Now, while her mind thumbed through Christ’s words, Enoch rushed on with other questions: “Mom, ain’t it a lie that all Protestant preachers ain’t no good, and that priests never does bad?”
“Hush, you’ll wake yer daddy,” she said. “I don’t know all th answers, but we both know what John said: ‘Whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ Jesus would hate tu see you youngens a fussen an a jarren around so. I guess, mebbe, they is some mean preachers, but—” She thought of Samuel and now the people at the big church where the children, and even Clovis sometimes, went; they were kind to her own. “They’s good preachers, real good, like they’s good priests an bad, too. But don’t go arguen; talk about somethen else.” What was it she had said to Clovis, years ago it seemed like now? “Spread the word,” she had said. “Keep shut,” he had said. She looked longingly toward the unfinished finger. “We’ve all got to live together,” she said.
Enoch went away, and there was a moment’s peace, though the knife was by now uncertain in the wood. Now and then Gertie glanced through the door, knowing as she looked that she would see only bare, sun-baked earth, the cardboard shedding walls of the next building, and above these the black roofs where the heat waves danced and trembled until the steel-mill towers and the telephone poles were twisted and dancing like things seen under water. Today, as on other heat-shimmering days, her eyes, hemmed in by the glaring closeness, cried for long looks across green hills. If for just one minute her eyes could go looking through long blue distances, and not always have to look at things so close they seemed behind her eyes! Once she tried looking at the sky, but it was low-hanging and pale, like a tin roof holding the heat down; and so from time to time she shut her eyes tightly; blackness, even blackness broken by the sights that lived eternally behind her lids, was better than the blinding glare of the dancing heat waves.
She was about ready to give up; sweat kept running into her eyes and oozing from her hand onto the knife, when through the kitchen door behind her she heard Mr. Daly speaking loudly, as if he wanted all the alley to hear. “Listen, yu kids; now I’m not mad, see. I know youse don’t know no better. Yu public schools an parents an preachers dey don’t teach yu no Americanism. Don’tcha know it’s un-American tu tell lies an persecute minority groups? Youse oughta be ashamed telling mu boys they’s bad priests and tucken like the Church could be wrong. Don’tcha know that’s th way communists talk? But youse can’t help it—youse has been listening—youse fadders ain’t too careful a du company.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gilbert cried. “What’sa matter with mu pop’s friends?”
“Yu’ll find out, m’lad. Justyu wait till Joseph Daly goes tudu red squad. I know a lot. See?”
“Go some’eres else to crap,” Gilbert jeered. “Our dads is sleepen. Victor run us away frum t’other side; now yu gotta come yellen, an we’ll git run away frum this tent shade—yu kids gotta keep their mouths shut if yu don’t want um to hear th truth.”
“Du truth,” Mr. Daly roared, angry now. “An wot is du truth? Dey’s somepun in mu house yu oughta read—if yu’d learned tu read in yu public schools. It’sa great big scrapbook wot Maggie helped me make; an it’s nutten but u truth; du little bit a truth wot comes out in u papers about u doings u yu Protestant ministers; headlines, I got; everthin—drunkenness, stealing, traffic violation, ignorance, immorality, killing people wit rattlesnakes; everthin. An I’ve got enough clippings futu make two books,” he went on, the same relish in his voice as when he had talked to Reuben, “all about rottenness in u public schools; du papers is full a it; parents allatime complaining du kids learn nutten; teachers gitten drunk. Yu tink I got mu education inu public school? Yu betcha life I didn’t; du good sisters, dey taught me everthin I know, see.”
Gertie had by now come into her kitchen, but as she had no wish to let Mr. Daly see her she stood listening behind the half-open inner door. There was a moment’s silence, and she thought with relief that he had gone; but, peeping, she saw that he had only stopped to get new wind and wipe sweat from his face and neck. Then, as if he felt her eyes upon him, he looked at her door as he resumed:
“An when anybody tries tu tell me or mine that Protestant preachers an public schools is fit fu decent, God-fearing Americans, I tells um, ‘Well, I never say nothing bad about nobody, butcha oughta read u papers an listen to Father Moneyhan.’” He raised his voice. “How many clippings yu tink I got about priests that breaks u law, or parochial schools wot ain’t no good, or criminals wot has graduated from parochial schools? Not one. Yu can read u Detroit papers year in an year out, an yu can’t find one priest, one good sister, wot’s done wrong; not one com—”
“Oh, yeah?” Gilbert interrupted, sticking his head out of the play tent. “G’wan; I’ll bet—”
He was silent when Sophronie, her voice low and worried, called: “Shut up, Gilbert. You uns’ull be a fighten.”
Mr. Daly smiled. “See, yu own mudder knows youse is a liar.” He went back to lounge in the shade by his western wall, and Gertie, watching, thought he smiled to himself like one tasting victory; she had kept silent; she had not stood up for the boys; Enoch must have repeated what she had said to him, and because of his belief in her he and the others were called names.
She turned to the block of wood in the other room, but three children stood with their noses pressed against the front screen door. One, seeing her, called, “Wot’s he gonna do?”
“Give it back,” she said, and grabbed her old blue split bonnet and fled to Victor’s part of the yard at the end of the unit. A train passed, and as always she trembled at the sound, but at least she was out of sight of Mr. Daly. Maybe it was about him the child had asked, not the man in the block of wood. She was pulling weeds out of the moss-rose bed, the seed of which she had brought from home, when Enoch came, and she saw that his lips were quivering.
“It ain’t th truth, what that ole Daly says, is it, Mom?”
“Law, no,” she said.
“But—it’s th truth that they ain’t no mean priests inu papers, an that th good sisters never does bad things like some school teachers, an that they ain’t no criminals ever graduates frum parochial schools. If it ain’t th truth why—”
She bent above the flowers to escape his glance; his eyes were like Reuben’s eyes—they wouldn’t believe the way Cassie’s eyes had believed. “Why didn’tcha talk back to him, Mom?” he was asking; and after a moment’s silent waiting for her answer, went on, his voice yearning, “I wisht I could find a piece, jist one little piece in u paper, about a bad priest er somethen.”
“You won’t,” she said, “an if you did it wouldn’t make you no better. You don’t want to be like that man, all th time throwen off on people.”
“Sure,” Enoch said, “then he wouldn’t throw off on us an Pop’s friends. Mom, Gilbert said it was that tool-and-die man ole Daly was throwen off on, an that he has been up to some kind a meanness; Sophronie don’t want him to come visiten their house no more. Gilbert said she’d have a fit if she knowed he was comen around so much.”
“You must a heared Gilbert wrong,” Gertie said. “Sophronie herself told me onct he’d allus been good to them; he ain’t got no family.”
“Oh, yes he has,” Enoch said. “Sorta. He hadda wife an two kids; but they started a tryen to strike out at old man Flint’s big place an he got th offer a bein a plant guard; but he wouldn’t take it er be no scab; but his wife, she wasn’t much; when they got a little hard run she upt an left him, went back to her own people in Pennsylvania. He’s allus sent money fer th kids, though, Gilbert said. But Gilbert wouldn’t say what he’d done, th meanness. What’s he done, Mom?”
“Nothen,” Gertie said. “Run an play now—we’ll be a waken Victor.”
“Victor’s gotta leave,” Enoch said. “Mr. Daly, he went up to th office—yu know, people without families, they ain’t allowed to live inu project—an Mr. Daly, he told that project manager, they’re good friends, that Victor didn?
??t have no wife now an—”
“I have, too, gotta a wife,” and Victor, his blue eyes blazing, a new burn on one cheekbone a livid red, glared at them from his living-room window.
Enoch scuttled away, and Gertie flushed and bent low among the flowers; she ought to have known that in the heat and the children he would be trying to sleep in the living room with its fenced-off northern wall. She pulled weeds from white flowers by the house wall whose names she did not know; many so trampled by the children their stems lay on the ground, but still they opened their little spires of pure white bloom above the cindery earth. She wished she could call such valiant creatures by name, just as she wished she could somehow help Victor. She straightened at last and stood close to the window and found his glance still upon her. She thought of Samson with his hair cut off, but only said: “Whyn’t you go tu yer mother’s long enough tu git a good sleep? I’ve heard she’s got a big house in a big yard; it ud be cooler an quiet, too.”
“Max might come while I was gone,” he said.
“But she—You could leave a note with me,” she said, but he seemed not to have heard, and she went back to the weeding of the flowers. There was still a narrow band of shade by the northern wall, but the heat rising up from the parking lot between the fence and the big alley was like air from a bake oven, and the noise worse than within doors.
She was just turning toward her door, when she stopped, troubled by the uproar of a man’s screaming, children’s crying, and a woman’s hysterical scoldings that came from the unit across from Victor’s. She’d never got acquainted with the people except for chance meetings in the alley; the woman, young, with three youngens, none big enough to wander in the alley or play with her own, had been living there, she thought, since the middle of winter. The man had come only lately, and of him she had heard Mrs. Bommarita talk in whispers, and Mrs. Daly sigh with pity; a discharged soldier—they’d ought to have kept him in the hospital longer, Mrs. Daly had said, for he was worse than wounded, and Mrs. Bommarita had frowned and tapped her head. “An we gotta have th likes a him around,” she had said.
Gertie now saw the girl-like mother come out the kitchen door, carrying one baby, and dragging another about a year old by the hand. They went to the northern end and sat on the ground amid weeds and broken bottles and rusty tin cans, the woman putting her back against the northern wall, drawing her feet up to make her body fit the narrow band of shade. She rocked her body back and forth and tried to quiet the baby, but it cried, and the other one with her cried; the man roared again from the house, something fell on the floor; then the child still in the house began a shrill, frightened screaming. Gertie, glancing quickly from the corners of her eyes, saw that the woman was crying too, her tears falling on the baby, naked save for a diaper and red with heat rash.
She took her knife and cut a fair-sized bunch of flowers, and risking Mr. Daly’s curious glances she went around and through her gate and across the alley. “Hold um up in front a you,” she said, “an they’ll shut out th sight a that parken lot an th railroad fence, an mebbe you can think it’s cooler.”
“Thanks,” the girl said, reaching for the flowers. “I ain’t never got time to notice the heat; it’sa kids it’s hard on.” But she sniffed the flowers before she waved them by the babies, and even smiled a little, though the tears on her cheeks were hardly dry. “I kinda git a kick looking at them flowers you’ve got—an grass,” she said, her voice still quivery. “I don’t know nothen about such, an mu kids don’t leave me a minnit’s time, but someday—mu husband’s not been home long outa th army—I’m gonna fence us up a little place; that is, when he gits him a job. It goes hard on a soldier when—that is—they ain’t a thing wrong with him, honest, but his discharge wasn’t medical.” All at once she began crying again; Gertie lingered a moment longer; she wanted to say something, maybe advise her to try baking soda on the baby’s heat rash, but the man roared out again, and Gertie went home.
Like Victor, the weeping girl had made her think of Max and the letter, come three days ago, waiting, hidden, for her to read again and answer. She managed to get her letter finished just as the boys came in for lunch, though there was hardly time enough to seal and stamp it, and shove it down into her apron pocket. Sometime late in the long twilight she would sneak off to the mailbox two blocks away on the through street.
It was while they were eating lunch that Enoch suggested they all go to the scrap-wood place and hunt boards good enough to make dolls and crosses on the jig saw. Gertie hesitated; she didn’t think she’d ever use the ugly little thing; it was like a monster from some fairy tale that, instead of grinding salt, spewed ugliness into the world. But Enoch insisted; they could take the shortcut through the vacant land, he said; it would be cool by the pools of water and through the little trees.
“Brush and scummy ponds, not trees an pools, son,” Gertie corrected him, but couldn’t make her voice scornful, and hurried through the dishes.
She put on a clean apron, her sunbonnet, and taking the red wagon went out into the alley, which seemed even hotter than within doors. She found herself at once in a great gang of running children, all, she gathered, on the way to a kind of playground in a corner of the project where the steel mill and railroad fences came together. She hurried on through the dancing heat waves, worried as always when Amos was out of sight.
She learned after a little questioning that Amos was with Enoch, and that all the running was to see a drunk man, in nothing but a ragged pair of shorts, sound asleep in the full sun by the chinning bar. There was a good chance, the children said, the cops might come and there would be a fight.
Gertie walked more slowly, wondering if the man were sick or dead; he would be if he lay for long half naked in the sun. The heat of the shadeless alleys was beginning to make her head whirl, and when she passed the unit where the woman with the cactus lived she hesitated, looking wistfully toward the narrow band of eastward-creeping shadow on the woman’s stoop. The cactus was there, but the door was closed, and while Gertie walked slowly past, watching the door, hoping it would open, a woman feeding a baby on the next stoop explained: “She hadda go to du hospital. Her man, his millen machine blowed up—hit um onu head.”
“I hope he ain’t bad hurt,” Gertie said, and walked on to meet soon a disappointed Enoch; some kid had laid ice cubes on the man and he’d got up and walked off; his shorts had been so torn a body could see “his you-know-what,” and he couldn’t walk straight; but now the cops wouldn’t come like they’d done last week for the man two alleys over, who’d been stretched crosswise of the road.
The three of them went on down the alley by the railroad tracks. Amos kept lagging behind to stare at the new board; he still cried out in his sleep at times, and Gertie had learned without ever asking that he had been in the crowd that had seen Cassie. She was glad that when they reached the vacant land he soon found a skinny, big-eyed frog, and laughed and followed it across piles of rusty tin cans and rotting papers until it jumped into a puddle of black swamp water.
The mosquitoes were bad and so were the flies, and the whole place smelled like a garbage can on a hot day when the collectors are a week overdue, but Gertie gathered a bouquet of tall-growing red flowers that grew by an evil-smelling pool of black water, and then she stood a while under the smoke-blighted, cinder-battered leaves of a cottonwood sprout; if she kind of shut her eyes and forgot the smell, it was a little like having a whole tree between her and the sky; and save for her own children the place was still of humankind.
The children had used to sneak away and come here as late as lilac-blooming time, tempted by the frogs and the flowers and the aloneness, but lately even the big bold boys such as Francis Daly seldom came. Men, sometimes with their britches only part way down, but often naked, had chased children; one had caught a little girl and hurt her badly, but the cops had never found him.
Rested somewhat by the stillness and the leaves above her head, and the wild flowers already wilting in
her hand, Gertie, with the boys pulling the wagon behind her, went on to the scrap-wood place; a trip which, although she had already taken it three times hunting wood for whittling and the fence, she still dreaded. The owner of the place was a squat, surly-seeming man who almost never spoke; in fact there had been for a time in the alley wonderings as to what language he did speak. Victor had tried him in Polish and scraps of Hungarian; Mrs. Zola from the next alley had used French; Mrs. Bommarita had tried Italian; Clytie had told of how the mother of one of her girl friends had tried him with Russian. The most that anybody ever got from him was a shrug and a stare until Gertie came one day carrying the Josiah basket; and the man had looked at it, touched its fat sides, and almost smiled as he said, “Oak splints.” But when, hoping he was from someplace at least close to back home, she had tried to talk with him, he had acted like Joe when Mrs. Anderson asked him questions.
Today the man was silent, watching from his little shed that held a power saw, as they wandered through the mountains of scrap wood and discarded furniture and packing cases from the war plants. He watched Enoch in particular, but turned away like one not interested when Enoch, after some looking about, came running to his mother, though plainly the child’s face betrayed the joy of a great discovery. He’d found away over behind that mountain of old factory work benches, some big, box-like things that he was certain were solid maple wood under the dark green paint.
“But Mom,” he whispered, “don’t let on yu want um bad. That man ud put th price up; lemme do it,” and he ran ahead of her to the man, his face blank of everything but surliness as he listened to Enoch’s quick talk. “Mister, I’m a Cub Scout, see—a little Boy Scout, yu know; and I wanta little scrap wood, cheap, futa build a little house—den house, yu know—so’s couldn’t yu give me somethen ain’t much good? They’s some old green boxes—no good atall, all smashed up an tore apart. Couldn’t I have some to build us a little den house? They ain’t fitten fer nothen an—”