The Dollmaker

  Clovis stuck his head around the door. “Don’t pay no attention to that fool woman,” he said, “shooten her lip like she owned the world—big-headed cause she’s saved some money. Close tu ten thousand dollars they’ve saved …” He stopped, blinking at the sum.

  She tried to get him back to bed, but he declared he felt better and wanted more coffee, which he drank carefully with a teaspoon from the unhurt side of his face. He stayed in the room, but was restless, listening to the sounds of the alley through the window which she had opened an inch or so at his request. He wished some of the men would come visiting, and asked so many times and so wistfully if the mail had come that at last she told him: “They won’t be none no how. I jist answered Mom’s last letter two, three days ago, an yer mom, she hardly ever writes.”

  He wondered on the ones back home, staring at the ceiling, shaking his head at times, as if by much talking, much thinking, much moving around, he could forget the man who’d tried to kill him. His brother Jesse and others of the soldiers were coming home, and Clovis wished he could see them, wished he could go fishing. At last he said, trying hard to sound as if it didn’t matter: “I bet coal haulen’s gitten good. It allus does along about now; an with no gas rationen an th mines able to git stuff to work with, I could do good—real good.”

  “But you wouldn’t have no truck, Clovis.”

  “Law, I was jist thinken. Cain’t a body think about how nice it ud be if’n you’d ha bought that Tipton Place an I’d a cleared out a this town soon as V-J Day come an put my car in on a pretty good truck. Then I’d a come rollen home in it—had a good truck might nigh paid fer by now—an you …”

  She couldn’t listen any more. Mumbling something about food left cooking, she hurried away and shut the door behind her. She stood by the kitchen door and watched the thin gray rain and wished for some excuse to take her walking through it, up and down the alleys, up and down, and wear all thought away. She ought to work on dolls. She’d have to make dolls, and sell them too. This year Enoch went all day to school.

  She reached for the pieces of pattern, put carefully away on a shelf, but her hand dropped and she turned swiftly into the living room. She couldn’t work on dolls, not now; they matched Mrs. Miller’s voice and her own words, the lie she had told Amos about his father’s sickness, the lies she had told the voice on the phone, the sneaking, the hiding, the fear.

  She felt clean working on the block of wood. The boy weeping on the table, the man dragged away in the dark, the wonder of how they would manage while Clovis was laid up, memories of the Tipton Place in the rain before the poplar leaves were gone, faded as she worked on a fold of the cloth, low down below the hand. By the time school was out in the afternoon, she was calm enough to say to Enoch, “I’ll buy er make ye some kind a Hallowe’en outfit somehow.” Enoch had been worried. The other kids had big plans for Hallowe’en.

  She was getting supper and Enoch was listening to the radio when Clovis pounded on the kitchen wall. She hurried in to find him crouched below the window, listening; his eagerness to hear, his fear of being seen like two fists knocking him in different directions. “Be still, real still,” he whispered, angry at the noise she made opening and closing the door. “Mebbe I’ll hear it again.”

  She listened and heard faintly down the alley a cry she’d often heard, “Fresh fruita, vegetable—homa-grown tomato-oes.”

  “Sounds jist like him,” Clovis whispered, “jist like that bastard—almost,” he added, disappointed when the cry came again. “I meant fer you to run out an look—but it ain’t th same.”

  “You’ll drive yerself crazy,” she said. “It ain’t nobody but Joe th vegetable man—mebbe one a his boys, er his nephew.”

  “They sound a heap alike,” he said, still crouching as he came back to the bed. There was a bead of perspiration on his upper lip; she guessed the aspirin had done that, and started to ask him how he felt, but the vegetable cry came again, and he lay there whispering curses she did not want to hear.

  Two mornings more she dialed numbers, repeated numbers into the phone. After that there was no need, for Flint Plant Number Ten was closed. The strike vote had passed; by law the men should have worked a few days longer, but Plant Four, that made small parts for the parts assemblies in Number Ten, went out on a wildcat, and since a strike would stop everything soon anyway, Flint management closed all plants.

  Sophronie sighed when she heard the strike vote news. What was the good of striking? she said; if the men got more wages, better hours, things would only go higher; a body couldn’t win. Whit was proud of the vote to strike, though he bemoaned the old days when a strike was a strike and a man had to fight scabs, city policemen, and company guards; now a man wasn’t allowed even to hang around the token picket lines, unless it was his turn to walk. This strike, though, might be long, real long, he said; and even if a striker couldn’t get the unemployment compensation there was relief—relief if a man were able-bodied enough to work at street cleaning or shoveling snow. He could, maybe, make enough to keep the rent paid; a factory hand could usually get grub enough together on credit to keep from starving, but not rent, especially in these government projects where there was never any fooling around about evictions.

  THIRTY-SIX

  CLOVIS WAS OVER THE worst of his wounds by the time the strike vote passed, but the scars and bruises lingered and kept him in the house, so that it was Whit who brought his last pay check. Though his wounds had cost him only one day’s work in that pay week, walkouts and work stoppages had made him lose so many hours the check was for only $37.23. Gertie figured that after the November rent was paid, and rent-paying day was less than two weeks away, there would be almost three dollars left.

  She would think of all the payments falling due and all their needs against the winter, and the next minute try to silence her fears by reminding herself how lucky they were—compared to the Meanwells and others. They had a ton of coal paid for; Clovis was getting well without a doctor; their credit was good at Zedke’s with the bill down almost to nothing when the strike started. She had always paid the milk bill on time, and credit for milk should come without trouble. True, the children would need more clothes before long, but what they had were paid for, not bought on time like the Meanwell clothes. And anyway, she had money, over and above the last pay check; she had counted it after the last telephone call—$34.86. Clytie would make a little money now and then from baby sitting, and Enoch was always getting a nickel here and a dime there from running errands.

  Still, in spite of all the brave talk to herself of her riches, she worked frantically on dolls, thought frantically for some combination of colors she had not yet tried. She decided that one all solid red with a white face and yellow hair might sell; she’d never tried that combination, somehow hating the yellow and red together. She carried the pieces before they were dried and strung in to Clovis for him to see, but he only glanced at the new combination of colors with absent-minded eyes.

  His eyes were often like that now, unworried by the payments falling due, blind seemed like to everything except his memories of the man who’d tried to kill him—a slight, youngish-seeming man with a torn left ear and a bruised left eye, and with a voice and an accent that Clovis would know in a million if he could only hear them again.

  With no pain of wounds to distract him, no work to use up either his mind or body, Clovis let the little man grow until he was big, bigger than all the rest of the world. When Whit or Miller or the tool-and-die man dropped by, his first questions were not of the strike or the chances of his picking up an odd job, but: “Have ye seen anybody? Have ye heared enything?” And it seemed to Gertie that many men, all close friends of Whit and Miller, were looking.

  It was, however, the voices of the many fruit peddlers, who now tried frantically to sell the home-grown peaches and other produce that could not be kept overlong after frost, that threw Clovis into his most frenzied fits of anger. Many times, after crouching below his window to l
isten, he had pounded on the wall for her. Reluctantly she had gone and listened to his whispered commands to go look at the seller of fruit. “It sounds so much like him,” he’d say.

  Sometimes she would go hesitantly into the alley, and stand, twisting her apron, searching the face of some dark-faced peddler who in his language, and looks, too, seemed kin of Joe. More often she argued. “These peddlers,” she would say, “mebbe they do sound like th man that hurt ye—they’ve got a right to; most a them come frum th same little place acrost th waters, I’ve heared—but that don’t mean nothen. To people up here we’d sound jist like th Cramers back home; but we’re all different, mighty different; an Joe an his boys an that nephew, mebbe they do sound like that man; but they’re good hard-worken people.”

  He would be silent; listen sometimes; maybe even look at her, but his glance on her was that of the wise for the stupid. Enoch, who with no bidding was always running to scan the face of some foreign sounding peddler, would, like his father, keep silent, but the “Oh, yeah?” was plain in his eyes.

  Sometimes it seemed to Gertie that even Clytie watched and hunted. She was certain Mrs. Miller was suspicious of all Sicilian fruit peddlers, even Joe, with whom the Millers had never used to trade, for both had hated the “foreign-talken swindlers.” But now Mrs. Miller was always running to buy a bit of fruit from every passing truck.

  Gertie, out one afternoon to buy a dime’s worth of the cheap overripe peaches from Joe, found Mrs. Miller looking over and around the heaped-up, open-sided truck as if she expected to find something more than fruits and vegetables. However, in spite of the busy season, there was no one with Joe but his latest “nephew,” a small child, not much bigger than Amos, whom Gertie had first seen on the truck some time during the summer. Mrs. Miller considered the little one, and asked: “Ain’t they no Catholic school today? Is that why he ain’t in school?” Joe acted as if he had not heard, but Mrs. Miller insisted: “Where’s your nephew, Joe? You need a helper.”

  Joe jerked his shoulder toward the child, and the child, as if aware of being watched, turned and smiled shyly at Gertie. She tried to return the smile, then swiftly began to consider the cheap home-grown potatoes. The child’s eyes were black as Callie Lou’s, and something in his timid glance from under the long dark lashes made her think of Cassie. He could speak no English, so there was about him, too, a lostness that had been Cassie’s after she had done away with Callie Lou.

  Gertie, as usual, was the last to buy the bruised and overripe peaches, but Mrs. Miller lingered, and watched Joe drive away, her eyes narrowed and suspicious. “‘S’funny thing,” she said, whispering, glancing about to make certain no one but Gertie heard, “th way them dagoes gits rich so quick.”

  “Rich?” Gertie asked. “They work awful hard fer real rich people.”

  “Yeah? Didn’t yu see his nephew—must a been five er six weeks ago—he come driven down th alley, slow, then stopped by Max’s place. He didn’t git out a th car, one a them big ’42 Olds—th kind you cain’t git without black market an a big down payment. He set there in that car, an looked at Max’s door, hopen she’d see him. He didn’t know, I recken, she’d already cleared out, an I kept a wishen that big Polock ud see an come out an knock his head in. But he never did. Now, Buckandy an me, an a heap a th others, we’d like to know how yu can make money on a fruit truck enough to buy a car like that.”

  “I guess he puts ever cent he can scrape together on it,” Gertie said, shivering, hurrying up her steps, for a cold wind came out of the north, promising thick ice and a heavy frost if it stilled through the night.

  Next morning she stared a long time at the frost, like a thin snow on the coalhouse roof; she thought of outgrown children’s boots, ragged, too short coats, and sleazy snowpants, already twice mended. She built a fire in the heating stove, the house was so cold, remembering only after she had poured on better than half a bucket of coal that she should have done as Mrs. Daly did when her coal was low—kept the oven going full blast. But a body had to be careful and stay close to the kitchen door in case somebody from the office came snooping—it was against the rules to use gas for anything but cooking. But it was like Mrs. Daly said; a person could always forget to turn the oven off after making toast or something—and a ton of coal wouldn’t last forever.

  The weak sun in the smoky sky had hardly touched the frost by the time the milkman came, and thinking on the winter ahead Gertie found it a little easier to ask for credit. Still, she was so sweaty-handed and flushed up as she stumbled over the words, that the milkman, forever hurrying, paused long enough to ask, “Yu trying tu ask fu credit, lady?”

  She nodded, hanging on his answer, and when he gave her none, she said: “Make it jist four quarts ever other day, stid uv th six I’ve been gitten. My man’s been sick, an now th strike—it’s come.”

  He looked disgusted as he wrote her new order in his little book. “If it’s Flint, it oughta come sooner,” he said, half accusingly, as if he read her doubts, then added words she had already heard from many: “It’s gonna be a long un—butcha’ull pull through. I been on some tough uns muself—teamsters.”

  He gave her courage to look at the shelves and into the little cupboard at the end of the sink. Since Clovis had got hurt she’d been buying as little as she could; now everything was running out: no more than enough flour for a batch of biscuit, coffee low—she’d have to mix in even less new with the old grounds—the last cake of soap half gone, a bit of sugar, a dust of meal, and that was all. She ought to buy more meal; mush for breakfast instead of oats would be cheaper.

  She pondered above an empty oats box; all groceries would have to come from Zadkiewicz on credit. How long would he give so much credit? Maybe it would be better to do as Sophronie did: buy stuff on credit from different people. Sophronie had credit with the bakeryman, Vegetable Joe, the milkman, and a clothing store in Hamtramck. She had bought so little from the bakery man, she could only ask credit of Joe; the bill would get so big at Zedke’s he might cut them off before the strike was over.

  She mustn’t worry so, she told herself as she got the noon meal. As soon as the scars on Clovis healed a little more, he’d get some kind of job, tinkering, maybe, like back home. She was ashamed when meal time came. The food was worse than they’d ever had back home, even late in the winter after a poor crop year: boiled beans scantily seasoned with a little bacon grease, sliced overripe tomatoes, and peaches, raw, because cooked ones needed sugar. However, the children ate it with no comment; and Clovis, who’d always quarreled if she seemed the least bit stingy about food, ate the meatless beans without a word.

  She could have fed him sawdust just as well, she thought, taking his dishes away, for he still wouldn’t risk Amos’s questions and maybe his talk in the alley about his dad’s scars, but continued to eat in his room, feeding mostly on anger. Today, as always, he’d asked Enoch the minute he got home from school, “See anybody?”

  Enoch had shaken his head, weary of the hunting, tired of his father’s anger. “Aw, Pop, fergit it. Nobody can’t never find him.” He had, then, repeated Whit: “He didn’t have nothen agin yu nohow.”

  There was little but beans and bread and scanty milk until the next night at supper when she served fried potatoes, using the last of the potatoes, the last of the lard. Lard would have to come from Zedke’s on credit, but more potatoes she would get from Joe—or at least she would try to get credit from Joe. He came through twice a week, and tomorrow was his day.

  All afternoon, next day, she listened for his calling while she sat by the kitchen table and drew around patterns laid on the grain-bin maple for another batch of dolls. Amos was playing outside so that Clovis enjoyed the freedom of the whole place, and lingered in the kitchen waiting for her to finish, for he had caught up with her in the sawing. It was almost school letting out time before she heard Joe, still two alleys away. Her hands grew sweaty over the pencil, and her mind went leaping back and forth for easy credit-asking words, but Clov
is never noticed for listening to the sound of Joe’s voice. As always he ran to the window, peeping, cursing, repeating, “Sounds a heap like him.”

  Gertie forced herself to work on until the truck had stopped, then waited by her gate until the other women had finished; she wanted to be alone with Joe when she asked for credit. She saw that he had put up his truck sides; winter it was when Joe boxed in his truck and started his little charcoal stove to keep the produce from freezing. It was curious, she thought idly, that he did all that today when the weather, though cloudy, had warmed up since the hard-freezing frosts had browned even her bit of grass.