The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor
it across his friend. He left him there.
On his knees in front of the box labeled Attic Junk, Ledford picked up his father’s batch book again. He’d not done so since reading of the dream, but now he scanned the pages for one word, Bonecutter. He soon found it.
June 5TH. Old man Bonecutter showed up at the door agin today. I will not do what he asks. I wanted to tell him it is his fault nobody will come out to Wayne and re-settle. He run them all off just like he did my mother. I will not leave the city of Huntington to return to the old ways. Something is not right out there.
Ledford read it three more times. He tried to remember his father as a man who might write such things, but nothing came.
He shut the book and put it under the quilt in the old trunk. It was a perfect fit inside the square where his Ten High used to be. As he closed the trunk’s lid, he wondered if Erm kept his Purple Heart under a stack somewhere. He wondered why the two of them didn’t keep in touch with anybody else from B Company. Why they’d never go to the VFW, or see about a First Marines reunion.
He supposed it had something to do with memory.
Ledford went to bed. Morning would get here quick, and Willy was to be baptized in front of the eyes of the church. He would have two Godparents. His Great-aunt Edna, a retired schoolteacher, and his Uncle Erm, a drunken criminal.
IT HAD TAKEN TWO months for someone to burn a cross in the front yard of Mack Wells and his family. At five in the morning, he was pouring a bucket of water on the last cinders when Lizzie asked him, “Why did they wait so long to do it?” She pulled the lapels of her robe tight across her chest. She wore Mack’s work boots on her feet, unlaced. In the yard, he was barefoot. He hadn’t answered her question. “You’ll catch your death out there Mack,” Lizzie told him. “No shoes on your feet.”
“The ground is warm,” he said. He stared down at it, watched an ember die. Tucked into the cinched waistline of his bluejeans was an Army-issue .45.
It occurred to Lizzie that whoever had done it might still be watching them, under the cover of early-morning dark. But the street was quiet. Only the bakery was awake, its assembly line humming, its slicers cutting loaves.
Mack looked around too. He had a mind to draw his pistol and fire at the first sign of movement. There wasn’t any. He looked back at his house. In the upstairs window, Harold pressed his forehead on the pane. The hall bulb behind him flickered. He knew what had happened. He’d awakened just as his parents had, confused by the dancing light from outside. “Stay inside,” was all Mack had said to the boy.
Lizzie shivered on the porch. Her breath turned to condensation on the air. “Mack?” she said.
Again he did not answer her. He stared up at his son’s silhouette until his vision blurred. “We’d better telephone Ledford,” he said.
AT MIDNIGHT ON the eve of Thanksgiving, Rachel sat down on the love seat for the first time that day. She’d been on her feet for sixteen hours. Willy was finally down and Mary could be counted on to sleep through the night. The stuffing was made and the half-runners strung. Rachel looked at her watch. She stretched for the radio dial. The tuner spun loose and she couldn’t pick up a signal. There was a hole in the grille cloth where Mary had punched the leg of a baby doll through. Rachel stuck her finger inside and for a moment wondered if she might be electrocuted.
She looked at the telephone, thought about how it had rung so early the morning prior. How it had awakened the baby. How Ledford had grabbed it and put his feet on the floor hard and said, “When?” What they’d all known might visit the Wells family had visited them in the form of a fiery cross. The West End was white, and Ledford had changed that.
Now the Wells family was joining them for Thanksgiving dinner, at Ledford’s request. Don Staples too. Rachel rubbed her temples and counted silently to herself, wagering that the telephone would ring again in twenty seconds. She got to sixty. Then one hundred. Ledford had gone for chewing tobacco at eight. “Right back,” he’d said, like always. And, like always, he’d stayed gone.
She reached down beside the love seat and grabbed her knitting bag. It had been her mother’s before her. From it she pulled her latest work, a half-finished sweater that would fit Willy next winter season. It was blood red and hooded with brown toggle buttons. She picked up the straight needles that had been in the family for two generations. Her pointer fingers found the taper. These were not metal needles, like so many. Nor were they wood. They were walrus tusk, brought back from Alaska by her great-grandfather, a fisherman.
Rachel’s hands bony and worn. Her nails were chipped and her fingertips dotted with tiny cuts. She pulled the yarn’s tail and looped, and soon found herself in a void of mechanical movement, orchestrating in her mind the tiny, scraping sound of the bone needles. She hummed, in time with the scraping, “Amazing Grace.” Always, it was “Amazing Grace.”
Downtown, on Fourth Avenue, Ledford was stride for stride with Staples. Their fedoras were pulled low and their coat lapels high. It was dark, save the headlights of a passing car or the office lights above the storefronts. The Keith-Albee and the Orpheum were both running late pictures. A woman in a purple pillbox hat locked the ticket booth and walked west. Ledford thought he recognized her. He’d taken Rachel to see Crossfire the week before. Afterwards, they’d run into Mack and Lizzie, as they filed down from the balcony with the rest of the black patrons.
They walked up Tenth Street, past the darkened doors of Chief Logan’s Tavern. On the sidewalk, there was a splatter of vomit in the shape of a daisy. They stepped around it.
The two walked fast and spoke to one another about the books Staples loaned him. The American Indian was up for discussion. Ledford had not known such thought and conversation possible until meeting Don, and ever since, it seemed to him that his mind was expanding faster than it had in all the years prior, combined. They’d had conversations, like this one, that lasted five or six hours. Don had waxed knowingly on the laws of the Confederacy of the Iroquois. He spoke of the Indian League of Nations and their General Council’s democratic ideals. He liked to say that nothing was new, that we spent our days committing the mistakes of those who came before us because we forgot to remember them. He liked to say, “America will grab hold of the scientist’s lab coat, and they will hold on for dear life as he rockets us straight to Hades.”
On this cold night, he answered Ledford’s question on work. On deeds. Staples said, “Look here. ‘Thou art the doer, I am the instrument.’ And this is real important for you, Ledford, because you’re the type that needs to keep himself busy.” The tip of his nose was red from the chill, and there was pipe ash caught in his beard. “Now, busy like a businessman isn’t going to cut it. Nossir. You’ve got to be busy like a bee, in the ser vice of something besides I. See what I mean?” He grabbed Ledford by the coat sleeve and kept walking. “You will only beat back what’s chasing you if you forget about yourself. You work for your family, for your God, for those around you that need it most. Never for yourself.” He put his hands back in his pockets. “Should’ve worn my gloves,” he said.
Ledford flicked the cherry off his cigarette one-handed and stuck the butt in his pocket. “But what if the work a man does isn’t real?”
“How’s that?”
“Office work,” Ledford said. “I’m not workin for anybody but those whose pockets is already lined, as far as I can figure.”
“Then quit,” Staples answered. “You don’t strike me as the type to fall in with the scotch-and-bridge crowd, Ledford. Get out while you can.” They were coming up on Fifth Avenue, Rachel’s Episcopal church. “Let’s double back on Sixth,” Staples said.
The younger man had questions. “Were you ever—”
Staples had stopped walking.
Ledford