Spindle City

by Jotham Burrello

  Maria’s heel tapped a bucket as she stood. Her breathing filled the space, then stopped. He sensed her mouth near his ear and dipped down. “You pig!” she shouted, and he stumbled backward. “Proud now?”

  Her hand fumbled for the door. The latch released, but Hollister jumped, blocking her way.

  “You proud?” she repeated, louder.

  Suddenly, Hollister remembered Viva. She had said the same thing, hadn’t she? Could the two be partners? He was always careful to pick girls in separate departments. Most had been Portagee, but he’d never seen any of them together. He’d scouted them as if they were ballplayers. What if they were scheming against him, hidden outside the door ready to pounce, Maria the star of their revenge?

  “Freak!” Maria spat in his eye.

  Hollister slapped her face. No, he thought, I didn’t just do that.

  She whirled back around. “Freak!”

  He punched and Maria toppled backward, upsetting the bucket and brooms. He hovered over her. “Shut up.”

  A voice outside said, “You hear that?” Feet shuffled. The voice was now right outside the mirror. “Is it part of the ride?”

  Maria screamed.

  Hollister clamped his hand over her mouth. He pressed his knee into her chest. “Be quiet, and they’ll go away.”

  The voice outside moved to the crack in the secret door’s frame. “Who’s there? You hurt?” The voice turned away. “Get the man.”

  Another boy, farther off, shouted, “Right!” Feet thumped off the wooden planks.

  Hollister eased his weight off her as the footfalls faded. He released his hand from Maria’s mouth and wiped it across his chest. “That was close,” he whispered conspiratorially.

  Maria jammed her knee into his crotch and knifed her nails into his neck. Hollister fell backward, and Maria scurried toward the door. Two loggerheads of pain crashed in the middle of his spine, and then his brain, already disturbed from a touch of the flu, exploded. He staggered, unsure which wound to grasp hold of. His foot landed in a bucket. The far-off marching band seemed to pass right through his head.

  Maria’s hand was frantic on the latch. “Help me,” she cried.

  “Who’s there?” the voice outside called.

  “Help me!”

  “I’ll save you. I will.”

  Save? The word gathered force in Hollister’s bowels and reached his brain as he grabbed a knot of Maria’s hair and yanked. Her scream was cut short as his elbow connected with something fleshy near her throat. She collapsed to the floor. Turning, he stepped on her knee and his ankle rolled.

  “Shut up,” he growled.

  “Who’s that?” the boy outside yelled.

  Everyone just shut up. Hollister leaned on a broomstick. The pain in his ankle calmed him. Slowly he began to separate the sounds: the approaching footsteps, the trumpet from the tuba, the boy’s warm breath through the crack, Maria’s whimpering. Her groveling was maddening. She wouldn’t shut her hole. She’ll never be my girl. None of them know how to please a man. Hollister zeroed in on her crying. He smashed the broom handle down on the noise.

  * * *

  The postal messenger had lost his hat, and now his six-button blue jacket was spread open, fluttering behind him like a cape. He was running full bore toward City Hall Square, worming between the merrymakers. He ducked under arms and around tent poles. A woman stepped on his foot and fell, but he had no time to stop—others would help her. He clutched an unsealed note. “Of grave importance,” the dispatch had said, knowing the boy would recognize Joseph Bartlett on sight.

  “Mr. Bartlett!” the boy shouted when he saw Joseph walking near the grandstand. It was Henry Daly, Evelyn’s younger brother. He was really hustling. Blooms of confetti, an inch thick on the sidewalk, exploded under his feet. Not more than ten years old and already a worker. But the boy ought to be in school. Henry called louder. Joseph smiled weakly to passersby. His throat constricted. He wondered if anyone had spotted him with Pierce. He glanced around for any of the local smut peddlers, but all eyes were on Taft. Henry stopped before him and doubled over, out of breath.

  “Easy, Hank Daly,” Joseph said. “Where’s the fire?”

  “Sir,” Henry started but broke into a coughing fit. Another boy arrived with Henry’s black cap. Neither would meet Joseph’s eyes. Joseph patted Henry’s back. A man nearby asked if the boy was going to be sick. Taft’s voice boomed from the plaza.

  Joseph forced another nervous smile. He squeezed Henry’s elbow. “Speak up, son.” The crowd surged forward, carrying them with it. Joseph crouched down. Henry held out the note, his face a mat of tears.

  Before succumbing to another coughing fit, he managed, “Mrs. Bartlett, sir. She’s . . . she’s dead, sir.”

  * * *

  A cloud of cigar smoke floated beneath the bank of lights as the bettors belted hot air into the sweltering canvas tent. Tommy held a paper bag over Will’s mouth and instructed him to breathe. Father Croix’s score card had the match all square. He motioned to Father Maxi, who twirled a finger to the bell ringer to start the last round. Maxi wanted a scotch. The boys hadn’t trained hard enough. Perhaps four fights in one day was too much.

  Helen huddled next to Tommy, her forehead pressed against the bottom rung of the ring, hands clasped in prayer. “I know it’s been, like, forever,” she whispered, “but your girl needs a favor . . .”

  Taft said, “And now, my friends, I did not come to make a speech.”

  Joseph pulled Henry Daly into his arms. He wanted to tell the boy that it was all a mistake, that the mill fire that killed Thomas Sheehan and Stanton Cleveland was not his fault, that none of this was supposed to happen: not the silly parade float or stolen mill ledgers or an overstuffed Georgian mansion on the hill. Lizzy and a New Hampshire lake—that was all he had ever wanted. But how do you define devastation? How could he tell a boy what he’d only experienced by living?

  Taft said, “And I did not come to get squashed by gigantic cotton bales.”

  Maxi waved the boxers to the center of the ring. He held their wrists up so their gloves touched. “Last round, boys,” he said. “Everyone’s a winner.” Maxi dropped their wrists, and Damian’s gloves fell to his knees. Maxi shouted, “Fight!” but Damian didn’t move. Tommy yelled for Will to get his dukes up. “Be steady! Watch out!” But Damian was no magician. Pete ran toward the ring, cursing. He pushed a large man down in the aisle, and a scuffle broke out in the seats. Damian stretched his chin as far out as it would go and shut his eyes.

  “Deck ’im!” Tommy called. “Around the house and through the barn.” Fifty bucks would pay off a boatload of debts.

  Will closed his eyes as he whipped his arm around his body. The glove slammed into the side of Damian’s head, the laces slicing open the soft skin behind his left ear. Damian crumpled to the canvas. Will whirled in a circle, his feet tangled in Damian’s splayed limbs. Falling, he spotted his father marching toward the ring.

  Taft said, “Nor did I come to shake hands and make long speeches.”

  Maria’s hand fell from Hollister’s leg. He whispered, “Stop fooling,” and nudged her ribs with his heel. The scrape on his neck throbbed against his collar. He unbuttoned his shirt and felt a sticky wetness. “Quiet. Someone’s coming. Get up.” He knelt down. “Maria?” He jostled her shoulder. His hand slid over her chin then her nose and forehead. He licked his finger.

  “Open the door,” the ride operator called. A second later he rammed his shoulder into the famine panel, popping the latch.

  Taft said, “I only came to see you, to say howdy-do.”

  Will met his father’s eye between sunken chins and pumping fists. Joseph’s bow tie was cockeyed and his slicked-back hair mussed. The straw boater he was clutching had a fist-sized dent in the top. Pete Newton stormed up the opposite aisle with little Patrick twisting from his belt like
the tail of a kite.

  Taft said, “And to congratulate you on the wonderful prosperity and on the wonderful progress that you have made.”

  Dr. Boyle measured out one gram of head powder and stirred it into a glass of tepid water, but Evelyn couldn’t lift her head to drink. Boyle pushed aside the cut-glass animals and set the glass down. He lifted Evelyn from the divan, stepping on the unicorn as he left the room.

  “To congratulate you even more on the happiness of the individual in Fall River, of which there is evidence on every side.”

  Will dove under the ropes, landing on all fours on the cement floor and skinning his knees. He juked under his father’s grasp and sprinted toward the hazy light shooting between the bettors’ heads. Half the crowd turned for a glimpse of pig-eyed Pete; the other half twisted to catch Will’s gymnastics. Father Croix snapped his blue scoring pencil in half. Maxi lifted Damian’s limp body from the ring.

  Will ran up June Street, ripping the gloves’ laces free with his teeth. His left eye was purple, the other nearly swollen shut. Ladies out walking screamed at the sight of him. He stopped at the house gate. Dr. Boyle sat hunched over on the front stoop. He looked up and shook his head, and without a word, Will ran farther up into the Highlands. Joseph’s automobile jumped the curb. The engine roared as he leapt into the lawn. “Will!” he shouted. “Will, come back!”

  Helen rounded the corner, her legs pumping like pistons. “Which way?” she stammered. “Which way did he go?” Joseph pointed, she pointed, and then she sprinted down the sidewalk.

  Tommy appeared at the corner, doubled over, gasping. Joseph met his eye. “Find Hollister,” he called. “Go find my son.” Tommy slowly pivoted back down the hill. Joseph ripped the committee badge from his lapel and spun his boater down the street. He snapped his jaw shut and ground his teeth. His eyes welled up. He inhaled deeply and then spat his rotten wisdom tooth into the grass.

  “And to wish you Godspeed in making greater steps forward in the next hundred years.”

  Thunderous applause and cheering swept Taft from the review stand, with many in the crowd believing they’d see the next hundred years. Taft encouraged them by flashing his presidential chops. They stood four and five deep down Main Street and hovered on rooftops waving red, white, and blue streamers and rattling noisemakers. All bounced on tiptoes to catch a lasting glimpse of the man who had helped them, for one afternoon, forget everything but their pride.

  Far out in Mount Hope Bay, the Connecticut’s big guns fired, and the crowd, momentarily stunned, flinched. The boom rumbled up June Street and then echoed eastward down into the Globe neighborhood, rattling tenement windows in the Flint and Mechanicsville, disturbing the water in Bleachery Ponds—its rumble recorded as far as the town of Westport, five miles to the east.

  Before the Connecticut lifted anchor, the special editions of the Herald and the Evening News hit street corners. Newsies shouted, “President declares Fall River presidential city! Read all about it! Next hundred years to rival the last! Historic edition! Here today, gone tomorrow! Two bits buys you immortality! Read it here! It’s all here!”

  a bounty it will be

  João Rose sat in the window seat of the Westport-bound trolley cradling his little cousins, five-year-old Pearl and seven-year-old Michael, in his ropy arms, thinking he had blown his only chance to see a president. Once a politician from Lisbon had visited São Miguel, but João had been too sick with fever to watch the senator’s landing party tour the island. His neighbor on the farm, Kitty, had thought him crazy to miss the last day of the Cotton Centennial, but his uncle Manuel believed the centennial a perfect excuse to avoid the city. Crowds of English speakers made him nervous. With everyone in the city ogling Taft, the river would be deserted. The trolley reflected this fact. It was full not of beachcombers, but of blurry-eyed Irish housekeepers heading down to their Highlands employers’ summer cottages. João was proud to see a few Portuguese in the service class. Most summers, the Highlands wives arrived in the country after the Memorial Day parades and stayed through Labor Day. Everything was delivered from Fall River, including their husbands on weekends. But the centennial celebration had altered routines, forcing the housekeepers to act as advance parties. Tasks such as receiving food and ice deliveries, preparing menus, sobering up the gardeners and drivers, doling out chores to the second girls, all had to be supervised by someone trustworthy. So they traveled back and forth the two weeks of the centennial. Thankfully, things would return to normal after the president sailed that afternoon. Tomorrow, summer restarted in the country, and all amenities and foodstuffs must line the pantry shelves.

  Though people were standing, Manuel took up two seats with his quahog gear: teeth, poles, burlap sacks. The handles of the long wooden poles slanted out the open window. He had forged the quahog teeth, the razor-sharp iron hooks that scraped the hard clams off the ocean floor, at his own blacksmith and machine shop on Columbia Street. In the Azores, he had made mostly farming tools, but in Fall River he forged damn fine replacement parts for mill machinery, and the occasional anchor or harpoon. He could replicate any part or tool once he’d handled it. Today he hoped to clear three bushels of quahogs—two to sell, one for himself and his neighbors. The extra money was put in his special home-buying account at the Five Cents Savings Bank—a bank that accepted five-cent deposits. Who had invented such a thing? Only in America.

  Manuel looked over his shoulder at his strong nephew, thinking the boy might pull in a fourth bushel if they made low tide. He rolled his bulbous nose in his palm then spat out the trolley window. Though he didn’t see João as much as he’d like, the boy had come through with money to save his business, so Manuel didn’t meddle in his nephew’s affairs. João had worked in Manuel’s shop while attending night classes at the Durfee Textile School, then took a job in the Cleveland Mill as a loom fixer. He was promoted. He courted a girl from the neighborhood. Neither lasted; Manuel didn’t know why. Soon after the tragic Cleveland Mill fire, João took over the management of the mill owner’s dairy farm in Rhode Island. The boy worked hard—too hard Manuel thought. But Rose Butter sold well, making João a handsome profit. Only in America could farmers make profits.

  They hailed from the village of Ponta Delgada on São Miguel, an island part of the Azorean archipelago. New England whaling ships first called on the islands in the early eighteenth century. Local sailors hopped ships for the New World. Nonmariners followed. Manuel was the first of his family to believe the promises of upstart America. His first letter home caused quite a stir in the village. He told the story of an irate Irish customs inspector on Ellis Island who had shortened his name from Rosario to Rose. Damn Portuguese have the penmanship of a squirrel. He bounced through a half-dozen towns and even more ideas. He wrote home, Some speak badly of America, but never in public. America has hidden costs. (This line resonated with João’s father, who promptly sold an additional cow for his son’s journey.) Manuel lived for two years on Cape Cod before settling in Fall River, where he fell in at a foundry in the seedy Mechanicsville neighborhood. He found cheap lodging north of the city in Steep Brook. There was land there, and Manuel worked it with other Portuguese families. He rented a room from a farmer and soon proposed to one of his daughters. He planted her a hedge of blue hydrangeas as a wedding gift. A year later Manuel invited his brother’s family to join him in the New World.

  * * *

  The trolley stopped in the village of Westport, and the four hitched a ride southwest on the back of a farm wagon to Adamsville, Rhode Island. The road to Adamsville was lined with dairy farms and large plots of squash, corn, and tomatoes. The outcroppings of rock reminded João of his father’s land on São Miguel. João counted no fewer than fifty head, a number his father could only imagine. At the duck pond bridge in the village center they passed a gristmill, and farther up the Fo’c’s’le tavern and a baseball field marked by a metal plaque shaped like a rooster that commemorated th
e town’s founding in 1867. At the ball field, they hopped off the farm wagon and headed south toward the ocean on foot, walking back into Massachusetts. Locals called the harbor area of Westport by its Indian name, Acoaxet, while the Fall River summer residents simply called it the Harbor. From June through August, the city invaders owned the sandy beaches. The local farmers swam in the Westport River.

  Just inside the Rhode Island side of the state line was the house of mill owner John Gower. An enormous forsythia bush, allowed to grow wild to a height of ten feet, fronted the Gower property. The Fo’c’s’le regulars spread a rumor that Gower was afraid of the ocean, so he’d chosen a spot at the head of the river. Highlands gossip countered that Gower didn’t want to pay the higher taxes in Massachusetts. Most of his peers owned homes right on the high tide line. Replacing water-damaged floors or a wind-damaged shutter was an annual expense they didn’t consider an inconvenience.

  The west branch of the river contained Manuel’s lucky quahog spot: a sandbar called Lions Tongue. It was a tidal river that ran four miles inland between wooden banks. Except to local fisherman, the lower half was not navigable, on account of the salt marshes and sandbars. Lions Tongue was up near the mouth of the harbor. They would start digging on the tip and work their way inland as the tide came in.

  The path to the river cut through a briar patch that had been beaten down into a U-shape by local fishermen dragging small skiffs to the water. The wet green terrain was wildly different from dry São Miguel, but the two shared the salty Atlantic. At a crest in the river path, João noticed the lobster trap buoys were slack in the channel, pushing neither in nor out. The tide was changing. The medium tide created a sliver of a path up the shoreline to Lions Tongue that varied from marsh to sand to slippery crags of barnacled rock. Green and blue eelgrass floated on the water. One swoop of a net would deliver an assortment of crabs and perhaps a bluefish. João carried Pearl on his back while Michael wandered behind, stopping to poke at crabs or skip stones. Manuel hauled their quahog equipment over a wooded path farther inland, where the footing was better, though he had to stop at each property line to climb stone walls grown over with raspberry vines spun with poison ivy. On his first visit to the river, he had spotted a deer in a clearing surrounded by a flock of gulls. This contrast was confounding. He’d never seen a deer before. He took cover behind an uprooted oak tree trunk and readied his quahog teeth but, in preparing his defense, cracked a twig with his heel. The snap drove the deer into a retreat that churned the gulls into a cyclone of white. Manuel was curious about the creature, as he was about the first deer tick he found sucking the soft skin behind his knee. So much of the land was a mystery: tightly clustered scotch pines, the cattails’ brown heads that darted in the wind like minnows, and hungry osprey, circling two hundred feet above the channel in winding figure eights.