Old Powder Man Read Online Free

though she never said a thing. He had wanted to say, Girl, go and get it someplace else; he would not have minded that so much as the others knowing Birdy man had dried up. She lay beside him hoping, waiting, remembering. For a long time, out of a desire to please, he had tried to arouse the feeling again but it wasn’t there; it wasn’t anywhere. Son had said, “You’re lucky anyway, old man. You got a good woman who don’t complain.”
    Poppa unlocked the store. Son wondered if Deal were asleep. Sometimes the old man pretended to be, so people passing would not bother him with talk of the weather—what it was like today and expected to be like tomorrow—or of crops or the mill. He had told Son none of it mattered: one of the advantages of old age. Rid of the world about him he thought of the past and the future when he would know what the reason for the past had been. One thing Son had found working in a little country store was you had time on your hands; lumped together, the times would add up to hours he and Poppa stood, staring into the road. That first year if Deal had not come in to talk, Son did not think he would have made it. But now he had heard all the old man’s stories over and over. In each of the other little towns they had lived, he had hung about Poppa’s store. But here Deal’s stories had taught him to care about the outdoors. This minute, Son drew in the dusty sweet smell of freshly cut wood Mill’s Landing was always full of: one of the few things Deal said was the same. Inside the mill, the smell floated about like the sawdust glittering there; early, Son had learned to hold his hand into the semi-dark and bring it down covered with a thin fine gold film. Reluctantly, he left the porch to follow Poppa inside.
    Never before had he had patience with old people; in fact, Son knew he did not have much patience at all. But since living in Mill’s Landing he had listened for hours to Deal talk about the past. Deal had been a roustabout on lumber barges, had sat at docks until a barge came in going someplace he wanted to go. Many times Deal came into Mill’s Landing and saw Mister Jeff, a barrel-chested man who always rode a big white horse. One day Mister Jeff had offered him a job at the mill; without knowing why, Deal took it. Pearl, eleven years old, was cooking for Mister Jeff then; that was when Deal met her. All around Mill’s Landing there had been one great world of trees. Taller than the highest building Deal had ever seen, trees had grown up as far as he could see. In those days, no one knew about draining land. In the swamps that stood, cypress and willow flourished in bent, scrawny, strange positions, like things from a world that had been and gone. And moccasins! Deal told how when you blew their heads off, they went on moving, headless, until they slid from wherever they had been sunning, back into the ugly, brown-green water. Whong. Deal’s hands would clutch his cane; he would pull the trigger again. But swamps were disappearing; these past few years people had begun to drain land, to farm. And cotton, Mr. De Witt, the mill’s manager, said, was going to be king. Acres of trees had been felled and tree stumps stood in rows as even as a crop. The sky where they had been, suddenly revealed, looked awkward, too bare and big, empty of tree tops.
    Deal had taught Son to chew the sweet gum’s sap, taught him to cover its sticky balls with tin foil, decorations for the Christmas tree he cut in the woods. Sometimes they repeated the names of trees wondering which they liked best: Sweet Gum. Maple. Sycamore. Oak. Pecan. Cottonwood. Hackberry: they liked them all. Deal told often a repeated dream: all the trees floated away toward heaven, dirt falling like brown rain from their roots; he called, Where are you going? but they were gone, gone with old Mister Jeff and the world to which he and Deal had belonged.
    Now the sun blazed on