The 42nd Parallel (15 page)

a squirrel was scolding in the whiteoak but the Pennypacker girls all the young ladies in their best hats singing the anthem who were the Molly Maguires? thoughts, bulletholes in an old barn abandoned mine pits black skeleton tipples weedgrown dumps who were the Molly Maguires? but it was too late you couldn’t talk in church and all the young ladies best hats and pretty pink green blue yellow dresses and the squirrel scolding who were the Molly Maguires?

and before I knew it it was communion and I wanted to say I hadn’t been baptized but all eyes looked shut up when I started to whisper to Con

communion was grape juice in little glasses and little squares of stale bread and you had to gulp the bread and put your handkerchief over your mouth and look holy and the little glasses made a funny sucking noise and all the quiet church in the middle of the sunny brightblue sunday in the middle of whiteoaks wigwagging and the smell of fries from the white house and the blue quiet sunday smoke of chimneys from stoves where fried chicken sizzled and fritters and brown gravy set back to keep hot

in the middle of squirrels and minetipples in the middle of the blue Pennsylvania summer sunday the little glasses sucking to get the last drop of communion

and I felt itchy in the back of my neck would I be struck by lightning eating the bread drinking the communion me not believing or baptized or Presbyterian and who were the Molly Maguires? masked men riding at night shooting bullets into barns at night what were they after in the oldtime night?

church was over and everybody was filing out and being greeted as they went out and everybody had a good appetite after communion but I couldn’t eat much itchy in the back of the neck scary with masked men riding Molly Maguires

FORFEIT STARS BY DRINKING

“Oh bury me not

            
on the lone prairie”

They heeded not his dying prayer

They buried him there on the lone prairie

COLLEGE HEAD DENIES KISSES

then our courage returned for we knew that rescue was near at hand, we shouted and yelled again but did not know whether we were heard. Then came the unsealing and I lost consciousness. All the days and nights fell back and I dropped into a sleep

VOTE AT MIDNIGHT ON ALTMAN’S FATE

This is the fourth day we have been down here. That is what I think but our watches stopped. I have been waiting in the dark because we have been eating the wax from our safety lamps. I have also eaten a plug of tobacco, some bark and some of my shoe. I could only chew it. I hope you can read this. I am not afraid to die. O holy Virgin have mercy on me. I think my time has come. You know what my property is. We worked for it together and it is all yours. This is my will and you must keep it. You have been a good wife. May the holy virgin guard you. I hope this reaches you sometime and you can read it. It has been very quiet down here and I wonder what has become of our comrades. Goodby until heaven shall bring us together.

Girls Annoyer Lashed in Public

COVETS OSTRICHES

In a little box just six by three

And his bones now rot on the lone prairie

Mac went down to the watertank beyond the yards to wait for a chance to hop a freight. The old man’s hat and his ruptured shoes were ashen gray with dust; he was sitting all hunched up with his head between his knees and didn’t make a move until Mac was right up to him. Mac sat down beside him. A rank smell of feverish sweat came from the old man. “What’s the trouble, daddy?”

“I’m through, that’s all . . . I been a lunger all my life an’ I guess it’s got me now.” His mouth twisted in a spasm of pain. He let his head droop between his knees. After a minute he raised his head again, making little feeble gasps with his mouth like a dying fish. When he got his breath he said, “It’s a razor a’ slicin’ off my lungs every time. Stand by, will you, kid?” “Sure I will,” said Mac.

“Listen, kid, I wanna go West to where there’s trees an’ stuff . . . You got to help me into one o’ them cars. I’m too weak for the rods . . . Don’t let me lay down . . . I’ll start bleedin’ if I lay down, see.” He choked again.

“I got a coupla bucks. I’ll square it with the brakeman maybe.”

“You don’t talk like no vag.”

“I’m a printer. I wanta make San Francisco soon as I can.”

“A workin’ man; I’ll be a son of a bitch. Listen here, kid . . . I ain’t worked in seventeen years.”

The train came in and the engine stood hissing by the watertank.

Mac helped the old man to his feet and got him propped in the corner of a flatcar that was loaded with machine parts covered with a tarpaulin. He saw the fireman and the engineer looking at them out of the cab, but they didn’t say anything.

When the train started the wind was cold. Mac took off his coat and put it behind the old man’s head to keep it from jiggling with the rattling of the car. The old man sat with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. Mac didn’t know whether he was dead or not. It got to be night. Mac was terribly cold and huddled shivering in a fold of tarpaulin in the other end of the car.

In the gray of dawn Mac woke up from a doze with his teeth chattering. The train had stopped on a siding. His legs were so numb it was some time before he could stand on them. He went to look at the old man, but he couldn’t tell whether he was dead or not. It got a little lighter and the east began to glow like the edge of a piece of iron in a forge. Mac jumped to the ground and walked back along the train to the caboose.

The brakeman was drowsing beside his lantern. Mac told him that an old tramp was dying in one of the flatcars. The brakeman had a small flask of whisky in his good coat that hung on a nail in the caboose. They walked together up the track again. When they got to the flatcar it was almost day. The old man had flopped over on his side. His face looked white and grave like the face of a statue of a Civil War general. Mac opened his coat and the filthy torn shirts and underclothes and put his hand on the old man’s chest. It was cold and lifeless as a board. When he took his hand away there was sticky blood on it.

“Hemorrhage,” said the brakeman, making a perfunctory clucking noise in his mouth.

The brakeman said they’d have to get the body off the train. They laid him down flat in the ditch beside the ballast with his hat over his face. Mac asked the brakeman if he had a spade so that they could bury him, so that the buzzards wouldn’t get him, but he said no, the gandywalkers would find him and bury him. He took Mac back to the caboose and gave him a drink and asked him all about how the old man had died.

Mac beat his way to San Francisco.

Maisie was cold and bitter at first, but after they’d talked a little while she said he looked thin and ragged as a bum and burst into tears and kissed him. They went to get her savings out of the bank and bought Mac a suit and went down to City Hall and got married without saying anything to her folks. They were both very happy going down on the train to San Diego, and they got a furnished room there with kitchen privileges and told the landlady they’d been married a year. They wired Maisie’s folks that they were down there on their honeymoon and would be back soon.

Mac got work there at a job printer’s and they started payments on a bungalow at Pacific Beach. The work wasn’t bad and he was pretty happy in his quiet life with Maisie. After all, he’d had enough bumming for a while. When Maisie went to the hospital to have the baby, Mac had to beg a two months’ advance of pay from Ed Balderston, his boss. Even at that they had to take out a second mortgage on the bungalow to pay the doctor’s bill. The baby was a girl and had blue eyes and they named her Rose.

Life in San Diego was sunny and quiet. Mac went to work mornings on the steamcar and came back evenings on the steamcar and Sundays he puttered round the house or sometimes sat on one of the beaches with Maisie and the kid. It was understood between them now that he had to do everything that Maisie wanted because he’d given her such a tough time before they were married. The next year they had another kid and Maisie was sick and in hospital a long time after, so that now all that he could do with his pay each week was cover the interest on his debts, and he was always having to kid the grocerystore along and the milkman and the bakery to keep their chargeaccounts going from week to week. Maisie read a lot of magazines and always wanted new things for the house, a pianola, or a new icebox, or a fireless cooker. Her brothers were making good money in the real estate business in Los Angeles and her folks were coming up in the world. Whenever she got a letter from them she’d worry Mac about striking his boss for more pay or moving to a better job.

When there was anybody of the wobbly crowd in town down on his uppers or when they were raising money for strike funds or anything like that he’d help them out with a couple of dollars, but he never could do much for fear Maisie would find out about it. Whenever she found
The Appeal to Reason
or any other radical paper round the house she’d burn it up, and then they’d quarrel and be sulky and make each other’s lives miserable for a few days, until Mac decided what was the use, and never spoke to her about it. But it kept them apart almost as if she thought he was going out with some other woman.

One Saturday afternoon Mac and Maisie had managed to get a neighbor to take care of the kids and were going into a vaudeville theater when they noticed a crowd at the corner in front of Marshall’s drugstore. Mac elbowed his way through. A thin young man in blue denim was standing close to the corner lamppost where the firealarm was, reading the Declaration of Independence:
When in the course of human events
. . . A cop came up and told him to move on . . .
inalienable right
. . .
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now there were two cops. One of them had the young man by the shoulders and was trying to pull him loose from the lamppost.

“Come on, Fainy, we’ll be late for the show,” Maisie kept saying.

“Hey, get a file; the bastard’s locked himself to the post,” he heard one cop say to the other. By that time Maisie had managed to hustle him to the theater boxoffice. After all, he’d promised to take her to the show and she hadn’t been out all winter. The last thing he saw the cop had hauled off and hit the young guy in the corner of the jaw.

Mac sat there in the dark stuffy theater all afternoon. He didn’t see the acts or the pictures between the acts. He didn’t speak to Maisie. He sat there feeling sick in the pit of his stomach. The boys must be staging a free-speech fight right here in town. Now and then he glanced at Maisie’s face in the dim glow from the stage. It had puffed out a little in wellsatisfied curves like a cat sitting by a warm stove, but she was still a good looker. She’d already forgotten everything and was completely happy looking at the show, her lips parted, her eyes bright, like a little girl at a party. “I guess I’ve sold out to the sonsobitches allright, allright,” he kept saying to himself.

The last number on the programme was Eva Tanguay. The nasal voice singing
I’m Eva Tanguay, I don’t care
brought Mac out of his sullen trance. Everything suddenly looked bright and clear to him, the proscenium with its heavy gold fluting, the people’s faces in the boxes, the heads in front of him, the tawdry powdery mingling of amber and blue lights on the stage, the scrawny woman flinging herself around inside the rainbow hoop of the spotlight.

The papers say that I’m insane

But . . . I . . . don’t . . . care.

Mac got up. “Maisie, I’ll meet you at the house. You see the rest of the show. I feel kind of bum.” Before she could answer, he’d slipped out past the other people in the row, down the aisle and out. On the street there was nothing but the ordinary Saturday afternoon crowd. Mac walked round and round the downtown district. He didn’t even know where I.W.W. headquarters was. He had to talk to somebody. As he passed the Hotel Brewster he caught a whiff of beer. What he needed was a drink. This way he was going nuts.

At the next corner he went into a saloon and drank four rye whiskies straight. The bar was lined with men drinking, treating each other, talking loud about baseball, prizefights, Eva Tanguay and her Salome dance.

Beside Mac was a big redfaced man with a widebrimmed felt hat on the back of his head. When Mac reached for his fifth drink this man put his hand on his arm and said, “Pard, have that on me if you don’t mind . . . I’m celebratin’ today.” “Thanks; here’s lookin’ at you,” said Mac. “Pard, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so, you’re drinkin’ like you wanted to drink the whole barrel up at once and not leave any for the rest of us . . . Have a chaser.” “All right, bo,” said Mac. “Make it a beer chaser.”

“My name’s McCreary,” said the big man. “I just sold my fruit crop. I’m from up San Jacinto way.”

“So’s my name McCreary, too,” said Mac.

They shook hands heartily.

“By the living jumbo, that’s a coincidence . . . We must be kin or pretty near it . . . Where you from, pard?”

“I’m from Chicago, but my folks was Irish.”

“Mine was from the East, Delaware . . . but it’s the good old Scotch-Irish stock.”

They had more drinks on that. Then they went to another saloon where they sat in a corner at a table and talked. The big man talked about his ranch and his apricot crop and how his wife was bedridden since his last child had come. “I’m awful fond of the old gal, but what can a feller do? Can’t get gelded just to be true to your wife.” “I like my wife swell,” said Mac, “and I’ve got swell kids. Rose is four and she’s beginning to read already and Ed’s about learnin’ to walk. . . . But hell, before I was married I used to think I might amount to somethin’ in the world . . . I don’t mean I thought I was anythin’ in particular . . . You know how it is.” “Sure, pard, I used to feel that way when I was a young feller.” “Maisie’s a fine girl, too, and I like her better all the time,” said Mac, feeling a warm tearing wave of affection go over him, like sometimes a Saturday evening when he’d helped her bathe the kids and put them to bed and the room was still steamy from their baths and his eyes suddenly met Maisie’s eyes and there was nowhere they had to go and they were just both of them there together.