Elton made it to a pew near the back as Munson made it to the microphone. Munson told a story of three men in the 1890’s who were killed installing wires on the very street where this church stood. Those men were heroes, Munson said, because they gave their lives so their neighbors could enjoy the miracle of electricity. Like them, Darezzo was a hero, a good soldier who died in the fight to keep hospitals running, to power the halls where the nation’s laws are made, to light runways and ballparks, to enable the communication systems that turned the world from an enormous collection of strange cultures to a single, easy-to-reach community. Four more times Munson called Darezzo a hero. As he closed, he vowed to root out those responsible for taking this fine lad before his time. Once their identity was known, he promised to hold them accountable.
Munson left the pulpit and the minister returned. “Next we’re honored to have another close friend of David’s speak about him, Mr. James Shepard.”
Claude groaned. He leaned forward to speak with Frank.
“Close friend?”
“Bosom buddy,” Frank replied.
As the men leaned forward, Joan leaned back and whispered to Bertha. “Did you get to walk up and see the casket?”
“We did,” Bertha said. “Your arrangement arrived. It’s over toward the right, between one from Dave’s hockey team and one from Warren Taylor.”
Claude heard the name and turned toward Bertha. “From Warren?”
Bertha shrugged and looked to Frank. Frank shrugged too.
Shepard’s theme was management’s lack of commitment to safety. Shepard suggested management chose money over safety and had done so for years. He said the union had shouted about safety for years, but those shouts had been ignored, ignored in spirit, ignored in practice, and ignored in the language of the UUW contract. He told Munson a short trip to a mirror and he’d have the person responsible for Darezzo’s death. He asked Munson how many more deaths he’d allow, and how many more trips to Aruba Munson planned for his family. He called for the entire management team to be fired, an act he termed “the most positive discipline possible.” No sobbing was heard from the front of the church.
The minister thanked Shepard, then drew nervous laughter when he asked if he could say a few words about the deceased. He spoke about Darezzo’s love of hockey, his love of his mother, and his service to God and God’s children through the church, praised Darezzo’s spirit of adventure, and read another verse from the Bible. After a few additional remarks, he thanked everyone for coming and closed the service.
Claude stood, but Frank motioned him to sit down again. Once nearly everyone had left the church, the Dombrowskis and Amognes walked to the coffin, paused a few moments, and left too.
Outside the church Claude pulled out a cigarette.
“Ten o’clock tomorrow?” he said.
“At Saint Mary’s,” Frank said. “Across town.”
“See you then.”
#
The next day light snow fell on the two inches that accumulated during the night. Claude and Joan ran a little late, arriving at the church at five minutes to ten. When they opened the doors, they were shocked to see a full house. On the left, though, Frank sat with his eye on them, holding two empty spots with his coat. Without scanning for faces, Claude walked over and sat next to Frank. Joan sat on the end.
“My word,” Joan whispered. “I can’t believe how many people are here. This place is packed.”
“You’ll have plenty of room to spread out in a minute,” Frank said.
The church was warm, so Claude and Joan removed their coats. Frank leaned to Claude.
“I talked with Clarke yesterday,” he said in a hushed voice. “He offered me Schulke’s job. Said I was the only person they knew could right the ship.”
“Did you take it?” Claude said.
“You bet I did. Squeezed five thousand more from him than he first offered. But that’s not all. I also talked to him about you.”
Claude flinched. “About me? What did you say?”
“Told him the stunt they pulled to get rid of you was bullshit. Said if I was gonna take over, I needed experienced people at my side. Told him you’re a hell of a worker when people treat you with respect, and that I intend to treat you with respect, and then I told him I wanted him to rip up your agreement, to stop paying you your disability benefits but let you keep anything else they gave you, and to bring you back with a clean slate. I said I’d personally vouch for you, if he wanted me to, because I’m sure after what you’ve been through you’ll be a model employee. He said he’d consider it, and had to run it by Shepard, but I think there’s a good chance they’ll give it the okay. A very good chance.”
The organist who’d been playing softly kicked the volume up a notch, and a priest and a deacon walked the center aisle. Everyone stood. The priest and deacon knelt at the altar, performed a silent blessing, and bowed their heads for a moment. The priest turned to the congregation, spread his arms, and welcomed everyone to the celebration of the taking of Thomas Schulke unto the arms of the lord and savior Jesus Christ.
The priest pulled his hands together and held them to his chest. “Please be seated.”
Everyone sat. But as the priest began to speak, three-quarters of the congregation rose. The priest’s mouth opened at he watched people step into the aisles and march toward the back of the church. Claude looked to Frank. Frank did not look back. With a firmly set jaw, Frank kept his eyes on the priest.
Claude turned to see. Elton and Gino. Bubba Nason. All the guys from underground lines. Men and women from meter reading. The union people in engineering. Five or six guys from the garage. UUW people from telecommunications, customer service, substation maintenance, overhead lines. Shepard held the door as they walked from their pews and left the church.
Claude surveyed the remaining mourners. Win Schulke sobbed, and members of her family and her husband’s family dabbed their tears with handkerchiefs. Clarke and Munson mouth-to-eared each other on the opposite side of the church. The management team sat behind Munson and scowled. A group of old women Claude didn’t recognize closed their eyes and prayed. At the back corner of the church, Junior and his wife stared at the closed coffin in the center of the altar.
The priest stammered. Frank fixed his gaze ahead. The mass proceeded. Claude and Joan stood when the others stood and shook hands with the people in the vicinity when the time came, but otherwise sat still as the Catholics knelt and recited and recited and knelt and ate the body of Christ and drank His blood.
Claude used the time to think about Schulke. He pictured him standing in his god-awful polyester. He looked over to Win as she fought back sobs. His eyes wandered to Munson, to Mickleson, to Junior. Claude took Joan’s hand and smiled at her. She returned the smile.
When the mass ended and everyone stood outside, Joan and Bertha whispered about the union demonstration.
“Shepard’s idea,” Frank said. “Listen, can you excuse me and Claude for a second?”
The two walked a snow-covered footpath to the snow-covered parking lot.Frank reached into his pocket and took out a roll of mints. He offered one to Claude, but Claude shook his head no.
“Well, buddy, whaddya say?” Frank said with the mint tucked in his cheek. “Will you come back to the company if Clarke and Shepard rip up the agreement and give you a fresh start?”
Claude looked at nothing in particular and took a series of slow, deliberate steps before returning to a normal pace. Frank kept by his side. After another fifty yards, Claude broke into a wide smile.
“What?” Frank said.
“Franko, thanks for doing that for me. You’ve been a great friend, better than I deserve, probably, and I know you’ll do great as head of stores. The last few months I’ve been thinking how being on disability wasn’t really the lucky break I thought it was. For all the bad shit there was in stores, there was a lot of good too, and as much as I like my days off I gotta say that these last months there’s a
lot I’ve missed about working.”
Claude grabbed Frank’s shoulder. The smile beamed brighter than before.
“But I’m gonna have to give you a no, my friend. Now that I’m away from it, I can see Rhode Island Electric for what it is. It had its hooks in me for too long Frank, for too long, and now that I’m free from it I don’t want to go back. It may sound weird, but I think being on disability was a lucky break after all, because Rhode Island Electric is one jig I never want to taste again.”
Chapter 54
At sunrise, thick mist hung low to the lake. As Claude paddled through the morning silence, he remembered telling Jamie on a similar Memorial Day years ago that clouds were just like people, that sometimes they hit the snooze button and slept in late instead of getting up and rushing to their work stations in the sky. Just like people.
Little whirlpools spun from his paddle. Claude watched one glide into the mist, then dipped his paddle to the water again and created another. A mourning dove cooed from the nearby shore, and the smell of bacon wafted from a small fire Claude could make out flickering through the fog. At the small island where the lake narrowed, Claude changed from long, effortless strokes and long, quiet glides to plunging strokes that moved the canoe quickly from one shore to the other. With land now on his left, Claude resumed casual paddling along the banks toward the river. When he started to see tall grass, he leaned hard on a paddle and braked the canoe, which turned a lazy circle before Claude brought it to a full halt.
“The short pole’s for you,” he said. “It’s all set up. Just keep your eye on the bobber and don’t worry about nothing. The current from the river will make your lure dance just enough. Put your thumb on the button like we practiced, and give it a fling.”
Joan raised the rod until it nearly touched the shoulder of her lifejacket and rolled her wrist forward. Her lure arched high in the air and dropped into the water ten yards out.
“How’s that?” she said.
“Not bad. Reel in the extra, and you’ll be fine.”
“If Jamie could see me.” Joan stared at the reel as she turned it a click at a time. “What do you think she’s doing right now?”
“Filling in on someone’s paper route, probably.”
Claude drew his own rod behind his head and cast. His reel whirred for a count of six. As a muted plop emerged from the fog, the line sagged into the water. He turned two revolutions of the reel to pull it up. From his shirt pocket, Claude extracted a pack of cigarettes. He tapped the pack on the base of the rod until a cigarette poked through the hole, nudged his index finger against it, then tapped the pack until a second cigarette emerged. With his mouth he grasped both cigarettes and pulled them free of the package. He reached beneath his seat for the open tackle box and ran his hand along the edge to find the back corner, where he kept a loose pile of wooden, waterproof matches. With a match in hand he sat up straight, struck the match on the base of the rod, and lit both cigarettes.
Without setting down the pole, he stood to a crouch and carefully stepped over the wooden support strut at his end of the canoe. The craft wobbled. Once Claude had set himself down on the lifejacket he’d opted not to wear, he slid the flotation device cushion from the caning of the canoe’s back seat and put it on top of the thin puddle of water that rolled to and fro with the movement of the boat. He held out a hand to Joan.
Joan’s step over the wooden strut wasn’t as smooth as Claude’s, but Claude held her firm and she maintained her balance. Once she plopped herself onto the cushion, he handed her one of the cigarettes. They both inhaled, and both blew a stream of smoke at the same time. Joan looked at Claude. He was chuckling.
“What?” Joan said as she smiled.
“I’m a janitor,” Claude said.
“So?”
“A non-union janitor.”
“I know.”
Claude took a long drag from his cigarette and blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “I always thought that would make me a traitor.”
Joan smiled again. She put her cigarette hand on top of Claude’s rod-holding hand.
“There’s lots of kinds of loyal,” she said. “You’re not a scab traitor janitor. You’re a scab traitor janitor husband father, and that’s okay by me.”
##########
a note about the writer
Michael Burnham is a certified safety professional who began working in the utility industry in 1995. A native of Derry, New Hampshire, he lived for 17 years in Rhode Island, where he wrote The Jig of the Union Loller, and now resides in Middletown, CT, with his wife and two sons. Michael writes as time permits. Although he has had many articles published in newspapers and magazines, The Jig of the Union Loller was his first published novel.
The Jig of the Union Loller Page 40