by John Crowley
jawed and laughed, sorted through machine parts idly and knocked off
for lunch before the horn sounded; far off amid the noise of machinery
she could hear human rows too. Maybe it was always like this, factory
work, as full of loose ends and cross-purposes as home, though she
was surprised to think it was so; in the movies work always proceeded
through the stages of production purposefully, white molten metal
poured into rods, rods shaped into this or that, a product taking shape
as farsighted men gave directions to great machines and the assembly
line crawled forward. Had she learned better? Or was it just this place?
Bunce always griped about it, said it was a shambles. She was sorry
that in her part of the plant she didn’t even see the airplanes taking
shape; that was in another of the three buildings that were combined
into the Bull works.
“It’s crazy,” a woman said to her in the lunchroom, lifting a sand-
wich to her mouth with hands not quite cleaned of metal dust, in her
nails and the ridges of her knuckles. “They build the planes here but
there’s nowhere to fly ’em, you know, test ’em out. So when they’re all
built they take them apart, put the pieces on a train, and take ’em out
to a field out there somewheres, and put the pieces together again to fly
the things.” She chewed, seeming delighted with the craziness of it. “I
guess they know best.”
Though the work itself didn’t seem hard, it was continuous, unre-
lenting, in a way nothing she’d ever done before was; the only thing it
resembled was the couple of days in the late summer when her dad
went out to the country and bought bushel baskets of peaches, and she
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 231
and her mother and her mother’s and father’s sisters all canned peaches,
skinning and cutting and scalding the fruit, heating the huge black
kettles, lowering the pale green Ball jars in their racks into the boiling
water; then filling the jars, pouring the melted paraffin over each top to
seal it, over and over, never done, her father carrying the filled jars to
the basement, climbing up again, weary and persistent. Like that, but
every day, endlessly, and without the steady accumulation of good
things to eat in the sweet steam. At evening she made it to the bus and
walked back up the hill feeling made out of sticks and stones, watching
her building come into view with a longing so fervent it was as though
she’d never make it.
“Was he good?” she asked Mrs. Freundlich, who seemed to watch
from her window to see Connie approaching and was always there to
throw open the door before she reached it, displaying Adolph ready
to go.
“Well,” Mrs. Freundlich said, looking down at Adolph as though
trying to make a decision.
He was dressed and clean, in fact his little cheeks shone like a car-
toon kid’s, one of the Campbell’s soup kids, and his hair was combed
and wet on his head. He looked up at his mother with that huge happy
but questioning look, and—unable to answer it—Connie swept him
up, and he held tight to her, smelling of something like Florida water
and his own good smell; and she thanked Mrs. Freundlich briefly and
took him away, since she’d learned that the woman found it a chore to
describe what she and Adolph had done all day. It was all right was
about as explicit as she got. Connie wondered if she even spoke to
him.
Holding him on her hip with one arm she fingered a letter from
Bunce from her mailbox. She glimpsed Mrs. Freundlich, half-hidden
behind her unclosed door, studying her through the door’s window.
Honey, Well I have changed jobs again and am working for Van
Damme Aero in their big plant here. The moneys better and the
place is swell, all new built, the best of everything. They even
have a bank right here in the plant! Mostly women work here I
have to say they don’t know much tho they would learn faster if
somebody took an interest in them. They are ready for anything.
232 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Say this is the place to be, out west, I doubt I’ll be able to live in
that smoky old town again. Bye for now, Bunce.
There was a postal money order for twenty dollars in the envelope.
The postmark on the envelope said Ponca City, but the letters signify-
ing the state were smeared and there wasn’t any return address on it.
You should always put that on, so that letters can find their way back
to you if they are misdirected. Always.
She folded the letter back up along the folds he had made and
thought she would quit her job. She felt certain she’d done something
to make him not want to come home, and all she could think of was
that she’d gone out and taken a job and not told him, and it was as
though her having done that had been somehow communicated to him
over the spaces between them, between here and the West, maybe in
the war news they all shared, no matter that it was crazy to think
that.
Why hadn’t she pleaded with him to stay, back then when he had
decided to quit? She saw as though arrayed across the nation those
smiling willing women of the magazine covers and the newsreels,
marching to work to stand all day beside a helpful man, rising on tiptoe
to nail this or screw that, his hot eyes on her, cap lifted in admiration.
He wasn’t coming back. He was just going to go on farther into the
war, and when it was over he would be where he was, he’d go on from
there rather than turning back.
That night she woke in the deep dark, startled out of sleep by her
own cry. Something she had dreamed or learned, she couldn’t remem-
ber what. She thought of that letter from Bunce and all that it had left
unsaid, the thing that had been going on all along and that she hadn’t
really known and now she did. She lay entirely still, feeling that she
was on the point of dissolution, that she would fall to pieces, not just
as a way of talking but actually: that what made up her would dissoci-
ate and shrivel away like ash. He would never come back. She knew it,
it had been what was going to happen from the beginning, like a dealt
hand of cards. If she could go back now to before he left, she’d hold
him tight and promise him anything.
Night went on unrelieved. She was aware of the ticking of the clock,
warning her with disinterested compassion of the time passing, that
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 233
before the light was full she would have to get up to get to work. She
began a rosary: not wanting to move to get her beads from where they
hung on the dresser mirror, afraid that if she moved she’d come apart
somehow, she counted on her fingers. Pray for us sinners now and at
the hour of our deaths. When the alarm went off at last it woke her,
though she had no memory of having slept again.
The day after that was her day off, and she went to visit Bunce’s par-
ents, as she had promised Bunce she would do, to bring Adolph for
them to see. She took a city bus to the station and the interu
rban to the
neighborhood they lived in, in a square plain house covered in some-
thing meant to look like bricks. For some reason it was a hard house to
be glad to go into—stern or forbidding—but once inside it was nice,
and Bunce’s parents were as warm as little stoves. Like her, Bunce was
an only child.
“Oh my gosh, how he’s grown! Dad, come see!”
Bunce’s father had been a machinist too, but he’d been in an acci-
dent at work long before, bones crushed in the overturning of a
mechanical bin, Connie had never been able to picture it exactly,
though she could a little better now, the Bull plant seemed like it was
made to cause awful accidents, she saw two or three nearly happen
every day. He lived on a workmen’s compensation pension and was in
pain a lot, though rosy-cheeked and always smiling. He grabbed for his
cane and got up with effort from his chair, though Connie tried to
keep him there.
“Well hello, little fella,” he said, tottering above Adolph. “Say you’re
doing a wonderful job with him, Connie, we’re so proud of you, bear-
ing up. If there’s anything we can do, we wantcha to let us know.”
She hadn’t told them she was working, and she’d warned her mother
not to tell them; her mother had anyway known not to.
They gathered around the table, and Mom Wrobleski put out a
cake, which had an epic tale behind it to tell, how it had come to be, as
every cake did that year—the sugar, the raisins, the eggs. They took
turns holding Adolph and feeding him cake. Connie had dressed him
in his little brown suit like a soldier’s with the tie attached—Mom said
he looked like Herbert Hoover, but Buster said John Bunny. And all
234 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the time the hollow of absence and guilt and fear opened and shrank,
opened and shrank again inside Connie.
His parents too had had letters from Bunce, and they brought them
out to read while the percolator burbled comically. His letters to them
were more detailed, less jaunty. He described the work he did to his
father; he complained more expansively to his mother, who shook her
head in sympathy and made that noise with tongue and teeth that has
no name. And he gave them, carefully and thoroughly, the addresses
where they could write back to him. Gosh I miss you old folks at
home.
“I had a letter just yesterday,” Connie said. They turned toward
her, leaned in even, smiling and eager. The cake-matter turned in her
stomach. “Well he’s doing fine,” she said. The coffeepot burped power-
fully, not only throwing coffee up into the little glass bulb at the top
but also lifting the lid to emit a puff of steam; Adolph laughed and
made the noise too, and they all laughed together. Connie could go on.
“He’s moved on to a new plant,” she said. “Everything’s wonderful
there. It’s all new. He just went. They needed people.”
“I’ll be,” said Mom. “Where did you say?”
“Ponca City,” Connie said. “Van Damme Aero.”
Buster clambered from his chair, making noises, going from chair-
back to chair-back to his own big mauve armchair with the antimacas-
sars on the arms and back, where he spent most of his day. Beside it
there was a maple magazine holder, and from it he pulled a big picture
magazine. “Here,” he said. “For gosh sakes it must be here.”
They laid it on the table amid them. The cover showed a vast semi-
circle that you could only tell was a building because workers were
streaming into it, tiny figures, maybe one of them Bunce. Harsh sun-
light cast their black shadows on the macadam. building the great
warbird in indian country, it said.
Buster flipped through the pages, past the ads for whiskey and
cleaners and radio tubes and life insurance, every one telling how they
were helping win the war. “Here it is,” Mom said.
In the great hangar the wingless bodies were lined up one behind
the other, each one with its crowd of workers around it. Married
couples worked on the factory floor together, it said: one couple were
midgets. In another part of the plant drafting tables went on farther
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 235
than you could make them out, men and some women too bent over
them and the fluorescent strip lighting overhead matching their white
tables. Women who carried messages through the vast spaces to the
designers and engineers went on roller skates!
“ ‘The cafeteria is larger than a city block,’ ” Mom read. “ ‘Seven-
teen hundred people can be served at a time.’ ” You could see them, six
lines of workers in their uniforms, trays in hand, passing the steam
tables. Mom looked again among them for Bunce, but Buster said they
would have taken these pictures long ago, before the boy got there, use
your head. The white walls, gleaming as though wet, were all made of
tile.
“ ‘Each worker receives a health code number and a card, listing job
capability and description and any health conditions,’ ” Mom read.
“ ‘Three clinics serve the plant, and a full hospital is being built in the
city nearby.’ Imagine.” There was a picture of a large man in a double-
breasted suit, meeting with a delegation of Indians: Henry Van Damme.
The health cards were his idea. He’d even thought of having a psy-
chologist in the clinics. For instance to talk to, if someone lost someone
in the war.
“Oh look,” said Mom. A picture showed the nursery: you seemed
to be looking in through wide high plate-glass windows at a bright
indoors. In playrooms protected from plant traffic trained nurses cared
for workers’ children, hundreds of them, Mexican, Indian, black and
white children all together. Cost was seventy-five cents a day, a dollar
and a quarter for two kids. “Why that’s not more than I—” Connie
said, then stopped, but she hadn’t been heard or understood. “Oh pre-
cious,” she said: a boy in rompers, a smiling nurse bent down to hear
him. “ ‘Fresh fruits and vegetables are abundant, grown in the huge
Victory Gardens in surrounding fields.’ ”
They each turned the magazine to themselves to look, and passed it
on. The sweep of the corn rows was like the curving sweep of the win-
dowed nursery wall, like the sweep of the drafting tables under their
banks of lights. They read every word. “If the world could be like this,”
Buster said.
When it was growing dark, Connie and his grandmother wrapped
Adolph up again in his warm suit as he looked from one face to the
other. Sometimes doing this Connie thought she could remember what
236 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
it had been like to be handled this way, by big loving smiling people
who did everything for you.
It was so clear outside you could see stars, though the sky was pale
and green at the horizon, the thin bare trees and the buildings and the
metal trellis of the overpass as though drawn in ink with fearful preci-
sion. Adolph lay against her, put to sleep by her motion. Bunce had
&nb
sp; said that ages ago, when we all were living in the woods, you had to
keep quiet as you traveled so the wolves and such wouldn’t hear you,
which means it’s natural that babies would fall asleep when their moth-
ers walk. It makes sense.
You have to fight for him. Your man. She heard herself say it to her-
self. You have to not let him go, you have to fight, you can fight and
you have to. The hard heels of her shoes struck the pavement. You have
to go and fight for your man. It was part of what you had to do, and
she knew she would.
The next day at the plant it was evident that something big was wrong.
Lines had stopped moving that were always going when she got there;
some of the ever-present racket was stilled, which made the place seem
somehow bigger, empty and expectant. Before noon Connie ran out of
parts to shape, and the little electric truck didn’t roll by with more.
Sometimes that had happened before, but she’d never had to wait more
than a few minutes before it came, driven too fast by the man with one
built-up shoe on his short leg. Connie looked around for the supervi-
sor, but he wasn’t where he usually was. There was nothing to do but
stand by her machine, ready to go. She felt conspicuous even though no
one was looking her way, except the man at the next machine whom
she distrusted, who left his place with a foxy grin her way, took a seat
on some boxes and lit a forbidden smoke.
Just then the noon horn sounded, though it wasn’t nearly lunch-
time. Everyone stopped working; some people downed tools and drifted
toward the lunchroom and then came back again. Connie saw coming
down the line a number of men, her own supervisor and some others in
shirtsleeves, and three or four men grim-faced in overcoats and hats
whom she had seen roving through the plant lately asking questions
and making notes. They stopped at each station and said a few words
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 237
to the workers and went on. The man next down from Connie listened
and then tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it with his heel in
disgust.
“The plant’s closing, sweetheart,” said the man who reached her
first. She could see that a badge was clipped to his lapel beneath the
overcoat. “Everybody’s going to be let go. Pack your gear and go down