by Howard Fast
“Either buy or move back,” the shopkeeper said. “Don’t you see that customers are waiting, and with a brute your size in the way, no one can get near the stand.”
The big man explained that he was a carpenter—a good carpenter, he said almost apologetically. A good workman, with his own tools and his own nails. Wasn’t there some work he could do in return for a cup of wine? The whole shed was leaning. He could set it right, and make it strong enough to stand the next twelve months.
“All day long, I’ve had offers like that,” the shopkeeper complained. “This is a land cursed with carpenters and bricklayers, and they’re all as rag-tag as you are. Either buy or get out of here.”
He bought a cup of water and brought it back to his wife, and when she tried to make him drink some of it, he lied and said he had a cup back at the wine-stand. She drank the water and ate a piece of dry bread from a pouch on the donkey, and she savored every drop of it. “Water is so good,” she told him, and he said that one of the reasons he loved her so was the pleasure she took in simple things that people should have as a matter of course, if the land wasn’t so cursed with leeches and bloodsuckers, squeezing the last ounce of life out of it.
“And do you mean,” she smiled, “that I should not take pleasure from my baby?”
“It will be a strong, healthy baby, and why not?” But one of the others under the olive tree remarked that the way it was with working people these days, maybe a baby was luckier not to be born …
When he helped her back onto the donkey, for them to continue on their way, she winced with pain. Was it the pains, he asked anxiously—the pains that meant the child was beginning to come. She answered that she thought not, but the truth of it was that she couldn’t be sure. It seemed to her that she had a pain just like it about an hour ago, but she didn’t want to tell him that and add to the burden he already carried. Also, she noticed now that the dry dust was beginning to pick up even where it was not stirred by the feet of the travellers, and the yellow grass began to twist back and forth. The hot wind was beginning, and if the wind grew into the wild blast of a dry storm, what would they do then, and how would her baby be born and how would she live through it? But her instinct was to protect her husband, feeling like a mother to him as well as the unborn child and vastly more knowledgeable and competent over the whole situation.
So they traveled on, and she was glad to hear her husband humming under his breath now, the way he hummed when he stood at his bench and there was enough work for his big, dexterous hands. But then his humming stopped, for he too had noticed the rising wind, and the whole company of travelers stretched out along the road quickened their pace, as if they too had suddenly realized that this was no time for the traveler to be caught out on the open road. And as if to make the matter more urgent, the sun began to set with the strange quickness that is a part of sunset in that country, and in the east, a dark band filled the rim of the sky. In that moment, the woman felt the third pain, and now she groaned aloud in spite of herself, and her husband cried,
“My darling, my darling, only a little while now—see, there is our birthplace,” pointing to a village that nestled in the valley below, but knowing too that his father and his mother were both dead and that strangers lived in his father’s house, and was he to go to them to plead for floor-room, for a woman to give birth? Many things he had done in his years, but he was a man with tools, a carpenter, a man who had skill and cunning in his hands, and never in all his life had he pleaded for anything.
It was dark, wholly dark, with the hot wind and the hot sand singing in their ears when they reached the one inn the village boasted, and now her pains were coming twice an hour, and she could no longer even think of controlling her moans. He helped her off the donkey, and then, prodded by that terrible sense of the urgency of birth that is so frightening and strange to any man, put his arm around her and helped her to the door of the inn. But the innkeeper himself must have seen them and measured them, for he greeted them with his arms spread, but not in welcome. “My inn is full,” he said, and behind him was the smell of food, and the sound of men and women talking and laughing and even singing with the joy of being out of the wild wind.
“I am a man of your own people,” answered the carpenter, “and my wife is in a family way. Will you refuse me shelter?”
“Where are you from?” asked the innkeeper suspiciously.
“We are from Galilee, and down here to the South to be numbered and taxed, even as the emperor ordered.”
“That I might have known,” the innkeeper nodded, “for every scum and dirt and inequity breeds in Galilee. There would be peace in the land, were it not for you wild men of Galilee, who are never content with what is, but must always be dreaming your crazy dreams of something that can never be, and always screaming about the rights of people, when the only right you know is the right to hate the rich and love the poor. I see a hammer and adz at your belt, but I’ll wager something that there’s a knife under your apron, and I want no men of Galilee in my house.”
“There is a knife under my belt,” the carpenter thought, “and I would like to give you a touch of it, damn you,” but he said quietly and evenly, “I am a plain working man and a good carpenter, and if you give my wife shelter this night, so that she may deliver her child—being already in pain—I will be your debtor by much, and I will work a fortnight and fix whatever needs fixing about your house.”
“My house is full. Where shall I shelter her? Have you any money?”
The carpenter felt in his pouch and found the three silver coins that were left, and he held them out wordlessly. The landlord took them. “My house is full. I would not spit on this much money. I throw more than this to the beggars who come to my door. But because your woman is in pain, you can take her to the stable.”
The carpenter stood rigidly as the door closed in his face, and then without saying another word, he led his wife to the stable, and they went in with their donkey.
They were only in time, for now the sand was driving and whipping with wild fury, boding ill for whoever was without shelter, without cover; but the, stable was only the lesser of two evils, hot, humid with fetid smell of beasts and the droppings of beast. When she felt that smell, her stomach turned over, her body shook and then the pains began, one after another. By her side bided her husband, a slow and patient man, slow to anger, slow to resist, slow to raise his hand against those who harried him all his life …
That was the stable into which the shepherds came, driving their sheep into shelter, out of the wind that raged and killed. They said a prayer to God for his mercy, and then they heard the crying of a child, which frightened them, and one of them who had a lamp struck flint and steel until it burned the wick. They saw the child, new born, in the manger, but not yet did they see the mother or the father. They were simple people, terrified as their sheep were terrified by the sandstorm, full of superstitious awe for whatever could not be explained immediately, and therefor they said, one after another,
“It is a miracle!”
“A child is born among the beasts, and there is no mother!”
“Surely, this is the holy child!”
And then they whimpered with terror and turned to flee as the great dark form of the father rose out of the shadows; but he smiled tiredly at them, and they saw that it was just a carpenter, driven to shelter like themselves.
“Peace,” he said to them, and he lifted up the child.
“The holy child—”
The father said that all children were holy, and why did they single one out? And then they followed him with the lamp as he went into the shadows and gave the child to the mother to nurse; and then he explained to them that because there was no other place for them, the child of a carpenter and his wife was born here in the barn.
One of them said that surely this was a good omen, and another of the simple shepherds insisted that it was a miracle—until the carpenter rose up from his wife and agreed, for now
that he had watched and felt and listened, he knew that there was no birth in the world that was not in the way of being a miracle.
“And from such a child, there will be great things,” the shepherd insisted.
“Great things,” nodded the carpenter, “for maybe he will have courage where I was afraid, and maybe when the whip is on his back, he will tear it out of the hand of the man who wields it. That will be as it may. For my part, I’ll teach him to be a carpenter and a good workman. I’ll teach him to love what is right and hate what is wrong. But the chances are that he’ll be no better off than I am, for how to be rich—that I cannot teach him.”
The shepherds nodded, but still they were afraid of the big man with the dark beard. One of them went to the stable door and opened it. The storm was over, and in the sky, there was a white moon and many stars, whereupon, they gathered their sheep together and led them out, back to the pastures. But still they talked among themselves of what they had seen, and still it seemed to them to be a wonderful happening.
It was something they remembered, though they never knew the names of the man, the woman or the child; yet even that did not interfere with the quality of their recollection, nor did it matter which child they remembered or how many were born in stables or huts or open fields. Until they were old men, they told the story over and over, for it was a moment in their lives that exalted them, a moment when they realized, however fleetingly, the miracle of life itself, the sorrow that finds redemption in an infant, and the eternal hope for truth and justice which is the birthright of all the children of the oppressed until at last one of them shall inherit the fulfillment of this hope.
My Father
I WAS NEVER SURPRISED TO FIND THAT MY FATHER HAD been something else in his time than I had ever dreamed of; I suppose the only thing he had never been was rich. He told me once that for two years or so, he had been gripperman on the cable cars—that is until they decided to do away with cable cars in New York entirely. It surprised me less that he had been a gripperman—something I had never heard of before—than that there had ever been cable cars in New York City; but he explained that there were in the old times, running south from Forty-Second Street, on Seventh Avenue, I believe.
Years later, in San Francisco, I spent the better part of a day riding the cable cars up Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill and all the other hills and little valleys that make San Francisco like no other city on earth; and for hours I watched the gripperman handle his three long levers with grace and competence,, a wonderful survival of a world that is no more.
So there it was, and my father had been a gripperman. He had large, beautiful and strong hands, and he was superbly muscled, lean and hard to the day of his death, and always from the beginning of memory, I remember those hands. They were the hands of a working man; they were his rock and his foundation, and all he ever had in the world were those two hands.
I am not completely certain of what work he did first. He went to work at the age of eleven, as I did, but he talked little of the work he did before he was seventeen years old. I think he worked in a stable in downtown New York—that was in the 1880s—curried horses, cleaned wagons, but there were many other things too.
In those times, man and boy too worked a twelve-hour day, and fourteen hours often enough, and when my father was fifteen years old he went into a sweatshop and worked from seven in the morning until eight at night. He was of a generation of working people to whom laughter and joy came hard and uneasily, and I will never forget the glad excitement of his face when he did laugh, the sunshine breaking through, and the wonderful pleasure that I and my brothers knew because he was laughing.
There was a time when he had been on strike for seven months and then, when the strike was broken, laid off for longer than I care to remember, and the burden of support for the family, of eating and drinking and paying some of the rent, so we would not be put out on the street, fell upon my older brother and myself.
I was twelve then, and we had a newspaper route which brought in ten dollars a week for the work of both of us, and it meant that on Sundays we had to rise at three in the morning, in the cold darkness of night, dress, and drag our aching, over-used bodies to the collating station. My mother was long dead, and my father was father, mother, and guardian angel to three small boys—with never enough to feed them or clothe them or to overcome his guilt at being able to do neither.
The only compensation was that strange communion of working people which bound us together, and on those Saturday nights he would rise, a half hour before we did, prepare breakfast, wake us gently, help us to dress, feed us breakfast and watch us go—all with that silent anguish in his face that only the poor know, and having once seen, the poor can never properly forget.
I never really believed that my father had ever been young, and when he talked of his youth, I always felt that he was describing a third person. There are some people who remain young and clad in youth until the day they die, even though they live to be eighty, but my father was not one of them, although there was youth enough in his body, his stride, and his amazing strength. He had the arms of a blacksmith, and they came from his years as an iron-worker.
In those days, just at the turn of the century, there was a great vogue in New York—and in other American cities too, I suppose—for wrought iron. Not only were the, new-fangled fire-escapes built to a large extent of wrought iron, but it was used ornamentally on stoops, horse-cars, wagons, for iron railings, to guard open cellars, and in a hundred other ways. Much of this iron-work was wrought in the hot forge, over charcoal fires with hammer and bellows and the strong arm of the smith, who was called in this trade, a monger—a method of working iron as old as man’s knowledge of iron. The iron sheds were on the lower East and West Sides, near the rivers, and the race of mongers were akin to the smiths who shoed the thousands of horses and the wheelwrights who repaired the thousands of iron wagon-wheels.
My father told me how as a boy he would rather be in an iron shed than in paradise, and how he would take his sandwich and can of beer in his lunch hour, squat in the open side of an iron shed, and glory in the roaring flames, the hiss of the bellows, and the mighty clang and clamor of the hammers.
He began as an apprentice of the lowest rank, a boy who ran errands, dragged iron bars, and made endless trips to the nearby saloon for beer to quench the smiths’ raging thirst. Then he became a tongs-boy, permitted to hold and move the metal as the smith worked, and finally, a full-fledged smith in a leather apron, with his own hammer to beat and subdue the red hot iron.
But even if the type and method of working iron had not gone out of existence, he would have, broken himself on the anvil; and in later years until I finally learned, I often puzzled why a man of his wit and skill could never depend on anything but his own two hands. With the end of the wrought iron industry, he became a tinsmith, but the use of tin for troughs and sinks and roofing had its own short day, and inevitably he gravitated toward the one industry in New York that increased steadily, and became a cutter in a garment factory. He had to learn a new trade, and he learned it well—and in between these three, how many others? I watched him work as a journeyman painter, and I worked with him once on a plumbing job, myself clumsy and incompetent next to his incredible hands. He had a store of patience that was inexhaustible, and his temper was as long as the time between sunrise and sunset. Only the manner of training a dollar to work for him and increase of itself was unknown to him.
My mother died when I was a little boy, leaving my father with the overwhelming task of raising three small boys. I suppose we were just as poor before my mother died, but she somehow had the skill to draw a mask over the naked face of poverty, and this my father alone could not do. Work as he would, twelve and fourteen hours a day, he still could not feed us and clothe us; and he gave away our childhood the way millions of working class fathers in so many lands gave away the childhood of their children. My older brother went to work when he was twelve, myself when I wa
s eleven—the beginning of an ache, a weariness, a tiredness that came not only out of work done, but out of play and gladness passed by. Possibly it was then that my father became old; he had to sell our youth, just as his own was sold, and his face became gray and tired, the life gone out of it.
I live in a time now when in my country the word socialism is far from popular, and communism little better than an epithet, but until I was sixteen years old, I don’t think I had ever heard those words, or if I had, that I was in any particular way conscious of their meaning. I knew that Bolshevik characterized a variety of obscenities, made plain to me by the rotogravure supplements in the Hearst newspapers, but the wild riot of rapine, starvation and murder therein described was sufficiently apart from my own experience for me to be unconcerned to any large degree.
I was then working as a messenger for the New York Public Library for the fine wage of twenty-two cents an hour—at a time when so many had no wages at all, and it was one of a dozen jobs I drifted in and out of, in spite of my father’s pleas that I learn a decent trade; but I liked books, being around them, handling them, reading them—and I read everything and anything, so long as it had the shape of a book and told a story for me to escape into. It was at this time that a librarian put into my hands George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.
She had no wish to subvert me; she was someone who became interested in me when I once happened to remark that late at night I occupied myself in writing stories, and when I gave her some to read, she observed that none of them were about my own orbit of experience. I tried to explain, and found myself explaining that I had no manner of understanding or power to understand my own orbit of experience. So she gave me one or two short pieces to whet my appetite, and then the book to satisfy it.
I didn’t like the title; the title embarrassed me. I was just turning seventeen years old, but I was a man in the earning of my daily bread, in the battles I had fought for my own survival, in the blood and filth and hardness I had encountered in my own jungle of street and work, in the profanity that marked my rich gutter speech, in my extensive if lopsided knowledge of the facts of life and biology—and I wondered what I could learn from a book earmarked for “intelligent women.”
