by John Bemrose
“How do you justify it to yourself,” he said, “risking these people’s jobs, in the chance you’ll get a union in?” It was the question that troubled him most, just now. He hadn’t worried about it when he’d worked for the union in 1949: he’d been so excited by the tactical, almost warlike side of the campaign, so caught up in the hope of making a better world, and yes, so mesmerized by the head organizer, Cary Winner, that he hadn’t really taken in the risk to anyone else. He had now, though. He was older and, besides, what had happened to Pete and the others had left him wary of fooling around with people’s lives.
“Hey, what we’re doing is legal,” Doyle said with gentle sarcasm. “And what they do, I mean firing people for organizing, that’s illegal, brother.” After a while, sounding a good deal more weary, the organizer added, “I worry about it, of course I do. I guess I believe in the big picture. To be frank, I don’t believe in it the way I used to, when I was a tyro. But I believe — I guess I believe we can push this bloody society to a place where the values are a little different. Where an ordinary person’s job, just a decent bloody wage for God’s sake, is more important than the ability of some obscenely rich bastard to add a new wing to his house in Palm Springs.”
“But if he’s earned it?” Alf said. It was the old independent businessman in him speaking, the guy who had once wanted to build houses, to someday build a fine house for himself.
“Has he earned it?” Doyle said, a new ferocity in his voice. “Or has the unfairness Ellen Kelly knows about just allowed him a god’s leverage on things, a leverage no human being should have? I mean, I don’t deny the punter his reward, but too much is too much. I know men who’d rather let a hundred or a thousand other men go to the dogs than give up a straw of their privileges. They haven’t earned it any more than I’ve earned the air I breathe. They’ve just taken it away from the rest of us.”
Alf knew Doyle had a point. A world where a few men had a hundred pairs of shoes and millions had none was not a just world. But hell, wasn’t there room somewhere between those two extremes? What, after all, was the matter with wanting to have a nicer house, a better car? Yes, for all he’d been through, there was something in him that was still hopeful he might rise one day. And a union wasn’t about rising — it wasn’t about life lived on the vertical. It was about the horizontal life, it seemed to him, a life where you couldn’t rise, unless everyone else rose with you, equally. The thought of a purely horizontal life depressed him.
He looked out the window. They were crossing a bridge; the murky water of the Attawan drifted in mist. He was caught, he realized. He was not a committed union man, he felt he was doing it to help those who had lost their jobs, and to make up something to Pete. And, yes, because he needed the money. At the same time, he was afraid that history might be repeating itself. If their campaign was discovered, there might be even more job losses than last time. There seemed to be no way out of this. He struck a match and lit two cigarettes. For the rest of the way home, he and Doyle smoked silently, turning their faces occasionally to the windows, to exhale into the rush of night air.
They paid their visits mostly in the evenings, and on weekends. That left the days free: long, rather tedious stretches of time in which Alf worked around the house. Sometimes Doyle came over and they sat outside, drinking juice or beer on the picnic table under the apple tree. They were becoming friends. Whatever the difference in their political beliefs, a deeper current was at work in them — a kind of sympathetic vibration. They liked each other, they shared a similar sense of humour, they had both fought in the war, Doyle as a member of a British regiment, an experience that had grated rather hard on his then Northern Irish, Catholic, nationalist sentiments. “I was just like Hitler,” he liked to joke. “Fighting a war on two fronts.”
For Alf, Doyle’s presence was a kind of gift. After Pete, he hadn’t expected to have a close friend again. In a way, he was already closer to Doyle than he had ever been to Pete. With Pete, he had always felt a bit superior, a big brother looking out for a younger. But he and Doyle seemed more like equals, mutually respecting. He had a sense he’d never had with Pete, a sense that Doyle understood him.
One afternoon he and Doyle climbed with their beer over the dyke and sat on a log near the deep bend of the Atta, where it swung below Lookout Hill. They were talking about the war, and Doyle told a story about falling asleep one night on sentry duty. That night, the Germans had attacked the camp he was helping guard, killing three men, one a friend of his. No one had known he’d dozed off, and in any case there had been several other sentries, so no one had blamed him — but he obviously blamed himself. “If I have one regret,” he said, and broke off his sentence. In the silence that followed, Alf watched a gull that had settled on the river, like a small white boat adrift under the shadowy bank. His mind was full of Pete. Hadn’t it been the same with Pete and him — his one slip-up leading to a result he’d never intended — to a regret that would never go away? He had thought it impossible he would ever tell anybody about what he’d done to Pete. But now, his heart surging, he felt he was about to.
Yet he shied away at the last moment, not at all certain his friendship with the organizer could bear it. Not sure he could bear it. Instead, he told Doyle about the German boy he’d shot in the wine cellar. Except for the death of his brother, it had been the worst moment of the war for him — when the cellar door was flung back and he saw the boy at his feet, the broken wine bottle in his hand. “I suppose he meant to kill me with it, but he couldn’t have. I’d got him in the heart.”
“Jesus,” Doyle said.
Alf dug at the sand with the heel of his shoe. He hadn’t told the story well, hadn’t conveyed at all his shock at what he’d seen: the freshness and youth of that lifeless face.
And Pete was still alive in him, a pressure.
49
ONE SUNDAY EVENING when Doyle was out of town, Alf got a call from Mary Carr. She’d been fired. “Somebody must have squealed on me to the Roadrunner,” she told him. “Can’t figure who it is.”
Joe had the car — he was off with some girl, a new one, Margaret said — so Alf walked over to Mary’s house on the Flats. It was a tiny, stuccoed place — one end of a long, oddly curved building that had once been a rail station, in the days when a line fed into the valley. His father had left from this spot to go to France in 1915. Red roses bloomed against the brown stucco.
Mary lived here with her twin daughters. Her husband, Carter, had decamped years ago, for the West, a runty little guy with an aggressive manner who, as Alf remembered, had been in trouble as a boy for stealing a shotgun. When Alf knocked on the door, one of Mary’s twins (was it Susie or Sharon?) looked out with wide-set, eleven-year-old eyes.
“Who’s that!” he heard Mary bellow. From deeper in the house came a sound of childish sobbing. The girl with her prominent, curved chin, like Mary’s, withdrew her head. The door swung open a little.
“Alf, come in! I’m on the phone. Deirdre.”
He waited in the cramped living room. There was a couch, which looked as if it folded out into a bed, two armchairs, a couple of small tables, and an old-fashioned radio topped with a statue of our Our Lady, her robe painted a bright blue, her arms out in succour. One of the hands had broken off. Mary stood with the receiver in the kitchen doorway, saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” while looking blindly in Alf’s direction. The twin who answered the door had disappeared. The sobbing had stopped, replaced by sounds of a TV pumping out the opening theme of The Ed Sullivan Show.
Mary hung up the phone and threw herself into a chair opposite Alf. Her shorts revealed slim, very pale legs.
“The fucker,” she said angrily. “He had the nerve to take a cup of tea off me. He comes to fire me, and he sits right there where you’re sittin’ and takes tea!”
“Who?”
She looked at him as if not understanding, blinded by her anger.
“The Roadrunner! The son of a bitch smiled as he told me. �
��We know you’re with the union,’ he says. Well I didn’t deny it. I should’ve denied it, I guess. I mean, what proof did he have? But I couldn’t — there was somethin’ in his face, I just wanted to hit him with the truth. He’s lucky I didn’t hit him with a brick. I did it to myself, no less!”
And she held Alf’s eyes in disbelief, as if he might tell her why she’d acted against herself — why she’d admitted to the Roadrunner that she was with the union when all she had to do was deny, deny. Of course, as she said, he might have laid her off anyway, but then at least she could have said she’d done everything she could to defend herself and her girls.
“The bastard wanted me to spy for them,” she said, throwing one long leg over the other.
“Spy —,” he said. He felt he had woken from a dream-state, in the deep chair.
“You know, I find out who’s signed cards, I can keep my job. The swine.”
“And you refused,” he said.
“I guess I did,” she said. She shook once, with a brief, silent laugh. Then tears glistened. “What am I gonna do with my girls! I can’t keep this place on unemployment!.”
“I’ll talk to Doyle,” he said, struggling to find his voice. “He’ll put you on salary,” he said, promising wildly. “At the least, when the union goes in, we’ll get you your job back.”
“That’s what Deirdre says.”
“Well there you go. We’ll fix you up.”
It was almost dark when he left her house. He walked down Willard to the corner of Bridge, and for a moment looked down the raceway, to the mills in their Sunday stillness. He had spent nearly twenty years in those buildings; his mother and father had spent most of their lives there. But now the mills seemed opaque, a mystery, with their countless windows reflected dully in the water below. In his chest, a little anger flickered and was gone.
He went on up Bridge past the mound of the arena and came to the bridge, where he stopped and leaned on the rail. A hundred yards away, Bannerman’s dam made a thick, white, churning line, in a deep shush of falling water.
He felt tired, too tired to move. He thought of smoking a cigarette, but even this seemed too much effort, so he went on staring at the river, his forearms braced on the rail, in a kind of hopelessness. He spat, and watched the fleck fall in a long curve, under the bridge.
The car arrived soundlessly behind him. He heard only the hush — like a nearer emissary of the dam itself — of a window sliding down. The dark-blue Fleetwood seemed darker than black could be, in the feeble street light.
He stooped to the open window. Prince was leaning towards him across the seat, smiling affably as if whatever had passed between them in the past had left only a residue of casual goodwill. The executive’s handsome face, over the open collar of his shirt, shone a little in the glow from the instrument panel.
“I was wondering if we could talk?”
Alf experienced a moment of triumph, realizing he was beyond the man’s power. I was wondering if.
“The union,” Prince said. “I may have a deal.”
Doyle had warned him this might happen, he recalled. If the company felt they were going to lose, they might offer to let the union in unopposed, for considerations.
“I’m not the boss,” Alf said, not bothering to hide a note of hostility. “I don’t have the authority.”
“For this you do.”
“What is ‘this’?”
“Why don’t you get in? Probably not too good for either of us if we’re seen together.”
Glancing up and down the street, Alf got in. He knew he shouldn’t, but he was curious to see what Prince had up his sleeve, and at the same time, he hardly cared. Before him, the wide windshield framed the main intersection where a red light glowed. Just beyond, a man in a baseball cap, oddly familiar, ducked into the porch of the Vimy House. Prince swung to the right and they began to rise into the North End. “Got some kind of ping under the hood,” Prince said, apropos of nothing. “The garage can’t seem to find it.” They swept past the grey bulk of the Bannerman mansion, like a grim fairy-tale castle set back on its sloping lawns, and so down the maple-shaded avenue.
Passing the high school and the hospital, Prince turned down Golf Links Road. He drove with his head up, with that sense of easy nobility that emanated from him so naturally, two fingers lightly touching the bottom of the wheel. He talked about sports — he had been to see a softball game behind the arena, and the quality of play had impressed him, he said. “I was shortstop myself. Loved not having a base to cover, you know? That sense of freedom.” Alf said nothing. The air conditioning made him feel he was enclosed in a bubble, removed from the night. Even the road itself felt far away, its imperfections smoothed by the magnificent carriage of the Fleetwood. They floated past the high hills of the golf course, past a mink farm crowded with long pens, past old trees that for a moment grew huge in the sweeping scrutiny of the Fleetwood’s headlights. Off to the right, a darkness watched by silent groups of cedars, the Shade ran towards town.
“So what’s the deal?” Alf said, bestirring himself. Already he regretted coming.
“Well, Alf, I hope I’m not out of place here, but I want to make you an offer.”
Alf let a beat pass, as he looked away at a paddock of churned mud, blazing under a floodlight. “I’m not too fond of your offers.”
A few seconds passed. Objects materialized in the dream world outside. In a weedy field, a white horse bolted, its neck flattening. “We made a mess of that,” Prince said at last. He sounded genuinely aggrieved, sorry. “You know, I really did want you for that foreman’s job. But I was under pressure to bring new people in.”
“I’m not interested.”
“I can’t blame you for being teed off, Alf. Seeing someone walk in and take the job that belonged to you. I’d like to make amends if I can.” Prince paused, and seemed to be considering his next step. In the headlights the asphalt gave way to washboard, a distant rumble. “How would you like to be assistant manager of the sweater mill?”
To Alf, Prince’s words seemed as unreal as the countryside startled by their lights.
“As you’ve probably heard, Gordie Henderson’s left. You could start right away.”
“You must think I’m one eager whore.”
Alf was taut with anger. And yet there was a place in him, beyond defiance, beyond conscience, where he was still hungry for a different life, where Prince’s words had raised a ripple of excitement. Disgusted by his own weakness, he added, “Or some kind of idiot. You’re just worried we’re getting close. You’re trying to buy me off.”
“Of course there’s some truth in what you’re saying,” Prince said, after a while, “but the offer’s real. I think you’d do a good job in that office.”
“If you mean it, you’ll offer it to me after the union goes in.”
Prince fell silent. Alf chuckled bleakly to himself, thinking he’d scotched him.
“Take me back to town,” Alf said. “This is pointless.”
They were nearing the top of a long rise. The Fleetwood slowed as Prince guided it sharply to the left, the headlights revealing an unfenced earthen track, and a spot fringed with tall grasses where the car came to a halt. Prince turned out the headlights. They were looking over the edge of the Reid Hills, with woods at their back. Three or four miles distant, the glow of the town dusted the horizon.
The engine remained idling with a low, nearly imperceptible vibration. The air conditioner put out its steady exhalation. Alf shifted impatiently.
“If I can have a few minutes,” Prince said, “I’d like you to hear my side of things.”
Alf shrugged in the darkness, he had little choice. And besides, he was curious. It felt safe to give his curiosity play; he was impregnable in his refusal, protected by his hatred of Prince. Like the sailor in the old story, who had himself tied to the mast, he could listen to the sirens without harm.
He listened to Prince’s voice as it went on: reasonable, humorous, inte
lligent, self-deprecating. But there was something else there, as well, under the surface, a hardness of will not quite disguised by these other qualities. Alf felt that Prince was, in some sense, acting. Because while he seemed relaxed sitting behind the wheel of the Fleetwood, turning over ideas at random, he was in fact pushing, pushing, with a directness of purpose that irritated Alf and kept him on his guard.
“You don’t like me,” Prince said. “I can hardly blame you, not after the way things turned out. But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the circumstances were, in some way, beyond our control. I know that might be hard to believe, but I don’t own this company, I’m only a vice-president — one among many.” He chuckled before continuing, “But what I want to say is this: I have great respect for you. I respected you when I first met you — that day you showed us around the floor. Later, I asked for your help in putting down the union. You balked at that, because it would have meant betraying your friends. I respect that too. Of course, I was on the other side, I had to play for keeps, but I admired you for your decision. Really, Alf, I did — I still do.”
Alf glanced at the other man. Above the vivid white of his shirt, Prince’s head seemed as much shadow as flesh. He was smiling at Alf with a strange, youthful eagerness.
“The thing is, Alf, the story of what you did, or didn’t do, is out there now. I blame myself for this. I’m afraid it’s being given a dishonest slant.”
“What are you talking about,” Alf said, suddenly alert.
“I was talking with Kit Ford, trying to demonstrate the kind of fellow you were, to show what we were up against. So I told him the story of what happened between you and me, in the motel room. To me, it showed your integrity. But Ford, I’m afraid, well, he pounced on the fact that you gave away one name. He’s spreading the story that you were a company plant. Or as you might say on your side of the line, a stooge. He’s telling people that you helped us break the union in the fall. He’s suggesting ah —” Prince paused, and went on only reluctantly, it seemed. “He’s suggesting you’re helping us break it this time too. He’s just doing his job, of course, trying to undermine your side. But I’m afraid it may leave you caught in the middle.”
