Old Powder Man Read Online Free Page A

Mill’s Landing all day long if it wanted; in the summer evenings, twilight lingered till almost bedtime. But in Deal’s time, trees had been so thick that dark came early. Hunters, deep in the woods, would stop and listen in the late afternoon and way back home, down by the bayou, the womenfolk, taking turns, would ring a great iron bell. Clang clang clang through the still cold silence, through the dark the sound came, and shouldering their guns, calling the dogs, the hunters followed the sound home. Not until the last man was safe, walking the town’s road, would it cease. Those were the days of the Lord’s plenty, Deal said. He told about the men bringing home full-breasted turkey, their wattles red as fire even in the pale flickering light of a lamp one of the women would bring on the porch to see. Squatting on their haunches the men would compare their birds: quail, duck, geese. There would be rabbits, frozen with legs extended as if they were still running, and squirrels, their little legs lost altogether in a limp lump of fur and tail. Many nights, with the moon high, there were fox hunts, just to run the dogs. In Niggertown, they sat on their porches and listened to that far-off baying. Sometimes it came with a pressing urgency, with a sound more ghostly than real, that sent a chill down a Negro’s spine. In those days, even the river had been a half-mile further east. Like the rest of the world Old Deal had known, it had refused to remain unchanged. In sleep now, before the commissary, he dreamed and called, River, I know you! It seemed he stood on the bank this side, shaking his cane. Go back where you belong, case Mister Jeff come! Deal opened his eyes into blue ones. Son, having watched from inside the commissary, had come out to wake him. “Hey, Old Deal,” he said. “You must have been chasing a rabbit. You were setting here just a going.”
    The old man got up slowly and came through the door Son held open. “I come after something, Mister Son. But it slip my remembers.”
    â€œSit down,” Son said. “You’ll remember after awhile.” They went to the dry goods counter, Son’s part of the store. Deal sat on a nail keg, and Son began to dust shelves almost to the ceiling lined with bolts of cloth. Later, he would set out boxes for the women to poke in, full of socks, thread, buttons. Above the shelves, two narrow windows admitted almost the only light; the plate glass ones were shaded by the tin awning. Through the small windows two shafts of sunlight, alive with motes, fell in unspectacular ways, making the commissary gloomy. On the opposite side, Poppa dusted equally tall shelves full of canned goods. On the floor were small bins of potatoes and onions, fruit and a few other vegetables; people ate food from their own gardens. The store sold flour, meal, lard. Shoes and boots hung from the rafters; down the center of the room a waist-high counter was full of heavy work clothes and underwear. About the room were racks of the shapeless, flowered cotton dresses the women wore year after year. Presently, Deal remembered it was tobacco he wanted and went to buy it from Poppa. It was only such small items the Negroes came in for regularly, candy, gum, cold drinks. Unexpectedly a child, shot up like a bean pole, had to be brought in for shoes or pants; a woman might run short of something inexplicably, for the Negroes shopped twice a year, spring and fall, bought their families clothes and supplies for six months of either cold or warm weather. In summer they might buy side meat or baloney, but in winter ate their own meat, kept in smoke houses. Everyone raised hogs and chickens, hunted, kept cows. The Negroes were encouraged to charge in the commissary and at the year’s end always owed money. For many years, few of them could read and it was true, as they suspected, that if they ever got out of debt, their accounts were juggled until they were back