And once in a while, especially during the winter, Honora will look out the window of her bedroom and the sand will be gone. Against the seawall, the beach will be five or six feet below the previous day’s level. It is as though the sand has simply been scooped away from the beach, the residue neatly smoothed, like icing. No sign of cataclysm, no melee, a sight defined only by absence. In the spring, the sand will mysteriously return. Overnight. As if it had been borrowed.
She picks up a pottery shard with rounded edges and a red-and-brown flower painted on the glaze. She puts her shoes on behind the abandoned Highland Hotel — bankrupt now, scheduled for demolition in the fall.
One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye. There is no paycheck, no way to earn money for food and clothing. Life is taken up with trying to survive.
It takes all the time there is, this trying to survive.
There have been days when all they have had to eat is cornmeal: cornmeal porridge for breakfast and then fried up for lunch, and then because there simply isn’t anything else to eat, and no money left from the pay packet, Honora will warm up those fritters for supper. Once, after they had already sold the radio and the clock and the Multi-Vider pen (never used), and there wasn’t anything else in the house to sell, they had only dried berries and peanut butter sandwiches to eat for days. Today, when she goes to buy the lobster bodies, the fish house will stink and Honora will have to tie her kerchief around her nose. There will be no tails or claws to speak of — those will all have been shipped to Boston. When she gets home, she will painstakingly remove the meat with a pick, and then she will make her stew. Night after night, sometimes that’s all there is to eat: lobster bodies.
Once, when Sexton was away, she put bread in water and tried to make a kind of porridge. The next day, she walked to Jack Hess’s store, and that was the first time she ever asked for credit. That Friday, when Sexton brought home his pay packet (the four silver dollars — cartwheels, the workers call them — and the ten paper dollars), Honora walked to Hess’s store and paid the man back. House or no house, she said to Sexton, they would not owe money to Jack Hess.
Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true. If you don’t have ingenuity, you don’t eat, and so you have to be smart. You take the lace collar and cuffs off a dress to make it appear as if you had a new dress. You get old coats at the church and carefully rip out all the seams and turn the material inside out and make new coats and jackets. You find old sweaters with holes in them and unravel the wool and wash it and reknit the yarn into new sweaters. You put fresh cardboard into your husband’s shoes every Sunday to keep the soles from wearing out. You turn his shirt collars, and you make your own laundry soap out of grease and lye and borax and ammonia. Such economies are embarrassing to Honora. She never speaks of them to anyone. She hides this effort in the way she hides the douche powder and the rubber hose and bag. High on a shelf so no one will ever see them.
And yet. And yet. If asked — if pressed — Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It’s an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone — not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it.
Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.
Honora has hired herself out as a caretaker to five of the cottages on the beach, one job leading to the other, the first the result of a recommendation from Jack Hess. Most of the time, Honora’s duties consist of making sure there are no burst pipes in the basement or animals in the cupboards or glass panes cracked in a storm. On good days, she opens all the windows to dry out a house, to rid the place of the smell of mildew. In the best of the five cottages, she will take the sheets off the furniture if she knows that the owners are arriving for a visit. When there is an emergency (bats in a bedroom, a shutter blown off in the wind), Sexton comes with her on the weekends and helps to make the repairs. For this work, Honora makes fifteen dollars a month, all of which goes to meet the mortgage payment.
Every time Honora visits Jack Hess’s store she is struck by how much barer the shelves are now than they used to be, and she wonders how it is that Jack feeds as many people as he does when he appears to have less and less to offer. It is a conjurer’s trick, and Honora has sometimes imagined a kind of alchemy in the back room, a modern-day reworking of the loaves and fishes. Today she would dearly love two pats of butter, but she won’t be able to get them home in the heat. She hasn’t ridden in an automobile since she drove Vivian’s beach wagon to her house on Christmas Day and then walked back to her own empty house. Honora needs rice and beans and flour and greens of some sort, though a quick perusal of the store tells her Mr. Hess has little in that line. And today she will splurge on strawberries and sugar. She wants to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie with the rhubarb that grows wild near the street. Today is her wedding anniversary.
One year ago today, Honora and Sexton were married and they were happy. Why not celebrate that event, she has been asking herself all week, even if the marriage that followed is complicated and cloudy? She cannot imagine a life in which the day of her wedding is never acknowledged, never honored.
“Good mornin’, Mrs. Beecher.”
“Good morning, Mr. Hess.”
Jack Hess’s back is so stooped she cannot figure out how it is he stocks the shelves himself, how it is he sleeps. He has on, as usual, his bow tie and hat. A fresh shirt.
“You were lost a bit there,” he says.
“Yes, I was.”
“How are you?”
“Just fine, thank you.”
“And Mr. Beecher?”
“He’ll be home tonight. It’s our anniversary.” She hadn’t planned on saying that aloud; it isn’t like Honora to discuss something personal. But she cannot deny that she has wanted to tell someone.
“I remember clear as day when your husband first came in here,” Hess says. “Dapper young gent, I thought to myself. All crowed up about being married.”
Jack Hess stands behind the counter with the grabber he uses for the items on the high shelves. As Honora selects a product, he puts it on the counter and then writes the price in pencil on a paper bag into which he’ll later put the groceries. Then he’ll add the figures, and the sum will always be five or ten cents below an accurate total. At first Honora felt obliged to point this out (once walking all the way back to the store), but now she knows better. It is Hess’s way of helping. A cynic, she thinks, might say it was his way of making sure a customer returned to the store, and that his shortages represented little more than advertising specials, but Honora knows that Hess’s contribution to the community consists of far more than just creative mathematics.
“By the way, Mrs. Beecher, I just wanted you to know that for the next couple of weeks, or however long this durned thing lasts, I’m not taking cash from mill families.”
Honora looks up.
“Till it’s over,” he says, explaining.
Honora, baffled, shakes her head.
“The strike,” Hess says.
Honora’s grocery list vanishes from her thoughts.
“I thought you knew,” Hess says.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I expect your husband didn’t want to worry you until it actually happened. I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you.”
Honora approaches the counter.
“The day the new pay cut takes effect,” Jack Hess says. “Monday. All the mills are involve
d. They say the tension is so thick over to Ely Falls that the air is just cracklin’.”
No, Honora has not heard about the impending strike. She knows only what her husband tells her. And when he is home, he never mentions his job. In the beginning, she would ask him about his work, ask him if he had friends, if he had met anyone he liked in the boarding house — the same way a well-meaning mother might query an awkward son who didn’t quite fit in at school. But shortly it became clear that Sexton didn’t welcome the questions, and she gave up. When he comes home weekends now, he never speaks of where he’s been, and if it weren’t for the lint in the laundry and the grime in the tub, she is certain they would simply pretend that he had been “on a trip.”
“I don’t like to see any family go without,” Hess says. “But conditions over to Ely Falls are inhuman. I go in there every once in a while to visit my sister and her family. Arlene married a Franco, don’t you know. And I tell you I never saw anything like that mill housing. No one can make do on the wages them mills pay. My sister’s kids are unsupervised most of the time because there’s no one at home to watch them. They’ve never had such a problem with gangs as they do now.” Hess pauses. “I’m sorry I put my foot where it wasn’t wanted,” he says, “but I expect your husband was going to tell you this weekend — after your celebration, that is.”
Honora pays for her groceries. She puts the paper bag in her satchel.
“We’ll manage,” she says.
“Course you will,” Hess says.
Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.
Why didn’t you tell me?
She is tired of the withholding, sick of the deception. How is she to trust the man? The unfairness, the injustice of it, fills her with rage. She will tell Sexton so tonight. Tonight they will have it out as they should have done months ago. She will scream at him if need be. She cannot be silent any longer. What is the point of scrimping and saving? They will lose the house anyway. They can’t survive even a two-week strike. All their savings have been poured into the house, their entire marriage ruined by a mortgage.
She stops abruptly on the beach. The lobster bodies stink today. They just stink. She reaches into her satchel and takes out the waxed bag with the shellfish carcasses in it. She walks to the water’s edge and hurls them into the sea.
McDermott
The machines might be organs or violins or pianos, the men and women at them as fluid as musicians. Their movements are precise: this note and then that note and then this note, moving toward a furious crescendo, sounding a particular beat as the music reaches a fever pitch and then warbles down to a simple melody. The music is always demanding and repetitive; there is no time for the musicians to catch their breath. They must raise their instruments immediately and begin again. And then again. And then so many times that they know every measure, every nuance, every note by heart. More than by heart, they know it in their blood and in their bones. They can carry on whole conversations with their minds while their bodies complete this virtuoso performance with the spools and the creels, the shuttles and the bobbins.
There’s only a minute left until the dinner horn sounds. McDermott doesn’t need a watch; he knows this with his inner clock. Sean Rasley, a weaver, looks over at him, and it is just a look — steady, no smile, no nod — but it says everything McDermott needs to know.
I’m ready, it says.
Rasley means the strike. He means Monday. Today could well be their last day at the looms for weeks.
McDermott nods his head. There are only ten, fifteen seconds until the horn. One by one, the weavers around him stop their machines. Lunch break. Thirty minutes. The first chance they’ve had to sit since they entered the mill at 6:30 this morning.
The air is soft and hits McDermott full in the face as he steps out of the mill door. Summer, he thinks; it’s officially summer now. The air has a hint of the sea beyond the city, and the sky above him is an almost unnatural blue. He puts his hands in his pockets and sets out for the boardinghouse.
He searches in his pocket for a piece of gum and finds instead a crumpled piece of paper — one of the leaflets that he and Ross and Tsomides were putting out just before the raid. Thinking about the raid makes McDermott’s stomach clench, even though it’s been three weeks since the men in masks that looked eerily like those of the Ku Klux Klan broke into the abandoned warehouse where McDermott and five others were printing up posters for the coming strike. For a moment McDermott froze, too astonished to move when the men smashed doors and windows and entered the building. Swinging sledgehammers, they shattered the press that had been sent up from New York and hit Paul Tsomides a glancing blow on the head that put him in the hospital. McDermott, crouching behind a barrel, watched the rout before fleeing through a side entrance.
Eighteen months of owner-ordered lay-offs and wage cuts have left most workers nearly disastrously destitute, he reads as he walks.
A half dozen craft unions have been made operational and have joined forces for a strike that will commence on Monday. Twenty-five hundred union men and women, who boldy speak for ten times that many non-unionized workers, have already voted unanimously and in a heart-felt manner to strike. Union members will be paid twenty percent of their hard-earned wages during the strike. Non-union members will receive necessary relief in the form of contributions from their comrades in other trades. The Citizen Welfare Committee, the Catholic Relief Bureau and the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Fund will be making soup kitchens available starting on Monday. Throw off the shackles of oppression and join forces with the international brotherhood of workers!
Telling the mill families where they can get relief is essential, McDermott has been told, since New England workers are notorious for not accepting relief of any kind in the belief that assistance goes against the grain of their own (or their inherited) Yankee culture. Thus they starve more quickly and give in more rapidly to management’s demands. In order for the strike to succeed, Mironson has stressed, strikers have to be persuaded of the necessity to accept relief.
Management has pared wages down to next to nothing, McDermott reads, and he thinks of fingernails scraping a cement wall as they go down. The bosses live in high style on the other side of the river. McDermott can see the massive houses from the mill yard — poor planning on someone’s part, he thinks. No hint of an economic depression over there. Not with all their power lawn mowers and swimming pools and fancy automobiles. In fact, it’s possible the bosses are doing better than ever now. Money goes farther these days: gardeners and cooks and chauffeurs come dirt cheap. At lunch, McDermott knows, as he hops up the steps of the boardinghouse, the strike will be all the talk. If it doesn’t happen Monday, McDermott thinks, the entire city will self-combust simply from pent-up energy.
McDermott washes his hands and finds a place at the table with men not shy about showing their appetites. They eat as if they might not eat tomorrow, and it seldom matters how bad the food is, how mysterious the ingredients in the stews that fill their bowls. Today it is fish, and McDermott doesn’t want to think about what kind. Madame Derocher has an impenetrable face, one that doesn’t invite conversation or questions. If sufficiently annoyed, she will answer in a French patois that McDermott thinks a Parisian wouldn’t understand. She has been known to snatch a bowl of stew from a complaining boarder’s hands, leaving the man with nothing to eat at all. A boarder usually makes that mistake only once.
Sometimes the lunch break is strangely silent, the men too focused on their food to talk, too quickly sated and then stunned at meal’s end to think coherently. Talk requires energy, and the men are careful, McDermott has observed, not to squander too much of that. There are still four and a half hours at the mill to go that day.
But today the talk is brisk, though McDermott can make out only some of the words, men with full mouths being difficult to understand under the best of circumstances. The boardinghouses are transient places, the men alwa
ys coming and going, constantly shifting lodging when one or another of the houses changes ownership or loses its lease or is foreclosed upon; and lately there has been more turnover than usual. McDermott has spoken personally to only a handful of the twenty or so men at the long table. Still, though, he likes to listen and strains to follow what is being said. He needs to know the mood of the men, the way they speak and what’s important to them.
He puts a pill in his mouth and takes a bite of stew, his ulcer worse now than it’s been in weeks. Sometimes he can’t eat Madame Derocher’s food at all and has to go to Eileen’s for a meal. She makes him a bowl of bread soaked in milk to keep him from starving. There has been talk of an operation, but McDermott can’t afford either the time or the money for such a drastic step right now.
It is strangely quiet when he visits Eileen these days. Eamon has gone off to Texas, and McDermott doesn’t know where Michael is. His sister Mary is married, which leaves only Rosie and Patricia and Bridget, all of whom seem too tired at night to make much of a fuss. McDermott feels sorry for Eileen and gives her the same amount of money he did when all the kids were in the house. He encourages her to buy pretty things for herself, and sometimes he brings her gifts: bonbons from Harley’s chocolate factory, an Italian Morain brooch he found in a thrift shop, once a Toastmaster from Simmons.
Last winter McDermott had a girl of his own — Evangeline, a weaver on his floor. She had violent red hair and the clearest skin he has ever seen. He met her when he had to repair her drawing frame. A week later, the frame was broken again, and he suspects now that she probably did it deliberately so that they could meet a second time. He didn’t guess in all the time he knew her that she was the scheming type. Their relationship was innocent enough, and he thought about asking her to marry him. On Saturday nights, they went dancing or to the movies. In April he bought her a watch he’d seen in a jeweler’s window. But on Easter Sunday, when he went to her house to give it to her, she cried and told him that she was pregnant. She was leaving Ely Falls to marry the father, a bricklayer from Exeter. McDermott can still remember the shock of that betrayal: he hadn’t even once touched her breast.