“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