The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ year next month.”

      “Child?”

      “Yessir.”

      “Boy or girl?”

      “Girl.”

      “Have you kept your pecker in your pants otherwise?” He did not break stride. They cut across the grass, dry and patchy.

      “Yessir.”

      “Good.” Staples stopped dead and pointed to a big maple tree ten yards off. “This is the tree,” he said. The skin on his hand said he’d seen a good bit of sun. Long fingers. He was roughly Ledford’s size, and he’d not stooped with age.

      Ledford followed him to the tree. Staples sat down Indian-style next to a surfaced root. Ledford looked around. A Sadie Hawkins girl squealed and hurdled a green bench. In the distance, the GI dormitory trailers sat quiet and squat, brown rectangles in the sun. Ledford took a seat on a wide root.

      Staples knocked his pipe on the tree trunk. “You were overseas, I’d imagine?”

      “Yessir.”

      “Pacific or Atlantic?”

      “Pacific. Guadalcanal.”

      “Navy?”

      “Marine Corps.”

      Staples looked down at the black ash and made a strange shape out of his mouth. He’d not figured the young man for a Marine. He cleared his throat with a booming cough. “You weren’t drafted?”

      “I enlisted.”

      “Your mother and daddy were okay with that?”

      “They died in ’35.”

      Staples had stuck his thumb in the mouth of his pipe. He shook his head. “I am sorry son,” he said. “You want to talk about booze now or save that for another day?” He pocketed the pipe in his jacket. Before Ledford could answer, Staples said, “You read much Ledford?”

      “I do some.”

      “What are you reading now?”

      “The Bible some. And a book called The Growth of the American Republic.”

      Staples nodded and stood up. He’d gotten a case of the fidgets. “Let’s walk a while,” he said, “and then you’ll accompany me to my office, where I’ll load you up with some new reading material.” He brushed off the seat of his brown slacks. “How’s that sound to you, Ledford?”

      Ledford stood and brushed himself off in the same manner. He nodded as the older man had. “Sounds good,” he said.

       September 1947

      THE CHILD WALKED UNSTEADY from one end of the little porch to the other. Her gait possessed a wild, untested confidence. Rachel stood guard, her foot on the first of three porch stairs. Boards were warped and nailheads surfaced. Rachel worried on splinters—Mary’s feet were soft, though she’d been walking for over a month. She lifted her knees to right angles and pounded against the half-rotten boards. Ledford pushed open the screen door with the box he carried. He let Mary pass before him, winked at her, and stepped down from the porch. The Packard’s trunk was up, Bill Ledford’s blowpipe and punty rod jutting out the back. The suicide doors were swung wide open. A single spot remained among all the boxes crammed inside, and Ledford slid the last one there. He’d marked it Attic Junk, and its contents, mostly old books, had nearly caused him to sit down in the dark reaches of his boyhood home and reminisce one last time. But Mack Wells and his family were on their way over. The home had to be emptied.

      Ledford slammed the Packard’s heavy doors tight against its contents. Inside those boxes were the remnants of a childhood in two parts—the first recalled in photographs, the second in pay stubs and grade cards that no one ever saw.

      There was a sound from the porch.

      “Oh dear,” Rachel said.

      Ledford turned to see her bent and picking up Mary, who was on all fours, crying.

      He pulled out his handkerchief on the way.

      Little droplets of blood emerged round from the checkerboard scrape on her knee. “Watch,” Ledford told her. He pressed the white hanky against the skin and pulled it back, showed it to her. “What’s that?” he asked.

      Mary quit crying and stared at the crimson mark on the white square.

      “That’s a big girl,” Rachel said. She tickled Mary where she held her by the armpits, and the laughing came, harder than the crying. Ledford dabbed once more and the bleeding quit. He bent and brushed his fingers against the porch boards where she’d fallen. A truck backfired, then rumbled past on the street. Its muffler dragged. Ledford watched it stop at Sixth Avenue, and then, still kneeling, he looked back to the porch boards. To the corner, where they met up in a chipped V. He pictured his father’s white buckskin mitt there, just as it had been all those years before, torn to hell by the dog. Then came McDonough’s face. Ledford shook his head and stood up. Mary walked a circle in the frontyard square of crabgrass. Rachel stood by the curb with her hands on her hips. She was turned so that he could see her belly in profile, stretched to full with another child. Best they could figure, she’d gotten pregnant around New Year’s, and here they were, on the precipice of another one.

      A car turned off the boulevard and rumbled toward them. “That’s Mack,” Ledford said. He stepped off the porch, picked Mary up, and stood next to Rachel. He waved as the car pulled up the curb, and then he rubbed at the small of Rachel’s back. She’d strained it pushing the stroller over railroad tracks.

      Mack Wells stepped from the old Plymouth and nearly slammed the door on his boy, who had hopped the front seat to follow his father. The boy ran around the back of the car and opened the passenger door for his mother. She stepped out and thanked him kindly. For a month, he’d opened all doors for his mother. “That’s what a gentleman does,” his grandfather had told him.

      Mack put his hand to his flat cap and nodded. “Ms. Ledford,” he said.

      “Hello Mack.” Rachel stepped toward them. “You must be Elizabeth.” She held out her free hand to Mack’s wife in greeting.

      “Yes. Everybody calls me Lizzie.” Lizzie wore a rust-colored blouse and matching hat, tilted on her head.

      The women shook hands.

      “This Harold?” Ledford asked.

      “This is him,” Mack said. He rubbed the boy’s head from behind.

      “Good to meet you Harold,” Ledford said.

      “Pleased to meet you.” Harold looked up at the white family before him. The baby drooled, and he watched it stretch well past her chin, then give and fall to the sidewalk. It made a quiet splat.

      No one spoke for a moment. Then Mack inhaled deep through his nose. “Mmm,” he said. “Smell that.”

      “Bread СКАЧАТЬ