The Island Walkers (3 page)

“Tell me about it,” Doyle said. Alf shook his head in disbelief. He didn’t want to think about the strike — it was the habit of years — let alone tell this stranger about it. He looked away, to the edge of the river, where the corpse of a big carp had been picked over by gulls. All that moved now was flies.

“I take it you went out,” Doyle said quietly.

Alf glanced at the other man: how had he found that out? He supposed he’d been talking to people in town. He supposed that he, Alf, still had a reputation as a troublemaker, even though he’d left the strike weeks before it ended. Even though it had ended sixteen years before. They didn’t forget in a place the size of Attawan. They didn’t change their minds about you, either, he thought with bitterness, at least not very easily. That was how it was in a town where everyone knew everyone else. Or thought they did.

“The more fool I,” Alf said.

Doyle chortled and went on watching him as he smoked. He seemed comfortable with the silence, as Alf did not. Alf was torn between going into the matter and simply walking away. But he felt he had to warn Doyle off. It was why he had brought him to the river.

“Look,” he said, fixing on the other man. “No one — I mean no one of any account — is going to be interested in your project. You might get a few of the malcontents. There’s always some of those. But the great majority — you start pushing them and they’ll run you out on a rail.”

Doyle’s big chest and shoulders heaved, as if he relished the idea.

“Actually, Alf, there’s more than a few.” The organizer spoke quietly, confidentially, sorry to have to contradict him. “Wrote me quite a letter,” he said and, leaning forward, tapped his nicotine-stained fingers on his chest pocket, where apparently the letter lay, nested with his cigarettes.

“Don’t even start,” Alf said, shaking his head. “You won’t believe the trouble you’ll cause.” He stopped. There was so much more he might say, so much more he wanted to say, pressing its inchoate dark weight on his mind. He stared off towards the dead carp, and the inheritance of 1949 was there, as real and palpable as its rotting carcass, under its boiling cloud of flies. But he did not know how to put it into words.

“I’ve got to get back to my roof,” he said.

Suddenly Doyle snapped away his butt. His eyes had narrowed on Alf, through smoke, and there was a sudden sense of attack.

“And Intertex,” he said sharply, “how do you feel about
them
?”

The first time Alf had heard the name, he hadn’t quite taken it in. It seemed more properly the name of a machine, or a process, than a company. It was Johnny Carruthers, Bannerman’s assistant general manager, who’d told him one evening in May — this was in the parking lot of the beer store — that Intertex had “picked up”
Bannerman’s. Not only did the word “Intertex” put him off balance, but there was Johnny’s “picked up.” What had happened? “They’ve bought us,” Johnny explained in an overly loud voice, as if speaking to a child. “International Textile — big firm out of Montreal. Picked us up last week.” Alf had an image of the new company plucking Bannerman’s from the ground, like the big hand in the insurance ad. “Picked us up for a song,” Johnny said, shutting his trunk. There was a cockiness in his manner, implying that he dealt in this kind of high-stakes activity every day: it was nothing a real businessman couldn’t handle. “They’re into industrial wovens: car-seat coverings, commercial drapes, that sort of thing. But recently they’ve been picking up knitting mills, mostly in Quebec.”

Alf had experienced a faint vertigo, as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet, for hadn’t he been “picked up” as well? Later, he sat at the picnic table in his backyard, under falling apple blossoms, and read about the sale in the
Attawan Star
. Under the headline “
BANNERMAN’S SOLD
” was a head-and-shoulders shot of a bald, handsome, heavy-jawed man in a suit, his shoulders slightly tilted, as though he were leaning out, a bit mischievously, from behind a tree. The caption identified him as R.J. Prince, an Intertex vice-president. The accompanying article revealed that Intertex owned plants in Canada, the United States, Britain, Italy, and France, and quoted Prince as saying how proud Intertex was to acquire such a venerable company as Bannerman’s — “a real slice of our national history.” He looked forward, he said, “to working with all the good people who made Bannerman’s such a success in the past.” Alf lowered the paper to the picnic table. A petal, like a tiny silk hat, fell across Prince’s head. Alf brushed it off and studied the man’s face. Everything about it, like everything he had said, seemed polished with an eye to public consumption. On the whole, Alf approved.

The next day on the fire escape outside the sixth-floor knitting room, where the knitters and fixers took their breaks, all talk was of the sale. Alf sat sipping from his plastic Thermos cup and listened to the eruption of speculations, rumour, fear, along the long iron
balcony. Some of the workers remained silent, like himself, but most of the others agreed the sale was a bad thing. It might mean layoffs, Pat Kenner said. He’d heard from his brother-in-law in Quebec that Intertex were “real sons of bitches. They’ll take an axe to the place.”

Through the deep millyard below, a pigeon glided on taut wings, fleeing from sunlight to shade.

Alf said, “Come on. You’d think the mills had never been sold before.”

He spoke so infrequently that all turned to look at him.

“When John Bannerman was an old man, back in the Twenties, they were sold then,” he said. “Everybody was worried then too, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. The next twenty or thirty years were the best we ever had.”

There was silence after that — he’d given them something to think about — and a minute later as they trooped back in to work, someone clapped him on the back. But he was uncomfortable with congratulations. He had his own worries about Intertex. Two weeks before the announcement of the sale, a notice had appeared on the knitting-room bulletin board, asking for applicants for the position of foreman. He’d applied, feeling the whole time it was an indignity. He’d worked in the knitting mill for eighteen years, worked his way up from knitter to head fixer, and had come in recent years, as everyone said, to pretty much run the place. Increasingly it was he, and not the foreman, Matt Honnegger (who was due to retire that winter), who made out the knitting schedules, hunted down lost orders, and expedited rush ones. He was more than a foreman-in-waiting, he felt. In some sense he
was
the foreman, and any suggestion that he had to take a step back and ask for what was his infuriated him.

The notice had asked the applicants to submit ideas on how operations in Number Six knitting might be improved. Alf had delayed for days, but finally filled several foolscap sheets with drafts of possible answers. In the end, he’d presented Joe with two paragraphs of tight script and stood by, as thin-skinned as any schoolboy, while Joe read it over. When Joe had suggested changes, Alf barely managed to keep
civil. It was hard to be reminded that he, Alf, had only Grade Eleven, and that his son would soon be in his final year of high school, on his way to the distant planet of university. But he accepted most of Joe’s suggestions (and worried later he should have accepted the rest), and Joe typed up his proposal. The next day, handing the letter to May Watson, the receptionist at General Office, Alf felt a piece of his life pass out of his hands, as though he were releasing into the sea a bottle with a note for help inside. It seemed impossible that so tenuous and haphazard a signal could find its way to the right place.

Spring became summer, the flood-dykes turned pink and blue with dames rocket, and there was no response. On the fire escape, the talk turned to softball and the summer holidays. Bannerman’s had changed hands, but the mills, it seemed, were entirely unaffected. The steam whistle above the boiler plant continued to howl up the dawns, calling the workers from sleep. The tall machines continued to pour out their rivers of soft, fragrant cloth. It’s like the phoney war, Alf thought, remembering the fall of ’39. Canada had declared war on Germany, but when he’d looked up at the sky, suddenly thrilled and frightened by the thought, We’re at war, the huge, white clouds had moved on with an unruffled stateliness, declaring all earthly business an illusion.

On the bulletin board over the washing-up sink, the notice faded under its blue-headed tacks. Every morning as Alf climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, he looked for it in trepidation. Its continuing existence seemed a judgment, an unfavourable one that said, “We’ve considered your application and found it wanting. We continue to search.”

“Everything’s up in the air with this Intertex business,” Matt Honnegger told him one day, his fleshy face expressionless. “It’ll be a while before they get around to the likes of you and me.” Matt’s resignation put Alf off even more. He wanted to be used. He imagined his letter waiting under a mountain of hundreds of others, while men he did not know, in offices he would never see, ignored his fate. And what did it matter, he thought bitterly. Wasn’t he a fool to
depend on something like this, over which he had no control, depend on it to the point of sleeplessness?

Then in mid-July an earnest young man in a yellow hard hat appeared in front of Alf carrying a clipboard and demanding answers in a shouting voice to such questions as “When you go to the yarn room, how many bobbins do you bring back, on average?” Alf looked into the evasive eyes swimming behind thick glasses. “I’m a fixer,” he said. “I don’t go into the yarn room.” This was not, strictly speaking, true, but he couldn’t resist a poke at the automaton. He was rewarded with a brief flutter of panic — something human — but the young man quickly found another question on his board. “How many times a day, on average, do you go to the washroom?”

The place was crawling with them — young men whose excruciatingly detailed questions and bright helmets spawned a bitter hilarity among the workers. Hard hats in a knitting mill! What were they afraid of, falling threads? The hard hats measured, they watched, they timed, they noted down, they disappeared, they came back for more measurements, they disappeared for good. A month later the layoffs began. Twenty from the night shift, an additional sixteen from day. Three from Alf’s floor alone, including his young friend Rick Stevenson, who had two kids to support and a wife going crazy with migraines. Those who were left were working harder: Alf often wasn’t home till eight o’clock. The political discussions on the fire escape resumed. Time to look at a union again, a few workers said, breaching a taboo. But most, perhaps remembering 1949, argued No: at this stage a union would just act as a red flag, it would bring on more firings. Better to hunker down, ride out the bad times, and (though this was never openly expressed) hope it was your neighbour who got hit, not you.

Alf had kept silent. The firings troubled him a great deal. He lent money to Rick Stevenson and spoke his concerns to Matt Honnegger, hoping that Matt would pass them up the line, up the chain of command that led, through ever more comfortable offices, to the holy-of-holies where someone with half a heart might be
listening. At the same time, he tried to grasp the rationale behind the turmoil — tried, as a foreman-in-waiting, to see things from management’s point of view. He felt that, as foreman, he would bring a special understanding to the situation — that he could bridge, somehow, the gap between what the workers needed and what the company had to do. How he would manage this remained unclear to him, but he felt it was more urgent than ever that his letter be attended to. He felt the new men, whoever they were, needed him.

“Intertex is doing what they have to,” Alf said, stubbornly defensive. He had lost his taste for argument. The sun seemed to be tightening an iron hoop around his head.

“You
like
what they’re doing here?” Doyle said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.

“Of course I don’t like all of it — I know these people. But the place was slipping. Something had to be done.”

“Still making a profit, though.” The organizer had pounced gleefully on “profit,” as if it were evidence that refuted all arguments. His black eyes shone.

Alf turned to look back towards the stark slope of his roof, floating tentlike above the dyke. His son was there, a slim, tanned figure standing on the peak. The boy seemed impossibly distant, like youth itself. A panel of shingles hung from his hand like a broken wing.

3

THE FAMILY SAT FOR LUNCH
at the picnic table, in the flickering mesh of light dropped by the dwarf McIntosh that leaned from the base of the dyke. Twenty feet away, in full sun, Red, their malamute, lay
on his side in the dirt, panting heavily, his lolling tongue like a piece of raw meat speckled with dirt. Margaret had asked Jamie to say grace. The eight-year-old was peeking over his clasped hands as he listed the things on the table. His thick, sun-bleached hair stood up here and there in tufts. “Thank you for our milk, and our water, and our pickles —