to rest up before I even look at the job.” One problem was to get tractors up the cliff. When they figured a way, Son knew it was a sight he would never forget; they hooked a pulley to a tree and the tractors to the end of the rope and pulled them two hundred feet straight up the side of the cliff, before Son shot the side off.

  It was the middle of a sunny afternoon when he got back home, but he could not wait to get to bed. As he crossed the back yard, Sarah came to the door of her room off the garage and said, “Mrs. Wynn’s gone to play cards. She’ll be back at six.”