Sea Glass (8 page)

  McDermott

McDermott pauses at the entrance to the apartment building.

“Come on come on come on,” Ross says, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “Don’t hang about.”

“I’ll be right with you,” McDermott says.

“Suffering Jesus, it’s hot,” Ross says, putting his filthy handkerchief back in his pocket.

A movement catches McDermott’s attention, and his eyes travel across the facade of the brick tenement to a fourth-floor window. A boy sits on the windowsill, watching him. All week, the heat has been stifling, nearly intolerable inside the mill. For a moment, McDermott feels sorry for the boy and thinks of sailing him a coin so that he can go to the movies. Two coins, so that he can take a friend. Ross tugs at the sleeve of McDermott’s shirt. “You don’t want to be seen,” Ross says from the bottom of the well. “The last thing you want to do is end up on someone’s list.”

  Alphonse

All afternoon Alphonse has watched the men come and go through the door with the peeling red paint. Arnaud Nadeau’s father, who keeps coming to the door to wave the men inside, is a mule spinner at the mill, and what all the men are doing in the Nadeau apartment Alphonse has no idea. The men move toward the door and pretend they aren’t actually going in, and then they slip across the threshold with a sneaky movement that reminds Alphonse of Sam Coyne, who was always arriving late for school and trying to slide into his seat without Sister Mary Patrick noticing. Trying to pull a fast one. As if Sister Mary Patrick, who sees and hears everything, wouldn’t catch him. It would be better, Alphonse thinks, for the men to walk up to the door as if they were going visiting, because anyone can tell there’s something up.

He doesn’t know the dark-haired man in the blue shirt who looked at him, the man who had his sleeves rolled and paused a moment on the steps. Alphonse is frightened because who knows what the men are up to inside Nadeau’s? Maybe they are gangsters and are planning a robbery, though he really doesn’t think gangsters would be so obvious. Besides, there are an awful lot of men going into the apartment. At least twenty that Alphonse has counted.

When the man with the blue shirt goes inside, Alphonse gets off the sill and kneels on the floor and peers over the ledge because he doesn’t want to be noticed by anyone else, just in case. Marie-Thérèse comes into the room then and says,
Look at Alphonse, he’s praying,
and he stands up quickly.
Didn’t get enough at mass?
Marie-Thérèse asks in that horrible taunting voice that she has, and his mother, who is cooking a stew, laughs with her. And then, because of Marie-Thérèse, his mother is reminded that Alphonse doesn’t have anything to do on the hot Sunday afternoon and tells him to go wash the sheets in the tub. Alphonse is so mad at his sister that he gives her a kick on her anklebone when he passes her, which makes Marie-Thérèse scream (she exaggerates everything), and then his mother cuffs his ear.

After he has scrubbed the sheets against the washboard — the sheets so heavy in the tub they make his arms tremble — he puts them through the double wringer and then hangs them on the line over the back deck. He hops down the stairs before his mother can ask him to do anything else. Alphonse thinks he should have one afternoon off a week, though it is pretty clear that his mother doesn’t even get that and so he feels a little guilty leaving her alone with Marie-Thérèse, who is practically useless.

He thinks of going round to Louis Desjardins’s house to see what he and his brothers are up to, to see if they want to go to the beach. Louis’s mother works a second job at the rectory on Sundays and so Louis and his brothers and sisters usually have the place to themselves and you can count on it to be pandemonium over there. Alphonse reaches the bottom of the back stairs. Normally he’d cut through the alley to get to Louis’s but instead he finds himself moving around the wall of the tenement to the front. He hugs the bricks and hopes no one will notice him, but that’s just as stupid, he realizes, as the men who’ve been sneaking through Mr. Nadeau’s front door. He wonders if the men are still inside. It has taken Alphonse at least a half hour to do the sheets and so maybe they have left already. He could go up to the door and knock as if he were just looking for Arnaud. That would be a perfectly ordinary thing to do, and then he could get a quick peek inside while Mr. Nadeau tells him Arnaud isn’t home.

But when Alphonse reaches the front of the building he loses his nerve. The street is deserted. Even the women aren’t out and about, which is unusual. Sunday is visiting day whether it’s stifling or not. Sometimes his mother keeps her Sunday dress on and goes to visit his father’s cousins on Fourth Street.

The front door opens. The dark-haired man in the blue shirt with the rolled sleeves comes out. Alphonse sucks in his breath. The man has his hands on his hips and his head bent and he steps off the cement stairs and walks in a small circle on the sidewalk in front of the tenement. His tie is loosened at his collar and his shirt has sweat stains in the armpits. You can tell the man is thinking about something. Maybe he is mad. The man raises his head to the sky, and Alphonse takes a step backward, thinking that two more steps and he’ll be around the corner and out of sight, but on the second pass around his circle the man looks down from the sky and runs his hands through his hair and that’s when he sees Alphonse.

“Hey,” the man says.

Alphonse cannot move or breathe.

“You’re the kid in the window,” the man says.

Alphonse shakes his head.

“Come over here.” The man beckons with his hand. “Come on, I won’t bite.”

Alphonse takes a breath as if about to drown. The man laughs and beckons again. Common sense tells Alphonse to run, but the man is smiling. Though Marie-Thérèse smiles a lot and she is a snake.

Alphonse puts his hands in his pockets and moves toward the man, who squats down in front of him so that they are more or less face to face. “What’s your name?”

Alphonse can’t speak.

“It’s okay,” the man says. His hair is parted in the center and his eyebrows go almost straight across. He has the bluest eyes Alphonse has ever seen.

“Alphonse,” he says finally.

“I’m McDermott.”

Alphonse nods. “Is that your first name or your last name?” Alphonse asks.

“It’s my last name,” the man says, “but it’s all anyone ever calls me. Except my family.”

“What do they call you?”

“Quillen.”

Alphonse nearly laughs.

“You speak English pretty good,” McDermott says. “I’m a little deaf, so I have to look right at you when you’re talking.”

“All right,” Alphonse says.

“What did you see from the window?” the man asks.

Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

“It’s okay,” the man says, reaching out a hand and briefly touching his arm. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Alphonse heaves a great breath of air. “I saw men going inside,” he says.

“Right,” the man says. His smile vanishes, but his face doesn’t look angry. “Best not to talk about what you saw, all right?”

Alphonse shakes his head violently. He makes fists with his hands in his pockets to keep them from trembling.

“How old are you?” the man asks.

“Twelve,” Alphonse lies.

“You work in the mills?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“The Ely Falls.”

“Doing what?”

“Bobbins,” Alphonse says.

The man stands up and stretches his back. “The men in there?” he says. “They’re trying to make it so your pop will have more money and you won’t have to earn.”

“I don’t have a pop,” the boy says.

“You have a mother?”

“Yes,” Alphonse says. He nods vigorously in case the man hasn’t seen his lips.

“In the mill?”

“She’s a weaver.”

“What’s her name?”

“Evanthia. Blanchette.”

“Your mother works on my floor,” the man says.

Oh, Jesus,
Alphonse thinks.

The man puts a hand on Alphonse’s shoulder. “I want you to do something for me,” he says. “I want you to run to Tsomides Market and get me some cigarettes. Lucky Strikes.” McDermott hands Alphonse the coins. “I’m going back inside, but I’ll come out in fifteen minutes,” he says. “There’s an extra penny there, so get yourself some candy.”

Alphonse puts the coins in his pocket. “I’ll be back before then,” he says, looking at the man intently, making sure he can see his mouth. “I’m very fast.” Immediately, Alphonse feels the color come into his face. What a stupid thing to say.

The man smiles. He reaches over and musses the hair at the top of Alphonse’s head. “I knew that,” he says.

  McDermott

“Where you been?” Ross asks when McDermott returns to Nadeau’s front room.

“I needed air,” McDermott says.

For reasons of security, the two front windows have been shut, and McDermott can hardly breathe: the heat plus the cigarette smoke have made the room nearly airless. The man named Mironson, who has come up from New York City, is still talking. He’s a sweet-faced man, small boned, with delicate hands and small feet. A thick hank of dark hair keeps falling in his face. Physically, he seems the least likely of men to inspire a crowd.

Twenty loom fixers in a room no bigger than a good-sized automobile. McDermott thinks of animals in a cage. Just the smell of the men is testament to a kind of animal-like restlessness. He has the sense that Boutet and Tsomides and O’Reilly and Ouellette and all the other Francos and Greeks and Irishmen want to flex their muscles, and he wonders if caged anger produces its own smell. Maybe the choice of a small room for the meeting was deliberate on Mironson’s part, a kind of strategic move that will make the men nervous, anxious to break free.

“We have to . . . faster and . . . ,” McDermott hears as François Boutet gestures with his hands. Boutet is short but powerfully built. His arms bulge below the short sleeves of his Sunday shirt. McDermott can catch only a portion of what is being said in the room because the words seem heavier than the air. He can see the anger, though, as sharp and as clear on the men’s faces as if it had been etched.

“Doing the work of . . . or three,” Paul Tsomides adds. Tsomides’s brother owns the market to which McDermott has just sent the boy.

“They’ve changed the wage rates . . . wife . . . piecework, and she gets less for that,” says a drunk named McAllister. He works in the Penderton mill, but McDermott has seen him often in the speak.

Some of the men are standing, while others are sitting on wooden chairs or on the floor up against the wall. All the furniture except for the kitchen chairs has been moved into the hallway. The room itself stinks of wet and onions. McDermott wonders where Nadeau’s wife and children have gone.

“It’s too easy . . . laid off,” says Ouellette. “If I get . . . who’s going to feed my kids? I have eight kids.”

“You’re . . . about a strike,” a man called Schwaner says to Mironson, “but if we strike, they’ll bring in scabs, and we’ll lose our jobs. I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“You can’t afford to . . . current wage,” Mironson says quietly.

McDermott has to strain to hear the man. He watches his mouth carefully.

“You can’t afford . . . no . . . security. You can’t . . . long hours.”

“But you go back to New York,” Schwaner says. “Meanwhile . . . and our kids will be on the streets. Jobs are scarce now. Where am I gonna find . . . lose my job?”

“Jobs
are
scarce,” Mironson says. “The mill owners . . . running scared . . . competition from the southern mills . . . cutting corners. It will only get . . . It’s just a matter of time before
you
“ — Mironson points at a man — and
you,
and
you,
have no jobs at all. But with a union, your jobs will be secure. Your children should be in school, not in the mills,” Mironson says, looking right at McDermott.

I don’t have any children, McDermott almost says.

“And how we gonna do that?” asks a man named Delaney, his snarl coiling around the room.

But Mironson doesn’t seem to fluster easily. “By securing a . . . wage,” Mironson says evenly. “By making sure . . . child labor laws are enforced.”

The men grumble, talking out of the sides of their mouths. Some of them, McDermott knows, have three or four kids earning in the mills. The last thing they want is to have the child labor laws enforced.

“Yes, there are going to be sacrifices,” Mironson says. “In some cases, terrible . . . No conflict is . . . risk. But my question . . . this: Are you willing to . . . health and your . . . and the health and security of your wife and children, in the hands of . . . whose only goal is to make another dollar? If that dollar comes at the cost of . . . clinic, what will you do? If that dollar comes at the cost of more hours a day . . .
what will you do?
”

The sudden shock of Mironson’s raised voice produces a temporary silence in the room. No man wants to appear to be a coward. Mironson is brilliant at this, McDermott thinks.

“So what happens now?” Ouellette asks finally.

“Open the windows, for God’s sake,” someone shouts.

Two windows and a door are immediately flung wide. McDermott edges his way closer to the window to get a breath of air. He thinks the men might agree to form a union just so they can leave the room. He ducks his head down to the open window, and when he does he sees the boy standing across the street at the corner, as if he were waiting for a bus. The boy has a Franco hairline, his stiff brown hair pointing forward all around the face. He badly needs a haircut.

Wisely, the boy does not come to McDermott, but waits for him to walk across the street. Together, they turn the corner, out of sight of the Nadeau apartment.

“You
are
fast,” McDermott says.

“Tsomides wasn’t open,” the boy says, only slightly breathless. He hands the Lucky Strikes and the penny change to McDermott. “I had to go to the candy store on Alfred Street.”

“You went all that way?” McDermott asks. “How come you didn’t want the change?”

The boy shrugs. He has on short pants and a cotton shirt that once had long sleeves. It’s mended just above the pocket. The boy’s shoes have no laces. McDermott thinks about his own younger brothers, Eamon and Michael, who are a handful. They’d have kept all the money, would never have shown up with the cigarettes at all.

“Well,” McDermott says. In the shadow of a tenement, there is at least the illusion of shade. McDermott can almost convince himself that there is a breeze. “What will you do with the rest of the day?”

The boy is silent a moment. “I like to go to the beach,” he says finally.

“The beach over to Fortune’s Rocks?” McDermott asks. The boy nods. He has wide eyes, nearly bug eyes, McDermott thinks. “How do you get there?” he asks.

“I take the trolley. Then I walk.”

“Kind of hot today for that long of a walk,” McDermott says.

The boy shrugs.

“You have money for the trolley?”

“I keep two dimes from my pay packet.”

McDermott lights a cigarette, drops the match on the sidewalk. “You know how to swim?”

The boy shakes his head.

“You ever been fishing?”

“A couple of times,” says the boy. “With my father.”

“I like to fish,” McDermott says.

The boy nods.

“Your father take off?”

The boy shakes his head and scuffs at the sidewalk with his shoe. “He died,” he says.

“That’s too bad,” McDermott says. “When?”

“Last winter.”

“Sorry to hear that,” McDermott says, and after a moment adds, “I could take you fishing sometime if you want.”

The boy looks surprised, as if McDermott has said something that doesn’t quite make sense. McDermott can feel through his feet the creak and rumble of large wheels over cobblestones. The ice man, McDermott guesses. Working on a Sunday. He’ll be doing a good business in this heat.

“Tell you what,” McDermott says to Alphonse. “I want an ice cream, and I want you to go get it for me, but I don’t want it unless you get one for yourself.”

The boy looks puzzled at first, as if there might be a trick. “All right,” he says after a moment.

McDermott feels in his pocket for the coins. “If I decide to go fishing, I know where to find you,” he says.

Alphonse nods. He turns and begins to run. McDermott has never seen anyone sprint that fast. Too bad the kid isn’t in school, he thinks. He’d be a natural for any track team.

But the boy isn’t in school. He works in a mill. McDermott lights another cigarette and waits for the boy to return.