The Marrowbone Marble Company - By Glenn Taylor Page 0,2

to people poking around about the boy who lived there alone. Eli Mann gave Ledford a job, something to get up for every morning.

Ledford picked up the bone he’d been staring at and gnawed it. Rachel had walked away. She bussed her tray and approached Mack Wells, who stood and said, “Miz Ball.”

“No need to get up, I just wanted to check on that hand.”

“It’s just fine. That salve done the trick.”

She told him to change the dressing when he got home, and then she came back over to Ledford.

“You eat like a caveman,” she said.

“You chew with your mouth open.”

She smiled and her eyelids got heavy. Ledford wiped his mouth and loosed a cigarette from its pack. The matchbook was damp with sweat, and it took four swipes to flame.

“I can make us a pot of coffee,” Rachel said. She had a new apartment on Eleventh Avenue. Lucius Ball had wanted her to stay under his roof, but after nursing school and a couple of Mann paychecks, she’d packed her things.

“Watered down or thick?” he asked.

She watched him through the smoke. Everything about Ledford seemed older than he was. “I bought a percolator just yesterday, and I’ll make it any way you like.”

He winked.

Outside, the rain was picking up. It beat a chorus on the roof above them, and the people eating raised their voices to hear one another, and the dishwashers slept standing up.

LEDFORD STOOD IN the entryway of the small apartment. He hung his wet coat and watched as she walked away barefoot on the hardwood. The place smelled of women’s powders and hand cream. Such a scent reminded him of his mother’s room and the small cracked mirror she sat in front of all those years before. Putting her face on, she called it. As a boy, he’d sneak up behind her when she sat in front of her mirror. But she always heard him and scooped him into her lap and tickled him. She claimed that the ticklish among us were guilty of crimes. Over his laughter, she’d ask, “You been stealin sugar, sweetie?” and then she’d hug him to her neck, and all was still and safe.

Rachel brought him a hand towel to pat dry. It was fancy, monogram-stitched, and Ledford hated to use it. She turned from him again and walked past the sofa to the kitchen. “Should I take off my shoes?” he hollered.

“If you want to,” she said.

He did not. He walked to the fireplace mantel and studied the photographs there. They were lined up for the length of it. They told a story. Babies dressed in christening gowns and men with sly grins and bunny-eared fingers behind the heads of their gentle wives.

“Do you like music?” Rachel asked him. She’d started the percolator and was crouching at the cabinet beside him.

“I reckon.”

Her Philco had a phonograph right on top. She pulled a record from the cabinet and set the needle down. “Do you like Claude Thornhill?”

“Never heard of the man,” he said. Piano keys tinkled soft over the quiet hum of clarinets. Ledford’s neck and ears were getting hot.

When the horns came in, he nearly jumped out of his socks. She laughed at him, brought her hand to her mouth to stifle it. He rested his elbow on the mantle, knocking over two framed photographs. When he went to fix them, Rachel grabbed his hands in hers. “Do you want to dance with me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

When she laid her head against his chest, it seemed to Rachel that she’d danced with Ledford a hundred times before.

Ledford was trying not to upchuck his steak and eggs and chocolate cake. He’d not held a woman the likes of this one before.

“Do you know what this song is called?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but only swallowed instead.

“It’s called ‘Snowfall,’” Rachel told him. They swayed. He looked at her hand in his, then down the length of her.

Barefoot in her nurse’s uniform, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever beheld.

NOVEMBER 1941

THE CLASS WAS CALLED “History of the Revolutionary War,” and its professor was dull as drizzle on a windowpane. Inside the lecture hall, Ledford sat back row left. Try as he might, he could not stay awake. Swing shift will do that to a man.

Those who surrounded him were not of his kind. They were the variety of young people who, when they got smart-lipped in high school, Ledford had punched in the mouth. Young men wore neckties and argyle sweaters. Young