Homeland

by John Jakes

  Roza Jablonec’s father was a slightly built man with brooding dark eyes and a high rounded forehead that reminded Joe Junior of pictures of Daniel Webster. Unfortunately that image was marred by a receding chin and a small, weak mouth. Tabor’s only child had inherited his best features, but she’d gotten voluptuous lips and breasts and a strong chin from her otherwise ordinary mother. Rosie was a year and a half older than Joe Junior, which was part of her attraction.

  He had met her in the country, at Ogden’s Grove, where he’d taken Paul. The occasion was the first of those political-cultural outings to which Benno invited him. On that hot and dusty Sunday in the autumn of 1892, he was profoundly awed by the radical nature of the crowd, the bold and lawless pronouncements in the speeches. He wondered whether police wagons would thunder into the grove any minute to halt the subversive proceedings. To counter this anxiety, and his nervousness among strangers, he drank a whole growler of beer, and then another, before the entertainment started.

  Rosie was third on the program. It wasn’t her father who’d fetched her along to the gathering, but Joe Junior didn’t know that at the time, just as he didn’t know her name, or anything about her, except that she excited him the moment he saw her. As she stepped up on the platform improvised from crates and boards, she lifted her skirts to show her bare ankles. There was applause, chiefly from men, to compliment her face and figure. Her talent as yet was an unknown quantity.

  Roza Jablonec had wide hips and heavy peasant legs. Her hair was dark brown, thick and wavy. Her full, billowy chest was the kind so in fashion with women and girls. For the picnic she’d covered her bosom with a high-necked blouse of coarse white material. Her dark skirt had felt flowers, gaudy and obviously homemade, sewn around the hem.

  Joe Junior was lounging against a tree not far to the left of the improvised stage where Miss Roza Jablonec was introduced as a young singer of promise. Benno belched fumes of onion and garlic and nudged him. “I wish she’d promise me her tits. Beauties. Put your head between ’em, you could smother. A lovely way to die, ain’t it?”

  A bowlegged white-haired man with an accordion sat on a nail keg at a corner of the stage. Joe Junior learned sometime afterward that the accordionist was the father of Rosie’s only girlfriend; he was a Pullman worker more angry, less fearful, than Tabor. The daughter had invited Rosie to the outing, and she’d told Tabor and Maritza she was going on a picnic on the lake shore.

  The audience lying about on the yellowing grass grew quiet. The singer clasped her hands in a stiff artificial pose and began to sing “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.” Done fast, and loudly, it hid certain flaws which quickly became evident in her second number, “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon.” Her voice was sweet but thin; and even Joe Junior’s untrained ear could hear that she frequently sang off-key.

  No matter; he found her spectacularly attractive. Not so much her physical attributes, though they were fine. It was a kind of raw aura that he sensed; a wantonness she communicated by cocking her hips, tossing her wavy dark hair, flirting her round dark eyes at men in the crowd.

  It was late in the afternoon, and some of the bachelors in the audience had drunk a lot of beer. While the young woman was still singing, Joe Junior heard a lewd proposition yelled out from the rear of the crowd. Then a fat man tipsily waved his beer pail and shouted, “All right, dear, that’s enough, let’s hear the next turn.”

  The accordion player’s fingers produced a last pitiable squeak from the box. The girl stopped singing in mid-phrase, looking at the audience with dismay that quickly turned to anger. With never a conscious thought about it, Joe stepped forward.

  “Shut up, give her a chance, where’s your manners?” he shouted.

  The fat man was startled; embarrassed. Behind Joe Junior, one of the men from Crown’s snickered. “Same place as her talent. Abwesend.” Absent. Joe Junior made a large, clumsy gesture, trying to show the young woman that she should resume her song.

  Her eyes fixed on his. A fleeting warm smile smoothed the anger from her face. She nodded slightly.

  He nodded back. The accordion picked up the tune.

  Sweaty and tumid, he clutched the tin growler in both hands while she finished the ballad. There wasn’t much applause, but at least there were no boos or catcalls. Joe Junior clapped hard, ignoring Benno’s smirking friends. He rushed to the end of the stage just as the girl jumped down with her skirt lifted in both hands.

  She stumbled as she landed. He was there to catch her by the shoulders, prevent a fall. She gasped, a burst of breath, and for an instant leaned her big soft breasts against his shirt. She must have felt something herself, for she gasped again, and her eyes grew large. Some force, some highly charged linkage, leaped between them, in both directions, without a word.

  He let go of her, stepped back, and struggled to find his voice.

  “My name’s Joe. I liked your song.”

  “My name’s Roza.”

  “Roza, that’s pretty. It’s like Rose.”

  “You’re pretty nice yourself. Meet me in ten minutes. Let’s go for a walk.”

  Well away from the grove, safely concealed in dappled shade of yellow and scarlet leaves, she braced against a tree and lifted her skirt and underskirt. He tugged her drawers down and with his head pounding, touched her great dark bush. She laughed and licked his lips with her tongue.

  It was his first time, but not hers, he suspected. She made it simple and, quick as it was, bliss.

  He began to see her regularly in Pullman. He called her Rosie and she liked that.

  She wasn’t a studious girl, or smart in the conventional sense. She never read books. Yet somehow she’d learned a lot about life and developed a clear if hard-edged philosophy, especially about her father:

  “Papa was born poor in Bohemia, he grew up poor, and it scarred him for life. He’ll never make trouble at the factory, he’ll let them shit all over him so long as they pay him every week. I learned a big lesson from that, Joey. I learned what comes first. It’s being somebody, having connections, so they can’t shit on you. That’s one part and here’s the other. You have to be somebody with a dollar in your pocket. The more the better.”

  “I don’t think that way, Rosie.”

  “I know, I piped you out pretty fast. You’re all tied up with fine fancy ideas that won’t keep you warm or put a beef roast on the table, that’s why we ain’t going to stay together. What’s it matter? Fucking’s good enough for now.”

  It was easier for her to say it than for them to accomplish. Two Sundays in a row, she and Joe Junior had no chance to be alone. But it didn’t discourage him. If anything, it made him all the more annoyed—and determined.

  On April 22, six days before his birthday, he boarded the horsecar as usual. The weather was balmy and bright, the kind of a day for stealing squeezes and kissing a girl’s ear until she succumbed and lifted her skirts.

  On the long ride he tried to keep his mind off the private places of Rosie’s body that he’d enjoyed before and urgently needed to visit again. He drew from his pocket a paper-covered book with the title printed in minuscule type to make recognition at a glance impossible. The book was a translation of Talk Between Two Workers, by the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta.

  Benno had loaned it to him. It violently damned the owners of property—men like Pullman and Joe Junior’s father.

  Do you not know that every bit of bread they eat is taken from your children, every fine present they give their wives means the poverty, hunger, cold, perhaps even the prostitution of yours?

  Pop wasn’t that bad, he knew. Yet Joe Crown did belong to the class Malatesta hated, and he shared many beliefs with men who were much more ruthless.

  He shoved the book into his pocket, unwilling to read more and spoil the morning. He spent the rest of the ride thinking of how much he wanted his girl.

  Tabor Jablonec and his wife and daughter lived in one of Pullman’s brick row houses reserved for married workers. These dwell
ings were distinctly inferior to the homes on Foremen’s Row and didn’t quite represent the ideal that Mr. Pullman and his management advertised. Rents were high and so were the rates charged for water and gas, which the town bought from the city of Chicago, marked up and then resold. Despite the wage cutbacks, the company was maintaining utility prices at predepression levels.

  When Joe Junior knocked and Rosie let him in, she put a finger to her lips. “We got company.” Swearing to himself as he entered the kitchen, he forced out the usual polite words when he met the visitor. She was a woman of about thirty-five, rather small, plainly dressed, with hair drawn back in a bun. A squarish jawline suggested an uncompromising disposition. She shook Joe’s hand vigorously when she learned who he was.

  “I know your mother quite well. She’s one of our favorite helpers at the settlement house. We’d have her there all the time if we could get her. Will you give her my regards?”

  “I will, sure,” he said with a smile. Now he was fascinated rather than annoyed by the visitor. He wondered what the founder of Hull House was doing in Pullman, seated at a flimsy table with sheets of closely written foolscap in front of her.

  Rosie’s mother explained. “Miss Addams is learning about how we live.” Maritza’s English was better than her husband’s, her accent less noticeable.

  “And I can state the answer in one word. Badly.”

  So saying, Jane Addams folded her papers and put them in her reticule. She explained to Joe Junior, “In view of the extreme privation brought on by the economy, I was asked to compile figures for the Chicago Civic Federation. What I’m finding is disgraceful.”

  “I know it’s terrible here,” Tabor said. He was seated with his elbows on the table, his palms against his temples. “When a man sweats hard and don’t get drunk—when he’s got a wife who helps, and saves—when he works ten years for the same bosses and still can’t get out of hock, there is something wrong.”

  “I would quit,” said Miss Addams. “At the very least, I would object, forcefully.”

  “I did it once, I got in bad trouble.”

  After Jane Addams thanked the family and left, Tabor put on his cap. “Going to Kensington for a while.” Maritza nodded without comment, provoking more silent curses from Joe Junior.

  Maritza Jablonec sat in the tiny grubby parlor, darning threadbare socks and union suits all afternoon. Rosie and Joe stayed in the kitchen and talked. He managed to slip his hand up under her dress a few times. Out of sight of Maritza in the parlor, he licked Rosie’s open lips and let their tongues caress. That was worse than not touching at all.

  About four-thirty the kitchen door opened and Tabor stumbled in, followed by two other men who worked at Pullman. One was a spindly fellow Tabor introduced as Link Randolph, the other a dour paunchy man called Dice Harrod. Link was carrying a brown pint bottle of whiskey, nearly consumed.

  He was ranting. “Born in a Pullman house. Fed from the Pullman shop. Catechized in the Pullman church. When you retire, the Pullman pension is your ticket to the poorhouse. When you die you probably go to the Pullman hell. They pretend to give us everything and they take everything away, even our self-respect. They take what comes out of out toilets, for Christ’s sake.”

  Maritza covered her mouth. Joe Junior said he didn’t understand the last remark. “Sewage, sewage. King George takes it for fertilizer on his truck farm. Bastard!” He threw the empty bottle against the wall. Bits of brown glass tinkled to the floor behind the stove. Maritza stared forlornly at her stained wall.

  Dice Harrod scraped a match to light a stubby cigar. Through puffs of smoke, he blinked like a frog on a lily pad. “What are you going to do about it, Link?”

  “I’m going to join the committee.”

  “What committee?”

  “The one that’s being organized to go to the bosses and demand they put our wages back where they were before the cuts.”

  Dice Harrod blinked. “Did I hear you? Did you say demand?”

  “That’s what I said. This week or next, we’re going to do it, you can count on it.”

  Joe Junior noticed Maritza shooting worried looks at her husband. Dice Harrod puffed away. “Jesus, that’s awful dangerous, Link. You step out of line, you know what happens. They’ll get back at you.”

  “I don’t care anymore, God damn it.”

  “Dangerous,” Dice Harrod muttered again, shaking his head. “Who else is on this committee?”

  “Never you mind, it’s a good strong group.”

  “But you’re a member.”

  “God damn right.”

  “How about you, Tabor?”

  “No! I’m interested, but I don’t get messed up with stuff like that.”

  When the men left, Maritza said, “Dice is right, Link shouldn’t do it.”

  “Yes, Dice is right. It’s the company view, but he’s right,” Tabor agreed. Joe Junior wanted to speak, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned close to Rosie’s fragrant hair. It smelled like roses; he’d bought her a special bar of scented soap for ten cents. She used it only on Sundays.

  They went outside. With the kitchen door standing slightly ajar, he backed her against the wall. He lifted her hair aside with his right hand and gently licked her ear.

  “I counted on getting a birthday present today.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll save it,” she whispered back, clamping her legs tight together and wiggling herself against his hand. Her underdrawers were wet. He was so hard he hurt.

  Next time he visited, Rosie told him Link Randolph had been fired, and handed an eviction notice by the Pullman real estate division.

  “Dice Harrod was one of their damn spies. For once Papa was smart, he didn’t take Dice Harrod’s bait.”

  Five hundred strong, “General” Coxey’s Army reached Washington and marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, the leader himself carrying the petition for a federal public works program to help the unemployed.

  At the Capitol, Coxey was instantly arrested when he trod on a lawn said to belong to the government. One of his followers tried to dash through police lines and was smashed back by fists and billies. The mounted police who had followed the demonstrators charged their horses at them, clubs swinging. The “army” scattered and disbanded as if it had never existed.

  At the brewery there was frequent and heated discussion of Coxey’s march. Some thought it was valiant, others thought it hopeless from the start. Benno had the strongest opinion. He enlightened Joe Junior at quitting time, in the little room lined with lockers Joe Crown provided for his men.

  “Marching don’t get nothing accomplished. Waving some piece of paper in Washington, that don’t either. I’ll tell you what they should have done, they should have taken along some dynamite.”

  On May 6, Joe Junior again set out for Pullman, burdened with a sense of probable defeat. He hadn’t been intimate with Rosie for weeks. This Sunday proved no exception. Tabor invited him to Kensington, to a mechanics’ hall where an overflow crowd of Pullman workers was expected. They would listen to a special speaker, Eugene Debs of the American Railway Union. Joe Junior decided he might as well go along since Maritza had made known her intention to spend another afternoon at home. Rosie looked piqued, at her mother and at him.

  Joe Junior had never seen Debs, only pictures in periodicals which usually accompanied attacks on his socialistic preachments. He couldn’t have been more surprised at the man’s appearance. He expected a rough, truculent person; a Benno Strauss from down the road in Terre Haute, Indiana. Instead, he saw a lean, clean-shaven, balding man who might have been a bookkeeper. Debs was six feet tall, about thirty years old. It was a hot afternoon but he wore a perfectly pressed tweed suit and hard white collar. His shoe tips gleamed. From an earlier base as secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, he had worked to implement his vision of all railway unions united in one, for their common good. The A.R.U. now had almost three hundred thousand members. Its recruiting argument was persuasive. If a
man joined the A.R.U., he was protected should the bosses try to play one brotherhood against another to break a strike.

  Debs spoke for half an hour, without notes. After two minutes, Joe Junior was impressed; after five, he was mesmerized.

  “I have moved quietly around the town of Pullman these past few days,” Debs said. “I have talked, and asked questions, but mostly I have listened. I came away with one indisputable conclusion. If, after working for George M. Pullman for years, you are laid off, and then, two weeks after your work stops, you find yourself ragged and hungry, what can we say but this. George Mortimer Pullman stands revealed as a self-incriminated robber. He has no humane interest in you, he has only pretended to have it. His paternalism is the same as that of a slaveholder in regard to his human chattels. That is why I urge you to stand behind your committee tomorrow. Keep your courage high, your purpose clear before you, and you will carry the day.”

  “What committee now?” Joe whispered to Tabor.

  “Same one that got Link Randolph fired.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know nothing about it. I don’t want to know.”

  Debs strode down to the edge of the platform and snatched off his spectacles, the better to rake his gaze across his audience of plain, tired, impoverished men. “I conclude with one final thought. Remember that the American Railway Union stands with you. Our philosophy is simple. When one brother is assailed, all others go to the rescue. In this contest, labor will stand by labor. Count on it.”

  Men jumped up, whistling and applauding. Joe Junior clapped loudly. The floor of the hall shook with the impact of boots and shoes stamping approval. Tabor glumly shook his head.

  “That kind of talk will get you fired. Come on, I need a glass of wine.”

  Joe went along to the saloon, but after one drink of the cheap dago red he couldn’t stand any more of Tabor’s whipped-dog attitude. He asked whether Tabor planned to go home.

  “Not right away.” Tabor signaled for another glass. Instantly, Joe Junior saw a way to turn this to advantage.