God's Kingdom (16 page)

“That's my brother, Charlie. No, he's an attorney. All Ivy League catcher out of Dartmouth. First in his class at Harvard Law School.”

The Scout stood up. “Is there a hotel in this burg?”

Jim pointed up the green at the Common Hotel, across the street from the bandstand.

“Eatery?”

“On the ground floor of the hotel.”

The Scout picked up his carpetbag. He peered at the cloudless sky. The storm had blown over without raining a drop. “Didn't I tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Jim said.

“That no man can predict the weather. Meet me at that hotel eatery at six sharp, Jim. Bring your Ivy League brother.”

*   *   *

Jim and Charlie were ten minutes early. The Scout was waiting for them at the window table overlooking the common. As they came into the dining room, he took out a round dollar watch and frowned at it as if they were late.

“You boys don't own neckties?”

Charlie laughed. “Up here in the Kingdom we don't usually dress for dinner. This isn't the Waldorf Astoria.”

“I'll give you that,” the Scout said, looking around at the trophy deer heads and trout mounted on the dining room walls. “But Waldorf Astoria or East Overshoe, Vermont, if a man is wearing a necktie and his shoes are polished, I call that man properly dressed. Sit down, boys. My dime tonight.”

“So,” Charlie said. “How many have you signed up this summer?”

“Nary a one,” the Scout said. “Mainly, the prospects turn out to be a lot of hot air. When the time comes to set down their John Henry, they get cold feet.”

This didn't make sense to Jim. He'd give his eyeteeth to be signed to a contract. So would Charlie or any of the other Outlaws.

Armand St. Onge came over to the table to take their orders. All three ordered steak sandwiches and fries. Charlie ordered a cold one from the bar. After Armand brought him his beer, Charlie said, “I don't understand. Why would your prospects get cold feet?”

“Timid,” the Scout said. “Afraid the owners will pick up stakes and pull out.”

For a moment he regarded Jim and Charlie with his still gray eyes. Then he said, “A. J. Peabody, gentlemen. Advance man for the United Woodworkers of America, out of Peoria, Illinois. Do a little baseball scouting on the side. Let's get to work.”

*   *   *

Jim's father once told him that the village of Kingdom Common was as close to a company town as it could come without actually being one. The American Furniture factory—or, as it was universally called in the Kingdom, the mill—sprawled out along the railroad tracks beside the Lower Kingdom River. The blowers on its roof could be heard night and day from every corner of the village, often punctuated by the clashing together of boxcars, the rumbling of the yard locomotive, and the
slam-bang
of boards being stacked in the lumberyard. Morning, noon, and at five o'clock in the afternoon, the mill whistle regulated the comings and goings of the workers. Six days a week the village was suffused with the scents of varnish and shellac. Before Jim's time the mill had paid its workers not in cash but in scrip, redeemable only at the company store. Mr. Arthur Anderson, whose grandfather had established the American factory, still rented out apartments to mill workers in the row of battleship-gray wooden tenements along the river known locally as the beehives.

Working at the mill during the summer before his senior year at the Academy had not been Jim's idea. He'd hoped to write for the
Monitor
full-time. Instead, his dad had insisted that he apply at the factory, which provided seasonal employment for high-school and college kids. Some years ago, when Charlie was Jim's age, their father had made him take a summer job at the mill. Jim suspected that the editor wanted his sons to know what a hellhole the place was as an incentive to tend to their studies and go on to college. At best, a job at the mill was a dusty, loud, low-paying stop on the way to somewhere, almost anywhere, else. For Jim, and for Charlie before him, it was a cautionary taste of experience in the real world. For many of its workers it was a trap from which there was no escape.

At the mill, as Jim had quickly learned, there was an unspoken caste system. At the top was Mr. Anderson. Once a week, usually on Monday morning, he would walk through the entire factory like a captain inspecting his ship. Mr. Anderson was in his mid-eighties and a little stiff and tottery, but he walked as straight as a palace guard and spoke courteously by name to each worker. Charlie had remarked to Jim that old Arthur Anderson was a benevolent despot, but a despot all the same.

Directly below the owner on the factory hierarchy was Bennett Carol, the superintendent, who had worked at the mill for fifty years. Then, in descending rank, came the foremen of the mill floor, cabinet room, finish room, and lumberyard; the master cabinetmakers who assembled the furniture; the machine operators; and the men who tailed the machines, stacked lumber, and packed the finished furniture and loaded it onto boxcars.

At the bottom of the ladder were the seasonal helpers, like Jim, who did certain repetitive but necessary jobs no one else coveted. In the eyes of the foremen and workers alike, Jim and the other temporary help at the factory had no status at all.

On the morning after he and Charlie had met with A. J. Peabody at the hotel, Jim began work, as usual, by climbing up the inside metal ladder to the trapdoor leading to the roof to update the accident-free message board. Today was Day 82. Then he reported to Bennett Carol for his work assignment.

“Day 82,” as the workers would now refer to it, was a Saturday. On Saturdays the mill closed for the weekend at noon. Jim hoped he'd be assigned to spend the rest of the morning working for Ned Baxter in the lumberyard. He loved the fresh scent of boards curing in the open air, and Ned was a good man to work for. From him, Jim had learned how to identify black cherry, maple, yellow-birch, and white-pine lumber. He'd learned that a load of one-inch hardwood boards, after being seasoned outdoors in the yard for six months, would be dried in the kiln at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for ninety-six hours. Ned had taught him how to measure board feet in logs with a Doyle rule and in lumber with a Stanley rule. Now in his late seventies, Ned still worked alongside his crew, not fast, not slowly, but steadily, and they willingly followed his lead. He was by far the best foreman to be assigned to, but today Bennett Carol dispatched Jim to the mill floor to run the barrow. Running the barrow consisted of pushing a boxy old wheelbarrow along the mill floor, sweeping the scrap pieces of wood from the saws and other machines into it. When the barrow was full, Jim would trundle it down to the boiler room and empty the contents into the factory furnace that heated the water for the gigantic Corliss steam engine that powered the mill machinery. American Furniture was one of the last steam-powered factories in New England.

The mill-floor foreman, Rip Kinneson, a distant cousin of Jim's, was one of the very few villagers Jim strongly disliked. He was a competent ripsawer and foreman, though he tended to hurry his work and had the reputation of a hard horse driver. His motto was “Keep moving.”

No one could accuse Rip Kinneson of ever standing still. As if in testimony to his philosophy, he was missing three fingers from his right hand, the result of hurrying on his own saw. He drank a fifth of 7 Crown at the hotel every night of the week. Two shots into the evening he'd begin to complain about the two great nemeses of his life, the government and his four ex-wives. Sometimes he'd get them confused and inveigh bitterly about the exorbitant taxes he had to pay his wives and the day he married his third government. At work there was nothing amusing about him. He had an unflattering nickname for everyone. He called Mr. Anderson “the Old Man” behind his back. Jim he called Jack because he was a jack of all trades at the factory but most definitely master of none. Jim detested the name.

In good weather the workers often took their dinner pails outside and ate lunch beside the river. During their nooning the Ripper, as he referred to himself, loved to tell war stories. His favorite was a detailed account of “putting the flamethrower to a nest of Japs holed up in a tunnel” during the fighting in the Pacific Islands. “Do you know what fricasseed Japanese smells like, Jack?”

Jim didn't and neither, Charlie assured him, did Rip. While Charlie acknowledged that the Ripper would have dearly loved to put the flamethrower to the Japanese, the closest the mill-floor foreman had ever been to the Pacific Islands was the docks at San Diego, where he'd spent his tour of duty loading navy supply ships.

Early in Jim's boyhood, his mother, Ruth Kinneson, had impressed upon him that Jesus taught us that it's always wrong to hate anyone for any reason. Jim figured that Jesus had never met the Ripper. It was widely believed in the Common that Mr. Anderson kept Rip on at the factory because as long as the mill-floor foreman was there to despise, the workers would be less apt to resent him. Rip's favorite victim was Little Ti Thibideau, the Outlaws' water boy.

“You hear the news, Ti? President Eisenhower's coming to inspect the mill this forenoon. He's going to present you with a Medal of Honor.”

Or “Hey, there, Tippytoe. Have you seen today's paper? The Sox have traded Ted Williams to New York for Joe DiMaggio.”

Ti never knew whether to believe Rip. “Oh, you g-g-guys,” he'd say. “You, you, you guys.”

Once or twice a month Rip would snatch off Ti's cap and toss it into the nearest blower pipe to be carried down to the furnace along with the sawdust from the machinery. Then Ti would stomp around and threaten to bring in the union—which union, he never specified. About ten years ago, a mill-workers' union from Maine tried to organize the employees at the factory, but nothing ever came of their effort. Rip told the men that if they voted in a union, Old Man Anderson would unbolt the woodworking machines; load them onto boxcars for South Carolina, where there was a raft of black niggers eager to work for sixty cents an hour; and lock the doors of the factory in Kingdom Common forever. The workers had voted down the union by a two-to-one margin.

Just where Ti fit into the caste system of the mill was unclear to Jim. At the same time that he was bullied mercilessly, Ti was respected for his unusual skill as a fixer. When a table, a chair, or another piece of furniture came off the line flawed or damaged—with a ding on a visible surface, say, or a leg half an inch too short or too long—Ti could repair it so that not even the most highly trained woodworker would notice the imperfection. With a dab of wood glue or filler, a block plane, a square of sandpaper no larger than a folded pocket handkerchief, and a touch of varnish or shellac, Ti was a wizard. He saved the factory thousands of dollars a year by restoring furniture that would otherwise have had to be sold as seconds. More than his fundamental good nature or comical rages or any rough sympathy inspired by his stuttering, it was Théophile Thibideau's unquestionable skill on the finish-room floor that secured his acceptance, for all of the taunting, as one of the guys.

At ten o'clock break time of Day 82, Rip shut off his saw and told Jim he wanted a word with him outside where men gathered for a quick smoke. “Listen, Jack,” Rip said. “Since he come to work this morning, Little Ti's been talking a shitload of big talk about a union waltzing in. Telling everybody who'll listen he's going to fix Anderson's wagon once and for all. He says that so-called baseball scout you and brother, Charlie, was sucking up to at the hotel last evening is a union organizer. What do you know about all this?”

Jim's heart fell. After finishing their steak sandwiches the evening before, Jim and Charlie had introduced A. J. Peabody to half a dozen union supporters from the mill. Jim should have known that in a small town like the Common, which was no more nor less than a beehive itself, word of their conversations would leak out. He doubted that there was a worker at the factory who didn't know the scout's true identity by now.

Jim wasn't sure what to say to Rip. It was hard for him to believe that he could be related to this man. While Jim considered whether and how to reply, Rip stepped up close enough to his face for Jim to smell the liquor he'd drunk the night before. “Do you know what we do to commonist agitators up here, Jack?”

“No.”

“They disappear. What would Dad Kinneson say if he knew you were keeping company with a commie agitator? Fella who comes into town pretending to be somebody he isn't?”

“My father and brother are both union supporters.”

Rip smiled as if he knew something Jim didn't about Charlie and the editor.

“You like working here this summer, Jack?”

“Not especially,” Jim said, and he went back inside the factory.

INFORMATION MEETING TONIGHT, 7:00. KINGDOM COMMON TOWN HALL. TO SEE WHETHER EMPLOYEES OF THE AMERICAN HERITAGE FURNITURE FACTORY WILL VOTE TO JOIN THE UNITED WOODWORKERS OF AMERICA.

“They're p-pretty as c-c-circus posters,” Little Ti Thibideau said, nodding at the stack of three-colored posters the editor had just printed up.

“It will be a circus, all right,” the Scout said. He looked at the poster he was holding as if it were a last will and testament disinheriting him of a long-expected legacy. “What's the damage here, editor?”

Jim's dad shook his head. “No charge. They're my contribution to the cause. Just be careful where you put them. Don't go on any private property without permission.”

The editor let Jim borrow his DeSoto for the afternoon. Jim drove; the Scout rode shotgun; Ti, whom Jim had recruited to help distribute the notices, sat in back. They started out in the village, tacking the handbills onto the trunks of the elms around the perimeter of the green.

Next Jim drove out the county road along the Upper Kingdom River. Ti put up a few posters above the Public Fishing Waters signs on the bankside black willows. They hit Pond in the Sky, the Landing, and Memphremagog, up on the Quebec border at the foot of the big lake of the same name.