The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “I was there,” she said. Her answer came so readily, with such hardness, he retreated again into silence. They drove towards town. They were separated by a gulf now; he was almost relieved, feeling they’d come to something more honest. At least, he felt less vulnerable in his anger. But after a while, she slid over to him and with a sigh put her head on his shoulder. He was desperate to experience every minute with her, as if something yet might be achieved that had not been achieved, or found, before. He put his arm around her and steered with his left hand, watching the headlights of the Bel Air pick out trees and mailboxes.

  It was after eleven when they embraced at her kitchen door. He was planning to come back in the morning, to see her off but, still, he didn’t want to let her go. They clung to each other in a kind of inert exhaustion, like those marathon dancers he’d seen in old news-reels. He was trying to convince himself she was holding on as tightly as he was. Finally, she broke away.

  That night he woke at three. Unable to get back to sleep, he dressed and walked up West Street, past the old hosiery mill, its windows boarded now, and up the rail embankment to the Macrimmons’. The wind had subsided, under an obscure sky. In the yard, everything was still, ghostly: the table where they had eaten so many suppers, stripped of its cover; the dim mountain of the maple; their four chairs scattered forlornly on the packed dirt. He sat with his back against the maple watching her window. Some time later, the chaotic caroling of birds woke him, and he walked off his stiffness in the yard before resuming his vigil in a chair. He must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing he saw was Anna’s face. She was kneeling before him in her dressing gown. For a blissful moment, he forgot she was leaving, and simply smiled at her.

  “You should be in a novel,” she scolded him delightedly as she led him into the kitchen, “waiting out there like that.” He sat at the kitchen table while she made eggs, standing at the stove in her dark-green dressing gown. He had never seen her in it before. He kept staring at the overly long sleeves she kept pushing back, her slender wrists — there was so much about her he didn’t know, might never know now. It seemed unfair that her novelty should go on unfolding so effortlessly before him, even on their last morning.

  “What about Guillaume?” he said, and immediately felt sickened by his own need to know, in the face of what she’d been through. From upstairs came the sound of voices. Her parents would soon be down. “Do you think you might run into him again?”

  At the stove, she went motionless. Then she turned, the spatula in her hand, and looked at him in what seemed incomprehension. For a moment, she fell into an abstraction, as if considering the idea further. Turning back to the stove, she shook her head a little — did it mean no, he wondered, did she mean she could hardly believe he’d ask such a thing?

  “Anna,” he said.

  “If I do,” she said, almost cheerfully, “I’m sure I can handle it.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  Everyone ate breakfast on the fly, while trying to do a dozen other things. Her father, who was driving Anna and her mother to the airport, acknowledged Joe gruffly and went off to call his office. Her mother hurried here and there as she kept changing her mind about the clothes she would take to France. He stood around, feeling he was in the way. He tried to make himself useful by cleaning up the kitchen. He helped Andrew Macrimmon carry Anna’s trunk downstairs. Everything was remarkably, nightmarishly, ordinary. He saw a squirrel run across the earth, leap to a lawnchair, and sit up on its haunches to eat something. It seemed curiously human to him — those dark little handlike paws — and when it scampered away behind the house, he looked after it in astonishment, as if its disappearance were a key to what was happening to him.

  A few minutes later he sat on Anna’s bed, watching her make some last-minute changes to the contents of her suitcase. Her mother called up the stairwell: “Vite, vite, allons-y! Ton père nous attend!”

  He helped Anna close the swollen case. They kissed, almost gravely, and with a quick movement she escaped his arms and went out the door. He pulled her heavy bag off the bed and followed. Her parents were already in the car. He put the suitcase in the trunk and closed it, in the sickening gust of the exhaust, while Anna slid into the back seat. Her mother extended a hand from the front window. “You’re a good boy,” she said. Her remark stung. He did not want to be a boy, did not want to be good. The man Anna had loved had not been good.

  Anna had rolled her window down. He was taken aback by her tears, which made the mark on her cheek glisten. His throat tight, he leaned down to her. Their lips brushed — that smell of her, that scent of vanilla that was almost a no-smell, the scent of space itself — and the car began to back up. He walked down to the front sidewalk and stood watching as the Bel Air swung backwards into Banting, then, with the slight jolt of the gear-change, began to slide smoothly forward.

  60

  LATE AUGUST, and the scream of Alf’s tablesaw, bees floating in the towers of goldenrod leaning beside his half-finished steps. Looking up, he saw through an open window of the sweater mill a carousel turning with a load of white bobbins. Swiftly, swiftly, the pale planets fled against the deeper darkness of the hall behind it. Other machines were invisibly at work with a steady brushing clash, like a waterfall, as thousands of needles and small metal parts raced through their tasks, above the deep, organic hum of the drive-belts. Regret lodged a small stone in his chest: he had once been at the heart of that work himself, and though he had never cared as much for knitting as for carpentry, he was alone now, outside the ark of easy purposefulness men and women made when they worked together.

  Kneeling, he fit the board into the deck and nailed it home. Already, the fresh pine of the other boards was dirty with the confused prints of his workboots. Descending the stairs, he picked up another board and was about to place it on the tablesaw when he noticed that in the open window of the sweater mill the carousel had stopped. Minutes later it still had not moved. Above idle bobbins, threads belled slightly in the breeze. The knitter in him was instantly alert, critical: no machine should stand idle for long. As he stared up at the high window, he realized he could no longer hear the thrum of work. Suddenly — it was like the uncanny feeling he got when his heart skipped a beat — the mills seemed wrapped in the silence of desertion.

  He looked around, the miraculous sole survivor of an event he could not grasp. Nearby, the bees, audible now, flew from frond to frond. A few moments later, he heard a cry. It might have come from a man or a woman — he could not tell which — and it sounded from the depths of the mills like some outburst of pain or alarm of the buildings themselves: as if the thick old beams had yielded up finally a reaction to the saws that had felled them a century before. A little later he heard other voices, shouting and arguing, phones ringing, the sound of breaking glass. The din was coming mainly from the sweater mill, from all six floors, though as he listened it seemed to spread, a contagion of anger or panic that soon echoed from other buildings as well. Standing on the unrailed deck, he looked around in amazement. And then he heard it: the drumming on the stairs that grew louder, and continued to grow louder, as workers streamed into the yard. His first thought was fire.

  He saw Lil Hepworth stalk out purposefully, thick legs working under her shapeless skirt. Immediately behind came Jim Corcoran, a spinner, and his cousin Sid Corcoran, gripping the hair on the crown of his head as if he meant to tear it out. Everyone seemed dazed. They stood in the yard, facing the doorways from which yet more workers were streaming. They were coming from all the buildings now: not in a solid mass, as they did when the sirens released them (he looked at his watch to make sure it wasn’t noon yet) but more raggedly, in twos and threes, from the door of the dyehouse, the knitting mill, the spinning mill. Some were grim-faced, silent. Others were arguing volubly. A couple were laughing and smiling as if they’d been released on holiday. Behind him now, people came clattering down the plywood ramp he’d rigged at the loading dock. Seei
ng Joe emerge, he called to him. Joe didn’t hear — he was listening to Eddie Baker, who was holding forth with clenched fists — but a woman who was closer to Alf, it was Linda Koch, raised her freckled face and shouted to him, “They’re shuttin’ the mills!”

  Stunned, Alf watched her plump back retreat towards the others gathering in the yard. A man and woman — it was Lottie Connor and Art Freud — were arguing so violently, red faces inches apart, it seemed they must soon fight in earnest. Others were trying to calm them. The growing crowd seethed.

  Alf left his perch and stood at the edge of the melee. Beside him, Davy Clark — a tall man of about sixty with a haggard, sour look — blew through his lips in little explosive bursts like the release of steam through a safety valve. Alf realized he was laughing.

  When he asked what was going on — he could scarcely believe what Linda Koch had told him — Davy regarded him with bright, dismissive scorn.

  “Closing ’er down,” he said finally, as if it was an event he had seen coming for weeks, and Alf, like the others, was some kind of ass not to have seen it too.

  “What do you mean?”

  He still had not grasped, would not let himself grasp, the full truth. There had to be some other explanation: a fire, a burst pipe, short-term layoffs.

  “It’s over. Finished. They just announced it. They’re moving the whole damn thing to Quebec.”

  “Quebec?”

  “They say anyone who wants to work down there can apply. They’ll get priority. How about it, Alf, you like Quebec?”

  There was a viciousness in this — a personal hostility — that added an extra current of confusion to the news that Bannerman’s was moving. Disbelief was pounding heavily in his chest, his face. He felt curiously exposed, as though the closing was somehow the result of his own missteps, his own naive miscalculations. He had the same feeling he’d had so often as a child. He could see blame making a wide turn in the far distance, like some kind of winged predator that had seen him on its first pass and now, despite his hopes that he had been overlooked, was returning for the kill.

  “When,” he said.

  “November,” Davy said, watching him closely. “Soon as we’re finished the fall lines.”

  Bruce Mason, the new president of the local, had climbed onto the loading dock of the sweater mill now, where he was conferring with two other union officials. Some people in the crowd were watching them expectantly. Others were jeering. By now, Alf understood what had probably happened. The foremen had called the workers together to announce the closing — or perhaps the news had come over the PA system — and the employees had stormed out spontaneously. He’d seen the same thing before, in 1949. But it was one thing to stage a walkout: the question was always what to do next. The workers seemed at a loss. They were jostling about, looking for leadership, and when Bruce finally stood forward with his hands raised to instill calm, he seemed helpless before the milling crowd.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he began.

  “Fuck your brothers and sisters!” someone cried out. New arguments exploded around the perpetrator of this remark. Beside Alf, Davy Clark continued to snort out his silent, bitter laughter. None of this surprised old Davy, it was what the fools deserved.

  Bruce said something about “fighting this with everything we’ve got.” He would talk to management — he’d go to Toronto and talk to the president of Intertex himself, if that’s what it took. He drew a flutter of weak applause from many, but the sniping of boos and epithets continued. In the windows overhead, a few people leaned on the sills, looking down like casual spectators at some arcane bloodsport. On the sixth floor, Kit Ford coldly observed the proceedings, his glance occasionally shifting to a clipboard on which he was apparently making notes. Across the yard, a fight broke out. Alf heard angry, surprised shouts, the desperate scuffling of feet on gravel. There was sense of a society unravelling at the seams. It seemed that no one knew what to do, or what to expect.

  Just then, Alf noticed Lucille, standing with a group of her fellow workers from the sewing department. Instantly, he experienced a surge of the old hunger; she seemed a point of solace — of escape, really — in the dismal confusion of the yard. Since the union picnic, he’d been hoping they might get together again, at least to talk. He watched her tuck in her blouse, watched her hand plunge behind her wide belt, watched the deep, equine curve of her lower back.

  A man was approaching the group of women: Bud Reed, from the dye department. He was a well-built fellow of about thirty, with a cockiness in his gait. A tight T-shirt showed his biceps to advantage. He leaned over to say something to Lucille and her friends, then remained beside them, standing so close to Lucille that their arms touched. Alf seemed to come awake as he watched their fingers entwine.

  Arriving home at noon, he said nothing to Margaret, but washed his hands and sat at the table, staring over the array of pink Melmac, the ribbed juice glasses she put down with crisp efficiency.

  When the phone rang, Margaret answered.

  “It’s for you.”

  The voice on the line was male, and toxic with rage. He could not quite tell who it was — half a dozen possibilities flashed through his mind, until there seemed to be not one but several persons there, speaking with a single voice. He heard profanities, a barrage of accusations. The closing of the mills was the union’s fault, the voice said. The union had priced itself out of the market. Because of the union they had lost their jobs. “I hope you’re happy now, Walker.”

  “Who is this!” he demanded, and was answered with the clatter of a fumbled hangup.

  “Who was that?” Margaret said from the sink.

  He barely heard her.

  “Alf —”

  “They’re closing the mills,” he said, distracted, the voice on the phone still seething inside him.

  “Closing —”

  He looked at her sharply.

  “Alf, what’s going on?”

  “The mills,” he said. “Intertex — they’re shutting them down.”

  “Who says they are?”

  “I say!” he cried, furious. He saw Joe standing by the door. His son had simply materialized, and now stood watching them remotely. It had been his mood for weeks, it seemed, ever since his girlfriend had left. Alf had tried to console him — Plenty more fish in the sea — but the boy scarcely seemed aware of his existence. Two or three times blue aerogrammes had arrived from France. Joe had hurried them to his room like a prisoner expecting a reprieve.

  Margaret turned to Joe.

  “Your father says they’ve closed the mills!”

  “For God’s sake, Margaret,” Alf said. Did she trust nothing he told her any more? He stalked down the hall, pausing at the door to the living room, where Jamie and Penny were watching TV. Bud Reed, he thought suddenly. Bud Reed. Wasn’t the guy a bit of a jerk? In a trance, he stared at the screen. The Three Stooges were up to their usual tricks: whooping like cranes, poking fingers in each other’s eyes, driving each other’s heads into trees and parked cars and telephone poles.

  61

  THAT AFTERNOON, back at work, the idea came to him that he should talk to Prince. He’d demand an explanation, cook up some deal that would keep Bannerman’s in town (he had the notion he might somehow reach into the mechanism of power, as if it were an idling car engine, and make some fine adjustment that would stop Intertex in its course). He knew it was a long shot, knew he was a fool to think he could change the course of events, but his relationship with Prince gave him hope. He knew he couldn’t rest till he’d tried.

  After supper, he set out in the Biscayne. At G.O., the Fleetwood was not in its usual place under the willow. He drove to Johnsonville, where the clerk at the Executive told him Prince had given up his room a week ago. He went back to his car and sat behind the wheel, looking out at the wobbling glow of the pool. Children cannon-balled, sending up geysers with their cries. Prince’s disappearance seemed the final blow. He and his company had swept in out of the b
lue, done what they wanted to, and now had flown off with their spoils, into distances where you couldn’t get at them. And the thing was, they’d always had the power to do this, whenever they wanted. All the contortions Alf’d put himself through — they’d all put themselves through — hadn’t made a whit of difference. They might just as well as have done nothing.

  Driving back into town, he kept looking for the Fleetwood, he couldn’t help himself. The hood of a large black car waited at the corner of Shade and Bridge, its body concealed by a store. He was instantly alert, but as it drew away, he saw it was Rick McArthur’s Cadillac hearse, the same vehicle Pete had made his last ride in, its long, bonneted cabin decorated with a stylized chrome S, like a baby carriage.

  It seemed he hardly slept that night; the next day, punchdrunk, he dragged himself through his eight hours at Bannerman’s. Then after supper, feeling a little better, he walked over to the Flats for a special union meeting about the closings. Arriving at the prefab barn near the mills — it had been built by the Lions as a clubhouse — he stood at the back in a press of heat-dampened bodies. Set up in front of the seated, noisily gabbing crowd was a long table where Bruce Mason, the union president, was leaning forward to tap experimentally at a mike. Bert Hatch, an old Bannerman’s executive who had grown up in Attawan, sat beside him, his face with its dark jowls looking exaggeratedly mournful. Beside him, Linda Connaught, the secretary of the local, was bent over a three-ring notebook, writing, with her wide face close to the paper, like a schoolgirl.

  Just then Bob Prince slipped in from a door at the rear of the stage and took the chair beside Bert Hatch. He was wearing a light-tan summer suit, but no tie. Instantly alert, Alf watched him closely: the slight, superior tilt of his head as he leaned to murmur something to Bert Hatch; the casual rubbing with one finger of a place under his right ear as he gazed coolly over the rows of faces.