The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor

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      Rachel took Mary from Ledford. “Let me show you the space in back for a garden,” she said. Lizzie nodded and followed, leaving the men and the boy by the car.

      “If it isn’t the bread smell stirring your stomach, it’s the scrap metal clanging in your ears,” Ledford said. He turned and walked to the house, motioned for them to follow. His limp had come back with all the box hauling. He ignored the burn radiating up his shinbone.

      Mack looked back at Harold. He knew the look on the boy’s face. It was fear. Mack felt it too. There wasn’t a black family for a mile in the West End, and he could scarcely believe he’d agreed to rent the house. But when his home loan had fallen through, and his mother had sold her house to move in with his brother, Mack had acted fast. Ledford had told him over lunch one day, “I got a place in the West End you could rent real cheap.” Mack had quit chewing, looked at him like he was crazy. Ledford went on. There weren’t many neighbors, he’d said. There was the scrapyard and the bakery. There was the filling station on the corner, whose owner, Mr. Ballard, was not a hateful type. He had a Negro in his employ, Ledford had told Mack. It had all seemed natural, what with Ledford’s need to hold on to his old house and Mack’s troubles with the Federal Housing Authority. Inside a week, they’d drawn up a lease and shaken hands on it. There’d been some looks in their direction, but neither man paid much mind. They’d become friends, as much as a black man could be with a white one. Mack was the only welcome visitor inside Ledford’s office, the only glass man interested in hearing what Professor Staples had been teaching his young pupil.

      The screen door squealed as Ledford opened it and stepped in. “Gas and water and electric are all on and in your name,” he said. The staircase before them sagged at the middle of each riser. It would be good to have a boy running up and down again. Ledford smiled, “Wasn’t always that way with the water and electric. We used to barrel-catch rain and heat it.”

      “I know about that,” Mack said. He surveyed the living room. “You ain’t taking that big chair?”

      “It’s yours if you want it.” Ledford regarded the wide upholstery. It had been his father’s drinking chair. On payday, he’d pass out cold and spill all over it. The smell still turned Ledford’s stomach.

      Young Harold walked over past the chair. He looked at the builtin bookcase, the few books left there. He whispered, sounding out the spines.

      “Book on baseball there. Go on and grab it,” Ledford said.

      Harold took down the skinny book and opened it. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and turned pages.

      “He’s reading like a older child already,” Mack said.

      “You like baseball?” Ledford asked the boy.

      Harold said, “Yessir,” without looking up from the book.

      “Good.” Ledford smiled. “That’s your book then. But if that baby in Mrs. Ledford’s belly comes out a boy, I may borrow it back from you down the line.”

      “Yessir,” Harold said, and then he went back to sounding out the words. “The Red . . . Head . . . ed . . . Out . . . field,” he whispered.

      Ledford fished the front- and backdoor keys from his pants pocket. His finger through the keyring, he whirled them a few times, Old West style, catching them mid-rotation with the snap of his hand. He held them out for Mack Wells to take.

      The women came in the back door, Mary in the lead. She dropped to all fours on the cracked ribbon tile and picked at a loose piece of grout. Before she could get it in her mouth, Rachel reached down and snatched it.

      “Harold used to put everything in his mouth,” Lizzie said. “I caught him eating mud more than once.”

      In the backyard, Rachel had asked her about having more children, and Lizzie had explained she was no longer able. I’m sorry, Rachel had said, and it seemed to Lizzie that unlike some white folks, she meant it.

      “Mary hasn’t yet sampled mud, but I figured early I sure can’t set out mouse traps.” They laughed together. They watched Mary pull herself up by a loose drawer handle.

      “Strong,” Lizzie said.

      Rachel pointed out the range’s unsteady leg. She showed Lizzie how to bang on the refrigerator’s monitor top if it quit running. “Loyal put some work in the kitchen over the years,” Rachel said. “Nothing’s new, but everything’s fixed.” She ran her finger over a long, glued crack in the table’s porcelain top. It pinched at her insides to think of him alone in that house back then, still a boy, doing a man’s job and a woman’s too. She rubbed at her round belly through the silk.

      Lizzie was used to some age on her things. The hand-crank wringerwasher next to the sink was the same one she’d grown up with, same one she still used. It was possible that Mack had not been crazy when he’d agreed to rent this place.

      When Lizzie knew it wasn’t obvious, she stole hard looks at Rachel’s face. It seemed the woman was kind and genuine. She suspected the only black folks Rachel knew growing up were those who cleaned her house, those who followed the orders of her parents, but it was possible that such ways had not rooted in her.

      “Loyal raised himself alone from age thirteen in this house,” Rachel said. She’d knelt to Mary, who was at the windowsill, pulling at an edge of unstuck wallpaper. She blurted something over and over that vaguely resembled “flower,” the paper’s pattern. Rachel looked through the windowpane, her eyes glazing over. “I know he hopes your family will find the house suitable.”

      Lizzie did not answer. She listened to the baby girl talking in her own language. Down the hallway, Mack and Ledford laughed at a joke. From the scrapyard there came an extended squeal and crunch. Lizzie’s knees nearly buckled and her forehead popped with sweat. She was thinking how dangerous all this was. Her new job had come by way of Mr. Ledford. Her family’s new home, the same. White folks. Those whom her father had raised her to be wary of. And here she was, talking kitchens and children, vegetable gardens and barren wombs, all as if the expectant woman across from her had been born into the same world as she.

      CHARLIE BALL WAS eager to hand out the cigars he’d bought. He walked the factory floor, sidling up to every man in sight with his box of White Owls, lifting the lid like it was a treasure trunk. “It’s a boy,” he said. “Little William Amos Ledford. Saturday morning. Mother and baby are just fine.” Most men took a cigar and stuck it in a coverall pocket, then went back to work. Fishing for conversation, Charlie said to more than one, “I’m not real sure where that middle name comes from, but to each his own, I guess.”

      The name came from the Bible, a book Ledford had read yet again. Ledford arrived at half past noon. It was Tuesday, the last day of the month, and he needed to get a few things done now that Rachel and the baby were home from the hospital. Her aunt, a retired schoolteacher, was helping out.

      Charlie caught him as he walked toward the office door. “There he is,” Charlie said, loud. His hair carried too much Royal Crown at the front. It clumped in spots. “Cigar for the proud papa?” He opened the box with flair.

      “Thank you Charlie,” Ledford said. He pocketed the thing as the others had.

      “How’s Rachel faring?”

      Charlie spoke about his cousin as СКАЧАТЬ