The Marrowbone Marble Company

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