The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  The following day it rained, and they spent their breaks inside, in the noisy third-floor lunchroom with its bare, beige walls and unpainted wooden floor, where people from so many departments were mixed together that discussion of any sensitive issue was impossible in the general din. But the next day, Wednesday, was fine again, and the workers from the sixth floor returned gladly to the fire escape. No more mention was made of the closing of the hosiery mill or, for a few minutes, of anything else. It was as if Alf’s answer two days earlier, and the intervening rain, had swept their minds with silence. But then Boomer Tomlinson and Eddie Ray began to talk about where they might take their holidays that summer. Boomer told a story about a bear that had lumbered into a campground where he and his wife were staying, near Wawa, and created such havoc he doubted he would ever get his wife camping again. While he and Stella were huddled in terror in their little tent, the bear had pried out a window of their Plymouth. “He just slipped his claws in and peeled the whole thing out like the lid off your Tupperware,” Boomer said. And that set others off with their bear stories, the best of which was Mary Carr’s tale of how, as a girl, she had been trapped in her grandmother’s outhouse by a bear that sat down outside the front door. “That door was so flimsy,” Mary said, “a skunk could have pushed it over,” and there was something so absurd in the notion of a skunk pushing open an outhouse door that they all laughed. “He looked like he was just waitin’ for his turn in the loo,” Mary said. “I was so scared I was ready to jump in the hole.” In the end, though, her grandmother had saved her. “She come yellin’ out of the house with her broom. Drove him right off. Really she did, cross my heart. She was a bear herself, my grannie. There wasn’t no one in the whole of Wrong Harbour who wasn’t scared of her. She was as big as an outhouse herself.”

  The nasal bleating of the buzzer sounded oddly distant and irrelevant, like a parental command the children do not yet take seriously. Other, sterner warnings might come later, but for now, there seemed no harm in sitting on in the sun. Someone started another yarn, and Alf, flicking the butt of his cigarette over the rail, thought suddenly of a bear story Pete had once told. There had been a campfire, and a bear lurking at the edge of the light. He couldn’t remember the rest, but the image of Pete’s knowing-unknowing face with its eyebrows raised in innocent surprise plunged a sickle of grief though him. A little cry broke from him, like the small, muffled cries people give in their sleep. His neighbour, Eddie Ray, turned to him and at that moment a high, tense, familiar voice scolded above Alf’s head, “People, people, this isn’t the way.”

  Along the balcony, the talk and laughter broke off. His face heating, Alf glanced covertly to his right and saw Kit Ford’s blue-jeaned leg and black running shoe swinging inches from his shoulder. The foreman was leaning from the open door, like a conductor from a train. Some of the knitters stared up at him, with blank faces. Some glanced once and turned away to look impassively into space. There was a sense in the air of obstinate denial. They were used to obeying the buzzer, to obeying every order that came from above, but today, in the light and intoxication of their laughter, they seemed to have taken a communal decision to ignore the foreman.

  Ford stepped down to stand on the board that served as a step. He clapped his hands. He might have been trying to raise a flock of geese. “Come on, people! Let’s go!”

  Still they sat on, in silence. Alf could feel the tension, feel it in the back of his neck, as if at any minute the man standing above him might strike him. He could hear Ford breathing, in a labour of controlled fury. Bending his head and shoulders forward, Alf slowly rose. As he climbed into the mill, he ignored the murderous gaze of the foreman, who stood by the door with crossed arms. From behind Alf came the sounds of cups being screwed on Thermoses, of lunch boxes being shut, of bodies shifting, as taking their time, the workers prepared to follow him in.

  41

  “SO WHAT WAS THAT?”

  Alf stood before Kit Ford’s desk. On its surface lay a scrap of paper, on which a twist of gum had been deposited like a pink grub. Ford’s eyes, bright with sarcasm and pent rage, had locked on Alf’s.

  “What was what?”

  “That!”

  Ford jabbed two fingers towards the door.

  “Shut the door,” the foreman ordered.

  Alf hesitated for a moment, then turned and slowly closed the door. The hum of the knitting machines subsided a little.

  He turned back to the foreman.

  “Sittin’ there five minutes after the buzzer went —”

  “I don’t know,” Alf said. “We weren’t paying attention —”

  “The damn thing is deafenin’!”

  They had heard the buzzer — at least Alf had — but it had seemed to sound distantly, from another life. He was a bit mystified by what had happened. But he would not be spoken to like this, as if he was fourteen. His defiance had taken the form of an exaggerated calm.

  He stood with his hands in the pockets of his factory greens, looking steadily at the foreman, motionless.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, with a shrug. “We forgot.”

  “Forgot!” Ford’s eyes grew larger, filled with outraged sarcastic glee, as if he’d just caught Alf in a whopper. “Even after I told you to get in you still sat there.”

  “Yes, I guess we did.”

  “And why was that?”

  Alf let a sigh escape him and looked down at Ford’s desk, at the curl of pink gum. He agreed with Ford that things had gone off track. But to pursue it this way — there was something so wrong-headed about it.

  “I’m asking you!” Ford demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Alf said. “You took us by surprise.”

  “You bet I did.” The foreman’s gaze roved in angry frustration, from the desk to Alf’s belt, from the belt to his chest. His jaw worked, as if in need of gum.

  “I’ve never seen it happen before,” Alf offered. He doubted Ford would get his hint that it hadn’t needed to happen before, but he had to try. “I doubt very much it’ll happen again.”

  “I guess you can see to that, can’t you?”

  Alf met Ford’s hard gaze, suddenly wary.

  “You’re the ringleader.”

  Alf felt himself colour. “There was no ringleader.”

  “What was it then, spontaneous rebellion of the working class? C’mon, man, I got eyes. They didn’t move out of there till you moved!”

  “That’s crazy,” Alf managed. But he felt guilty, as if the foreman was speaking the truth. “It could have been anybody.”

  “Be that as it may,” Ford said, glancing at a clipboard, “I’m holdin’ you responsible. They do it again, I know who to look for.”

  The foreman picked up the clipboard and made a show of looking at it. Was the interview over? Alf went on standing, his calm in tatters. Slowly, he took his hands from his pockets: they felt weighted, as if all the blood in his body had poured into his fists.

  At ten the next morning, the workers paraded onto the fire escape as usual. Near the end of the break, when everyone had fallen silent and a cool breeze from across the yard was lifting a page of Book Cummings’s paperback, Steve Johnson glanced at his watch and spoke the thought that was on every mind. “So I wonder if the Roadrunner’ll be out today.” Someone chortled darkly, and Alf felt the backs of his arms tingle. I should go in, he thought, before the bastard comes out, but he sat on, ignoring his own better wisdom. Kit Ford had taken up residence in his thoughts like a conqueror from a foreign country. He couldn’t stop thinking of their meeting, thinking of what he might have said, thinking of the injustice of the whole damn business. He blew smoke, and watched it pass, a shape-shifting genie, through the railings over the sunlit yard.

  Just as the buzzer went, a motion to his right made him turn his head. Ford had stepped swiftly from the mill and positioned himself at the end of the fire escape. The foreman stood facing his workers, his fingertips wedged in the pockets of his jeans.

>   Silence ran along the balcony. No one moved. Then Boomer Tomlinson leaned forward as if to bang his head on the rails, and let out a low groan.

  “You have a problem, Mr. Tomlinson?” Ford said.

  “Just a headache,” Boomer said, without looking at him.

  One or two knitters rumbled their amusement — Ford was the obvious source of Boomer’s “headache” — and still they kept their seats, not so much, as on the previous day, out of defiance but because they were confused and, in a sense, disciplined into immobility by the foreman’s presence.

  Alf sighed, flicked away his butt, and prepared to get up. He was dreading the result, figuring the rest would follow suit; then Ford would have more “proof” that he was their ringleader. But he figured he was doomed as well, if he went on sitting, especially if the others also kept their places. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, but before he could rise, Mary Carr leapt up. “So let the fun begin,” she cried out, with black irony. They stirred as one then, and shuffled into the mill after Mary. Alf was one of the first to pass Ford; he pointedly ignored the foreman, who stood with his arms crossed, watching them all with thin disapproval, as if they had only barely passed muster.

  By the time the afternoon break arrived, most of the workers were anxiously anticipating Ford’s reappearance. They had talked enough about his behaviour in the meantime to work up a good head of opposition: who knew what would happen if he tried his funny business again? But Ford was wiser than Alf dared hope. The foreman didn’t reappear at the end of the break, even though a few of the workers waited a half-minute extra for him. In fact, he didn’t reappear again on any day, and the incident, with its two chapters, passed into the general fund of factory lore, a story to be retold over beer, and embellished with witty comebacks that hadn’t actually been spoken, celebrations of courageous determination “to not let him get away with it” that had been tentative at best.

  The workers’ actual behaviour on the fire escape told a different tale. Alf noticed that now, as the end of a break approached, the workers grew restless. They furtively consulted their watches, and put away their lunches and books a little earlier than before. And though they still sat on after the buzzer, this traditional period of defiance had grown shorter — to the point where it hardly existed at all.

  Several weeks after the fire-escape incident, Ford again called Alf into his office. On his desk lay a strip of patterned sweater cloth, loosely folded. Alf looked at the deep-blue cloth warily: he had made it himself.

  “Alf,” Ford began. The foreman was putting on his most sincere, concerned face. “I’m worried you’re doin’ too much there — workin’ the Richardsons and fixin’ too. It’s a lot for any man.”

  Alf sensed where this was heading. Pushing his hand over hair, he said, “Well to tell the truth, since you’ve come I’ve had a lot less to do. As far as I can see, you’re doing about three times as much work as Matt ever did. I had to spend a lot of my time helping him out.”

  “ ’Preciate that,” Ford said, with a twitch of a gaunt cheek. “But ’fraid we got a problem here.” He deftly flipped open the top fold of cloth. It was a rich, subtle blending of dark-blue yarns, with just a touch of red running through it. Alf had made it on one of the Richardsons, the only machines on the floor sophisticated enough to turn out such a pattern. “You see what I’m talkin’ about?”

  “Not sure I do.” But his face was heating. He watched the foreman’s blunt fingers shove the cloth forward.

  “You used the wrong red.”

  Alf picked up the soft length of cloth. The red surfacing in random streaks, glimpses of fire.

  “It’s supposed to be Persian red. You used barn red — too bright.”

  Carrying the cloth past Ford’s desk to the tall, unshaded window behind it, Alf held the cloth up and saw that Ford was right.

  Ford’s high voice jabbed at his back. “There’s fifty yards of it spoiled, Alf.”

  Alf looked out the window and saw the gravelled roof of the dye-house: the pulsing necks and breasts of the pigeons gathered there. An irony he did not fully grasp tugged deep in him, the shape of an obscure joke.

  He returned to his place — how quickly and completely it had become his — in front of Ford’s desk, tossing down the cloth with a gentleness that belied the tension setting in his face and chest. It seemed pointless to say sorry, to say anything. In nearly twenty years of knitting he had never made a mistake of this order, a mistake that would cost the company dearly.

  He could not understand it.

  “What I’ve decided to do,” Ford said, frowning with great seriousness at his desktop, “is take you off the Richardsons. If you’re workin’ on some of the easier machines, then you’ll be able to concentrate better, on knitting and fixing both.”

  The foreman looked at him. Behind his look of concern, triumph glinted.

  Alf said nothing. He felt oddly neutral, almost untouched by Ford’s announcement.

  “I want you to switch with Marr,” Ford told him. “He knows how to run the Richardsons — ain’t that right?”

  Alf grinned bleakly.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Alf said. Beyond the window, pigeons were ascending, a storm of grey wings.

  He left the office and walked by the motionless Richardsons, refusing to look at them, but sensing their tall mass as if they were watching him pass their ranks like a disgraced soldier.

  Woody Marr’s stand was at the back of the room: four old underwear machines now used to make cloth for T-shirts. Alf reached them just as Woody emerged into the aisle, a bobbin of white cotton in one hand. The knitter barely glanced at Alf as he went about his business. Since the previous fall, they had done their best to avoid each other.

  “Now?” he barked, incredulous, as Alf told him what Ford wanted.

  “Seems so.”

  Woody shot him a look of pure malevolence. Alf felt jolted awake, as their mutual history rose into fleeting acknowledgment. He turned away without expression, pretending to interest himself in the state of Woody’s machines.

  It is one thing to accept your fate; it is another to go on accepting it, as if there was no argument to be made for an alternative. Within half an hour Alf was scouring his brain to understand how he could have mistaken barn red for Persian red. They were as unalike as red wine and a Coca-Cola sign. Had he been operating in that much of a fog? After a few minutes he marched off to the yarn room, where he flipped a switch and sent a pale, shuddering fluorescence over the rows of deep wooden bins, scarred by generations of use. The bins of barn red and Persian red stood side by side, heaped nearly to overflowing with the huge, head-sized bobbins. He looked from one bin to the other, in a state of self-lacerating wonder. A child could tell the colours apart. He couldn’t shake the sense that he’d been tricked — most likely, by himself.

  But still his sense of injustice — that something had been done to him — went on raising its complaint. Moving to one of the long windows set in the thick brick wall he looked down across Willard to the old house that held General Office. Bob Prince’s dark-blue Fleetwood was parked in its usual place, under the willow whose massive crown showed a faint blush of green. At the sight of the wide, polished car with its low fins, a current of anger surged through him, and for another few seconds he raged silently.

  After the Richardsons, running Woody’s old machines was a breeze. Alf had more time on his hands than ever before: time to be bored and look at his hands, time to hope for a breakdown somewhere so he could fix it (though he hated meeting the looks and, worse, the condolences of the other workers, who felt his demotion was unfair), time to look bitterly up the aisle where Woody hurried around the Richardsons, time to chat with Coreen Appleton.

  She ran the stand across the aisle, a young woman in her twenties with two young kids at home, pretty, with an open face and brown, eager eyes that smiled at him with no hint of flirtatiousness or guile. She usually wore a plaid shirt tuck
ed into jeans, which fit her in a way Alf found quite pleasant to look at, a way that emphasized the fullness of her pear-bottom, the sudden narrowness of her high waist, cinched with a white plastic belt on which a red heart design had been printed. She sang sometimes as she worked, in a childish soprano, old Teresa Brewer songs from the Fifties. She gave his days a lighter touch, and though he enjoyed her fresh looks, he wasn’t drawn to her physically. She was so bright and cheery there seemed to be no mystery in her, nothing hidden that called to his own hiddenness — not the way Lucille had called and still called, sometimes. He saw Lucille in vivid, isolated fragments. Bending to roll up some cloth, he’d flash on her eyes, searching his without expression, or on the black cloud of her pubic hair as she slid down her jeans.

  One morning he was tending his machines when he heard Kit Ford’s high-pitched voice across the aisle. The foreman and Coreen stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to Alf, talking. Alf watched as the foreman’s square hand rose across Coreen’s blouse and lit for a second on her far shoulder. Then the hand dropped, brushing the hollow of her back and lighting, palm open, fingers spread, on the fullness of her bottom, squeezing as Coreen tried to twist away. In three strides, Alf was across the aisle. He was acting so quickly, so impulsively — powered by a rage against Ford that had never really gone away — that his action seemed almost rehearsed, he accomplished it with such efficiency. Careful not to touch Coreen herself, he took the foreman’s wrist and flung away his arm, flung it like something rotten he scarcely wanted to touch himself.

  “Hey!” Ford said, turning. In those wide eyes, where innocence and outrage usually held sway, Alf saw a stab of fear, a hint of the boy again. But it was gone in a second, buried under a smirk of patronizing satisfaction, as he recognized Alf.

  “Keep your hands off her,” Alf said in a dry voice. The words seemed unreal to him, as if he’d taken up a role in a play.

  “Back to work, fella —”