The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor
away. On the bottom shelf sat a single photograph, flipped, showing only its cotton white back. Ledford reached for it and turned it around. There was the fat Kentucky toddler in her white walker shoes. A hole had been burnt where her face should have been. Ledford smoothed the black ash with his thumb and the photograph roared at him. He fell on his tailbone and covered his ears, and the worms in his palms slid inside and burrowed deep, all the way up to his sinuses, and Ledford shook his head like a dog in water to loose them.
He awoke in this state on the hard basement floor in front of the bookcase. His fingertips were plugged up his nose-holes, and he lay flat on his backside like someone had knocked him out cold.
He crawled to the trunk for his Ten High. Tomorrow was a workday. He’d need to brave sleep again. He’d need to get through.
Upstairs, Rachel had frozen mid-stitch. The tips of her needles quivered as the baby grunted and banged against the crib rails in the nursery. “Please,” Rachel whispered. “Please stay down.”
Ledford’s screams had come again, but she’d not go check on him this time. His nightmares were his alone. What he’d seen and done were not for her to question.
It was the baby she’d see through. It was Mary she’d listen for inside all the other noise.
WHEN MACK WELLS HAD returned to his janitorial duties at the Mann Glass Company, it was with little fanfare. Unlike the other GIs, his return was not featured in the company newsletter. Though he’d taken Honningen with the 394th, he was not allowed to sail stateside with them after V-E Day. He’d been sent back with his ser vice unit to an ill-lit port yard at four in the morning. No parades, no flashbulbs.
It was a Tuesday of his first week back on the job that Mack Wells made eye contact with Ledford. They remembered one another from their time before the war, and they recognized in one another’s eyes the remnants of a shared shitstorm. They convened in Ledford’s new office to talk over lunch. Each preferred the egg salad of the other’s wife. They didn’t speak much on the war. But as for life after its end, Mack Wells was not being offered what Ledford was, not by a longshot. Mann Glass liked its janitors black, the Federal Housing Authority liked their vets white, and neither party made an effort to hide such things.
Ledford didn’t take to such small thinking. As a younger man, like everybody, he’d played the game of white over black, but college had changed all that. History’s study will sometimes enlighten the pre sent. Theologians will sometimes speak openly in classrooms. At Marshall, Ledford had met such a man in Don Staples, professor of ph ilosophy.
In Ledford’s office, the rotary fan hummed metallic. He shut it off. Noises had begun to get under his skin.
Across the desk, Mack Wells had just asked about a new job.
“You want off the swing shift?” Ledford ran his fingers along the desk’s beveled edge.
“That would help,” said Mack Wells. “You want mold shop or hot end?”
“I think I’d make a okay flint.” Mack cleared his throat. He looked at the picture of baby Mary, stuck with a silver tack to a press board panel. Nothing else was hung on the wall.
“Mold maker it is.” Ledford took out a Mail-o-Gram pad and made a note to personnel. “I’ll speak to somebody in the 75 about you.”
Mack shook his head no. The Local 75 would sooner deunionize than offer membership to a black man. “We could hold off on that,” Mack said. He wondered about Ledford’s ways. Couldn’t figure if the white man before him was on the level. “But my wife will be lookin for work. My boy starts first grade this year and she was wonderin if selecting had a spot.”
The selecting department was all women. All white. Ledford said he’d check into it.
They stood and shook hands, and each wanted to ask the other about what they’d seen over there. Neither could do so. Mack Wells nodded and put on his flat cap. He closed the heavy door behind him.
Ledford put his feet on the desk and lit a cigarette. He looked at the memo to personnel. Thought of all the men he knew at the plant who would spit at Mack Wells’ feet if he wasn’t pushing a broom. A knot took shape in his belly. He looked at the blank brown walls around him and rubbed his hands against his slacks. It was not yet ten a.m. Time to walk the floor, he decided. Time to watch the lava pour.
It was loud down there, but steady. Inside the sounds of a factory floor, there was the quiet that comes from constancy. The batch attendant unloaded the mixes. He wore the same split-leather gloves Ledford had worn years before.
Ledford nodded to the man, who he’d heard was a mute, but the gesture wasn’t noticed.
When he turned to walk away, he knocked against the young man approaching. It was Charlie Ball, Lucius’s nephew, who had been hired out of college as a supervisor. Charlie’s father was county commissioner. His grandfather had been governor. “Morning,” he said. His grin was of the shit-eating variety. His tie knot was fat and perfect.
Ledford had hated Charlie Ball from the moment he’d met him. “Morning.”
“Loud, isn’t it?” Charlie’s eyes were set too close, and they looked right through you when he talked, on out to some empty designation beyond.
“It is.” Ledford glanced at his breast pocket to be sure he’d remembered his cigarettes. He had. He looked back at Charlie Ball, not much more than a boy, pudgy cheeks. Freckles. He had a face that stirred in Ledford the urge to whup him.
“You see the new blonde in corrugated yet?” Charlie’s grin spread. He shuffled in his loafers. It was the third time he’d asked that particular question in an hour. He mistakenly thought such conversation ingratiated him with other men.
“I haven’t,” Ledford said.
“Titties the size of footballs.” Charlie cupped his hands in front of his chest to elaborate.
“Uh-huh,” Ledford said. He stared sufficient to make Charlie squirm, and then he moved on.
Ledford walked past the flow line and through the side doors. It was warm out. Humid and cloudy. He sidestepped a stack of shipping palettes and lit a cigarette. Freight cars sat quiet on the line, waiting to be loaded. Ledford walked along the rail as if on a tightrope, his arms outstretched, his lips gripping his smoke. He fell off and kicked at shale rock between the ties. Picked one up and spat on it, rubbed it with his thumb. It reminded him of the pocketstone he used to carry for sharpening the dogleg jackknife. The knife he’d long since put away in the big trunk.
In the sunlight, the rock seemed to house glass, a shine inside the dust.
He threw it high at the batch tanks, above them the steaming chimney stacks. Through the steam, he could make out the green hills. They gathered up and cinched the valley shut. They were perfect.
It was quiet for a time. Then a shift whistle sounded to the east and Ledford’s neck hairs stood on end. Every part of him seized up tight like a watch spring. The whistle, like the fan, had become an irritant of his soul.
When he got back to his office, Ledford tore off the Mail-o-Gram, walked to his secretary’s desk, and said, “Ernestine, I’ve got a note for personnel.” He watched her read it and nod her head. She wore a flower in her hair and a five-year ser vice pin on her blouse collar. “I’m feeling poorly,” Ledford told her. “Taking the rest of the day off.”
She watched him walk away, pulling on his crooked tie knot and unbuttoning his shirt collar.
He gassed up the Packard and stopped at the ABC, where he bought two fifths of Ten High, a couple RC Colas, and a tin of cut plug for the trip.
At the house, he kissed Rachel and Mary hello. He phoned Erm, shoved a change of clothes into his gray leather grip, and kissed Rachel