The Island Walkers (45 page)

“You dumb bugger,” he whispered. Tears had come to his eyes, in a rage against his friend. “You should have fought it. You should have told
me
. Hell, I should have told
you
.” Yes, if only he’d confessed to Pete, begged his forgiveness. But now the possibility of confession and forgiveness — with Pete, with Margaret, with anyone — seemed as remote as the dim grey line of bush crayoning the far edge of the field beyond the cemetery. He was in a place where no one else was, or seemed capable of approaching, a place bound in iron-clad distances. Overhead, the tree had filled with the cheerful rant of small birds.

Each morning, hearing the cry of Bannerman’s whistle, it seemed that only moments had passed since it had released him from work the previous day. He trudged numbly up the stairs of the mill with the trudging incommunicado crowd, arriving in the room of tall machines that seemed to have been waiting for him all his life. He no longer had even a minimal pleasure in his work. He’d told Prince what he could do with the foreman’s job; his ambition had become an offering (an inadequate one, he felt) laid on the altar of Pete’s death. And yet, several times, he was appalled to discover himself staring at the fading notice on the knitting room bulletin board, as though some small, craven part of him hoped to be made foreman yet. Matt Honnegger was staying on, temporarily. Alf was still doing most of his work for him. It seemed that the foreman’s job — its burdens if not its title — had come to him by default.

He did his work swiftly and automatically, with a curious sense that he was alone. Sometimes, though, he was wakened by a chance event that broke through his isolation. He might drop a wrench and, bending to retrieve it, be struck by the oddity of its existence: as if he had never seen a wrench before, or felt its cool heft in his hand, or looked at its square, silently howling jaws. And another time, one damp, cloudy evening, he had gone out for a walk and was just
passing along the rail platform by the station, on his way to the old concrete steps that led to the Shade, when it seemed that someone had spoken to him.
Alf
, a voice said, a voice both familiar and not. Not seeing anyone, he stopped and looked around. Above him a Manitoba maple made a rushing sound as its dry seed pods — hundreds and thousands of pale-brown tags hanging in clusters in the bare tree — stirred in a faint breeze. It was odd, but he felt as if the
tree
had spoken, as if it had said, Look, and looking up through its branches he glimpsed the moon in a blue tunnel of cloud: a little, gibbous moon like a battered stone sailing along up there, and a shiver of excitement — of life — ran through him, though it was gone in a moment.

That night, he dreamed he stood before a knitting machine, taller than any he had ever seen. It seemed somehow human to him — human and fatherlike and commanding in its sense of quiet power — and although it was not knitting anything (the threads were still, the whole atmosphere was one of lonely stillness), it seemed about to speak. However, it could not make a sound, and there was something both painful and suspenseful in this failure. On the machine’s great head, where it wore a rack of white bobbins like a vast crown, each bobbin was stained with a trickle of dark blood.

One day, soon after the midmorning break, all the knitters and fixers were told to shut down their machines and come to a meeting in front of Matt Honnegger’s office. The last to arrive, Alf peered over a mass of heads and shoulders at three men who stood waiting with their backs to the washing-up sink. Matt was part of this triumvirate, but the foreman had remained a little aloof, cradling his empty pipe against his plaid shirt while casting a bland smile at the floor, as if distancing himself from the proceedings. Beside him stood Wilf Thomas, the manager of the sweater mill: a solid-looking fellow whose Roman nose with its thick bridge lent him the gladiatorial air of an old football guard or hockey defenceman. Wilf was talking in
low tones, his head down, to a man Alf had never seen before, a young man of thirty or so, with a taut, bony face and a brush cut so short it seemed his head had been shaved. He wore jeans, and a tight black T-shirt, and stood with his well-muscled arms folded, revealing on his left biceps a fading, bluish tattoo in which the hooked head of a hawk or eagle was just visible. He was chewing gum — so rapidly that it looked as if the lower half of his face were afflicted by a nervous disorder — and darting the gaze of his large eyes between the floor and the knees of the men and women who stood a few feet away, watching.

“All right,” Wilf Thomas said at last in his gruff voice, turning to the crowd. Wilf gave off a sense of blunt integrity that inspired trust. Many of the workers had known him all their lives, as he had grown up on the Flats, the son of a spinner. “I won’t take too much of your time, folks. But as you know, we’ve been looking for a new foreman for this floor, and though we’ve had lots of good applications, we felt we needed a specialist.”

Alf’s heart pounded: in a flash he understood that he wasn’t going to be made foreman. He had tried to convince himself he no longer wanted the job. But all the same, the tenacious weed of his hope — now crushed — filled his chest with the hot acid of disappointment.

He heard Wilf out in a kind of dream, the manager’s words coming with a sense that was also non-sense, as if he were speaking of some other, distant place that Alf new little of, not the mill where they now stood, surrounded by the great crowd of motionless machines. “The reason we need a specialist,” Wilf went on, “is that Intertex is going to be putting a number of new machines in here that none of us know how to run, so we thought we should have someone who does. And I’m happy to say that in Kit Ford here, we’ve got one of the best. Kit comes to us from one of the most advanced mills in North America, and I know we’re going to appreciate his expertise. He’s already been telling me things I don’t know —” Here Wilf grinned, showing a gold tooth, but the crowd in front of him did not respond. “Kit’s staying in a motel in Johnsonville, but he’s going
to be moving into town, and I know you’ll make him welcome. Oh yes, and I should mention that Kit was once in the Marines, so I know he’ll waste no time getting us in fighting trim. Kit —”

Kit Ford said, “Yeah,” with a slight drawl. He licked his lips and looked at them with a bright, earnest gaze and thin smile. He spoke in rapid bursts, almost too fast to be understood, in an accent that seemed southern — from the Carolinas, maybe, or Georgia — and in his eyes was a straining, plaintive quality, which gave the impression he was laying too much stress on his own sincerity. “Yeah, been knittin’ most of my life,” he told them. “Fact I see some machines in here haven’t seen since I was a kid. The old Jacquards there — should be fun. Sure you’ve got a lot to show me. Look forward to that. Good to be in Attawan.” (Somehow he made the name of the town foreign, as if they’d never heard it before.) “Used to come up to these parts as a kid, to fish, in Quebec there. Good to be back. Look forward to knowin’ ya and workin’ with ya.”

When the meeting was over, Wilf Thomas called to Alf, who turned back through the dissolving crowd. As he passed Dick Kenshole, the knitter leaned in close. “That job was yours,” Dick seethed in a demanding undertone: what was Alf going to do about it? Without responding, Alf went on to the place where the three men waited for him. He did not look at Kit Ford until Wilf introduced him, and then he calmly took his hard, damp hand and met the reaching, anxious sincerity of his gaze. In those wide-staring eyes he caught an insistent claim of innocence. I didn’t do it, Kit Ford’s eyes said. And though there was no indication of what “it” was, Alf felt a tremor of misgiving.

“Alf’s our best man here,” Wilf was telling Kit. “Really knows the place like the back of his hand.” He turned to Alf, speaking in a slightly overloud voice that betrayed a certain nervousness. “Matt was going to take Kit on a tour, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going along with them.”

Alf glared at Wilf — he couldn’t help it — and was rewarded by a slight, evasive ducking of the manager’s head. He felt the least Bannerman’s might have done was warn him this was coming: hadn’t
he earned
that
much in his years of virtually running the place? Behind Wilf, Matt was smiling nervously into his pipe.

Alf, Matt, and Kit Ford went down the aisles. Alf was in a state of turmoil. A sense of betrayal kept rising, bitter in his mouth. It made it hard to speak calmly about the machines and the routines of the knitting room.

And Kit Ford didn’t help. No matter what Alf told him, he chewed his gum and nodded and said, Yep, yep, yep so rapidly and continuously that he gave the impression that he already knew
everything
Alf could possibly tell him: it was all old hat. Put off balance, Alf forgot names he normally knew, and several times had to be helped out by Matt while Ford looked at them both in that sincere, slightly pained way that suggested none of this incompetence was a surprise in the least.

Finally, to give himself a break, Alf asked Ford about the new machines Intertex was buying.

“A lot faster than these old junkers,” Kitt said, somehow managing to keep chewing and talking at once. Alf did not like to hear the machines of Number Six called “old junkers.” He had worked on all of them and kept them going for years beyond their expected lifespan, often by improvising spare parts: he had a certain pride in them.

He listened as Ford described the new knitting machines. They looked a bit like a jet engine, Ford said, a curious description Alf could not quite picture. They were computerized. They would take fewer workers to run. “Fewer hands, fewer mistakes,” Ford said with his reflexive grin.

“My, my,” Matt Honnegger commented mildly, shaking his head.

Kit looked at Matt, and seemed startled to find his predecessor there, smiling weakly over his empty pipe.

“Nothin’ ’gainst the old ways,” he said. “Good in their time. But you don’t keep up with the competition, you die.” He looked meaningfully at Alf and Matt as he said, “you die,” and there was something overdone and faintly comical about this — after all they were talking about knitting, not cancer or war. And yet at the same
time Alf caught a glimpse of a no-holds-barred tenacity and, behind this, a positive delight in the extreme vision he had just expressed. Kit Ford was telling them, in his melodramatic way, that in the game of survival they were all playing, he knew the real conditions, and was willing to abide by them, as a man should.

Over the following days, Kit Ford moved up and down the aisles so quickly — his rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the hardwood — that the workers in Number Six knitting soon dubbed him “the Roadrunner.” Despite his claim that he was looking forward to knowing them, he went on confusing “Alf” with “Art” and “Mary” with “Eileen,” and he never stopped for even a few seconds to shoot the breeze, as Matt had done to a fault, or joined them on the fire escape for their breaks. Worst of all, he spread a spirit of resentment by letting them know somehow that they were not working hard enough. It wasn’t that he accused them of sloth in so many words, it was the atmosphere of haste and disapproval that emanated from him: the gaze of those wounded eyes that seemed to be suffering their poor performance in outraged silence.

On the fire escape, they made jokes about him. “I don’t think he ever goes to the bathroom,” Dick Kenshole said one day; and quick-as-a-whip Boomer Tomlinson answered in his droll bass, “I guess that’s why he’s so full of shit.”

They laughed ruefully, weighed by a sense that their jokes were ultimately futile, and that an old world, more friendly to them, was passing away. They did not know what was coming, but with the glum fatalism of those who must await change passively, many of them suspected they were not going to like the new order. The machines Wilf Thomas had said Intertex was bringing in worried them because they were sure some workers would probably be made redundant. In their minds, Kit Ford and these new machines were already inextricably bound — the exhausting haste he had brought to the mill seemed just a foretaste of an even faster regime to come. In
some way, they were
already
living with the new machines, which even before they arrived promised a world in which workers were going to have to become creatures of another kind, creatures like Kit Ford, as fast and efficient as the machines they served.

Alf, too, disliked Ford and his ways, but tried to suppress his bitterness. After all, it wasn’t Ford’s fault he’d been overlooked for the job. He did his best to sympathize with the foreman, telling himself that the new man, for all his experience, was nervous in the job, and deserved a chance to settle in. When the complaints on the fire escape escalated, he decided to offer Ford some advice. One evening after the mill had emptied, he dropped by Kit’s office. The young man was sitting behind Matt’s desk (Alf still thought of it that way), which he kept completely clear save for an order spike holding a mess of impaled papers, a clipboard, and a single orange pencil, sharpened to a clean point. There was something forlorn about all this. Alf was suddenly aware that Kit Ford was young, younger in some ways than his actual age. Sitting there with his large fingers hooked over the edge of his desk, motionless but for that perpetually working jaw, he seemed like a student awaiting some as yet undisclosed after-school punishment.

Alf started off gently. The workers were feeling a bit edgy, he explained, sitting forward in his chair and gesturing with open hands. They sensed there were big changes coming and were nervous. It might help if he, Kit, made an effort to warm up to them a bit. If he talked to them casually from time to time, even if he only talked about the weather.

Kit Ford looked back at him without comment, and it occurred to Alf that for Kit Ford chatting idly about the weather might be impossible. There was something overwound in the fellow, as if he had never been taught — never had the freedom — to relax.

“So they sent you to tell me this —”

“No, no,” Alf said, smiling amicably, his face heating. “It’s my own idea. I just think if you made a few gestures, you’d have a happier gang out there.”