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The Marrowbone Marble Company
Glenn Taylor
A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.1941. Orphan Loyal Ledford lives a very ordinary life in Huntington, West Virginia. By day a History major, by night a glass-blower at the Mann Glass factory where he courts the boss's daughter Rachel. Preferring to read rather than talk about the war raging in Europe, he focuses his mind upon work and study. However when Pearl Harbour is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel, but he chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, unconnected from the present and haunted by the memories of war, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory town becomes a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must not only fight for his family but also the community he has worked so tirelessly to forge.Returning to the West Virginia territory of the critically acclaimed The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, M. Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community. A beautifully-written and evocative novel in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, The Marrowbone Marble Company takes a harrowing look at the issues of race and class throughout the tumultuous 1950s and 60s.
THE MARROWBONE
MARBLE COMPANY
A Novel
GLENN TAYLOR
Copyright (#ulink_2214629d-b6c1-542d-b28c-3d7a92e975e8)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Glenn Taylor 2010
Glenn Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-742328-6 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-00-735907-3 (Trade Paperback)
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007369393
Version: 2015-10-28
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Black ground was fenced for men to till. The dead of Gauley own this hill.
—Louise McNeill
Contents
Cover (#u16f36af3-7118-5ffb-832e-7bdcc70f1f83)
Title Page (#u4bc33803-e16e-5d62-ae8e-7eb399af635d)
Copyright
Epigraph (#u2e8d2aeb-de3d-5131-b1fe-df0f431fb607)
Prologue - January 1969
I - A Line in the Dirt
October 1941
November 1941
December 1941
August 1942
September 1942
October 1942
November 1942
August 1945
May 1946
June 1946
September 1947
October 1947
November 1947
February 1948
May 1948
July 1948
September 1948
November 1948
April 1949
October 1951
June 1953
II - A House on the Sand
June 1963
August 1963
September 1963
December 1964
February 1965
March 1965
April 1965
May 1966
June 1966
February 1967
June 1967
July 1967
September 1967
October 1967
February 1968
March 1968
April 1968
July 1968
December 1968
January 1969
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Glenn Taylor
Author’s Note
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue January 1969 (#ulink_0761b8ec-c449-51fe-a0ca-4c58d8963e41)
THE GROUND WAS THE color of rust. Holes the size of half-dollars were every where, some encircled by tiny mounds of dirt. This was hard earth, nearly frozen. Dried-up leaves and spruce needles turned brown. A hush had befallen the land, as still as the inside of a coffin. Such quiet recalled a time before timber had framed houses and a church, before plumbing hooked in hot and cold, before electricity snaked conduit. The trees slept. The creek was iced over.
At the back of the hollow, there was piled ash and shingle. Sheet metal lengths. Two-by-fours at peculiar angles, their surfaces bubbled and cracked and black. There was a furnace stack, fifty feet high and made from fieldstone. It towered above all that fire had taken, but its mortar was crumbling. A strong wind would soon enough knock it down and stir the ash and frayed black picture-frame wire and lampshade bones below.
Snow came. It landed silent on a thick sheath of glass, the size and shape of a backyard pond. This glass had run molten, but now it was cooled, its edges rounded, frozen in rolls. A woman walked a circle around it. She held in her hands a Bolex 16mm movie camera. She filmed the glass. Thought for a moment she had seen a fish eye looking up at her from beneath.
This tract of land had known many names. Bonecutter Ridge, Marrowbone Cut, the Land of Canaan.
A German hog butcher named Knochenbauer had settled it in 1798. He’d entered into common-law marriage with an Indian woman and they’d raised children and grandchildren and made their surname Bonecutter. The Bonecutters lived on these five hundred West Virginia acres for 150 years. They were hard, proud people who prospered some times and went hungry others. They witnessed love and murder, fire and flood, until only two remained. It was left to them to hold on to the land. They did so with the sure grip that hill people possess.
Loyal Ledford came to this place in 1948, and for a time people again walked the ground. They followed paths beaten by the feet of those who’d walked the same routes before them. House to church to meeting hall to woods’ edge, and back to house. The people here made something real and good. They built with their hands. They put down roots. Ledford put his in deep. But his blood carried memories and his temper ran hot. In his dreams, hollows were flooded and people hid in holes they’d dug in the ground.
Ledford was apart from this world, and yet the people followed him. “Tell you what,” he once said to them. “We can stir the creek and wake up the trees. We can be a people freed.”
I A Line in the Dirt (#ulink_d29e52e7-5986-5b3d-97bc-00ad036113f4)
October 1941 (#ulink_31938800-c558-59a7-a8dd-1db33da8eb60)
SIX BRICK CHIMNEY STACKS stood at a hundred feet each. This was the Mann Glass Company, a ten-acre factory tract straddling the C&O Line at Huntington’s western edge. Machine-made wide- and narrow-mouth bottles had been blown inside since 1915, and later, prescription and proprietary bottles. Eli Mann had opened the doors of a handblown specialty shop here in 1908. Now, at ninety, he owned a factory with one thousand employees and two 300-ton furnaces.
Inside, Loyal Ledford worked the swing shift, four to midnight. He’d done so since graduating high school in June, and before him, his father had done the same.
Ledford was a long, sturdy young man with big hands. At thirteen, he was a Mann Glass batch boy. At eighteen, he bid on and got his job as furnace tender. It suited him. He was careful to respect the fire, as heat will sometimes break even a young man down. Inside a glass factory, a furnace roared at 3,000 degrees.
Ledford squinted hard. Checked the gauge and eyeballed the furnace fire one last time through the barrier window. As was his custom at the end of a shift, Ledford stared at the fire until his peripherals went white. Then he closed his eyes and watched the little swirls dance across the black stage of his eyelids. He pushed his scoop shovel into the corner with his boot tip and walked blind down the dark east aisle. The wall bulbs had surged again. Popped open like fireworks, muted by the rest of the racket inside. Ledford clocked off at a minute past midnight.
Saturday turned into Sunday, and Ledford sat alone in the dark in front of his work locker. The sweat sheen on his body dried up. His wetcollared shirt turned cold and stuck to him. He coughed. Pulled off his split-leather work gloves. They rode high, all the way to the elbows.
Inside the factory cafeteria, Ledford looked for Rachel. She was the plant nurse on the four-to-midnight shift, and they’d been eating together for two months. Rachel’s mother was Mary Ball, formerly Mary Mann, Eli Mann’s daughter. Rachel’s father was Lucius Ball, plant manager.
She was three years Ledford’s senior. She’d grown up easy in a big house on Wiltshire Hill. He’d grown up hard in a little one next to the scrapyard on Thirteenth Street West.
She was easy to spot. Her posture was spike straight and her hair was coal black. Ledford followed her from the milk bin to the table, put his tray down across from hers. “What say, Jean Parker?” he said.
“What say, Pittsburgh,” Rachel answered. They’d had a date to see The Pittsburgh Kid a week prior. After, she told him he looked like Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid himself. He told her she looked like Jean Parker, only younger. They’d kissed.
“Tired?” he asked.
“A little.” She wore a purple flower on the breast of her nurse’s uniform. Her silver watch was loose on her wrist, thin as twine.
“Hungry, I take it.” Ledford cut his steak, as she did hers. They always ate the same meal. Steak, eggs, chocolate cake. It was the second thing he’d noticed about her.
“Did you read about the Navy destroyer? The torpedo attack?” Rachel chewed while she talked, blocked his view with her napkin.
