The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  He had to hurry to keep up with her. Perhaps she wanted him to simply vanish; perhaps the thing to do was just to let her go on, out of his life. But he stuck to her stubbornly, wild with a sense of unravelling love, angry that she couldn’t see what he’d done for her. At the corner of Willard she stopped. She closed her eyes and put back her head, taking long breaths. He waited in trepidation beside her, thinking she was preparing some final speech. To his shock, she turned into him suddenly, pressing her forehead into the side of his neck. She said she was sorry: she’d been childish, an idiot. She said she didn’t deserve his love. He had saved them, and she had been terrible. He circled her with his arms and felt her slim, trembling body, under her cotton dress.

  She didn’t want to go home, so for a while they wandered on the Flats. They walked slowly, with their arms around each other, up dim lanes past garages and gardens and silent porches. A black-and-white cat followed them for a while. They came back along Willard, under the vast east wall of the mills that rose sheer from the race.

  They went along the fence together, looking down at the still, dark water, the cloudy, inverted reflection of the mills. A duck quacked sleepily and glided off, leaving its trembling wake to glitter in the street light. Above, the white-framed windows, many tiers high, gazed out from the dim brick. They came to the narrow metal footbridge, with its pipe railing, which crossed the race to the mill. At the other end, a windowless door had been left ajar. The door looked small and secretive, the one opening in the vast wall.

  “Can we go in?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” He knew the night watchman must be about. Perhaps he was just inside. He couldn’t imagine the door had been left open by accident. But he let her draw him forward.

  “Come on,” she said, cajoling. “We can’t be killed here, can we?”

  Her ironic challenge piqued him: he didn’t want to be always saying no. So he followed her across the bridge and in the little door. He shut it behind them, but did not draw the bolt. A single bulb lit a corridor. He smelled the piney fragrance of Dustbane. He picked his way along warily, hushing her at every turn and listening into the great stillness of the mills. To her, he sensed, this was an adventure, a glorious lark, as if these huge buildings, even the spectre of the watchman, had been put here for her amusement. But he took trespassing more seriously. He was the son and grandson of mill workers, he had worked here himself: to take the place casually was impossible.

  They stole through corridors and up stairways, into vast rooms where long trestle tables shone dully, in a pleasant odour of new cloth. She put her face to a stack of finished garments and breathed in deeply. She touched her fingertips to the cool, oddly shaped metal of machines. “It’s so strange,” she whispered to him. “I never thought of cloth coming from anywhere. Cloth, our clothes, just are. But then there’s all this — it’s like looking underground and seeing the elves and dwarfs working away.” At one point they saw the watchman crossing far below them, his light darting here and there through the millyard. He disappeared into the power plant, near the vast, round base of the stack. Joe was anxious to leave, but for her sake he pressed on with their tour, all the while watching and listening.

  He showed her where his father had worked. The tall knitting machines stood silently in their rows, uncannily still under their wide crowns of bobbins. She had to know everything: how the yarn flew up through the loops of wire above, and down into the churning drum of needles. She stooped to look at a tube of cloth, hanging between a machine’s legs. She could not get over how it seemed to appear out of nowhere. From just a few strands of yarn appeared this pale-blue cloth, as soft and fragrant, she said, as a baby’s skin.

  A sudden clattering startled them. Outside, pigeons — wakened perhaps by a collective nightmare — swarmed from a roof, their wings whirring past the windows.

  They moved on, walking through a covered bridge, several stories above the millyard, to another building. In one hall, bales of raw wool were piled to the ceiling. The wool was rough to the touch and exuded a sharp smell of dried dung. They passed through further rooms, past great, shining vats and tubs, and came to a large bin. Inside was a mass of clean, whitish wool, smelling richly of lanolin. To his surprise, she climbed over the side of the bin and threw herself back in the wool, like a child playing on a mattress.

  “Come here,” she said, holding out her arms.

  “I don’t think — the watchman —”

  “Come here.”

  The wool was too scratchy on their naked skin, so they spread the red tartan blanket. Even so, the wool curled over its edges, around them. As he moved on her, it tickled his sides, his forearms, and formed white balls, like snow, around her face.

  56

  ONE WARM JUNE NIGHT, several weeks after his fight with Margaret, Alf sat in the Biscayne, too tired to get out. Cooling metal popped. In the dim yard, the apple tree rustled at the edge of a square of light from the kitchen. The back of his shirt had stuck to the seat. For all the visiting he had done that night — he and Doyle had taken to working alone to double their effectiveness — he’d picked up only one card. The women hadn’t done much better. The union was just fifteen or so cards from the total needed, but something in the atmosphere had changed. Many people didn’t want even to open their doors. They spoke through screens, shadowy prisoners of their fear, or simply gestured through windows for the organizers to go away. Mary Carr, whom Doyle had hired several weeks before, blamed the change on Kit Ford, who was playing the heavy for the company. “I’m telling you, everywhere we go, seems like the Roadrunner’s just leaving. Lila Soames didn’t even wanta open her door to us. I don’t know what the Roadrunner’s been saying to people, but it’s working.”

  It wasn’t just the Roadrunner. Ford, Alf had heard, had taken to driving around with a bodyguard, a big fellow from Johnsonville whom Doyle usually referred to as “that goon.” This development had occurred after several union supporters had threatened Ford in a restaurant. The goon accompanied Ford when he was visiting workers after hours. Ford hadn’t unleashed his henchman yet, but he hovered in the background, a hint most people weren’t slow to pick up. The atmosphere in town was getting more tense by the day, and Alf, who remembered the violent strike of 1949 all too well, was afraid they were slipping towards a repeat of that mayhem.

  He got out of the car and trudged to the back door. Margaret had left the light on in the kitchen, it seemed a good sign. He was foraging in the fridge for something to eat when she came in, crossing in her dressing gown to the sink. He watched as she took down a glass. “Your tomatoes are coming along well,” he said. “That was a good idea, getting the greenhouse starts.” She said nothing but, filling the glass at the tap, turned to leave.

  “Margaret, we can’t keep this up!”

  She sighed and looked at the glass. He heard Jamie call out, upstairs.

  “Tell me what I can do, Margaret, and I’ll do it.”

  She looked at him for a moment. “Jamie wants a drink.” She moved towards the door. When he put out his hand to touch her shoulder, she twisted away. A bit of water slopped to the floor.

  She was soon gone, her slippers scuffing quickly down the hall. Then Joe was there, pushing in from the night. Greeting Alf tersely, he went to the cupboard.

  Alf watched him take down a glass. Everything he had wanted to say to Margaret was still burning in him. “Joe,” he said, his voice parched. “What happened with your mother, Joe, I need to talk to you —”

  Joe turned, his face impassive. Alf sensed the common front between mother and son. They had their reasons for punishing him, good reasons maybe, but in some obscure way he felt the entire story had not been told. That night in this room, just before he’d struck Margaret, it seemed that she had touched something in him that should never be touched — that she had reached inside him and cut his very soul. He felt she had meant to do this. He had reacted with the fury of someone who, in an instant, feels his life threatened. Yet this
seemed absurd to him now. How had his life been threatened?

  Standing before his son, he struggled to explain something of this. “I know there’s no excuse, for a man striking a woman. But you see, I love your mother, and so when she says —”

  His throat had constricted, and he stopped. They were both embarrassed.

  “Okay,” Joe said softly. His fingers brushed Alf’s arm as he went out, leaving his empty glass on the counter.

  The next evening, Alf left after supper to visit Carl Schmidt, a spinner who lived a couple of miles outside town. The man had already turned him down once. Alf drove down the back roads in a fatalistic mood, not hoping for much.

  As he headed along the dead-end lane that lead past Carl’s place, he glanced in the rear-view and saw a red Chevelle turn in behind him. If it was Ford — and the sudden leap in his gut told him it had to be — then the foreman was clearly following him.

  Alf knew it was impossible to visit Carl now — it could get him fired. The Chevelle was keeping well back, hardly visible in the dust drifting behind the Biscayne. “Come on, it could be anybody,” he told himself. “Get hold of yourself.” But the blood was pounding in his chest and face. He passed through a grove of old maples, out into the sun in front of Carl’s place. A movement of his eyes showed him Carl’s dilapidated front porch, flickering behind the grey, decaying survivors of an orchard. Carl was nowhere in sight, though his Ford pickup was parked on the grass outside the kitchen door. Alf drove on.

  A turn in the lane cut off the view behind. Dust hung, shining, under a pine. Alf eased the Biscayne over a rib of white bedrock, down through a pasture spotted with wild fruit trees.

  And the river was there, swimming under the willows on the far bank. The road ended at a rotting wood barrier that blocked the ramp to a ruined bridge, and forced him to the left, along the sand-flats, where he finally stopped by a clump of scrub willow.

  Feeling he needed room to manoeuvre, to confront the man following him, if it came to that, he got out and walked towards the river. A length of driftwood was lying at the water’s edge. He picked it up and started to look around for stones. He could hear the other car in the pasture now, its engine growing louder as it descended towards the flats. Making a show of indifference, he found a stone and whacked it with his heavy stick, watching as it knifed across the river.

  As the Chevelle crossed the flats behind him, he turned to look. In the passenger seat, gazing over at him, was a mop-haired, dark-skinned fellow in sunglasses. His massive forearm hung outside the door with a queer indolence, as if it were broken. Behind the wheel, erect as a soldier, was Ford.

  Alf went back to his game. Rattled now, he swung at another stone, and another, missing both. Hearing footsteps on sand, he turned.

  “Kit,” he said. He had let the stick droop, at his side.

  The foreman stood a few feet off. His eyes, shadowed with fatigue, took in Alf’s weapon.

  Ford’s goon had stopped a couple of steps away from his boss. He was well over six feet, too heavy for his height, with a look in his eyes of lazy contempt. Held loosely in his left hand was a tire iron.

  “You guys got a flat tire?” Alf said.

  A strange coolness had invaded him. He was ready to fight, but at the same time, he almost didn’t care what happened. There was something absurd about them all standing there like schoolboys getting ready to brawl. He wondered if this was Ford’s idea of revenge. He’d considered his fight with the foreman to be pretty much of a saw-off, but maybe Ford himself didn’t see it that way. Alf waited, with the river at his back, feeling no need to talk. But he did not take his gaze from Ford’s staring eyes.

  There was an evasion there, a refusal to see. Ford’s shrunken pupils had found their focus somewhere just in front of his face. Alf was put out by this. For God’s sake, he thought, at least look at me.

  He sensed the goon shift his weight, getting ready.

  “Alfie,” Ford said, and his voice was more strangulated than usual, “I want you to stay away from our people. Anybody who works for Bannerman’s, I don’t want you near them. You got that? Or do we have to teach it to you?”

  Alf chortled. Ford was sounding an awful lot like some movie cowboy.

  “What’s so funny, asshole? Stay away from our people.”

  “Is this how you want to spend your life?” Alf said quietly.

  Ford’s head jerked, almost imperceptibly, as if he’d been struck, and for a moment, a moment only, he looked directly at Alf. Alf saw, not for the first time, the boy in Ford, the lost, plaintive boy at the centre of all that hardness. Alf, too, was affected, at the unexpected contact. A kind of electric shock went through him.

  Tossing down his weapon, he kept looking steadily at Ford.

  “You just watch it,” Ford said. But his voice was hoarse now, without authority; in his eyes was a watery sheen.

  He walked quickly away, towards the Chevelle.

  “Watchit,” the goon told Alf, pointing at him with the iron. Scowling, he turned to trek away across the sand.

  Alf watched the red car bump its way up the pasture road. Turning to the water, he found himself swept by unexpected emotion. It was as if some old grief had been exposed in him — a heaviness that verged on sorrow. It saturated everything around him — the warm air smelling of sand and willows, the implacably moving water, carrying along bits of grass and weed, funnelling under the ruined bridge. He had no idea of what had just happened between him and Ford, but the world had changed, he could feel it: the world had grown sadder and heavier and more itself. The very light seemed to lie on the land with a slow, viscous, golden weight. He watched two swallows skim the river, twisting and dodging with breath-taking alacrity, rising on wings so quick they seemed aflame.

  57

  THAT NIGHT, he made four visits and picked up as many cards, including one from Carl Schmidt. “I guess I’m just sick of being afraid,” the spinner told him as he signed a card at his kitchen table.

  When Alf got back to the Vimy House, he discovered that the other organizers had been successful too. In fact, they had put the union over the top, in fine style. They’d signed up almost fifty-seven per cent of the workforce, two per cent higher than was needed to achieve automatic certification. People who had held back for weeks had suddenly found reason or courage or weariness or anger enough to sign a card. It was as if there had been some change in the atmosphere that had tipped the mysterious mechanism that releases a decision. Doyle couldn’t explain it, though he said he’d seen the phenomenon once or twice before. “An earthquake in China,” he said, shrugging, “who the hell knows?” As the organizers celebrated in the Vimy House, Alf felt oddly distant, though he had a pleasant shock when Shirley, her head snaking forward almost apologetically, planted a long, dry kiss on his mouth.

  The following week two union negotiators arrived from Toronto to hammer out a first contract. They asked Alf for the names of people who been laid off or fired over the past year as a punishment for supporting the union. The idea was to lever these people back into Bannerman’s as part of the collective agreement. Alf put his own name on the list. He told the negotiators he didn’t want to go back to knitting, he couldn’t stomach the idea of working again under Ford, but anything else would be fine. A few days later, he was offered — and accepted — a job on Bannerman’s maintenance crew.

  He was soon spending his days patching and painting, often working alone, and often out of doors, which suited him well enough, though it all seemed a bit tame after the drama of organizing. One of his first tasks was on the roof of Number Six, his old mill, repairing some leaks around a ventilation shaft. He worked at his own pace — it was a relief not to be hurried along by machines — and from time to time, with a melancholy sense of freedom, paused to gaze across the roofs of the town towards the humped hills of Wiley’s farm, cutting the fresh sky of early summer.

  In late July, the workers approved their first contract, and the union held a victory party in Li
ons Park. All afternoon, tall clouds drifted from the west, casting a double mood of sun and shadow over the thousand or so people who spread their blankets on the parched grass, in the shade of maples and willows. Taking a chance, Alf asked Margaret to come with him. She was speaking to him again, but she said she had a choir rehearsal at the church. Jamie and Penny came gladly, though, excited by the promise of hot dogs and prizes.

  Doyle had returned to town for the celebrations. Dressed in Bermuda shorts even redder than his face, he insisted on making the rounds with Alf. “It wouldn’t have happened without this guy,”

  the organizer told people in his gruff way, while planting his large, moist hand between Alf’s shoulder blades. Alf was chagrined by the attention — Doyle’s praise seemed exaggerated, to him — but, also, he was secretly pleased. Everywhere, he met approving faces: that look of admiration and hopefulness he’d first encountered on the fire escape. It had unsettled him then, and it unsettled him a little now, this discovery of something in himself people seemed drawn to. When the time came for speeches from the bandshell, Doyle barked into the microphone that Alf should stand. He got up warily from the picnic blanket he was sharing with Jamie and Penny to the largest ovation anyone got all afternoon. Then, sitting down, he found himself gazing at Pete’s house, on its hillside above the park. The garage door was open. Pete’s Sarasota was there, facing outwards, its windshield dark.