The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ need to get up, I just wanted to check on that hand.”

      “It’s just fine. That salve done the trick.”

      She told him to change the dressing when he got home, and then she came back over to Ledford.

      “You eat like a caveman,” she said.

      “You chew with your mouth open.”

      She smiled and her eyelids got heavy. Ledford wiped his mouth and loosed a cigarette from its pack. The matchbook was damp with sweat, and it took four swipes to flame.

      “I can make us a pot of coffee,” Rachel said. She had a new apartment on Eleventh Avenue. Lucius Ball had wanted her to stay under his roof, but after nursing school and a couple of Mann paychecks, she’d packed her things.

      “Watered down or thick?” he asked.

      She watched him through the smoke. Everything about Ledford seemed older than he was. “I bought a percolator just yesterday, and I’ll make it any way you like.”

      He winked.

      Outside, the rain was picking up. It beat a chorus on the roof above them, and the people eating raised their voices to hear one another, and the dishwashers slept standing up.

      LEDFORD STOOD IN the entryway of the small apartment. He hung his wet coat and watched as she walked away barefoot on the hardwood. The place smelled of women’s powders and hand cream. Such a scent reminded him of his mother’s room and the small cracked mirror she sat in front of all those years before. Putting her face on, she called it. As a boy, he’d sneak up behind her when she sat in front of her mirror. But she always heard him and scooped him into her lap and tickled him. She claimed that the ticklish among us were guilty of crimes. Over his laughter, she’d ask, “You been stealin sugar, sweetie?” and then she’d hug him to her neck, and all was still and safe.

      Rachel brought him a hand towel to pat dry. It was fancy, monogram-stitched, and Ledford hated to use it. She turned from him again and walked past the sofa to the kitchen. “Should I take off my shoes?” he hollered.

      “If you want to,” she said.

      He did not. He walked to the fireplace mantel and studied the photographs there. They were lined up for the length of it. They told a story. Babies dressed in christening gowns and men with sly grins and bunnyeared fingers behind the heads of their gentle wives.

      “Do you like music?” Rachel asked him. She’d started the percolator and was crouching at the cabinet beside him.

      “I reckon.”

      Her Philco had a phonograph right on top. She pulled a record from the cabinet and set the needle down. “Do you like Claude Thornhill?”

      “Never heard of the man,” he said. Piano keys tinkled soft over the quiet hum of clarinets. Ledford’s neck and ears were getting hot.

      When the horns came in, he nearly jumped out of his socks. She laughed at him, brought her hand to her mouth to stifle it. He rested his elbow on the mantle, knocking over two framed photographs. When he went to fix them, Rachel grabbed his hands in hers. “Do you want to dance with me?” she asked.

      “Yes.”

      When she laid her head against his chest, it seemed to Rachel that she’d danced with Ledford a hundred times before.

      Ledford was trying not to upchuck his steak and eggs and chocolate cake. He’d not held a woman the likes of this one before.

      “Do you know what this song is called?”

      He opened his mouth to answer, but only swallowed instead.

      “It’s called ‘Snowfall,’ ” Rachel told him. They swayed. He looked at her hand in his, then down the length of her.

      Barefoot in her nurse’s uniform, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever beheld.

       November 1941

      THE CLASS WAS CALLED “History of the Revolutionary War,” and its professor was dull as drizzle on a windowpane. Inside the lecture hall, Ledford sat back row left. Try as he might, he could not stay awake. Swing shift will do that to a man.

      Those who surrounded him were not of his kind. They were the variety of young people who, when they got smart-lipped in high school, Ledford had punched in the mouth. Young men wore neckties and argyle sweaters. Young women wore their boyfriends’ jackets and spoke in tongues of Alpha and Omicron and Pi. When these students left the lecture hall, it was in groups of eight or more, hip to hip and laughing astride the downed top of a deluxe V-8 convertible. They drank beer.

      Ledford walked alone from campus to Mann Glass, and if he drank, it was going to be whiskey.

      But he’d long since decided not to go bad to the bottle, and truth be told, he liked his routine. Ledford had learned early to exist without friends, and his work and school schedules, though they’d run an average man down, gave him much-needed purpose. Besides, he liked glass. Especially in its molten form. To watch the stuff glow and channel outward from a 300-ton pot was a sight. He’d once watched his father, a real free-blower, puff up and shape that very material, and he remembered what he’d been told. “Glass ain’t nothing but the earth under your brogans, boy.” As his father had said this, he gripped his blowpipe in one hand and his punty rod in the other. He set them aside and scored a hot green ashtray with his dogleg jackknife. “That there is sand, limestone, and ash,” he’d said.

      Back in front of the furnace, Ledford watched the gauge needle blur and wobble. He smacked himself to stay alert. Late nights with Rachel were catching up to him.

      There was a sting at the base of his neck. He turned to find Lucius Ball before him in black safety goggles. “You want little babies to starve?” Lucius asked. Spittle flew. Landed on Ledford’s cheek where the heat evaporated it.

      “How’s that?”

      “Baby food jars. Isn’t that what we make here son?” Sweat ran from the crease of Lucius’s double chin, and his hair tonic smelled sour.

      “I reckon it’s one of the things we make, Mr. Ball.”

      “You can bet your last bits on that. And if that fire isn’t tended right, then we don’t stay on top of that quota board, do we son?” Lucius Ball liked to ask questions and not wait for answers. “This plant outproduces Los Angeles and Oakland, did you know that? Did you know we outproduce Waco, Texas? I bet you didn’t. I bet you take your eyes off the fire just as regular as you please.”

      It wasn’t about the fire. It was about Rachel. The man neither cared for nor understood his daughter’s suitor, and he made no effort to hide it. Lucius Ball was an angry, greedy man. His father-in-law, the head honcho, was dying, and now it seemed that his wife Mary was dying too, unless they’d cut out all the cancer this time.

      Lucius didn’t like to look the young man in the eyes. Something was there that made him uneasy. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor.

      Ledford turned and tended the furnace.

      When СКАЧАТЬ