Ernie's Ark (18 page)

The next words—
the corporate barracudas whose jagged teeth have bitten into the very flesh of our community
—remain unspoken. The class has heard this speech before. Mrs. T clears her throat, looks as martyred as possible, and finishes up: “Well. Heaven forbid I should violate any mandates.” She folds her arms. “Thank you, Francine. And I hope the rest of you were listening for a change. Now. Chapter questions on the Constitution.”

Francine goes for her book, but just then Mrs. T clears her
throat again, loud. “Speaking of the Constitution,” she says, leveling them with a look that could fell trees, “freedom of speech is a
right
. It’s a
right,
people.” She waits, tapping her pink fingernail against her teeth. “Well, guess what. I believe I’ve just had one of my ideas.” Everyone in the class—not Cora Spencer, not Marty Fallon—straightens up. Mrs. T notes the shift, then continues: “Consider for a moment the Reverend Jackson’s special fondness for young people and his inspiring work on their behalf.” She glares around, as if defying them to deny the frigid fact that young people are ingrates first and last. “Wouldn’t it be wonderfully a propos if one of my young people introduced Reverend Jackson at the rally?”

Francine cannot believe what she is hearing. Mrs. T has a lot of influence—Francine has seen her at the union hall, grading papers and making picket signs simultaneously—and there is no question that her wish will be somebody’s command. Already Francine imagines the surge of warmth as her friend Jesse enfolds her hand in his—the meeting of kindred spirits. Already she imagines adjusting her glasses, evening up her note cards, staring out at the multitude collected in the high school gym. Keep hope alive, she thinks. Her father will beam from the crowd, and Cindy, and Kenny (who’s been nothing but kind since returning home); maybe they’ll call London to let her mother know.

Face flaming, she looks up at Mrs. T. But Mrs. T is looking at Eddie Little. Everybody is looking at Eddie Little, son of Roy Little, president of Local 20. Francine has just given a report on the Reverend Jesse Jackson, has delivered a pitch-perfect imitation of his famous lines, but still everybody is looking at Eddie Little.

Then Mrs. T snaps up a notepad and aims her pen. “Let’s get a ballpark on how many of you would like to be considered
for the privilege.” Three hands shoot up, three volunteers, three combatants: Francine, Eddie, and Meghan Bouvier, who is beautiful, period, and has won every single thing she has ever competed for. Except this time. She wonders if Meghan will mind. If it hurts more to lose if you never lose.

“Fine,” Mrs. T says, scribbling the names on a pad. “Tomorrow. Two-minute practice intro from each of you. The class will vote.” Most of the time she treats the class like feeble-minded inmates, except for the times, as now, when she treats them like game-show contestants.

When the end-of-day bell rings, Francine marshals her courage and waylays Eddie Little at his locker. “I’m very qualified,” she says, her body humming with panic; she fears her lips may tremble clean off her face. “You heard my report, right?”

Eddie looks at her, registering surprise. She has never spoken to him outside of class, though he was her peer reviewer for language-arts last fall.
Good similars,
he’d written on her poem, a long rhyming poem called “The Fifteen Fingers of Freedom.” Eddie is tall and well-liked. He plays basketball and this is a basketball town. Some of the other kids have stopped to gawk, and Francine feels like a big, ugly toad-person, a slug-person, a creature made of fat and slime.

“You’re not even
from
here,” Eddie says.

“My mother is,” Francine says, then corrects herself: “My stepmother.” She remembers, a second too late, that Cindy was once married to Eddie’s uncle. That Cindy broke Eddie’s uncle’s heart into about four million pieces.

Eddie blinks at her. “She’s not from here, either,” he says, meaning: Not a mill family.

This is the worst thing you can say in this town, at this time.

“She grew up right on Lincoln Street,” Francine says, suddenly enraged on Cindy’s behalf. “She’s your
aunt
.”

“Not anymore,” Eddie informs her. But he is not a mean boy—there are mean boys in this school, and Eddie Little is not one of them—so he knocks her gently on the shoulder and says, “May the best man win.”

Which allows Francine to flee the hallway still in possession of a shred of dignity. This is the first time she has been touched by a boy. For this she will be grateful to Eddie Little, she is sure, all her life.

When Francine arrives at the union hall on the following Saturday, two hours early for Jesse’s arrival, something is wrong. The usual people are there: Eddie’s father, Roy Little; three of Eddie’s uncles, including the one whose heart Cindy broke; Mrs. Therriault’s husband, talking on the phone with his face afire; Allan Landry, in his too-small T-shirt, belly half-mooning above his belt; and about twenty more of the inside circle, everybody talking at once, low and secret and disbelieving.

There has been bad news.

Two other phones are ringing and nobody answers. Voices crack and thunk, the phone ringing over them.

Francine sets to work, trying to make herself both useful and inconspicuous. She joins two women boxing food at a long table. “What’s going on?” she asks, grabbing an empty crate.

One of the women is old, the other just looks old. The old woman—a parishioner from St. Anne’s—shakes her head. “Maybe Jackson canceled, is all I can think of.”

The other woman—a lean, leathery striker whom Francine has seen shrieking on the gauntlet—lifts her chin. “Big surprise,” she mutters. She picks up a canned ham and looks at it. She wants it.

“He wouldn’t cancel,” Francine says, eyeing the ham. “Jesse would never do that.”

“Right,” the woman says. “They’re so famous for keeping their word.”

An uncomfortable silence descends upon them. The old woman pretends not to have heard.
Thwuk, thwuk, thwuk
, goes the food into the boxes. The leathery woman’s bunions, pink and bare, poke out from the ripped uppers of her sneakers.

Francine moves away, down the length of the table where she can work alone. She boxes up a couple of cans of soup, some spaghetti sauce, tins of cat food and tuna fish, some toilet paper: a little of everything necessary to get through a day without crossing over. The box will be delivered without fanfare, anonymously, to a striker family with no second income and a cleaned-out savings account. When she peers sideways at the women, she catches the leathery woman, whose bunions must be cold, staring at the older woman’s hair, which has just been permed. Not everybody has suffered equally. At first everybody was equally angry, their anger a straight, perfectly directed line, like an electrical current running from Abbott Falls, Maine, to the headquarters of Atlantic Pulp & Paper in New York City. Now the long months have intervened. Their anger is no longer perfect. It is less an electrical current than a lightning bolt, jagged and hard to control and not as fussy about its target. How many times in these long months have those two women stood here, on what Ray Little calls this hallowed floor? What have they really been thinking?
Solidarity forevvver
,
solidarity forevvver,
they have sung many times, standing on this hallowed floor:
The union makes us stronnng!
Francine loves that song, she hums it all the time. But solidarity is not a floor, she has found. It is a ladder. People end up on different rungs.

She lifts a crate of oranges and divvies them up. Along the upper balcony of the cavernous room—a century ago it was a grange hall, and it still seems suited to farmers gathering to talk prices and play mandolins—she can see Roy Little pacing frantically, arms flying, in a wide blade of light from a partly open door. Mrs. T isn’t here tonight, but her husband is, slamming down a phone and yelling something across to Allan Landry.

Something awful has happened; the women sense it, too. They stop, looking upward.

Eddie is in there, Francine sees, the only other kid in the place, because he has been chosen to deliver Jesse’s introduction. Meghan Bouvier got six votes and Eddie got the remaining nineteen. Eddie and Meghan voted for each other and Francine voted for Eddie. He leaps out of the office and tears down the stairs, weaving his way through snags of chairs, tables laden with clothes, food, brochures, lumber, sheets of cardboard.

Francine steels herself: “What happened?” she calls to him. She doesn’t want it to be that Jesse canceled; she doesn’t want that poor woman with her bunions to be right.

Eddie looks at her, hesitates, then walks over, flush with news. “They’re folding up shop. McCoy and them. It’s over.”

McCoy means Henry John McCoy, CEO of Atlantic Pulp & Paper. The rest she does not understand. The women have already headed up the stairs, mouths working. Francine looks helplessly at Eddie.

“They’re putting the mill up for sale,” Eddie explains, slowly, as if speaking to an imbecile. But he looks frightened. “It’s over.”

“The strike’s over?” Francine says, not believing. “The strike’s over?”

Eddie grimaces. “
Everything’s
over. McCoy’s firing the scabs after tonight’s shift.” He looks at her, his blue eyes intent. “We’re not strikers anymore. We’re just working stiffs at a plant closing.”

Though she understands that Eddie has just snatched those words from his father, she envies him the word
we
. “What about Jesse?” Francine asks. “Is he still coming?”

Eddie snorts. “Yeah. A lotta good it’ll do now.” Then he wings past her, probably fetching something for his father, something important and secret.

Word has gone out, instantly, the way it always does. People arrive in small, panicky surges. Some of the men start putting chairs in place. There will be a makeshift meeting before the rally. Francine races over to the coffeemaker, pours a cup for Roy—cream and two sugars, this is how he takes it—and climbs to the inner sanctum with the cup proffered. Roy, engulfed by questions, his shirt sweat-stained, crumpled by worry, spots her and yells over a clanging phone: “Will somebody get that kid out of here?”

Somebody—a woman, someone she doesn’t know—takes Francine gently by the shoulders and guides her out the door. “Not now, dear,” she says, as if Francine were an orphaned animal she had to be kind to. Francine shrinks into the doorway, recognizing the tone as the one her father takes most of the time, and her teachers, and even some of the nicer girls in her class.

It is over. It is all collapsing as she stands there with an unwanted coffee. A couple of reporters, jackets flaring, enter the
hall, a news truck pulls up in front, word is spreading like an oil spill in this town she does not belong to. Today’s news is one of those turning points—there have been so many! fourteen months!—that will bring back the national news people, their cigarette-smoking cameramen and boom operators and anchorpeople in makeup, some important and some not, you can tell by who jumps when who snaps. And Francine will not be interviewed for anything, will be passed over in any crowd she places herself in, for she is not informed, not pretty, not from here. Jesse will be arriving soon, altering his poetry on the fly, speaking not to righteous strikers but to dazed, defeated workers who have just been slapped into the street. Jesse is good at this; his speech will be recorded and shown, his show of solidarity.
I understand.
Even the woman with bunions, her eyes will fill. Jesse will come here, slip out of his jacket, pull one of those red T-shirts over his bleached white shirt. He will speak. They will listen.
Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it.
They will believe, Yes, we can. We can make it. And Francine will squeeze and shuffle toward the front, where he will fail to notice her, where his eyes will pass over the professor’s daughter with a fax machine in her bedroom who has not known a moment’s deprivation, not one, since the day she was born.

It is all collapsing. She spies Eddie rabbitting back and forth, vibrating with responsibility. The place balloons with news, with people, with a muted, unappealing hybrid of despair and resentment that Francine has not sensed before. She can almost smell it. And because she has no claim on the thing that is collapsing, Francine slips into the street and heads into the teeming evening with the coffee cup still in her hand.

It takes her a long time to get home. She stops every so often just to listen to the faraway hissing of the mill, to watch the last of the smoke and steam. By the time she reaches her white house on the corner of Randall and Pine, it is time for the rally. She listens, and fancies she can barely make out crowd sounds. She puts the cup under the hedge and goes in.