Sea Glass (26 page)

“Can you understand it?”

McDermott laughs.

“I seldom see you laugh,” she says. “It’s nice. I like it.”

He blushes and hopes that the sudden color will be hidden by his blotchy pink sunburn.

“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” Honora asks. “I would think you’d have lots.”

“I had a girlfriend,” he says, “but it didn’t work out the way I hoped it would.”

“What was her name?”

“Evangeline.”

“Like the poem,” she says.

“I guess,” he says.

“You don’t know the poem?” she asks.

“Eileen told me about it,” he says. “I don’t read too much poetry.”

She smiles. “I didn’t think so,” she says.

“She got pregnant by another guy,” he says, confessing a fact he has never told anyone.

Honora looks up from her work, her expression giving away her considerable surprise. “You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “I’d never even . . . I was completely in the dark. I was about to ask her to marry me.”

She puts the knife down. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s too bad.”

“Just as well,” he says, shrugging. “I might have married her. And
that
would have been too bad.”

She turns away and picks up the knife again, and he wonders if she regrets anything about her marriage. Sometimes it drives McDermott crazy to be in possession of a fact about her husband that he can never tell her — the one piece of information that might serve him well, the one thing about her husband that would almost certainly break her heart and then possibly might one day set her free. Even McDermott, as out of touch with God as he is these days, understands that. He does his best to try not to think about it, though when he saw Sexton Beecher two weeks ago leaving the speak with the English girl, he was so furious (and yet so unforgivably elated) that he found it difficult even to talk to the man later that night. And it is all McDermott can do sometimes when they are riding in the truck together or working at the press or sitting at the dining table at the boardinghouse not to take the guy by the lapels and shake him hard and tell him to shape up. Doesn’t he see what he has at home? Doesn’t he know what he is jeopardizing? What is wrong with the fucking guy, anyway?

But, of course, McDermott knows perfectly well what is wrong with the fucking guy. He’s a guy. He’s lonely in town. He wants a girl. So what? If McDermott didn’t know Honora, he doubts he’d ever give the matter a second thought. None of his business is what he would think.

“What are you making?” he asks.

“Coleslaw,” she says.

Maybe he is a little bit hungry after all. He wonders if he’s got his medicine with him. With all this coming and going — beach to city, city to beach — the medicine is often not where it’s supposed to be.

“It’s exciting, being part of this,” she says.

“The city has come alive,” he says.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when you all leave,” she says. “I’ve come to hate being here by myself.”

“I’d have thought you’d be glad to see the back of us,” he says.

“I miss you guys when you’re gone.”

His heart, stupidly, leaps — willing to snatch at any crumb.

“I, for one, hate leaving here,” he says after a minute. “This house. I’ve enjoyed it.”

She licks a dollop of mayonnaise off her finger. “Thank you,” she says.

“I wouldn’t have an excuse to talk to you, for one thing,” he says, trying to make it light.

From the front room, McDermott can hear Vivian calling,
Hey, doll.
A chair scrapes against a wooden floor. Mironson says,
I’m starved.
Through the window McDermott hears the sound of waves crashing. The printing press starts up again.

Honora stares at the platter of sandwiches in front of her. “There’s a pitcher of lemonade in the icebox,” she says, “if you wouldn’t mind getting it.”

  Honora

“No guns,” Mironson is saying.

Sandwiches and coleslaw make their way along the table. Vivian, in parchment batiste, fills glasses with lemonade. McDermott has not come to lunch. Through the doorway, Honora can see him leaning against the porch railing.

“But the picketers need to be able to defend themselves,” Sexton says from the middle of the table. Louis, in a shortsleeved white shirt, sits sideways, as if he were there but not entirely there. In his posture, he gives the impression of a man who is indescribably weary — which Honora thinks is probably the case. She wonders how it is that he does this for a living. Moving from town to town, following strikes, starting strikes, moving out, starting all over again. When this is finished, he will leave Ely Falls and enter into an entirely new community. She wonders if he minds, if he is ever lonely.

“No guns,” Louis repeats. “Militiamen cannot weave cloth. They instill fear, but they cannot by themselves break the strike.”

“But we’re getting the — excuse me, ladies —
shit
kicked out of us, and we have nothing to fight back with but stones.”

Honora thinks her husband might have been better served if he hadn’t used the word
we
— not only because Sexton himself clearly hasn’t had a hand laid on him, but also because Louis never pickets.

“This has to be done without violence,” Louis says. “It has to be this way. Yes, the bosses are just itching for a fight. They’re just itching for an excuse to bring out the machine guns and mow us all down.”

“Golly, I hope not,” Vivian says, smoothing her pleated skirt.

“No, not really,” Louis says. “But as good as. It won’t be machine guns, but it will be rifles and bayonets. Tear gas. Vomit gas. You haven’t lived until you’ve been under an attack with vomit gas.”

“Do we have to talk about this at lunch?” Vivian asks.

“If we had guns,” Sexton says, gesturing with military precision, his fingertips blue with Copiograph ink, “this thing would be over tomorrow.”

“Oh, it would be over tomorrow, all right,” Louis says.

“So then,” Sexton says.

“Don’t you see?” Louis asks, looking up at Sexton as if he were a particularly recalcitrant child. “If one of us got caught with a gun, what that would do to us?”

“The press is already portraying us as alien creatures destroying a way of life,” Sexton says.

“What way of life?” Ross asks, picking his teeth.

“They’re portraying us as Reds,” Sexton says.

“They call us the Red Menace,” Tsomides says. “Oooh, that’s so
scary.
”

“We could scare the scabs at the very least,” Sexton says.

“We
have
scared the scabs. And remember, the scabs of today are the strikers of tomorrow,” Louis says automatically, as if it were a sentence he has repeated many times.

Through the doorway, Honora watches McDermott put both hands on the railing and bend his head.

“We need relief, not guns,” Honora can hear Louis saying. “Relief supplies are inadequate.”

“We always need relief,” Mahon says. “It’s never-ending.”

McDermott pushes himself away from the railing. He turns and glances inside the house.

“Amber applejacks,” Ross says to Vivian. “Fifty cents a shot. Three, you feel like a king. Four, you feel like a czar. Five, you feel like hell.”

“Honora?” Sexton says.

“I’m sorry?” she asks, turning her gaze back to the table.

“I was asking you what you thought.”

“About . . . ?”

“Guns,” Sexton says with pained annoyance. “What your opinion is.”

Honora glances from Louis, who still looks indescribably weary, to Ross, who is sucking his teeth, to Vivian, who is taking a delicate sip of lemonade. Tsomides and Mahon are tucking into their second (or is it their third?) sandwiches. Sexton is waiting for her answer.

“No guns,” Honora says finally, and Louis looks at her with frank admiration. “I believe the strike can be won without guns,” she says. “And I believe, as does Louis, that relief is more important than firepower. As long as the strikers have food and a place to sleep, and the strike is over before the weather turns, I think they can force the mill owners to restore the wages to where they were before the last pay cut.”

Sexton sits back in his chair with obvious disgust. Ross raises an eyebrow, clearly surprised that the woman who cooks and types has an opinion.

“We’re making history here,” Louis says, turning around to face the group, and Honora thinks, not for the first time in the last several weeks, how remarkable it is that such an unprepossessing man can command such respect. “Each of us is part of something much larger, something that cannot be stopped,” he says. Honora watches his eyes travel around the table, pausing at each individual in turn. “Honora, you’ve been invaluable.
Lucky Strike
has already caught the attention of organizers in Boston and New York. I’m told
The Federated Worker
wants to take it over. We’re printing over ten thousand copies a week.” He pauses. “Vivian, you’re a firecracker. No one would be reading the thing without you.” Vivian waves the compliment away. “Ross and Mahon and Tsomides and Thibodeau, you’ve been jerks,” Louis says, and everyone laughs. “And Sexton, this never would have gotten off the ground at all had you not led us to your machines, your beautiful house, and your even more beautiful wife.”

“Hear, hear,” Ross says. Honora smiles and turns quickly to catch yet another glimpse of McDermott through the doorway, but the porch is empty now.

“How we conduct ourselves in Ely Falls will be remembered forever,” Louis says, and for just a moment it seems the ponderous weight of history itself floats and settles around the table. It is so quiet in the front room that Honora can hear Ross breathing through his open mouth at the end of the table.

“You know,” Vivian says, tilting her head and peering at her plate with unusual interest, “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a bologna sandwich.”

  Sexton

Sexton inspects another sheet and cranks the cylinder with more force than is probably good for the machine. He cannot believe that just an hour ago his own wife sat at the table and made a fool out of him by not supporting what he had to say about guns. It’s perfectly obvious that without guns they cannot possibly win this thing, that it will go on forever.

And that’s the interesting part, he thinks, because he cannot quite make out why he does not want it to go on forever. It’s not having the men in his house — he likes that; it was always too quiet with just Honora and him. And it certainly isn’t wanting to go back into the mill, because he doesn’t expect ever again to work there. He’s betting Mironson will be able to use him somewhere within his organization; or, better yet, maybe now he can get a job in sales. In January and February, when he went out looking for a job, he had a sorry attitude; he was defeated before he’d even begun. Now he feels anything but defeated. What he feels now is . . . Well, what he feels now is that he’s just itching for something to happen.

He thought he could make that sale.

He was sure he could convince Ross and Mironson and Tsomides — Ross a kind of sergeant mobilizing supplies and troops, Mironson a tactical general, thinking things through in that droopy way of his, and Tsomides because he’d been injured. As for McDermott, Sexton isn’t sure where he fits in, but McDermott wasn’t there at lunch, so it was only Ross and Mironson and Tsomides Sexton really had to sell. But none of them was buying. Sexton argued that at the very least they should give guns to the strike leaders so they could protect themselves against the special deputies, who everyone knows are no more than thugs hired by the bosses. He was concerned that the special deputies might one day show up at Fortune’s Rocks, he said, thinking that the image of a man protecting his home might sway the others. They couldn’t keep this place a secret forever, he said, and, frankly, he was amazed they’d kept it a secret this long.

Still Mironson wouldn’t bite.

Maybe McDermott is the guy to convince, Sexton thinks. No, McDermott would never go against Ross and Mironson. You can just tell the guy’s not on board one hundred percent. Kind of a dreamy fellow, actually — probably because he can’t hear too well. And that’s another thing that’s got Sexton stumped. Why do they have a deaf guy on the team? Seems like a big liability to him.

He cranks the sheets out as fast as he can now. It galls him that he prints only the agendas. Nobody reads the stuff anyway, as far as he can tell. The real juice is in the newsletter with that dopey name. Amazing how that thing has gotten so popular. It seems like they spend half of their supply money these days on paper. At least Mironson has got Sexton running the books. Mironson could hardly work the adding machine they bought, and no one else wanted to, so that job fell to Sexton, which was something. But it’s a backroom kind of job, and Sexton wants to be out front, which is where he should be. Making sales.

As for Honora, he will deal with her later. Tell her to button her lip. Well, he won’t put it quite that way, but he’ll let her know that he didn’t like it, doesn’t want it to happen again. Although
when
he’ll tell her this is a mystery. She’s always doing the dishes when he goes up to the bedroom these days, and usually he is so tired — with a little help from the booze — he can’t stay awake long enough to wait for her. And when he opens his eyes in the morning, she’s already up and in the kitchen making breakfast. He’ll have to corner her before he leaves, though he doesn’t want another scene like the one they had in the kitchen that first weekend. McDermott heard that one, Sexton is sure of it.

A wife should be respectful. Not contradict her husband at the table. Not in front of the men.

He wonders if he should start looking now for a job, see what’s out there in sales. Even if he has to go a little distance, say back to Portsmouth. Honora is used to living with him away for stretches at a time. She could manage by herself; she’s good at that. But who knows how long this strike thing will last? He can’t see abandoning the team until it’s over. It had better be over by October, he thinks, or those poor bastards will all freeze to death over there in that tent city. What a dump. He hates it when he has to go in there with Mironson and Ross. The place smells like an outhouse that hasn’t been emptied in years.

He checks the height of the pile of printed papers against his other stack. He has to collate and staple now. Most of the time he feels like a goddamn secretary. The adding machine and the Copiograph are women’s tools — not a man’s. And he should be in the front office, not the back room. He should be making his sales.