Leaving Lucy Pear(68)

“See here,” said Henry, “even the New York Times says Fuller did what he was supposed to do. ‘Civic inflexibility.’ ‘Steadfastness.’ See? They say even if you don’t agree with the decision you have to admire him for standing by it.”

Ira picked up the Globe again. “‘Sacco’s Father Weeps at the News. Screaming inarticulately and trembling in every limb, the aged man finally managed to say, “They have killed my innocent son,” and then fell back into his chair weeping and muttering maledictions.’”

“Hysterical reporting,” Henry said. “And to be embraced by a newspaperman such as yourself.”

“It’s a bit hysterical,” Ira admitted. “So I picked the wrong bit. That doesn’t mean change isn’t called for.”

“The Times agrees with that, too. It’s really a very balanced piece.”

“Since when did balance become a virtue?”

In Lanesville, Josiah Story left the quarry early and went home to Susannah to ask her forgiveness for what he’d done.

“The strike,” he prompted.

“The strike,” she repeated.

She took his hand. “I forgive you, Joe. It’s all done.” Then they read the paper together, in silence.

At Sven’s, Emma poured coffee and listened to the men talk. She liked the job Josiah had gotten her there, liked how in the afternoons light poured in the front of the shop and neglected the back so that the place seemed to be two places, and how she knew by now, after only a couple weeks, which men sat in the sun and which in the dark, and how well their choices fit their faces. She liked not being in the house with Roland. But today the air in the shop felt too close. The men looked sick with disappointment. They spoke softly, as if a baby were sleeping nearby, and Emma found herself thinking of her own babies: of the ones who, like her, had been pale, almost translucent; and of Lucy. At the back of Lucy’s neck, and on the backsides of her ears, and along the tops of her toes, there grew a black, downy fur that Emma touched helplessly, incessantly, as she nursed her. She had nursed all her babies well but often without thinking of it—she had mended clothes and stirred porridge and fed the fire and shoveled snow with babies attached to her breasts. With Lucy, she was transfixed. Even now, if Lucy was in sight, Emma watched her. She had watched her new skittishness sharpen in recent days. Lucy looked at Emma like a rabbit, ready to bolt. Thinking of her now as she poured coffee for the grieving men, Emma felt a nauseating fear rip through her. Lucy! What was wrong with Lucy? She spilled the coffee, enough to drip off the counter and stain her shoes, but the men, eyes on their mugs, barely noticed.

In Charleston, Admiral Seagrave believed the execution unjust but had no one to talk about it with—not the other officers, who would disagree, nor his wife, who didn’t like “the world” disrupting family time. He tried his older son, but the six-year-old said, “Those wops? Jack Jessup says they got ’em good!” And all Seagrave could think to do was send him to his room and wonder—as he often did now—about the daughter he would never know.

On Eastern Point, Bea interrupted Ira and Henry to ask, “Did you see the two-inch about Mother Jones?” Her voice was rough from not speaking. “She’s ninety-eight years old, in the hospital, and nobody will tell her they’re dead. They’re telling her they’ve been given an indefinite reprieve. She’s lying there shouting things like, ‘They’ll never dare to kill them, it would stir up the whole world!’ And nobody will tell her the truth. They say it would kill her, but I don’t buy that. The same article says she lost her husband and four children in one week to yellow fever. If that didn’t kill her . . . I think they’re just scared.”

“Of what, sweetheart?” Henry leaned forward, preparing to stand. He felt buoyed, more like his usual self, his boss self. Bea had not said so much in days. But when she looked at him, her cheeks wrinkled and red from where her sleeves had pressed into them, her eyes pinned him to his chair. “That she knows something they don’t,” she said, in a tone bordering on disgust, as if he had asked her the color of the sky. Then she left the room, leaving him alone with his brother and their papers, every inch of which they had already read.





Twenty-nine




Once upon a time, Caleb Stanton himself handed the quarrymen their pay, and now, as a symbol of his mistrust and a warning to his son-in-law, he began the practice again. On the first Friday after the execution, the last whistle sounded and there he was, all five feet two inches of him, standing straight as a mast in his white suit and white Panama hat against the backdrop of the Berenice, the hulking, shining, incomparably aggressive 0-4-0 tank-type locomotive named after his late wife.

Caleb always told any man who asked—and more asked than you might expect, which confused one of Caleb’s basic divisions of the world, into the sorts of people who wondered about things and the people who didn’t—that Berenice was an old lover of his. This seemed to amuse them. Maybe it even made them like him a little more. At least it used to. But that had been before the strike. Before the Mendosa. Before, now that he thought of it, the Scare. It had been years since Caleb stood before his men.

They lined up according to how long it took them to get to the Berenice from their positions: Berenice’s engineer, her brakeman, the boys who work the chains and pull the pin, the loaders, the draftsmen, the carvers, the cutters, the surfacers, the derrick operators, the fall men, the drillers, the chip men, the men who set the powder kegs and lit the match. Every one of them colored gray. “Asa Hood,” Caleb said, prompted by Sam Turpa, who stood to his right and knew the faces. “Jacob Soltti, Urjo Matson, Dominic Toneatti, Henry Hanka, Andrew Pearson.” Caleb knew how to pronounce these sorts of names—he had hired a tutor, years ago, to teach him. This had seemed to him a good idea. But as he looked down the line at the gray faces, Greeks, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Yankees, Irish, and called out the syllables that had taken not a small amount of effort to learn to pronounce, an effort he had thought of as wholly selfless—“Peter Lilja, Angelo Buzzi, Toivo Nikola”—as he waited for Sam Turpa to hand him each check, which Caleb then deposited into a gray hand, he felt a steam rising off the line, a thickening agitation, as if their strike had brought them no satisfaction at all, as if in their impeccably pronounced names they heard Caleb joking with the other quarry bosses: One left-handed Finn is worth three right-handed Yanks. Pay the Irish, watch them drown. As the line steamed, Caleb felt physically vulnerable for the first time in his life, and bewildered. Why were his men so angry? He paid them fairly and on time, let them have their little union meetings, never asked them to sign any yellow-dog contracts. He was not the tyrant his grandfather had been. Why should they fight to save a couple of anarchists? If it weren’t for the state, who would have stamped their papers when they arrived in America? Who would pay for the streets that took them from home to work? “Silas Procter, Octave Marcelles, Liam Murphy, Jeffrey Murphy, Johnny Murphy . . .”