by Carol Zoref
“Such as you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourself. But don’t put up the announcement until Friday night, when the factory is closed.”
“And you’re gone,” Noah pointed out.
“If you get caught and they know I helped you, I’ll get fired. Which means I won’t be here to help after, which is when you’ll need me.”
“You’ll help?” said Noah, hoping, I’m sure, that she was ready to jump on the union bandwagon.
“It’s best to keep me in reserve. When you make your sign, be certain to write the words Everyone Welcome. That way it won’t look like you’re meeting in secret. You tell them you thought this fellow Morrow worked for the Farm Administration or something like that. Better yet, ask this Mr. Morrow. He’ll know what to do.”
Getting ten men to attend a meeting was not so simple, but somehow Joey persuaded Massimo, Nick, and Vince to come, even if their mistreatment of Joey made the factory managers’ pale by comparison. Joey and his brothers and Mr. Paradissis made five right there; Mr. Dowd made six plus Mr. Baldwin made seven, Mr. DeWitt made eight, Yorgos made nine, and one by one the list in Noah’s notebook grew to twenty. My father said he would not go, what with my mother and all. No one held it against him. Tragedy had a way of drawing a protective circle around him. He gave Noah some coins anyway to buy a bottle for the men to share.
“You’re not getting them drunk, Noah. Just a shot for each, a little blood warmer to set the tone. Ask your uncle about the brotherhood. It’s a family.”
“You’ll reconsider coming tonight?” pressed Noah.
“You go for us all,” said my father.
After, Noah made a point of telling me that I was not to come anywhere near the schoolhouse during the meeting. He told me I was not even to leave our house for a walk. If anyone came looking for him or Yorgos or Joey, I was to say they were learning how to plant better vegetable gardens.
“I’ll have to tell them where you are.”
“And you’ll have to lie about the rest,” he said.
I made a show of going to his room and switching on his radio. He followed me in.
“I’m telling you: stay home,” he said again, and gathered his things, including the bottle of whiskey.
When he was gone for long enough to have walked all the way to the schoolhouse, I opened the French notebook that he always left out. A loose piece of paper fell out on which he had scribbled this in English:
DeWitt kisses my mouth before he sticks his prick in me. He rubs me down good after he pulls out. He says he would take me up his own ass but he can’t. Not even if he gets all greased up. Too old. He works his mouth around my dick instead. He gets down on his knees while I sit back in his swivel chair. Sometimes I hold back. Make him work harder. When I’m done, he starts again.
After, he wipes down his chair with a rag. Wipes me off. Then he gives me something to eat, maybe potatoes from the coal fire. We talk about the plant, about school. Maybe people think it’s wrong, but thinking is different than feeling. We talk about the unions. He talks about his wife and he gets all choked up. He says he can go to Brooklyn for a woman when he wants to. He says that has nothing to do with what’s between him and me.
That is where Noah stopped and returned to the carefully written French that could be anyone speaking anywhere.
C’est la vie! Fantastique!
He should have thrown that piece of paper in the trash if he did not know enough French to write what he wanted to say.
I had heard the boys refer to their dicks more times than I care to remember, you should pardon me. It never mattered if Sofia and I were listening. I knew what kissing was and I knew about human reproduction because of Miss Finn’s so-called hygiene lesson. The combination of sex and love and desire, however, was a mystery. Growing up is hard enough without other people making it hell, especially for people like Noah.
I slipped the piece of paper back into the notebook, returned the notebook to its spot on the floor, and went upstairs to my own room.
CHAPTER 9
Noah returned home from that first Barren Shoal organizing meeting so wound up and speaking so fast that the spit pooled in the corners of his mouth, giving him a mad-dog look. It was 10:00 p.m. and quiet the way it could get at night on Barren Shoal, when the sound of the tide reaching shore could be heard from anywhere. “Shssshh,” I warned him, “you’ll wake them.” I still missed my parents’ attention, even two years after Helen’s death. But I no longer expected it to return.
My father and mother were in their bedroom, where my mother retreated after dinner each night and stayed until we left in the morning for school. I was at the kitchen table with a newspaper and a hand-drawn map of Central Asia, studying the Silk Route. A homemade bomb had exploded that week in Istanbul. The newspaper said it was the work of Armenians, though the article did not explain why. I understand now. No one on Barren Shoal owned an atlas, so Miss Finn had each of us copy what we needed from her book. Which explains how we ended up so muddle-headed about history and geography. How could we understand history if we did not know geography? I decided to add the Silk Route to our Odyssey Project, which Sofia and I still talked about even if we no longer cared enough to update our scrapbook. What still mattered was the idea.
Noah was pacing. “The men, Marta...,” he sputtered. “You should have seen them. Completely amazing.” It was all I could do to make sense of a few phrases here and there of what Noah was saying.
“You’ve never seen anything like it,” he went on, moving about in fits and starts. His eyes were lit up like my own kids’ eyes would get years later, when I knew they were smoking pot. Of course I knew.
“I would have seen it if you’d let me come.” Not only had he left me out of the conversation, but he had ordered me away from the schoolhouse. Why was I supposed to care about a party I was not invited to? Noah did not even notice that I did not care.
He dropped into the chair. “Mr. Morrow laid out the steps for collective bargaining, which...”
“You always say that the workers should own the factories, not make deals with bosses.”
“You’ve gotta be practical....”
“That’s the word Dad uses when he’s tired of saying ‘no.’”
“Would you just listen, please? Everyone was passing the whiskey bottle, guys who never look each other, taking a shot, sending it on. Even Joey’s brothers.”
“You’re excited about putting your lips on the same thing as the Pessaras?”
“It was symbolic. We’re gonna be in this together, even the Pessaras.” He wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve.
“We’re forming a local, just for Barren Shoal.” He was poking his finger onto a picture of my newspaper, an image of a mansion on the eastern bank of the Bosporus. Talk about geography: such a thin bit of water dividing the continents.
Noah lifted the newspaper to look closer, which sent my map sailing. “Sorry about your drawing,” he said, sighing pretend-exhaustion when he bent to pick it up.
“You don’t have to be such a dope,” I said. I smoothed out the map, even though it was not wrinkled.
“You want to hear about it or not?”
I shrugged. That did not stop him.
“Uncle David knows Mr. Morrow real well. He’s the IWW man; he knew Eugene Debs!”
“What’s he selling?” I do not know how or when I became so cynical, but there it was. I lived on an island where they burned dead horses. I was a girl whose little sister died in agony and whose mother refused to speak. What was I supposed to do? Walk with the faithful?
“It’s about principles.”
“Here’s your principles: the police will move in, Dad will be fired, and Barren Shoal will still stink.” I felt adult debating this business with Noah, like I was seeing into the future time when Noah and I were fully grown.
“We’re allowed to join a union if we want. That’s the law.”
“What’s this ‘we’ business?” This was the same question Noah
put to Yorgos about going to Brooklyn. I loved throwing his words back in his face.
“It’s not a trade union. Everyone’s allowed in.” Noah’s still-changing voice cracked, which made him blush.
“They’ll call you an ‘agitator.’ They’ll never give you a job.”
“I don’t want a lousy job here.”
“You’re crazy, Noah.”
He gave me one of those watch-what-you-say looks. He pulled a pamphlet from his pants pocket. “Listen up: ‘By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.’”
“Says who?” I asked.
“Says the Industrial Workers of the World,” he said, proudly. He slapped the pamphlet playfully on my head.
“Miss Finn says they’re Communists.” Or maybe it was Mrs. Paradissis. Noah had already declared himself a Trotskyite, a distinction which would not matter to the bosses any more than it mattered to me.
Noah did not bite at my feeble attempt at red baiting. “The bosses are gonna have to listen now.”
“You sound like those Daily Workers. Which is a Communist paper, by the way, not Trotskyite.” I was feeling pretty clever.
“I told you stay out of my room!” he shouted. Noah had not followed Mr. Paradissis’ instructions to burn The Daily Workers after reading them. Maybe he should have been burning his notebook, too.
Our father stomped into the kitchen. “Nothing,” said my father, slamming his hand on the table, “not one single thing is to happen in this house that disturbs your mother. No unions. No fighting. No nothing.”
“Would you prefer we talk on the street?” Noah asked.
“There are no streets on Barren Shoal,” I piped in.
“I’m counting on your common sense,” said my father. “I can’t always be here to stop your upsetting her.”
“We’re not always here, Dad,” said Noah.
“Well you should be,” my father replied. “She lost her baby, for heaven’s sake.”
“You think she has the monopoly on trouble?” said Noah.“The whole damn world is falling apart.”
My father had never smacked any of us children before that night. One stiff word from him had always been enough to shame us. Noah’s hand flew up in self-defense, his arm colliding with my father’s arm on its way back down. They hung there for a moment, my father’s color rising, Noah’s face going white except for where my father’s hand had made contact.
My father grabbed Noah’s hand. I thought he was going to hit him again.
“Oh, God, Noah...” began my father.
“It’s me, I shouldn’t talk that way...”
My father kissed Noah on both cheeks, then on the forehead the way he did when he was blessing us.
“I never...” said my father.
“I promise, Dad,” said Noah.
“Miss Finn says it’s the worst thing that can happen to a person,” I said when my father left the room.
“Getting smacked around by your father?”
“Children dying before their parents, you moron.”
“We’re alive, Marta.”
“Shssshh!” I begged. “They’ll hear you.”
Noah now took Yorgos and Joey to the union hall in Brooklyn as often as they could get away. I tried imagining what the place looked like, but all I could picture was a movie palace, not the dingy storefront it turned out to be. The boys always met with Stanley Morrow, who was giving them a full-fledged education in labor movements and organizing. He lectured them; he read to them; and he introduced them around. The boys, and Barren Shoal, were on their way.
That did not mean much when Noah came home on the first morning barge a few weeks later to find my father at the dock waiting for him and me standing there waiting too, wanting to see what would happen. Noah had promised to ride the night barge back to Barren Shoal, but the boys had missed it. My father’s angry concern, private as it was, was loud enough for anyone to listen.
“Morrow is using you boys. Can’t you see that?”
“He’s teaching us what we gotta know,” said Noah.
“Your teacher here in school, Miss Finn: she ever give you any lessons about The Crusades? This Morrow fella is sending you boys on a children’s crusade. You have no business doing what you’re doing.”
“We’re not children,” said Noah.
“Don’t make me hurt you by telling the truth. This whole business is nothing but trouble.”
“We don’t have the money to get into trouble.”
Noah was lucky my father did not hit him again.
“What kind of trouble takes money?” I asked Sofia that day after school. “I thought money keeps you out of it.”
We were sitting in the low dunes on the far end of the island, having found a breeze that was upwind from the smokestack. Sofia was trimming my hair with a pair of scissors she had taken from Grandma Paradissis’ sewing box. She was good about this task, which had formerly been my mother’s. I was a pretty good sport about it too, considering that she was learning on the job.
“You are so slow, Marta.”
I tugged some strands of dune grass out by their roots, strand by strand.
“Sit straight,” she said as she cut. “They need money for girls.”
The boys achieved a new status on Barren Shoal. Noah, my introverted brother, was now known by everyone. It was not as if he had been a stranger before, but now men would offer him cigarettes when they stopped to talk. People congregated in our yard after dinner. The boys were like squad mates on a small town high school baseball team and Mr. Morrow was the scout who came knocking on their doors. My father would not have liked this analogy. He might have enjoyed listening to a Giant’s game every now and then or hearing about another home run by Hank Greenberg, but he thought that professional athletes were chuckleheads.
“Don’t you think, Dad, that the workers need protection?” argued Noah.
“You could protect yourself better by not tom-catting around Brooklyn.” My father did not go for the boys-will-be-boys attitude that Mr. Paradissis took towards their wandering.
“Look where you work every day. Look at how hard. How can you be so anti-union?”
“I’m pro-labor, Noah, but this is for adults to fight, not children.”
“The men down at the plant can’t be going back and forth to a union hall in Brooklyn the way we can. You’re all tied down. We can move around.”
“Joey Pessara has time for this? If he’s not careful, he’s gonna end up down a chute.”
“Dad!”
“You think Boyle doesn’t know? You think Boyle won’t find out?”
“Morrow looks out for us, Dad. He gives us books, gets us dinner.”
“That’s wonderful: you can be bought for the price of a meal?”
“Do you notice anyone else giving Joey a regular meal?”
“You’re the expert now on how families should conduct their private lives? That’s fine, Mr. Big Shot: you go ahead and make sure those lousy brothers of Joey feed him. Then come back home and tell me about being a man.”
That day, the rift between Noah and my father was blown too wide to heal anytime soon. That meant Noah needed an ally, not that he found the idea of pulling me into his children’s crusade all that appealing. But that is what happened.
He let me spend more time in his room, listening to the radio and reading pamphlets supplied by Mr. Morrow. He was practicing on me, I now know; a ready audience when there was no other. Maybe that was why he got nicer. Noah spent even more time with the boys. When my father was not at the factory, he was still always with my mother in their bedroom, the door closed. Heaven knows what went on in there. When we lost Helen, we lost everything. I know, I understand: we were not the only family to suffer that kind of loss. But why compare one family’s tragedy to another’s? Grief is not a horse race; everyone who suffers wears the crown.
No one asked any longer how I spent my time. I was still sleeping in the room
I had shared with Helen, her empty bed inches from mine. Some things cannot be gotten used to. What was the purpose in that? I did not need to see that bed every day in order to remember Helen. I still think about her every day.
Sometimes I would doze off in front of Noah’s radio and he would cover me with a blanket, tuck his pillow beneath my head, let me stay the night on his floor. We grew closer. Sofia, more than once, came looking for me on a weekend morning, only to go upstairs and find my room empty.
That spring, Noah and Yorgos also announced to our fathers that they were taking over the planting of the family gardens. The plan was to combine our yard and the Paradissis yard into one larger, better-planned patch and divide the labor. Joey would work it too, in return for food. The collective effort would result in a higher yield. The boys had learned about sustenance farming from watching newsreels with Stanley Morrow, who sometimes treated them to movies before the stinky trip home on a barge. In addition to seeing the feature film of the day, the boys saw those pro-business shorts by M-G-M and the pro-labor shorts from Warner Brothers, which included advice about home gardens. No matter how carefully Noah described them, I could not imagine what a movie really was until I finally saw one.
“Mr. Morrow says the M-G-M films are a bunch of propaganda,” explained Noah, “but the Warner documentaries are full of great stuff. We just saw one about Upton Sinclair; he’s running for governor of California.” It turned out that this film about the writer-turned-politician was the one that gave the boys the idea of collectivizing the garden.
My father was pleased about the boys taking over the garden. He never wanted anything to do with it and my mother had lost the heart for it. Mr. Paradissis was glad to see the boys bending their brows to actual work, whatever the reason. I was excited at first about Noah’s renewed interest. It seemed like a good sign. How could I know that his taking over would also mean him bossing me around? So much for his concern about the exploitation of the worker.
The first day out, the two fathers watched the three boys strip down to their undershirts, their new muscles burning in the sun. They put in zucchini and carrots, cucumbers and eggplants and peppers and potatoes and beans and tomatoes and radishes and half-a-dozen kinds of lettuces, including arugula, and escarole and broccoli rabe. There was an herb section, with basil, dill, parsley, oregano, and a bay leaf bush. In the back a few rows of corn stood like a hedge of soldiers. Noah drew a map showing Sofia and me where the Brussels sprouts and cabbages, squashes and garlic would come in the autumn. It was a beautiful map, with shadows giving dimension to Noah’s precise renderings.
