A Room of My Own

by Ann Tatlock

  Aunt Sally's voice held a hint of anger when she commented, "I hope that Rex Atwater isn't married. That's all I have to say about him. And if he is, God help his wife."

  Dr. Hal chewed and spoke at the same time, one cheek bulging with food. "We were plenty busy, though, I'll say that--even with the number that were sent to hospitals. We left dozens of men sleeping on the floor of the warehouse because there weren't enough cots to go around.

  "There's been an injunction issued against picketing, you probably heard," he continued, glancing up at Mother and Aunt Sally. "So it looks like there won't be a picket line tomorrow. But even if there weren't an injunction, I don't think there's enough men able to stand upright to keep the strike going."

  "Nevertheless, Rex is determined to keep it going," Papa countered. "Though in my estimation, the mill workers are beat."

  "I hope it's over," Aunt Sally said quietly. "Even if the workers lost, I just hope they decide to call off the strike."

  Silence settled over the kitchen, broken several minutes later when Simon staggered drowsily into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. "Hi, Papa!" he said when he saw our father sitting at the table.

  Papa held out a hand and beckoned him over. "Come here and let me see that cut."

  "Did Luke tell you--"

  "He said you had a little mishap with a rock."

  "My glasses got broken, Pa."

  Papa lifted the bandage on Simon's forehead and inspected the wound beneath. "Well, it's not deep," he determined. "It looks like your mother cleaned it well. As for the glasses, we'll get you down to the optician tomorrow and have another pair made." Papa patted Simon on the shoulder. But then he looked at my brother sternly, or as sternly as Papa could, and said, "You were wrong to be down there, Simon. You know that, don't you?"

  Simon nodded dolefully. "Yes, Papa."

  My father looked up at me to include me in his reprimand. "You too, Ginny."

  "Yes, Papa," I said. The scene before me started to swim as my eyes glazed over with tears. I thought I had used them all up, but I was wrong.

  "You too, Luke," Aunt Sally added. "You know the grain mill was off limits to you and Rufus."

  Luke, his mouth full of chicken, mumbled, "Yes, Ma."

  "It was very wrong to tell your mother you were going one place," Papa scolded, "then go to another place where you had no right to be."

  Luke must have told him about our scheme, perhaps trying to place most of the blame on me as I had done to him and Rufus.

  Papa continued. "I'm very disappointed in both of you that you'd conspire to lie and disobey us."

  Nothing cut me to the quick more keenly than to disappoint Papa. I promised myself in that moment that I would try never to do anything wrong again.

  "I have a feeling that just as virtue is its own reward, this evil has been its own punishment. You're no doubt sorry you went down to the grain mill today, after all that's happened."

  The tears coursed freely down my cheeks. "Yes, Papa," I said, with Simon echoing my words.

  "And I can trust you not to do any such thing again." It wasn't a question; it was a statement.

  "Oh yes, Papa," we agreed.

  Our father nodded, satisfied, though I had an idea Mother was mulling over the possibility of some additional punishment. I would accept gladly whatever punishment she doled out, hoping it would help to wipe out the memory of what I'd seen.

  "Why don't you children go on to bed now," Papa ordered quietly. "It's been a difficult day for all of us, and we need our rest. Time to dry those tears now, Ginny. A person can't sleep and cry at the same time."

  I was a little embarrassed to be crying in front of everyone. I sniffed loudly and wiped the tears off my cheeks with both hands.

  Luke didn't help me feel any better when he said, "Aw, you know how girls are. She's been bawling all day."

  "That's enough, Luke," Aunt Sally intervened. "Time for you to get into bed, too."

  My cousin rose from the table, carrying a chicken leg away with him. He and Simon and I said good-night and gave kisses all around, even to Dr. Hal, as that night it seemed somehow appropriate. As we turned to go, Simon suddenly said, "Oh! There was a man with a shirt around his head--"

  Dr. Hal chuckled and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Was that your shirt, Simon?" My brother nodded. "We wondered how a boy's shirt got around that man's head, didn't we, Will?"

  "Did you see him, then?" Simon asked anxiously.

  "Yup. He's asleep down at the strike hospital right now," Dr. Hal said.

  "I wanted to help him...."

  Papa smiled. "You no doubt helped to stop the bleeding. That was an important first step in saving his life."

  Dr. Hal winked at Simon from across the table. "Good job, Dr. Simon," he said.

  Simon, smiling broadly, stood basking in the glow of the older men's praise until Mother brought him back to earth by saying, "That still doesn't make it right, though--your being where you didn't belong. Off to bed now, all of you."

  As we left the kitchen, I heard Aunt Sally ask, "What do you think will become of Jim?"

  But I didn't hear the answer, if anybody had one to give.

  I was exhausted in body and soul but was still awake a few hours later when Papa came into the study for "the first order of the day."

  I think I startled him when I said, "Papa?"

  He turned from his desk to peer at me though the dimness of the room. "You awake, Ginny?"

  "Yes."

  "Can't sleep?"

  "No."

  "Still thinking about things?"

  "I guess so."

  "Would you like me to fix you some warm milk?"

  The thought made my stomach turn. "No thanks, Papa."

  "Well, try to get a little sleep."

  Papa turned back to his Bible and I lay quietly a moment, unwilling to close my eyes. I had been thinking about the man who was shot, and that Simon might have been hit by a bullet instead of a rock, and that I myself might have been downed by stray gunfire. It was the first time in my short life that I actually realized my own mortality--and the mortality of those I loved.

  "Papa," I asked, "does it hurt to die?"

  My father turned back around to look at me, chuckling and frowning at the same time as though not quite sure how to react to such a question. He laced his fingers together and rested his hands over the back of the chair. "Well, that depends," he said. "Sometimes death is painful, but other times--most often, I think--people just kind of drift away peacefully."

  I remembered that Grandfather Eide had simply fallen asleep one night and never awakened. How different a death from the man I'd seen gunned down in the street. Still, either way, it was a frightening prospect. "Are you afraid to die, Papa?" I asked.

  Papa took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. "I'm in no hurry to leave you and your mother and all the people I love--but, no, I wouldn't say I'm afraid, exactly. I know where I'm going."

  "You'll climb the sunbeam up to heaven?"

  "Well--" Papa paused to smile. "I don't know for certain how I'll get there. I only know that's where I'll end up."

  I pursed my lips and thought a moment. My eyes wandered to the window. The last darkness of the night was fading as morning began to rise. "Sometimes," I said, "it's hard to believe there's really such a place, and that we'll ever be there."

  "As strange as earth might seem to someone not yet born," replied Papa. "But when we wake up in heaven, it will seem just as natural and familiar as waking up right here at home. Maybe more so, since that's where we really belong."

  "Do you think so, Papa? Do you think it will all be familiar when we get there?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "But still, I'm glad to be here with you and Mama and Simon and Claudia and Molly."

  "I am, too."

  "And I hope everything gets back to the way it was ... before the strike and everything."

  "Things will be better soon."

  "And I hope Mam
a's bad feeling about Soo City goes away."

  "Well, maybe if we could convince your mother to come to Soo City with us sometime, she'd see there's nothing to be afraid of."

  "She'd never come."

  "Maybe not. Still, none of us needs to spend time fretting over things that haven't even happened. And now, young lady, you need to shut your eyes and try to get some sleep."

  "All right, Papa. I'll try."

  "Sleep well, then, Ginny."

  He turned toward the desk, adjusted the small lamp, and leaned over the open pages of the book. I gazed at his beloved figure across the room, wishing there was no other place than here, and no time other than this very moment.

  Chapter Twenty

  Aunt Sally always said things happen in threes. If she broke one drinking glass, she was bound to break two more. If she pricked herself on her sewing needle while darning a sock, she was destined to suffer two additional wounds before the stitching was done. If she was gripped by a sneeze that left her ears ringing, two more explosive sneezes were sure to follow.

  While it was a rule that even Aunt Sally admitted had its occasional exceptions, it did seem to apply when it came to the men in our family getting whacked on the head. First Uncle Jim had that patch of railroad track laid across his brow when his head collided with a billy club and Dr. Hal had to stitch up the wound. Then my brother Simon stepped into the path of a flying rock that left him with a pretty cut on the side of his forehead. Finally, cousin Rufus, in the midst of the riot, took a thump from an unseen assailant that raised a plum-sized knot on the back of his scalp. That thump also left him unconscious, and like Dr. Hal said, it was lucky he was rescued by the mill workers and carried off to the strike hospital rather than handcuffed by the police and hauled off to jail.

  So that was three, and according to Aunt Sally's reasoning, I figured we were done with the whole mess and life would return to normal. It certainly seemed so, anyway. The only person unable to accept the fact that the mill workers were beat and the strike a lost cause was Rex Atwater. As stubborn as the proverbial mule, he refused to surrender even after the governor instituted martial law and continued to oversee the strike machine from his bed in the warehouse hospital. There were a number of mill workers who remained loyal to him. While Mr. Atwater and the union lawyer tried to get the injunction against picketing repealed, some of the men got around it by invoking their constitutional right to peaceable assembly. They showed up in front of the mill gates without signs and simply stood there, sometimes singing, sometimes talking quietly among themselves, deftly ignoring the National Guardsmen who patrolled our city streets with rifles and machine guns. In this way, the strike limped on for another week, but it was only a token demonstration. Thiel had no reason to pay attention to the men who continued to demand a union. His mill was running just fine without the men and without the union.

  The mill was operating normally with a force made up partly of scabs and partly of former workers who had given up and returned to their jobs beyond the gates. Thiel, true to his word for once, accepted back all who wanted to return--at the same hours and wages as before the strike. When the former workers went in, word got out that Thiel had built up his work force during the strike by smuggling men in on the same trains that hauled in the grain.

  "It was really so simple," Dr. Hal said when he learned of Thiel's scheme. "I can't believe I didn't think of that." Dr. Hal was still putting in time at the strike hospital, following up on the men as they recuperated after the final riot. It was there he learned about what was happening behind the scenes while the strikers were marching in front of the gates. "The scabs," he explained to us later, "that Thiel recruited to cross the picket line were only a front. It didn't really matter whether they got through the line or not, since Thiel was bringing the real workers in on the trains. Those scabs were brought around to the picket line just to get the strikers rioting. That was their whole job, and they were paid pretty well to do it."

  "But those men, those scabs, didn't they know they might get hurt? Killed, even?" I asked, appalled. After all, I had seen firsthand what happened when they tried to cross the line.

  "Sure they did," Dr. Hal replied. "But they figured a little money in their pockets was worth a beating."

  "But why, Dr. Hal?" I asked. "Why did Mr. Thiel want to start those riots?"

  "Because, Ginny, rioting means men will be wounded and men will be arrested, and the more men out of the way, the less men on the picket line. That way, Thiel figured, he could undermine the strike. And he figured right."

  On the evening of Friday, September 9, the strike finally ended with one last gasp and a long drawn-out sigh when several hundred National Guardsmen, a battery of light artillery, and a detachment of machine gunners surrounded the warehouse that served as strike headquarters. The military stayed outside while their colonel went in to meet with Rex Atwater and the other union organizers. The colonel asked that the warehouse be evacuated without resistance. Finally admitting defeat, the strike leaders--including Rex Atwater--allowed themselves to be taken into custody while the remaining mill workers, members of the women's auxiliary, and other strike sympathizers who happened to be there at the time broke rank and drifted off in various directions. After that, the city settled back into normalcy, and martial law was repealed.

  Some of the mill workers who stuck with Rex Atwater till the very end simply returned to their old jobs after his arrest. Others left the city in search of better opportunities elsewhere, though their prospects were questionable. Rumor had it that a few, disillusioned with capitalism after Thiel's victory, pledged allegiance to the Communist Party and devoted the rest of their lives to the revolution that never came.

  Uncle Jim and the others who had been arrested languished in jail because there was no money left in the strike coffers to bail them out. Again the rumor mill, working overtime, had it that the men would be slapped with long prison sentences. But we read in the newspapers that a trio of lawyers from the Grain Millers Union was pleading with the governor for leniency. Chances were good that our farmer-labor governor, thinking ahead to the next election, would comply. It was men like those awaiting trial who would be voting him back into office.

  While waiting for the trial date to be set, Aunt Sally insisted I move back into my own bedroom.

  "Nonsense," Mother said. The three of us were in the kitchen canning tomatoes when my aunt offered me my room. "Where else will you sleep, Sally?"

  "I'll sleep on the couch in Will's study, where Ginny's sleeping now," Aunt Sally replied firmly.

  "You won't be comfortable there," Mother argued.

  "I can't sleep in that bed without Jim. Really, I prefer the couch."

  My heart gave a little leap for joy. I'd have my room back, my own place. I could sleep in my own bed and move my two Charlies back to the dresser mirror and again see the morning sun coming in through the windows.

  "Well, if that's really what you want," Mother conceded, "then all right. But you'll move back into Ginny's room when Jim comes home."

  Aunt Sally sighed as she wearily peeled tomatoes. "Who knows when that will be," she said quietly. And she was right. None of us knew.

  School started the following week, and while Charlotte and I walked to the school yard that first morning--I in my old shoes but wearing a new dress of my own making--I realized as I began my eighth year of education that I wasn't dreading the start of classes as I once had. Always before, even with the regimented schedule Mother imposed upon her children, summers had been a magical time and I hated to see them end. It was with great reluctance that I would bid farewell to the warm sunny days, to the exhilarating sense of freedom that came when I awoke and knew the whole day would be spent right there at home, away from school and lectures and tests and all the annoying social intricacies of cliques and, even at our young age, the wearisome rap-tap-tapping of the pecking order. At school, a person was always having to prove herself: her intelligence, her athletic ability, her s
ocial graces. But at home a person could just relax and be herself because there was nothing to prove. She was accepted just because she had been born and she was family.

  But this summer everything had been different. Not the family, really, but things in the wider circle of life. Just as the sun, once a warm friend, had nearly crushed us with the full strength of its heat, the economy, once a prosperous ally, had trapped the country in its still crumbling structure and nearly left us all flattened in the dirt. I had seen those most affected by the times--the hungry down-and-outers in the soup line; the men and the families in Soo City; the mill workers rioting outside the gates in a bid for higher wages and shorter working hours. I had seen a man die, shot in the back by one whose job in former days had been to protect him.

  No, it had been no ordinary summer, and though I knew I would continue to visit Soo City at times with Papa, I was content to put the summer behind me and move forward. I could not pretend that none of it had happened. It had happened, all right, and the country and our city and my family--and I--would never quite be the same. We had all of us felt the heel of the Depression's boot pressing down on us. But I for one was ready to piece together the thread of my life that had been snipped in two by the summer, ready to go back to the place I had been before the summer began. I thought that in school, in the midst of the books, the chalk dust, the wooden desks with the names carved into the tops, I could regain a sense of order and well-being. Unlike other years, I was surprisingly ready to turn my attention to my studies, to my school friends, and of course--for hope springs eternal in the human heart--to the pursuit of romance in whatever adolescent forms it might appear.