The Dollmaker
“Say you’ve not seen Reuben?” Clovis asked.
“He don’t allus see him,” Gertie said.
“But ginerally I see him when our section passes his section in th hall.” He saw the bananas, crowded past her, grabbed one and began pulling back the skin. Gertie continued to stand between the doors and watch the alley, brimming now with the full tide of the homecoming children. Her eyes snatched eagerly at each dark brown jacket, each head higher than the other heads. She did not look around when Enoch cried, “This banana’s rotten, Mom.”
And Cassie, troubled by the thought of throwing food away, said: “Mine’s all black and squshy inside, Mom. Must I eat it?”
Clytie came next, running up the steps, calling, “Mom, I never did see Reuben.”
Gertie said nothing, and Enoch cried, disgust and derision in his tone, “Mom’s tryen to feed us rotten bananas.”
“She didn’t know they was rotten,” Clovis said with some sharpness, and then in a kinder tone toward Gertie’s discouraged back: “But, Gert, you’ve got to watch what you buy. That sandwich meat you put in my lunch hardly had th taste a meat. More like corn meal an taters mashed an colored to look like meat.”
“Th man that makes it must make a heap a money,” Enoch said, admiration in his tone, then his voice nagging again like his father’s: “They’re allus a maken a fast buck on you, Mom. Recollect them pork chops, two, three days ago. They all briled away into grease, like that hamburger an th sausage.”
“Grease at sixty cents a pound,” Clovis said, standing beside instead of behind her now. He put his hand on her shoulder, but his glance still searched the alley as he said: “Yer mom ain’t used to buyen. She’s got to learn. It ain’t easy. Like Cassie’s dress; over an over that clerk tells me it’s good cotton that’ll wash an iron like yer mom wanted. She said they’d be a label if it was rayon. But th first time yer mom set a iron on it, it melted down like chewen gum.”
There was only one child going down the alley now and that a safety patrol boy. Still she watched; the turning away, the closing of the door would somehow be the closing of her hope that Reuben would come home. She clung to the hope, struggling against the mounting panic. What if he didn’t come home by dark? She had caused him to do this just as she had wasted Clovis’s money for rotten bananas and poor meat and all the other things they didn’t know about—the box of pepper half full, the rotten eggs, the rotten oranges, the sweet potatoes bought as a treat one night but all black in their hearts, yet showing no sign from the outside, like Joe’s eyes.
She gripped the door handle. She could raise bushels of sweet potatoes, fatten a pig, kill it, and make good sausage meat, but she didn’t know how to buy. She could born a fine and laughing boy baby and make him grow up big and strong, but inside him all his laughter died. She heard screams and saw the Bommarita boy, his head hunched under his jacket as he raced home in front of the Daly ice balls. It was late when the Catholic children got home. But she continued to stand, unconscious of the cold wind whipping through the door. Then after what seemed a long time Clovis, his voice troubled, said, “Me an th youngens is a goen to—to git some bananas. We’ll look around a little fer Reuben, but most like he’ll beat us home, fer we’ll be gone a while.”
They were gone and the storm door shut. She tried to do her kitchen work, but in the spells of silence between the airplanes and the trains she heard the white cat in the Icy Heart, the clock tick, the wind scream in the telephone wires, and once Whit, by the girls’ bedroom, moaned in his sleep and struck the wall with an outflung arm. She kept running to the door, but the alley was always empty.
The pale red glow of the steel mill had brightened as twilight deepened into darkness, and overhead the lights of airplanes glowed like wandering stars, before Clovis and the children came. They were too silent, and ate little of the supper of pork liver, fried potatoes, boiled beans, cabbage slaw, and cobbler made of canned peaches.
Clovis sat a long while stirring his coffee round and round, and when the older children had gone from the table and the radio was loud, said, “I think I’d better tell th police, Gertie.”
“No—no.”
He was silenced by her terror, and nodded when she said: “He’ll come. I know he’ll come. He wouldn’t worry me thisaway. He’s right around somewhere afeared to come home, afeared to go to school. He ain’t never been afeared,” she went on, her voice rasping, broken. “He don’t know what to make of it—bein afeared.”
Clovis looked at her and she at him. Each saw the fear in the other but would not speak of it. At last Clovis, his face turned carefully away from her, said: “But Gert, it ain’t like back home. They’s traffic—he could git hurt—an we’d never know. They’s—they’s mean men. You—you wouldn’t know—quair mean. They’s gangs kills a boy ever once in a while. We’d better git th police.”
She shook her head violently. “No—no.”
“His knife missen?”
She nodded, and he did not urge her again; but seeing her restlessness, forever walking to the door with the drippy dishrag to stare into the dark alley, he said: “Whyn’t you wrap up good—it’s mighty cold—take the flashlight an go look around. You can git to places we couldn’t in th car.”
The wind tore at her coat, stinging her legs and her face, but it was better to be outside than in. The wind kept the smoke away, and on the side of the sky away from the steel mill she could see the stars. In spite of her worry she searched out the Big Dipper, though its bottom on the western side was washed away in the steel-mill light. As always she pondered on the highness of the north star here compared to home. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night—”
She walked on. What was the speech to her but loneliness? The stars and the night sky spoke to no one around her. It seemed a long time since even Cassie had talked about the stars or watched the moon rise. The steel mill took the sunsets, the evening star, and washed out the pale young moon. Reuben had liked to look at the stars. Maybe he was now; crouching in the cold, freezing, looking up, crying at the coldness of the stars. She shivered and hurried on into the face of the north wind, trying to find the path into the swamp with the little trees.
She crossed the through street, turned the corner by the filling station, and walked on past the brightly lighted bowling alley and tavern. She went more slowly by their warm-looking windows, frosted like her own and double, but not too thick to let the jukebox music come seeping through. She passed a small factory where lights flickered blue behind the glass walls.
Just ahead of her a man in an overcoat and a woman in a long full-skirted dress got out of a car. They hurried, laughing, across the snowy sidewalk, then through a door that on opening flung out steam and music and laughter. She had a glimpse of a large dim room and couples dancing a dance quick and wild with much stamping of feet. A man almost as big as Victor, with a yellow-headed woman in his arms, was for an instant like a picture seen past the doorway. Gertie watched him as he stamped one foot, lifted the other high, threw back his head and cried out in laughter a strange and wordless sound. Past the dancers on a raised platform she saw dimly through the cigarette smoke the music makers; one worked an accordion, laughing as he played.
The door shut, but the shouts and the music and the laughter seeped through in one thin sound like the singing of a fiddle far away. Then there was nothing but the wind and the snow and the cars going by, their windows shut against the cold, dark inside so that it seemed they drove themselves.
She reached a vacant lot fringed with brush, where old newspapers stirred in the wind among shadowy mounds of drifted snow. Further, lay darkness where the yellow light of the street lamp on the corner did not reach. Reuben might have gone there. She plunged in and sank knee-deep in snow, but floundered on further and further from the light. She tripped over tin cans, struggled through piles of rubbish, and slipped, falling at times, when she stepped ont
o one of the many little frozen ponds. Willow and alder brush and strange trees with unfamiliar twigs slapped across her face and tore at her clothing.
Here, the red light of the steel mill no longer warmed the snow, and overhead the stars were thicker, brighter than in the alley. Detroit seemed far away. If Reuben were close by, he would be in such a place, as far away as he could get from the city. The brush rose above her head so that if a body stood still and didn’t listen too hard, it was like being in a little woods where twigs instead of smokestacks and telephone poles stood between her and the sky.
She snapped on the flashlight, and at once the illusion of being away from the city was gone. The snow was trampled by the booted feet of children; a banana skin lay close to a bitten-into bologna sandwich; and under the willows was a tiny pond criss-crossed with skate marks.
A train thundered past, and through the willow twigs she saw fleeting squares of yellow light that held the blurred forms of people. The train was gone, and she was still, staring in its direction. She went back to her search and turned the flashlight off again. She had gone a few steps into the brush when she saw, half hidden in the willows, the figure of a man, the head dark above the snow-spattered shoulders. Reuben? Too thin, too tall—a tall man either wearing a closely fitting cap or bare-headed.
“Hello?” she said, but the figure continued still among the willows as if he held his breath. A man frozen dead standing up? A man followed her into the swamp? No man would follow her, so big, so ugly. A robber somehow knowing of the money in her coat?
“Speak,” she said, and flicked on the light. Old and rusty iron glinted dully. She walked up to it, and saw the bell-shaped down-curving top of an old lamp post, a fancy thing rising higher than her head, but grown rusty waiting for a light. A closely matted growth of vines and briars around the iron standard had given it the bulk of a man’s body. She turned quickly away, stumbling over the rubble of a sidewalk that had grown root-cracked and wrinkled waiting for the feet that had never come to walk under the never lighted lamp to the houses that were never built.
She shivered, and hurried as if from a graveyard where the dead were only partly buried, plunging through snow and brush and tin cans toward the railroad tracks. Though the wind came more fiercely over the tracks than in the swamp, her numbed hands and face and legs felt it but little as she strode on, taking three cross-ties at a stride, not knowing why she walked the railroad and never asking where. Walking was the thing, for only by walking could she find Reuben. She would find him and he would be hers again, with no wall between.
She reached the switch leading to the steel mill, and hesitated, looking toward the switchyard. She saw only darkness, cut here and there by the slowly moving yellow eyes of engines. Reuben wouldn’t be there. On a night like this he would want the warmth and light of the steel mill. Victor would be working now. Maybe he had seen Reuben.
She hurried through the opening in the high steel fence through which the trains went, remembering what she had heard of other factories; there might be guards with guns to keep spies away. But no one bothered her as she came up the track, past piles of smoking slag and irregular heaps of scrap waiting for the furnaces. She reached the stripping shed, and hesitated. While she stood there, wondering, the donkey engine passed, chugging slowly with its load of freshly poured steel, the uncapped tops of the molds glowing red, sputtering like dying firecrackers. When the engine with its light was safely past into the stripping shed, she stepped closer to the moving cars and felt the good heat of the hot steel on her chest and through her coat, for all the rest of her seemed frozen into numbness.
The last car passed, and she crossed the tracks and went over to the pouring shed. The great doors were shut against the cold, but through chinks and cracks the warm red light came, and it was like the cookstove back home on winter mornings before she had lighted the lamp. One pour, she thought, had just been finished, and another was almost ready. The ever rising roar and hiss and crackle of the electric furnaces muted all the other sounds—the blowing of whistles, the clank and rattle of the overhead cranes, and in the next shed the grating of the oven door, the muted clang of the drop-forge hammers, and at last the steel, crying, complaining, hissing, screaming in defeat as it went away under the great rollers.
Last Sunday afternoon she’d sat with Clovis and the children in the car in front of the forging shed, but mostly, instead of watching, she had listened shivering and wanting to go home. It would be warmer there in front of the pickling oven. Maybe she could find a man who would hunt Victor and ask him had he seen Reuben. She started around the pouring shed, but stopped when the donkey engine came again, this time with stripped ingots for the oven. The tracks were close, and the fierce heat of the glowing cylinders of steel hurt her face, so that she quickly turned her back, pressing her body close against the iron doors.
The engine went on, and cold touched her again, but she continued to stand with her face against the crack between the hinges of the door, and through it she looked into the pouring shed. She saw a huge, cave-like room filled with smoke and flame; not flame either, more like the play of lightning about the four furnaces along one side of the wall. The lights were forever leaping, now blue, now red, now white; behind the shifting, trembling, leaping lights were dull glows and gleams. Above the furnace third from the front there was a wilder, brighter dance of lights, the thunderous hissing louder. Looking closer she saw through the smoke a giant kettle hung in front of it, waiting for the running steel, while on the other side of the shed a man who looked like Miller in the alley stood on a high platform and arranged molds that were swung into position with hooks and cables worked by an overhead crane.
The roar of the furnace grew even louder. It trembled as if with eagerness to spew out the fiery mass inside it. Then, on a narrow platform by it, so close it seemed that it too should melt, she saw, puny-looking as a paper doll, the figure of a man silhouetted against the brightness. He dissolved in the red-colored smoke, reappeared, vanished. She continued to watch, seeing sometimes his legs only, sometimes his shoulders, then all of him gone again; she pressed more closely against the crack, half afraid that he had flamed up and disappeared like a bit of paper flung into the fireplace. She saw him soon; now he seemed bigger than a man, an iron giant, distorted as he was by the smoke and the flickering lights.
She watched as he took an iron bar and punched it into the red side of the furnace, working quickly, with no air of skittishness, as if he knocked the bung from a keg of vinegar instead of eighty tons of running steel. A tongue of bluish flame leaped at him, and while he stood, seeming to watch, she realized it was Victor. Reddish steel came out, a thin uneven stream; he worked the bar again; white-hot steel shot out with a roaring hiss and a blinding brightness.
The stream widened, brightened, until she could see nothing but the steel. Even when she looked away, thinking of Reuben, wondering how to reach Victor, her eyes were like they had used to be when she looked too long at a bright sunset. Though now instead of suns before her eyes there were streams of steel, bright as the sun but not sunlike, more like a fiery fountain out of Revelation, springing in the land where might have walked the angel with the feet of burnished brass and the golden girdle, and above it the angel might have stooped to gather flowers. For out of the beds of flame and smoke the flowers came; long gracefully drooping stems would for an instant hang out of the kettle, lean earthward, blooming on the end into the blood-red flower, blooming, dying all in an instant, their seed a tiny lump of smoking steel.
She had not seen Victor again, and the furnace had begun its slow tipping over the kettle, when a hand tapped her shoulder and a voice said: “Yu gotta git out, lady. Wives gotta stay behind du fence like anybody else.”
She turned to face a figure so wrapped and bundled and booted against the cold that she could see nothing except an old man’s faded, watery eyes above a weathered red-tipped nose from which one drop, red like a jewel in the light, hung trembling, ready to
add its weight to the frost on the muffler over his mouth. “I’m not a wife,” she said, “I want to see Victor—up there.”
“Lotsa women wanta see Victor,” he said, “but dey gotta wait behinda fence like du wives. Git now,” and he gestured with his lantern toward the high steel fence between the mill and the road. She had not noticed or thought of the fence, coming in on the tracks as she had. It stood no more than fifty feet away, and behind it were the red eyes of parked cars.
“It’s my boy,” she said, following the old man. “Reuben, he’s gone. I wanted to ask Victor had he seen him hangen around.”
“I watch,” he said. “I never seen him. Kids allatime hanging round; but tonight, too cold.”
“I figgered he might come to git warm,” she said.
“Yu don’t warm by pouren steel—yu burn.” He opened a gate, saying. “Yu gotta wait like u rest.”
“Ask Victor has he seen him,” she begged, and began shivering again.
The old man answered nothing as he shuffled off toward the pickling oven that was opening now with a clanging and grating of doors, red light leaping out to show giant tongs fishing for an ingot. Gertie clung to the fence, shivering, hoping one minute to see Victor, the next afraid. He was her last hope; after him where would she go, whom would she ask? Close by her elbow a voice said, low-pitched and carrying through the noise: “Yu gotta wear slacks in this weather. Yu’ll freeze.”
Gertie looked around, and saw the outline of a babushka-covered head, the cloth white she guessed, but red now in the light, extending past cheeks and forehead so that she could see only the tip of a nose. “I couldn’t sleep,” the voice went on, “an it was so cold I thought I’d bring th car an meet him. He gets mad—but no more’n a month ago th oil in a converter exploded. A first helper got killed—he was down in u empty furnace. It was a sight th way he screamed, Bo said, burnen up in th oil, knowen he couldn’t git out.”