The Marrowbone Marble Company

November 1942

IF THERE WERE ANY boys among them, Bloody Ridge and Matanikau had made them men. Bayonet-range fighting will do that, quick. Ledford didn’t worry on the enemy any longer. If he kept an eye open, it was for Erm. The sureness of death’s liberation had sunk in. Someone was coming for him, and it didn’t matter much whether that someone was his comrade or his enemy.

When a man accepts that he will no doubt die, he is free to live.

The pagoda’s shade was cooler. The rice rations tasted better. The whiskey was like drinking the sun.

Ledford grew accustomed to seeing things he’d not imagined stateside. One Marine safety-pinned six enemy ears to his belt. Heads stuck on a pole were not uncommon. Erm had joked of the sight, and now Ledford knew why. It was just another thing to look at while you smoked.

Still, Erm never spoke to or looked at Ledford after having his top teeth knocked out. He didn’t speak much to anyone. He’d developed a noticeable lisp since the fight. The man’s tongue knew not where to go.

Once, he’d gotten excited about a rumor that was spreading. “The division is about to be relieved,” he’d said, lisping all the way. “We’ll be parading in Washington by Christmas.” The next day, his eyes were back to staring blank at nothing, all pupil. Black as jungle mud.

Some said Erm was shooting morphine he’d won in a stud game.

Ledford felt guilty for what he’d done to the hard Mac from Chicago. In some ways, he hated the man, the secret they shared of a maneuver in darkness. In others, he admired him. It crossed Ledford’s mind to apologize, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak on much of consequence to anyone in those days of preparation. They were to push the Japanese out of the airstrip’s artillery range.

Ledford found himself uncharacteristically hungover on the morning he marched toward Kokumbona on the heels of an Air Fleet strike. Positions were to have been secured and the movement through the jungle was to have been a safe one, but something was not right. Ledford felt it in his headache and in his bones. He looked at the Marines around him. They felt it too.

It was quiet. Ten yards to his right was Erm Bacigalupo. He looked as though he might vomit. His cheekbones stuck out. His lips were in a pinch.

Then came the hard clap of a single Japanese rifle, and Ledford’s every muscle seized. He dropped and rolled toward a thicket of green, but the noise had got to him this time. A burst of machine-gun fire originated somewhere too close, and then the thump of a mortar shell blew out his eardrums. All was still. Then ringing. His vision went seesaw. He stood, and just before another mortar landed before him, he made eye contact with Erm, who was running in his direction. Then another thump, and then silence. Ledford was aware of hurtling through the air. Something had gone through him, and he lay on his back, touching at a torn spot on his chest. Air emanated to and from this spot. It had gone clear through, and he breathed from it. He was deaf, but he could hear it plain as day, in and out, pfffffffffff-hooooooo. The left shin was also torn, smoking gray wisps and spilling black blood on the ground cover.

The thought came. This is it.

But then a corpsman was there, and he stuck in a shot of morphine. And then there was a stretcher and some movement, and then nothing.

The night ahead was something Ledford would never forget. He lay in a wounded dugout, eight feet deep, at Henderson Field. The heat inside the earth there was too much to take, and the men were packed shoulder to shoulder. They screamed. The smell induced gagging. Ledford tried to keep deaf, but his eardrums were healing. He tried to shut his eyes, but the swirls on the black stage of his eyelids erupted like they never had. His stomach jumped and his throat crawled up his tongue. He breathed through his mouth, labored, like a dog.

Once, before passing out, he turned and saw Erm, three men away from him, his forehead wrapped in bloody gauze. He stared at Ledford, and a corpsman came by and stuck Erm with morphine, and he smiled, toothless.

The next morning they were flown out to a Navy hospital. Espiritu Santo it was called. It was there that Erm said to Ledford, “I told you we’d be home by Christmas for the parade.”

The USS Solace carried the men to New Zealand. On board, an infantryman younger than Ledford cried with joy in his bunk. Everyone ignored him. They all spoke upwards, to the ceiling. Loud. Some perched on an elbow to see their surroundings. It didn’t seem real that they could be out of the jungle.

“Think they’ll have any KJ billboards up back home?” somebody said.

“What’s a KJ billboard?” It was the teary kid. “Ain’t you had your eyes open doggie?” Ledford said. He was drunk and delirious. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. There’s one plastered across every piece of plywood in the Solomons.”

The kid shivered. Jungle disease was in his blood. “I’m done with killin,” he said. “Japs or no Japs.” He looked down at his shaking fingertips. “I just want my fingernails and hair to start growing again,” he said. As dysentery came, such growing went. The jungle blood could rot you inside out.

“Yeah,” Ledford said. “You’re done with it all right doggie. You go on and turn soft. Let those nails and hair grow real long.”

A couple Marines laughed. Another one said, “Damned pansy Army dogs.”

Erm Bacigalupo said, “Put some panties on while you’re at it and bend over.” Everyone laughed hearty. There was no longer any room for soft. A code needed to be kept. Among men who’d done what they’d all done together, none could ever speak of going soft again. To do so would invite their nightmares to the waking world.

That night, Ledford made his way on crutches to Erm’s bunk. He apologized for knocking his teeth out. “I’m truly sorry for it,” he said. He held out his hand and they shook. Ledford pledged that once stateside, he would buy his friend some new teeth.

August 1945

IT WAS MONDAY, the sixth. The grandstand at Washington Park Race Track was filled. Elbow to elbow they sat and waited, Southside Chicagoans and out-of-towners together. They’d come for the match race between Busher and Durazna, for which the purse was twenty-five grand.

Under the grandstand overhang, Ledford and Erm swilled from their respective flasks. They studied their short forms in silence. A fat lady in a flowered hat sat down in front of them and Erm made a farting sound. She turned, frowned, and fanned herself with a program. “Excuse you,” Erm said to her. He flashed his smile and winked at her. His teeth were white as ivory, set solid and paid in full. When the woman left to find a more suitable seat, Erm hollered, “Keep fannin honey, you don’t know from hot.” He stood for no reason and wobbled a little on his feet. He sat back down. “Did you see that broad? She was wide as she was tall.”

They were drunk. Had been so for three straight days, nine hours of sleep in total.

“What’s the skinny on Durazna’s trainer?” Ledford said.

Erm didn’t answer. He was eyeballing the suits down front. “Look at these cocksuckers,” he said. “I paid good money for these seats. I gotta look at these silver-haired bastards all day?”

Ledford licked his pencil and drew a circle around the words Oklahoma bred.

“What’s the point in standin? There’s twelve minutes to post, for cryin out loud.” Erm’s ears were turning red. He got like this, and there was no point in trying to stop it. “Look,” he said. “See how they all hold their binoculars with their pinkies out? How much you think they paid for those binoculars?” He stood up again. “Hey, Carnegie. Hey.” The men down front knew not to turn around. They recognized that kind of voice.

“Carnegie came from dirt,” Ledford said. He didn’t look up from his Racing Form.

“What?” Erm thought about sitting back down, but didn’t. He ground peanut husks with the soles of his Florsheims.

“Carnegie came from poor folks. He was a philanthropist.”

“Philanthra-who-in-the-what-now?” Erm cleared his throat and spat on the ground. “Pipe down, college boy.” He kicked popcorn at the empty seatback in front of them and sat down. “Choke those fuckin suits with their binocular straps,” he mumbled.

Ledford said he wanted to go to the paddock and see the horses running in the fourth.

Erm looked at his wristwatch. “You go on,” he said. He’d set up a three-thirty meeting with his uncle and needed to be in his seat.

Down by the paddock, the horseplayers tried to blow their cigarette smoke above the heads of the tourists’ kids. It was hot and drizzly. Undershirt weather. A track made soft by summer rain. Ledford was in the bag and it wasn’t yet three o’clock. He drew another circle around the number nine in his short form, put it up over his head like a rain canopy, and walked inside, away from the paddock. He chewed cutplug tobacco. “Homesick Dynamite Boy,” he said as he walked. It was the name of the number nine horse, and at 7 to 1 it was an overlay if he’d ever seen one. He looked at his short form again. His left shoulder knocked against the side of a pillar, so he sidestepped, and his right shoulder knocked against a man in a black shirt and matching derby hat. There were no Excuse me’s. This was expected. Ledford felt the man’s eyeballs on him as he walked away.

He had a fifty, three twenties, and a ten left in his billfold.

Since the war, Ledford had been lucky at the races. He’d once paid a semester’s tuition with a single day’s payout. Erm had helped him along with tips from men with no names. Ledford didn’t ask questions. He stayed drunk much of the time. He’d finished college and proposed to Rachel and taken a desk job at Mann Glass. His life was a game of forgetting.

Housewives from Homewood were logjamming the betting lines. Ledford chewed the plug hard between his eyeteeth and studied his form while he parted all of them, instinct taking him where he needed to go. He stepped up to the counter and said, “Five dollars to win on the nine.” There was no response.

Ledford looked up. A kid in a green golf hat looked back at him. His voice cracked when he spoke. “This is the popcorn cart,” the kid said.

Ledford tried to recollect the previous half hour of his life. He remembered sitting inside a stall on a toilet that had seen too much action, drinking the last of the bourbon in his pint flask. But, like all memories, this one was a sucker’s bet, because once he was in the bag, time and place were wiped and gone. He ended up wagering on three-year-old geldings at popcorn stands.

“Did you want some popcorn?” the kid asked. A red-rimmed whitehead pimple on his nose threatened to blow wide open of its own accord.

Ledford thumbed at the bills in his hand. The dirt under his nails reminded him of Henderson Field, digging. “I’m a college graduate,” he told the kid, who was getting nervous because the man in front of him was relatively big and radiating alcohol and possessed eyes that had seen some things. “Getting married on Saturday,” Ledford told him. “Beautiful girl.”

He looked at the people going by. So happy. So unaddicted to booze and playing horses. So empty of parasitic memories. A short woman with legs like a shot-putter’s rolled by a handtruck carrying a beer keg. It was held tight with twine. “Hell of an invention, the handtruck,” Ledford said to no one in particular. “Dolly, some call it. Roll three buckets a cullet around with one, no problem.” He watched the stocky woman go, her beer destined for some bubblegum-ass in the VIP Room.

As he walked away from the popcorn stand and the acned teenager who could no longer hold eye contact with him, Ledford’s insides ached. He spat heavy.

He walked to the betting line and made it to the window with one minute to post. “Five dollars to win on the nine,” he said.

He held the ticket between his thumb and forefinger. Kissed it. “Come on, Homesick Dynamite,” he said, wedging himself through the crowd, jackpot sardines with dollar signs in their eyes. Ledford stood tall at the rail and waited.

Homesick Dynamite Boy came out of the clouds on the three- quarter turn only to falter at the wire. He placed by a head length.

Ledford littered his ticket for the stoopers to pick up.

Back at the seats, he was introduced to Erm’s uncle Fiore, a short man with bags under his eyes and a tailored black suit. He had a large associate called Loaf.

“Erm tells me you busted his teeth out,” Uncle Fiore said.

“Yessir,” Ledford said.

“And you’re from Virginia?”

“West Virginia.”

“You like to play the horses?”

“Yessir.”

“All right, son.” For the entirety of this exchange, Uncle Fiore had been grasping Ledford’s hand, looking him hard in the eyes. He finally let go and said, “I’m a patriot, by the way. I got the Governor’s Notice for helping secure the port docks.”

Ledford nodded.

“How’s the shin? Erminio tells me you took some shrapnel bad.”

“It’s healed up fine. Little limp left.”

“Good. Good. My nephew’s brain I’m not so sure about, but that didn’t have nothing to do with the shrapnel.” Erm tapped the scar on his forehead where it spread beneath his hairline. They all laughed, except Loaf the associate. He had his hands crossed in front of him and kept shifting his stance. His feet were too small for his frame. “Anyway, son, you stick with Erminio around the track. He knows a little something about ponies.” Uncle Fiore winked, and his eyebags seemed to disappear for a moment. He embraced his nephew, whispered something to him, and was gone.

Erm convinced Ledford to put everything he had on Busher in the mile race. Both men emptied their wallets, and both men cashed in fourfigure tickets. They walked out of the racetrack feeling as good as two medical discharges living on military pensions could feel.

They hit a nightclub, then Erm’s mother’s place for a meal. In the driveway was an Olds Touring and a red Packard sedan with suicide doors. After she had kissed him six times, called him “country handsome,” and complimented his appetite, Ledford asked Erm’s mother how much she wanted for the Packard. Without missing a beat, she answered, “Five hundred cash for a marrying man.” It was a done deal. Instead of taking the train back to Huntington to be married, Ledford would ride in style.

Before he left the next morning, he phoned Rachel. She sounded tired. “Well, we’re in the money,” he told her. Said he’d be home earlier than planned, and that he had a surprise.

“Me too,” Rachel said. “I’m pregnant.”

Ledford didn’t know whether to howl or have a heart attack. But he smiled, and told her he was doing so. Then he told her he loved her. He meant it.

“A springtime baby,” she said.

“Nice time of year.”

He fired up the Packard and waved goodbye to Mrs. Bacigalupo. In the passenger seat, Erm nodded off within three city blocks. He was coming to West Virginia to be Ledford’s best man.

Crossing the flat expanse of Indiana, there was peace inside the car. Neither of them knew that across the world, the city of Hiroshima had already been erased by the atom bomb. Gone, all of it. One hundred thousand men, women, and children had been evaporated.

The war was nearly over.

* * *

THE RECEPTION’S BUFFET table was as long as a limousine. Folks who’d grown accustomed to rationing during the war lined up to get their fingers greasy. Here was a spread not grown in any victory garden. There was an apple and salami porcupine, chicken livers and bacon, cocktail sausages, dried beef logs, bacon-stuffed olives swimming in dressing, salami sandwiches, shrimp with horseradish, pineapple rounds with bleu cheese pecan centers, roast salmon on the bone, and anchovies with garlic butter. Ledford bit into the last of these and winced. This was partly on account of his toothache, but it was more than that. The little anchovies called to mind those long-forgotten fish-and-rice rations, stolen from the dead hands of the enemy. Ledford swallowed and smiled to a skinny old woman he knew to be Rachel’s kin. He turned from the buffet table and bumped into Lucius Ball, his new father-in-law.

“How do you find the spread?” Lucius asked. His neck fat quivered as he hollered over the trumpet’s blare.

“Plentiful,” Ledford said.

The man had spared little expense to host his only child’s wedding in his own backyard, and he wanted it acknowledged.

Lucius tried to be friendly. He was nervous about the money Eli Mann had left to Mary in his will. Money she’d be doling out in short order. “How’s the leg?” he asked. The band finished a fast Harry James number. They’d only played three songs, but already they pulled their silk handkerchiefs as if choreographed, mopping sweat before the bride and groom’s dance.

“It’s just fine.” Ledford answered. “Excuse me.” He’d spotted Erm talking up a curvy brunette he knew to be fifteen, if that.

Ledford walked away. He didn’t care if it was rude. His father-inlaw was fishing for gratitude, and he wasn’t going to get it. Not so long as he was the way he was. Lucius Ball had never been able to keep his pecker in his pants, not even with a dying wife. Such things had kept right up. Everybody knew of his transgressions, and Lucius didn’t give a damn. And now, the house on the hill was done up in grand fashion for the reception. If the church was dark and humble, this was whitelinen and bulb-light flashy. Ledford had seen too much of nothing to be impressed by so much everything. He looked up at the tent’s ceiling as he walked. There was a rust-colored water stain at the center post. A blemish amidst all that white. It called to mind the hole in his tent at Guadalcanal. That drip against his Adam’s apple. McDonough.

He came up quiet behind Erm and kneed him in the leg. “I see you met Rachel’s cousin Bertie,” Ledford said. “Bertie’s a freshman in high school.”

Erm didn’t care how old she was. He started to say so when the bandleader came over the PA. “About one minute now, if we could gather up the bride and groom.”

Erm’s dress blues had been in a box for three years. It showed. Ledford wore a store-bought black tuxedo, and that morning, when he’d asked his best man why he didn’t do the same, Erm pointed to his brass belt buckle and grabbed his crotch. “Eagles and anchors,” he’d said. “She spreads eagle, I drop anchor.”

Ledford stepped from the crowded tent and looked up at the bedroom window. A light was on.

He nodded hellos and fake-smiled his way through the strangers on the porch, climbed the stairs inside and knocked before opening the door.

Rachel sat on the bed beside her mother, whose complexion was not unlike the white of her old hobnail bedspread. There was a coughedblood stain on the hem of her bedsheet. Underneath, her shoulder and hip bones stuck out like stones.

Both women smiled at him.

In the glow of the table lamp, Rachel looked so tan and young next to her mother. Rachel pulled pins from the bun in her hair. Her veil sat next to a red glass bottle of codeine.

“Crowded down there?” Mary Ball’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, but Ledford listened to her every syllable. He’d come to love and respect his new mother-in-law. Once, when he’d come up short on tuition money, she’d stuck a hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket and told him, “Any man who takes a degree in history needs a little help.” Then she’d laughed.

There was none of that now. Laughing always brought up the blood.

“Yes ma’am. It’s packed to the tent poles,” he answered. He sat down next to Rachel and took her hand. “They’re calling us for our first dance.”

“Open the window wider,” Mary Ball told them, lifting a bony finger. “I want to hear your song.” Ledford did as she said. She called him back over to the bedside. Looked him in the eye and squeezed his hand. “You do right by Rachel,” she said.

“I will.”

“You don’t ever forget what you’ve promised in marriage.”

“I won’t.”

It worried the old woman that Ledford had no people there, no kin to speak of at all.

At the bottom of the stairs, Rachel wiped her tears before they went back out. She blew her nose and breathed in deep and kissed her man. “I almost told her I was pregnant,” she said.

He nodded. “I think she might know it anyhow.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” She laughed a little. Dusk had gone to dark outside the French doors behind her. Her gown looked almost silver against it. “Still as hot out there?”

He nodded again. Stared at her.

“What?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“No.” Seeing her in the dress made him nearly as clumsy as the first time he’d gone to her apartment and knocked over picture frames. “Can you dance in those?” He pointed to her high-heeled shoes.

“If I can’t, I’ll take em off.”

Though it wasn’t as good as Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, the band did a nice rendition of “Snowfall,” and Rachel laid her head against Ledford’s chest, and she knew they’d do what they’d pledged to do earlier that day. Richer or poorer. Sickness and health. This was forever. And Ledford looked down at the length of her and smiled at how the wedding gown could just as soon be the nurse’s uniform he’d beheld four years before. For the length of that song, neither of them could see the people stuffing their faces at the buffet table, nor could they see Erm swallowing a highball glass of scotch in one swig, eyes shut, saying to woman after woman what he always said—“How do you do?” Even the white linens and lights and cover of tent that had seemed in excess for a people at war, even these, for the length of that song became nothing more than snow falling all around as they closed their eyes and swayed. It was ninety-two degrees inside the tent, but the newlywed couple had ceased to sweat.

Above them, Rachel’s mother nearly got up and came to the window. She knew better. Instead, she swigged her codeine and moved her fingers to the music and pictured them in her mind, just as they were outside. Her only daughter. The man she’d chosen. So much pain in him, but equal parts strength and virtue. She thought of her own husband, whose small storage of such righ teous qualities had long since disappeared. He’d not been faithful to her, and that was unforgivable. She thought of her last will and testament, the changes she’d made unbeknownst to anyone, and she smiled.

Mary Ball would hang on for another day, long enough to see them off on the honeymoon. Long enough to read in the Sunday paper of a second bomb dropped, this one more powerful than the first. The smile she’d had from the music through her window was no longer. Her mouth wrenched downward at the corners. She mourned for man and wished only that she’d died the night prior. Her focus blurred, eyes shutting down like the rest of her. The last thing she ever saw were the words Nagasaki wiped clean from the earth.

May 1946

LITTLE MARY ESTELLE LEDFORD squirmed in the crook of her father’s arm. She had gas, and she couldn’t yet pass it with efficiency. Ledford laughed at her grunts, the faces she made. Her eyebrow hairs were fine but dark and nearly connected to the hairline at her temples. He kissed her face all over. He sang to her a song that his mother had sung to him. Was an old mouse that lived on the hill, mm-hmmm. He was rough and tough like Buffalo Bill, mm-hmmm.