A Room of My Own

by Ann Tatlock

  "Don't let him see you!" warned Rufus.

  "He's too busy to notice us over here," Luke argued.

  "Yeah, well, just keep your head down. That goes for you, too, Ginny and Simon."

  My knees ached from crouching in the alley, and I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The nervousness of the men was infectious, and I pressed my fingernails into my palms as my eyes followed the movements of the picket line. My heart pounded with an overabundance of adrenaline, and I suddenly felt so thirsty my throat ached. I swallowed hard and pursed my lips and tried to keep my mounting fear bridled within my chest.

  The song tapered off as a low rumble of mumbling replaced the singing. Hundreds of pairs of feet slapping against the pavement slowed to a shuffle. The picketers looked uneasily over their shoulders. There was a tensing of bodies, a shifting of eyes. The lawmen touched palms to batons and guns and stamped nervously at the gravel and pavement like frightened horses. Whatever they were waiting for wasn't there yet, but it was coming, and they all knew it.

  "What's going on?" Simon asked.

  None of us answered. None of us knew.

  A distant roar of engines blew over the picket line like an icy wind and sent a shiver through the crowd. "They're coming!" one of the picketers cried, and finally all movement ceased as hundreds of eyes, both anxious and angry, gazed down the street in the direction of the rumbling. Police and deputies fell into line about the picketers, weapons poised. The first of the camera bulbs flashed. The film on top of the newsreel truck started to roll. The fedoras swam through the sea of caps as the journalists moved toward the center of the impending action.

  But the mill workers stood placidly, like surrendered prisoners of war, watching as a line of vehicles drew near to the mill. The first was a Ford convertible driven by the chief of police, Morton McCormick, and in the passenger seat was Sheriff Clem Dysinger. They were followed by two squad cars, then three pickup trucks loaded down with men waiting to be taken into the mill. Beyond the trucks was a large contingent of policemen and private-citizens-turned-deputies following on foot.

  The serpent of vehicles slithered along the street, coming to rest at the edge of the picket line. Chief McCormick left the Ford's motor idling while Sheriff Dysinger stood up in the front of the car, supporting himself against the windshield while holding a megaphone up to his lips. A hush fell over the crowd as the mill workers glared up at the sheriff and waited for him to have his say.

  "You men are going to have to clear on out of here!" Sheriff Dysinger began bluntly, spitting his words out through the megaphone and over the heads of the picketers. With his left hand he pulled a folded sheet of paper out of the breast pocket of his uniform and waved it at the crowd. "What I've got here is a court-ordered injunction, issued on behalf of the Thiel Grain Mill, that prohibits you from picketing--"

  An angry roar went up from the throng, interrupting the sheriff's words. Men shouted and hissed, and above the clamor I heard a familiar voice cry, "What good's a strike if we can't picket?" It was Uncle Jim. Other men picked up on his argument, saying they had a right to picket, and no court could deny them that right.

  Sheriff Dysinger waved his arms to silence the men. Even from where I crouched in the alley, I could see the two full and dripping moons of sweat in the armpits of his uniform. His thick arms stopped waving when the noise had settled enough that he could be heard above it. "I've got an injunction," the sheriff continued, "and it's legal, and any one of you who disobeys this injunction is facing a jail sentence."

  Again the crowd roared, but Sheriff Dysinger went on yelling through his megaphone, and eventually the strikers quieted down enough to listen. "You men might as well recognize the fact that you're beat. Injunction or no, your striking is getting you nowhere. You might as well put down your signs and go on home peacefully or join the men inside and get your old jobs back. Now, Mr. Thiel has generously promised to take back any and all willing to come back, no questions asked." A murmur of dissent rippled through the crowd, but the sheriff ignored it. "I say we've had enough fighting and enough bloodshed. It's time to get this thing settled peaceful-like. You can choose to go on home, or you can come with us right now and return to work. We've got a few men in these trucks willing to work, and Chief McCormick here and I are gonna escort them inside. In the meantime, you men decide what it is you want to do."

  Like a politician on the campaign trail, he held up his hands to the crowd, gave one cursory wave, and settled back down in the seat. The police chief began inching the car forward toward the crowd, hoping for it to part like the Red Sea and let them through. The trucks holding the scabs revved their engines.

  The picketers suddenly fell eerily silent as they stood their ground in front of the mill gates. Not one striker moved. They glared en masse at the occupants of the Ford, daring the lawmen to mow them down.

  For several seconds the two sides stood pitted against each other like a couple of bulldogs separated by a fence, but the stagnant standoff was interrupted and the fence pulled down when one of the picketers yelled to his fellow strikers, "We gonna let 'em crush us like bugs?"

  "No!" cried the men with one voice, and like a single creature the men rose up and lunged forward. In the next moment the street became a battleground. Police whistles pierced the air as angry hands reached out and dragged McCormick and Dysinger from the still idling car. A dozen police officers leapt to the defense of the two lawmen. The scabs likewise were pulled from the pickup trucks and swallowed up by the crowd. From within the tumult of billy clubs, baseball bats, knives, and rocks--for the picketers had finally armed themselves with weapons--came the shouts and screams of the fighting and the wounded. I lifted my hands to my ears in horror against the shouting, the stomping, the cries, but I could not turn my eyes away from the battle out in the street. Just in front of us, not thirty feet away, an officer swung his billy club at the head of a striker. The striker's cap flew off and the man--one hand instinctively rising to the wound--staggered forward before collapsing against the asphalt. After a moment he struggled to push himself up with the palms of his hands, but the policeman hit him again, swinging the club against the man's shoulder blades with both hands, like a baseball player determined for a home run. With all the breath knocked out of him, the striker reeled and slumped forward, his right cheek landing and coming to rest against the hot pavement.

  I cried out against the beating of the defenseless man. Rufus crawled across the alley and put his hand over my mouth--for what reason, I don't know. My cries could never have been heard above the tumult in the street. I pulled his hand away frantically and yelled, "He's dead! He's dead!"

  "Maybe he isn't," Simon countered. He looked at me with eyes wide with compassion. He was trying desperately to console me and keep me calm. "Maybe he's still breathing."

  The man lay alone and ignored in the street, his attacker having gone off to batter someone else.

  "Come on, Simon," Rufus said, "let's get him out of the street."

  I grabbed my brother's shirt. "Don't go out there, Simon."

  But he pulled away and ran with Rufus to the wounded man. Luke came and crouched beside me, watching the riot intently and saying nothing. I wanted to scream again, but I was paralyzed by the gruesomeness of the event playing itself out in front of me. Adding to my confusion was the flashing of cameras here and there like so many lightning bugs on a summer night. Why are you taking pictures! I wanted to scream. Cameras were meant to capture smiling faces, family portraits, sunsets, flowers--not blood, not anger, not the evil of man against man. Why would anyone want to record this? Why would anyone want to remember this?

  Trembling, I pressed my cheek against a sun-baked brick to steady myself. I closed my eyes to shut out the scene and pressed my palms over my ears to dull the noise, but it was no use. On the dark screen of my own eyelids I saw the panorama of that harsh summer played out--the doleful line of hungry men outside the soup kitchen, the homeless and penniless in the shantie
s of Soo City, and now the fierce bloodshed outside the mill gate. Everything I knew about life was suddenly turned upside down. It was as though an error had been made in the cutting room, and an awful and terrifying movie had been spliced onto the happy, romantic film advertised on the theater's marque. I'd bought a ticket for the romance, and here it was interrupted right in the middle by some tragic picture I never would have chosen to see. All I wanted was to get back to the original film, to be again the girl who gazed at sunbeams in search of angels, and who spun a globe to find out where she was going on her honeymoon.

  By the time I dared open my eyes, Rufus and Simon had dragged the wounded man onto the sidewalk only a few feet away from the alley. Simon had a hand on the man's neck trying to find a pulse. Luke and I, still on our hands and knees, crawled over to peer at the victim sprawled out on the pavement.

  I cast a fearful glance at Simon. "Is he dead?" I asked.

  Simon shook his head. "He's still breathing and I feel a pulse. Good thing that last one was across his back and not his head. He's bleeding pretty bad, though, from that first wallop."

  Rufus, who'd been supporting the man's head and shoulders as the boys carried him off the street, uncurled his fingers to reveal two red and sticky palms. I heard him curse under his breath as he wiped his hands on the sidewalk, painting two red patches there with the blood of this wounded stranger.

  "What should we do, Simon?" I asked breathlessly.

  My brother didn't answer, but in a moment he had removed his shirt and was wrapping it around the man's head. "This might stop the bleeding a little," he said. As I watched Simon at work, a sense of pride pierced my terror, and I smiled in spite of myself. My brother, only nine years old, seemed already to be fulfilling his destiny, and I knew this moment foreshadowed what he was to become. He was so very much like Papa, and I thought, They are good people, always trying to fix the bad that others have done.

  Simon was gently tying the shirt's short sleeves together to form a kind of tourniquet when Luke, pointing out toward the crowd, cried, "Fire!"

  The four of us turned to where Luke was pointing. In the midst of the struggling crowd there wafted a thick haze of smoke, rising as placidly above the tumult as Wordsworth's lonely cloud.

  "It's not fire," Rufus, narrow-eyed, hissed angrily. "They've thrown tear gas. They're trying to blind the mill workers. Another unfair advantage."

  We watched as the assaulted men screamed and staggered, their hands lifted to their smarting eyes. Some rubbed their eyelids frantically, trying to wipe away the searing gas, but in vain. A group of police wearing gas masks appeared as from out of nowhere and surged into the crowd, grabbing at the blinded men and subduing them with repeated blows of their billy clubs. When the beaten workers had fallen to their knees or collapsed completely on the street, they were handcuffed and carried off to the patrol wagons.

  I turned to look at my cousin Rufus, who was clenching and unclenching his bloody fists. He was muttering under his breath, and it sounded something like "Gotta help Pa. Gotta help Pa."

  In the next moment, Luke yelled, "There's Pa! There he is. He's taking on two of them at once!"

  Uncle Jim alternately swung his fists at his assailants and lifted his arms to ward off the blows of their clubs. "It's not fair, two against one!" Luke cried, and Rufus must have thought so too because before any of us could protest, he had sprinted up from the sidewalk like a track runner and darted into the midst of the fray. The three of us watched him wide-eyed and openmouthed. I realized only slowly that I held my arm straight out in front of me, instinctively reaching for my cousin, trying to pull him back from the battle. Resignedly, I let my hand fall to my side.

  "Kill 'em, Rufus," Luke muttered.

  "He's gonna get killed himself," Simon replied soberly.

  I could only whisper a prayer wrenched from the very center of my heart. "Oh, God. Oh, God." And that was all. I was scarcely aware of the tears streaming down my face as helplessly I looked on. The same instinct that had sent Rufus into the battle was inside me: Someone I loved was being attacked, and I wanted to rip apart his attackers limb by limb. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. Didn't those policemen know what they were doing? This wasn't just another picketer. This wasn't just any ordinary man. This was my Uncle Jim. My fun-loving, caring, hardworking, Mouth-Happy, beloved Uncle Jim.

  "They got Pa handcuffed," Luke replied solemnly.

  Out on the battlefield Uncle Jim struggled against the restraint. Rufus swung at one of his father's captors, but in a moment the swarming crowd swallowed them up, and they were hidden from our view.

  "I gotta help, too!" Luke cried, standing up.

  I knew how he felt, for I, too, wanted to rush out there and swing my fists blindly until all my rage was spent, but I grabbed one of Luke's legs, Simon the other. "You stay right here!" I ordered. "We never should have come. We never should have--"

  My words were cut off by a shot ringing out through the crowd. Luke stopped struggling and stiffened, almost as if struck himself by an unseen bullet. We heard another shot and then another. "They're shooting," Luke said quietly, announcing the obvious. I felt the muscles in his leg tremble.

  Simon squinted behind his glasses and looked out over the crowd. "Just blanks," he said. "Uncle Jim said they just ignore the guns anymore. They all know the police are only trying to scare them."

  Just in case, we took cover again in the alley and listened for more gunfire. In spite of the tear gas, the fighting continued as fiercely as ever. The crowd actually grew as reinforcements were added to both sides, lawmen surging in from one side, strikers from the other. Word of the riot must have gotten back to strike headquarters because dozens of men wielding baseball bats, clubs, and knives joined the throng from the direction of the warehouse district. By now, a host of wounded men lay moaning or unconscious in the streets. The police went about collecting them as quickly as they could and hauled them away like so much deadwood. Other bleeding strikers were carried to vehicles that had arrived, tires screeching, from the warehouse district. I figured they were being taken to the strike hospital. Man after man fell and was carried in one direction or the other toward the union's rented warehouse or toward the long line of patrol wagons. I had a good idea which direction Uncle Jim was going.

  For several minutes no more shots were fired, but then another shot rang out, and a great roar of anger went up from the crowd. One of the strikers on the edge of the crowd facing us suddenly threw up his hands and thrust out his chest as a look of surprise crossed his face. The man staggered and tried to stand but sank to his knees instead. He lifted his right hand to his chest where a red spot appeared on his shirt like a bud, then spread like the opening of a rose. With his quizzical eyes still open, the man fell face forward onto the street, shivered a moment, and then lay still.

  "They killed him," Luke said flatly. "That was no blank. That was a real bullet."

  "Yeah, that was real," Simon confirmed with a nod. "Looks like he was shot in the back and the bullet went clean through."

  Staring immobile at the freshly fallen corpse, I suddenly felt detached from the scene around me. Surely this was all pretend, a carefully arranged scene. Surely the man running the camera on top of the truck would cry "Cut!" and the action would stop. Surely the man facedown in the street would push himself up again, wipe the dust from his pants, and go off whistling.

  "He can't be dead," I said, shaking my head. Still unable to take my eyes from the corpse, I grabbed Simon's hand. "He's not dead, is he, Simon?"

  Before Simon could answer, two men, obviously mill workers, rushed up to their wounded companion on the sidewalk, the man Rufus and my brother had dragged off the street. One bent over him and, as Simon had done earlier, felt his neck for a pulse. The other gently touched the wounded man's head and said, "Lookit here, someone tied a shirt--" He interrupted himself when he spotted us crouched between the buildings. "Hey," he yelled, "what are you kids doing there? Are you crazy? You go on home
! Go on, git! You wanna get yourselves killed or something?"

  The other man, more concerned about his downed companion, said, "Come on, Joe, let's get him to the car." He lifted the man's legs around the knees while Joe slid his arms under the man's shoulders. Without waiting to see whether we left, they hurried their wounded toward the car and the strike hospital.

  Simon squeezed my hand. "Come on, Ginny," he said. "I think we'd better get out of here like the man said."

  Numb and senseless as a sleepwalker, I let Simon pull me up and drag me out of the alley. Just beyond our hiding place the sidewalk glistened with the blood of the wounded man who had just been hauled away. I walked up against the front of the building to avoid the crimson spot.

  Simon yelled back over his shoulder, "Come on, Luke. We gotta get out of here."

  Luke shook his head and made no move to get up. "I'm staying put."

  Simon started to protest, but before I knew what was happening he suddenly cried out and fell to the sidewalk. "Simon!" I cried, dropping to my knees beside him. "Simon!" Fresh tears broke loose from the cistern of horror inside me and mingled with my screams. Though I couldn't see the wound, I was sure my brother had been shot, and that he was dead.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Like the corpse in the street, Simon lay with his forehead pressed to the hot cement, his shattered glasses straddling a crack in the sidewalk a few feet from his head. I wrung my hands, wondering what to do. Then, to my surprise, Simon moaned. Tentatively, he raised one hand to his head. He was bleeding, I finally realized, from a wound just beside his right brow, and I wondered whether a bullet had sliced his skull and entered his brain. I thought that I might faint, but I forced my trembling hands to turn my brother over on the sidewalk. By now Luke was beside us, holding a rock.

  "This is what hit him," my cousin explained. "It landed right at my feet."

  I looked at the rock, then at Luke's face. "Are you sure it was a rock that hit him?" I asked. "Not a bullet?"