All-Bright Court (4 page)

“The hunt? What hunt? Half the eggs out in the middle of the floor. What I look like, going on a hunt?”

“A father,” Mary Kate said. “You don't never want to do these little things . . . I'm going up to bed,” she said. She rose slowly from her chair and ascended the stairs.

He did not go after her, not then. He would let her be alone, let her be right.

She
was
right, but he was trying to be a man the best way he knew how. It was just like a woman to make such a fuss over eggs. Samuel provided, brought his whole check to her. He protected her too, with silence.

If he had a problem, he did not bring it home to her. What good would that do? Whatever problem he had, he held inside—even when he worried about a strike. For over a month there had been talk of a strike. Samuel had gone to Dulski's to hear what the talk was.

“This is how it's gonna be,” a man with a mouthful of meat loaf yelled. “Strike!”

“We're going to bring the whole goddamn country to its knees, just like we done before.”

“There won't be no strike. There's still over a month left before the contract runs out.”

“That's nothing. I'll vote for a strike when the time comes.”

“Jesus Christ, Dulski, watch that stove. It's flaming up there. When was the last time you cleaned it?”

“Who are you, my wife? I know what I'm doing over here.”

“Strike!” someone yelled.

“Well, I'm not putting no fires out today. You're going to be on your own if that greaseball goes up.”

“Strike!” Dulski screamed, branches of flames sprouting from the stove.

“Management won't jack us off.”

“Union busting, that's what they're up to.”

“Strike!” the man with the meat loaf in his mouth yelled. “We'll never be beat.”

“Right!”

“Right, Taylor?” a man asked Samuel. It was a man who worked at one of the coke ovens. He had eight fingers.

“Right,” Samuel said. He heard his own voice, the excitement it contained. It was a voice that had conviction, a voice that believed what it said. It would rise with thousands of others in the brittle air at the lakefront. But it was also the voice of a man who was thinking how easy it would be to fly with the wind, to tuck his head and let the wind carry him south.

The men began chanting, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”

They were hypnotizing themselves, working themselves into a trance that would send them traveling back through time. They could do it like they did back in '59. One hundred and sixteen days they had held firm.

Samuel was drinking coffee and he finished quickly. It burned his mouth, and he wanted to get out, to get away from these men before his mouth said more unbelievable words. He did not want a strike, not now, not with Mary Kate having another baby. The coffee was already paid for. He had slapped down a quarter on the counter when Dulski brought the coffee to him. Now he thought of picking it up. While the men were chanting, walking through time, he could pick it up and slide it into his jacket pocket. But he did not take it. Instead, he got up from his stool and left.

Samuel walked through the snow-filled streets toward home. Mary Kate had dinner waiting for him. Pig tails. He could smell them before he opened the door, the briny smell of the vinegar she seasoned them with. He had asked her to cook them, but though he was hungry, he couldn't eat. Samuel lied. “I'm too tired to eat. I'll eat later,” he said. But he didn't. He had showered at the company's Welfare Building before he left work, so he went to bed. His stomach filled with silence. If he told Mary Kate about the possibility of a strike, he would cry. He would fall into her lap and cry like a baby. What kind of man would she think he was? As it was, he was thinking that he would not be able to support her and Mikey through a prolonged strike.

 

When it was just him, back in '59 before Mary Kate came up, he went hungry. Even with money in the bank, with money in his pocket, he did not have enough to eat because he was saving for her to come north. He was living in a boarding house on Steelawanna then, and he had been naïve. He had never been in a strike before, and when it dragged through the early weeks, he did not worry. An event like this seemed to be contained within biblical dimensions. Forty days and forty nights. He enjoyed the time off, using it to sleep, write letters to Mary Kate, go to union meetings.

There was some kind of meeting nearly every night. The men met to celebrate their greatness. They had closed down all of the big plants, U.S. Steel, Republic, Wheeling, Allegheny. Five hundred thousand steelworkers were idle. The men had not walked out over money. All they were asking for was a seven-cent-an-hour raise over three years. They walked out over working conditions and management's claim that the union was featherbedding.

At one of the meetings a representative of local 2603 spoke. “Can you beat that? Featherbedding. We're out here working in a plant over sixty years old, and the bastards in management say we aren't efficient as the workers in plants in the Midwest. That's bullshit. It's the plants that aren't efficient. It's not us. We work like dogs,” the union man yelled. “They compare our output to the output of our brothers working in plants half the age of the dinosaur we work in. They're trying to divide us. Divide and conquer. Not us. They won't divide us!”

The men jumped to their feet and applauded. Samuel jumped up with them.

The union man waved them back in their seats. His face was red, his shirt wet. “Thirty-six thousand,” he said. “That's how many visits were made to the clinic last year. Thirty-six fucking thousand injuries to men in our locals, the two thousand six hundred and one, the two, the three. I don't have to tell you who you are. You had the sprained backs, the broken arms, the infected lungs, the burns. You heard of our brother in Pittsburgh, burned to death when his cherry picker fell into the candy kitchen. He was doing his job, just lifting off the lid when the whole thing fell in. That should have never happened. Those bastards in management need to buy heavier cranes, because it was the weight of the lid that dragged him in. That kind of accident can happen in Lackawanna or Buffalo. Thirty fucking six thousand in four fucking plants. And these bastards are going to sit back and tell us we got too many men working in the plants.

“The motherfuckers are too cheap to update the equipment. Too cheap. They're making money on our broken backs, and the only reason they say we're featherbedding is that they want to make even more by having less of us in the plants. They're trying to bust the unions. If we give in, if we fall apart, we can bend over right here tonight and kiss our asses goodbye.”

Another roar rose in the hall, a roll of thunder. The men did not believe the charges of featherbedding, but they were worried about what would happen if their numbers were cut. They were the ones who had to face the one truth in the plant: heat.

Each man had had to judge for himself if he could stand it. The closer he worked to the heat, the more money he made. He could work at one of the one-hundred-foot-tall blast furnaces where iron ore, coke, and limestone were smelted. The material, the charge, was fired by stoves bigger than the furnace. Before the iron was tapped from the furnace, it reached temperatures of over 3,000 degrees. The furnaces ran continuously, sometimes for as long as two years. They were down only when their asbestos firebrick linings had to be replaced. If a man had the nerve, he could reline the furnace—don a green asbestos suit, put in his earplugs, pull on his gloves, climb into the furnace only ten hours after it had been shut down, and with a jackhammer begin chipping away at the slag, chipping into the red, then into the white glowing iron and slag. A man who did this worked with a partner, each working for five minutes, then climbing out while the other went down. They were watched by a safety man, who would be responsible for pulling them out if they were burned, if they were injured by the jackhammer, if they looked as if they were going to pass out. After the chipping was done, any damaged bricks were replaced.

If a man could stand more heat, he could work at the open hearth where the steel was made. He could operate the overhead crane, charge the C-pits where the steel was smelted. At the open hearth he could also be a first or second helper, walk around with an asbestos suit and face shield to protect him. Before the steel could be poured into molds, the first helper had to test it. To do this he put on a silver-colored, zinc-rayonized suit over his asbestos one and went out onto a catwalk over the ladle of molten steel where he took a sample. If he were to fall in, as sometimes men did, he had an assurance from Capital that the steel would not be used. A body in the steel spoiled the whole batch, the men were told. The fact of the matter was, a man falling into a 2,500-degree vat of steel was vaporized. And anyway, none of the men would know if a batch was ever dumped, because before any pouring, the floor had to be cleared. A siren was sounded for the men to vacate the area before the explosive was set off, blowing the tap plug and sending the steel flowing into the molds. Two-hundred-pound men could pass out like girls swooning at the sight of blood. They knew they were in hell.

Even those who could stand up to the heat found the cold hard to bear. In winter the men would emerge from hell only to face below-zero temperatures and a fierce northern wind, the Hawk, swooping across Lake Erie at thirty, fifty miles an hour. If it caught them crossing a patch of ice, it would lift them off of their feet, carry them tumbling through the air, and abruptly drop them back to earth.

Tuberculosis and pneumonia were common. Those who stayed too long got black lung, emphysema, cancer. This was the reality the men at Capital had to face. Featherbedding was only a word.

The representative had spoken the truth. Samuel knew the horror of the conditions, and thought there was no way the union could lose. It was on a mission.

On the sixtieth night of the strike, an Irish worker from the rolling mill went out into the back yard of his Capital Park house, which he had eighteen years of payments left on, and while his twelve children and pregnant wife slept, shot himself in the stomach with a .38.

The next day a meeting was called. “One of our own has fallen,” said the same red-faced man who had spoken at the previous meetings. “We are bowed, but we will not be defeated.”

A collection was taken up for the man's family, and Samuel threw in fifty cents he could not afford to give. He felt defeated. He felt as if someone had fallen upon him and beaten him with a stick. He had had enough of mummering men crammed into rooms. He had grown tired of harangues.

There was to be no miracle, no manna from heaven. Their strike had put one hundred thousand men in other industries out of work, and daily that number grew. Coal miners, auto workers, construction workers, truckers.

As Samuel looked around the room, he felt alone. He recognized a black man he knew from his boarding house, Moses.

Moses was working for a plant manager who walked out with the strikers, “doing this and that,” he had told Samuel on day forty-five. “You can get a job too, if you need money.”

“Where this man get money?”

“I don't know and I don't care. He got money, but if you can't use a little extra, don't come.”

“Who don't need money?” Samuel said. “How long can this strike last?”

“I don't know,” Moses said. “Ain't no end in sight. Talk done broke off.”

Samuel went along with Moses. Moses was going to the manager's house, Samuel to a company doctor's house. As they walked over the bridge to Capital Heights, Moses asked, “Don't you got a lunch?”

“Naw,” Samuel said. “I can make it without lunch.”

“Don't you even got some water?”

“Naw, I didn't think to bring none. Don't they got water where we going?”

Samuel's job was to mow and rake the doctor's lawn and split a half cord of wood. It felt good to be working, but he was working on an empty stomach, and by noon, every time his heart beat he felt a rush of blood in his ears. He went to the back door to ask for a drink.

The doctor's wife answered, smiling through the screen door.

“Ma'am, could I get some water, please?” he asked, his eyes cast down.

“Sure,” she said, her mouth filled with sugar. “Where's your thermos?”

“Ma'am?”

“Your water bottle? Don't you have one?”

“I forgot it. If it's not too much trouble, ma'am, could I get a glass?”

The smile disappeared from the woman's lips, but her voice was still sweet. “Certainly. You wait right here,” she said, and vanished behind the silvery mesh. She returned and carefully opened the door just enough to give him the water. It was in a mayonnaise jar. He quickly drank, left the jar on the steps, and then backed off of the porch.

At the end of the day he was in his room frying a pan of potatoes when Moses came to see him. “How it go?” Moses asked.

Samuel rolled his eyes at him. “I ain't know it was such a short walk to Mississippi.”

“It ain't that bad.”

Samuel tended his pan. “That woman ain't even want to give me no water. When I saw that, I asked her for a glass. I was testing her.”

“Testing her? You must be crazy. Who you think you is, some kind of a goddamn teacher? These white people the ones got the lessons to teach. They the ones do the testing. All you got to do is smile, play things they way, and make the money. The man I work for like me. He be taking me out to his cabin to do work. It's nice out there. You can fish, got a little lake ain't poisoned like Lake Erie.”

“All you got to do is be a Uncle Tom.”

“You think I'm a Uncle Tom?” Moses asked, raising his voice.

“Let me tell you something. I was a man when I left the South, and I ain't come all this way to be a white-man boy. I'll go back 'fore I do that.”