by John Jakes
Manfred appeared. “Mr. Joseph, the caller is asking for you. A young woman.” The steward always made it evident that he disliked this kind of disruption of routine.
Joe Junior patted his sister—“Go on to bed”—and hurried to answer.
He wasn’t ready for another shock. But he got one.
“Joey? ’S that you?”
“Rosie?” Her voice was faint and scratchy at the other end of the wire. The telephone he’d answered was located in the short service hall leading to the kitchen. The hall light was turned off. He kept his voice low. “Where are you?” The Jablonecs couldn’t afford telephone service.
“Min Slocum’s, her folks got the only phone on the street.” He couldn’t believe this was his Rosie, always so strong.
“You sound scared to death.”
“I am. I’m scared to death for Pop.”
“Why?”
“All hell’s broke loose. Did you look at the sky? A neighbor told Ma there’s hundreds of boxcars burning in South Chicago, the yards of the Panhandle line. People are running up and down, it’s crazy. The worst is, Pop’s going on duty tomorrow morning, right where they’re expecting trouble.”
“Going on duty? I don’t understand what—”
“Scabbing! Pop’s scabbing, he signed on to be one of the special deputies.”
“Oh Jesus. Oh my God.” He slumped against the wall. “Why in hell did he do that?”
“For the money, two and a half bucks a day. The Pullman bosses say it’s all right, they say it shows loyalty.”
“He’s sold out his friends, for Christ’s sake. He could get killed. Of all the stupid—”
“Joe Crown, I know all that, I don’t need lectures and sermons, I need you. There’s a repair train going out at ten o’clock, with soldiers and deputies to take it through. Pop’s one of the deputies. The strike people are going to stop the train at the level crossing at Loomis and Forty-ninth. Pop’s pretending he isn’t scared but I know different. I love my pop, I have to be there to see he don’t get hurt. But I don’t want to go alone, please come with me.”
“Rosie, it’s a workday, I don’t think I—”
“Joey, you son of a bitch, I never asked nothing of you before. I been good to you, Joey—” She was close to crying. “You can’t weasel out, you got to help me this once.”
He ran his palm down his sweating cheek.
“I’ll be there, nine-thirty.” He slammed the earpiece on its hook.
46
Paul
HE CAME BACK TO pain. He was lying on the floor, some kind of hard pallet. Eyes closed, he slid his tongue forward. His lower lip felt fat as a sausage. It hurt. So did his tongue. The flat metal taste of blood filled his mouth.
A man spoke. “He’s waking up, Ella.”
Paul tried to assess the extent of his injuries. His belly and ribs hurt, and the back and side of his head, where the pipe had struck. He remembered the second blow driving him into the gutter, but nothing else.
His right eyelid worked, his left didn’t. “Wait, it’s all caked with the blood,” a woman said. He heard water slosh. A dripping cloth pressed against the closed lid. Tepid water trickled down his face. He could open both eyes.
Against a mottled brown sky he saw splashes of color, hundreds of them. Rose red, yellow, white, ultramarine, fiery orange. He blinked, and things fell into perspective. The brown was a water-marked wall in a dirty stale-smelling windowless tenement room. The colors were scraps of felt and silk in shoe boxes, lying on a table among packets of wires and a few finished artificial flowers.
“Lad, you’re a sight,” the man said. He was stout, with a pink cherubic face and curly white hair. His wife behind him was pale and lean as a straw. Paul heard children’s voices.
The man crouched down beside Paul and held up a small framed mirror. Paul grimaced at the reflection. Purpled eyes. Huge lower lip. Brown blood still caked on his temple.
“They left you in the alley behind the hotel. I was out looking for work and I found you as I was coming home. It’s raining hard.” Paul heard it. “I brought you in. I am Marcus Mantville. This is my wife Ella.”
“I’m Paul. Thank you.” Every word was an effort. He tried to sit up. The top of his head throbbed. He touched it and felt more dried blood.
“Careful, you’ve a big laceration there,” Mantville said. “You are German, am I right?”
“Yes, from the city of Berlin. I came here two years ago.”
“Do you live nearby?” Mrs. Mantville asked.
“I live on Michigan Avenue with my uncle, Joseph Crown. I came down to Clark Street on an errand for him.”
“Well, it’s a vile neighborhood. We’ve been here six months, we’ve learned,” Mantville said. “You shouldn’t walk home in your condition. We have no telephone. Give me the address and I’ll send my boy Judson to your uncle’s, to fetch him.”
They helped Paul to an outer room. It had one window opening on a large air shaft with similar windows on every side, below and above.
“I apologize for the poor quarters,” Mantville said. His son Judson, eleven or twelve, had already left. Mrs. Mantville bade Paul sit at the deal table, which was the main piece of furniture, apart from an old sofa with the legs missing at one end. In a corner stood a rusty wood stove. In a wall niche above, a coal oil lamp gave feeble smoky light.
Paul glanced back to the windowless room. He saw four thin pallets of striped ticking. No beds. No toilet.
A brown-eyed girl of perhaps four stood at a respectful distance, shyly watching him. She held something in the crook of her elbow. “I am grateful to all of you,” Paul said. “I’m sure my uncle will be here soon.”
Mantville pulled up a chair and took from the table drawer a churchwarden pipe, which he packed and lit. The tobacco smoke improved the smell of the flat.
“Were you carrying any money?”
Paul felt his pockets. “About thirty cents in change, that’s all.”
“They took it, of course. Lord, I hate this sinful neighborhood. We had no choice but to move here, or a place like it, after they threw me out of Pullman.”
“You worked at the factory?”
“Nine years. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity, else I wouldn’t have come all the way from Philadelphia. I’m a cabinetmaker by trade.” Mantville uttered a sad laugh. “I was. After I made my protest, I was discharged, and blacklisted. I can’t get a job anywhere that’s decent. So we do sweat work here.” He pointed his pipe at the artificial flower materials in the next room.
“What did you protest?”
From the wall Mantville brought a small cheap picture frame. Under the dirty glass was a large, elaborately engraved check from the Pullman Palace Car Company. It was paid to M. Mantville, in the amount of four cents.
Paul handed it back. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s my paycheck, lad. The paycheck that drove me to demand my rights.” Mantville rubbed a finger over the glass. “Each job at Pullman is rated, with a fixed minimum and maximum wage per hour. A cabinetmaker was rated at seventeen to nineteen cents. The company also sets prices for individual piecework. A man is supposed to do enough piecework in one hour to earn within his hourly range. Not more, and not less. Our section, building new coachwork for the latest Pullmans, developed a team spirit and expertise that made us quite fast, even as we kept the quality right up to the mark. We began to make a penny more per hour. Then two. When we reached three pennies, it threw the bosses into a panic. The job rating was dropped to ten to twelve cents. Piece prices were dropped in proportion.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Indeed yes. What you see here, the check I didn’t cash because it was hardly worth it, was my pay for two weeks. Twelve days of ten hours each. My gross earnings under the reduced rates were nine dollars, eleven cents.” Ella Mantville started to cry. She covered her eyes with her apron.
“Of course we lived in the town of Pullman then. The company ded
ucted for rent, water, gas, even three dollars a year to use the library. What remained after two weeks of work is what you see. Four pennies. Don’t think this was a rare check, checks like it were common. I’ve seen many for two pennies, even one. A lot of the lads framed them.”
Cousin Joe had told Paul a lot that was bad about Pullman, but he’d failed to grasp the vicious reality behind the words. Words couldn’t capture misery like this.
The little girl moved nearer. Shyly leaning against his leg, she offered something for his examination.
“See my dolly? It was my Christmas present. St. Nicholas brought it.”
The doll was a rail spike. The doll’s skirt was newspaper. The doll’s hair was a few strands of old knitting wool. Paul’s heart broke.
“It’s a pretty doll,” he said, touching it. Forgotten were his aches, his anger over the beating, the humiliation of being whipped physically; all that was left was outrage.
Like a tidal wave, something was rushing, moving in him. Joe Junior was right.
And the baker of Wuppertal …?
Uncle Joe was polite but gruff when he came up the unlit stairs of the tenement to find his nephew. He thanked the family, and shook Mr. Mantville’s hand, but he didn’t linger or make idle conversation. To Paul it seemed that his uncle’s face had a look of strain. In the carriage, riding home through heavy rain, he asked about the tap handles and the sign.
“I couldn’t find that fellow Toronto Bob to ask about the handles, Uncle. I was on my way back to the saloon to take down the sign when I was set upon. Please let me go back tomorrow, I want to finish what I began.”
“No, I believe you did your best. Dolph Hix returns from the road in the morning, he’ll take care of it.”
Uncle Joe turned to watch the passing street. Terrible conflicting feelings warred within Paul. He could never repay Uncle Joe for all his kindnesses; the food, the shelter, the concern—even the misguided effort to educate him. At the same time, his uncle endorsed the actions of a man like Pullman who bled his workers and would even insult a man with a paycheck of four pennies. Four pennies. Paul wasn’t a Benno Strauss, but now he could understand why men who were downtrodden and desperate talked of bombs as their only recourse.
“Paul.” He started. “Are you hurting? You’re very quiet.”
“It’s that family, Uncle. They were kind. They are good decent folk. They’re starving. It isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“All the man did—his only crime—was to speak up when the Pullman Company cut his pay.”
“Oh, I expect there’s more to it. Probably he was associating with the radical elements. The agitators.”
“How can you say that, Uncle? You don’t know.”
“I have experience to guide me,” Uncle Joe said, rather sharply. He began to twist the boar’s tooth on his watch chain. Paul turned away, biting his lip as he gazed at lighted shop fronts passing in the rain.
Uncle Joe touched his arm. “I’ll send around a sum of money to help them. A hundred dollars. I’ll do it because they helped you. I don’t have great sympathy for their plight, however.”
“Sir—with respect—I think you should.”
“See here, you really don’t know a thing about it. Poor people usually live the sort of lives they earn, and deserve.”
“I do not believe that.”
Uncle Joe leaned on the head of his cane. “You are starting to sound like your cousin. It disappoints me, Paul. I gave you more credit.”
Paul looked away again. The carriage lurched and bounced over a street railway track. Paul clenched his teeth. His bruised body hurt, but there was a worse inner pain. Neither he nor his uncle said anything else on the ride home.
Paul and Uncle Joe entered the house about half past nine. Paul convinced his aunt and uncle that he didn’t need Dr. Plattweiler, but Aunt Ilsa decreed that he must rest at home at least one day, possibly two, before returning to work. Uncle Joe disappeared into his study without comment.
Paul threw his soiled clothes down the galvanized laundry chute. In the bathroom he washed his face with hot water, a painful process. He donned a robe over his nightshirt and sat while Aunt Ilsa dressed the cut on his scalp. His aunt wore her nightrobe and slippers. Her hair was in a single long braid.
He slipped under the duvet, feeling better. She patted him. “You must be starving, Pauli. Stay awake for a little, I will come back to remedy that.”
She reappeared in a half hour with a large tray of wursts, hot bread and beer, then gave him a final hug and left.
He was drowsing when Joe Junior knocked softly and entered the room.
“I just got home. God, who decorated your mug that way?”
“It’s quite a story, I’ll tell you if you want. What have you been doing?”
Cousin Joe sat on the bed. “Just walking for a couple of hours. All hell’s broken loose. Altgeld ordered out the militia today. Five regiments. In the morning there’ll be fourteen thousand armed soldiers in the city. Nicky Speers was out too, he says the mayor’s issued a proclamation banning assembly by ‘riotous persons.’ Listen, something else—important. I won’t be at work tomorrow.”
“Neither will I, your mother forbade it.”
“I’m playing hooky. Not for fun, either. I’m doing something for Rosie. If anybody asks, tell them you don’t know where I am. Which will be the truth, because I’m not telling you.”
“Sure, Joe.”
Joe Junior wiggled his fingers. “Now give. Who banged you up?”
Paul told it as quickly and concisely as he could. At the end, his cousin shook his head. “Christ on the cross. I’ve heard about those two- and four-cent checks. Never saw one, though.”
“It changed my mind,” Paul said. “Those poor people changed my mind. I am for the strike one hundred percent.”
“You mean it? You’re with the strikers no matter how Pop feels?”
“Yes. I won’t deny it’s hard to say so. Uncle Joe has been good and kind to me, I’m not angry with him. It’s Pullman I’m against.”
Blue eyes sparkling, Joe Junior threw his arms around Paul, hugged him, slapped his back. “Good for you, kid. Good for you!” Paul tried not to gasp or groan aloud in his cousin’s rough embrace.
“We need white ribbons,” he said. “If we can’t wear them in this house, we can wear them other places.”
Grinning, Joe Junior headed for the door. “I’ll look for some. But remember—tomorrow you don’t know where I’ve gone.”
“Right, no idea,” Paul nodded.
The door closed.
Feeling that the day had been a kind of watershed, Paul put out the light, rolled on his side and let drowsiness dull his physical pain. For the painful guilt induced by turning his back on Uncle Joe there was no remedy.
47
Joe Junior
ROSIE CLUTCHED HIS SWEATY hand. “This way, I hear the train.” He heard it too—the hoot of the whistle, the low steady chug of the locomotive. The tracks were a block ahead on Forty-ninth Street.
Initially Joe Junior and Rosie had missed each other for ten minutes, caught in the swirl of men and women and youngsters, maybe three hundred, four hundred, all converging on this one level crossing. The crowd raised clouds of saffron-colored dust from the street. It sifted into Joe Junior’s hair and fell on Rosie’s damp skin like a fine ladies’ powder.
Around his left arm, above the elbow, he’d tied the white ribbon. He’d rescued it from his bureau drawer, where he’d hidden it. In the morning’s excitement he could almost forget the way his father had humiliated him over the ribbon. He saw many more white ribbons here.
Near the tracks they hauled up short behind noisy men and women standing three and four deep. Already the crossing gates had been torn down, broken to kindling. Children waved pieces as souvenirs.
The crowd flowed onto the tracks. Joe Junior and Rosie were repeatedly jostled and shoved. He squinted to the right, north, the direction of
downtown. He glimpsed blue-clad men from the Illinois National Guard riding the cowcatcher of the locomotive, which was about a block away, chugging slowly, squirting steam.
Guardsmen sat on the roof of the engine cab too, faces shadowed under their campaign hats, rifles on their knees. They were basically civilians, probably nervous. The United States had fought no war for almost thirty years.
“I wonder where Pop’s at,” Rosie said. She craned up on her toes. Her red and white gingham dress, faded from laundering, stuck to her in wet patches under her breasts and arms. A damp butterfly place marked the center of her back.
A Guard officer on the cowcatcher waved his hat at the mob. “Clear the track. We’re authorized to fire if you don’t clear the track.”
A lanky boy threw a stick. “Fuck you, scab.” The Guard officer batted it down before it hit him. The mob flowed along both sides of the train, screaming, “Scabs, scabs, dirty scabs.”
The train chugged on toward the level crossing. The mob inevitably gave way before it. But men and women ran along both sides of the train, throwing stones, sticks, bottles. Rosie bobbed up and down on her toes. “Where are the marshals, Joey, do you see them?”
He pointed. “There, second car.”
“Do you see Pop?”
“Not yet.” It was hard to see anything clearly in the rising dust.
The train consisted of four gondolas and a caboose. The second gondola carried a huge swivel crane, rusty red, with a heavy chain and a great iron hook swinging from it. Most of the marshals were on this car; men in vests and derbies, pistols displayed prominently, tin badges winking. Joe Junior searched their faces, hunting Tabor. He caught his breath.
“I know that marshal. The one with something silver in his lapel. It’s a damn delivery boy who stole some good china from our house.” She paid no attention.
The gondola carrying the crane and the marshals squealed and creaked through the Fifty-ninth Street level crossing. The delivery boy from Frankel’s butcher shop wore an old derby, and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He twirled his blued revolver like some Western pistoleer. His tin badge flashed and so did the silver object pinned to his lapel. Joe Junior identified it suddenly. “Godamighty, he’s wearing somebody’s silver soup spoon.” At the brewery he’d heard that a lot of the deputy marshals were stealing what they could, wherever they could.