A crunching sounded on the front stoop. She looked up quickly. Chinatown had already opened the door. It was Sugar Mama, bareheaded, a little afraid to come in. Her oiled moon face gleamed.
“Mama!” yelled Chinatown.
“Ha, the one who laughs!”
“I been plannin’ to git by your place.” Chinatown slapped her on the hip.
“Sure, sure. You come by tonight.”
He chanted: “ ‘Gonna wait till payday to swing down the lane, ’cause nothin’ good is give away.'” He thought he heard the outhouse door creaking. Without knowing why, he became nervous.
“See you later on, Mama,” he said quickly. “Got somethin’ to do now.”
Anna rose and wiped her knees on the dish towel.
“What you want?” she asked coldly.
The question caught Sugar Mama in the middle of a grin. The grin twisted.
“Ah, my little one,” she cried, “you are wearing such fine things that old Mama think you are Americano.”
Anna tried to move behind the table.
“What you want?”
“Maybe I just stop for a look at my little one— my sister’s own child. But she is so grand now that Sugar Mama does not know if she should come in or go away.”
She looked down at Anna’s bare feet. Anna had taken off the high-heeled shoes. They hurt her feet. Sugar Mama looked at Anna’s dress. The dance-hall dress was like a rag. Anna had it pinned like a diaper between her legs.
“Go away!” cried Anna. “You are an old bitch.”
“Yes,” said Sugar Mama, “I will go away. It is not right that the old bitch talk with Americano— the fine lady who is friends with the fine people who live up on the hills and ride in motorcars.”
“Get out!” screamed Anna.
“But yes, I am going to the dogfights in the evening. Of course, you will not go to the dogfights. Tell your fine friends on the hill that Sugar Mama is at the dogfights and let them laugh. Tell them that when next the foreman’s wife invite you to eat.”
Anna screamed a curse and ran at Sugar Mama. Chinatown grabbed her and held her arms. She kicked with her bare feet at Sugar Mama.
The back door banged open. Big Mat strode into the room. His face was purple black. Sugar Mama gave him one frightened look and turned to run down the stoop. In two bounds he was close enough to help her on her way. His foot caught her in the back. She tumbled into the road, sliding a little in the dust.
Chinatown was afraid that Big Mat was going to jump on Sugar Mama. But he and Anna were pushed back into the house. Big Mat slammed the front door. The frame shack rattled.
Sugar Mama stood in front of the stoop and screamed awful Mexican curses. Her voice carried like a mill whistle. A crowd gathered and began to laugh at her. She picked up pieces of dirt and began to throw them at the house. Then they could hear the voice fading in the direction of Mex Town.
Big Mat and Chinatown were at table. Chinatown wanted to talk about what had happened but he did not dare to break the silence. After they had eaten Big Mat and Chinatown left the house. Anna did not see them. She was busy putting on the high-heel shoes and unpinning the dance-hall dress.
It was evening before Big Mat had drunk all he could hold, yet his step was certain. Chinatown had not drunk half as much but already was beginning to stumble. Big Mat supported Chinatown as they mounted the flat stone in front of the lunch car.
“Got to eat,” Chinatown was saying. “You got to eat, too, Mat.”
Big Mat was not talking.
“Be sick if we don’t eat,” complained Chinatown.
They were inside the doorway. Shoulder to shoulder, they blocked the narrow car. A couple of men had to flatten themselves against the counter in order to squeeze out. Nobody paid them any attention. A steel worker who smelled of liquor had special privilege.
Smothers was sitting opposite the coal stove at the far end of the counter. A thick cup shook in his hand. The cup made a steady clatter when he tried to hold it against the saucer. The wild look on Smothers’ face was more pronounced than ever before. The other men had left an empty seat on either side of him. He mumbled to himself.
“There Smothers!” cried Chinatown. He started toward the little cripple. Chinatown was too drunk to notice Smothers’ condition.
Smothers started as Chinatown and Big Mat dropped onto the stools on either side of him.
“Steel goin’ to git ol’ Dusty.” His lips were loose.
Chinatown said, “Got to git a bellyful of black coffee. Be too sick to see the dogfights. You got to eat, too, Mat.”
“Steel goin’ to git Dusty,” repeated Smothers.
Chinatown looked at him. “Steel ain’t gittin’ nobody.”
“Steel goin’ to git everybody that’s leavin’,” cried Smothers.
Before Chinatown could give a heated answer a slow voice behind him took up the words: “Sure, steel get everybody. . . .”
There was a man behind the stove. It was Zanski, the old Slav that worked with them in the pit.
Smothers was excited. “See—it’s true—steel git ’em all. . . .” He quieted. The cup began to rattle again.
Zanski made a sign to Chinatown. He touched his forehead meaningfully and indicated Smothers.
“Worse tonight. Every month it is worse. They take him away soon. It is better so.”
“What he talkin’ ’bout?” asked Chinatown.
“It is talk around mill,” said Zanski. “Lots of colored fella leave job. They go to big mill near Pittsburgh. More pay for same job.”
“Why didn’t I hear ’bout this?” fumed Chinatown.
Zanski looked hard at Chinatown before he spoke. “You would not want to go. They get more pay for job because trouble comin’.” He leaned back behind the stove.
Clucking at her gum, the waitress drew Chinatown’s coffee from the big urn.
“One midnight coffee comin’.”
She slid it down the counter. It stopped in front of him. Not a drop spilled.
“Man, that there’s service!” Chinatown grinned.
“She is my granddaughter, Rosie,” said the old man behind the stove. He got up and took Smothers by the arm. “Come, it is time for job.”
Smothers was looking at the mill stacks through the lunch-wagon windows. The smoke from them looked to be liquid, so heavily it rolled.
“Like big guns jest shot off,” said Smothers.
“Maybe they is guns jest shot off.”
“Come, we go,” said Zanski.
Quietly Smothers put on his cap, and they left.
A young man at the other end of the counter laughed.
“Ain’t never seen Smothers so bad off as he was this evenin’.”
An old man looked out of the window at the smoke stacks.
“He ain’t so wrong. Mill stacks do a fella in same as a gun. Long time I see kids get white as kids can get and still know what the sun is like.”
Three cups of coffee had completely sobered Chinatown. When he left the lunch wagon he was in high spirits, ready for the dogfights.
He tried to persuade Big Mat to come along. “You can’t git in more ’n a coupla hours’ sleep, anyway, Mat. Might as well stay up. We be jest in time to see the first dogs pitted and maybe win a little somethin’.” He fastened his hand on Big Mat’s arm.
Big Mat broke away from the detaining hand. He gave no sign at Chinatown’s call.
All day he had been drinking green whisky. It had not made him drunk. It could not make him forget the feeling of helplessness when his muscles couldn’t make things right for himself and Anna.
There was no light in his shack. Big Mat opened the door softly. Anna was not in the room. The quilt on the cot was in a twisted pile. Big Mat passed his hand over the quilt. Then he sat down to wait.
Three days passed before Melody felt like going back to the job. He had not been worried. For five dollars a doctor would write his name on the sick list. He had sat with his guitar and looked at
the book propped against the window sill. That book was Big Mat’s Bible. Mat had moved out and taken everything but the Bible. It was strange that he had left the Good Book. In all the time Melody had known him there had never a day passed that Mat hadn’t studied the word. Seeing Mat’s Bible had given the trouble in Melody another twist. But he had not moved it from the sill.
So all those long days he had been twisted inside. And his guitar sang all the empty notes it had. His own music, he felt, was driving him crazy. Without trying, he had built a song around a tan-skinned girl, the shadow of her legs making a pattern on the floor as she turned down the kerosene lamp.
Dusty-butt Jones and some of the other men had been packing for their journey to the new mill near Pittsburgh. They had complained about the music.
“Sound like somebody dead in here.”
“Whyn’t you play somethin’ happy like ’fore we go?”
“Be glad to go. That music been goin’ since day before yesterday.”
“Git drunk an’ sleep it off.”
“Aw, go to hell!” Melody told them.
Yet he was tired of his own noise after three days. He was tired of it but he couldn’t help wanting to play. For the first time he thought it was a bad thing to have to play only the music inside him. He began to wish that his right hand were smashed so never again would he be able to hold a pick.
On the morning of the fourth day he went to the superintendent’s office. He had decided to ask for a transfer. The superintendent was a busy man; the interview was short and to the point.
Melody said, “I wants to git off the hearth.”
He had not expected to be transferred immediately. He had merely expected the superintendent to keep the request in mind. But Melody was lucky. A man was needed at the blast furnances. The superintendent gave him a slip of paper to pass on to the boss of number-six stoves.
The superintendent said, “He’s colored fellow too. He’ll fix you all right.”
Melody went straight to the lockers. He wanted to say good-by to his old gang before they left for the pit. They laughed and gave him advice as they struggled into their clothes. He looked around for Zanski.
“The old hunky got his three days ago,” one of the men told him.
“Naw!”
“Yeah.”
“How it happen?”
“I was up on the hearth. I see when he and Smothers come back from eatin'—that’s the last I see. Next thing, O’Casey was bawlin’ for a new man. Zanski was gone.”
“A dead one?” asked Melody.
“Don’t know.”
Melody was not satisfied until he had found a man who did know.
“Naw, he ain’t dead,” said the man, “but he through in the mills. Was just too old to know when to jump. Steel tagged him.”
It was good to know that Zanski was still alive. But he was through in the mills. That was something to make a man cry a little. It would be a relief to cry for somebody other than himself. Yet instead of crying Melody smiled. Now the old hunky could sit in his courtyard and watch his kids and his kids’ kids go to work in the mills.
The boss of number-six stoves was Bo. Melody remembered Bo’s advice that first day at the mills. He started to greet Bo as an old friend. Bo looked at him out of hard eyes and snapped:
“What’s your moniker?”
“Melody.”
Then Bo looked at his crew. His mind ran: Two micks, a ginny, a hunky and a hayseed. “Boys,” he yelled, “this guy is Melody.”
Nobody said anything.
“Take a look around,” snapped Bo. “See how things go. At noon start in dumpin’ cinder.”
Number four was not in use. Melody climbed the winding ladder and sat atop the furnace. He had several hours before noontime. He took out his tobacco and rolled a smoke. A little way across the yard was the open hearth. Big Mat would be just getting off. Melody had tried not to think about his reasons for transferring. He wanted to make himself believe that he had just gotten tired of seeing the same old faces every day—doing the same kind of work. But in the back of his mind he knew that all those reasons were linked to a jealous hatred of Big Mat. Unconsciously he had acted to keep that hatred from growing. Now he would not have to see Big Mat go home to Anna.
Just before noontime Bo came up the ladder and sat with Melody. He thought that Bo was going to give him hell for not looking around as he had been told to do. But Bo was sociable.
“Got the makin’s?”
“Sure.” And Melody passed the sack.
“Lucky for you this blast not workin’.”
“How come?”
Bo drew the sack shut with his teeth and talked while he rolled the cigarette.
“Bad gas always on top the furnace. Kill you quick as hell. Got to be keerful not to spend no time top a live furnace, boy.”
“Obliged.”
“That’s all right. I had a eye on you.”
“Obliged.”
“Sure. How come you wanted to git on a stove gang?”
“Jest tired o’ the hearth, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
They looked across the yard and smoked.
“I’m the only nigger in the mill got micks workin’ under me,” said Bo.
Melody gave him a puzzled look.
“That’s how come I got to be so short with you when you come in,” said Bo.
“Oh.”
“I got to show no favorites and be eight times as good as the next man.”
“Reckon so.”
“Somebody all the time gunnin’ for me. Don’t like to see a nigger in my job.”
“Then how come they to make you a boss in the first place?”
Bo laughed. “Same way all us niggers got here in the first place—’cause o’ trouble. If it wasn’t for trouble wouldn’t be no niggers in the mills at all.”
They let that drop. Soon it was time for Bo to go if he wanted to get his eating done.
“Luck with that cinder,” he called.
“Obliged.”
He was halfway down the iron steps. He turned and threw his voice against his hand.
“Be keerful and don’t walk the top o’ this furnace. Ain’t been rebuilt yet. Bad blowout.”
“What kind o’ blowout?”
“Slip. Killed a guy. That’s how come you to git your new job.”
The work at the blast furnace was easy to learn. In three or four hours Melody was working in rhythm with the stove gang. There was very little real hot work. It could not be compared to the open hearth. Working next to the bosh, the base of the blast furnace, was cool in comparison to the hearth when there was a front wall to be made. And the four big stoves, heating the air blown through the blast furnace, were nothing when he remembered the pit below the pourers shelf.
However, there was plenty of heat for the stove gang after the furnace had been tapped. They had to push a mud gun right up to the dripping tap hole. The gun shot mud under great pressure. They had to shovel like madmen to keep that gun supplied. It did not take long to seal the furnace, but he was glad the tap hole did not have to be mudded often.
On the last turn of the day Melody smashed his right hand, his “picking” hand.
He had been thinking of the guitar, knowing it could never plunk away the craving that was in him. In the South the music makers had said, “A love cravin’ gits so mixed up with the music you can’t tell which is which.” Melody had said that also. Now he knew it for a fact. The last three days of picking at his guitar had wearied him. Yet he knew he would not be able to let the music box alone.
That was what he had been thinking. Now he was lying with his hand quivering at his side, and blood ran in hot circles around his fingers. He would always wonder if he had done it purposely. That was how it seemed at the time.
They had been working on number four when it happened.
Bo had said, “It ain’t no use in them buildin’ this here furnace again. Once they blow out like this jest the spot
where they was sittin’ is jinxed. Everythin’ is jinxed.”
But the superintendent had kept the men working on the furnace. He laughed at their grumbling and put Bo’s gang to cleaning the flue dust out of the gas chambers.
“Somethin’ bound to go wrong,” Bo had muttered.
Number four was cold, but they had worn wet handkerchiefs over their faces. Even with that protection they had only been able to do minute shifts inside the stoves. The heat stung through the handkerchief when they poked blue dust out of the hivelike chambers.
Melody had entered the stove with Bo. In the lamplight he should have been able to keep out of Bo’s way, but his mind was on the guitar. He had put his hand in the wrong place. He had seen Bo’s rod come down. It had been like watching something in slow motion. Then had come the shock. There was no pain. Now he wouldn’t be able to pick a guitar for a long time.
The next thing he saw was the crowd of men around him. He was down on the floor in front of the water trough. Bo leaned over and spoke to him. He did not answer. He was trying to figure out if he had done this to himself purposely.
Chinatown could see the dark windows of Big Mat’s shack when he turned a bend in the dirt road. He began to curse softly. It was coming dusk. If Big Mat had been at home there would be a lamp lit. Perhaps Mat was already at the hospital. He, too, could have been at the hospital if he had not given time to this useless trip. He started to turn back from the dark windows. But the door was close at hand.
“Hallo!” he cried to the dark room.
There was a shadow on the bed. He waited until it took form. It looked to be Anna.
“Oh, I almost went off,” he said to the still form. “Thought the place was empty.”
There was no answer. He came in quickly, the lighted lamp choking in his hand. Holding the lamp in front of him, he advanced slowly.
Anna snapped her eyes open. She blinked in the light.
The lamp almost dropped.
“Boy, you give me a scare!” he breathed.
She sat up and began to rub her eyes.
“Jest come by to pick up Big Mat.” He set the lamp on the table. “Waited for him at the mill. Didn’t show up.”
Blood on the Forge Page 12