by Sam Ross
“Shut up and go to sleep. Take a glass of milk and go to sleep.”
She rose and brought a bottle of milk out of the icebox and poured a glassful. Then she cut a slice of pumpernickel bread.
“Here,” she said.
Hershy dunked the bread in the milk, and, as he ate and swallowed, without being able to wash down the lump in his throat, his mother, as though answering the ticking of the clock, said: “Nothing happened. He’ll be home soon. Nothing happened.” It was exactly what he was saying to himself; it had to become real; he was saying it often enough in his head.
Then, thinking out loud, with woeful creases bunching up her face, she said: “If something happened, what would happen to the money in the bank? It’s in his name. I can’t read or write. To get money from a bank you need a signature. Who could sign? Only David. The bank then will keep the money. I’ll be left penniless. Oh, oh, oh.”
“What are you talking, Ma?”
“I know what I’m talking. Oh, the curse of being ignorant, of being married to a workingman. The curse of being bound to a man and his job. If there is no man for the job, what is there left for the woman, a woman with a child: the street? What can a woman do with no skill, no education: beg, steal?”
“What do you mean, Ma? What’s Pa’s is yours, ain’t it?”
“Who knows? In this crazy world, who knows anything?”
“Let me see.” He took the bankbook from her hand and looked at the small print inside.
“Well, what does it say?”
The print and the words were a blur. He read out loud. Nothing in it made sense to either of them.
“You see?” she said. “The banks, the smart banks, they make it impossible for anybody to understand anything.”
“Yah.”
“They’d like nothing better than to cheat us.”
“Maybe a lawyer can tell us what to do?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe we should see Benny by the grocery. He’s going to be a lawyer. Maybe he’ll know.”
“Shut up.”
He looked at her frantic face in astonishment.
“Nothing happened yet,” she said.
“Who said something did?”
“Shut up and go to sleep before I go crazy.”
He left reluctantly, got undressed slowly, and crept under the covers on the couch. But he couldn’t fall asleep. The clock ticked too loud. His heart beat too hard. The coals in the stove were making too much noise. The wind outside made him shiver.
Nothing happened yet, he told himself.
A man suddenly reared up with a hammer in his hand. It came down with terrific force, but instead of driving the nail into a board it struck the hand that was holding the nail in place. The shocking pain made him gasp for breath. The hand had suddenly become a bloody pulp. He shuddered away from the image.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened.
He heard the whir of an electric saw. A man put a plank of wood to it. The saw bit into the wood, made the sawdust fly, made the wood scream. The saw suddenly loosened from its mooring and whirled right at the man. He closed his eyes tight, trying to blank out the scene, but the saw ripped through the dazzling white dots of tight blackness and cut the man in two.
Nothing, nothing, nothing happened.
He was utterly alone. Rachel was gone, married, living far away. He was utterly alone with his mother. He had to fall asleep. Oh, sleep, because tomorrow he had to go to work. He had come home so tired he couldn’t eat. Oh, sleep, because he needed rest to work. Sleep, sweetheart, sleep, his mother was saying. You are the man now. You have to sleep if you are to earn a living for us. Sleep, babele, sleep, so that I won’t have to go out in the street. No, dearest, you can’t go out and play. You’ll never be able to play again. You will have to make new friends. They will be men. You will have to be a man. No, no more play. You’ll have to sleep to work hard. So sleep, sleep.
A tear dried into a stone. It welled up in him, so big it began to choke. No, Pa, he yelled without sound. Don’t let nothing happen, Pa.
His face was set with sweat and tears when he heard the kitchen door open and shut, and his heart leaped at the sound of his mother yelling and his father trying to quiet her down. He ran to him and wrapped his arms around him and felt the cold outdoors against his clothes and smelled the familiar odor of wood and sweat that was part of him, as his mother called his father every black name he had ever heard.
There had been a union meeting. The men were going out on strike. It was going to be a big strike, a general strike in the trade. It started first in New York. The New York carpenters wanted support. So the Chicago carpenters were going to give them support. And they were going to get what the New York carpenters wanted: a dollar an hour and a shorter work week.
For that, shrieked Hershy’s mother, he had almost made her go out of her mind with worry? What affair was it of his if crazy people wanted to go out and have their heads broken?
His father tried to calm her. It had to be his affair. He’d have to do what the union decided. Imagine, he said. A dollar an hour. That would really be something. No other worker in industry got that much. Not even Henry Ford paid that much. Why, a wage like that, with a shorter work week, would make a man out of a worker. Why, the world would begin to belong to the worker.
His mother laughed at him. A dollar an hour, she sneered. Cold beets, they’d get, a club on the head, a good jail sentence, they’d get. What business did he have anyhow to think of going on strike? Him, a greenhorn, a man the government could send back to Russia on the next boat. Was he crazy or something?
No, he insisted, he wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t a greenhorn, either. He was a citizen. He’d like to see the government send him back to Russia.
Oh, she groaned. Suddenly she was blessed with a hero for a husband. Suddenly a Bolshevik was in her house. Suddenly a striker. Over her dead body was he going on strike.
What would she have him do: scab?
He wasn’t going to scab, either.
What was he going to do? Not an honest job was open to him.
She knew what he was going to do. She knew that he had no business allying himself with common workers. Imagine, a man with money, tying himself to a dollar an hour dream. Imagine, a man with money, deciding to go out to get his head broken. Not on her life. No, he was going to find a business and make a man of himself.
His father shrugged his shoulders.
She knew what she was saying. This was an example of a worker’s life. He never knew where he was. If the boss didn’t fire him or lay him off, then the union took him off a job. Like a dog, he was between his mouth and his tail, chasing himself in circles. But a man in business, he knew where he was all the time. He was his own boss. He made the decisions. He had control over his life. He came home on time for supper; he had time for his children and his wife; and he never drove his family out of its mind with worry. One thing she had learned about America: each man had to make his own fortune or else he had no business here. And he, if she had anything to do with it, was going to make his own fortune, he was going to stop thinking about strikes. If he didn’t she’d leave him. She’d take Hershel and leave him.
A strange look came over his father’s face. It reminded Hershy of a kid he once hit. The kid just sat down and looked up at him in amazement. It made him walk away.
4.
The news of the strike caused a flurry of excitement in the neighborhood. Most of the men on the street belonged to unions and, through Hershy’s father, saw their own battles being fought.
Mr. Pryztalski, the Pole upstairs, who had been in the stockyards strike the year before, stopped at the back door on his way home from work each night.
“Well?” he asked. “How goes it?”
“So-so,” said his father.
“Don’t give an inch.” Mr. Pryztalski curled up his beefy fingers and pounded his thick fist against the door. “Be strong like the stockyard workers. If you lose, maybe m
y bosses will take away everything we won. If you win, we will be stronger. So be strong.”
His father nodded with determination.
“If you give in I’ll chop you up in little pieces. I’ll kick you out of my flat.”
“I won’t give in.”
“That’s good talk. I talk funny for a landlord, huh? But I’m a worker, too. If you win a dollar an hour and a shorter work week, maybe later I’ll get it, too. I’ll live a little. Imagine, a dollar an hour and a forty-four hour week; it’ll be a worker’s world.”
Hershy’s father agreed.
Mr. Pryztalski, who considered himself an authority on strikes, since he had been in one which was won, concluded: “Give them hell.”
Mr. Bromberg, the cigar maker who lived next door, claimed a great stake in the strike. Impressively smoking an expensive cigar he made, which was his only link to wealth, his bronchial cough hacked away at his whole body and his dried tobacco-leaf face seemed to crack apart as he said: “Listen, Melov, my union just gave your union a lot of money. So don’t lose, you hear.”
Mr. Greenberg, the dress cutter who lived in the flat above the Bromberg’s, loosened a piece of phlegm from his throat, then raised his stooped shoulders and pointed a gnarled finger at Mr. Bromberg. “Look who’s talking. And do you think my union, the garment makers, are cheap about a dollar? I’ll have you know the garment makers buy and sell the cigar makers. Without us, no strike can be a success.”
“What’s the difference?” said Hershy’s father. “So long as we win.”
Even Old Doc Yak, a machinist in the nearby railroad yard, who owned a house across the street and who was considered a madman because he worried more about his garden and the fence that surrounded it than a human being, called Hershy over one day and glared at him from his broad face and bushy eyebrows.
“I wasn’t on your fence, Mr. Peterzak. Honest.”
“Who said you was?”
“Then what do you want?”
“How’s your pa?”
“Okay.”
“Here, give him this.”
It was then that Hershy noticed the red flower sticking out of Old Doc Yak’s rough hand; it came out of one of the many pots that lined his windowsill.
“For good luck,” he said.
The sentiment embarrassed Hershy but he felt proud in taking the flower and handing it to his father, who, in turn, and with great dignity, presented it to his mother.
“From an admirer,” said his father.
“Who?”
“From all the neighbors. They think well of us. They respect us.”
“Respect won’t bring a dollar in the house. Remember.”
“No, but it brings a good feeling. It makes you feel you belong.”
Hershy’s mother accepted the flower and put it in a glass of water; no matter what she felt about the strike, she couldn’t help but feel pleased at the gesture and its meaning.
Among the kids, of course, who saw only danger in a strike, Hershy’s father was lifted to a pinnacle: Tough Guy. It was hard to see him in that role, but it was a fact that he went out to the picket line every day to brave the threat of a broken head. He was not a yellow scab like Jo-Jo’s father who had scabbed on a job the year before and as a result couldn’t find anybody to talk to him afterward. His pals made Hershy feel proud of his father, but in school he sat in fear, wondering what might happen and praying that nothing would.
For all that year, in a period called Current Events, teacher had dedicated herself to the duty of educating her pupils to the American way of life. In her missionary zeal, she attacked directly the roots of their lives, since, in her opinion, all of the world’s ills, from bobbed hair to bolshevism, converged in one word: foreignism. Pinched by her rimless pince-nez glasses, her bony corset, the pins in her hair, and the very wrinkles of her flesh, she turned into a battleground, it seemed, upon which raged the forces of destruction that were running riot in the world.
Hershy felt personally indicted. It seemed, when she talked, that her eyes flared out at him and that her bony forefinger pointed right at him: for on his school records it was stated that his mother and father were from Russia, where the winds of death were gathering; even he was born there. It seemed, as she made him squirm and slink in his seat, trying to hide from her steady accusations, that he had turned dark and evil. It was he who wanted to make of America the burning hell that was Europe. It was he, the fomenter of strikes and revolutions and disaster, who was the impure element of America. It was he who was crucifying humanity on a barbed-wire fence and who made mankind stalk the Earth with a gun in its hand. It was he who forced the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to thunder through the sky.
America, which teacher represented, reared up like a wild horse, crashed down upon him, and trampled all over him. And now, with his father on strike, her accusations pierced deeper; his whole being shrunk with fear before them.
In defense, Hershy wondered who she was talking about: the dark, evil bomb-thrower, his father, who turned the other way when he saw a cockroach so that he wouldn’t have to kill it? Mr. Pryztalski, who talked loud and looked big, but who had a childlike belief in Christmas? Mr. Bromberg, the cigar maker, who looked more dead than alive? Mr. Peterzak, who looked fierce, but who spent all his spare time trying to raise flowers? Uncle Ben, the shlimazel? Uncle Irving, who would rather play cards than eat? Uncle Hymie, the big businessman?
Outside, completely rejected, the un-American children talked.
“Ah, teacher. Yap yap yap.”
“Yah.”
“If you want to know, she ain’t even American. Nobody is American. Only the Indians are American, if you want to know.”
“Yah. Mayflower or no Mayflower, she’s a foreigner. So what’s she yapping about?”
“You know what she needs?”
“Yah.”
“One good one. One real good one. That’s what my big bro says. That’s what they all need. By a Russian, too.”
“Wow.”
“She knows what she’s talking about like I know French. Parley-vous, that’s all the French I know.”
Thus they dispensed with teacher, in order not to be whirled completely out of the pattern of their lives.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Hersh.”
“No.”
But Hershy worried. And each day he came home and saw his father alive he’d exhale with relief. Because teacher was not the only one who talked.
There were the restless big guys on the corner who dreamed of getting their hands on a wobbly or a Bolshevik. A newspaper wrote about a striker out West who was taken out of jail and lynched. A story came to him of an I.W.W. who had his testicles crushed, and then, begging to be shot, was thrown out of an automobile. Uncle Hymie came over to warn his father: if he wasn’t careful he might find himself in jail, he might find his money taken away, he might find himself deported to Russia, where he could starve for a piece of bread like the rest of the Bolsheviks there, citizen or no citizen. Uncle Hymie, with his warning, terrified Hershy’s mother.
She cursed the men on the street, with their flowers and their heroic stances, and she cursed the union and the men who worked with his father, and she cursed her own lot. Others could pin their hopes on him, could make him feel like he was doing something important, but in the end it was the woman, who brought the man into the world, who did all the suffering. What would happen to her and Hershel if anything should happen to him? Who was he to suddenly want to turn the world upside down? What if he did win? What would he have: a dollar an hour, a job he couldn’t call his own? What was he striving for anyhow, a piece of dung, when in the shop windows were steaks for the asking? What kind of flaw was there in his character that made him endanger his life for a future that nobody in his right mind wanted? When was he going to stop this nonsense? When was he going to put his time and energy to better use? When was he going to start looking for a business?
Later, he said. Later.
Hershy worried more the night Rachel came home and said: “Pa, don’t go picketing tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“There’s going to be trouble.”
“How?”
“Some scabs are going to try to get into the plant.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Never mind how. I’m telling you.”
“Will your sweetheart be there?”
“Never mind. I warned you. Don’t go.”
Hershy’s mother tried to prevent him from leaving the house the following day, but he left despite her. Hershy sat tense all through school that day. When he got home his father was there. He wasn’t hurt but he looked tired. He looked like something in him had been destroyed. Some gangsters, he said, tried to make trouble, but nobody had got into the plant. The bosses, however, got what they wanted as a result; they got an injunction against picketing; and the union officials had decided to honor the injunction for reasons he didn’t understand. The strike, he felt, was practically broken.
“Good,” said Hershy’s mother. “Good.”
But, though men were free to scab, it did the company no good; for nobody with the necessary skill to make cabinets could be had. The strike settled down to a siege, with the strikers’ only weapons being their patience and their skills.
Hershy’s father continued to go to union headquarters every day, but somehow his heart wasn’t in it any longer, and each day he came home looking depressed. He was not used to being idle; it made him feel lonely and useless. Being with men who quickly became demoralized when not working, as though all their life and vitality were bound up in their hands, began to take its toll. Being around the house more often, with Hershy’s mother nagging him to start looking for a business, began to undermine him.
It was strange for Hershy to find him at home when he left for school in the morning and to see him again when he came home from school. It seemed, in the way his father carried his head and body, that he was waiting endlessly for something to happen, like a sick man impatient to get out of bed to start functioning again. In his waiting, he took to moving the furniture about, building new shelves for the pantry, and a new phonograph for the house. The day he drew some money out of the bank for living expenses he seemed to come home with a hole in him.