The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “Alf’s our best man here,” Wilf was telling Kit. “Really knows the place like the back of his hand.” He turned to Alf, speaking in a slightly overloud voice that betrayed a certain nervousness. “Matt was going to take Kit on a tour, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going along with them.”

  Alf glared at Wilf — he couldn’t help it — and was rewarded by a slight, evasive ducking of the manager’s head. He felt the least Bannerman’s might have done was warn him this was coming: hadn’t he earned that much in his years of virtually running the place? Behind Wilf, Matt was smiling nervously into his pipe.

  Alf, Matt, and Kit Ford went down the aisles. Alf was in a state of turmoil. A sense of betrayal kept rising, bitter in his mouth. It made it hard to speak calmly about the machines and the routines of the knitting room.

  And Kit Ford didn’t help. No matter what Alf told him, he chewed his gum and nodded and said, Yep, yep, yep so rapidly and continuously that he gave the impression that he already knew everything Alf could possibly tell him: it was all old hat. Put off balance, Alf forgot names he normally knew, and several times had to be helped out by Matt while Ford looked at them both in that sincere, slightly pained way that suggested none of this incompetence was a surprise in the least.

  Finally, to give himself a break, Alf asked Ford about the new machines Intertex was buying.

  “A lot faster than these old junkers,” Kitt said, somehow managing to keep chewing and talking at once. Alf did not like to hear the machines of Number Six called “old junkers.” He had worked on all of them and kept them going for years beyond their expected lifespan, often by improvising spare parts: he had a certain pride in them.

  He listened as Ford described the new knitting machines. They looked a bit like a jet engine, Ford said, a curious description Alf could not quite picture. They were computerized. They would take fewer workers to run. “Fewer hands, fewer mistakes,” Ford said with his reflexive grin.

  “My, my,” Matt Honnegger commented mildly, shaking his head.

  Kit looked at Matt, and seemed startled to find his predecessor there, smiling weakly over his empty pipe.

  “Nothin’ ’gainst the old ways,” he said. “Good in their time. But you don’t keep up with the competition, you die.” He looked meaningfully at Alf and Matt as he said, “you die,” and there was something overdone and faintly comical about this — after all they were talking about knitting, not cancer or war. And yet at the same time Alf caught a glimpse of a no-holds-barred tenacity and, behind this, a positive delight in the extreme vision he had just expressed. Kit Ford was telling them, in his melodramatic way, that in the game of survival they were all playing, he knew the real conditions, and was willing to abide by them, as a man should.

  Over the following days, Kit Ford moved up and down the aisles so quickly — his rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the hardwood — that the workers in Number Six knitting soon dubbed him “the Roadrunner.” Despite his claim that he was looking forward to knowing them, he went on confusing “Alf” with “Art” and “Mary” with “Eileen,” and he never stopped for even a few seconds to shoot the breeze, as Matt had done to a fault, or joined them on the fire escape for their breaks. Worst of all, he spread a spirit of resentment by letting them know somehow that they were not working hard enough. It wasn’t that he accused them of sloth in so many words, it was the atmosphere of haste and disapproval that emanated from him: the gaze of those wounded eyes that seemed to be suffering their poor performance in outraged silence.

  On the fire escape, they made jokes about him. “I don’t think he ever goes to the bathroom,” Dick Kenshole said one day; and quick-as-a-whip Boomer Tomlinson answered in his droll bass, “I guess that’s why he’s so full of shit.”

  They laughed ruefully, weighed by a sense that their jokes were ultimately futile, and that an old world, more friendly to them, was passing away. They did not know what was coming, but with the glum fatalism of those who must await change passively, many of them suspected they were not going to like the new order. The machines Wilf Thomas had said Intertex was bringing in worried them because they were sure some workers would probably be made redundant. In their minds, Kit Ford and these new machines were already inextricably bound — the exhausting haste he had brought to the mill seemed just a foretaste of an even faster regime to come. In some way, they were already living with the new machines, which even before they arrived promised a world in which workers were going to have to become creatures of another kind, creatures like Kit Ford, as fast and efficient as the machines they served.

  Alf, too, disliked Ford and his ways, but tried to suppress his bitterness. After all, it wasn’t Ford’s fault he’d been overlooked for the job. He did his best to sympathize with the foreman, telling himself that the new man, for all his experience, was nervous in the job, and deserved a chance to settle in. When the complaints on the fire escape escalated, he decided to offer Ford some advice. One evening after the mill had emptied, he dropped by Kit’s office. The young man was sitting behind Matt’s desk (Alf still thought of it that way), which he kept completely clear save for an order spike holding a mess of impaled papers, a clipboard, and a single orange pencil, sharpened to a clean point. There was something forlorn about all this. Alf was suddenly aware that Kit Ford was young, younger in some ways than his actual age. Sitting there with his large fingers hooked over the edge of his desk, motionless but for that perpetually working jaw, he seemed like a student awaiting some as yet undisclosed after-school punishment.

  Alf started off gently. The workers were feeling a bit edgy, he explained, sitting forward in his chair and gesturing with open hands. They sensed there were big changes coming and were nervous. It might help if he, Kit, made an effort to warm up to them a bit. If he talked to them casually from time to time, even if he only talked about the weather.

  Kit Ford looked back at him without comment, and it occurred to Alf that for Kit Ford chatting idly about the weather might be impossible. There was something overwound in the fellow, as if he had never been taught — never had the freedom — to relax.

  “So they sent you to tell me this —”

  “No, no,” Alf said, smiling amicably, his face heating. “It’s my own idea. I just think if you made a few gestures, you’d have a happier gang out there.”

  Ford looked from Alf to the pencil on his desktop. He was chewing more slowly than usual, and Alf sensed he’d confronted the foreman with a problem he did not know how to meet.

  “So they’re not happy —”

  “Well, nothing too serious. I’m just suggesting, you know, make an effort to get their names right. It’s a little thing, but —”

  “So they sent you in here to agitate —”

  “I’m not agitating,” Alf said, trying to make light of the idea. “No one sent me here. I’m just saying —”

  “You were an agitator in ’49, isn’t that right?”

  Taken aback, Alf could only stare at the other man. All vestiges of the boy had vanished. Ford was the ex-Marine now, hard, perfunctory. He seemed to be looking right through Alf to the chair he sat in.

  “I wasn’t an agitator,” Alf said softly. A weariness was enveloping him, a sense he had started up a hill he could never reach the top of. “I went out on strike.”

  “An illegal strike —”

  “Well, that’s debatable.”

  “Thank you very much for your advice,” Ford said sharply. “ ’Preciate it.” It was clear the interview was over. The foreman pulled the clipboard towards him and made a show of studying it. For a few seconds Alf did not move. He watched Ford — that angular face knotting and unknotting in its perpetual flow of tensions — and he looked out the window behind the foreman’s close-cropped head, where the evening sky had grown luminous — a mirror in which he could not find his own face.

  In late April, there was a spell of unusually warm weather, and the workers on the sixth floor were able to take nearly every break outside. In the
morning, before the sun reached the west wall of the mill, it was still cool enough for sweaters, and the hot Thermoses of coffee and tea they unscrewed and poured into plastic cups were deeply enjoyed. But in the afternoon, when the sun beat into the bricks of the wall behind them, and threw the striped shadows of the fire-escape railing over their knees, they doffed their sweaters and opened shirts and drank the warmth they had so long missed. These ten minutes were precious: a time unclaimed by not just the tall machines fallen silent in the room behind them but also by the duties they owed their families. These little islands of time contained as much undiluted freedom as most people there enjoyed in a day, and they used them well: they talked, or ate, or read, or smoked, or looked out through the railings of the fire escape through the deep cube of the millyard, where sharp geometries of light and shadow shifted back and forth all day. And when the buzzer finally sounded with a subtle but penetrating violence, there was always a double sense that the minutes that had just passed had been deeper and slower and more important than other minutes, and also, that they had fled with the swiftness of a glance.

  In the days when he had helped Matt, Alf was so busy that he often skipped break. But after just a week on the job, Kit Ford made it clear he didn’t need him, so he increasingly took up his old seat just outside the door, on an upturned wooden box topped with a scrap of foam rubber that had turned a rich, golden colour. He didn’t join in the conversation of the others, sitting on their long, makeshift benches that stretched along the wall to his left, but he listened with a secret pleasure, drawn by an instinctive need. Not so long ago, he’d felt he was a man with a purpose, a man with important things to do, and he’d forgotten this: how good it was to just sit with these men and women, many of whom he’d known all his life. So he smoked and drank his coffee and — wondering if the others knew of his role in the breaking of the union and were cold-shouldering him as a result — gazed through the bars, across the millyard to the gap between buildings, fixing almost unconsciously on the place where all their eyes tended, the little ribbon of river-water, visible between the dyke and the cement wall of the opposite bank, gleaming and flowing there like a banner.

  Often at these times he thought of Lucille with a longing that surprised him. She had started to appear in his dreams (he saw her, once, driving away in a red car, from which she had looked back at him with a curious, watchful indifference). He worried that he had used her, though he had never intended to. He felt badly about this, and the worst of it was his sense that he had overlooked something when he was with her. When he glimpsed her from the mill, passing in the street, she — her beauty — seemed to promise an experience he could not name, but which he had missed.

  One day, a windy Thursday under scudding clouds that seemed about to catch on the high, soot-stained lip of Bannerman’s stack, someone on the fire escape said, “I guess they found another cat.” Alf, sitting on his box, looked up. He’d been aware that for several months someone in town had been killing cats. The plague of small corpses seemed to have petered out for a while, but now, apparently, the skinned body of a tom had been found hanging on a wire from the Shade Street rail overpass. Down the balcony, Mary Carr cried out in dismay — she kept cats herself, and didn’t want to hear anything about it — but some of the others got into an animated discussion of the killer’s possible motives. (“He’s just some poor sicko trying to prove he’s a big shot,” Dick Kenshole said with angry revulsion, summing up the general attitude.) Alf listened as the conversation drifted into humorous speculation about who the killer might be. A few tossed out the names of the town’s most important citizens. The knitters howled expansively, then fell silent, sensing they had gone too far.

  It was then that Book Cummings, sitting about halfway down the row, turned his big, pimply face towards Alf and said, “I think Alf did it.”

  Alf was shocked: his entire body seemed to wake from its torpor. It was not just the stab of Book’s accusation, which was obviously meant in fun; it was the sudden exploding of his isolation. He had begun to feel invisible, sitting there in silence day after day on his foam pad. Now he realized that several faces had leaned out to catch a glimpse of him.

  Struggling to keep his composure, he blew out smoke and said, deadpan, meeting Book’s eyes, “That’s right, Book.” Still holding Book’s gaze, he let a beat go by before adding, “You’re next, cool cat.”

  They roared at that, since the overweight, bookish Book was anything but cool; they were relieved Alf had taken the jibe so well. The only person who didn’t laugh was Woody Marr. Sitting with his pugface lifted sourly, he was habitually ignored by the other knitters, who believed he had ratted on the people who had been laid off in the fall.

  After the cat incident, Alf took a more active part in life on the fire escape, though he supposed he was never what anyone would call talkative. What surprised him most was that when he did speak, the others stopped talking to listen. He felt he must surely disappoint them, for he never thought that what he was saying was witty or important or interesting enough to warrant the staring, expectant faces ranged along the balcony.

  One morning all talk on the fire escape was of the big news that had broken over the town the previous evening: Bannerman’s was closing its hosiery division. For almost a hundred years John Bannerman’s original building on West Street (the tall mill with its tiers of white-trimmed windows and handsome mansard roof and bell tower) had churned out hosiery renowned across the country — fancy dress socks, women’s silk hose (the silk supplied by special trains racing with their bales from the West Coast), work socks, children’s socks, sport socks — but now the whole enterprise would be shut down by August. Almost two hundred people would lose their jobs.

  The earthquake might have struck another mill, on the other side of town, but the tremors reached right to the iron perch above the millyard, reminding the workers of their vulnerability. They could do everything that was asked of them, and do it well, but this would never be a guarantee that their jobs would not disappear from beneath them. Many of them had friends or family members working in the hosiery mill. For them, its closure was not a distant or abstract event but one that cast a chilly shadow of deprivation, and behind it they glimpsed the behemoth, Intertex. It was not lost on them that in almost a century, Bannerman’s had never closed a mill in town and, that within a year of acquiring Bannerman’s, Intertex was now shutting down a fixture that had seemed as permanent as the hills that faced it across the Atta.

  “I heard the place was makin’ money,” Steve Johnson said, in a high, complaining voice. He was leaning out from his seat, as if beseeching the rest of them for an answer.

  “How could it have been,” Mary Carr said tartly to the railing in front of her. She was from Newfoundland, a stringy, scoop-faced woman with strong opinions. “They wouldn’t close it if it was making a profit. That’s what these guys are in it for.”

  “That’s right,” someone else said, and that seemed to settle the matter. For a few moments there was silence.

  Looking at his own hands, which suddenly seemed strange, animal-like — Alf said, “Actually, they were making a profit.”

  He could sense the stir, the awakening power of attention, his words evoked, and looking to his left he saw the mild, anxious face of Steve Johnson staring back, where he leaned with his elbows on his knees. Other faces had turned his way too, blank and expectant, half-hidden behind other faces and bodies. In the yard below them, an iron-wheeled cart rumbled over the rough asphalt.

  “How’s that, Alf?” Mary said.

  “Well, I guess there’s profit, and then there’s profit. They were making only about two per cent over there, and well, I guess Intertex felt they could do better with their money elsewhere.” Grant George, the assistant manager of the hosiery mill, had told Alf this a couple of days before the closure had been made public. Alf had run into his old boyhood acquaintance in the post office, and Grant, looking harassed and sounding grim, had barely been ab
le to contain his disgust at the whole business. “No flies on these boys,” he’d said sarcastically of Intertex. “They’d sell their grandmothers if they could get their price.”

  Silence greeted Alf’s news. Below, the cart of bobbins rumbled out of hearing and a pigeon floated from darkness into light, while a second bird disappeared simultaneously into shadow.

  “They were making a profit?” Boomer Tomlinson said, incredulously. “How could that be?”

  “He told ya,” Mary said. “They’re not makin’ enough profit.”

  “But what about all those people who lose their jobs?”

  “They’re not in business to make jobs,” Mary said. “If they could run the whole thing off a control panel, like Harry Lumley and his boilers there, they’d be rid of us in a flash.”

  “You got it there,” someone said.

  But Boomer, rubbing his hands and screwing up his face into a rumpled mask of disgruntlement that showed his gums, was not satisfied.

  “Alf,” he said, still peering down the row. Alf looked at him. “How much profit are they makin’ here? In the sweater mill, like?”

  All faces turned to him, intensely interested in his answer. Feeling his mouth go dry, Alf shook his head. “I don’t know,” he told them. “Enough, I guess.” They remained fixed on him a few moments longer, sensing or hoping he had more to say, but he could only repeat his gesture of disavowal and stare through the railing into the millyard, unhappy at his failure to satisfy them, wary of the hunger he had glimpsed in their eyes.