Earlier that day they had all said good-bye to the bottle green Maia, which a Yale professor had driven away after drawing the lucky short straw. The other New York buyers would have a few months’ wait while theirs were built and shipped.
“So what shall I tell Ma?” Jed asked his brother once Mac had ascended the gangplank. “About when you’re coming home.”
“Nothing,” McColl told him. “I’ll write to her tonight and tell her you’re on your way. And that I’ll be home soon.”
“You will?”
“I will. I can’t stay here forever, can I?”
“I suppose not. But for God’s sake be careful while you are. After everything that’s happened, it isn’t that easy just leaving you here on your own.”
“What, alone in the big city?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I do. But I’m pretty sure that danger’s passed.” And he was. Keeping an eye out for trouble had become almost second nature, but since their arrival in New York he’d noticed nothing untoward and had never had the feeling of being watched or followed.
“I hope you’re right,” Jed was saying.
“So do I, but let’s talk about something else. Are you heading straight back to Glasgow?”
“I have to. They’re expecting me at the Prudential a week tomorrow. April Fools’ Day,” he added bitterly. “It’s going to be so boring after all of this. I’m almost hoping for a war to liven things up.”
“Don’t say that,” McColl said. “Not even in jest.”
“Who was joking?”
McColl couldn’t help laughing. A few minutes later, he watched his brother board, exchanged final waves, and walked off down the quay toward the city. The ship wouldn’t leave for an hour or so, but it felt like they were already gone, and despite his earlier teasing of Jed he did feel alone without them. They had spent the best part of six months together, and he had grown accustomed to their silly jokes and ridiculous bravado.
Jed’s comment that a war might save him from boredom came back to McColl. His younger brother was a fool in so many ways, but he loved him dearly. Caitlin’s Colm was also a fool, and in ways that might prove much more damaging, but she would love her brother every bit as much.
Mill-Town Alley
He had some business loose ends to tie up, but by Wednesday evening McColl was wholly a man of leisure, with no one else for company. Over the next couple of days, he did a lot of walking and made the most of the city’s attractions, gazing out from skyscraper observation platforms, sitting in smoke-filled moving-picture houses, puzzling over the latest European paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He was still staying at the expensive Aberdeen, having convinced Kensley that leaving his luxury hotel for a fleabag would dent his credentials as a successful businessman and thereby cast doubt on the story he had told the Hanleys, that business was the reason for prolonging his stay. According to Kensley’s probably fanciful account, Cumming had huffed and puffed at first but then agreed to transfer the funds McColl needed to support this Reillyesque life.
Paterson, he knew, would be another world. On Saturday morning he took the Christopher Street Ferry across the Hudson and met Caitlin, Colm, and Seán Tiernan at the Hoboken terminal of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. She had already bought his ticket, and he was pleasantly surprised by the lack of overt hostility from her two young companions. Tiernan in particular seemed in a jovial mood, as if they were heading out on a picnic rather than visiting an industrial battlefield. Neither he nor Colm questioned McColl’s presence on the jaunt, and Colm actually asked him about his time in South Africa. Caitlin had obviously begged him to be civil.
“So pretend I’m one of your less knowledgeable readers,” McColl told her as the first factories and chimneys of the New Jersey shore flitted past their carriage window, “and explain what’s been happening since last year’s strike.”
She did her best, but it was a complicated story. The 1913 strike had been defeated, but not as comprehensively as some had claimed. In the immediate aftermath, some owners had conceded a nine-hour day while others had increased the wages they paid. Some were now using the economic downturn to renege on these deals, and Sunday’s rally was intended, among other things, to demonstrate the widespread opposition to such backsliding. But as always seemed to be the case, defeat had sown divisions among the various groups of workers and their political champions. The ribbon weavers had different priorities from the broad silk weavers, and the latter saw things differently from the dyers’ helpers. The socialists and the IWW had blamed each other for the strike’s failure, and now the former were concentrating on securing deals on a plant-by-plant basis, while the IWW remained committed to an all-or-nothing approach.
“Which is why this rally’s important,” Caitlin concluded. “All the silk workers have to agree on a few basic demands—like the nine-hour day—and then hold together until they’re met.”
“How many hours are they working now?” McColl asked.
“Ten hours five days a week and four on Saturday morning.”
“For the princely sum of six dollars,” Colm added. “But you’re still fighting last year’s strike, sis. A few basic demands, holding together—they did all that for six months, and they lost. Something has to change. We have to scare the bastards.”
“How?” Caitlin asked. “The last time I heard, the IWW was still opposed to violence.”
“It still is,” Tiernan agreed, without turning his face from the window. “But the owners aren’t, and when their tame sheriffs and hired hands use violence against us, then we have the right to defend ourselves in any way we can.”
“With guns?” Caitlin asked.
“We must fight like with like,” Tiernan said, finally turning to face her. “If they use sticks, then so do we. And if they use guns …” He shrugged.
“And this is IWW policy?”
“Not so you’d notice, not yet. But it will be.”
“God, I hope not.”
“There are a lot of us feel this way, sis,” Colm said.
She shook her head. “You won’t beat them that way. They have all the weapons, for God’s sake.”
“We don’t need to beat them,” Tiernan said calmly. “Every time they bring out the militia, your average American has to reach in his pocket. He won’t stand for that, or not for long anyway—eventually he’ll turn against the bosses. We don’t have to win a war, just keep fighting battles.”
“I think you’re overestimating the influence of the average American.”
“I’m a stranger here, so that’s possible. But what I know from Dublin, and what surely to God you must know from all the doings in Paterson, is that the old ways don’t work anymore. If there was a God looking down who was ready and willing to intervene, then maybe a worker could shame his boss into paying a decent wage by striking and starving his family. But there isn’t, and the boss has no reason to care. And until we give him one that he can’t ignore, nothing will change.”
On reaching Paterson, Colm and Tiernan headed off to the IWW local, where lodging had been organized for visiting activists. Caitlin, to McColl’s delight, had decided to share his hotel room rather than stay with the family she’d gotten to know during the previous year. “They hardly have room for one another,” she said, “and I have to sleep with the children. If someone’s going to keep me awake for half of the night, I’d rather it were you.”
They found a middling hotel on Main Street and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. She asked the clerk to have their bags taken up and told a disappointed McColl that she was going straight out. “I won’t drag you around with me,” she said as they reached the street, “but at least come and meet Ruthie. It’s not far, and after that you can do what you want.”
As they walked toward the river, downtown’s seeming prosperity gave way to wretched tenements and the mills where their residents toiled. “I’ll be spending the next
few hours with wonderful people,” Caitlin said, “and they’re all going to be at the end of their tethers. I’ll swan in and I’ll swan out again, and their terrible lives will just go on. And I’ll go back to New York and earn money from telling their story. Sometimes I hate what I’m doing.”
“Journalists have to be paid,” McColl said. “And if you tell their stories well enough, their lives might get a little less terrible.”
“I know. But …”
Ruthie lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement building. There were two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen—the toilet was three flights down in the yard. Her three children shared the double bed that filled one room, she and her husband a pull-down bed in the room where everyone lived. This was uncluttered by possessions and very clean. As Ruthie poured coffee from that day’s jug, her two girls and one boy sat watching their visitors in respectful silence.
McColl looked for a sense of relief when Caitlin announced that she wouldn’t be staying, but Ruthie and the children seemed genuinely disappointed, and the latter were mollified only by the promise of another visit in the summer. When Caitlin got down to business, Ruthie told her that times were hard and that most people were still trying to pay off the debts they’d incurred during the previous year’s strike. “And the feeling’s still bad,” she said. “People won’t work with them who crossed picket lines. The bosses have had to fire a few of them—some reward for loyalty, eh? Well, they should have been loyal to their own people.”
The workers at one mill had come out on strike the previous week, when the owner had demanded a speeding up of production. So far no other mills had come out in support, but there was a meeting at a nearby school that evening, which Caitlin could use to judge the local mood. Though she might find it depressing.
But not all the news was as bad. At the mill where Ruthie’s husband worked, there had been some changes for the better. “The bosses brought in fire alarms and put safety guards on one machine where a woman lost her arm last year—too late for her, of course, but better late than never. And Manny says that the foremen don’t shout as much as they used to.” She shrugged. “A small thing maybe, but he appreciates it. Makes him feel more like a person, less like an animal at the carnival.”
After agreeing to meet up at the rally next day, they walked down to the street and along past the school where that evening’s meeting was due to be held. A children’s choir was singing somewhere inside, but no smoke was rising from the boiler-house chimney despite the chill March air.
Gina’s family home was smaller than Ruthie’s, and she seemed less inclined to detect any silver linings in the overall situation. Her youngest was sick and looked it, but they already owed the doctor several weeks of her husband’s pitiful wages.
Her bitterness was palpable, and so was that of her sister, who dropped in while they were there. Unlike Gina, who had greeted Caitlin like a long-lost friend, the sister had obvious difficulty keeping her hostility under wraps. She ignored McColl but stared at Caitlin with the weary air of someone thinking, How could anyone dressed like you are have any idea of what we’re going through?
“I’ll send her some money for the child,” Caitlin said when she and McColl were back outside. “Anonymously. I tried to give her ten dollars last year, and she refused to take it.”
“Where next?” McColl asked, peering down the street. There were several people on stoops, giving them curious looks.
“How would you feel about doing some work for me?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Just listening, really. A few hours in cafés and bars shouldn’t be too taxing. I’d like a better idea of what the men are thinking,” she explained. “When they talk to each other, I mean. I can’t ask them—I can’t—they just see a strange woman and look at my breasts.”
“Like Father Meagher,” he murmured.
“I doubt you’re immune,” she said tartly. “What is wrong with men?”
He could think of no answer to that, but she kissed him anyway and promised to see him back at the hotel. He watched her walk away up the desolate street and turned back toward the downtown area, where he’d noticed a row of suitable establishments. It seemed early for lunch, but he felt surprisingly hungry, and a plate of corned beef hash filled the spot for a minimal outlay. The only other customers in the café were nursing cups of coffee at a shared table, staring out the window, and murmuring occasional observations he was too far away to understand. They were all at the young end of middle age and looked like they could take care of themselves. Not to mention anyone who got in their way.
A tawdry bar three doors down was doing better business, but a similar group of hard-faced men had occupied one of its tables and set up an obvious no-man’s-land between themselves and the workingmen who made up the rest of the clientele. McColl took up residence in the latter’s territory and used his English accent to disarm the suspicion his presence seemed to generate. He was an automobile salesman, he told the barman, loudly enough for others to hear, and he soon had several men straining to see the publicity shot of the Maia he carried in his wallet.
“You won’t find much demand for fancy cars round here,” one obviously Irish immigrant told him cheerfully.
“I think I will,” McColl disagreed, offering his cigarettes. “What town doesn’t have a handful of bastards with more money than sense?”
There was general agreement that Paterson had its share of rich bastards, and several meaningful glances at the table across no-man’s-land.
“Who are they?” McColl asked one of his new friends in a quiet voice.
“They call themselves ‘special deputies,’ ” the friend told him, “but they’re really hired thugs,” he added rather more loudly. “They say they work for the city, but Barlow pays their wages.” Barlow, it seemed, was the millowner keen to have his workers work faster. And the general feeling on this side of the bar was that Paterson’s silk workers were too weak to resist him.
McColl moved on to another establishment, and another after that. By dusk he had bought drinks in seven of them and left most of his glasses virtually full. The story was the same wherever he went, of angry workers hanging on to what little gains the previous strike had brought them, knowing they were still too weak to fight for something better. For the moment at least, the owners held most of the cards. Not all, or they wouldn’t need to flood the town with imported thugs. But most.
Paterson felt like an occupied city by day and something worse once dusk had fallen. It was probably just his imagination, but the downtown streets seemed to empty too soon, their lights much fainter than they should be. The passage of a streetcar sounded preternaturally loud, and in the silence that followed, he could hear the distant roar of the town’s famous falls.
Back in the warmth of the hotel lobby, he read the city’s evening paper while waiting for Caitlin. There were reports of local society gatherings, an article on the restoration of a local church, and a preview of the forthcoming baseball season, but no mention whatever of trouble in the local mills.
He supposed there was little point in writing about such matters when those most concerned could not afford the newspaper.
Many more days in Paterson and he would end up a socialist.
Caitlin eventually appeared, looking more worn out that he’d ever seen her. “We have to get going,” she insisted. “The meeting starts in fifteen minutes.”
They walked through the dimly lit streets, swapping stories from the last few hours. She seemed drained by her interviews, but unalarmed by his news of the “deputies.”
“The owners brought hundreds of them in during last year’s strike,” she said. “And mostly they just stood there looking mean. All the real violence came from the police.”
They reached the school entrance. Just inside the door, a couple of men were controlling admission, and as Caitlin explained who she was, McColl noticed a long line of baseball bats leaned up against a wall. Journalists were
not welcome, one man was saying in the tone of someone who had suffered at their hands, but the ensuing argument was cut short when a local woman insisted on vouching for Caitlin—“She was the only one who told the truth!”
Inside the auditorium the lines of chairs were mostly occupied. There were pictures of American presidents on the walls, and McColl wondered what Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were making of the IWW banner that stretched across the front of the stage.
Colm suddenly appeared, accompanied by Tiernan and a big man with dark, longish hair and a luxuriant mustache. He was wearing a workingman’s cap and trousers and a long coat with leather lapels. “This is Aidan Brady,” Colm told them.
“Caitlin Hanley,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, in what sounded to McColl like a midwestern accent.
“Brady’s been in Oregon,” Colm said as McColl shook hands. “He was in the logging wars.”
“So what are you doing this far east?” Caitlin asked him.
Brady smiled. “Fighting the good fight,” he said.
“For the IWW?”
“That’s right. And this is a good turnout,” he added, looking around. Someone on the platform was waving at him, and he raised a hand in acknowledgment. “I have to go,” he apologized.
“He’s going to say a few words on the situation in Detroit,” Colm explained. “Things are going well there.”
They weren’t in Paterson, as the meeting made depressingly clear. Speaker after speaker from the strikebound Barlow Mill made impassioned pleas for others to follow their example, and speaker after speaker from those still in work explained why they couldn’t, shouldn’t, or wouldn’t. It wasn’t hard to sympathize with the opposing points of view, but that didn’t stop the meeting from becoming increasingly impassioned, and often acrimonious. This town had suffered too much, McColl thought; there was nothing left to give.
When Brady started to deliver his report from Detroit, McColl was expecting him to use developments there to bolster the Paterson strikers’ case. Up to a point he did, but there were no appeals to solidarity; he seemed more intent on stressing the importance of individuals and their actions—how they had furthered the Studebaker workers’ struggle in Detroit and how they might do so here. He never actually argued for violence, but a faith in its efficacy seemed to lie just beneath the surface of everything he said. His audience applauded when he finished, but without any great conviction, as if they weren’t quite sure what they’d heard.
Jack of Spies Page 21
