The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  Christ, don’t get sentimental, he thought. But he was shaken. Something old, forgotten, had come and touched him in his isolation.

  May brought him a chair and he sat near the kitchen door. Near the far end of the porch, in the faint light from the yard, Doyle’s pitted face glowed like bronze.

  “Glad you could make it,” the organizer growled. A note of irony? “We’re just going through the mills, one department at a time. Trying to get an idea of who’s likely to support us.”

  “Who’s solid and who’s kind of wishy-washy,” Ed Berry said, from his chair beside Alf. The tiny planet of his cigarette reddened under his downward-tilting face.

  At first, Alf had trouble concentrating on the discussion. He was preoccupied with the emotion that had taken him unawares, the uncanny sense that this was not 1965 but 1949. Sitting across from him was a little owl-faced woman called Margo Love. She’d been one of the most violent of the strikers, in ’49. He remembered how she’d followed every vehicle that broached the lines, pounding on the hood and screaming obscenities. When the police had tried to drag her away, she’d lain on her back kicking in the air so that her underwear showed, threatening to impale all comers with a hatpin. She looked a little heavier now, but it was still the same Margo, quick to take offence, and challenging the other speakers so often Doyle had to tell her to wait her turn. Rebuked, she scowled at the wall over Alf’s head.

  As Alf listened, he couldn’t help remembering how, sixteen years ago, there had been an excitement in the air, a sense that they were not just making a union but reshaping the world. This lot seemed depressed, by comparison. They seemed isolated from each other, as if they hadn’t fully made up their minds to be here at all, slow to offer suggestions, letting two or three people carry the ball, while Doyle, smoking and cajoling and glowering at his clipboard, seemed to get more irritated by the minute. Already — a secret sigh of relief — Alf saw himself reporting back to Prince: You’ve got nothing to worry about. This bunch isn’t going anywhere.

  The discussion turned to Number Six knitting. The organizer’s gravelly voice came down the porch: “All right, Alf, you see any possibilities there?”

  Before he could answer, Woody Marr broke in. “You can put down Sid Queen and Ellie Snider right off the top,” the knitter said, raising his bulldog face and stabbing with a thick finger. Woody was a short, powerfully built man who, Alf felt, had always been resentful of him, for reasons that were never clear. Perhaps it was simply that Woody was resentful of everyone: there was an anger in him, a bitterness, that seemed to flow not from any discernible cause but from the depths of his personality. Woody had gone out in ’49, and got fired for it. Like Alf, he had returned to Bannerman’s after an absence of a few years.

  Doyle tapped the bottom of his pencil on his clipboard. “You agree with Woody, Alf?”

  “I’m not so sure about Ellie Snider,” he said.

  “Why not?” Doyle said sharply.

  “Hell, she’s solid,” Woody growled as he watched them both.

  “What are your reasons, Alf?” Doyle said.

  “Well, she might be sympathetic, which I doubt. But she’s got three kids to look after, and no husband —”

  “This is bullshit,” Woody said.

  Doyle made a note. “Anyone else,” he said, looking straight at Alf. Alf shook his head.

  The porch fell silent, though there was a covert restlessness, as if people were disappointed by his response. “Hell,” Doyle said suddenly. “It’s like a bloody dungeon in here. Could we have some light?”

  The weak overhead bulb flooded the porch with a sickly light. Eighteen washed-out faces blinked and avoided each other’s eyes, as if they had been exposed in some private, vaguely shameful act. The woods up the hill had disappeared. Looking around, Alf was startled to see Lucille Boileau in the corner behind Doyle. His heart leapt, for she was leaning out to look at him, her black eyes lit with recognition.

  “The overall picture,” Doyle was saying, “ain’t very good, brothers and sisters. In fact, it stinks. The for-sures don’t add up to more than ten per cent of the total. We’re really gonna have to do some persuading, folks. Really go after those maybes.”

  “So is there any hope or what?” someone said.

  “There’s always hope,” Doyle said abruptly, as if hope were a weak ally it was best not to depend on. “The thing is, we have to build, get thirty or forty per cent of the place signed up before the suits find out. And they will find out, believe me. Then the bloody horserace starts. We might have to sign the last ten per cent, to take us up to fifty-five, in a weekend.”

  “So is it worth going on?” Rob Cole asked, a young shipper Alf knew. He had a wife and God knew how many kids. “I mean, I don’t mind takin’ the chance if there’s decent odds.”

  The porch went still: there was intense interest in Rob’s question. No one wanted to get fired for trying to start a union; everyone knew there was a risk. Doyle stared at Rob as if he hadn’t heard him, his pencil twitching in his fist like a little orange tail.

  “What this company’s doin’ to you here ain’t right,” Doyle said at last, and his voice was low and threatening like something in the back of a cave. “It isn’t just. It may be legal, at least as the world stands presently, but that’s a different matter. Slavery was once legal too.

  “These layoffs: I know many of you are worried it’s gonna happen to you. Some of you are running twice as many machines as before. You know, in your hearts, that this isn’t right. It’s no way to treat people. It’s just a backdoor way of cutting your pay. And there’s signs they’re gonna cut your benefits too, such as they are. Without a contract, you have no protection against that —”

  Doyle paused, melodramatically Alf thought, to light another cigarette. Everyone watched as the flame lit his pitted face.

  “What you’re asking for — to make a union — it’s only what’s yours by law,” the organizer continued, under a spreading cloud of smoke. “You understand that, that’s why you’re here. All we have to do is bring some of the others to the same place of understanding. Then they’ll act, they’ll join us. I remember a mill in eastern Ontario, Dempsters Mills, we started off with a smaller group than this. There were ten of us, a band of ten. By the time we’d finished, we’d organized a two-hundred-man shop. Two hundred and seventeen. 1959. And still goin’ strong.”

  Doyle’s tiny eyes nearly closed for a moment as he took another draw and sent the smoke on its way. He had presence, Alf would give him that. What he did seemed important. What he said, in that raw, earthy voice, seemed worth listening to, and not only that, it seemed true, or at least truer than the common run of talk. If I hadn’t been through it once already, Alf thought, I’d be half-ready to sign myself …

  “This isn’t just about money,” Doyle said. “We’re making something here that has to do with justice, security, decency. This is a rich country. Ordinary people worked hard to make it that way. Why shouldn’t they have a fair share of what they’ve made? Why should the rich get to keep their jobs and their privileges, while all the ‘cost-saving’ is taken out on you? It’s the same question people were asking in the Depression, and it hasn’t gone away. If there’s enough for all, why are some forced to make do with so little?

  “The rich think they have the right to forget the rest of us. They think they have the right to take and take, even if it means pushing us down. They don’t call it pushing us down, they call it the laws of economics. They call it freedom. They call it the market. They say that the best way for the market to work is for them to get as rich as Croesus, and somehow, magically, we’ll all be taken care of. Well it ain’t true, brothers and sisters. They’re playin’ a game with the rules rigged their way. And no matter what they call it, it isn’t right —”

  Afterwards May served cookies and fresh coffee. Alf found himself standing next to Ed Berry.

  “Thought you were dead set against this union stuff.”

  “No
t me,” Ed said, struggling to raise his head. Years of working over flatbed knitting machines had left him preposterously stooped, his face nearly parallel to the floor. Alf wondered how old he was —sixty-three, -four? — not far from his pension anyway. And putting it at risk by being here.

  “I mean, you didn’t go out in ’49.”

  “I wanted to go out,” Ed said. “My wife said she’d leave me if I did. Regretted it ever since.”

  “You could take that more ways than one,” Alf said with a laugh. Ed didn’t smile, so he switched to a more sober tack. “So even after what happened, in the strike, you’re still willing to try it —”

  “I want another chance,” Ed said softly, with great dignity. His grey eyes — a young man’s eyes — glanced up with sudden vividness.

  “So your wife has changed her mind, has she?”

  “Edna’s no longer with me.”

  Chagrined, Alf remembered the car accident: the newspaper flash-photo of Edna Berry’s crushed car, like some dark, shapeless meteorite.

  “Ed, I’m sorry. I forgot.” They stood uneasily, nibbling at their cookies. And then Lucille Boileau was there, her wide face smiling up at Alf. She seemed extraordinarily pleased to see him, as if their encounter the night he’d brought Billy home had ignited some sense of loyalty or friendship or simple liking out of all proportion (it seemed to him) to what he’d done. “Wasn’t that some speech?” she said, her gaze assaulting his. Choking on a piece of peanut-butter cookie, Alf couldn’t answer.

  “He’s overcome by your beauty,” Ed said to Lucille.

  “Go home with you!” Lucille said.

  “Only if you’ll come with me,” Ed said, heaving a little.

  “You liked that speech, did you?” Alf said when he’d recovered.

  He was watching her sharply, and for a moment something passed between them — he couldn’t have said what — an acknowledgment, a fear.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “Well, these old lefties,” he said. “They know all the tricks —”

  “You don’t sound very keen,” she said, perplexed.

  “Oh Alf’s keen,” Ed said. “Back in ’49 he was one of the keenest.”

  “He helped my father,” Lucille said. She had recovered from her moment of doubt and was glowing at him again. He saw the gap in the side of her teeth, which gave a hint of the hag to her smile, and was aware of how the white cotton of her blouse swelled over the shallow V of her bra: another world.

  “That wasn’t really the strike,” Alf said, a bit embarrassed. He’d forgotten all about the incident.

  Lucille told Ed, “A bunch of guys started pushing Dad around in the hotel. Alf stepped in and stopped them.”

  “He’d do that,” Ed said, nodding.

  It was another half-hour before he could get away. Catching him in the kitchen, Pete slapped him generously on the back and drew him into a conversation with two women from sewing. Alf kept glancing at the clock over the stove. The sense of his own fraudulence was overwhelming. He felt he was in a bubble, with his oxygen slowly running out, and no real connection to anyone.

  13

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK, Alf slid Prince’s card from his wallet so many times it was soon covered with the grey smudges of his fingerprints. But each time he picked up the phone, something stopped him: the memory of the faces at Pete’s house. If he did what Prince wanted, he’d be putting those people in danger, no question. And he was resentful that he had to do anything, let alone something distasteful, to get the foreman’s job. Of course, Prince hadn’t said that one thing was dependent on the other, though the implication had been there: a smiling understanding, a glance towards the manila folder where his past sins lay entombed, the suggestion he might move on, move up, if he atoned.

  The following Monday, the phone shrilled through the kitchen, where Alf and his family were eating supper. A few minutes earlier, he had quarrelled with Margaret. She had asked him, innocently enough, if he’d heard the rumours about a union organizer living at the Vimy House: “I wonder if it’s the same one who came here?” He tried to avoid a direct answer, and when she pressed him, he snapped back at her that, hell, he couldn’t go around checking every bloody rumour that came through town. In truth, he suspected her of suspecting him, though of what exactly he wasn’t sure. He felt he had done nothing wrong, not yet, and yet a vague pressure of impending guilt, a foreknowledge of what he was going to do, or might do, had made him see criticism everywhere.

  His outburst had spread a bruised, isolating silence in the room, which the phone now interrupted. Penny answered.

  “Daddy, it’s for you.”

  As he crossed the room, she kept her eyes fixed on his.

  “Alf. Bob Prince here.”

  The “Bob” took him unawares, postponing for a moment his understanding of “Prince.” Whom was he talking to? Then he lurched forward, obscurely thrilled, into the intimacy offered by that rich, confiding voice, as if, already, he were being offered membership in those places where the powerful met in affable familiarity: on the greens of private golf courses; in elevators flashing up towers of light and steel.

  “Have you got any news for me on that matter we discussed?”

  “Ah yes, yes, I think so.”

  The silence over the line demanded more.

  “It’s difficult for me to talk now. Could I see you at G.O. tomorrow?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Alf. Too many curious eyes. Could you come over tonight? I’m at the Executive. Room 226.”

  When Alf hung up, his family was staring at him: four faces backlit in the receding light, watching him with the stillness of grazing animals interrupted in a field, as if mystified by the very fact of his existence.

  “Is there something wrong?” Margaret asked.

  “No, no,” he said, touched by her note of concern. “Mr. Prince wants to see me — company business.” As soon as he’d spoken the phrase “company business,” he felt reassured. It was as if he’d cited “state secrets” at a time of national emergency. Company business was not always nice business, though it was necessary. The awards, the beaming honours, would come later.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to the outskirts of Johnsonville. In fields sprinkled with garbage, the hulks of closed and decaying factories drifted under the elongated pink islands of the sunset. Smaller businesses still clung to the edge of the highway. The Biscayne passed an auto-glass outlet, several fast-food restaurants, and a sprawling store that sold wooden lawn furniture, the unpainted Muskoka chairs and lounges crowded right up to the shoulder.

  The Executive Motor Lodge formed a square C, two storeys high, around a central courtyard where a swimming pool gave off a clinical glow. He parked near the office and climbed metal stairs to a long exterior balcony that ran past a series of identical doors and picture windows. A pretty young woman in a short dress marched crisply towards him, her high heels ringing on the metal gangway. Her gaze, like a disapproving restaurant hostess’s, swept coldly down his canary-yellow polo shirt (one of Bannerman’s, four years old), his too-short, synthetic, navy-blue slacks, his black church shoes. He had put on the wrong clothes, he saw that now, though he didn’t suppose there was anything better in his closet. Margaret had picked them out for him, discarding nearly everything she unearthed with an impatient brusqueness, kneeling to sponge vigorously at an ancient mustard spot on the trousers, as though she had guessed how much was riding on tonight and was angry with him, with herself, for not being ready.

  The drapes in the window of Room 226 had been drawn. From the back of one, the lining hung down like a discarded undergarment.

  Beyond the door, a man’s nasal voice climbed in excitement: “He’s going for it! Look out! Oh!” The TV, Alf realized, a football game. He had to knock twice before the door opened and Prince’s brown, rectangular face loomed.

  “Alf. Good to see you. Come in.”

  Prince offered him a chair near the window, then padded away in
bare feet to stand by one of the twin beds, arrested by a collision on the screen. “Toronto and Hamilton,” he said, mesmerized. In his large hand, a glass contained ice, a smear of amber. Alf smelled again the atmosphere of his aftershave, at once brisk and suffocating, saw the heavy, slightly protruding jaw open in a smile that tightened into a wince.

  “You a football fan?” Prince had not taken his eyes from the screen.

  “You bet,” Alf said. In truth, he never watched it. The repetitions of chaos along the line of scrimmage, the frequent stops, bored him. He was a hockey man.

  “I got ten bucks riding on this with my son.”

  “You’ve got kids?” Alf caught hopefully at the domestic detail, a hint of normalcy, of something he had in common with Prince. He was trying to relax, to adopt the air of someone who’d dropped by a friend’s place: for wasn’t Prince’s casualness with him — the bare feet, the game — a signal they’d moved onto a more intimate plane?

  “You don’t mind if we watch for a while?”

  “No, no, great.”

  Still riveted to the screen, the executive climbed onto the near bed. He was wearing faultless tan slacks and a white sports shirt with buttoned pockets, open at the throat to reveal a fine gold chain that disappeared into the first shadowy hint of chest hair. Alf crossed his legs and surreptitiously eyed the spot on his trousers. It had dried, but the mustard stain had survived Margaret’s attack: a rude little splotch shaped like a pike’s head.

  To the screen, Prince said, “You want a drink? I got a Scotch going here.”

  Prince poured his drink on the little table between the beds.

  “Ice?”

  “That’d be great.”

  Alf sat with the heavy glass, trying to lose himself in the game. Bodies streamed together, collapsed in a writhing heap. The referee ran up in his prisoner’s stripes, waving furiously.