their faces at the buffet table, nor could they see Erm swallowing a highball glass of scotch in one swig, eyes shut, saying to woman after woman what he always said—“How do you do?” Even the white linens and lights and cover of tent that had seemed in excess for a people at war, even these, for the length of that song became nothing more than snow falling all around as they closed their eyes and swayed. It was ninety-two degrees inside the tent, but the newlywed couple had ceased to sweat.
Above them, Rachel’s mother nearly got up and came to the window. She knew better. Instead, she swigged her codeine and moved her fingers to the music and pictured them in her mind, just as they were outside. Her only daughter. The man she’d chosen. So much pain in him, but equal parts strength and virtue. She thought of her own husband, whose small storage of such righ teous qualities had long since disappeared. He’d not been faithful to her, and that was unforgivable. She thought of her last will and testament, the changes she’d made unbeknownst to anyone, and she smiled.
Mary Ball would hang on for another day, long enough to see them off on the honeymoon. Long enough to read in the Sunday paper of a second bomb dropped, this one more powerful than the first. The smile she’d had from the music through her window was no longer. Her mouth wrenched downward at the corners. She mourned for man and wished only that she’d died the night prior. Her focus blurred, eyes shutting down like the rest of her. The last thing she ever saw were the words Nagasaki wiped clean from the earth.
LITTLE MARY ESTELLE LEDFORD squirmed in the crook of her father’s arm. She had gas, and she couldn’t yet pass it with efficiency. Ledford laughed at her grunts, the faces she made. Her eyebrow hairs were fine but dark and nearly connected to the hairline at her temples. He kissed her face all over. He sang to her a song that his mother had sung to him. Was an old mouse that lived on the hill, mm-hmmm. He was rough and tough like Buffalo Bill, mm-hmmm.
Rachel walked in from the kitchen. She eyeballed the beer bottle on the end table. Wondered how many he’d had. The throw rug under his feet stretched and tore with each step of the made-up dance he did with his infant girl. Their home was new, but their furnishings weren’t.
Lucius Ball had gotten to keep his home after Mary died, but that was all he’d gotten.
As it turned out, the Federal Housing Authority liked to help out war vets. They’d only had to spend four pregnant months in Ledford’s beat-up old house next to the scrapyard. In that time, Ledford had fixed things like cracked door thresholds and rotten windowpanes, but in the end he was glad to move into a new place. There were memories left behind in his boyhood home, but he hadn’t yet sold it. He’d kept it as a place to go to on his own once in a while. These visits were less and less, as Ledford was skilled in the art of pushing on from the past.
His mother-in-law had been right about a man with a history degree. He hadn’t done much with it. But, his mother-in-law had also left her family stake in Mann Glass to Rachel, and that meant a good deal. For one, Ledford had gone back to work. Not as a furnace tender, but as hot end manager. Desk job. He didn’t care for the work, of course, but he could close his door even on the likes of Lucius Ball, who was now a broken man with the same pension to look forward to as everybody else. Rachel had sold the factory to a Toledo glass man who’d been a friend of her grandfather’s. She and Ledford had put the Mann money in the bank for something they didn’t yet understand. Rachel spoke to her father some, but only on the phone. He hadn’t yet met his granddaughter, and she was three weeks old.
Mary grunted again. “She’s hungry,” Rachel said. “Hand her over.”
Ledford did so, kissing the little one once more as he passed her to Rachel. Then he walked into the kitchen and opened another beer. Church of the Air was coming through the radio, but Edward R. Murrow would be on at one-forty-five.
Through the Philco, the preacher asked, “How long has it been since you labored in the field of God? How long since you bathed in his majestic waters?”
“Too long,” Ledford answered. He cleared his throat and spat in the kitchen sink.
The preacher’s words stirred in Ledford a memory he’d not had in years.
There was a field, and he’d run through its weeds as a boy. Shoulderhigh, the weeds seemed to know he was coming, bending before him and waking like water behind. There was a barn and an old preacher woman with a clay pipe in her teeth.
There was the lake from his dream, and his daddy, fishing from the rowboat.
Ledford went to the basement and looked at the half-full bookcase he’d built. It wasn’t plumb to the ground. He stared at two books, side by side. The Growth of the American Republic and the Holy Bible. Both had belonged to his father. He picked up the old King James and looked for penciled underlinings. The marks of Bill Ledford’s study. The marks of a man who could never outrun the engine in his head, but who would damn sure try. Ledford located one such passage. He took a belt off his beer and read the words, I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the holy. Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? Who hath gathered the wind in his fists? Ledford liked that last line. He said it aloud. “Gathered the wind in his fists.”
The phone rang. He slid the Bible back to its designation and picked up the receiver. It was Erm. He had a tip on a horse in the eighth at Pimlico. “This is the overlay of overlays, Leadfoot,” he kept saying. “Don’t back off the gas now.”
He told Erm to put him down for another five hundred and hung up. Stood in the center of the basement and looked around. His shinbone was acting up. Like someone had taken a hot poker to it. But Ledford would not sit down and prop it up. He’d ignore it.
Everything salvageable from his old house had ended up in the basement. There was a full tail fan of turkey feathers, gathered at the base in a knot of quills. It had come from his father’s father. It sat on top of the bookcase, next to handblown blue bottles and three big glass scraps shaped liked diamonds. Against the wall there was an old brown trunk with quilts inside, one of them covered in swastikas. It was made by his great-grandmother, who, according to his father, had been half Indian. You’d always had to hide such a quilt, even before the second war, on account of Hitler. But Ledford’s daddy told him that the quilt’s true meaning was luck. Or love. One or the other, he’d never been sure.
The burn in his shinbone flared. He sat down on top of the trunk and picked at a shoot of splintering wood. Checked his watch again. Murrow would be coming on. He’d not listen today. He didn’t want the news.
Above him, the floorboards gave as Rachel carried little Mary to her crib. He listened as Rachel stepped light from the nursery and across the living room. He cupped his ear and picked up the sound of her knitting needles sliding and clacking. Ledford stood, opened the trunk, and felt beneath the swastika quilt. He pulled out a pint of Ten High. It was three-quarters full.
He tilted back, drained the bottle to a quarter, and put it back, next to the flat little box that housed his Purple Heart. He never opened that box. It may as well have housed a Cracker Jack prize. Next to the box he kept a burlap sack full of marbles his daddy had made for him. The shooter was black like tar, as if rolled and frozen in ice. “One of these days,” his daddy had said, “little boys and girls will line up and lay down every tooth-fairy penny they ever made for a marble like that there.”
Ledford stuck a piece of Beeman’s in his mouth and stood in front of his crooked bookcase, smiling and looking for something to read. The pain in his leg subsided. He closed his eyes and fell asleep standing.
When he opened them again, the bookcase shelves were made of mud. Empty. Their surfaces cracked with tiny crooked lines like wrinkles in a roadmap. Ledford traced the cracks with his fingertip. He brought the finger to his mouth and tasted it. Dirt. Copper penny. Blood. There was a tickle on the palm of his hand, and there, worms wriggled forth from a hole the size of a button. Ledford pinched their ends