“My wife’s called du cops,” Mr. Daly said. But his voice was uncertain as he added, moving toward the car but looking over his shoulder, “Yu’ll git a ride.”
Gertie pinched pleats in her apron and stared over the heads of the running children. The car stopped, a window was rolled down, and one of two burly men in uniform questioned the children. His voice was too low to carry through the tumult, but at once she saw heads nodding, and fingers pointing, seemed like in her direction. “If it’s me they’re a hunten, tell em I’m right here,” she said in a low trembling voice.
But there was nobody left around her stoop to hear, except Cassie’s friend, who comforted: “Them cops ain’t fu you, lady. Cops don’t gitcha fu little ole quarrels.” He came onto the stoop and stood on tiptoe beside Gertie and tried to see the scout car, entirely surrounded by children. Mable was heavy, and he sank back on his heels when the car, instead of turning into the little alley, went on up the big one. “See, they wasn’t fu you.” But he was almost at once worried again, and stood on tiptoe, and tried again to see the disappearing car, a troubled wrinkle in his forehead as he said, “Who they after, I wonder.” He turned to Gertie. “Yu sure they wasn’t no priest an no Red Cross in that car? Pop, we figger from his letters, is right inu middle a them Jap islands.”
“They wasn’t no priest an no Red Cross. Your pop’ll be all right,” Gertie said, and though she was not much given to caresses she smoothed his hair, then straightened Mable’s hood that had slid over one eye. “Yer pop, he’ll be a comen home one a these days an—”
Cassie’s friend never heard her. A swarm of children, Enoch among them, was running past toward the alley by the railroad fence. The boy cried: “Whatsa matter? What is ut? Where yu going?”
No one answered his frantic questions until Mike Turbovitch, lagging so far behind he’d lost hope of getting a grandstand spot on a coalshed roof where he might see an arrest or even a fight with a cop, stopped. “Them cops is crazy. It ain’t u reg’lar patrol an dey don’t know du project. Lookit, they’ve went all u way around, stid a going up u alley by du tracks to git tu I54II Merry Hill.”
“That’s me,” Cassie’s friend cried, springing down the steps. He glanced once over his shoulder at Gertie. “Yu sure dey wasn’t no priest an no—” Panic choked him and he ran, Mable bouncing on his hip.
Gertie, still thinking of Reuben, had a moment’s wish that she had held Mable while the boy ran to see what the cops wanted at his number. Nothing much, she guessed; police, she’d learned, came for all kinds of reasons, from barking dogs to drunken men. She went into the Meanwell kitchen, and comfort for Reuben took up all her mind, until Whit, opening another bottle of beer said: “I don’t reckon she’s in any kind a trouble, that kid’s mom. Sophronie knowed her. They was ona same ’sembly fer awhile.
“She’d drink some,” he continued, as Gertie, thinking only of Reuben, went into the hall. “That is, accorden to Sophronie. I recollect onct she didn’t hear frum her man fer a long time an her youngens all come down with th measles an she hadda quit work an got down in th mouth an drinken some when she got kinda hard run tryen to git along on them army wages. Soon’s she could, she got her a job where she could git considerable overtime. She might a done somethen foolish er let herself git hurt on a little drink, er two. They go to some people’s heads, specially when they’re kind a tired frum overtime an—”
Whit’s voice died as Gertie opened the bathroom door. Reuben was there, his face washed, but he continued to stand in the little place like a wounded wild thing afraid to leave its den. “I didn’t do nothen,” he said, glaring at her, more defiant and angry now than he had been with Mr. Daly. “All a them a laughen, an you a standen a taken his—” He choked, and she thought with terror that he was going to cry.
She tried to put her hand on his shoulder, but he brushed past her to the door. “He’s jist showen off, son—and, well, I thought I smelled whisky on his breath.” He was walking away as she talked to him, a thing not even Enoch had ever done. She followed, wanting to heal the hurt, determined that he should understand. “Everwhere you’ll find people with shoddy ways, son.” He only jerked open the kitchen door. She was afraid again for him, and spoke quickly. “You’ll have to quit carryen a knife, son. Detroit’s differ’nt.”
He whirled and looked at her, his face white with fury. “I’ve allus carried a knife. I ain’t a quitten now. I ain’t a maken myself over fer Detroit. I ain’t a standen a taken nobody’s lies—like you done.”
The door banged and he was gone into the alley. He wouldn’t go hunt Mr. Daly now, she thought, but still she hurried to the door, and was relieved to see him only a few feet away with Whit and another man she had never seen. She wanted to speak to Reuben again, or better yet hear him speak so that she might know he was not so hurt and angry as she had thought. She opened the outer door, and now, after the tumult of the children, there seemed a heavy stillness in the alley, as if it waited to hear again the blue-eyed smiling man call her names. Whit looked up, and waved his bottle toward her. “Recollect that little boy with th little kid said somethen to you ’bout wanten a priest? His Mom, she got squashed to death in her press.”
Gertie gave a slow headshake of wonderment. That other woman hadn’t done anything either except try to raise her children the best she could. She thought of bubble gum and shoestrings; maybe the woman had figured it all out in her head. She was staring straight in front of her, looking at the woman she had never seen, a woman pretty like her children, when she heard the sound of vomiting from the boys’ room. Gertie, for the first time in hours, seemed like, remembered what she was supposed to be doing. But as she took the few steps to their room, she realized she couldn’t have been away more than a few minutes.
Claude Jean was clearing blood from his throat when she got there, but he was able to look at her. There was disgust as well as pain in his eyes as he said: “Jeez, couldn’cha a socked him onct, jist onct right in u puss? Couldn’cha, jist onct?” and he fell back, sighing, not heeding the blood on his chin.
Claude Jean was the only one who mentioned Mr. Daly. The hush lingered in the alleys. Even the children were still, gathered in little huddles, not even shrill when Mrs. Daly came, loaded with groceries, and they ran to tell her the news of the woman squashed to death. Whit, in for another bottle of beer, wished he could remember her name. Nobody did. Some thought it was Vermiglio, but they weren’t certain.
Later, when suppers were over and the children in from the alleys, Clovis came to see, he said, about the Meanwell boys. But mostly, she thought, he wanted to visit with Whit. She wanted to ask him about Reuben, but did not. If Clovis didn’t already know about the knife business, there was no need to tell him, at least not now. When not busy with the boys, she sat in the living room and worked on Victor’s Christ while the men talked in the kitchen. They were joined soon by Andy Miller, once a service-station man in an Alabama town, but now a pitman in the steel mill. He lived with his wife and three small children in the last unit in Gertie’s row. Not long after, there came a tool-and-die man from a place where tanks were made. He was one of Whit’s old cronies, she learned soon, for he and Whit had worked together for old man Flint in what they called, smiling as they said it, “the big house.”
He studied her hands a moment over the wood, and asked her what it was she made. “A Christ,” she said.
He considered, his head tipped down. “You could make a pretty good Christ with a jig saw,” he said in a moment, than turned away, for Whit was telling of Mr. Daly’s anger, laughing a little, like it was a movie he had seen.
Finished, he sighed a little, slumping in his chair. He was silent a moment before he said: “It wasn’t half what he said to Sophronie, onct.”
“Oh, him,” the tool-and-die man said, and the little trouble in the alley seemed forgotten. Over their beer the men talked of the woman dead in her press. A needless death, Whit said: her press had been the kind with a foot treadle, and it was t
oo easy for a body to forget, being tired or sleepy, and tramp the treadle when your hands or your head was over the stock in the press.
They fell then into long musing tales of the things they had seen and heard of in factories when men got mangled or killed. Gertie had never known there were so many ways for a workingman to die: burned, crushed, skinned alive, smothered, gassed, electrocuted, chopped to bits, blown to pieces. She heard tales of the ways of loose bolts or old belts with human arms, legs, and heads. She listened to stories of machines on a speed-up that, unable to bear the speed as did the men, flew with no warning into flying pieces of steel that blinded and crippled when they didn’t kill. A fast-turning wheel or milling machine wasn’t like a man; it wouldn’t just fall down on the floor peaceable-like when it passed out the way a man would. Even worse, she thought, were Miller’s stories of white-hot steel, but worse than anything were the foreman’s fists and his iron-toed shoes in a man’s behind.
Terrified, yet fascinated, she stood whittling in the passway the better to hear until Clovis noticed her and said, half jokingly, half chidingly, “You’ll scare my woman so she’ll want to take me back home.”
Whit turned to her with a comforting smile. “Th foremen ain’t like that no more, leastways not right now. Th companies makes plenty a money now, with th war an cost plus. An we got th union.”
The tool-and-die man leaned back in his kitchen chair, tipping it far backward, for he, like the others, was a long man. “Yeah, but wait’ll th war’s over. They’ll bust th unions—when times gits bad an a lotta th men’s got kids, not starving, but, well, you know, kinda hungry.”
“Oh, yeah,” Whit said, “they’ll hafta bust up a lotta men first.”
The tool-and-die man shook his head, his eyes reflective, remembering. “But they’re getten smart, them big companies. They’ve learned you can’t bust a union by busten heads—not even if th busten kills a few men. Them companies has made so damn’ much money outa th war they can do anything. I figger now they’ll do it th smooth way, politics, no-strike laws, stir up things that’ll bring trouble between th factions in th unions—kinda make the unions bust theirselves.”
“Oh, yeah?” Whit said, but the men were silent, staring less at cigarette smoke and the head on their beer than at the future.
Gertie wished Clovis would speak. He hated the unions as much as she. He’d grumbled more times than one about the dues he had to pay to a union he had never wanted to join. A man oughtn’t to have to join anything except of his own free will. Free will, free will: only your own place on your own land brought free will.
The men left for work, but Gertie, after looking again at the boys, for Claude Jean worried her, he was so still, went back to her work on Victor’s Christ. The figure was almost finished now except for the face and the nail holes. It was a drooping, ribby-chested Christ that made her think, faceless as he was, of somebody she had once seen, but could not name. He was no kin at all of the Christ she had seen in her mother’s field. She sat a time and tried to see a face for him, but could see only Reuben’s face, sick with hurt and anger, and in and out through Christ and Reuben there was the bubble gum boy’s face and the worry of Claude Jean, sharper now that she was alone.
She went again and stood a long time by him, listening to his too-gentle-seeming breathing, and squeezing his hands that seemed cold. She snapped on the light. Still he did not waken, and it seemed to her his ears and lips looked blue, and there was no color in his cheeks. She kept pushing back Sophronie’s story of the child who had died, swallowing his blood. But all at once she couldn’t any more. Sophronie wouldn’t be home for another hour, and by then Claude Jean could have bled to death like the other.
She grabbed the scrap of paper with the doctor’s name and number, and hurried out into the alley. She’d never used a telephone and didn’t know where the closest pay station was. She’d first have to find a neighbor to help her. She was looking frantically about for a lighted kitchen door, and wondering where first she should knock, when she heard a car come into the parking lot. It must be Victor, she thought, for with a car, and his work close, he got home much sooner than Sophronie.
She met him in the alley, and told him of her fears. He only shook his head. “Yu couldn’t git no doctor this time anight,” he said, and without taking the slip of paper turned back to his car.
She was listening to Claude Jean’s heart when Victor came creaking through the door. “Lookut um,” he said. “If he’s bleeding bad, we gotta call u cops.”
He handed her a flashlight, she got a spoon, and the two of them pried open Claude Jean’s sleepy mouth. She could see no running blood, and Victor, wrinkling his nose at the smell of ether, also looked, but could see nothing.
They did, however, waken Claude Jean, who sat up and at once wanted ice, ice cream, and the answers to a great many questions, such as the time and how many kettles of steel had Victor unplugged on his shift.
Victor laughed and slapped Gertie on the shoulder as he went away. “Quitcha worrying. Du kid’s okay.”
Gertie had the nail holes finished when Sophronie came, breathless from running, but asking before she could get through the door, “Is th kids okay?”
TWENTY-ONE
HU, GYP. HU, GYP, come on now.” Gertie, holding a plate of breakfast scraps in one hand, unhooked the storm door with the other as she called the dog. “Hu, Gyp, hu—” Wind screaming down the alley scattered her words and whirled the scraps away. An instant later it jerked the storm door from her, flung it hard against the wall, and sent powder-like snow into the kitchen. She caught the storm door, hooked it, then looked quickly and guiltily behind her. She was relieved when she saw no one had noticed her wool-gathering ways. Gyp was back home in Kentucky.
Clovis, finished with breakfast, was trying to sleep. Amos was in the bathroom, and Enoch, kept out of the alley by the weather, listened to the radio. In spite of the bitter wind whipping through the broken pane, Gertie continued to stand with the inner door open, and stare into the white desert of the alley. She looked down at the gray rubbery white, the flat yolk of the refused egg, the only scrap of food the wind had left. Maybe an alley cat, or a stray dog, or even a sparrow would come, just one sparrow to peck at the egg. That would be something alive that needed food in the hard cold, anything so as not to waste the egg in the garbage can.
However, nothing came but loose paper flying along with the whirling snow. She craned her head toward the Meanwell door. But, like the other doors, it might have been the opening to a tomb for all the life it showed. The steps, like her own, were heaped with snow in spots, clean swept in others, for no sooner did a body freeze herself to death to sweep off the thin, forever moving stuff, light as feathers, than it blew on again.
It seemed months since she had seen the Meanwells or spoken with anyone save her own. It just seemed that way, for the day that Wheateye’s tonsils had been taken out was hardly three weeks ago, and Gertie had stayed with her as with the boys.
A louder shriek of the wind in the telephone wires caused her to close the inner door, but she continued to stand a moment, the saucer of scraps still in her hand. Maybe Max would come, asking for a dream, or Mrs. Anderson, hurrying, a thief’s look in her eyes, the bundle of Homer’s dirty shirts small under her coat so that Georgie could not see and tell his father. She glanced at the clock. It was too early for the mailman, but there would surely be a letter. She had sent Christmas cards, and written to Aunt Kate and to her mother. Clytie, proud of the family’s big Christmas, had written both her grandmothers; but still no letter for weeks, only cards from Mrs. Hull and Aunt Kate.
She turned from the door at last and finished her kitchen work. Then, frowning a little, her lips folded tightly together with distaste, she took from a kitchen shelf a half finished doll, a kind of jumping-jack, smooth-faced thing, one of the two that Homer had ordered. Save for the face, Victor’s Christ was finished, and since Victor wanted it only in time for Easter, she had laid it aside, h
oping a face would grow in her mind while she filled Homer’s order.
She sat now by the door and whittled, and watched for the coming of the mailman. Several times she glanced up hopefully, the beginnings of a smile warming her eyes, when she thought there was a shadow by her door as of someone looking in, or the sound of feet on her steps. But always it was either a wraith of snow flung near the glass, or some as yet unheard voice of the many-voiced wind, for Detroit’s wind seemed like her people, a thing of many voices, many tongues.
Often she paused in the weary, lonesome work of whittling for money as another directed, head lifted, listening. Far away across the vacant land past the railroad tracks, the wind’s whine mingled with the trains and the steel mill’s roar. Then, there was the shriek of it as it leaped against her unit, poking and prying like a white cat determined to claw its way through the cardboard walls. Defeated, it would cry in the chimney, sob with a long woo-wooing by the walls, then be gone with a higher, shriller shrieking as it leaped through the telephone wires. Then would come the moments of silence, even worse now than formerly, for mingling with the ticking of the clock was the purring of the white cat in the Icy Heart. No matter how cold it was outside, the kitchen, unlike the rest of the house, was always hot, and the white cat purred.
It was almost time for the children to come home for lunch before she saw the gray shape of the mailman going slowly through the blowing snow. He did not look her way, but she continued to watch until he had passed into the next alley. There was always the chance he might have overlooked a letter.
She stood a long moment, lax-handed, staring into the swirling snow, before she remembered to look at the clock. She hurried then to start lunch for the ones coming home from school, and to get Enoch ready to go.