“I tell you what…” said the barman. He walked over to the bar and lifted up a short shotgun. “That was too much firecracker.”
“What you goin’ to do?”
“See if he does it again.” Then he put the gun back.
“Come here with it. I believe he’s turned around and coming back. Give me the gun,” pleaded Butte.
“Really, man. I don’t want you to shoot nobody … be some trouble for me, now.”
Butte snatched the gun. “I don’t like anybody scaring me like that,” he said. “Look out! He’s pitchin’ one down!”
“Watch it! God d….”
Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
“Got damn! You come back here, man!”
Gurraw Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the shotgun in Butte’s hands. He fired from the porch. Then he went back in.
“I didn’t kill anybody, honcho.” He smiled sickly and laid the gun on the bar. “I got a rear light and lots of the backend of a station wagon, though.”
“It was a white man, wasn’t it?” said the barman.
“It was a white child.”
“Chile?…”
“Yes sir. I do believe it was my boss’s son, little Harry.”
“You in for it, man.”
“I think I can handle it.”
Butte and the old man got along. The mulatto really had nothing against making mattress frames. Where he worked was a wide concrete shop with twenty men spread into four job groups. Harley liked to hear the music of the hammers and springs, and he liked to see the mattresses take shape through the glass where the women were working with sewing machines alongside his area. See them get stuffed and stacked up on the dock behind the tremendous doors, and the automotive lorries taking them out twelve high. Butte got along well with his innerspring squad, too. Two of them were Negro, and two white, and all they did while they framed was make jokes. It got to where the jokes went round to every man in a regular circuit, and you got booed if you came in some day without a good joke or only had a half-ass joke. Butte had plenty of stories from the army he didn’t even know he’d remembered. He and the on-and-off wino white fellow competed for laugh king. His squad knew he was clever and fast on the frames. He turned in more tickets than anybody at five o’clock, and the old man paid them by the piece after a certain number. He was always ready for overtime. He liked the way his wife treated him when he got home late and tired in the arms. She respected that he was weary, and helped herself to him in gentle ways. The old man saw how Butte was succeeding with his squad in the shop. Harley came into his office one day and told the old man he’d like to buy one of those innersprings for his own bed, and he was wondering if the price of it couldn’t just be taken out of his check this time. It seemed easier that way.
“You made a lot of money this month, didn’t you, Harley?” the old man said.
“I think I’ve got in enough for a little more than three forty this time.”
“Good for you. You look like a man who’s going somewhere, to me. Don’t think I don’t like that.”
“Mucha blige,” said Harley.
In December he asked the old man couldn’t it be arranged for him to take some college work in the afternoons over at Grell starting mid-January. It would mean he could still work till two o’clock. The old man fell into his study for about two weeks of fake mental hernia, at home, and hollered at anybody who disturbed him, thinking we were out to spoil his mental life; but sneaking in the den behind the couch and standing breathlessly still, the old man watched Jack Paar late at night. He thought, as regards the intellectual life, Paar was the last word. Then at the factory he finally called in Harley and told him that Grell arrangement would be all right. He could keep his job. The old man told Harley he wanted to see him make A’s. Winkadoo.
My old man looked something like Paar, and nourished the hell out of that fact.
Harley went to Grell. The college amounted to an exploded quad of three-story ocher buildings. The band room was in a mossy basement of one of them. He was a smash his first semester, what with all that overwhelming cognizance about instruments and Sousan music. By next fall, he took over the unofficial leadership of the thirty-piece band, the old director perfectly willing to let Butte drill and play them, and take the football trips in the yellow bus with them. At Grell, it so happened that football was inmidst of its first golden age since the school was founded. Butte took what he got.
He wore pith helmet, whistle, and sunglasses in the late afternoons. As director, he was a hard man. In a month he was marching perhaps the best twenty-piece band in the nation. And at the end of football season, there were fourteen of them left — hard-bitten Sousa-lovers every one.
Butte would take trombone, flute, trumpet, or sousa-phone along and fill in what absent parts he could, when they sat in the bleachers. Once, at a game between Grell and Alcorn A. & M., he played a trumpet with one hand, beat the bass drum with the other, and directed the group by use of an elbow.
This was one of the weekend nights when his wife, who was not a member of the Grell student body, sat with the band, one baby on an upright mobile board beside her and another one active in her womb, while she played bell lyre, and pretty decent bell lyre. Her stomach was too big for her to hold the instrument in her lap, so she perched it on a bleacher and sat sideways, tapping the tone bars, with one eye on the director, her husband. Butte would see her wrapped in her old woolen coat, a Scotch plaid scarf tied under her chin, and see his son asleep on the padded board beside her, and his wife’s eye on his conducting, and the weather was nipping cold. But the Disciples-size band would be playing, say, “Washington Post” especially well, and the air around his ears would be warm. He’d look on the wife he’d trained to bell lyre, and the kind of love that leaves no room for anything else in the soul and body would take hold of him.
It goes without saying that Butte never told the old man just how interested he was in band. Ode Elann Monroe thought Harley was grooming his life around being a foreman of the innerspring shop. You don’t tell an employer who’s giving you a raise every month that your real mental existence is somewhere else entirely. Harley did eventually make foreman, over a horde of protests — two illiterate letters from Dream of Pines racists which the old man read to us in an ironic redneck voice one morning at breakfast. And the old man felt a wee bit ill-used when Butte quit him two months after he got his Bachelor of Music degree at Grell and moved his wife and four boys over to Mississippi, where he’d happened to land on a vacant directorship of one of the biggest Negro high school bands in six states, counting Texas.
He didn’t tell me quite all of this poop about himself, either. But he told me most of it. When things got to where Harley and I could talk — behind the factory or leaning on the fence of that neat yard of his on the edge of niggertown (Harley’s yard was as neat as any yard that grew nothing but Johnson grass as I’ve seen, and he had the lattice fence, which was an absolutely revolutionary improvement out that way), or even in my own room out at Pierre Hills that he came to as a detour off mattress business with the old man — I and Harley knew that we were in for at least forty-five minutes of talk, peripherally of music and mostly about his life. Harley had a fine middle-range voice. He never emphasized any of his troubles to me, and went over the facts of his life like they were just that, facts; no whining. This man knew his dream was taking him somewhere.
But Butte always had some problem he felt required a 9:00 P.M. interview with the old man at our house. I don’t know but what he felt guilty about succeeding at the factory and with the Grell band at the same time and wanted to talk it out with the old man, though he’d kill himself before he told all about his progress out Grell way. He told that part of it to me.