A Room of My Own

by Ann Tatlock

  Luke snorted. "If it'd been a bullet, it would've blown his head clear off. Your head's still there, ain't it, Simon?"

  Simon sat up, and when he did, blood dripped from his cut brow and onto his bare chest. "Yeah, it's still here," he moaned. "I know it is, 'cause it's killing me."

  I let go a great sigh of relief and would have thrown my arms around my brother if it hadn't been for the blood. Still shaking, I lifted my cotton skirt and ripped a jagged piece of material from the thin attached petticoat. "Here, Simon," I said, pressing the cloth against his forehead, "hold this on the cut."

  He obediently pressed the improvised bandage to his head, then asked, "Where's my glasses?"

  On hands and knees I retrieved them from the sidewalk and held them out to Simon. Both lenses were shattered and the frames were bent. Simon slowly lifted the tangled object from my palm.

  "They broke my glasses," he said mournfully, and he sounded so pitiful I started to cry again. Then he said, "Oh, it's all right, Ginny. Don't start bawling. Let's just get out of here. You coming, Luke?"

  "Nope, I'm staying."

  "You're crazy."

  "I gotta see what happens to Pa and Rufus."

  "But Aunt Sally will die if she knows you're here," I protested. Luke shrugged. It would be impossible to persuade him to come home with us. Nodding toward the chaos in the street, I relented, saying, "Look, just don't go out there, all right? Stay put in the alley."

  "All right."

  "Promise?"

  "Yeah, now, go on. You better tell Ma that Pa's been arrested."

  "Can you walk?" I asked Simon.

  He nodded and stood, pressing the torn cloth to his head with one hand and clutching what was left of his glasses with the other. I put my arm around his bare shoulders, and together we hurried away from the scene of the riot. I felt for the nickel in my skirt pocket.

  "Let's try to catch the trolley," I said breathlessly as we made our way toward the warehouse district.

  "You got money?"

  "Just a nickel."

  "Which one of us is going to walk home?"

  "Neither. The driver's got to let us both on. You've been hurt."

  I felt Simon's shoulders lift as he shrugged. "You can ask him, I guess."

  We had to wait only a couple of minutes at the stop before the trolley arrived. I pushed Simon ahead of me up the steps to the driver, where I held out the nickel in the palm of my hand. I felt like Oliver Twist as I pleaded, "Please, sir, I only have a nickel, but my brother's been hurt and I want to get him home. My father is Dr. William Eide, and he's good for the other nickel."

  The motorman was a huge fellow with a full-moon face and a thick neck that bulged out over the back of his sweat-soaked collar. He gazed at the pitiful picture Simon and I made and said kindly, "Keep your nickel, little lady, and you and your brother have a seat. I'll take you where you need to go."

  I was tempted to throw my arms around his thick neck, so sorely did I need that bit of human kindness at that moment. His words caused a fresh batch of tears to well up in my eyes, and I could scarcely catch my breath to thank the man. He nodded toward the seats and said, "Go on, now. I've a schedule to keep, and the sooner we get the lad home the better."

  Simon and I turned and started down the aisle, realizing for the first time that we were not alone on the trolley and must appear as quite a spectacle to the half-dozen or so passengers who stared at us quizzically. Only one man, absorbed in his newspaper, seemed not to notice the wounded, half-naked boy and the weepy girl who accompanied him. I sniffed loudly and slid into an empty seat. Simon sat down beside me. The curious eyes pressed heavily on my back, and my face burned in anger and humiliation. Yes, I was crying, and yes, I had begged the driver for a ride, but didn't these people know what was happening only blocks away? How dare they complacently go about their business while men were being beaten and killed in the streets. What right had they to stare at me as though I were the strange one!

  Simon seemed not to care about our fellow passengers. He sat indifferently nursing his wound, but I cried quietly all the way home, wiping my eyes and nose with the back of one hand.

  Just before our stop, Simon mumbled, "We're going to catch trouble from Mama, Ginny."

  I sniffed and replied vaguely, "I don't care." Suddenly Mother's wrath appeared amazingly mild compared with the violence I'd just seen.

  "We shouldn't have gone," he continued, shaking his head slowly. "We shouldn't have done it."

  Maybe not, but we had gone, and there was no covering up that fact now.

  "I wish they hadn't busted my glasses," Simon continued. "Everything's blurry without them."

  "Papa'll get you a new pair." I sniffed loudly, then asked, "How's your head feel?"

  "Hurts some. But I think the bleeding's stopped."

  "Maybe you'll have a scar like Uncle Jim."

  "Maybe. If I'm lucky."

  When we reached our stop a couple blocks from home, we again thanked the driver. He said, "Have your father clean that wound with a little peroxide. That oughta take care of it." A paternal smile lighting his round face, he patted Simon's shoulder with his doughy hand before we exited the trolley.

  Simon and I approached the house with a sense of foreboding, not for ourselves, but for Aunt Sally--because of what we had to tell her. We found her and Mother, as we expected, seated in front of the radio, listening for bulletins about the riot. When we arrived, a daytime drama was playing and the radio's volume was turned down low. Aunt Sally was sitting in the rocking chair with a linen handkerchief pressed to her forehead. When she saw us, she gasped and her face blanched even paler than it already was.

  Mother jumped up from the couch, crying, "Simon! What happened to you?" She rushed to Simon, and lifting his chin with one hand, she removed the strip of my petticoat from his forehead. Gazing at the wound, she asked, "How did this happen? And where on earth is your shirt?"

  "I was hit with a rock, Mama," Simon explained. "It smashed my glasses to bits." He held up the shattered spectacles for Mother to see.

  "A rock? On your way to the drugstore?"

  "No, ma'am."

  Aunt Sally interrupted, "Where are Rufus and Luke? Lillian said you four went out together."

  "They didn't come back with us, Aunt Sally," I confessed reluctantly.

  "Then where are they?"

  I looked hesitantly from my aunt to my mother. I didn't want to admit where we had been--where my cousins were--but as I had already realized on the trolley, it couldn't be avoided.

  Mother, impatient with my hesitation, insisted, "Speak up, Virginia. Tell us what's happened. Then I want to get Simon cleaned up. Of course, your father isn't here to tend to this cut. He always seems to be absent at the worst possible moments."

  "Where is Papa, Mama?" I asked.

  "Harold got called down to the strike hospital about an hour ago, and your father decided to go with him. The reports have been that there's a bad riot going on down at the grain mill, the worst yet."

  Simon nodded his head and replied sheepishly, "We were there. We saw it."

  Aunt Sally gave a brief anguished cry and held her handkerchief up to her open mouth. Mother's face grew stormy with anger and concern. "What do you mean, you were there? Didn't you tell me you were going to the drugstore for a soda?"

  My heart beat rapidly and my palms grew sweaty. "Rufus and Luke wanted to go to the grain mill," I explained, trying at least to pass some of the blame along to my cousins, where I thought it properly belonged. "They wanted to see the picket line."

  "Dear God in heaven!" Mother cried. "Have you completely lost your senses? There've been reports of gunfire. Don't you know you could have been killed!"

  Aunt Sally leaned forward in the rocking chair and asked anxiously, "Is that where the boys are now?"

  "Yes, Aunt Sally."

  Before I could add more, Simon volunteered the dreaded information. "We saw Uncle Jim handcuffed. Two policemen were beating him and they h
andcuffed him. Rufus went out to try and help him."

  "Rufus--" Aunt Sally started. She stopped and looked up at Mother in disbelief, then patted her upper lip with the cloth she clutched in her hand. "Rufus went out into the fighting?" she asked hesitantly, as though afraid of the answer.

  Simon and I nodded in unison. "We couldn't stop him," I explained.

  "And Luke?"

  "He stayed in the alley--we were watching the riot from an alley across the way," said Simon. "We tried to get him to come home with us, but he wouldn't come."

  "I made him promise to stay put, though, and not go out into the street," I said, hoping to bring some comfort to my aunt. I don't think I was successful.

  Aunt Sally's lips moved but no words came out. She slumped back in the chair, shut her eyes, and held her hands over her heart. In a moment, two tears slid out from beneath the closed lids and slithered down her face. "Oh, Lillian!" she moaned.

  Mother left Simon to take her sister's limp hand. "It'll be all right, Sally," Mother said. "It sounds like Jim's been arrested. That means he's out of the fight. I guess he'll be taken to jail, but at least he'll be safer there than on the picket line."

  "Yes, I suppose you're right," Aunt Sally agreed. "But, Rufus--" A sob clutched her chest. Her shoulders heaved forward as she gave in to it. "They said on the radio three men are dead already--"

  I saw in my mind the man who was surprised by the bullet, how he looked as though he'd only received a bit of news he couldn't quite believe, and how he dropped to his knees and spent the last moments of his life trying to make sense of the blood oozing from the wound in his chest.

  Mother patted her sister's hand and sighed. "We can pray, Sally. Rufus was foolish to do what he did, but we can pray for his safety."

  Aunt Sally took a deep breath and held it as if she were trying to breathe in courage from the air around her. She let it out slowly, then whispered, "All right, Lillian. All right. I'll try to pray."

  After a quiet moment, Mother said, "Virginia, you stay here with Aunt Sally while I take care of Simon."

  She crossed the room to Simon, and I sat down obediently on the end of the couch near Aunt Sally's rocking chair. Just before Mother and Simon stepped out into the hall, Aunt Sally, trying bravely to smile, asked, "What did happen to your shirt, Simon?"

  But before my brother could explain, I spoke up in his defense. "There was a man lying hurt in the street not far from us. Rufus and Simon pulled him up to the sidewalk. A policeman had hit him in the head and he was bleeding, so Simon took off his shirt and wrapped it around the man's head like a bandage."

  Aunt Sally nodded in satisfaction. "Well, you're your father's son, aren't you, Simon?"

  Simon beamed and smiled broadly. Mother, her arm around Simon's shoulder, seemed less impressed. Her only response was to say, "I hate to think of what you children saw down there."

  She disappeared with Simon into Papa's office. Aunt Sally and I sat in silence, waiting for news. My aunt stared tensely at the radio while I peered at her from the corner of my eye. Her face remained ashen and even her lips were white, and I could see the pulse thumping in the hollow of her slender neck. The clock on top of the piano continued to tick away the minutes above the sheet music that Simon and I had tried to play together only a few hours before, when we were young.

  With the waves of reinforcements that came in on both sides, the riot lasted more than four hours and was finally quelled only when the governor called in the National Guard. It had been a slaughter in the streets. The last numbers we heard that night were eight dead and more than five hundred wounded. Among the fatalities were five mill workers, two policemen, and one deputy sheriff. The latter was a man who had been deputized only the day before. His actual vocation was that of selling life insurance. A young man, he left behind a wife and two small children.

  It was well after midnight when Papa and Dr. Hal returned from the strike hospital, bringing Luke with them. Luke had made his way to strike headquarters by following the cars that were hauling away the wounded picketers. He knew Dr. Hal would be there and could eventually give him a lift home.

  Mother, Aunt Sally, Simon, and I were still in the parlor, our tense vigil having been interrupted only long enough to eat a bite of dinner and put Claudia and Molly to bed. Simon, who hadn't wanted to go to his own room, was asleep on the couch with his bandaged head resting on Mother's lap. Aunt Sally sat in the rocking chair, fanning herself with one of the funeral parlor fans while staring intently at an invisible spot on the wall. I was curled up in one of the wing chairs, drowsy but avoiding sleep, fearing the dreams that might come when I shut my eyes.

  Neither my mother nor my aunt had asked me to go into detail of what I'd seen at the grain mill, and I didn't want to tell them. If I had had to put it into words, if I had had to say, "I saw a man die," then I could no longer deny the reality of it. The death would become fact, and I couldn't pretend that it wasn't so. And it was just too awful to believe.

  Mother allowed me to stay up with her and Aunt Sally, knowing instinctively that I needed to be near them. We had turned off the radio a couple of hours earlier. Mother was reading aloud from the Psalms while Aunt Sally and I listened. At least I tried to listen, but I found it difficult to concentrate on the words. The scenes from that afternoon kept wanting to replay themselves in my mind, and I had to consciously push them away.

  Only when we heard the faint crunching of the Buick's tires over the gravel in the alley did Mother abruptly stop reading and Aunt Sally turn her eyes from the spot on the wall.

  "They're home," Mother announced mildly, as though they were returning from an ordinary house call. She closed the Bible and put it aside, then lifted Simon's head gently from her lap and slipped out from beneath his sleeping form.

  Aunt Sally jumped up from the chair and left it momentarily rocking without her. Still clutching her tear-moistened handkerchief to her heart, she rushed across the parlor toward the kitchen, with Mother and me following.

  "Oh, Luke! Thank God!" I heard Aunt Sally exclaim in the next moment, and when I got to the kitchen, she was down on her knees with her arms about her youngest child. She was crying again, and her shoulders shivered as she sobbed.

  "Aw, I'm all right, Ma," Luke assured her. "You don't have to cry." His hair stuck up in all directions, and his eyes had the glassy look of interrupted sleep. One side of his overalls was undone, and the bib hung lopsided in front while the strap trailed him like a tail.

  Aunt Sally continued to cling to Luke as she looked up at Papa and Dr. Hal. Both men appeared heavy with fatigue. Their faces sagged under the weight of overwork. I'd never seen Dr. Hal look so middle-aged, nor Papa so old. Funny, you could leave the house one age and only a short time later come back another.

  "Where's Rufus?" Aunt Sally asked anxiously.

  "He's all right, Sally," Papa said softly.

  "But where--"

  "He was asleep on one of the cots at the strike hospital by the time we left, so we decided to just let him be. Harold will go down in the morning and bring him home."

  "But is he hurt?"

  Dr. Hal shook his head. "Nothing serious. Just some cuts and bruises. Worst thing is a bump on the back of his head. Must have been a billy club that knocked him out, but there was so much going on at once that he's not sure exactly what hit him. By the time he was brought to us at the strike hospital, though, he was talking and coherent and aching to go back out into the fight." Dr. Hal let go a little sniff of a chuckle. "Of course we didn't let him go, and finally he gave up and fell asleep. He was one of the lucky ones--lucky he wasn't hurt bad and lucky he didn't get arrested."

  "But what could he have been thinking to go out there in the middle of a riot... ?" Her voice trailed off. Still on her knees, she looked at Luke.

  "They were beating up on Pa," Luke explained. "You couldn't expect Rufus to just stand by and watch, could ya?"

  Aunt Sally dropped her head. "Oh, Rufus," she whispered.

>   Mother, ever practical, stood at the pantry door tying on her apron. "You men must be starving," she said. "Sit down and let me fix you something to eat."

  "I'm starving too, Aunt Lillian!" Luke cried, pulling away from his mother's grasp.

  "I figured as much. Go on and have a seat. It won't be a moment." While Mother pulled three plates out of the cupboard, Papa and Dr. Hal seated themselves wearily at the table, dropping their medical bags on the floor beside them. Papa briefly rubbed his forehead with both hands, then acknowledging my presence for the first time, he smiled up at me. I stood shyly against one wall, not quite sure I belonged in this group but wanting to. Wanting, most of all, simply to be in the same room as Papa.

  Luke scrambled into a chair, and Aunt Sally sat down at the table beside him. Tentatively, her words almost a whisper, she asked the question that was on all of our minds but we dreaded to ask. "Any word about Jim?"

  Dr. Hal sighed. "He wasn't at the strike hospital. Word has it he was taken to jail."

  "A lot of men were arrested today," Papa added. "Those jail cells are going to be plenty crowded tonight. They'll probably be taking the overflow to the next town, maybe even to the town after that."

  Mother set heaping plates of cold chicken, potato salad, and homemade bread on the table, following those with three large glasses of lemonade. Luke and Dr. Hal ate hungrily. Papa picked at the food and chewed thoughtfully.

  "I'm surprised you didn't have to stay down there all night," Mother stated.

  "Well, Dr. Wilson and all four nurses are still there. And of course the worst cases were farmed out to the hospitals--every hospital in the city is packed to the gills about now," Papa explained. "The strike hospital isn't set up to do complicated surgery, and a good number of men needed bullets removed."

  "Will did take out one bullet," Dr. Hal interjected. "Rex Atwater caught one in the shoulder. He refused to leave headquarters, though. He knew he'd be arrested if he did."

  "How is he?" Mother asked.

  "As well as can be expected, I think," replied Papa. "He's as stubborn as a mule, that one. He wouldn't even accept chloroform. Said he needed to stay alert, so I had to operate without--" He looked up at me again and interrupted himself. He didn't like to go into too many details about his work when his children were around. "Well," he continued, stabbing his fork into a piece of potato, "there's always the risk of infection, but my instinct tells me he'll pull through without complications."