Gilded Mountain, page 20
“ ‘We’ll own those banks of marble…’ ” Kerrigan sang, ignoring him.
“Yessir, we will,” said Tony Mercanditti.
“You won’t own nothing but your dago name,” Tarbusch said, and dished out similar insults till the air was blue with cursing.
“Get your brothers,” Maman told me. “It will be trouble. We leave.”
“Calm it, boys,” my father said. The music died out.
The men bristled like dogs. Tony stuck up a middle finger. Tarbusch swung. Tony punched him. Three men came to the boss’s defense, to curry favor, and within seconds the drunken quarryhogs went at each other, delirious with violence, brawling. Mrs. Quirk swatted a broom at the pile. A bottle shattered. The floor was a glitter of glass where the men rolled and clawed, breaded with it. Then it was over. The fighters stood heaving and bleeding. Tarbusch swayed on his feet and bent to pick something off the floor. A watch. His prize possession, crushed.
“You boys will pay,” he said. “Count on it.”
“We count on being paid,” said my father. “January first. We’re owed.”
Tarbusch said, “I don’t owe you a damn thing, Pelletier.”
Maman pulled me and Henry toward the door. “This godforsaken place.” We left Papa and carried Nipper home. The wind creaked in the trees, scudding clouds past the moon. “Primitifs,” said Maman. “He will kill him now.” She did not say who would kill, or be killed.
We lay awake worried until Papa came home, singing touralouralou. I heard him rattle the coal bin, whispering in the lean-to, “Chérie, Chérie.”
“Assez,” Maman hissed at him. “Enough.”
“Never enough,” my father said. “More heat, more whiskey, more money. More Chérie. More amour, mon amour. Happy Christmas.”
“Jacques. Tarbusch is—”
“It will be fine.”
“Fine, fine, you say always. Setkowski is a wolf. He has your daughter.”
But he did not. I scrubbed at my mouth to get that kiss off. It was not the one I wanted.
Chapter Eighteen
JANUARY CAME AND SAT ON us. Snow fell, relentless, piling against the walls and over the roof to entomb us alive. Eight feet of it on the track, then fifteen. A horse could not get through. The tram couldn’t. Nobody got paid and nobody had hauled coal to Quarrytown in the two weeks since New Year’s. We dug a passage to the jacks. Water froze in the pitcher. Eggs froze in their pickling brine. Ink froze. Spit. Tears. “Out!” Nipper cried, and climbed the walls, climbed on our laps. “Once upon a time!” he demanded. I told him stories—“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “The Little Match Girl”—till I was ready to light the cabin on fire with the tedium. Henry practiced the fiddle in screeches and tapped spoons, drummed us all to madness. We could not ski to town or clamber very far, even on raquettes, due to the danger of slides.
I was itching to resume life as a printer’s devil, angling again for the cot at the Record. “I could ski down, stay with Miss—”
“Your patience will improve with prayer” was all Maman had to say about it.
I did the rosary in silence, each bead an unholy wish, for a letter, a job, a word, a dove with a kiss in its beak. There was no mail. Also no coffee. No tobacco. Only a few liters left of lamp oil and a coal ration. On the daily menu was beans, but we said, “Pass the strawberries” with mocking Belgian accents and did not mention our cracked lips, the skin of our fingers broken and bleeding, our boots soaked through. Complaints are the seeds of misery. We Pelletiers were stalwart and silent as sides of meat in a meat locker. I wrote down the boredom and the bile in my journal.
January 10, 1908: If the Devil would come to take me away I’d leap into his arms. I did not bother to erase this.
George Lonahan had not replied to Papa’s November letter. “Maybe Tarbusch stole it out of the mail sack,” Papa mused. “Maybe he has bigger fish to fry than us bony minnows. Maybe George has given up.” Or my father had.
But not me. In the throes of winter doldrums, I pondered George Lonahan. Doldrums and throes: pluralia tantum. Lonahan’s specialty. He was an agitator, and wasn’t that what we needed? He wanted my father to call a strike in summer, but summer was too long to wait. I recalled the way George smiled around a cigarette, his offer of sarsaparilla. Would he return if I asked him? Why shouldn’t I write to request that he come back and organize the workers? They were worn to nubs.
Inside the mountain, the fires belched smoke out of the cave, ash on the snow from the blacksmith forge. Plenty of coal was available for the machines while we in the cabins were on a ration. Tarbusch would not stop work. Colonel Bowles, warm in town, in his beaver coat, was determined that the quarry would produce stone year-round, in all weather. Orders for tons of marble were due to ship from the mill in February. The temperature in the pit dropped to twenty below zero. Break time in the warming hut was fifteen minutes, but no amount of time was enough to thaw the blood.
“Cold enough to freeze the match flame to the pipe,” my father said.
The men worked wearing canvas over wool, rubber over leather, hats on top of hats. The rest of us stayed in our dens, wrapped under blankets. We heated rocks in the stove, took them to our beds. The path to the jacks was treacherous, the privy holes frigid. We emptied the commode out the door, where the night soil froze in foul ice, to be covered by layers of white.
My father went out into the solid wind and into the quarryhole, where he chipped ice off the Snail and checked the compressor, fired it with coal, ran its slow pace along the cut. He filled his pockets with anthracite lumps that fell from the barrow to bring home, and told us how Tarbusch caught him: “You’re a thief.”
“And you’re a weasel,” said my father in French. Une belette.
“Dock you, frog bastard, for insubordination and theft.”
“Can’t dock half of nothing. You owe us nine weeks.”
The men were set to quit, Papa said. Once they were paid, the crews would slide down the mountain and leave for the warm suns of New Mexico or Arizona, never to return. We burned the stolen coal. “It’s not a crime. It’s a right,” he said.
His words were a gift I’ve kept all my life as a justification and a defense for what I did, and later took. More than a few lumps of coal.
All the cabin dwellers stole from the brimming coal cars in the Quarrytown supply shed, while dreaming of a desert sun. We were never warm. We slept in our coats all in one bed. The snow fell endlessly, like a white darkness.
* * *
I wrote letters of grievance in my notebook: to Jace Padgett, to Inge, to the gods, to Satan, and to Beatrice Fairfax, advice columnist.
Miss Fairfax, I suffer a broken heart.
Dear Satan, come and get me at least it is warm in the fires of hell.
All of these I ripped from the bindings and burned. Pleading and self-pity were kindling for the fire. But there was one letter I did not burn.
Dear Mr. George Lonahan,
The situation at the Padgett quarry in Moonstone is bad: The men are on a twelve-hour shift but no pay since October. So far they’ve been sent three times to clear track on shovel brigade, so-called dead work. They can’t get supplies here from town due to the snows, and we are shorted provisions. There are no safety ropes, and the ladders in the pit are so icy that yesterday a man fell and was concussed. It is twenty below and the foreman only allows fifteen minutes to get warm. They do not have good work boots. It would help if you would please return to do what is required for a union.
Sincerely,
I intended to mail this letter only as a last resort and told myself my motives were strictly business. In truth, the tedium of winter had nurtured my interest in sarsaparilla.
* * *
On January 26, the weasel Tarbusch closed the quarry for the season. My father would not work there till spring. He went to bed and slept two days straight. When he woke up, he said, “I’m a new man,” and seemed to us his old self, whistling and roughhousing the boys. He mended raquettes with rawhide leather and wired the broken door hinge. He told Nipper the story of the loup-garou so the little boy crawled around with teeth bared, growling. He taught us songs from The Little Red Songbook despite my mother’s warnings. “ ‘There’s power in the union boys,’ ” he sang, and gave Henry fiddle lessons that grated our nerves. “The neighbors will murder us,” Maman said. Papa sat her on his lap and sang “À la claire fontaine” so she wilted against him and talked of her old dream of Quebec, where we’d live on a little farm in Beaupré.
“To grow potatoes,” she said.
“And petunias,” he said. “And parsnips and peas.”
I stayed up on my shelf and wrote terrible poetry. The snow fell. Quarrytown was cut off same as an island in the Pacific, only it was not flowering vines hanging from the eaves but icicles like daggers ready to spear us in our beds.
* * *
On the first of February, the screech of the shift whistle woke us in alarm, for the quarry was closed. “Somebody’s hurt,” Maman said.
Papa strapped on webs and went to see about it. Twenty minutes later he was back. “On with your boots. They’re ordering us out to shovel track.”
The order was due to a break in the weather, a thaw to a tropical thirty-three degrees. Colonel Bowles was hell-bent on getting stone to the mill. Three miles of track to shovel. All hands would dig. Out we went, wrapped in layers of wool, stamping on webs over the drifts to the loading yard, where a boil of men trampled snow. Mr. Tarbusch handed out shovels. “Froggy’s here,” he said when he saw us. “With his tadpoles.”
Papa pointed at us. “These two get paid. Dollar a day. Men’s rate’s two-fifty.”
“It’s dead work, Pelletier.”
“Don’t see any corpses here,” my father said. “Payroll’s overdue.”
“You boys have a complaint? Get the hell out,” said Tarbusch. “Vamoose.”
“We dig, you pay.” A hardness like stone dust hung in the clouds of my father’s breath.
“You’re paid to quarry rock,” Tarbusch said. “Trackwork’s dead work.”
“We ain’t dead,” Kerrigan said. “Put it on the clock.”
“How you gonna get paid if the rock don’t sell? How it’s gonna sell if it don’t get to market? How’s it get to market if you don’t clear track?”
The men took up their shovels. My father began to whistle his ominous happy tune, “Hallelujah, I’m a bum. Hallelujah, bum again.” Code for a walkout coming.
“Don’t you boys even think it or you’re done, Pelletier.”
In the worst foul French, my father cursed him and turned on his heel, whistling his Wobbly tune. We followed, and I filled the holes his boots made with whispered blasphemous words.
“Sylvie, shush,” Henry hissed. “Girls can’t say swears.”
“I can, putain,” I said. Profanity, no doubt, makes a hard task easier, but this assignment was near impossible. At first we were giddy to be outdoors in the blueness and sparkling sun. A couple of roustabouts threw snowballs, wrestling in the drifts. But then Tarbusch blew his whistle and we dug without ttalking. We cut steps to toss snow over walls of it higher than our heads. Jenkins’s mule teams followed, dragging plows. We rested leaning on our shovels, arms and backs lit with pain. Burrs of snow stuck to my skirts. At noon we drank tea at the warming station by Hairpin Point. Mrs. Quirk had a fire going there, roasting potatoes.
“Free spuds!” Tarbusch said, as if offering a luxury. We ate them, ravenous, muscles burning, holding red hands over the flames.
After six hours, we heard the mill crews digging toward us from town, and then, around a bend, we met the whole population of Moonstone working shovels. The mill hands. The barber and the doctor. The new schoolteacher. And there, rowing toward me with her shovel, was K. T. Redmond, winded and chapped. “Pelletier! Why in hell don’t you move to town for the duration?”
Hope sprouted. But before I could jump at the offer, Colonel Bowles climbed up a snowbank for a speech. “What a fine town!” he cried. “Here in Moonstone we all pitch in to get the job done. Nineteen-oh-eight promises to be the best year on record for the Company. Every darn one of you boys is a hero. Why, even some of you gals made your little effort too.”
My little effort boiled in my sore bones. I resolved to mail that letter to Lonahan, first chance available.
“Thanks to all you stalwart volunteers—”
“We ain’t volunteers,” Kerrigan said. “We don’t want none a your thanks.”
“We want a paycheck,” my father shouted. “Ten weeks and counting.”
The Colonel pointed to distract them. “Look, fellas! Thar she blows. The first block on the way. The first block of 1908.”
A loaded flatcar inched down the clear track. The color of the cargo matched the snowbanks. The driver tooted the whistle. Oskar Setkowski stood up on the stone, holding its chains like a trick rider, flourishing his hat.
“Hip-hip!” said Bowles.
“Hooray,” said the exhausted men, not cheering.
“Bastard sonuvabitch,” muttered my father. He stepped toward Colonel Bowles. Steam came off his blue-black beard in wisps of danger. “Crews were on the clock twelve hours, Mr. Bowles. Mark each man, two dollars for the day.”
The Colonel stared as if amused. Miss Redmond watched. Men crowded closer.
“We dug you out this time. We won’t do it again.” My father wheeled around and beckoned us to follow.
K.T. caught my sleeve. “Stay in town, Sylvie, why not?” Then, with a lift of her eyebrows, she said, “By the way, I have a letter for you.” She smiled wickedly.
The train whistle sounded, my father beckoning. “Sylvie! Now!”
“Thank you, K.T.,” I said. “I’ll—come for it tomorrow, now the track’s clear—” I ran for the trolley and climbed the hill with the load of exhausted Quarrytowners. The news of a letter plagued me.
“Papa?” I said. “I’m asked to stay in town to work for the newspaper.”
“She pays you?”
I nodded. “Did you write to the union man to invite him? Lonahan?”
“Months ago,” he whispered under the clacketing noise of the tram. “But maybe the invitation went missing?” He jutted his head toward Mr. Tarbusch, riding behind us in the cab. “Don’t worry, Birdy. We’ll win this time. I’ll take care of it.” He pulled me against his solid bulk, under the warmth of his chin. “Eh, Oiseau, you’re a good girl.”
* * *
The next morning I heard my dear papa crack the ice on the bowl, his creaks and groans of stiffness. My own back was rusted with pain. Nipper coughed. Maman whispered in the lean-to. Across the raised platform where we slept, Henry snored softly, his head covered by the blanket. My breath rose in cold smoke toward a frosted spiderweb in the corner like the weaving of fairies. Shards of sunlight lit the spokes, and I remembered: A letter for you.
Below, Maman was arguing, “It’s a danger.”
“It’s a newspaper,” said my father. “Paid work.”
Maman could not argue with money. My father put on his layers and went up to the boardinghouse to parlay with the men. I did not say thank you or tell him au revoir. God forgive me, I didn’t. I sat up fast out of the warm nest of my bed into a torture of cold and climbed over Henry, the heat leaving me, teeth rattling. Down the ladder, the fire was embers. At the coal bin, I scraped the last lumps. Nipper came shivering toward the stove. “Slivvie,” he said, reaching up. I held him and wiped his nose and got layers on him.
“So you leave?” Maman said, martyred in her thin brave smile. She’d have to do the washing and cooking, all the hauling and mending, without me now.
“Two dollars a week,” I said, but faltered at the sight of her twisted face, gnawed by anger, and saw we were not so different, that she chewed and swallowed her complaints. Up the ladder, I packed my rucksack, and followed Henry into the blinding day. We skiied down the clear track and stopped to look across the knobby backbone of the Gilded Range. Tendrils of smoke rose from the buried burrows in the village, dissolved in the blue sky. Elkhorne’s chimneys were cold.
* * *
“It’s about time,” K.T. said. “Thought you turned to icicles up there.”
“So you missed me?” I grinned at her.
“Don’t give yourself airs.”
I hung my coat on its peg. You mentioned a letter? I’d say. But before I could get the query out, she put me to work rolling newspapers, the front page outward.
MILL COSTS EXCEED $1.5 MILLION COMPANY HARD-PRESSED FOR CASH
The Padgett Company is on record for the year 1907 as having paid $1.5 million to build the new mill, while employee checks are held.
“So why is there no money for payroll?” I asked K.T.
“Child,” she said, “that company never missed a dividend of profit, ’cause they never paid a living wage.”
“My father said the men will strike this summer,” I said.
“What’re they waiting for?” said K.T. “Hearts and flowers from a Padgett?”
Precisely what I’d waited for all winter. Did I really imagine that some letter would contain that fantasy? Imbecile Sylvie. To prove to myself I wasn’t some romance-addled birdbrain, but still an agitator, I tore my invitation to George Lonahan out of my diary and found his address in the Record’s subscription ledger, c/o United Mine Workers in Denver. I rolled the letter inside a newspaper and stuck the label down. Let Mr. Lonahan come to Moonstone and fix things. Maybe then the dividends would accrue to others, not just Padgetts. To my father. Me. Off to Paris.
“I’ll head to the post office now,” I said. “Anything else?” Hoping.
“Almost forgot,” K.T. said. “Came last week.” She dug through a stack of papers and held out a long envelope addressed to Sylvie Pelletier, c/o the Moonstone City Record. I took it outside and opened it, shaking in the clear cold.
