The Marrowbone Marble Company

“Listen,” Erm said. He was making sure his shirt cuffs stuck out beyond his jacket. “I got something I need you to hold on to for me.” He pulled a fat-stuffed leather envelope from his inside pocket. “Just make sure it stays where nobody gets their hands on it.” He held it out, but Ledford didn’t reach. “It isn’t a bag of dogshit Ledford. It’s dough. And a book.”

Ledford laughed and took it. Rubbed his thumb across the gold snap button holding it shut. “I got a safe spot in the basement at home.”

“Good. And for your trouble, we’ll wipe your paysheet clean. Get you out of my left column, back on the right.” Erm winked. Then he leaned forward. “But listen,” he said. “If I don’t make it back from Baltimore, you see that money gets to my old lady.”

An alarm sounded from the factory floor. Erm stuck his fingers in his ears. “Some job you got here,” he hollered.

“It’s just a backup on the flow line,” Ledford hollered back. He looked at the half-full gin bottle, wondered if his friend would be leaving it behind.

“Whatever you say.” Erm licked his pointer and pinky fingers, then smoothed his eyebrows. “For Ernestine on the way out,” he said. He turned, was gone, then stuck his head back in the office. He yelled, “I’ll be back in a week or two.”

The alarm shut down, and from outside his door, Ledford could hear the low murmur of Erm’s voice, then Ernestine’s giggle. The leather envelope in his hand was squared off, worn at the corners by whatever it held. It was smooth cowhide, a deep brown. Ledford wondered why Erm might not make it out of Baltimore alive. He wondered how much money was in his hands. He put the envelope in the middle drawer of his desk. In the bottom right drawer he set the gin bottle on its side. Then he sat down and stared at the pile of paperwork before him. At home, Rachel would be nursing or napping. Mary would be playing with her great-aunt. Ledford looked at Mary’s photograph on the wall. He’d need to get one up of William.

October 1947

THEY WERE CALLING HIM Willy within a week. Sometimes Ledford called him Willy Amos. He slept just fine in the daylight hours, but at night he fussed and fought his swaddling. Rachel was too tired to rise every time, so Ledford took to walking the house with the boy. He sang to him and he danced with him. He stared at the boy’s eyes and how they locked on to an unknown point and stayed there regardless of swaying, all iris and pupil, black as cast iron. He had a darker tint to him than Mary. He was bigger than she’d been.

Ledford one-armed little Willy in the basement early Sunday morning. It was not yet four a.m. He pulled the lightbulb chain hanging from the rafters, and the boy squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s all right,” Ledford told him. “Just a lightbulb.”

Willy cried some, so Ledford lifted him high and sniffed directly at the seat of his diaper. It smelled only of powder. “That’s a boy,” he said. “You just stay that way until your mother rises and shines.”

He strolled the length of the basement floor, pointing to and naming the tail fan of turkey feathers, the glass scrap shaped liked diamonds, the map of the world he’d hung. He put his fingertip to the map and said, “This here green chunk is the United States of America, and right here, West Virginia, is where we live.” He slid the finger to the right. “And if you take a boat or a airplane across all this blue water, and you cross this pink Spain and over all these different colors in Africa, you get to here,” he tapped his finger against it, “to these little specks of nothing on the blue ocean, to where your daddy was for a time.” Willy’s head wobbled from his propped vantage point on Ledford’s shoulder. He liked the tapping sound of his father’s fingers on the paper map.

Ledford laughed. “All right, little one,” he said. They stared at one another for a moment, and Ledford kissed him on the forehead. Then he looked back to the map.

He took a deep breath and told his boy that he’d not ever have to go to the little specks on the ocean, nor any other place like them. He put his hand on the boy’s chest, his fingers nearly wrapping around the girth of him, and he said, “I will protect you from all of it, William Amos.”

When the boy fell asleep, Ledford set him on a cushioned desk chair from the old house. He began unpacking the last of the boxes. Attic Junk it read on the side. In the box, an old black album of photographs popped and cracked when he opened it. With each turned page, it shed little black corner frames. Ledford gathered them as they fell. The photographs themselves were lined and chipped with age. They were not in the order they’d been intended. Their look made them his daddy’s people, the Ledfords of Mingo, mostly tall and thin. Unsmiling faces and cheekbones that cast shadows. There were dates in faded pencil on the backs of some. Names like Oliver and Homer and Eliza and Wilhelmina. In one photograph, Ledford’s daddy swung on a rope hung from a tree limb. He looked to be about six, his T-shirt dirty, loose around the neck. His head a blur of black hair and bared teeth.

Ledford picked up the other album. There wasn’t much inside. Four pages filled out of twenty. An old woman who looked to be part Indian sat in a rocking chair and smoked a clay pipe. There was no name or date on the back. A baby picture of a child with eyes big and dark like his own children. On the back, somebody had written Bonecutter.

He picked up another book, leatherbound. It was small but thick, the size of a good Bible. It was his daddy’s batch book from the early days at Mann Glass. Pages were organized by color. White Batch and Opal and Best Opal and Shade Batch White. There were penciled-in measurements of hundreds of pounds of sand and soda. Lead and arsenic. Ounces counted for borax and manganese. Bones. Bill Ledford had figured out how to make a transparent green by adding copper scabs. Every shade of green may be obtained, he wrote.

In the back pages, the batch book became an account of disparate times in his life. Bill Ledford had written in it almost daily, it seemed, from the years 1916 to 1925. There were passages about his days playing ball in the Blue Ridge League for the Martinsburg Blue Sox.

Lefty Jamison threw at my head today on account of me running off at the mouth last night when the likker oiled me up. I believe I had poked at his stomack to show how fat it was, and I may have called him a bench blanket.

The baby shifted and grunted on the seat cushion. Ledford eyed him a minute and knew he wasn’t long for sleep. He flipped fast through the journal’s pages, looking for something. In all those years alone in his house, he’d never been able to look. He’d feared doing so would make everything worse than it already was. But Ledford was the father now, and fear had been replaced by the single-minded need to keep his wife and children above ground. He’d protect them all.

On the next-to-last page the handwriting was easier to read, as if written slow. It read,

January 12, 1924, I am twenty-six today. Last night I dreamed the same dream again. I can’t pick my feet up so I look down and I’ve got no feet. They are inside the ground. I fall forword and my legs bend the wrong way. A cracking sound and a feeling of my bones breaking. I’m unable to put here in words what it is, but it is bad. Then comes the roaring sound like a glass furnace and I’m holding my punty rod in one hand and my blowpipe in the other. I get to my knees and I’m all cut up as I’ve been laying on cullet. It is raining and I have to keep my eyes shut. That’s what the voice is hollering at me, not to open my eyes up. But I do, to see who’s hollering in that awful familur voice, and when I look, it is our littlest one. Loyal. Nearly two now. And he puts the fear of God in me because his mouth don’t open when he talks and his hands are afire.

Willy screamed out sudden. Ledford dropped the book back in the box and stood. The hair on his arms and neck was pricked and he couldn’t get enough saliva to swallow. He held little Willy and felt his own heart race against the child’s side, pressed to him. He could not understand what he had just read. The mind was not made to know such words as those from his daddy’s pencil. Ledford breathed deep and looked out the single-pane window. The ground there was warming, sunrise gathering in its well. He watched a dwarf spider navigate the glass and wondered why he opened the books. He’d been getting by all right as of late, drinking less on the advice of Don Staples. Dreams visited Ledford with less frequency, their horrors dulled. But what he’d read had stirred anew the unquiet. He looked at his boy, no longer screaming but not yet settled, his eyes like those in the photographs.

SEVEN-CARD STUD was the only game allowed in the home of Don Staples. Straight poker and five-card draw had no place. If a man tried to force such a variation, Staples would walk away from the table and hit the light switch on his way to bed. The group had changed over the years but had never topped five men. Its exclusivity was born in the idea that those light on brains and nickels, while always welcome in Staples’ office or home, were not permitted to pull a chair to his round-top mahogany card table. In the fall of 1947, the group was down to three: Don, his younger brother, Bob, and Ledford. An exception to custom was made on the final Friday of October, Halloween night, when Ledford phoned ahead that Erminio Bacigalupo was passing through on his way back from Baltimore, and that he was a fine poker man. Staples said bring him.

Before they left the house, Rachel spoke very little to Erm. She had always mistrusted him, though not as much since her wedding night, when he’d told her, “Ledford is the brother I never had, and I’d take a bullet for him.” Still, when he was under her roof, she watched him, close.

In the basement, Ledford pulled Erm’s leather envelope from under the swastika quilt in the trunk. Erm opened it and pulled a hundreddollar bill from the stack. “For your trouble,” he said. “And if you want to double it, look at the over-under on Maryland tomorrow. Now let’s go play some poker.”

Staples’ house was small, dark inside. From the record player in the corner, Louis Armstrong’s “Big Butter and Egg Man” played. The acorn ceiling fixture gathered smoke from below.

Each of the card table’s four legs carried an ashtray. The men sat slouched over their elbows. They eyeballed the cards face up on the table and lifted the corner of those faced down. Ledford folded after Fifth Street, Bob after Sixth. Erm dealt in a manner bespeaking experience. The cards flipped from his finger and thumb and turned a singular revolution before landing flat. He was showing a pair of Jacks. Staples, a pair of sevens.

“Check,” Staples said. He tossed in a nickel, and down came Seventh Street. They showed their five and Erm took the pot, again.

Bob shook his head. He was ten years younger than Don, yet everything about them seemed identical—voice, movements, eyes, laugh. Bob was a less-wrinkled, clean-shaven version of his brother. He scooted his chair back. “I gotta hit the head,” he said.

“Magnifying glass is in the top bureau drawer,” Don said.

Erm laughed and raked in his dollar seventy-five.

Staples packed his pipe and lit it. “Ledford tells me you’ve recently married.”

“That’s right.” Erm’s nod was loose on the hinges, and his eyes were shrinking fast. “She’s a looker, but she’s goofy up top, you know?” He tapped his temple with a finger.

Staples laughed. “I know,” he said. “Ain’t we all?”

The clock on the wall read ten past midnight. They’d been playing for three hours. Ledford looked from the clock to his quarter-full rocks glass. He’d gone as easy as he could, but it was harder with Erm around.

The cornet sang a sad tune from the corner.

Bob sat back down and sighed. “I’m about busted,” he said. He’d checked his pocket watch every ten minutes for an hour. Bob was a trial lawyer with a wife and three kids and his eye on public office. And though he’d gotten on fine with Erm that evening, he’d just as soon not know him past midnight. Like his big brother, Bob was a man of God, though he’d not taken the philosopher’s path to knowing him, and he’d not wrecked his marriage and children along the way. He loved Don dearly, but he’d not gone overseas like his older brother. He’d never understood the demons.

“Looks like you can ante and stick for a few rounds.” Erm pointed to the little pile of nickels in front of Bob.

Bob pulled out his pocket watch again. He breathed in deep through his nose. “I reckon I could play one more.”

“Big Bob,” Erm said. “Big Bob, Big Butter and Egg Man.”

“Like the song says.” Staples stole a look at Ledford. They’d spent a little time in the office talking on Erm.

It was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that comes when a record has stopped playing and one man is drunker than the rest.

Bob shuffled the deck slow. Erm declined to cut. He poured another whiskey and sat back in his chair. “Ledford tells me you’re a scholar and a man of the cloth.”

Staples smiled easy. “I’ve lived in both worlds. Even tried to mix the two.”

“Flammable is it?” Erm studied Bob’s dealing motion, a habit of the suspicious.

“It can combust, if that’s what you mean,” Staples said.

“I don’t know what I mean half the time.” Erm laughed. It was loud. “But if somebody had told me I’d be at a Virginia poker table with a preacher, a lawyer, and an office jockey, I’d have told him to climb up his fuckin thumb.”

“You’re in West Virginia Erm,” Ledford said. He peeked at his down cards.

“That’s what I said.”

“You said Virginia.”

“Tomato, tomahto.”

The Staples brothers looked at each other the way they always had when a card game went south. It was quiet, each man surveying what he had.

“Potato, potahto,” Erm said. Then, “Shit or get off the pot, Preach. We got to go church in the morning.”

“I fold,” Staples said. His chair whined when he leaned back in it.

Ledford raised a dime and wished he hadn’t told Erm about Willy’s baptism the next day. Truth be told, he’d wanted to ask Don or Mack to be the boy’s godfather, but one was lapsed and the other was black. Then Erm showed up, and without thinking Ledford had asked him.

Erm saw the dime and raised another. Bob folded. He dealt the rest of the hand in silence. Erm took the pot and kept his mouth shut for once.

Bob stood and stretched. He said, “Well gentlemen.”

Don stood and followed his brother to the kitchen. On the way, he asked about a case Bob was trying. “Any more on the Bonecutter dispute?”

Erm slapped his hand on the table. “Drink with me Leadfoot,” he said.

Ledford ignored him. He was tuned in to the Staples brothers. Bone-cutter, they’d said. It was the name from the back of the photograph. He got up and walked to the kitchen.

Don washed and dried his glass, his back to Bob, who leaned against the range, arms crossed. He was talking about arson.

“What was that name you used just now?” Ledford asked.

“Bonecutter,” Bob said. He yawned. “They’re a wild bunch out in Wayne County. Trouble. Had a land dispute with Maynard Coal for years, and I’ve done some work for them, pro bono. Now all hell’s broke loose.”

Bonecutter. It seemed to Ledford a name he’d known all his life.

“Well who set the fire?” Don wiped his hands with a yellow dish rag. He still wore his wedding ring, though he’d not seen his wife in fifteen years.

“Looks like 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 long to do it?” She pulled the lapels of her robe tight across her chest. She wore Mack’s work boots on her feet, unlaced. In the yard, he was barefoot. He hadn’t answered her question. “You’ll catch your death out there Mack,” Lizzie told him. “No shoes on your feet.”

“The ground is warm,” he said. He stared down at it, watched an ember die. Tucked into the cinched waistline of his bluejeans was an Army-issue .45.

It occurred to Lizzie that whoever had done it might still be watching them, under the cover of early-morning dark. But the street was quiet. Only the bakery was awake, its assembly line humming, its slicers cutting loaves.

Mack looked around too. He had a mind to draw his pistol and fire at the first sign of movement. There wasn’t any. He looked back at his house. In the upstairs window, Harold pressed his forehead on the pane. The hall bulb behind him flickered. He knew what had happened. He’d awakened just as his parents had, confused by the dancing light from outside. “Stay inside,” was all Mack had said to the boy.

Lizzie shivered on the porch. Her breath turned to condensation on the air. “Mack?” she said.

Again he did not answer her. He stared up at his son’s silhouette until his vision blurred. “We’d better telephone Ledford,” he said.

AT MIDNIGHT ON the eve of Thanksgiving, Rachel sat down on the love seat for the first time that day. She’d been on her feet for sixteen hours. Willy was finally down and Mary could be counted on to sleep through the night. The stuffing was made and the half-runners strung. Rachel looked at her watch. She stretched for the radio dial. The tuner spun loose and she couldn’t pick up a signal. There was a hole in the grille cloth where Mary had punched the leg of a baby doll through. Rachel stuck her finger inside and for a moment wondered if she might be electrocuted.