The strike showed no sign of ending: at the supper table one night, my father announced that the negotiations had broken down.
“There's a rumor the company's bringing in scabs.”
Yvonne made a face. “Scabs?”
“It's somebody the owners hire to cross the picket lines and work in the shop. Strikebreakers. Usually men from out of town.”
“It could mean fighting, right, Dad?” Armand asked, excited. “Uncle Victor says we can't let scabs cross the lines. If they do, they'll take your jobs and the strike will fail….”
“I'm glad we've got an expert in the house,” my father said sarcastically. “It saves me a lot of talking. …”
Armand concentrated on his food and so did the rest of the family. I looked up once and saw my father and mother exchange troubled glances. If it was difficult for me to accept my father as a striker carrying a picket sign, it was impossible for me to picture him in a fight.
* * *
I wrote no more stories that year. Paid attention in class, did my homework faithfully, passed all my tests, and made the Second Honor Roll for the first semester. I stopped going to meetings of the Eugene O'Neill Drama Club and nobody seemed to miss me. I was not chosen for the chorus of The Pirates of Penzance.
So the days and evenings of that autumn passed. School and the library. Books in which to escape the loneliness. During the first snow of November, I brought my father a thermos of hot soup as he stalked the picket lines, cheeks rouged with cold, hands enclosed in the woolen gloves my mother knitted.
“When will it end, Dad?” I asked, stamping my feet against the cold.
He shivered as he slurped the steaming soup while I stood there watching him, in my own cold and loneliness.
The scabs are here.
These words spread quickly through Frenchtown on that frozen afternoon in December the way Paul Revere's cry must have echoed from Boston to Lexington almost two centuries before. I felt, in fact, like a twentieth-century Paul Revere as I raced through Frenchtown bursting with the news. Lexington and Concord lay only twenty miles to the east of Monument and our U.S. history class at Silas B. had visited the “rude bridge that arched the flood” as a project in October. Streaking homeward that December day, I felt like a part of history in the making, eager to report what I had seen.
Three dump trucks had been waiting at the traffic lights at Main and Mechanic. The trucks were old and sagging and decrepit. Their astonishing cargo was men. Men who huddled together in the backs of the trucks exposed to the raw afternoon, caps pulled down over their eyes against the cold, bulky in their heavy jackets and mackinaws. The trucks belched blue exhaust, their engines idling while waiting for the light to change. I felt a wave of pity for the men. They looked old and battered and used up, like the trucks. How far had they come and how far were they going? Searching for clues, I saw Maine license plates on one of the trucks, the legend METRO SAND& GRAVEL, BANGOR, ME. on the door of another.
Two men stood beside me waiting for the yellow pedestrian light. They wore black overcoats with narrow velvet collars. I glanced at their white shirts and thin ties. Bankers, I thought, playing my old game of guessing the occupations of strangers.
“I see the importées have arrived,” one of the men said. His face was not familiar but the voice might have been the voice of Emerson Winslow's father.
“Bound to happen sooner or later,” the other answered, in a clipped Yankee twang.
Importées. Which I transferred immediately into scabs.
The light turned yellow, the truck engines gasped and groaned in anticipation of the green light, and I dashed across the street, leaving the bankers behind, almost knocking over a woman pushing a baby carriage, in my eagerness to spread the news to Frenchtown.
But I had forgotten about Frenchtown's unique communication network. News of a fire at one of the shops, for instance, always reached the homes of the workers even before the whistles sounded or the fire trucks, with sirens howling, blazed down Mechanic Street. Now as I turned from Mechanic Street into the heart of Frenchtown, I felt excitement in the air. Men had gathered in front of the stores, women called to each other from piazza to piazza, store owners stood in their doorways, and everyone seemed to be talking at once.
Bounding up the stairs to our tenement, I encountered Armand, who had just filled the oil jug for the kitchen stove from the big barrel in the shed.
“Did you hear the news?” Armand asked as I paused to catch my breath. “The scabs are here.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw them downtown.”
Armand's jaw dropped open in astonishment. “Come on inside. Dad and some of the men are there,” he said.
In the warmth of the kitchen, I told my story in rapid sentences, my tongue running as fast as my legs had carried me home. I felt like an actor performing on a stage with all eyes on me.
“Maine license plates,” my father said when my performance was finished. He shook his head and fell silent.
“Canucks,” Mr. Lagniard declared, voice sharp with hatred. “Potato workers.” He was a huge man with a gargantuan thirst, although he seldom missed a day's work. “Then what they said about Toubert is true….”
I sensed that my moment in the spotlight was over and sank down beside Armand on the floor. “Are they talking about Rudolphe Toubert?” I whispered to him.
He beckoned me into the bedroom and I followed, reluctantly leaving the scene of my triumph. As we sat on the edge of the bed, Armand said: “They say Rudolphe Toubert arranged for the scabs to come here. The factory owners went to him to supply the scabs and Rudolphe Toubert was only too glad to do it. They say he got so much money per head. Of all the double-crossers …”
“He's worse than Hector Monard,” I said, astounded at Rudolphe Toubert's treachery.
“They're both traitors. One is as bad as the other.”
The voice of the men in the kitchen reached us in low murmurs.
“What happens now?” I asked Armand.
“We wait,” he said. “The workers meet with the owners tomorrow night. A final meeting to straighten out the situation. Everybody hopes that the scabs won't have to be used….”
“But why bring them here all the way from Maine?”
“A show of force,” Armand explained. “The owners want to show that they mean business. It's like holding a gun to our heads. Ready to be used if the meeting fails.”
At the supper table that night, my father said: “Let me tell you about the scabs.” And we all fell quiet.
“They're people like us. Men like me and all the other workers. Times are bad in Maine too. Maybe worse, because farm workers have to depend on the weather as well as work conditions. Us, we don't have to worry about the weather, at least. When the strike is settled, we'll have our jobs. Rain or shine.”
“Would you go to Maine as a scab?” Armand asked.
“You can't judge another man until you lace on his shoes,” my father said.
“But you'd never become a scab, would you?” Armand insisted.
“These are hard times, Armand,” my father replied, his voice surprisingly tender. “Nobody's a bad guy. We're all trying to earn a living and support our families. …”
The meeting began on Thursday evening at 7:00 P.M. and continued throughout the night and into the following morning when the negotiators adjourned for three hours and then resumed their talks at noontime.
The meeting gave rise to optimism in Frenchtown. For weeks, the strikers had walked up and down in front of the shop without results. Although the arrival of the scabs was threatening, the meeting was the first sign that the owners were willing to sit down and talk with the workers. Thus, despite the presence of the scabs in Monument, enthusiasm filled the air as the meeting began.
The weather seemed an omen of good things about to happen. The December temperatures rose above normal and sunshine melted the early frosts and dissipated the remains of the first snowfalls. The frozen ground softened a
nd in some places turned to mud—to a boy in Frenchtown, mud signified spring and now a kind of false spring seemed to have arrived.
As families joined the workers in the shopyard while the talks went on, a carnival atmosphere prevailed. The fires were lit in the barrels not so much for protection from the cold but as symbols of hope and devotion, much as candles burned in St. Jude's Church like prayers made visible.
My mother bundled up my baby sister, Rose, and took Yvonne and Yvette to the shop yard, where Bernard and I kept watch with the others. Armand hung around the platform near the shop entrance with the strikers. As the favorite of my uncle Victor, who was inside as one of the negotiators, Armand was treated with a measure of respect by the workers. He made himself useful running errands, carrying messages, and had already adopted the mannerisms of the workers, laughing quickly at the jokes, knowing when to sit still and be silent.
A hush fell on the crowd and all eyes were drawn to the platform as the door opened and my uncle Victor stepped out, followed by two or three others. No one moved, even the babies were quiet.
My uncle Victor raised his arms.
“We're taking a break,” he said.
A moan of disappointment from the crowd.
“Go home,” he called, raising his voice. “The talks will go on all night. You'll need your rest for what's coming if we fail.”
His words cast a pall over the yard, obliterating the pleasant atmosphere that had prevailed earlier.
My mother gestured to me, and I rounded up Bernard. When I told Armand it was time to go home, my father said: “That's all right, Paul. He can stay….” Armand beamed.
Most of the workers remained in the yard, in small groups huddled together as the night turned cold, the flames in the barrels flickering low. A sharp wind nipped at our cheeks as we made our way homeward. I envied Armand, who had stayed behind. He belonged to something, at least. Had a sense of his destiny, even though that destiny was nothing I wanted.
The talks entered their second day. At school, I flunked a test: Math, my worst subject. In my homeroom I found that Emerson Winslow had changed his seat. He no longer sat beside me. That chair and desk was now occupied by a red-haired boy with a noisy sniffle and a runny nose. Glancing around surreptitiously, I saw that Emerson Winslow had taken a place near the window, five rows away. The red-haired boy, whose name I did not know and did not care to find out, wiped his nose with the sleeve of his plaid shirt.
When I got home from school, my mother said that the talks were still going on. My father had returned to take a bath and gulp a quick snack and then had gone back to the vigil.
* * *
A noise, a whisper of sound, woke me, and I opened my eyes to the darkness of the bedroom, the sleep instantly gone from my body. The bedsprings creaked as I raised myself to look past Bernard, who always slept curled up like a snail. I saw Armand's dim figure beside the bed, hastily drawing on his clothes.
Propping myself up on an elbow, I whispered: “What's going on?”
He pressed a finger against his lips as he shrugged into a sweater. Then circled the bed, on tiptoe, in a half crouch.
“I'm going to the shop,” he said on his knees beside me. “I heard the talk earlier. The scabs, they're going to try to get into the shop just before the sun comes up.”
“I'm going with you,” I said, although I hated to leave that warm, safe bed.
“Hurry up,” he urged. “It's almost five o'clock….”
We stumbled out of the house and down the stairs into the strange stillness of early morning, the sky eggshell white on the horizon and dark above.
When we reached the shop, we took up a vigil at the far side of the yard, crouched behind low piles of lumber, our eyes riveted on the clusters of men in the yard. Spotlights had been erected by the shop owners at the start of the strike and they caught the men in their stark, merciless light, casting their skin in a pale yellow glow. They paced the yard sullenly, heads down, puffs of steam issuing from their mouths. I searched for my father and did not see him. Two policemen patrolled the sidewalk, guns in their holsters and billy clubs dangling from their belts.
“Do you really think there'll be a fight?” I asked Armand.
“Of course,” he said. “There's no way around it. Look close. See the bulges in their jackets? Those are weapons.”
“Weapons?” The word ugly as I spoke it.
‘Oh, not guns,” Armand reassured me. “Billy clubs, like the cops use.”
I spotted my father in the crowd, arms at his sides, looking vulnerable and defenseless. I would have bet a million dollars that he carried no billy club in his mackinaw.
The policemen chatted with the strikers occasionally, their voices carrying across the yard to us. Then everyone turned to the street as a car pulled up, the motor purring softly as it came to a stop. Rudolphe Toubert's gray Packard like a jungle beast breathing heavily in the night. Exhaust curled out of its tailpipe. The car moved off into the night.
“Bastard,” Armand muttered.
A moment later, he said: “Listen.”
I lifted my head, cocking my ear, heard the murmur of the men, the hiss of flames in the barrels. Listened more closely and then heard, yes, something beyond these sounds, almost out of reach but more distinct even as I strained to hear. The faint rumble and coughing of old trucks moving in the night, the grinding of engines, growing louder by the moment.
The policemen came instantly alert, hands on their hips, legs spread apart. Several strikers slipped their hands inside their jackets and I knew they were gripping the clubs hidden next to their bodies. I searched for my father, saw his face as a blur until he became lost in the crowd.
Then silence, so sudden that it was itself a sound in the air, everyone caught by surprise, the men in the yard motionless, the cops as still as the statues in Monument Park.
“Have they gone away?” I whispered to Armand, the question a wish more than a question. They had not come all this way from Maine only to turn back within shouting distance of the shop.
“They're gonna sneak up on us,” Armand said. Us. His spirit out there in the yard with the workers.
I sat back, waiting, remembered the last time I had spied like this, when the men of Monument had charged into the hooded Klansmen at Moccasin Pond. But that clash had been a battle of good and evil, an attack on people who set fire to churches and wanted to rid the world of Catholics and Negroes and Jews. The fight that was imminent now was different, a sad kind of fight, workers against workers, men like my own father who must fight men like himself who had probably left their own wives and children behind in Maine.
When I looked up again, the scabs appeared, like grim ghosts lumbering out of the half darkness, marchers in a disorderly parade, seven or eight abreast, unseen columns behind them. They crossed the street, out of step, one man stumbling, their faces unknowable in the dark, as if their features had not been formed.
The strikers formed a line of defense at the mouth of the yard while the two policemen stationed themselves on the sidewalk.
“Halt,” one of the cops called. “Don't come any closer.”
But the scabs kept coming, their steps heavy on the pavement. Now that they were in the periphery of the spotlights, I could see them clearly, their faces gleaming blue and grizzly in the harsh glare.
The fighting erupted without warning. One moment, the men faced each other in grim silence, hesitant, tentative, massive in their stillness. Then, the lines broke and they rushed at each other as if a signal had sounded that only they could hear. They clashed and grappled each other awkwardly, amateurs at combat, performers in a grotesque ballet.
The silence of the fight was eerie, not like the battle of Moccasin Pond, which had been loud and furious with screams and yells and horns blowing and automobiles being pounded like giant drums. In the shopyard as daylight began to invade the darkness, the sounds of their brawling were muted and subdued except for sudden gasps and groans and muffled cries, as
if the participants had pledged themselves to a battle that would not disturb the rest of the world.
Armand leapt to his feet, impatient, bobbing and weaving as he screamed: “Give ‘em hell. Kill the bastards …” And he ran off to join the fighters.
“Come back, Armand,” I screamed. “Come back.”
But he disappeared into the battle.
I looked for the cops. Surely they'd spot Armand and pull him from the skirmish. The policemen, however, were rushing around ineffectually, trying to drag or pull men from each other, tugging at jackets, dodging blows, imploring the men to stop, stop, give up, somebody ï going to get hurt …
As the fighting continued, the white light of morning overcame the yellow glow of the spotlights. I tried to spot my father and Armand and realized that I could not tell the strikers from the scabs as they swarmed and struggled. They were all strangers.
Suddenly, the weapons appeared, the way magicians plucked rabbits and scarves from hats or hidden places. These were not stage props but clubs and hammers and sawed-off bats. I saw the first blood splash from the cheek of Rubberman Robillard. And at the same time, a knife blade glinted iethally in the morning light.
I finally spotted my father, who was tugging at a giant of a man holding someone in a headlock, the knees of his victim buckling, his body sagging. Unable to make the giant loosen his grip, my father leapt on his back, looking ridiculous for a moment, as if he were playing a parody of piggyback. The giant loosened his hold—his victim fell in a heap to the ground—and swiveled around, trying to shake my father loose. My father held on for dear life, his knees scissoring the giant's waist. Turning furiously now, the giant shook himself free of my father and sent him hurtling into the crowd as if he were a ball aimed at pins in a bowling alley.
I saw the flash of the knife again.
A moment later my father staggered from the crowd, clutching his chest, blood cascading through his fingers. His face was lifted to the sky in the awful anguish of pain, his knees wobbling. He did not cry or scream but seemed to have gathered the pain within himself. As I watched, stricken, paralyzed, he looked down to see the blood on his hands, dark, spreading, spurting now the way water bursts from a spring.
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