“Good day, Ms. Strong.” Joseph turned east and hurriedly made tracks for his motorcar.
Strong lost the grin and gave chase. “I want just a moment, Mr. Bartlett. And if you refuse to hear me out, I will scream at the top of my lungs and swear to each man in this park that I am your whore.”
Joseph stopped and took out his handkerchief and patted down his brow and neck. He’d hit a trifecta of crazy: Evelyn, Hannah, and now this Sarah character. But the first two were benign. This one could exile him from every decent circle in town, even the few he actually enjoyed. He’d read about her in the Globe: a New Hampshire farm girl is forced to work in Nashua mills. At seventeen her mother dies and she uses their savings to attend Mount Holyoke College. When she graduates with honors to limited career options, a cousin in Manchester writes with news of an impending strike and bossy male overseers, and Strong reads this as a message from above to devote her every breath to labor terrorism.
Joseph eyed her up and down. The most feared agitator in all New England twirled her parasol like an innocent virgin. A real outlaw. The Robin Hood or Jesse James of union organizing, depending on your point of view. Outwardly she looked sane, showing no signs of forced famine, excessive clubbing, or hours of Chinese water torture. She had approached Joseph on a sunny August day in front of the whole town as if they were school chums. Normally, she wouldn’t be allowed to come within fifty yards of a man like him. But picking a Sunday, knowing he was alone, that he was even in the city on an August weekend and not in the country—she’d been watching him.
Joseph felt the charge he got during his clandestine meetings with George Pierce. Coming off her victory in Bangor, he guessed Strong wanted to sniff out allies and brew trouble before the IWW organizers picked their next town to persecute. Lawrence was also rumored to be making strike preparations. But he didn’t sit at the association’s table. He was no good to her.
“Walk behind me, Ms. Strong. I will listen, but stay behind me—understand?” Joseph walked toward the toboggan ride.
She nipped at his heels. “Fall River women demand better wages.”
“Who says? You?”
“You know as well as I the hardships these women face, Mr. Bartlett.”
“Do I? My operatives enjoy many benefits.”
“That’s why I’m contacting you, sir. You understand, unlike your peers, that these hardships don’t need to be endured. I came to Fall River to record their grievances. I’ll submit my report to my friends to see if the time is again ripe to challenge the owners.”
“Your friends? Agitators in the IWW?”
“They are fighters for justice.”
Joseph wondered if she was always this self-righteous. It was like talking to Matt Borden about the value of a dollar. Joseph tapped the stock certificates against his leg. The value of a dollar. What do I know?
“What do you want with me? The association doesn’t listen to me.”
“But you belong to their club. I’m asking nicely for you to consider my proposal.”
Asking nicely. Joseph smiled broadly. He considered disappearing into the crowd filing into Sandy Beach, meeting Will and Helen at the circle swing as they’d planned, and then changing into his swimming trunks. The chalkboard at the entrance listed the water temperature at seventy degrees. Boys on roller skates clamored passed on the boardwalk, the last boy unsteady, his arms flapping like a gull. “Bend your knees,” Joseph called. “Now push, don’t run. That’s it. Good.” Joseph couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken the boys figure skating on the South Watuppa.
Sarah Strong leaned toward him. “I was a fast skater once.”
Joseph hated this position, the middleman to get to the bigger fish. When would he wash his hands of all this backdoor dealing? What had it ever gotten him? But he was curious. He’d heard only rumors about these fiery women. Last year in Bangor, one had stolen a police badge and ticket pad and then patrolled the streets in a homespun uniform, issuing citations to mill agents’ motorcars. But left unchecked, Sarah Strong and her cronies would bring more than high jinks to Fall River. They’d bring picket signs, hate mongering, scab baiting, and perhaps, the dynamite stolen from the Bangor armory last year. There’d been bombings in New York. For all the Fall River system’s faults, Joseph wouldn’t trade it for a riot. Apparently, Sarah Strong was too stupid to realize her actions only made the owners stronger.
He leaned over the white picket fence that surrounded the wooden maze of supports that was the toboggan ride. Helen’s favorite. The downslope of the last hill lay within arm’s reach. Strong stood a dozen pickets away. She opened the parasol she’d been carrying. The shade of it created a large shadow around her. A toboggan car jittered up the first hill. The tow chain clackity-clacked between the two-by-four wooden crossbeams. Another car zoomed down the last slope. Screams rose above the chattering, then subsided. At the top of the first hill, the riders raised their arms.
“Your proposal, Ms. Strong. I’m waiting.”
“I want to show you something you’ve never seen, Joseph.” Already she was using his first name. He wondered what about his demeanor put women at ease so quickly. He waved to one of his mill clerks walking inside the park. “If you saw the living conditions. It’s inhuman. The boardinghouses are unsanitary.”
“They can find other work.”
“No, they can’t. They’re slaves to the loom. Standing all day, and then home to cook, mend clothes, and nurse sick children. The men leave for a pub, or worse. It’s an endless cycle. Have you ever been to the edge of the Flint? To the worst ones?”
“I know of it.”
“Aren’t you a bit curious?”
“I have other business.”
“Come see them with me and I’ll make my proposal. You can leave or join us.”
Join? Joseph smiled again. The woman was indeed crazy as a cornered rat. Join her in what? His own suicide? Though he was curious to see if the exaggerated reports in the Labor Standard were to be believed. Children playing in sewage? Girls as young as fourteen prostituting themselves? He’d once asked Evelyn if she thought such stories were to be believed. “When the Irish lived in those units, there was no problems,” she’d said. “Those dirty Portuguese thrive in the grime.” Just once, Joseph wanted to ask Evelyn why, if Irish were so great, did she live at his house?
“If I don’t agree to your offer, what then? Another screaming fit?” Joseph kneaded the handkerchief in his wet palm.
“No.” She moved down the fence toward him. She slipped her fingers under the top of her blouse. “I’ll rip my blouse and run to the first policeman I find, screaming, ‘Rapist, rapist! ’” A toboggan car rocketed past.
Joseph scratched his chin and scanned the crowd for Mary Sheehan—she’d save him.
“Five seconds.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Three.”
“Where?”
“Ever been to the Drovers Café in the Flint?”
“I’ll find it.”
“In one hour, then. I’ll be waiting.” She winked at Joseph and then spun on her heel, almost poking out his eye with the point of the parasol.
He dabbed his forehead. No woman had ever winked at him.
* * *
Joseph found his green Pope-Hartford right where he’d left it, though Wiggins had raised the top to keep the sun off his fair Irish skin. Most of the other mill agents drove large touring cars or Overlands, but Joseph preferred the tight ride of the Pope. Lizzy had been clamoring for a Cadillac. Of course, he thought. Otis would have driven a Cadillac too.
Wiggins was snoring.
“All up, old man,” Joseph shouted. Wiggins pinched his bulbous nose and blinked himself awake. Albert Wiggins was a cousin of Evelyn’s and known affectionately as Minimum Al for his paltry work habits. Joseph grabbed the flask teetering on the dashboard. He screwed on
the cap and wedged it under the passenger seat. Joseph ditched his cap and tie and told Wiggins he was going to the beach. “If I miss Will, tell him I’ll see him for dinner.” Wiggins wore a flop cap popular with the men from abroad. Joseph told him to hand it over. Joseph had intentionally stepped in dog shit on the walk over and now explained to Wiggins he needed his shoes also. Joseph’s shiny Johnston & Murphy leather loafers would be a sure giveaway in the Flint. Wiggins, still groggy, handed over the items. He took Joseph’s envelope and puttered up the hill.
Joseph took a trolley up President Avenue, then walked to Drovers. It being Sunday, and hot as hell, there was a lazy mood in the streets. Families bought foodstuffs from peddlers’ carts and the few open shops. Young men under awnings passed cigarettes. A middle-aged man in a red vest eyed Joseph suspiciously. They rubbed shoulders as Joseph passed. Down the block a woman leaned against a lamppost licking an ice cream. She caught Joseph’s eye and followed him into Drovers. Inside, he passed by Sarah Strong’s table, knocking it with his foot, and then turned back outside. He glanced at the lamppost and caught sight of a young man guiding the ice cream woman down the block.
Across the street were four identical triple-deckers with mansard roofs and clapboard siding with narrow corner boards. Each had a type of handcrafted ornamentation at the cornice and doorframes not seen in recent years. Piano music stopped and started; Will was learning similar songs. The small yards were well tended. Herbs and tomato plants were cut into small beds out back. These were the homes of civil servants and overseers, not unskilled workers. The sun dipped, but the heat was still oppressive. The windows were thrown open. In one, a woman pulled a thread from between her lips and eased it through the eye of a needle. In another, a bare-chested boy shined a row of shoes, the tips hanging over the street. A man handed Joseph a flyer for a concert at the local parish.
Sarah Strong stood beside him. “I didn’t recognize you.” Again with the wink. Hopefully she was the only one not fooled. No one would believe it if they saw them together. “These aren’t what I want to show you. Let’s walk.”
“Where to?”
“The edge of the Flint. Cogsworth country.”
The Cogsworth Mill’s boardinghouses and tenements were routinely singled out in the labor’s papers for health violations. Cogsworth Sr. was among the first mill owners to stroll through Quebec offering carrots of salvation to desperate farmhands. For a month’s pay, the wagoner would deliver the novices to a Cogsworth boardinghouse and then to the mill, where a supervisor would note the novice’s name and impose a weekly garnish, usually twice the agreed amount, to pay back the mill for advancing the wagoner his fee. This neighborhood, Sarah explained, was one of five she’d been researching. It appeared she’d rented rooms nearby.
“Among the unhappiest of the unhappy,” Joseph said. “Your mission won’t prove to be much of a tussle.”
“The mostly Irish police force, whose fathers and mothers toiled in the mills a generation before, rarely come to these streets. They wait till the noise of rebellion swells to their triple-decker apartments in Corky Row.”
“I know all this.”
Sarah shook her head at him. She ended the travelogue with a short historical summary that Joseph had no desire to be reminded of: “At first, the mill owners supplied the rooms to house workers who had no rent money or transportation. Villages sprung up around the mill for the workers. Now they trap them.”
He had to admit, mill owners did not make very good landlords. Jefferson Cleveland had built houses in the 1870s and shortly thereafter sold them to his workers at cost.
Nearing the Cogsworth area, the scenery changed. So did the smell.
“See how the buildings are clustered close on both sides so they loom over the street, affording no relief from the stench of garbage,” Sarah said, and spit into the street. “Each tenement houses four to six families. The yards, or dirt piles, breed dust and more garbage. The granite bedrock foundations made service pipes impossibly expensive, the owners never pressured the mayor, so anything built before 1880 has either no plumbing or a poorly rigged system.” Communal privies stood in clustered courtyards. Some families rigged pipes down windows.
In the front of the next tenement, a square section of lawn had been cordoned off with stakes and black ribbon. Funny, Joseph thought, the dirt in the squared area was the color of cinnamon.
“Now that is queer,” he said aloud, observing that in the center of the plot the grass was green, or well, sort of green, and brown. And wet. He turned to Sarah. “Water in this heat?”
“Cesspool burps,” Sarah said. “They haven’t seen the honey wagon in six months.” Sarah dipped her toe into a creeping stream of black muck lining the gutter. “Cogsworth had mastered every legal maneuver to make even the most ardent statehouse representative weary. These drains are not far from their water source.” She wiped her toe on a piece of paper in the street. “Dysentery, anyone?” She kicked the shit paper at Joseph, and he leapt backward, nearly tripping.
A boy in overalls and a dirty undershirt passed, pulling a dog missing a hind leg and towing, in turn, a cart of iron scrapes. “Move out,” the boy shouted, as he marched up on folks, who split and came back without looking at him or his cargo. Joseph stopped in the road when he passed.
Sarah pulled his sleeve. “That boy is a few years younger than Will. Probably never been to school. His mother is a prostitute.” Joseph continued walking. How did she know so much? He could see where standing water had evaporated in the dips in the road, leaving behind a dirty green fungus. Mosquitoes swarmed around bits of rotten fruit in the gutter. In the distance, a rooster crowed.
Every few blocks, a ground-floor door was missing. In its place hung a curtain of tobacco smoke. Crowds of men stood inside carousing, their laughter and curses reaching the street. Men in rough clothes smoking clay pipes climbed up the cellar stairs hauling pails of ale. Watching the exchanges, Joseph bumped shoulders with a woman wrapped in a dark shawl. Ale sloshed out from under the shawl, splattering his shoes.
“Kitchen bars. Rum houses. The dealers distribute too,” Sarah said. “All in violation of the boardinghouse rules. Want to go enforce your owner friends’ rules?” At a distinct disadvantage, Joseph kept moving from one grossity to another instead of challenging Sarah. She’d continue to bait him no matter what he said. He had no answer. He was not the savior of Fall River.
“You oppose wealth made in any way?”
“Abject wealth leads to abject poverty. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We wouldn’t have the former without the latter.” Joseph flipped over this logic, thinking there must be some way to compromise. But why tolerate even a little poverty if it can be avoided? Could capitalism exist without poverty? What was enough wealth? Two million? Lizzy’s people, the Durfees, were always pressing for more. But what of the mantra Kindness, Piety, and Fear? He’d been hoping to save his soul from eternal damnation, and instead, he’d just become a millionaire. He wanted to believe there was still time for salvation. He kept walking.
The man in the red vest he’d seen earlier turned the corner. He came at them, staring intently at Sarah. He kept a thick mustache and wore fine tailored clothes. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge him as he closed. Closer, Joseph could see lines behind his spectacles. The man was older than Joseph first guessed. He carried a black satchel. Joseph turned his shoulder as they passed but they hit anyway. Something in the satchel rattled.
“Pardon me,” the man intoned, tipping his derby to Sarah. Joseph turned to catch him disappearing into a tavern called Lizzie’s Axe.
They overtook a knot of ashen, needle-thin women. Their hair was parted down the center and wound into braids or tied with lifeless red ribbons. Joseph had expected more activity in the street, given the weather.
“Fifty-six hours in the mill taps the strength,” she said.
“They do get paid,”
he said.
“A subsistence wage.”
Joseph caught one woman’s eye. She smiled. He smiled back. She was Portuguese. Perhaps he could help a few of them if business picked up. A man passed Sarah and put his arm around the woman. Her husband, Joseph guessed. She’d been smiling at him. The man kissed her, his lips covered in red sores.
Sarah sighed. “Shuttle-mouth.”
Joseph nodded. He knew many of the mills had yet to adopt the perfected shuttle on their looms. Without it, weavers drew thread from the bobbin by puckering their lips against the loom and sucking the thread through the hole. The man had probably taken over the shuttles of a sick coworker.
They passed a half-dozen women—girls really—chasing their puny children. A few were missing locks of hair. And each left a most foul-smelling wake.
Spindle City Page 10
