Gertie gave one last yearning glance toward the block of wood on which she had hoped to work, and fled to the bedroom by Victor. She shut the door, and stood trying not to think of Meg’s letters from Harlan years ago when the big battle for the union was on. Meg had written of fights, killings, bombings, and what seemed worse—hungry children, the men out of work so long. Her mother had gone around sniffling, declaring that if a man didn’t want to work and went on strike and left his children to starve he ought to be shot.
She had agreed with her mother then, and wondered at Meg, who had seemed to take the idleness of her man for granted. But now? Suppose a man didn’t want to strike after the vote was taken? Could he work? Or suppose the men in the mines hadn’t struck, and one man alone stood up and said, “I won’t work because the pay’s too low, the timbering’s bad, and too many men have already died from bad air and you won’t fix the fans. …” To that one man or the dozen men or the hundred the company could have said, “You’re fired.” Then what?
She had in her trouble turned all unknowing to her knife, now open in her hand, while, hardly knowing what she did, she looked about the little room for a piece of whittling wood. There were, she thought, on the top shelf of the doorless closet, some little chunks of seasoned maple scrap. Reaching, her fingers touched some bit of rounded wood; puzzled as to what it could be, she pulled it out and saw the bald-headed baby in maple she had meant for the least Daly. She had always aimed to do a little more work on it, put at least a little curl in the hair, but even unfinished it was still much nicer for giving than the two-fifty dolls. Close by was Maggie’s chickadee, finished, but forgotten until now. Once, little and made of poplar as it was, it had seemed a thing too cheap and shoddy for a gift; yet, looking at it now, she thought Maggie would like it.
She went sneaking and tiptoeing through the living-room door with the gifts hidden in one great hand, in case Clovis looked up to wonder where she went and what she gave; but no one noticed her going, absorbed as they were in talk, whispers now between the huddled heads.
She hesitated by the Daly screen door, not wanting to startle a lone woman by a sudden knocking. Mrs. Daly might for a minute think something bad had happened to Mr. Daly, who wasn’t expected home till Sunday morning. She had walked heavily up the steps, but no one seemed to have noticed her coming. She peeped at last through the door, and saw Mrs. Daly by the ironing board, her shoulders hunched as she pressed down the iron. Gertie knocked gently, but still the woman did not look around.
She looked more closely and saw scallops such as her mother had used to embroider and realized it was a piece of Maggie’s hope chest Mrs. Daly ironed. She remembered that a day or so ago, Mrs. Daly had washed it all again, and Mrs. Bommarita out by Joe’s truck had said, “She wants u new people to see her fine linen.” Mrs. Schultz had wondered why she didn’t at least wait until Maggie was home to do all that laundry; Maggie had gone someplace visiting, and her mother had such a time when she was gone and nobody to help her.
Gertie knocked more loudly, and at last Mrs. Daly looked around for an instant, but turned back to the ironing before she said, “Come in,” and when she spoke it wasn’t like Mrs. Daly’s voice at all, neither laughing, nor cursing, nor quarreling, but still, just saying things like any other voice.
Gertie felt awkward, holding the chickadee and the doll, opening the door slowly and slowly making her way across the cluttered kitchen to the woman who wouldn’t turn her head to look at her. “I been wanten tu give yer baby one a my dolls,” she said to the woman’s back. “Somethen it can chew on an git no splinters—and no pain,” Mrs. Daly still ironed and gave no sign that she had heard, but after a moment’s waiting Gertie continued, “An a long time back, I made Maggie a chickadee—a little chickadee to go with her ma—saint that blessed th birds.”
Something about the shoulders, too still, too stiff, as if they fought to keep from sagging down upon the unironed linen, made Gertie think of Job’s wife, a woman she had lately pondered much upon. The iron went slowly and ever more slowly, and stopped at last on a scalloped hem. Gertie said, “It’ll burn, Miz Daly,” and took the iron and set it endwise on the scorched folded paper that served as pad; but even so, there was on the embroidery a faint yellowing of scorch. Mrs. Daly turned at last and looked at her, and Gertie saw her eyes, dried out and old-looking, ringed with red as if the weeping were finished only because there were no more tears. “You’re worken late,” Gertie said, looking quickly away from the tell tale eyes to the bushel basket half filled with dampened things.
“I gotta hurry. I hafta quit when Mr. Daly comes home,” Mrs. Daly said, her voice low and level dead. “It would make him feel bad, dear man, to see all her tings spread out—an her not needing um no more.”
“Oh?”
Mrs. Daly turned back to the iron, nodded above it. “Maggie’s gone away to be a nun. Dey’ll never be no turning back for her while she can turn back, like they’s some that’ll say. She’ll take her vows when her time comes. Such a girl was Maggie,” and her voice was defiant, a little of the old Mrs. Daly. “‘Wot’ull yu do wit’out her—an all that hope chest?’ some says, like his sisters. But I’m proud, real proud.”
Gertie backed away, not answering, wondering if she ought to tell the woman her tears would spot the linen; tears were not like plain water, not a bit.
THIRTY-FOUR
BACK HOME IT WOULD be hot, with the little goose-craw beans hanging plump and green among the late corn, but here in late September there was the chill of frost in the air, and already the alley lay cold and blue in the still dusty twilight, though it was early, with Clytie not yet home from high school. Gertie lingered, looking for her, head craned around the door, glass again in place of screen. “Yer flowers done real good.” It was Sophronie speaking from her kitchen stoop, nodding toward the marigolds by Gertie’s fence.
And Gertie, too, smiled on the dwarfish, child-battered plants covered with their many petaled flowers all shades of gold and bronze and brownish red. There was something frantic in their blooming, as if they knew that frost was near and then the bitter cold. They’d lived through all the heat and noise and stench of summertime, and now each widely opened flower was like a triumphant cry, “We will, we will make seed before we die.”
Sophronie’s still, forever troubled eyes were on the flowers as she said, “That strike talk’s gitten worse—comen in over the radio now.” Then added as if Gertie didn’t already know, “I been looken fer a telegram an a listenen on th radio all day, but Whit ain’t got no call back. They let him work jist long enough to make him lose that bowlen alley job an th unemployment.”
“Well, leastways they ain’t made you lose your unemployment compensation.” The long strange words came slowly, and she spoke haltingly, feeling guilty, somehow, before Sophronie. Whit had been sent home before he’d had a chance to draw even one full pay check; a parts shortage, the company had claimed; but Whit and others claimed the company lied; there were whispers of mountains of parts; the company just didn’t want to assemble the parts into cars until the OPA went off and cars could go sky high.
Sophronie turned back to listen to her radio, but Gertie went out onto her stoop and continued to watch for Clytie. Clovis had lost a lot of time from wildcat strikes and walkouts caused by the workers, and even more from mysterious work stoppages, and one disciplinary lay off by the company. Still, they had been able to meet their payments, start Enoch and Clytie in school, and lay in a ton of coal against the winter. She oughtn’t to complain, for times were none too good for many; she could see that in the peddlers flocking through the alleys; many ex-servicemen, all knocking on her door, holding out books, magazines, photographs, clocks. “Lady, yu need luck; lemme sell yu this genuine electric clock in a horsehoe, onie twelve ninety-five,” Others sold dancing lessons, clothing of all kinds, imitation jewelry, an endless assortment of pots, pans, brushes, gadgets for what use she could not even guess, radios, and toys. “But, lady, it’s onie
eighty-eight days till Christmas.”
The last had been said to her today—another Christmas, another winter. She wanted to run from time that took her life, her days, and left only trouble in return. There was no place to run, so she went slowly down her walk, looking for Clytie. Her glance happened upon some tiny lumps of coal, spilled from the coalhouse door. She squatted and began to pick up the pieces; a moment later a voice asked, “Lady, what must we do to be saved through Christ?”
She looked up and saw a young man in a worn soldier’s coat, bent above her by the fence. There were so many sellers of Christ in the alley; He was offered on Christmas cards, punch boards, rosaries, revivals, bingo parties, books, Bibles, and pamphlets. Now the teachings of her childhood came with no bidding, and she answered, reaching for a lump of coal, “Believe.”
“One of our own,” he said, and held out a card with the name and address of a church.
“But what if a body cain’t believe?” she said, still squatting, looking up at him. There was a scar on his forehead, disappearing into his hair, and his face had the whitish faraway look of a soldier’s long in a hospital.
“We must believe,” he said, smiling, believing.
“But God give us a mind that can or cain’t believe.” She shook her head over an old wonder she had never spoken aloud until now, “but not even God can make us believe.”
“Pray,” he said, “and come to church; we want your soul, not your money.”
“But you have tu believe first before you can pray,” she said, but he was gone toward Sophronie’s door.
He limped, she saw, and looked tired; she ought to have invited him in for a cup of coffee; he maybe didn’t have a dime ahead. She was ashamed of herself being always afraid; it was the strike hanging over their heads; always and always the strike talk, even the children at their schools. A strike vote was coming up soon: Whit wanted it to win, Clovis was silent, and Sophronie was wearily certain; certain, too, that the strike would be long and hard and bitter; the first big strike since the war, with the whole nation watching, or so the tool-and-die man said, to see if the union could hold what it had won through the war. Gertie heard other talk, the whispers, mostly of women in the alleys—the strike was made by the union big shots who wanted to show their power.
She forgot the strike and drew a breath of relief when she saw Clytie coming up the alley. Clytie came and went on the streetcars with her girl friend, but even so she seemed so young to wrestle with Detroit. The girl came closer, and Gertie smiled on her, and all at once her child seemed grown and far away as she so often did, now that her mother didn’t raise her any more. She looked like any one of thousands of other girls Gertie had seen; she wore like a uniform the white head cloth far back on the head, the straight, hip-length, dark blue jacket of cheap, reused wool, the plaid skirt, and the low shoes with thick white socks, perpetually wrinkled so that her ankles looked thick and ugly. Gertie never complained about Clytie’s choice of clothing; after all, the child had bought most of it with babysitting money.
Gertie had wondered at times what high school was like and how her teachers were in the great school all in shifts so that sometimes Clytie never left until nearly noon, but some mornings she had to leave so early it would be dark in winter. She pondered much on the things Clytie told her—of the place where she could learn to drive a car when she was older, of the tough guy who knocked down a teacher, of the strange girl who’d offered her lunch money one day when her girl friend was eating on another shift and she had lost her own. There were many stories of the boys who didn’t go to school, many still in soldier’s uniforms, who waited on back corners to offer the high-school girls rides. Boys with cars were the especial worry of Iva Dean’s mother, who had warned her own daughter, and Clytie, too, so much about boys and men with cars that Clytie was wise, though she had already learned much from the men. “‘Little girl, you’ll freeze in this cold rain; lemme take yu home,’ he says to me, an boy did I run.”
But that had been two days ago; tonight there was another story. “He opened that car door right in mu face an says to me, ‘Little girl, yu know I know yu pop; he’s a friend a mine.’” And Clytie gave word pictures of herself smiling, but backing away, then safe out of arm’s reach across the sidewalk, asking, “‘Mister, yu must work at Griggs?’ ‘Sure, girlie, yu know me—come on, lemme take yu home,’ he says to me.
“An, boy, did I laugh. ‘Oh, yeah, wise guy?’ I says, ‘My ole man works at Flint’s.’ I thought he was gonna jump out a that car, an boy was I glad when I seen Donna Mae an a bunch a kids waiten at the corner! I’d forgot my algebra book an run back by a shortcut alley to git it was how it happened. One a th big girls, when she heard me tellen Donna Mae, told me not to go off by myself that away no more; if yu stay with a gang or even just one er two they never bother you none.”
Gertie nodded, grim-faced. “Stay with th crowd,” she said.
Clytie never saw her mother’s sick-hearted eyes for she had found the evening’s comics, and a moment later was laughing shrilly over a strip showing a wolf trying to snuggle up to a pretty girl. “Boy, did he git his comeuppance,” she cried, and added from her wisdom, “Yu gotta treat um that away, jist like Clare Bodell on u radio.”
Gertie nodded again; and the evening was long, as if eternity looked through the window, while she got the evening’s work done and the children to bed so that she could find cleanliness and strength and truth, too, seemed like in the uplifted hand of the man in the wood. However, tonight the work went but poorly; she was tired, kneeling by the wood, and realized that instead of whittling she was leaning on him.
She looked at the clock; almost midnight and not much use to go to bed, for soon she would be awakened by Clovis’s homecoming. No matter how he tiptoed she always came wide awake, but worse, were the nights when he didn’t get home on time. She would awaken, frightened, knowing he hadn’t come, but rushing to the kitchen in her half-sleep, hoping to find him there. She would stand and watch the alley through the darkened kitchen door, her mind jumping from traffic accident to fight, for lately in the electioneering for and against the strike vote there’d been several fights between the factions.
Tonight she watched the red light from a steel pour, heard many empty streetcars going home, and had fallen into a shivery, restless pacing from kitchen door to living-room door before he came. He was unhurt, and somewhat angered by her sleepless, worrying ways as he explained that he had had car trouble. She answered nothing to that; did not even point out that used to be he had ever bragged he never had car trouble; he’d always been able to see trouble coming and keep a car running, even the oldest of his trucks. Maybe he’d had a flat tire; but she did not ask. She tried instead to put her mind on the flowers; maybe she should have cut a great bouquet tonight; it had seemed so cold.
However, it was not until three evenings later that she went out to cut the flowers in the cold still twilight. She was bent above the asters searching out the finest buds when she stopped, knife uplifted; a gurgling, inhuman scream, the kind the radio made when an Indian died, had come from the Meanwell kitchen door. She whirled to see Wheateye race through her door and down her walk, then spring, monkey-like, from garbage-can top to coalshed roof. She held a large bunch of purple grapes, and in spite of chewing and swallowing she began to scream again while she went round and round on the coalhouse roof in the jigging, bouncing step the alley children used when they played Indian war dance; her hands were ever clapping at her mouth, but Gertie, listening, frowned. The words, though gargled and broken with the grapes she chewed and swallowed, were plainly not the usual Indian words heard on the radio.
Gertie went closer to the small thin figure that in the red-tinged half-darkness looked like some poorly sawed jumping-jack doll dressed in out-grown clothing so that it seemed all skinny legs and arms, for since there was so little money coming in, Sophronie’s children, like Gertie’s, wore their good clothing only to school. But Wheateye’s cry was not of nake
dness nor hunger, but joyful; and when Wheateye’s brothers and other children took it up, Gertie understood the words: “Old man Flint is dead—dead—dead. Old man Flint is dead—dead—dead. Globba—lobba—lobba. Old man Flint is dead, dead, dead; globba, lobba, lob.”
Whit, who had been shifting his car wheels in the parking lot, came running, a wrench in his hand, asking, joyfully, unbelievingly, “Honest?”
And when Sophronie called from her stoop, “Yeah, it come over th radio; sudden up at his fall home,” the joy in even her forever troubled tiptoeing voice was reflected in his own as he stood smiling, looking about him, but unable to say anything but, “Well, I’ll swan,” followed by a low whistle of exultation.
There was a great calling back and forth across the alley, some wanting to know if the news were indeed true, with others giving joyful confirmation. Mr. Daly, listening to the radio, had heard it all, Mrs. Daly reported, walking down the alley, speaking loudly above the chanting of the children. “He hadda bishop by him when he died. Cunyu’magine, a bishop fudu last rites? They was vacationing tugedder.” And some of Mrs. Daly’s old self came back as she pondered on the future of old man Flint; with all the money he had and a bishop by him when he died, he wouldn’t have to spend hardly any time at all in purgatory. She hoped she could go to the funeral; if she could get a baby sitter she was certain she could get into the cathedral; Mr. Daly knew so many cops. There would be bishops at the funeral mass, and maybe even a cardinal. Just think of it, and she shook her head in wonder. Democracy did it, for Mr. Flint had been an immigrant boy who’d used a pick and shovel to dig out railroad beds.
Gertie offered to mind the children, and almost a week later, when the city had paid full tribute to Mr. Flint with lowered flags, throngs filing past the dead, the papers each outdoing the other with pictures of his many homes, his many children, his collection of ruffled petunias on which he had spent more than a hundred thousand dollars and said to be the finest in the world, his many grandchildren, and his old, bejeweled wife, who had not been with him when he died; after all this Mrs. Daly went to the funeral. She came home disappointed. There had been no end of bishops and priests, and cops directing traffic, but still the funeral was not so fine as Short Joe Menazzi’s. Oh Gertie, of course, hadn’t been in Detroit in the days of Short Joe Menazzi; he was king of the rum runners all through prohibition; but somebody—a cop would never have been so mean—shot him when he came out of one of his banks. Yes, he’d bought a lot of banks, and he’d been a fine man, openhanded with cops and the Church and a bitter, bitter enemy of communism.