Leaving Lucy Pear(66)

She could not say this, of course. She would not give them any more reasons to think she was a loon. She held Albert’s gaze. “It would be something,” she said. Then she gathered up the confettied check and the hateful note and went upstairs, to throw it onto the piles with the others.





Twenty-seven




The paper would speculate that Josiah Story, holed up in his office with the quarry gates locked, was afraid—afraid of what his striking workers would do if he opened the gates for the scabs, afraid of the scabs themselves, Sicilians who had been trucked in from Lowell and who paced, dark-skinned, at the wall. Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution had once again been scheduled—they would die tonight, August twenty-third. No judge had saved them, not William Howard Taft or Harlan Fiske Stone, who were both summering in the North, not Louis D. Brandeis, whose wife had grown close with Sacco’s wife. Brandeis recused himself. There had been more bombings, more demonstrations, more strikes. Steelworkers, textile workers, miners (many of the same miners who would be massacred in Columbine, Colorado, that winter), mill workers, granite cutters. In Gloucester, the wreck of the Mendosa was like kerosene on an already blazing fire.

If Josiah Story wasn’t afraid, wrote Jonathan Hardy, a young reporter who had been praised in school for his impeccable logic, why wouldn’t he let them in? Why wouldn’t Caleb Stanton’s son-in-law let the scabs in?

But he wasn’t afraid. His men were peaceful. His engineer had come early to bank his fire, then left to stand with the others on Washington Street, holding signs: FREE SACCO AND VANZETTI; SUMMER PEOPLE = MURDERERS; WE STAND WITH THE FISHERMEN AND THE FISHMONGER; LAND OF LIBERTY; and Josiah’s favorite, JUSTICE FOR ALL, which so neatly condemned his absurd slogan—Prosperity for All—on the east rock that Josiah felt relieved of having to condemn it himself.

In fact, he was so unfamiliarly calm he experienced it as a kind of elation. There was nothing he wanted to be doing apart from what he was doing. Just as extraordinary, he was doing nothing. He was standing in his office watching the empty pit: a bird drinking at a sludgy puddle, a pile of bright, rusted bits, a vision of himself down there, drill in hand. This vision mesmerized him. He knew the figure was himself, Josiah, yet from this height and distance he couldn’t see his own eyes and so he doubted what he knew. The figure moved like him, but maybe it was his father as a young man. Josiah and his father had the same high-arched feet (like ballerinas, his brothers laughed) and walked a bit on their toes, chests forward. They were steady with their hands but slow, the way Josiah down in the quarry was with his drill, setting it, seeming to consider, setting it again half a foot farther along the seam. Josiah’s father had never worked in a quarry, but his father’s brothers had. They had worked in the quarries and Giles had worked in the shop just as Giles now worked in the shop and Josiah worked in the quarry. Not in it—above it. But there he was in it, busy with his drill, not allowing Josiah to tell if he was Josiah. Josiah thought it extraordinary, how immersed he could be in the vision and also aware of it as fantasy. What was it in him that he could stand here, doing nothing, allowing his men their strike, pretending—almost—not to consider the consequences? He felt so calm. Unified, really. With himself, with the lone bird, the thrown-off bits, the quarry, its green mouth open to the sky. It wasn’t sexual, he didn’t think so, though the only thing he had to compare it with was what he felt when he slept with Emma, his urges narrowed, his priorities clear, his clear urging toward the light. But that was in his body, whereas this was everywhere. The word “spiritual” occurred to him. It rode across his mind the way he’d seen kites, bearing advertisements, slip across the sky behind airplanes, a surprising, doubtful sight. It rode out again. Down in the pit, he had chosen his spot. He was readying his drill, without wonder or guilt.

It took Josiah a full minute to register his father-in-law in his face, throwing a finger, hauling it back, throwing it again, his face contorted. First, Josiah heard his men chanting, though he couldn’t make out their words. My men, he thought. I’ve been brainwashed. He saw the white hat in front of him dripping with sweat, saw dark maps appear at the armpits of a custom-made poplin shirt. Only then did Josiah feel the worm in him waking, anxiety slithering up his innards.

“What are you doing?” Caleb growled.

Josiah realized he’d heard a pistol shot. “Did you shoot them?” he heard himself ask, his voice far away and oddly measured.

“Are you insane? I was simply announcing . . . I was making . . . Why am I defending myself to you?”

“I don’t know,” Josiah said. He waited for his father-in-law to rear up and attack again, to say he knew about Josiah’s affair. Even if Susannah, against all odds, didn’t know (when she’d asked about his mangled hair and he told her he cut it himself, she believed him! she laughed, then fixed it herself without another word!), wouldn’t Caleb? Josiah waited for his self-sabotage to be complete: the quarry, the campaign, and now his marriage. But Caleb simply stood there, shaking his finger. Josiah was struck by what a remarkably undersized finger it was. He leaned left to see around Caleb. Down in the quarry, the figure was gone. Josiah lowered himself into his chair.

“This is my office!” roared Caleb. “Stand!”

Josiah sat. What could Caleb do? He was small, and old.

“Please,” he said. “Sit.”