Sea Glass (18 page)

One year ago today, Honora and Sexton were married and they were happy. Why not celebrate that event, she has been asking herself all week, even if the marriage that followed is complicated and cloudy? She cannot imagine a life in which the day of her wedding is never acknowledged, never honored.

“Good mornin’, Mrs. Beecher.”

“Good morning, Mr. Hess.”

Jack Hess’s back is so stooped she cannot figure out how it is he stocks the shelves himself, how it is he sleeps. He has on, as usual, his bow tie and hat. A fresh shirt.

“You were lost a bit there,” he says.

“Yes, I was.”

“How are you?”

“Just fine, thank you.”

“And Mr. Beecher?”

“He’ll be home tonight. It’s our anniversary.” She hadn’t planned on saying that aloud; it isn’t like Honora to discuss something personal. But she cannot deny that she has wanted to tell someone.

“I remember clear as day when your husband first came in here,” Hess says. “Dapper young gent, I thought to myself. All crowed up about being married.”

Jack Hess stands behind the counter with the grabber he uses for the items on the high shelves. As Honora selects a product, he puts it on the counter and then writes the price in pencil on a paper bag into which he’ll later put the groceries. Then he’ll add the figures, and the sum will always be five or ten cents below an accurate total. At first Honora felt obliged to point this out (once walking all the way back to the store), but now she knows better. It is Hess’s way of helping. A cynic, she thinks, might say it was his way of making sure a customer returned to the store, and that his shortages represented little more than advertising specials, but Honora knows that Hess’s contribution to the community consists of far more than just creative mathematics.

“By the way, Mrs. Beecher, I just wanted you to know that for the next couple of weeks, or however long this durned thing lasts, I’m not taking cash from mill families.”

Honora looks up.

“Till it’s over,” he says, explaining.

Honora, baffled, shakes her head.

“The strike,” Hess says.

Honora’s grocery list vanishes from her thoughts.

“I thought you knew,” Hess says.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, I expect your husband didn’t want to worry you until it actually happened. I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you.”

Honora approaches the counter.

“The day the new pay cut takes effect,” Jack Hess says. “Monday. All the mills are involved. They say the tension is so thick over to Ely Falls that the air is just cracklin’.”

No, Honora has not heard about the impending strike. She knows only what her husband tells her. And when he is home, he never mentions his job. In the beginning, she would ask him about his work, ask him if he had friends, if he had met anyone he liked in the boarding house — the same way a well-meaning mother might query an awkward son who didn’t quite fit in at school. But shortly it became clear that Sexton didn’t welcome the questions, and she gave up. When he comes home weekends now, he never speaks of where he’s been, and if it weren’t for the lint in the laundry and the grime in the tub, she is certain they would simply pretend that he had been “on a trip.”

“I don’t like to see any family go without,” Hess says. “But conditions over to Ely Falls are inhuman. I go in there every once in a while to visit my sister and her family. Arlene married a Franco, don’t you know. And I tell you I never saw anything like that mill housing. No one can make do on the wages them mills pay. My sister’s kids are unsupervised most of the time because there’s no one at home to watch them. They’ve never had such a problem with gangs as they do now.” Hess pauses. “I’m sorry I put my foot where it wasn’t wanted,” he says, “but I expect your husband was going to tell you this weekend — after your celebration, that is.”

Honora pays for her groceries. She puts the paper bag in her satchel.

“We’ll manage,” she says.

“Course you will,” Hess says.

Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.

She is tired of the withholding, sick of the deception. How is she to trust the man? The unfairness, the injustice of it, fills her with rage. She will tell Sexton so tonight. Tonight they will have it out as they should have done months ago. She will scream at him if need be. She cannot be silent any longer. What is the point of scrimping and saving? They will lose the house anyway. They can’t survive even a two-week strike. All their savings have been poured into the house, their entire marriage ruined by a mortgage.

She stops abruptly on the beach. The lobster bodies stink today. They just stink. She reaches into her satchel and takes out the waxed bag with the shellfish carcasses in it. She walks to the water’s edge and hurls them into the sea.

  McDermott

The machines might be organs or violins or pianos, the men and women at them as fluid as musicians. Their movements are precise: this note and then that note and then this note, moving toward a furious crescendo, sounding a particular beat as the music reaches a fever pitch and then warbles down to a simple melody. The music is always demanding and repetitive; there is no time for the musicians to catch their breath. They must raise their instruments immediately and begin again. And then again. And then so many times that they know every measure, every nuance, every note by heart. More than by heart, they know it in their blood and in their bones. They can carry on whole conversations with their minds while their bodies complete this virtuoso performance with the spools and the creels, the shuttles and the bobbins.

There’s only a minute left until the dinner horn sounds. McDermott doesn’t need a watch; he knows this with his inner clock. Sean Rasley, a weaver, looks over at him, and it is just a look — steady, no smile, no nod — but it says everything McDermott needs to know.

I’m ready,
it says.

Rasley means the strike. He means Monday. Today could well be their last day at the looms for weeks.

McDermott nods his head. There are only ten, fifteen seconds until the horn. One by one, the weavers around him stop their machines. Lunch break. Thirty minutes. The first chance they’ve had to sit since they entered the mill at 6:30 this morning.

The air is soft and hits McDermott full in the face as he steps out of the mill door. Summer, he thinks; it’s officially summer now. The air has a hint of the sea beyond the city, and the sky above him is an almost unnatural blue. He puts his hands in his pockets and sets out for the boardinghouse.

He searches in his pocket for a piece of gum and finds instead a crumpled piece of paper — one of the leaflets that he and Ross and Tsomides were putting out just before the raid. Thinking about the raid makes McDermott’s stomach clench, even though it’s been three weeks since the men in masks that looked eerily like those of the Ku Klux Klan broke into the abandoned warehouse where McDermott and five others were printing up posters for the coming strike. For a moment McDermott froze, too astonished to move when the men smashed doors and windows and entered the building. Swinging sledgehammers, they shattered the press that had been sent up from New York and hit Paul Tsomides a glancing blow on the head that put him in the hospital. McDermott, crouching behind a barrel, watched the rout before fleeing through a side entrance.

Eighteen months of owner-ordered lay-offs and wage cuts have left most workers nearly disastrously destitute,
he reads as he walks.

Telling the mill families where they can get relief is essential, McDermott has been told, since New England workers are notorious for not accepting relief of any kind in the belief that assistance goes against the grain of their own (or their inherited) Yankee culture. Thus they starve more quickly and give in more rapidly to management’s demands. In order for the strike to succeed, Mironson has stressed, strikers have to be persuaded of the necessity to accept relief.

Management has pared wages down to next to nothing,
McDermott reads, and he thinks of fingernails scraping a cement wall as they go down.
The bosses live in high style on the other side of the river.
McDermott can see the massive houses from the mill yard — poor planning on someone’s part, he thinks. No hint of an economic depression over there. Not with all their power lawn mowers and swimming pools and fancy automobiles. In fact, it’s possible the bosses are doing better than ever now. Money goes farther these days: gardeners and cooks and chauffeurs come dirt cheap. At lunch, McDermott knows, as he hops up the steps of the boardinghouse, the strike will be all the talk. If it doesn’t happen Monday, McDermott thinks, the entire city will self-combust simply from pent-up energy.

McDermott washes his hands and finds a place at the table with men not shy about showing their appetites. They eat as if they might not eat tomorrow, and it seldom matters how bad the food is, how mysterious the ingredients in the stews that fill their bowls. Today it is fish, and McDermott doesn’t want to think about what kind. Madame Derocher has an impenetrable face, one that doesn’t invite conversation or questions. If sufficiently annoyed, she will answer in a French patois that McDermott thinks a Parisian wouldn’t understand. She has been known to snatch a bowl of stew from a complaining boarder’s hands, leaving the man with nothing to eat at all. A boarder usually makes that mistake only once.

Sometimes the lunch break is strangely silent, the men too focused on their food to talk, too quickly sated and then stunned at meal’s end to think coherently. Talk requires energy, and the men are careful, McDermott has observed, not to squander too much of that. There are still four and a half hours at the mill to go that day.

But today the talk is brisk, though McDermott can make out only some of the words, men with full mouths being difficult to understand under the best of circumstances. The boardinghouses are transient places, the men always coming and going, constantly shifting lodging when one or another of the houses changes ownership or loses its lease or is foreclosed upon; and lately there has been more turnover than usual. McDermott has spoken personally to only a handful of the twenty or so men at the long table. Still, though, he likes to listen and strains to follow what is being said. He needs to know the mood of the men, the way they speak and what’s important to them.

He puts a pill in his mouth and takes a bite of stew, his ulcer worse now than it’s been in weeks. Sometimes he can’t eat Madame Derocher’s food at all and has to go to Eileen’s for a meal. She makes him a bowl of bread soaked in milk to keep him from starving. There has been talk of an operation, but McDermott can’t afford either the time or the money for such a drastic step right now.

It is strangely quiet when he visits Eileen these days. Eamon has gone off to Texas, and McDermott doesn’t know where Michael is. His sister Mary is married, which leaves only Rosie and Patricia and Bridget, all of whom seem too tired at night to make much of a fuss. McDermott feels sorry for Eileen and gives her the same amount of money he did when all the kids were in the house. He encourages her to buy pretty things for herself, and sometimes he brings her gifts: bonbons from Harley’s chocolate factory, an Italian Morain brooch he found in a thrift shop, once a Toastmaster from Simmons.

Last winter McDermott had a girl of his own — Evangeline, a weaver on his floor. She had violent red hair and the clearest skin he has ever seen. He met her when he had to repair her drawing frame. A week later, the frame was broken again, and he suspects now that she probably did it deliberately so that they could meet a second time. He didn’t guess in all the time he knew her that she was the scheming type. Their relationship was innocent enough, and he thought about asking her to marry him. On Saturday nights, they went dancing or to the movies. In April he bought her a watch he’d seen in a jeweler’s window. But on Easter Sunday, when he went to her house to give it to her, she cried and told him that she was pregnant. She was leaving Ely Falls to marry the father, a bricklayer from Exeter. McDermott can still remember the shock of that betrayal: he hadn’t even once touched her breast.

Beside him a carder belches from having eaten his stew too fast. McDermott reaches for a pitcher of milk. He can’t get the stew down, but if he has some bread and milk, he’ll be fine. The men are squeezed around the table, more of them it seems than there were just the day before. Madame Derocher must be packing them in like rats, he thinks. Anything to make a buck.

McDermott hears the words
business
and
machines.

He sets the milk pitcher down and searches for the speaker. A man who looks vaguely familiar to him gestures with his hand and says the word
salesman.
McDermott’s seen this man before, but where? He bends forward and cups his ear, turning it so that it might catch the entire sentence. The man has dark blond hair, parted in the middle, and bloodshot eyes. He gestures with a kind of military precision.

The weaver on the other side of McDermott starts to laugh at what must have been a good joke. Mule spinners and slasher tenders are knocking spoons against bowls, glasses against wood, hitching chairs forward, shouting to be heard. Someone demands more food and says that if he is paying eight dollars a week for room and board, he wants more bread. Madame Derocher sits in her chair in the corner as if she hasn’t heard a word. In the din, three words float the length of the wooden table, and McDermott strains to catch them. Three mundane words of no apparent interest to anyone except McDermott. McDermott, whose heart lifts as he takes them in.

Typewriter,
he hears.

And
Copiograph machine.