Homeland

by John Jakes

  “Trouble,” Anna’s father said with a snort. “Course there’ll be trouble. I’ve told people all my life, shingle weaving isn’t a trade, it’s a battle.”

  Ehling Sieberson was a round-shouldered man of fifty-three. He looked ten or fifteen years older. His face had the pasty pallor Joe Junior associated with shingle weavers; it was the badge of their perilous occupation. That, and their hands. On Ehling’s left hand only half a thumb remained, and no fingers, just stumps at the knuckles. His right hand had a full thumb and index finger, and three stumps. Ehling Sieberson was a sour and defeated man, no longer able to work at his trade. He survived in modest comfort only because his late son-in-law, Prestrude, had received a small inheritance from an uncle in Wisconsin.

  Ehling’s pronouncement silenced the table again; very little was said during the rest of the meal. When Ehling was finished, he took his akvavit glass to his chair in the parlor; he was expert at carrying a glass with the two fingers of his right hand. Crossly, Anna sent Thor to his schoolbooks. Joe Junior said, “I’ll help wash dishes.”

  She turned her back. “Go outside and smoke your pipe. It’s a pretty evening, make the most of it.” Then suddenly she whirled around. “We could have such a happy life together. You’ll throw it all away.”

  “Anna—” He touched her; she recoiled. “It isn’t that I don’t care for you, I do. But I have to go tomorrow. I have to stand with the others.”

  “You and your damn conscience,” she said. “Go on outside, Joey, leave me alone.”

  He left her with her hands in the dishpan and sunset light through a small window catching the tears on her plump cheeks.

  Everett, Washington, was a growing community; over six thousand people, most employed in, or dependent on, the lumber industry. There were nine shingle mills, seven sawmills, and a pulp mill. The town had electricity and telephone service; the former hadn’t yet reached the hill, and the Siebersons couldn’t afford the latter. You could count on at least two things in Everett, westerly winds blowing from the Orient and the snarl and whine of saws in the mills that worked a night shift.

  The Sieberson house was small, impeccably clean, and largely alone on Rucker Hill above the town. There might come a time when the richer element would want homes up here, because of the view. At present, the nearest residence was a poor shanty a quarter of a mile away.

  For all its isolation, the house was pretty, sided and roofed with different widths and varieties of shingles, some of them made by the Smiley Shingle Company, whose large rambling factory Joe Junior could easily see down below on the waterfront. Anna Sieberson was the person responsible for softening the starkness of the hillside location. She’d planted spirea, blooming white now. She’d carefully sited beds of rhododendron, whose fluted flowers, rose and pink and white, were just opening in their spring glory. The family had put in a vine maple just where the road from the lower hill straggled past the house. The maple’s springtime leaves were a spectacular red.

  Joe Junior leaned on the rail of the narrow porch that overlooked the rhododendron beds, the town, Port Gardner Bay on Puget Sound, and long Whidbey Island, where the Olympic Mountains rose, hiding the Pacific to the west. This is such a beautiful place to be so full of greed and pain, he thought. This was the wheat farms and orange groves all over again. Pullman in a setting suitable for the greatest of landscape artists.

  It was a clear, cool evening, not quite summer yet. The air grew steadily sharper as the sun sank and the Sound turned from slate gray to indigo in the changing light. Three fishing trawlers were bearing north, going home. A tug churned south, drawing two large rafts made of pilings. A valuable cargo of new lumber was stacked on each, secured by chains.

  Joe Junior had come to love the peculiar beauties of this coast. When he awoke in the morning, he could look from a circular window on the attic’s east side and see the snowy peaks of the Cascade Range; watch the slow transformation of the forests of pine and Douglas fir on the near slopes—the inky color of the night changing to the rich dark green of day. Near marshy places on the shore, where eelgrass grew, the lapping water sometimes looked red as wine. On a Sunday outing Thor had shown him a piece of the branched red algae people called sea rose. It was found nowhere else, Thor said.

  He relished the special aromas of the place. Salt and seaweed, tarry creosote on the dock pilings, freshly cut lumber, wood smoke from the mills burning sawdust and scraps.

  Seattle was about thirty miles south of Everett. On a sunny day in April, Joe Junior had observed his twenty-second birthday there. He’d spent several hours sitting on a wharf watching tug skippers maneuver lumber rafts to a railroad pier.

  He didn’t like Seattle, it was a madhouse because of last year’s Yukon gold strike. Every day Northern Pacific trains dumped new arrivals into the already overcrowded streets. There were no rooms, cheap or expensive. Every leaky vessel on the Pacific Coast was touted as a fast, comfortable ship to Alaska. Prices were higher than the mountains.

  In Seattle, as throughout most of the West, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the war with Spain; so much that Joe Junior had taken to calling this the Jingo Coast. War fever had spread despite a strong populism in the state; in 1896 Washington had gone for Bryan and free silver, although of course the lumber barons had foamed and ranted against the “Popocrat” as though he were Satan. Much of this had been told to Joe by his friend Julius Rahn, a thirty-two-year old shingle weaver who so far had lost only the tip of his left little finger.

  Hating the greed and clatter of Seattle, and having no desire to risk death in snowy mountain passes as the price of searching for gold in Alaska’s rivers, Joe Junior had drifted up to Everett, seat of Snohomish County. The town had been settled about thirty years ago, and Julius Rahn said John D. Rockefeller had an interest in the company that had done much of the real estate development; there was a Rockefeller Street downtown.

  Joe Junior packed his pipe, lit it, and sucked the sweet rum-flavored tobacco into his mouth. Although he had certainly learned to live without contact with his family, he missed them. It had been too long since he sent his mother a little package, he must do that soon. Thor had given him the perfect idea. An acorn-size nugget that seemed to sparkle with flecks of gold. It was iron pyrites, sold in souvenir stores. Fool’s gold. But it was pretty.

  He thought of his sister with her mimicry. Burly little Carl, whose knockabout clumsiness made him smile as he recalled it. Carl was probably not so little any more.

  And cousin Paul, where was he? Still in America, or back in Germany, perhaps disillusioned like many another immigrant? It wouldn’t have surprised him.

  Sometimes Joe Junior even missed his father. This was such a moment. During his wanderings he’d come to realize that in comparison with other bosses, Joe Crown wasn’t such an ogre. More, generous and fair with workers than most, in fact. If he ever saw his father again, he wondered if he’d have the nerve to admit that many harsh things he’d said in the past were wrong. Joe Junior didn’t believe in letting yourself be injured or killed by the enemy, but neither did he believe any longer in the usefulness of dynamite, the virtue of “propaganda of the deed.”

  Well, it was an unprofitable speculation, given the situation here. In less than twelve hours the sun would rise and he would stand with the other shingle workers down at the factory.

  Perhaps because this part of America was so fair and clean, the greed and repression he’d found made him sadder than usual. The pattern was familiar. The bosses owned mayors and town councils. They owned governors, legislators, and judges. They supplemented the salaries of sheriffs and deputies, who did their bidding. They dominated the press and the pulpit. They defended their right to form combinations in their own interest, but denied working men the right to organize to defend theirs.

  He’d seen a lot of the country by now; met a lot of Americans. Mostly, the poor were good, except for the few who turned on the others and robbed or killed them out of rage and desperation. Mostl
y, the rich were bad, because their preoccupation was the constant defensive war to protect their businesses, their bank accounts, their property … always with the same results for the worker. You were shorted in your pay packet. You were cheated at the company stores. You were fired if you objected; arrested, beaten, or maimed if you tried to organize.

  Working men out here knew of Gene Debs; he was a revered leader and socialist. But his doctrine of peaceful protest and negotiation wasn’t popular. “This is a God damn dangerous trade, shingle weaving,” Julius Rahn said when they were planning tomorrow’s action. “You can’t be soft and work them saws ten hours a day. We got no patience with sitting down at a table, jawing and jawing for weeks. Where does it ever get a working stiff? No place. Strike quick and strike hard, that’s the motto around here.”

  So they chose to walk, not talk.

  The lumber coast had known a brief period of labor agitation a little more than ten years ago, Julius explained another time. The Knights of Labor, the great idealistic organization founded in 1869 with the purpose of joining every worker in America in a single brotherhood, had appeared in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1880s. One of the goals of the Knights was the reduction of the mill workday from twelve hours to ten.

  A bloody confrontation was expected once the issue was joined. To the astonishment and fury of other bosses, a respected lumber magnate, Cyrus Walker of the Puget Mill Company, granted his men the ten-hour day almost at once, preferring that to a long, ruinous strike. In less than a year, after a few small and relatively peaceful strikes at other mills, the whole Pacific Slope combination gave up and established the ten-hour day.

  After winning that battle, the Washington State Knights went through a series of internal power quarrels and disappeared. When the depression of 1893 came, volume dropped, mills closed, jobs were fewer; men would accept any wage. In the last couple of years, however, the industry had started to revive. Jobs were becoming plentiful again.

  But working conditions weren’t getting any better. Joe Junior discovered this when he answered a newspaper ad and was hired as a utility man at the Smiley Shingle Company, at one dollar five cents per ten-hour day. With a six-day week, this brought him the munificent monthly salary of twenty-five dollars twenty cents. Even a skilled weaver like Julius only received a dollar forty per day; a little better than thirty-three dollars a month. One of the demands to be presented tomorrow was a daily increase often cents. Another was advance notification of layoffs that were now announced with no warning, the moment orders fell off.

  The general manager, Abel Grover, who interviewed Joe Junior, said nothing about layoffs. He spoke of a dollar five cents a day as though it were the wealth of Midas. A gruff, deeply religious man, Grover had a little lecture prepared for new employees:

  “I’ll tell you what kind of man we like around here. A serious, thrifty, industrious man. A reasonable man who understands that we try to improve working conditions to the extent our balance sheet will allow. But we don’t want union stuff—bums from the deadbeat class who do nothing but attack corporations and capital.”

  Grover answered Joe Junior’s sole question—yes, there was a Mr. Smiley; James Lincoln Smiley II. He lived far away in San Francisco, as did a number of other Pacific Slope lumber barons. Smiley had a princely house in the Nob Hill district. He visited the mill once or twice a year. Later Joe learned that when Smiley sailed up Puget Sound in his yacht and docked in Everett, he met only with Grover and the section supervisors, never with the workers. Julius Rahn had seen Smiley often in ten years but had never exchanged a word with him.

  “It don’t surprise me,” Julius said soon after he and Joe Junior got acquainted. “Around here they talk about ‘the price of labor’ same as they talk about ‘the price of shingles’ or ‘the price of oxen.’ We ain’t human beings, we’re things, store-bought and sold when, as, and if it suits Mr. Smiley and all the rest like him.”

  Joe Junior had been put to work with a broom, his chief task being the cleanup and removal to the burning yard of the incredible quantities of cedar sawdust generated each day. What he saw, particularly on the upper floor where the weavers worked, almost beggared belief. The first time he went up there and stood slack-mouthed amid the swirling sawdust and the screaming steel saws, he thought he’d ventured into some torture chamber devised by barbarians.

  Each shingle weaver sat in front of a pair of spinning ripsaws mounted in a metal table. A chute device fed chunky blocks of cedar to the left side of the table. The weaver pushed the block against the left saw with his left hand and the teeth peeled off a rough shingle. In some mills, Julius said, a weaver had a quota of fifty shingles a minute. At Smiley’s it was fifty-five. Floor supervisors circled constantly, counting.

  The instant the shingle was split from the block, the weaver reached over the left sawblade to grasp it. He did this by instinct, never watching, because at the same time, his right hand was manipulating the previous rough-cut shingle on the right-hand saw; trimming it, or slicing out knots. This done, he threw the finished shingle into a chute to the right of his table. The shingle slid down to the packing stations on the first floor. The weaver’s hands flew over and around the blades, each hand doing a separate task fifty-five times a minute. The weaver worked in a constant cloud of sawdust spun off by the blades, and for protection wore only a water-soaked sponge on an elastic, covering his nostrils.

  “If the blade don’t get you,” Julius Rahn said, “the cedar asthma will.”

  On Joe’s fourth day, while he was sweeping on the lower floor, he heard a scream from overhead. Only a couple of packers bothered to look up from the work of bundling shingles. Joe watched a blood-splattered shingle slide down the chute and then, scrawling a bloody line, an index finger severed at the middle knuckle. One of the packers snatched the finger and tossed it into Joe Junior’s waste barrel and went on working.

  When a weaver was maimed too badly to work, he was discharged without any extra compensation. And if he died as a result of a factory mishap, the management neither acknowledged his death nor contributed to a fund to help the widow. As Joe Junior had learned from Anna and Julius, that would admit the bosses bore some responsibility. The position of the bosses was clear and simple. When a man took up the trade of shingle weaving, he did so knowing the hazards of employment. That was the main reason they were walking out in the morning; like all the other shingle mills, Smiley’s wouldn’t admit to an iota of guilt if an accident left a man without work and maimed for life. Repacking his pipe in the cool evening air, he heard Thor ask Anna a schoolwork question. She answered with a harshness not typical of her. He noticed a flash of white on the road that wound along Rucker Hill. Julius Rahn said his hair had turned white during his first year in the factory.

  Julius climbed the porch steps and joined him at the railing. “How are you, Joey?”

  “All right. You?”

  “It’s worse than we thought down there. Matilda’s awful upset. I left her crying.”

  “How do you mean, worse?”

  Julius Rahn buttoned the upper buttons of his black and red plaid mackinaw. Joe wanted to go inside for a sweater but he didn’t; Julius was too upset.

  “About three this afternoon, Abel Grover paid a call to my house.”

  “For God’s sake, Julie, why?”

  “To plead with us to call it off tomorrow.”

  “How does he know about it?”

  “Hell, he’s got plenty of spies on the floor, don’t think he ain’t. Grover offered me two hundred dollars. I wouldn’t take it. I could sure use it, though.” He sounded sad.

  “Why would the general manager try to—?”

  Julius interrupted. “Do you know Weyerhaeuser?”

  “Heard his name. Another German immigrant, like my pop. He’s important in the lumber trade in the Midwest, isn’t he?”

  “Important? In lumber, Fred Weyerhaeuser’s like old man Carnegie in steel, or Rockefeller in oil. For months I been heari
ng that he’s sniffing around here. He wants to expand from St. Paul, and there ain’t but two places he can go, the South and the Northwest. They say he hates the hot weather and the nigger beating and the backward ways of the South, so he ain’t going there. Something else. There’s a new outfit in town, the Coast Lumber Company. I think it’s a front for Weyerhaeuser. They got men looking at shingle mills to buy. The Bell-Nelson mill. Ours too.”

  Julius Rahn looked at Joe with pale gray eyes full of wrath. “Grover used a lot of two-dollar words this afternoon. After he left, I wrote down as many as I could remember. I thought everybody should know what he said before we walk out.”

  Julius produced a wrinkled piece of foolscap and, with difficulty, read from it in the failing light. “Grover said Mr. Smiley was desperately anxious to preserve an appearance of labor harmony”—he tilted the paper and squinted—“ ‘cos anything else would surely create a negative impression in the mind of any prospective buyer. So we will be doubly hard on agitators. Let them all be warned.”

  Joe Junior heard Anna gasp. He turned around. There was no one in the dim rectangle behind the half-open door.

  Carefully, Julius Rahn put the paper back in his pocket. “That’s the message, Joey. ‘Let them all be warned.’ I’m making the rounds, every one of the others.” It sounded impressive; there were, counting Julius, only nine.

  “What I’m telling them is, you don’t have to go through with it. You don’t have to be there. I don’t want nobody to get killed.”

  Joe Junior’s stomach hurt. “That’s good of you, Julie. I’ll be there anyway.”

  “Hoped you’d say that. If we don’t stand up together, we’ll be down forever. Well, got to leave, going to Erickson’s next.” He pulled a cloth cap from his coat and settled it on his white hair. “Cold wind, ain’t it? Damn westerlies never let up. Just like the bosses, huh?”

  He said it without smiling. Joe Junior laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.”