The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ the bad Maynard boy did it. He’s come up missin since.”

      “That’s mass murder he committed,” Don said. His eyes were wide. He held the dish rag at his side, fisted, like he was trying to squeeze something out of it.

      “What do you mean?” Ledford asked.

      Bob cleared his throat. “Five people died in that fire,” he said. “It was in the paper.”

      Staples just shook his head.

      “Who died?” Ledford asked.

      “The elders,” Bob said. “I knew them a little. Mother and Daddy B is all they’d be called. They lived in the old ways.” He shook his head just as Don had. “And their oldest girl, Tennis they called her. She was going on sixty herself. Burned in the house with them, along with her two grown children, who I didn’t really know. Men, both of em. In their thirties, I believe.”

      In the other room, Erm stood up and walked to the record player. He put the needle down unsteady. “Big Butter and Egg Man” started up again.

      Ledford cringed at the volume. He spoke louder. “Who’s left then?”

      “The twins,” Bob said. “Dimple and Wimpy. A little younger than Tennis was, maybe fifties.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Put it back in his pocket. “They are tough to figure. Hard men. Real hard. Part Indian is what they’ll tell you, among other things. But they will look you in the eye, and they will die before they give that land over to Maynard Coal.”

      Erm stepped into the open kitchen doorway. He leaned against the jamb and smiled. His glass was full again. “What time saloons close in West Virginia?”

      The other three didn’t answer. Erm had walked in at the wrong time.

      Staples hung the dish rag on a hook next to the sink. “Like you said, Erminio, church is bright and early.”

      Erm nodded in that loose motion again. “Yes,” he said. “Church is early. Big Bill’s big day. Big-balled Big Bill’s baptism.”

      Ledford laughed despite himself.

      Erm continued. “Big Bill will no doubt be a big butter and egg man like his Uncle Erm.”

      Staples looked at Ledford. He wished the young man hadn’t enlisted his Chicago friend as godfather. He wished he’d taught him a little more on life. There hadn’t been time yet.

      Erm kept up. “Or like Big Bob over here.” He motioned with his drink hand and spilled. He tapped his foot in time with the piano keys from the other room. “You got the kind of money that folds, don’t you Bob?” Erm laughed, said he was only fooling. Then he looked directly at Don and said, “Where you get this music anyway?”

      “Louisiana,” Don said.

      “Louisiana?” Erm said the word as if he’d never heard it before.

      “Louisiana,” Don repeated. “This is Louis Armstrong, the finest musician we have today.”

      Erm turned to Ledford. “Leww-weeeez-eee-anna,” he said. “Ain’t that where Sinus came from?”

      “Can it Erm,” Ledford said.

      “Ooooo, yes sir.” Erm had straightened at the command, pried his eyes alert. He smiled at the Staples brothers. Then he paused and said, “Armstrong’s dark meat, isn’t he?”

      Nobody answered him. Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. Both he and Don straightened from their lean-tos. They’d not been talked to in this way by a younger man before.

      Erm wore a look of contentment. He said, “Ledford rents his house to dark meat,” and looked from one to the next, fishing for a response.

      Ledford started to speak, but Don cut him off. “Erm—can I call you Erm?”

      Erm’s grin spread one-sided and he nodded yes.

      “Your friend Ledford rents the home he grew up in to Mr. Wells because the federal government doesn’t see fit to help out a Negro GI the way they might have helped me out, or the way they’ve helped you out, Erm. You follow?”

      Erm didn’t move a muscle.

      “Well, see if you can follow this,” Staples said. “You noted earlier that I’m both a man of scholarship and a man of God. An astute observation on your part. And do you know what I’ve come to learn from both? What is more clear to me now than ever?” He did not wait for an answer. “That the poor, most especially the Negro poor, have suffered long enough, and that we are at a crossroads, right now, at this moment. And if we do not right our wrongs against them, a mighty eruption will come.” He started to continue, but didn’t. Instead, he stared down the young Chicagoan, whom he suspected of carrying a pistol in his sock. He asked him again, “You follow?”

      Erm stared back and let his grin spread both ways. “I follow,” he said.

      “Good,” Staples said.

      His brother let out a held breath. Ledford did the same.

      Staples pulled the dish towel from its hook and threw it across the kitchen. Erm caught it with his free hand. “Now,” Staples said, “clean up the shit you spilled on my linoleum.”

      On the drive home, Erm passed out in the Packard. Before going inside, Ledford took off his overcoat and spread 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.

       November 1947

      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 СКАЧАТЬ