by Anita Shreve
“How can I help?” he asks, following Honora into the kitchen.
“Talk to me,” she says as she unwraps a loaf of bread. He watches her walk to the icebox and remove a packet of bologna and another of cheese. “You stopped the press.”
McDermott situates himself so that he can see her mouth. It is, he thinks, the most beautiful mouth he has ever seen. Sometimes it visits him in his dreams — the upper lip that peaks in a plumpness that seems more French than Yankee. “Thibodeau had to set up the second page.”
“Where is Alphonse today?”
“Mironson has him distributing leaflets at social clubs in Portsmouth.”
“Will he come at all this weekend?”
“I think you can count on it,” McDermott says. “Even if he has to crawl. You said you would make him peach ice cream. He’s been talking about it all week.”
She laughs. “I’ve got all the ingredients.”
“And he wants another swimming lesson.”
“He’s doing well,” she says, spreading a dozen slices of bread with mayonnaise.
“When you get done with him, will you teach me?” McDermott asks, and immediately he regrets the question. It sounds like a line every sleazy guy he has ever known would give.
But Honora seems to treat the request as plausible. “Sure,” she says. “If you really want to learn.”
“I do,” he says, though truthfully if it weren’t for Honora he would never go near the water.
“You’ll need a suit.”
“I’ll get one.”
“Next week, then.”
“Good.”
He watches her layer the sandwiches — a slice of bologna, a slice of cheese, a leaf of lettuce, another smear of mayonnaise. He wishes he were hungry.
“Louis says the mood of the strikers is low,” she says.
“It is,” he says, relieved to be on more familiar ground. “Carnival’s over. Bill Ayers, who owns the Emporium Theater, said he had to run the projector day and night for the first week.”
She smiles. “And now?”
“And now everyone’s beat. They’re hungry and they’re tired. Some of the men have left their families to look for work elsewhere. You know about the evictions and the tent city. And the truth is, men don’t picket well. Women are much better at it.”
“Why?”
“More patience.” More than once McDermott has been thankful that he is on the strike committee. He isn’t sure he could stand the boredom of the picket line.
“You know,” she says. “I went in there to have a look for myself.”
“You did?” he asks, surprised.
“About ten days ago. On a Thursday. I wanted to see.”
“And what did you see?”
“I felt like I had had a blindfold on. I felt cut off from the action. So I took the trolley into Ely Falls. As soon as I saw a crowd, I got off. About two hundred picketers stood outside a mill. One man carried a sign that said ‘The Truth Is on Our Side.’ And there was a child with a sign that said ‘The Ten Percent Pay Cut Took Our Milk Away.’ “
McDermott nods.
“I saw the militia with their fixed bayonets. I didn’t understand why they felt they needed to do that. The women were in summer dresses and the men were in shirtsleeves and ties. The children were sitting on the curb. They had cloth shoes with holes where their big toes went. Someone had given the children eye-shades, which looked kind of funny.”
McDermott smiles.
“I saw another line of picketers and then discovered they weren’t picketers at all. They were all relatives waiting to get their kinfolk out of jail. One woman told me it cost two bucks to get your husband out, and another said that every day the police arrested so many picketers they had to hire trucks from other towns.”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t actually see the tent city, but I could smell it. It smelled like raw sewerage. I walked for another hour or so, sort of thinking I might run into you and Sexton and Alphonse, but I didn’t see you. I stopped in at a lunch counter and had a milk shake and went home. What do you think will happen?” she asks.
He leans against the counter and crosses his arms. “I think the strike leadership will do just what it set out to do — break the backs of the mills in New England. But where I part ways with Mironson is that I think the mills will then go out of business or move south, and no one will have jobs.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” she says.
“Me too.”
“What would you do if the mills went south?” she asks. “Would you go with them?”
“Never,” he says. “A good Irish Catholic like me? Be a fish out of water.” He wishes he hadn’t smoked his last cigarette. “What about your husband?” McDermott asks, unable to say the man’s name, as if saying it aloud might cause him to appear, right here, now, in the room with them.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “It was hard enough just finding the job he has now. We could always move, I guess; go live with my family.”
“Where’s that?” McDermott asks.
“In Taft. It’s a small lake town north of here. Near Lake Winnipesaukee.”
“Your folks still alive?” he asks.
“My mother.”
McDermott watches Honora spread her fingers over the sandwich to hold it together, and then cut beneath her splayed hand. She has clean, precise movements in the kitchen, nothing extra, nothing wasted. He has never seen her flustered, even when there have been a dozen or more men in the house, a dozen or more mouths to feed.
“I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t be in there too,” she says. “On the picket line.”
“You’re doing your part,” he says. “More than your part, really.”
“Still, though.”
“Still, though,” he says, and he wonders if she will remember this particular exchange from Christmas.
Honora looks up quickly and smiles at him, and the smile moves through him like a warm rush of water. “That seems like so long ago,” she says.
He puts his hands in his pockets. “And to think this is where you came back to that night,” he says.
He walks over to the window and glances out at the lawn and the hedge and beyond the hedge at the narrow road that leads, he now knows, to a tiny village with a fish shack and a general store. One day, a couple of weeks ago, itching for a walk, he set out on foot along the coast road, not knowing where it might lead. He stopped in at the general store, had a Moxie and a chat with the owner.
“Seems like you must get a lot of peace and quiet here,” he says.
“Not lately,” she says, smiling.
“It can’t go on much longer,” McDermott says. “This strike, I mean. The city is a powder keg.”
“In your heart,” Honora says, speaking of an organ that seems to have a life of its own these days, that has lately led him to places he thought he would never go, “do you believe that capitalism is evil? I mean, we both listen to this all day. I was just wondering how you feel. Deep down.”
McDermott watches as she tears open another waxed packet of bread and cuts another dozen slices on the bread board. “There are basics I’d like to see everyone have,” he says. “People like Alphonse’s mother, for example. I’d like to see her have, minimum, hot water, indoor plumbing, food for the table, access to a doctor who isn’t a quack, some kind of assistance since she’s trying to raise a family without a husband — but I’m not convinced that overthrowing capitalism is the answer. Truthfully, I’m not very political. I like the job I’ve been given to do, but I hardly ever think about the stuff Mironson talks about.”
“Can you understand it?”
McDermott laughs.
“I seldom see you laugh,” she says. “It’s nice. I like it.”
He blushes and hopes that the sudden color will be hidden by his blotchy pink sunburn.
“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” Honora asks. “I would think you’d have lots.”
&
nbsp; “I had a girlfriend,” he says, “but it didn’t work out the way I hoped it would.”
“What was her name?”
“Evangeline.”
“Like the poem,” she says.
“I guess,” he says.
“You don’t know the poem?” she asks.
“Eileen told me about it,” he says. “I don’t read too much poetry.”
She smiles. “I didn’t think so,” she says.
“She got pregnant by another guy,” he says, confessing a fact he has never told anyone.
Honora looks up from her work, her expression giving away her considerable surprise. “You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “I’d never even . . . I was completely in the dark. I was about to ask her to marry me.”
She puts the knife down. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s too bad.”
“Just as well,” he says, shrugging. “I might have married her. And that would have been too bad.”
She turns away and picks up the knife again, and he wonders if she regrets anything about her marriage. Sometimes it drives McDermott crazy to be in possession of a fact about her husband that he can never tell her — the one piece of information that might serve him well, the one thing about her husband that would almost certainly break her heart and then possibly might one day set her free. Even McDermott, as out of touch with God as he is these days, understands that. He does his best to try not to think about it, though when he saw Sexton Beecher two weeks ago leaving the speak with the English girl, he was so furious (and yet so unforgivably elated) that he found it difficult even to talk to the man later that night. And it is all McDermott can do sometimes when they are riding in the truck together or working at the press or sitting at the dining table at the boardinghouse not to take the guy by the lapels and shake him hard and tell him to shape up. Doesn’t he see what he has at home? Doesn’t he know what he is jeopardizing? What is wrong with the fucking guy, anyway?
But, of course, McDermott knows perfectly well what is wrong with the fucking guy. He’s a guy. He’s lonely in town. He wants a girl. So what? If McDermott didn’t know Honora, he doubts he’d ever give the matter a second thought. None of his business is what he would think.
“What are you making?” he asks.
“Coleslaw,” she says.
Maybe he is a little bit hungry after all. He wonders if he’s got his medicine with him. With all this coming and going — beach to city, city to beach — the medicine is often not where it’s supposed to be.
“It’s exciting, being part of this,” she says.
“The city has come alive,” he says.
“I don’t know what I’ll do when you all leave,” she says. “I’ve come to hate being here by myself.”
“I’d have thought you’d be glad to see the back of us,” he says.
“I miss you guys when you’re gone.”
His heart, stupidly, leaps — willing to snatch at any crumb.
“I, for one, hate leaving here,” he says after a minute. “This house. I’ve enjoyed it.”
She licks a dollop of mayonnaise off her finger. “Thank you,” she says.
“I wouldn’t have an excuse to talk to you, for one thing,” he says, trying to make it light.
From the front room, McDermott can hear Vivian calling, Hey, doll. A chair scrapes against a wooden floor. Mironson says, I’m starved. Through the window McDermott hears the sound of waves crashing. The printing press starts up again.
Honora stares at the platter of sandwiches in front of her. “There’s a pitcher of lemonade in the icebox,” she says, “if you wouldn’t mind getting it.”
Honora
“No guns,” Mironson is saying.
Sandwiches and coleslaw make their way along the table. Vivian, in parchment batiste, fills glasses with lemonade. McDermott has not come to lunch. Through the doorway, Honora can see him leaning against the porch railing.
“But the picketers need to be able to defend themselves,” Sexton says from the middle of the table. Louis, in a shortsleeved white shirt, sits sideways, as if he were there but not entirely there. In his posture, he gives the impression of a man who is indescribably weary — which Honora thinks is probably the case. She wonders how it is that he does this for a living. Moving from town to town, following strikes, starting strikes, moving out, starting all over again. When this is finished, he will leave Ely Falls and enter into an entirely new community. She wonders if he minds, if he is ever lonely.
“No guns,” Louis repeats. “Militiamen cannot weave cloth. They instill fear, but they cannot by themselves break the strike.”
“But we’re getting the — excuse me, ladies — shit kicked out of us, and we have nothing to fight back with but stones.”
Honora thinks her husband might have been better served if he hadn’t used the word we — not only because Sexton himself clearly hasn’t had a hand laid on him, but also because Louis never pickets.
“This has to be done without violence,” Louis says. “It has to be this way. Yes, the bosses are just itching for a fight. They’re just itching for an excuse to bring out the machine guns and mow us all down.”
“Golly, I hope not,” Vivian says, smoothing her pleated skirt.
“No, not really,” Louis says. “But as good as. It won’t be machine guns, but it will be rifles and bayonets. Tear gas. Vomit gas. You haven’t lived until you’ve been under an attack with vomit gas.”
“Do we have to talk about this at lunch?” Vivian asks.
“If we had guns,” Sexton says, gesturing with military precision, his fingertips blue with Copiograph ink, “this thing would be over tomorrow.”
“Oh, it would be over tomorrow, all right,” Louis says.
“So then,” Sexton says.
“Don’t you see?” Louis asks, looking up at Sexton as if he were a particularly recalcitrant child. “If one of us got caught with a gun, what that would do to us?”
“The press is already portraying us as alien creatures destroying a way of life,” Sexton says.
“What way of life?” Ross asks, picking his teeth.
“They’re portraying us as Reds,” Sexton says.
“They call us the Red Menace,” Tsomides says. “Oooh, that’s so scary.”
“We could scare the scabs at the very least,” Sexton says.
“We have scared the scabs. And remember, the scabs of today are the strikers of tomorrow,” Louis says automatically, as if it were a sentence he has repeated many times.
Through the doorway, Honora watches McDermott put both hands on the railing and bend his head.
“We need relief, not guns,” Honora can hear Louis saying. “Relief supplies are inadequate.”
“We always need relief,” Mahon says. “It’s never-ending.”
McDermott pushes himself away from the railing. He turns and glances inside the house.
“Amber applejacks,” Ross says to Vivian. “Fifty cents a shot. Three, you feel like a king. Four, you feel like a czar. Five, you feel like hell.”
“Honora?” Sexton says.
“I’m sorry?” she asks, turning her gaze back to the table.
“I was asking you what you thought.”
“About . . . ?”
“Guns,” Sexton says with pained annoyance. “What your opinion is.”
Honora glances from Louis, who still looks indescribably weary, to Ross, who is sucking his teeth, to Vivian, who is taking a delicate sip of lemonade. Tsomides and Mahon are tucking into their second (or is it their third?) sandwiches. Sexton is waiting for her answer.
“No guns,” Honora says finally, and Louis looks at her with frank admiration. “I believe the strike can be won without guns,” she says. “And I believe, as does Louis, that relief is more important than firepower. As long as the strikers have food and a place to sleep, and the strike is over before the weather turns, I think they can force the mill owners to restore the wages to wh
ere they were before the last pay cut.”
Sexton sits back in his chair with obvious disgust. Ross raises an eyebrow, clearly surprised that the woman who cooks and types has an opinion.
“We’re making history here,” Louis says, turning around to face the group, and Honora thinks, not for the first time in the last several weeks, how remarkable it is that such an unprepossessing man can command such respect. “Each of us is part of something much larger, something that cannot be stopped,” he says. Honora watches his eyes travel around the table, pausing at each individual in turn. “Honora, you’ve been invaluable. Lucky Strike has already caught the attention of organizers in Boston and New York. I’m told The Federated Worker wants to take it over. We’re printing over ten thousand copies a week.” He pauses. “Vivian, you’re a firecracker. No one would be reading the thing without you.” Vivian waves the compliment away. “Ross and Mahon and Tsomides and Thibodeau, you’ve been jerks,” Louis says, and everyone laughs. “And Sexton, this never would have gotten off the ground at all had you not led us to your machines, your beautiful house, and your even more beautiful wife.”
“Hear, hear,” Ross says. Honora smiles and turns quickly to catch yet another glimpse of McDermott through the doorway, but the porch is empty now.
“How we conduct ourselves in Ely Falls will be remembered forever,” Louis says, and for just a moment it seems the ponderous weight of history itself floats and settles around the table. It is so quiet in the front room that Honora can hear Ross breathing through his open mouth at the end of the table.