The Marrowbone Marble Company. Glenn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ missed a spot sweeping. Mack got an earful on dust and its potential to wreck all that is good and mechanized inside a factory’s beating heart. Lucius walked away, shaking his head.

      Ledford hollered for Mack Wells to come over. When he got there, Ledford said, “I bet I can guess what he told you.”

      “Man says the same things every week,” Mack said.

      “Gave me a new one today. I reckon he used the same on you.”

      Wells pulled out his handkerchief and blew. “Dust take the durable out of duraglass?”

      “No, but I like that one,” Ledford said. Behind him, a batch boy pushed a hand truck loaded with broken glass. Its peak rose from the stacked gallon buckets, cranberry-colored. Ledford said, “Son of a bitch told me if I take my eyes off the furnace, the little babies’ll starve.”

      Mack Wells smiled and nodded. “Suppose he thinks there wasn’t no food fit for babies before the jar.” He wiped the back of his neck with the handkerchief. Ledford did the same with his glove, sulfur streaks left behind. Down the line, an operator screamed at a machine boy.

      Ledford wanted to tell Mack congratulations on his wife’s pregnancy, but didn’t. They stood awkwardly for a moment, then nodded and went back to work.

      Operators sulphured the blanks. Corrugators steamed the paper. Shippers stacked the boxes. Everywhere were hisses and clangs, roars and thuds. And Ledford wiped at his sweat and thought of his history professor and the way he stood silent in front of them all, waiting for an answer to questions like, “What percentage of colonists backed the Crown?” And Ledford thought of Rachel, and how no one but him knew that she’d kiss a man on the mouth after only four dates, that she’d invite a man over after five.

      He eyeballed the temperature gauge. He eyeballed the clock on the wall. He knew he was meant for something other than this.

       December 1941

      RACHEL WATCHED HIM PACE back and forth in front of the fireplace. Once in a while, he’d stop and stoke the embers, but mostly he checked his wristwatch.

      She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a fire going in the middle of the day.

      On the Philco, a man told any ladies listening that Lava soap would get their extra-dirty hands shades whiter in only twenty seconds.

      Outside, a car engine roared, then cut out. Ledford could tell it was Lucius Ball’s Lincoln Zephyr, but he walked to the window anyway. “Your daddy,” he said.

      “Well, what’s he doing here?”

      “I don’t know.” He walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He closed it without having gotten anything, came back to the living room, and said, “But he’d better not talk over this broadcast. So help me, if he interrupts the president—”

      The doorknob turned and in came Lucius. He took off his fedora and brushed at the snow before he acknowledged either of them. Then the same with his overcoat. When he’d hung everything up and slapped his driving gloves against the end table to announce his presence, he shot his cuffs and said, “Let’s see what old Roosevelt’s got to say on this one.”

      Ledford walked back to the kitchen and stared inside the refrigerator some more.

      “Shouldn’t you be in bed Ledford?” Lucius Ball hollered. “Aren’t you on the clock in three hours?”

      When the broadcast started, Rachel turned the volume knob as high as she ever had. She sat back down on the sofa with her knees pulled to her chest. Ledford poked at the fire, and Lucius stood with his arms crossed. His nose ran, and he sniffed hard every ten seconds.

      The president’s words were carefully chosen, and his voice carried vengeance and sorrow. The three in the small room were as still as the congressmen who watched their man before them. There was a cough through the radio’s grate. There was a pop from the wet hickory in the fire.

      Then Roosevelt said, “Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.” Something had moved inside Ledford’s gut, and now it surged upward as the congressmen beat their hands together like they never had as one. “No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion,” Roosevelt went on, “the American people in their righ teous might will win through to absolute victory.” The roar from the Philco caused Rachel’s eyes to tear, and her heart seemed, for a moment, to stop.

      She knew before looking at him that Ledford was gone from her.

      He hung the poker on the cast iron holder and slowly turned. His teeth were grit behind his lips and his nostrils flared wide. He looked to Lucius, who was dumbstruck, unable for once to speak his mind. “Mr. Ball,” Ledford said, “I quit.”

      He put on his coat and told Rachel he’d ring her later. With his hand on the knob to leave, he stopped. She was crying on the sofa. Her father did not console her. He’d walked to the window and was watching the snow fall. It had picked up since earlier.

      Ledford stood in the doorway and thought of their dance. Their song. He spoke her name and she looked up at him. He winked and was gone.

       August 1942

      HE HAD JOINED THE Marine Corps.

      On December 10th, Ledford had walked into the recruiting station with a birth certificate altered by a Mann Glass secretary for a fee of five dollars. In the station’s filthy bathroom he’d pissed in a test tube. Passed his physical. He was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, where he found the weather utterly suitable to his demeanor. He watched the ocean any chance he got. He followed every syllable his drill instructor spat at him, as if the man was God himself. Ledford thrived on discipline. He got a reputation as a hard charger who didn’t shoot the breeze.

      When the men were issued their 782 gear, Ledford felt that old, joyous feeling from childhood Christmases. He loved his M1, and in no time he could fieldstrip and reassemble it like most never would. He grew to love the strain of calisthenics, whether at 0500 or midnight under floodlights. Drills became second nature. Hand-to-hand combat with short blades, plunging fixed bayonets into dummies—these acts were honed to reflex.

      Ledford earned the designation of Sharpshooter on the rifle range. Even at five hundred yards, his targets came back Swiss cheese.

      He smoked and played hearts with the other men, finding a peace in card playing he’d never lose. He traded insults, dimes, and nickels most often with a hard Mac from Chicago named Erminio Bacigalupo.

      Erm, they called him. Nobody could tell whether Ledford and Erm liked or hated each other. In truth, neither could the young men themselves.

      Ledford wrote to Rachel twice a week.

      Nights, he slept like the dead.

      Once, drunk on his ass against the barracks wall, Ledford’s drill instructor, an old Devil Dog from Alabama, had let his guard down. He’d seen action in the Great War. “Enemy’ll break, but only if you cut him,” he said. Ledford and Erm were the only men in listening distance. “My CO taught me that. What you do is git СКАЧАТЬ