Even the weather had seemed to consider the burial of old man Flint; the cold fall rain that had threatened all day never started in earnest until even Mrs. Daly had her children home from Gertie’s. The sooty rain fell on the frost-blackened flowers, and Gertie watched it with a heavy heart—the beginning of winter. The radio ground in her head, funny tonight with a drunk man, then above it Enoch squealed with laughter and cried: “Lookee, Clytie, didja see this—th old woman with a mule? Boy is she haven herself a time!”
Gertie, thinking of Aunt Kate driving a sled because all her sons had been taken for the war, turned and looked over Enoch’s shoulder. She saw a woman, not so old as Aunt Kate, barefooted and sunbonneted, driving a raw-boned mule fastened to a homemade sled. They were going to town, and the woman on the way changed her bonnet for a silly looking hat with a big bird and a little long-stemmed flower; the old mule looked round and bucked and knocked down the woman.
Gertie knew, even as her palm shot out, it wasn’t Enoch she wanted to slap; he was a good boy—everybody said he was good. Her palm came against his cheek, but not too hard; and he, used now to the falls and blows in the alley, was more angry and startled than hurt, yelling at her, “Mom, cain’t a guy laugh at a funny picture?”
“It made me think a yer Granma Kate,” she said. She wanted to apologize for the slap, but was unable to make her voice kind as she said. “It wasn’t funny.”
She strode to the block of wood, knife open in her hand. The radio was talking by it, something about the strike vote coming up at the Flint plants in three more days. She retreated to her bedroom. She ought to work on the dolls, but she couldn’t, not tonight; she couldn’t bear the eternal sameness of the ugly things. They needed the money, but she’d wash, she’d iron, she’d do anything.
She closed the bedroom door and stood with her back against it so that the forever curious, solicitous Clytie could not come in. At last she put a chair against the door, then knelt upon the bed, her face close to the window; when she held her face so and listened hard, she could faintly hear the rain against the glass. If she could hear it on a roof—fall rain on the roof shingles of a barn when the animals were fed and the fodder and hay still smelled of summer—and Dock to drive. Where was Dock? He had been so kind; he wasn’t broke to saddle good when Amos took sick, but seemed like he had understood and let her ride him. To have Dock in a barn, even a rented barn, and around her food for the winter, and then be able to stand in the barn hall and listen to the rain while she held the night’s milk … and above her on the hill would be the house with her children, all her children, safe. To live that way, without debts, unions, boys in cars, foremen, traffic; to be free from the fears, forever at her back—How long would Clovis work tonight, next week? Would the strike vote pass? What if he got sick? Doctors here, she’d heard it said, wouldn’t come unless they knew they’d get the money.
She realized tears were falling on her twisting hands. She had never cried for Cassie, but now she cried for a mule, a mule that wouldn’t recollect her, but with him she had been so free, so unafraid.
The children went at last to bed, the radio was still, and Gertie worked on the block of wood. Tonight she chose again the cupped hand; in her haste to be finished with the general shape and bring out the empty one above it she had finished only the upcurving backs and tips of the fingers, so that the hand seemed overfull with riches heaped above the fingertips and slipping down between the fingers.
She worked a long while dividing fingers from the thing they held. She grew tired, but still she knelt, working. The knife stopped at times over the ball of the bent thumb; the ball must be flattish, hardly rounded at all, for the hand had done much work, maybe worked all its life for the thing it held, and now she took it away. What did the hand hold, heaped so high, so full it slipped between the fingers? Sandy earth from her father’s river-bottom fields? She dreamed of the coolness and fog by the river and the sound of the shoals and the rustle of corn, ready for cutting; and while she dreamed one finished finger of the hand tapped on the window behind her. Her head lifted; no, the tapping was a maple bough like that by the doctor’s window; it kept tapping and tapping, but mixed in with the rain as it was, she could hardly hear it.
She realized the knife was drooping in her hand, and that she was drowsing, kneeling by the wood. She rubbed her eyes; there was no maple bough; the window was, as always at night, covered by the pale blind; the rain was hard tonight, tapping so loudly. She got slowly to her feet, frowning over the stiffness of her knees. She forgot her knees and turned swiftly toward the window as the tapping came again, and she knew it wasn’t rain.
She reached for the doorknob, but hesitated as she remembered the warnings of Clytie and Clovis and the neighbors: never, never open the door at night to a strange knocking—crazy men, drunk men, thieves, and murderers. She tiptoed to the window at the end of the sofa, and lifted the shade enough to get her head under it. She dropped it again behind her, and when her eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light she saw the rain washing down the storm window glass, faintly pinkish in the steel-mill light, dull now, as if no furnace were ready for a pour.
The tapping was repeated, and she jerked her head back in surprise, for, close as she had been, she had seen nothing. The sound came again; she pressed her face against the glass, and looking down she saw a long thin hand, a man’s hand, but seemingly all alone, with no man behind it as it rose out of the darkness by the house wall and tapped her window again.
Fear twitched her face, but she did not move; she at last made out the dark blurred shape of a man crouched close against the house like one who must hide even when there is no place to hide. She hesitated, then at last tapped softly on the glass; a man’s face rose swiftly out of the shadow, but stopped when it had come just high enough to let her see it through the glass. She drew back, staring; rain fell on the uplifted face, but not enough to wash away completely the smear of blood on one cheek. She stared a moment in fear and wonder before she realized it was the tool-and-die man; his lips moved, made words without speaking while his head jerked sidewise, then frontward; she understood that she must turn out the light and open the door.
She jerked the light string, and with her throat choking, her breath a hard thing hurting her chest, she moved a chair, pulled back the locked thumb latch, and opened the door slowly, with no creaking, and then in the same cautious way opened the storm door. No one was there. She went out onto the top step and looked about her, unconscious that rain from the unguttered eaves was splattering on her head.
She saw, at last, what looked to be a thicker blot of irregular darkness moving out of the parking lot at the end past Victor’s unit. She hurried toward it, hugging the wall, crouching in the shadow as the tool-and-die man had done. She was past Victor’s windows when in the murky light she saw enough to know that the moving darkness was a huddle of man shapes, hurrying now by Victor’s fence. They came on so strangely, hurrying but staggering like drunken men, that she hesitated, half afraid; but her fear for Clovis was greater, and she went on, hurrying, but crouching even lower, for here the street light two alleys away made the gloom less thick. A few steps further, and she understood it was only three men walking, staggering because they carried another man.
She sprang forward, peered into the faces of the three walking, and not finding Clovis, looked down to the one carried. She didn’t need to see the face; the smudged shape was enough. She gave a whispered, terrified, “Oh,” and bent lower, searching for his face. She found it, a black, featureless mask in the dim light. Why so black? She sniffed, and knew without touching him that his face was covered with blood.
She must have made another sound, for the tool-and-die man gave a whispered, “Sh-h.” He was close against the house wall, holding up one shoulder while a slight thin shape she did not recognize held the other shoulder, and Whit came behind with the feet; all three moved clumsily, stumbling at times and bumping against the wall in their haste. Gertie caught the s
agging waist, and walked a step or so, stooping, hurrying like the men. The fresh blood smell brought back Cassie: she should have run faster, much faster—a few minutes sooner to the hospital … Hospital—that was where Clovis ought to be going—go now, and it wouldn’t be too late, like for Cassie.
She stopped so suddenly that, holding him as she was, the men staggered, “We’ve got tu git him to a hospital,” she said, forgetting to whisper.
“Keep moving,” the tool-and-die man begged, pulling on Clovis while she held back. “He’s not bad hurt,” he whispered.
It could not have been more than five minutes from the time she heard the tapping until they had him through the door and on the cot in the living room. But to Gertie it seemed hours before she could bend above him, hear his breathing, a mumbled groan, and then the thickly spoken words, “What th heck?”
“Yu passed out ’fore we got tu th car,” Whit whispered, his voice more disgusted than sympathetic; then, as Gertie jerked on the light, he was worried, asking, “Ain’tcha got a little lamp a some kind? People’ull notice this.”
Gertie did not answer; she was looking at Clovis, or at what little of his face she could see for the blood. She was too dazed to help Whit, grabbing newspapers now, commanding, “Git somethen under him; yu don’t want blood all over.”
Whit and the tool-and-die man shoved the papers under his bloody head, and by him on the floor, for his eyes were bulging, his stomach writhing like one who had to vomit. He did, mostly blood, it looked to Gertie, and the tool-and-die man, seeing her frightened glance, explained: “They got him in u jaw. He’s swallered blood’s all. Some wet cloths an a towel might help.”
She roused from her stupor of terror and got water and towels and washed his face and neck and hands while the tool-and-die man took off his shirt and looked for body blows. There was none, and some of the trembling went from Gertie’s legs when she saw that though there was much blood, his wounds seemed no worse than Henley had used to get in some drunken jamboree of fist fighting back home. He was lucky in a way, for a little more and he would have lost an eye; there was a deep, though short, gash just above his left eyebrow.
One jaw was cut and bruised inside as well as out, and that was why he kept spitting blood, or maybe he had a tooth loose or even lost. She wanted to ask him, but didn’t. His jaw hurt him more and more, stiffening so that he spoke with difficulty. He lay wracked with nausea from his own blood, and stared at the ceiling, his good eye blazing, the one under the cut blackening up and swelling shut but blazing still, while through his clenched teeth came terrible whispered oaths such as she had never heard from him, for he had joined the church before they married.
“Don’t take it so hard,” Whit said, gathering up the dirtied newspapers. “It wasn’t nothen personal.”
Clovis twisted his head, the terrible anger like a blindness in his eyes. “I ain’t to say hurt. It’s th blood, th damned, damned blood, an th fool I was.”
He vomited again. Whit spread more papers, laughing a little like one who has come from a gay and pleasantly remembered party. He tried again to soothe Clovis, reminding him that he could have been blinded or had his skull crushed. “It was lead pipe,” he said, considering the cut on the forehead, “endwise, but he never got a good swing.” And over the jaw he shook his head; a poor swing too, for the jaw was not so much as fractured, bruised some, but so little he couldn’t tell if the wound came from a poor swipe with a tire chain end, or maybe nothing more than a ring on the bare fist of a short-reached fighter.
Clovis flopped down again. He was silent, the wounded eye almost closed now, his rapidly swelling jaw making speech more and more difficult, but the one good eye kept swinging about the room, saying things that Gertie had never thought could be in Clovis. “Don’t take it so hard,” Whit repeated, wiping blood from his shoes. “We was all lucky; we could all git away on our legs. That’s more’n they could do.”
“I wonder if,” the stranger said, and stopped when they all turned and looked at him. Gertie saw that he was young enough almost to be the son of any of the other three. His face, though unbloodied, was deathly pale, and his dark brown eyes, wide like a child’s eyes, were neither angry nor frightened; they were dead, glittering, maybe a little puzzled. Still, they were familiar; she remembered at last the blue eyes of the young soldier who had wondered about hunting and who had seemed to belong to the man with the star. These eyes, like the blue ones, saw things behind them, the way she saw Callie Lou and smelled the train grease in the stillness and the dark. It wasn’t dark and it wasn’t still, but this child saw them now.
He looked at Whit, licked his lips, opened his mouth, and stood an instant so. “I wonder,” he began again, his voice struggling like his glance, “if that one you hit—well, he was so still—and when they dragged him off he was like the ones I used to see—you know, in th war.”
He began to shiver. Whit’s eyes on him were angry and disgusted. “Sure, it’s like th war. I got in some good licks with mu jack handle, an—”
The tool-and-die man spoke quickly. “Aw, kid, nobody’s gonna die that easy.”
“Sure,” Whit agreed, “right onu back a th head like that, they pass out easy.”
The boy’s eyes were still accusing. “But you hit more than once—I thought; you kept on and on after he fell. I can—could—hear it.”
The tool-and-die man tried to smile. “Aw, kid, you’re imagining things. If you’d stayed in th car like we said, we’d have their number now an—butcha didn’t; that’s that. But hell, no matter what happened, they ain’t no rules fer stuff like this. It ain’t high-school basketball.”
Clovis rocked his head from side to side, in anger and disgust. “Th kid done as good as me. He was supposed tu watch—I was supposed tu fight. I didn’t.” Anger and the pain of speaking made him fall again into a whispered curse.
“Butcha done good, real good, for th first time,” Whit said.
“But I didn’t have no sense,” Clovis said, swinging his feet to the floor as he attempted to sit up. “I gotta pretty good look at th kid comen at me—it wasn’t so dark but what I could tell he was scrawny—not to my shoulder.” He stopped to spit blood, and went on, his good eye squinched against the pain of speaking: “I thought to myself, ‘That kid an them three others is jist aimen to skeer Bender; all four a them wouldn’t jump on one lone man.’ Then he swung at me ’fore I could make myself swing on him with that big wrench—him a little guy, mebbe jist a kid.”
“But frum what I seen, yu didn’t stand still fer him,” Whit said.
Clovis dropped his weary head into his hands. “Naw, but somehow that wrench got away frum me; the next thing I knowed I was a comen down on him with my hands an my teeth like when I was young, fighten back home. I recollect a thinken, ‘If I cain’t kill him, I’ll mark him up good.’ So’s I gouged at his eye an chewed on his yer. I’d know him now in a million, an I’ll allus recollect th way he sounded—damned dago.”
“Sicilian,” the tool-and-die man corrected with a quick silencing look at Clovis, and a troubled glance toward the young one who stood, his eyes on Clovis without seeming to see him.
“Aw, don’t take it to heart so,” Whit said. “That kid that gotcha, he didn’t have nothen agin you; he hadda chance to make a fast buck’s all. Somebody hired him; mebbe th same feller smuggled him into th country, fer all we know. If he gits killed, whatsa difference? He didn’t live here inu first place; cops cain’t hunt a feller that never lived—an enyhow Bender’s still safe.”
The tool-and-die man’s sigh came loudly in the silence, and he looked old, older than Whit. “That’s what hurts,” he said. “Yu know we could a done away with all four a them after Bender, an never hurt th real one—th one that hired em—saved him money. I guess he pays for the beatings, not the tryings.”
“A lot a good union men don’t wanta strike an hate Bender,” the young one said.
The other three turned as one and looked at him, their eyes accus
ing. “Boy, if you’re hinten at what I think you are, you’re plum crazy,” Whit said, angry, mean.
“You’re tired, kid,” the tool-and-die man said, his voice kind. “Somebody inu company hired these thugs; th war’s over; they don’t mind a little labor trouble. They ain’t in any hurry for final assembly, but they don’t wanta full-scale strike now; they’d like to git a lotta cars ready for final assembly—but sell um when OPA goes off.”
“An recollect th war’s over, they’re out to bust th unions—if they can,” Whit said, his voice low, but like a battle cry.
Gertie folded another newspaper, dirtied with blood from Clovis; she straightened, thinking of Meg’s man in Harlan, the redheaded woman in the station, Mrs. Miller, and now this. “But a body’s got a right to be free. They oughtn’t to have to belong tu nothen, not even a union.”
There was a moment’s silence; the words had come almost without her knowing, an over-flowed weariness with the dues, the numbers, the badges, the meetings, the walkouts, the strike talk, and now blood.
“Aw, Gert,” Clovis said at last, ashamed of her, “you don’t know what you’re a sayen. Shut up.”