Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  A handful of people near the back got up and stomped out, grumbling.

  “Don’t be deceived, friends, by these smooth-talking Communist radicals with their tinted glasses and their miniature cigars. I’m sure yall know who I mean.” The congregation whispered.

  “All the time talking about the ‘downtrodden oppressed workers.’ You poor, poor things, they moan, you is earning fourteen percent less than your working brothers in Lowell, Massachusetts. I guess fourteen percent would just about cover their phone bills home to Boston, don’t yall?”

  Mr. Tatro nodded agreement, thinking how the Princes took all the risks, bore all the responsibilities. It was a relief when he got home to stretch out on the couch and forget about the mill until the next morning. Whereas the Princes had to live with it day in and day out. It was their place, and they could offer whatever wages they pleased, which a man could either accept or reject. The notion of a union was humiliating. Damn, he could look out for hisself, always had, always would. On the day when he made the last payment on his house, he invited Mr. Prince Sr. over to celebrate. And he came! The president of the mill, but he took time out to sit on the back porch with one of his foremen and sip iced tea and talk about the garden and termite-proofing and asphalt shingles. As Mr. Prince walked down the front sidewalk in his shirtsleeves, trying to smooth down his scrambled white hair, Mr. Tatro had stammered his gratitude. Mr. Prince Sr. said, “You don’t need to say it, son. There’s gratitude flowing in both directions.” Shoot, he didn’t need him no middlemen with the Princes.

  During the slow periods, Mr. Prince Sr. would keep production as close to normal as he could, stockpiling goods in warehouses all over town until demand picked up again. You had to be a dead loss for him to ever let you go. But unions was one thing he wouldn’t tolerate. His face would go all scarlet when the topic came up, and his bushy white eyebrows would start in to twitching. In the old days when the organizers would arrive, the mill men would usher them to the town limits singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” And tell them not to come back cause they wasn’t wanted. But these days they was more sneaky. They hired Southerners as front men. Them you could sometimes pick out even easier, because they was all the time exaggerating their accents and talking about the dirt farms they was raised on. One question they’d never answered to his satisfaction: If they was such avid Southerners, how could they allow theirselves to be used as mouthpieces by a bunch of Yankee Communists?

  The loyalty the old-timers felt for Mr. Prince Sr. extended to his son, though he was tough to figure. Seemed like he didn’t hardly have no personality at all. Especially compared to that daddy of his. You couldn’t say he was stuck up or nothing, even though he went up North to college. He chose to come back here, married a local girl. His daughters went out with Jed and Junior. But he didn’t seem to have no backbone. Why, he stooped when he walked, and he wasn’t no older than Mr. Tatro hisself.

  “… now John, he says in the fourth chapter, thirty-sixth verse, says: ‘He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.’ Well, I know it’s difficult for our good union friends to understand how we see things down here, since workers and management up there is at each other’s throats ever minute of ever day. But just cause we got us a mill in this here town, hit don’t mean we’re in no hurry to give up our Southern way of life.

  “It is writ in the 126th Psalm, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’ And I say to you, friends, that we has known tears. But we sowed, and now we’re reaping. And hit is joyful! Yes, hit is, friends. And I say to these Communist agitators coming in here all the time trying to stir up trouble—thank you all the same, you with your dues checkoffs and your health plans and your binding arbitration, but the Lord is our negotiator. And when that last spindle’s been wound, brothers and sisters, heaven is the only closed shop we’re hankering after. The only collective bargaining we gonna do is right here in this church on our knees with our Lord God!”

  He launched into prayer with his arms upraised.

  Raymond wasn’t sure he agreed with this message he’d been hearing all his life. One big happy family, was how his father portrayed the mill. They’d gone once a week to the company ball field to watch their father play in the mill league. When they were little, he and Jed spent the game climbing on the jungle gym, sliding, and swinging. As they got older, they watched the game and cheered at the right spots. Every summer there were company barbecues at a park on the lake. The Princes were there in Bermuda shorts, laughing and talking just like everyone else. But recently he was understanding that the Princes weren’t “just like everyone else.” Something was fishy in this here happy family. He couldn’t say exactly what. Maybe there was a limit on how many generations a family could be expected to show gratitude. There was a job waiting for him at the mill that dozens of men would kill to get, but he didn’t feel grateful. He could see his life laid out before him. In twenty-five years he’d be just like his father, content in a dumpy house with a boring job.

  But there was an appeal to it. Safe and comfortable. He wouldn’t have to prove anything to anyone—couldn’t prove anything, since he’d been pegged since birth, like an etherized moth.

  In the grey stone Episcopal church at the top of the hill, the congregation was confessing, “… we do earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us …”

  Sally was trying to decide whether or not she had sinned. The previous night at the quarry, Jed had handed her the stubs from all the movies he’d taken her to since they first started dating. She counted them up—over two hundred. At a dollar and a quarter each, he’d spent over two hundred and fifty dollars on movies alone. Reeling, she allowed Jed to put his hand in her panties. Before she knew it, he had his finger inside her. She shrieked and leaped out of the car. When she got back in, she absolutely laid down the law: Jed was never to do this again. But did this mean she was no longer a virgin? Had that membrane, or whatever it was, been broken? And was it for sure a sin to be unmarried but not a virgin? Was there any way this could have made her pregnant? She opened one eye and glanced at her father, who knelt next to her with his head bowed and his eyes closed. At breakfast she kept wondering if he could see in her eyes that Jed had done this.

  “… spare Thou those, Oh God, who confess their faults …”

  Yes, Lord, it was wrong, Sally prayed. And I’m sorry. (It didn’t even feel good. At least it could have felt good if she was going to have to feel this guilty. If a finger had felt so unpleasant, what must a…)

  She decided to think about something else. Punch cups! The Plantation Ball was in two weeks. Each Ingenue was chairman of something, and this year she was Punch Cup chairman and had to borrow cups from all over town, and label them, and keep them washed and filled at the dance, and replace broken ones, and return them afterward. It was a big job. What if she didn’t plan for enough cups? What if people ended up drinking out of Dixie cups, as they had at the prom two years ago? It would be so embarrassing. Someone had suggested disposable plastic cups, which just grossed everyone out. She’d better get plenty of extras.

  Robert Prince, his elbows on the pew back in front of him, was pondering the collect from the first Psalm: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful… And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” Profits were up nine percent this year. Was this a sign that he was doing all right? “To him that soweth righteousness shall be a sure reward.” He had just authorized construction of a new employee recreation area with four tennis courts, a playground, and a baseball diamond. He was trying to run the mill as his father had. The well-being of his employees was his responsibility. It weighed on him. He wasn’t
doing enough, or not the right things.

  Some of the younger men at the mill he didn’t even know. On his walks in his shirtsleeves through the rooms, the older men would introduce them. Some were sullen and would glance around impatiently as he and the older men tried to chat about hernias and Chaxolais-Angus crosses and the Dodgers. From among these younger men sprang those who were listening to the union organizers. A small local had been formed. Under total secrecy, but he usually heard about whatever went on. He wished he could reassure them: If they felt he’d engineered some plot by which to exploit them, they were overestimating his efficiency and competence.

  His father’s ways didn’t work anymore. No one wanted a union in the old days. They were thrilled to have a steady salary, a house in the village with services nearby. And his father heaped on softball leagues and picnics and paid vacations, knowing that benevolence was good business, that every dollar spent on employee benefits saved a couple in terms of the demands of a union of unhappy employees. Besides, his father had liked his workers and really did want to see them happy. But nowadays good will and barbecues weren’t enough. The young men were talking health benefits and pension plans and grievance procedures and cost-of-living raises. Things were changing. When his father had been brought down from Lawrence, Massachusetts, after the strike there, to run this mill using “native-born Anglo-Saxon workers,” he’d been received like Christ entering Jerusalem. The mill was a community undertaking, and many of the workers were from outside the community. They were offered wages and housing, which they could take or leave, since there were hundreds more who would gladly take them. Now the attitude among the younger workers seemed to be that it was their mill.

  He smiled bitterly. As far as he was concerned, they could have it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his to give anymore. He had stockpiled extensively during the recession following the Korean War. The entire bottom floor had been packed to the rafters with bales of cloth. He was on the verge of bankruptcy and didn’t see how he could hold out until the next war came along. Finally he had to close down or sell out, so he’d sold to Arnold Corporation—which had forty-five mills; 35,000 employees, fourteen million dollars in profits last year. They’d kept him on as a figurehead, but he had little real authority now. He was sure the home office would cancel the recreation area.

  The minister, Mr. Shell, was talking along the same lines: “… it is doubtful whether Anglo-Saxon people at any time since the Norman Conquest had lived in such abject poverty. I was a young man then, fresh out of seminary. I found a region devastated by war, humiliated by Reconstruction, inhabited by hungry and hopeless people. I remember standing in this very pulpit trying to fire up my congregation about a textile mill as a means of escape from this dreadful idleness and despondency.

  “People told me I was an outsider, meddling in a way of life I didn’t understand. I sustained myself with the knowledge that Joseph, a foreigner in Egypt, nevertheless inspired and assisted the Egyptians. The South was a civilization founded on agriculture, some argued. I was proposing to graft a shoot from another species onto the Southern rootstock. The North had defeated the South on the fields of battle, but it had not defeated it as a cultural entity. But should the South embrace industry, cultural defeat would follow.

  “The North was materialistic, they insisted. A person’s worth was determined by how many goods he had amassed. Decisions were based on maximizing profits. These were not traits my parishioners admired or wished to emulate. I maintained then, and I maintain now, that there need not be this dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. In the words of our collect, ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners … Whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” The righteousness of a righteous man permeates all his activities and causes them to flourish and to benefit those involved. Only to the superficially spiritual do the industrial successes of Newland appear materialistic. To those with eyes to see, they are evidence that our undertakings have been regarded with favor by our Lord …”

  Mr. Prince lowered his head and shielded his face with his hand, under the guise of prayer, but in fact to hide the bitter smile stamped permanently across his features these days. A team of efficiency experts’—or management consultants, or some damn thing—had arrived from Arnold headquarters in New York City. They’d followed him around for days taking notes, then sat him down and presented their findings. It was not cost-efficient for him to spend so much time strolling around chatting with employees. He was paying subordinates good money to represent him to the workers. He needed to increase the number of machines supervised by each man. The workers spent too much time in the bathrooms. For once, he felt something unequivocally: He requested in a wavering voice that they leave. They marched off in their pinstriped suits and horn-rimmed glasses, informing him he’d be hearing from the home office. And he did—via a memo ordering him to increase quotas and monitor bathroom time. Since then, rumors had been flying about organizing in the village. Some days he even wished them well. But what scared him was the suspicion that the union leaders were just using them. If expenses rose at this mill, contracts would have a better chance of going to unionized mills in the North, where the bulk of the union membership worked. His workers were such naive people that they’d never be able to see this, or to believe it if someone told them.

  He felt as flying reptiles must have when rodents began their climb to ascendancy. He was a man cast in an old mold. A flattering way of looking at his indecisiveness was to regard it as judiciousness: There was validity to each person’s point of view, and the challenge was to reconcile them, not to prevail over them with your own point of view. He tried to keep his dealings polite and pleasant and voluntary. He felt how people treated each other was more important than any consensus they might reach. People who didn’t abide by this code—the management consultants and the younger workers and the Arnold executives—he didn’t know how to deal with. And didn’t want to know. When it came right down to it, he couldn’t bear being disliked. He wished he were out of it altogether. Too young to retire, too old to start off in a new line of work, children to send through college, a family name to uphold, workers with families who depended on the mill for their livelihood.

  But at least he knew he was a flying reptile, something his own father couldn’t grasp. He was always saying, “Now you take good care of my workers, son. They need us.” Sometimes he thought the old guy was schizophrenic. He’d talk about “his workers” and the “Benson Mill family,” and you’d almost forget that he’d been scooping off hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit for decades. Yet there was nothing cynical about him. He really did care about “his workers,” and really did see the profits as rightfully his. Unlike the ranks of executives from Arnold who’d flowed through Newland. You couldn’t hate these men. There was nothing there to hate. They were too bland. They weren’t even Yankees. They had no regional loyalty at all, no religious compunctions. Their loyalty was to the Arnold Fiber Corporation profit-and-loss statements, which determined their own personal fortunes and their ascent up the corporate ladder. You couldn’t expect them to care about Newland or the workers because they never stayed around long enough to get involved.

  Not that Robert himself was one to talk. He knew the setup wasn’t just, but he didn’t know what to do about it, so he passed most of his profits on to the children in trust funds. To be the beneficiary of a system you knew was askew put you at cross-purposes to yourself. Sometimes he wondered if, apart from uncontrollable economic forces, he hadn’t actually engineered his own failure when he had to sell the mill after the Korean War, in a half-hearted attempt to extract himself from an iniquitous system.

  He glanced down the pew at his family. Melanie was still a gorgeous woman. From time to time he thought wistfully of the excitement of their courtship—when her hair swinging against his cheek as they danced to Tommy Dorsey sent stabs of passion through him. Then the high drama when he went off to
war, not knowing if they’d ever see each other again. The excitement had faded over the years, but he still felt a quiet peace when he was with her. Sometimes he looked at her as she read in the lamplight and felt a stab of poignancy. When the house was full of little children, it seemed as though the chores would never end, but with middle age came the knowledge that they would end all too soon. Their love wasn’t forever. Each new day was a gift, and one day not too far off, one of them wouldn’t be there any longer to enjoy it. It was similar to how he’d felt leaving to fight Hitler, only more painful because more drawn out, less heroic, and more inevitable.

  Bouncy little Sally took after Robert’s father, had the “common touch.” Too common, he sometimes feared as he watched that oaf Jed Tatro pick her up for dates and recognized that glazed gleam in his eye. He understood what drove men to lock their daughters in towers, or clamp them into chastity belts. But here, as everywhere else, he realized that forces beyond his control were at work—hormones and God knew what all. It was horrible. As for Emily, poor child, she was stuck with his own grim determination to fit in and inability to do so. She also had his capacity for outrage, but without the indecisiveness that kept it under wraps. She stalked around the house these days like a hand grenade whose pin has just been pulled.

  It was too soon to tell about little Robby. At Robby’s age Robert was being dragged by his own father on walks through the mill. There had never been any question what Robert’s career would be. He sometimes wondered what he would have done otherwise. Taught history maybe. Been a dog catcher. As far as he was concerned, Robby was on his own. The atmosphere in the mill office now was all intrigue and jockeying for position, as Arnold executives marched in and out. He wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy, to say nothing of his own son. Sometimes he even wished the kid would be a crazed revolutionary and blow the place sky high. But maybe Emily would instead.