Old Powder Man

by Joan Williams

  “You mean face powder, cosmetics, so on?”

  He was laughing before she finished, having led her up to it carefully. It always gave him a kick. “Blasting powder!” he said. “Caps, fuses, dynamite, explosives.”

  As breathless as if she had been running, she said, “You don’t mean to tell me.”

  “Ain’t you ever known any old wore out dynamite peddlers before?” he said, grinning.

  “I have not,” she said and called, “Alice Jean, want to buy some dynamite? This gentleman sells it.”

  Low, he said, “She needs a stick of it under her.” The hostess threw back her head and laughed in a holler. Alice Jean had stood to look with interest across the room of empty tables. “What does anybody want dynamite for?” she said.

  “Farmers. Road builders. And how you think the levee got here?” he said. “I blasted for levee work from Cai-ro, Illinois, to Vicksburg and back. It was a booger but we made her. I cleared a thousand acres of land for old man P. J. Willson near here.”

  “I know Mr. Willson,” the hostess said. “That’s where I was a waitress at, in Willsonville. He’d come into the cafe.”

  He said, “Old man P. J. Willson started out like the rest of us, without one dime in our pockets to rub against another.”

  “I declare, I thought he had always had his money.”

  “No mam, that old man made it; you got to hand it to him too. During the Depression, he was just starting out to farm all that land when I was starting my own dynamite company. It took me awhile to do it, but I run ever competitor I had out of this territory. Once they started running, they kep’ on too, just as far-rr as they could run.” He looked at her triumphantly, sat back and laughed until tears came. Her eyes held vicariously his delight. “Everybody said I was crazy to start out when I did and I had to work myself almost to death now. But I did what I said I was going to. I made it.”

  “That’s something for a man to be able to say, to me,” she said.

  “Yes mam, that’s what it seems like to me too,” he said. “But to some folks it seems like it it’nt anything.”

  “You never know what’s going to happen,” she said. “My husband left me. Died of a heart attack when he was forty years old. You can’t look ahead to those things, can you?”

  “No mam, and that’s why I’ve always believed you had to save for a rainy day. My wife says what’s the use of making money if you never spend it and have a good time, but I promised myself a long time ago I wasn’t ever going to get caught short of cash again.”

  “I got enough to get by, as long as my health holds,” she said.

  “There’s some women not happy or satisfied no matter what you do for them,” he said.

  “You only make yourself unhappy wanting all the time,” she said. “I got me a nice son, lives down in Florida in a little house him and his wife has fixed up as nice as can be. I go down there every onct in a while and they come here come Christmastime.” She looked at him expectantly.

  He said, “What I started out to tell you was, when old man P. J. and me started, we had a falling out because I wouldn’t extend him credit.”

  “You don’t mean it?” she said, her mouth opening as if something hot were in it.

  “Shoot, I couldn’t extend credit to nobody. I was scraping around trying to eat like the next fellow. I didn’t know the old man was going to hit the jackpot.”

  “If I don’t kid Mr. Willson if I see him again!”

  “We got back together. He was one of my biggest customers around here for thirty years. Last time I saw him, four, five, I don’t know how many years ago, we got to laughing about it then.” He pushed his chair back and sat, one hand to his chest. “I guess I’ve eat up about all I can. How much I owe you?”

  She looked at his dishes, whispering inaudibly, then said, “Sixty-five ought to do it.”

  He stood, sinking his weight onto one leg, dug deeply into a pocket full of change and brought up a handful. He extricated a quarter for Alice Jean and gave the rest to the hostess. Going ahead, she rang up the money. He took a toothpick from beside the register and his hat from a peg by the door, opened it, and stood aside as she came forward and went out behind her. They stood squinting, then walked to his car, shining like a squat black beetle in the sun. She took her hand from shading her eyes and offered it. “It sure has been a pleasure, Mr …”

  “Wynn,” he said, shaking hands. He touched his hat with the other. “Dynamite Wynn.”

  “Stop in again when you’re travelling this way,” she said.

  He said, “I don’t do any travelling any more. I retired here not too long ago.”

  “Why that’s nice,” she said, “when a man don’t have to work so hard, can take it kind of easy.”

  He was in the car, had started the motor, sat humming it. “That’s the way I always had it figured,” he said. “I’d catch up on my rest, then me and my wife would do some of the things I’d always put off. I’m about caught up on my rest but it don’t seem like I can get to feeling like doing the other things.”

  “Well, take care of yourself, hear?”

  “I intend to,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” He touched his hat again, the car was moving. “Tell old man P. J. if you see him you saw Dynamite. He’ll know who you mean.”

  “I’ll do it,” she said, calling as he drove away, “I’m Iris!”

  At the edge of the highway, he stopped, saw her in the rearview mirror turning back to the restaurant; he knew he could not make it this far again but she was the kind of woman he liked, like Scottie, one who knew what it was to get out in the world and turn a nickel. Having looked, he drove quickly onto the highway to avoid being caught behind a truck which came ponderous and slow like some antiquated animal; he watched it fall behind, the driver a tiny figure bouncing in the cab, thought of the time he drove the dynamite truck, knew he wouldn’t want to have pushed one down the road for a living. Belching, he tasted the soup and something cold, reminiscent of the ice cream. He searched the toothpick from his breast pocket and picked at the back tooth that always worried him after eating. He drove with the pick in his mouth, sucking at it occasionally. The highway stretched ahead as long as the rest of the afternoon. On either side wide flat fields rushed away full of cotton plants now no higher than mushrooms. From an unadorned shack in the center of a field three tow-headed children ran to the road, stood at its crumbling edge and waved as he passed, their pale eyes vivid an instant in flushed faces. In return, he waved and went on, thinking they would never amount to more than their pappy, thinking of his own rise. He settled with his old feeling of familiarity to the wheel and the road, flying along past countryside eroded into gullies filled with old cars and tin cans rusted almost beyond recognition, the earth’s color the same as the Mississippi. He viewed with a sense of change kudzu vine planted to stop erosion, growing so thickly roadside, trees and telephone poles were choked and rushed on through a tangled, jungle-seeming world of greenery. Around the squares of little towns he went, remembering the mornings with the old Negroes coming to town, how he liked listening to their conversations; now benches were empty because of the chill afternoon. Close to the city, he was aware of changes that had come since he had started out peddling dynamite; the countryside lost its particularity, was the same as he had seen coming close to cities across the country and back; there were shopping centers crowded with automobiles as dazzling in the day as mirrors. Gay as carnivals, the shopping centers were hung with triangular banners and bunting and smelled, as far as the road, of yellow-greased almost stale popcorn. They were filled with people stopping to stare, ponder and move on. Now, on what had been countryside when he started out, row after row of small houses were set on treeless plots of land, but there was a vacant feel, different from the first little street where he and Lillian had lived, though here too the yards were littered with riderless tricycles and corroded toys. Behind him the highway rushed backward as quickly as the years; the years fell before his
mind like pieces in a puzzle. He thought of the things he had told Iris about starting out, thought how hard it had been and good because it was, how on the levee he had learned you couldn’t be afraid and it had given him the courage to quit his job the way he had, start his own company; he thought on back to Mammy and Poppa, those years, of Mill’s Landing and Old Deal, knowing now he was the same as that old man had been, always talking and thinking about the past, what had already been, because not much else was going to go on. All that time he had been working he had thought he was working toward this time, maybe had not been after all. At least he had found the business he wanted to be in; maybe that was all you could ask. Some men didn’t have even that much to be grateful about. Over and over he thought about Laurel, that the mistake he had made was letting her go off in the first place or to California or out there the last time; maybe that had been his mistake. If he could go back, whatever he had to do to keep her at home, he would have. He had the baby to look forward to, even if Laurel was far away. Leaving behind road, fields, gutted, vine-covered countryside and people who had turned to watch him go, he went on, pursued by the sun emblazoned above him like a medal and by memory.

  “Do you know why your wife does this?” the doctor said, filling out a form.

  He sat forward, able to breathe easier, and said, “She says to worry me to death.”

  The doctor gave him a steady look. “From the looks of you it looks like she’s about done it,” he said.

  “She says she’s getting back at me for a lot of hell I use to raise,” he said. He looked down a moment, one hand flat against his chest, then raised his eyes. “I guess I did. I guess I made some mistakes. But I didn’t know I was.”

  “I see she’s never been in a sanatarium before or had psychiatric help. If you leave her long enough, maybe we can help.”

  “Hell, keep her,” he said.

  “At least a week,” the doctor said.

  He was in touch with Cecilia but said he could stay alone with Sarah to cook. When the week was up, the telephone rang one night and it was Laurel saying the baby was born. “Well that’s mighty fine,” he said. “What kind of baby is it?”

  “A boy,” she said.

  “We needed some more boys in the Wynn family,” he said. “How are you?’

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Is mother there?”

  “She’s gone to the drug store to get me a prescription. She’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

  “Daddy, he already has big hands that are going to be strong like yours,” she said.

  He said, “Well I hope he finds out some more things than I ever could.”

  When he could get up the next morning, he went to get Kate. She was on a sun porch playing cards and came toward him smiling, looking better, he thought, than she had in a long time. He believed the place had done her some good. From many rooms along the hall people came to tell her goodbye. Leaving, she said she had liked it; there were people around to talk to all the time and something to do. She was full of conversation, he knew that. She said how nice the doctor had been, but quickly, “It wasn’t really like seeing a psychiatrist. He just talked to me. Said he knew I drank to give myself a lift, feel happy. I told him I was the most miserable person in the world when I was drinking.”

  When he could get a word in edgewise, he told about the baby.

  “Why, it’s more than a month early,” Kate said. “Did Laurel say anything about that?”

  “No,” he said. “And neither did I.” But he had sat up half the night thinking about it, had always thought that if a woman had all that education she could avoid making mistakes. And if that wasn’t the answer, he wondered what was. “I’m just going to think about it like a stock dividend. We got two for one,” he said. But it was not so easy telling his friends.

  When the baby was six weeks old, Laurel came home. Her hair had grown and she wore it pulled back and in a large knot on top of her head. Kate said right away be sure she didn’t skin it back tight like Cecilia; but it was softly waved about her face. He was glad to see she had gained some weight and later asked her when she was going to stop biting her fingernails. Never, I guess, she said. At the airport, he peeped into the blue blanket and said, “Shoot, that’s a pretty baby,” and held him all the way home. Laurel carried the baby into the house, then he held him some more. During the month she was there for the first time in his life he realized just how helpless a little baby was.

  Laurel came again when the baby was four months old and he had even more pleasure. The time in-between had been spent waiting for the baby to come again. He said, “What in the world you been feeding this baby? He’s popped out like a bull frog. I’m going to call him Roll-o. No little baby ever wanted to be called George.”

  Each morning, waking earlier now, he called at the top of his voice. “Roll-o! Hey, Roll-o, what are they doing to you?” When he could get up, he went to where the baby was. “Roll-o,” he would say, “we’ve got a load to carry being in a house full of women. What’s that stuff they’re feeding you, phew. You need a steak.” One evening each week he watched prize fights between young Negroes and whites. He sat the baby on his lap to watch too. “Roll-o, tell him hit that nigger again,” he would say. Sometimes when he lay in bed, Laurel put the baby beside him. He drew the baby close, covered him, put his arms around him. One night Kate said, “Frank, I swear, you’re going to smother that baby yet.” He withdrew, looking sheepish with need.

  In the long twilight hours before dinner when he had finished reading the afternoon paper and usually sat waiting for supper, now he began to talk to Laurel. One afternoon he told her to get paper and pencil. “Write this down,” he said. “Maybe you’ll never need it but it’s information that’s only in my head. You have three hundred shares in the Delton County Bank and Trust Company …” Impatiently, she wrote stock numbers, dates bought, prices paid, wondering why it had to be done this minute. No, he had said, it could not wait until morning. But she was convinced there was plenty of time. Moments before, groping for words, he had tried to impart some idea of what it had all been about, building a levee, said it had begun with men with wheelbarrows trying to fight floods, how had they had the nerve? And a hundred years later there was one safe secure line, unless the big flood came; did she realize that? No, she had said, thinking it was interesting, that she would listen later. She was staring in a mirror trying to decide if she had gained weight since the baby. Dr. Phillips had not said the disease would kill him and she held fast to her dream. Roll-o would grow up and he would be here to see him.

  One evening he exclaimed sharply, holding up the paper. “I see here where Lillian’s died.” It had always surprised him, he said, that living in the same town they had never run into each other but once; he told Laurel about that time, told about the time he came home and found his furniture gone. “I made up my mind then wasn’t anybody ever going to do me like that again and nobody ever has.” He told about the bills she had left and how ever since he could, he had paid every bill he got the day it came in, did not wait for a month’s worth to accumulate. In a moment he said, “I’d be a widow-man now.” He tried to imagine that, tried to imagine Lillian old and Lillian dead, but he could picture only the young woman he had last seen. The paper said she had died after a short illness; he wondered what it was, wondered if she had ever thought of him again. All he knew about her was that shortly after marrying that old man he had lost a lot of money speculating in grain. He sure had been glad to hear it.

  He said, “I can’t pick up the paper anymore without seeing somebody I use to know has died.” He leaned back, his hand against his chest. “You know a lot of folks for a long time, then suddenly it seems like you don’t know a damn soul. I mean it.”

  One night he told about an old man who had cut the price of dynamite and how he had broken his son’s nose. “See these knuckles? They never did grow back just exactly right.” Long afterward the old man had blackballed him for a club he had wanted t
o join; he had been sorry about that. Another time he told about running away from home and of the trip to see Pike’s Peak again. A moment he seemed to confront a long empty corridor, then said, “I guess I should have known it couldn’t be the same.” Then his eyes were full as they must have been long ago with merriment. “I worked out there with a bunch of Mexicans, learned to talk some Mexican. Frijoles, frijoles, frijoles,” he said, fast. “Beans! That’s the way they talked holding out pans for food. Zapato, zapato. Shoes!” Laurel waited expectantly. He looked sadder. “That’s all I remember,” he said. “But I use to know some more.”

  One morning he got up with a desire to eat hot cakes; several mornings in a row they went out to have brunch. Sarah could make hot cakes better, Kate said; but it gave him a reason to go out. He took Laurel into Mississippi to see a marker where the levee began, one day asked if she would drive to Mill’s Landing.

  The shelves of the commissary, a store now, were sparsely filled, only a few of the twelve houses still standing were occupied, but the cottonwoods shaded the road. Waving a hand toward empty countryside, he told where the mill and Niggertown had been. Laurel gave such a start, he laughed. “Well that’s what we called it back in those days,” he said without apology.

  The road to the highway was little more than tracks through dirt. He had Laurel stop at a small unpainted store, a gas pump in front. Inside, an old lady pulled an overhead string unlocking the pump. She came out and gave them gas. He asked if she had known a man who long ago ran the store and had a daughter named Betty Sue. Remembering, the old lady said Betty Sue had married a man who bought an orange grove in Florida; she thought he had done all right. Pulling away, Son told that Betty Sue had been his first gal.

  Another day, driving, he decided to find Shut-eye. Laurel, having read his letter to Son, wanted to meet him too. They questioned Negroes in East Delton until they found the old man, his eyes covered with a film nearly blue. His mind was clear. He and Son, in the living room, talked of old times. The floor held patterned linoleum hardly distinguishable from a rug. Crocheted doilies were on the wall as decorations, along with two framed placards. Son read, Is My Name In the Book of Life? and Give Me My Flowers While I Live.