Sea Glass (24 page)

  Sexton

“We really have to go,” Sexton is telling Honora in the kitchen. He is watching her wrap up a half dozen sandwiches and a couple of pies in waxed paper. He wants to tell her to speed it up. Mironson and Ross and McDermott are waiting to take off.

“You’ll be on the picket line tomorrow,” she says.

“I guess,” he says. “I’ll do whatever they tell me to do.”

“Be careful,” she says.

“I will. Don’t worry about me.”

“The laundry is in the hallway,” she says.

“Yeah. I saw that.”

“Are you going to need forks?”

“They give us forks in the boardinghouse,” he says impatiently, although he doesn’t know if this is true. Madame Derocher is a harpy. She keeps the forks locked up. Anyway, they’ll eat the pie in the truck with their fingers is his guess.

“I can’t use all this food,” she says. “You might as well take it with you.”

She puts the sandwiches into a paper bag. He hasn’t much liked the way the other guys have been ogling Honora this weekend when they think he isn’t looking. Though he can’t deny that he is proud of her. In a way, he would have to say that Vivian is a prettier gal — she is certainly sleeker and better dressed (and definitely funnier) — but, oddly, not as sexy, not even for all her brassy talk. And of course she’s much older — nearly thirty, he would have to guess. No, Honora is the more alluring of the two. And if he hadn’t been so drunk these last two nights, he might have done something about it.

Jesus, these guys can really put the booze away. It was all he could do to keep up with them. Ross, especially. Sexton is actually glad they’re going back to the city now, even if he hates the boardinghouse. Just to have a night off.

This strike thing is a miracle, he thinks. Just a miracle. Mironson is now taking care of the mortgage — and what a load off Sexton’s mind that is — and he and Honora are eating better than they have since October. And all because of the Copiograph and the Eight he’d squirreled away in the attic. He knew he’d made his sale even at lunch that first day at the boardinghouse. He’d seen it on McDermott’s face. Not a cash sale, but as good as. Better, in fact.

Funny about the way the guy can’t hear unless you look right at him. A little spooky, actually.

“When were you going to tell me about the strike?” Honora says, turning and speaking so that only he can hear.

“What?”

“The strike,” she says close to his face. “When were you going to tell me?”

For a moment Sexton is so surprised by the question and the tone in her voice that he can’t think of how to answer her. “What does it matter when I was going to tell you about the strike?” he says.

“I need to know what you know,” she says.

“It would have upset you,” he says.

“You’d keep something from me if you thought it would upset me?” she asks.

He darts a quick look into the hallway, but he can’t see the men. They must be outside by the truck. “I have to go,” he says.

“If you had a girlfriend,” Honora is saying, “and thought that telling me would upset me, would you keep that from me too?”

“Jesus, Honora, what is this?”

“I need to know what you know, Sexton. That’s what a marriage is all about. It’s about trust, and you’ve made me not trust you.”

“Why are you bringing this up now?” he says.

“Because I haven’t seen you alone and awake in a room since you got here,” she says.

Jesus Christ, why is she doing this? Doesn’t she see that it’s the first time he hasn’t felt like a bum since Christmas? He hasn’t felt this good, this
useful,
since the late fall, nearly a year ago. And she wants to pick this particular moment to have this fight? Has she forgotten what it was like all winter and all through the spring, when he was so tired and depressed and . . .
ashamed
. . . that he could hardly look at her?

“If it weren’t for Louis and McDermott and Jack Hess,” Honora says, “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.” She folds the dish towel in her hands.

“I tell you what you need to know,” he says.

“Like the fact that you had a Number Eight and the Copiograph in the attic? Machines we could have sold instead of starving ourselves and burning the mantel when we didn’t have money for coal?”

“That’s none of your business,” he says, though truthfully he has felt guilty about that ever since he took the machines out of the Buick before the auctioneer came. Nonexistent deliveries to a nonexistent bank from a soon-to-be (though Sexton didn’t know that then) nonexistent business machine manufacturing company. He’d thought then that his personal setback was only temporary and that one day he’d be up and running again and could get a head start with the two machines. Or did he think them merely trophies that he might take out from time to time to remind himself of another life, the one in which he’d been, for a time, successful? “Look, I’m in the city working in a filthy, noisy hellhole from six in the morning until five at night,” Sexton says. “And then five nights a week I go back to a rat-infested boardinghouse and sleep in a room with four other guys like some kid at camp, and all this so that you can sit here reading books and looking for pieces of your goddamned sea glass.”

She lays the dish towel over the lip of the sink — slowly and carefully, like someone trying to control herself. “That’s what you think I do all day?” she asks.

“You have to let me handle business in my own way, Honora. I know what I’m doing.”

“You know that Louis is a Communist,” she says.

“The rest aren’t.”

“It could be dangerous,” she says.

He leans in conspiratorially toward her face. “Look at this sweet deal we’ve got now. They’re going to take care of the mortgage and feed us. What could be better?”

“What could be better?” she asks. “Having a husband who doesn’t withhold information from me would be better,” she says. “Having a husband I can trust would be better.”

“I couldn’t have sold those machines,” he says. “It wouldn’t have been legal.”

“Since when have you cared about something being legal?” she snaps. And immediately he can see that she knows she’s gone too far. She puts a hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

But that’s all right, Sexton thinks. Because he’s got the high ground now. He can make this sale.

“You let me handle this, all right?” he says, bending over and kissing her on the side of her mouth. “I’ll see you,” he adds. “Next weekend or earlier.”

“Sexton,” she calls to him, but by then he is already across the kitchen. He makes a conscious decision to pretend he hasn’t heard her.

In the hallway, McDermott is standing by the front door. Has the man been waiting for him all this time? Did he overhear that little marital tiff in the kitchen?

Sexton stops, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and slides one out. He takes his time lighting it, snaps his lighter shut, and reaches down for his sack of clean laundry where it sits by the front door.

“Sandwiches in there if you want them,” Sexton says to McDermott.

  McDermott

He is trembling as they stand on the walkway. He puts his hands in his pockets to stop the shaking.

“You all right?” Ross asks.

Mironson is taking forever to say good-bye. Alphonse and Sexton are already in the truck. McDermott takes one last look at Honora on the doorstep.

“Everything’s jake,” he says, turning to Ross.

  Alice Willard

  Alphonse

Alphonse slips alongside the familiar line of picketers, thinking that their signs always look homemade and that maybe the strikers could do a better job of printing the words INTERNATIONALISM WILL FEED US and NO UNION WILL STARVE, because all you have to do is take one look at the mill signs — ALL STRIKING WORKERS WILL BE REPLACED — to see which is the spiffier organization. No hand-lettered signs there.

All the picketers look bored and hot and like they wish they weren’t walking around in circles on the cement outside the mill gates. Even Alphonse has gotten used to the sight of the state militia in their peaked caps and their rifles with bayonets, and he thinks they must be dying of heatstroke inside those long brown coats. Once in a while someone from the picket line will throw a stone at one of the guards and all of the soldiers will point their bayonets straight at the crowd and threaten to charge, but only twice, as far as Alphonse knows, have people gotten pricked. Arnaud Nadeau’s father had to go to the hospital, and one other man Alphonse knows, and he doesn’t understand why they keep having these fights since one side has rocks and the other has guns and it is pretty obvious who is going to come out the winner.

Mironson says it’s important that the picketers be peaceful and that he will not tolerate any violence, but you can tell that the picketers, especially the men, are just itching for a fight most of the time. Alphonse thinks the special deputies who go around in plainclothes and masks so you can’t tell who they are are much scarier than the state militia. The special deputies fight with bricks and sledgehammers and go into the tent city at night and take men out and beat them, and someone said that they tried to poison the water supply, but the men who were in charge caught them and made them run away. Alphonse doesn’t know if this story is true, because there are so many stories floating around, and he thinks that sometimes people just make them up when they are having a slow day. This is already the fourth week of the strike, and it is no longer even interesting to see furniture on the street or people standing in line for hours just to get flour and beans from the relief center. When Alphonse can’t get food to his mother, she buys bones from the butcher. She boils them and takes the scum off the top of the pot and then makes a stew with the broth. The stew tastes terrible, and Alphonse doesn’t dare ask her what kind of meat it is in case she says horse meat. He eats and sleeps at home four nights a week, but on weekends they all go to Mrs. Beecher’s house, and even though there is a lot of work to do, it is paradise over there. Just paradise.

He slips into an alley to take a shortcut to the Alfred Street candy store, where the men are waiting for him in the back room. This is the fifth place they have had as a secret strike center, because every time they get set up, the special deputies discover where they are and come in and smash the furniture and even take a swipe or two at McDermott or Mironson, who is a very good boss but who is sort of pathetic at fighting back — he slaps like a girl — or Ross or Tsomides, who just got out of the hospital, or any of the other twenty or so strike leaders who might just happen to be there.

Every morning there is a meeting of the strike committee, and usually Alphonse is there to get his orders for the day from McDermott. Alphonse is by far the youngest person, though there are two older boys who are maybe sixteen who do some of the driving. Alphonse wishes he were old enough to do some of the driving too, because it would be great fun to be behind the wheel of Mahon’s bread truck, even though you don’t have a seat and have to stand up.

After the meeting, there is always a rally at one of the mill gates and usually there is a song session, which is supposed to pep up the picketers, though some of the songs are just too embarrassing to sing. And then one or two of the strike leaders will give interviews to the newspaper reporters who have been coming into town. One reporter was from a New York paper, which got everybody all excited, and when Alphonse went to the picket line that day he noticed that the women were dressed in their Sunday clothes and were hoping to be interviewed. Alphonse is himself dressing better these days, mainly because his mother doesn’t have to go to work and has more time on her hands and made him a shirt out of good white cotton and a pair of pants that for once aren’t too short for him that he sometimes wears to Mrs. Beecher’s house. And Mrs. Beecher has knit him a pair of socks, though the weather has been too hot for socks lately.

And tonight, McDermott said, they will go to Mrs. Beecher’s house because they have to get out another newsletter, you have to keep the spirits of the picketers up, and Mrs. Beecher said on Sunday when he left that when they all came back she would make fried chicken and corn and ham and peach ice cream, which he just can’t wait to taste.