Glenn Taylor - The Marrowbone Marble Company

JANUARY 1969

T HE GROUND WAS THE color of rust. Holes the size of half-dollars were everywhere, some encircled by tiny mounds of dirt. This was hard earth, nearly frozen. Dried-up leaves and spruce needles turned brown. A hush had befallen the land, as still as the inside of a coffin. Such quiet recalled a time before timber had framed houses and a church, before plumbing hooked in hot and cold, before electricity snaked conduit. The trees slept. The creek was iced over.

At the back of the hollow, there was piled ash and shingle. Sheet metal lengths. Two-by-fours at peculiar angles, their surfaces bubbled and cracked and black. There was a furnace stack, fifty feet high and made from fieldstone. It towered above all that fire had taken, but its mortar was crumbling. A strong wind would soon enough knock it down and stir the ash and frayed black picture-frame wire and lamp-shade bones below.

Snow came. It landed silent on a thick sheath of glass, the size and shape of a backyard pond. This glass had run molten, but now it was cooled, its edges rounded, frozen in rolls. A woman walked a circle around it. She held in her hands a Bolex 16mm movie camera. She filmed the glass. Thought for a moment she had seen a fish eye looking up at her from beneath.

This tract of land had known many names. Bonecutter Ridge, Marrowbone Cut, the Land of Canaan.

A German hog butcher named Knochenbauer had settled it in 1798. Hed entered into common-law marriage with an Indian woman and theyd raised children and grandchildren and made their surname Bonecutter. The Bonecutters lived on these five hundred West Virginia acres for 150 years. They were hard, proud people who prospered some times and went hungry others. They witnessed love and murder, fire and flood, until only two remained. It was left to them to hold on to the land. They did so with the sure grip that hill people possess.

Loyal Ledford came to this place in 1948, and for a time people again walked the ground. They followed paths beaten by the feet of those whod walked the same routes before them. House to church to meeting hall to woods edge, and back to house. The people here made something real and good. They built with their hands. They put down roots. Ledford put his in deep. But his blood carried memories and his temper ran hot. In his dreams, hollows were flooded and people hid in holes theyd dug in the ground.

Ledford was apart from this world, and yet the people followed him. Tell you what, he once said to them. We can stir the creek and wake up the trees. We can be a people freed.

S IX BRICK CHIMNEY STACKS stood at a hundred feet each. This was the Mann Glass Company, a ten-acre factory tract straddling the C&O Line at Huntingtons western edge. Machine-made wide- and narrow-mouth bottles had been blown inside since 1915, and later, prescription and proprietary bottles. Eli Mann had opened the doors of a handblown specialty shop here in 1908. Now, at ninety, he owned a factory with one thousand employees and two 300-ton furnaces.

Inside, Loyal Ledford worked the swing shift, four to midnight. Hed done so since graduating high school in June, and before him, his father had done the same.

Ledford was a long, sturdy young man with big hands. At thirteen, he was a Mann Glass batch boy. At eighteen, he bid on and got his job as furnace tender. It suited him. He was careful to respect the fire, as heat will sometimes break even a young man down. Inside a glass factory, a furnace roared at 3,000 degrees.

Ledford squinted hard. Checked the gauge and eyeballed the furnace fire one last time through the barrier window. As was his custom at the end of a shift, Ledford stared at the fire until his peripherals went white. Then he closed his eyes and watched the little swirls dance across the black stage of his eyelids. He pushed his scoop shovel into the corner with his boot tip and walked blind down the dark east aisle. The wall bulbs had surged again. Popped open like fireworks, muted by the rest of the racket inside. Ledford clocked off at a minute past midnight.

Saturday turned into Sunday, and Ledford sat alone in the dark in front of his work locker. The sweat sheen on his body dried up. His wet-collared shirt turned cold and stuck to him. He coughed. Pulled off his split-leather work gloves. They rode high, all the way to the elbows.

Inside the factory cafeteria, Ledford looked for Rachel. She was the plant nurse on the four-to-midnight shift, and theyd been eating together for two months. Rachels mother was Mary Ball, formerly Mary Mann, Eli Manns daughter. Rachels father was Lucius Ball, plant manager.

She was three years Ledfords senior. Shed grown up easy in a big house on Wiltshire Hill. Hed grown up hard in a little one next to the scrapyard on Thirteenth Street West.

She was easy to spot. Her posture was spike straight and her hair was coal black. Ledford followed her from the milk bin to the table, put his tray down across from hers. What say, Jean Parker? he said.

What say, Pittsburgh, Rachel answered. Theyd had a date to see The Pittsburgh Kid a week prior. After, she told him he looked like Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid himself. He told her she looked like Jean Parker, only younger. Theyd kissed.

Tired? he asked.

A little. She wore a purple flower on the breast of her nurses uniform. Her silver watch was loose on her wrist, thin as twine.

Hungry, I take it. Ledford cut his steak, as she did hers. They always ate the same meal. Steak, eggs, chocolate cake. It was the second thing hed noticed about her.

Did you read about the Navy destroyer? The torpedo attack? Rachel chewed while she talked, blocked his view with her napkin.

Off of Iceland? Didnt sink it though, did they?

No.

She liked to talk about the war raging in Europe and in China. He didnt. Always, with wars, Ledford had liked to read, not talk. And so he did, in the paper, each day as he ate breakfast before class. But mostly, his reading came by way of books. History books, like the big old red one that had been his fathers. The Growth of the American Republic it was called, and Ledford had read it thrice before enrolling at Marshall College as a history major.

The sound of stacked glass shifting echoed loud from the kitchen. Mack Wells walked past. He was the swing-shift janitor and the only black man at the plant. He nodded to them and they nodded back. Rachel had bandaged his hand the night before. Hed been scorched by a valve exhaust.

Mack Wells wife is pregnant, Rachel said.

How do you know?

He told me while I wrapped his hand. Shes due at springtime.

Is that right? He shook hot sauce onto his eggs.

Yes. Shed stopped chewing and clasped her hands together on the table. I think springtime is the finest of the seasons for a baby, dont you?

I dont know. He didnt look up at her. His pinbone sirloin was cut to gristle.

What season were you born? I know youve told me, but Ive forgotten.

July the eighth, he said. He looked over at Mack Wells, who sat alone, his back to them. A line of sweat traced the spine of his coveralls.