Free Old Powder Man by Joan Williams

cans lightly as balls and toss them back again—empty, joking, complaining of one another in a dialect so rapid it was unintelligible to any but of their own race. Summer induced the most intense smell of everything in the alley, weeds, grass, splintery unpainted fences, dirt road and spurious flowers, but the smell of garbage overlay it, and Lillian seldom went near. Imbedded in the dirt were countless pieces of broken glass, red blue green and plain-colored for diamonds; following the jewelled road, children peered into the privacy of otherwise unseen backyards: ran through Lillian’s bushes in fits of laughter, having glimpsed her neighbor, Mr. Woolford, in his B.V.D.’s. Hanging up wash one morning, Lillian drew back a sheet and caught a covey of little faces watching her; then, beyond the morning glory vine twisted into the wire fence, she saw them go. Later, with candy and cakes, she tempted them, close, closer and finally every day, the children alleviating her loneliness as Son worked longer and later. Often Lillian roamed the small, dark, cleaned house and cleaned it again, twitching aimlessly with a dust cloth about the spotless rooms. Despite Son’s continual proclamation that he would “defeat the s-o-b’s,” uttered now frequently on a breath smelling of liquor, to which she listened as though attentively, her baby-soft eyes turned up to him, she began not to believe it. He had a steady job; the salary seemed adequate to start; but would it lift them, ever, beyond this street where the breadwinners came from the car line, slapping evening papers against their thighs, to enter the bungalows whose dark interiors were darkened more by black window guards and green awnings and already smelled of supper at five? Lillian’s dreams were of a large house, of knowing the right people, her own car, and at their ultimate of membership in the Country Club. Her fear of never having any of them grew worse as Son continued to bring home men she had never expected to know, rough, uncouth, usually half-drunk, and twice his age. Disarranging the living room they spread on the floor to shoot craps the entire night. The Sunrise Club, they called themselves: noon Sad’dy to Sunday morning, Son said. To avoid them, Lillian went to bed early, stuffed her ears with cotton, but it was dawn, the last door slammed and the last car driven away before she ceased hearing their loud abandoned laughter and vile words. Coming in the morning to clean, she was sickened by the old odors, smoke and whisky and sweat, by a cigarette ground out on the floor, glasses scattered, and ties draped everywhere, forgotten. She saw herself middle-aged and gross like so many on the block, facing the morning eternally in a faded wrap-around, facing it even like the carpenter’s wife next door, with a permanently shamefaced smile for the husband who lurched home every evening bringing, like an obedient school child, his empty tin lunchbox. Her heart felt for the woman in the kitchen early to make him another sandwich, pour his thermos full of milk, when on the previous evening the whole neighborhood had heard her scream in agony as he hit her. Didn’t the woman wonder how her life had turned out this way, who once had been young and pretty? Don’t let it happen to me, Lillian prayed. Why hadn’t she told Son the second time not to bring those men home, told him not even to see them? And asking herself, she wondered why she bothered, already knowing the answer: she had no wile that worked. He did exactly as he pleased, always.
    When she did mention the men, he said, “What’s the matter with those boys? Not a thing in this world’s the matter with those boys.”
    And she said, “Boys! They’re old enough to be your Daddy, that’s partly what’s the matter with them. And they’re too rough, and they make you drink too much.”
    â€œThey’re my customers,” he said.