Onyx (60 page)

“What is it, sweet?” he whispered. The walls were thin, and Mitch and Zawitsky might be awake. Both were working full time for the union now, and it made sense for them to be occupying the children's empty bedrooms; Justin was glad to have them, but Elisse had invited them without even discussing the matter with him, and this, to Justin, somehow fit in with her new tense way and their problems in bed. “What's wrong?”

“You tell me,” she murmured back.

“Do I hurt you?”

Her lashes went down as she shook her head.

“Is it the children? Are you upset they aren't back yet?”

“I
enjoyed
it, Justin.”

“I've thought of everything that could possibly be wrong. The illness. You're doing too much, working far too hard—”

She interrupted him by pulling his head down. “If this is your idea of a postcoital compliment, forget it,” she said against his ear.

He wanted to tell her how isolated he felt, how much it darkened him, the absence of that electricity with which she had charged their most trivial touch, but stopped himself; wouldn't he sound accusatory? He lifted up onto his elbow again. “We have to leave this miserable town.”

“Because I didn't have an orgasm?”

“Since your doctor gave the go-ahead we've made love three times.”

She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation.

“Like this,” he persisted. “Properly.”

“We're being adventurous.”

“Is there somebody else?”

“Oh, Justin,” she sighed. “You make every other man look like Frankenstein's monster.

“Then tell me what it is, sweet?”

She turned her head. “Since the cervicitis it hurts a little at first.” She closed her eyes. “You mustn't notice. Please stop noticing.
Please
?” Her whisper shook and her hand clenched his beseechingly.

He kissed her hair. “I love you a bit too much, that's all.”

“I love you the same way.”

He turned off the lamp and she cuddled around him and this comforted him, yet he was unable to repress the thought that it was a poor crippled thing now, their love.

IV

Elisse needed the car to bring women to a Ladies' Auxiliary sewing circle, so Justin, who was on the six to ten shift, took the trolley. He had not thrown off the previous night's melancholy, and as he swayed along between tight-packed men in odorous clothing he was filled with wintry desolation. It was December. Nearly a year since Mitch had shown him those letters. A year ago he had hugged his children good night, a year ago his wife had not shrunk from his touch with a nervous glint in her eyes, a year ago was the land of lost content.
Whether the Brotherhood needs me, whether she wants to leave or not
, he brooded,
I must take her home
.

There were five stops at Woodland. Justin got off at the last one, and so did the remaining passengers. Everybody tramped onto the overpass. From here one could see most of the vast, lit-up industrial complex. The tops of the foundry stacks glared red against dark, racing clouds, the endless windows shed a gaudy yellow light across the snowy yards. Justin paused, recapturing the image of Tom shifting around the table models of this same scene:
How like a god
, he had thought at sixteen, and he retained the same awe. How could a single mind conceive so vast a project?

Then, one of the Lilliputians, he trotted down the iron steps.

The man punching in ahead of him had difficulty slipping his time card into the rack. It was Coleman.

In the washroom Justin hung his jacket on the hook next to Coleman's. They were of the same height, but Coleman was far thinner, a gangling boy-man entering his twenties: when he pulled off his hunter's cap his tousled blond hair, big ears, and the pale fuzz high on his cheeks made him look yet younger. This fall his parents' farm in West Virginia had been repossessed, and now the elderly couple were crowded into the frame shack with Coleman's shy, dark-haired wife and their two babies. The infant had scarlet fever—Justin had advanced a Brotherhood loan to pay the doctor.

“How's your boy?” he asked without moving his lips. A bespectacled Security guard was leaning against a sink, noting on a clipboard the badge numbers of talkers.

“Poorly, thank you,” Coleman replied from the corner of his mouth. His hands trembled as he hung up a knitted muffler.

Together they went into the roaring din of the tirebuilding room. Not a pulse could be missed in nourishing the machines, and when the whistle shrieked, men moved forward while others, sweat-drenched and drunk with fatigue, backed away.

Justin worked in a frenzy. His hands flashed about the rotating drum as he positioned rubberized fabric, winding the plies at sharp angles. A helper set more material beside his machine. When the tire was built, Justin unlocked the wide, flat cylinder from the drum, straining to slam it onto the hook that clattered by on the conveyor over his head. In the same movement he turned back to his machine. With the raucous tympany of the conveyor belt, the shrill whine of machines, the bumping drone of motors, he could not hear the footsteps of Security, but he was conscious of their eternal patrol.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw his foreman leave his desk. The short, mean little man halted behind Coleman. Coleman, thrashing like a drowning man to keep the pace, dropped a diagonal of material.

The foreman's stubby arm shot up. A relief man trotted over.

The sole support of four adults and two children was being fired for dropping rubber one time.

Justin saw Coleman's mouth jerk, the desperation of his pleas moving his gaunt collarbones. A Security duo approached, the mustached one grasping Coleman's arms behind his back while the other's left knee raised to the mountain boy's groin.

Justin felt as if every cell in his body were swelling. A red-black haze dimmed his vision. His hands ceased their weaving motion. He stood erect. Not wiping the sweat that ran down his face, he strode the few steps to the master switch.

He yanked the steel handle, pulling with his full strength.

Stillness.

Silence.

Belts no longer clanked, motors no longer whirred, drums no longer rotated.

The lines of men, sinking into the depths of this magical quiet, peered uncertainly around. They saw the frozen vignette, the mustached Security grasping Coleman, the khaki knee raised again, the red-faced foreman watching.

“
Let him go
,” Justin roared. A quality more potent than fury rang in his voice, his eyes were deep blue stones set in the hollow of his skull, and his hand clenched the lever as if it were a truncheon.

The two Security, startled, moved away from Coleman. He bent over, clutching himself. His jagged groan could be heard all the way to the windows. The Brotherhood—and most of the men in this vast downstairs shop belonged to the union—straightened their backs, gripping their heavy tire tools. Their anger traveled in waves, palpable, near visible.

“Start that damn current!” screamed the foreman.

From all over the shop came cries of other foremen: “What's with that fucking switch?” “We're falling behind!” “Turn on the damn current!”

A high-pitched Southern voice called, “Sit down!”

The mean little foreman's face had contorted. “Either you switch on the current, you cocksucker, or every man here gets his dismissal slip.…” His threat trailed on a note of querulous fear.

A large, shirtless black worker had taken a step toward him. Other men were hefting their tire tools as if to feel the weight. The mean-faced man edged toward a fire door, his metal-tipped shoes clinking loudly on the cement. Another foreman followed. A Security fingered his holster. Justin turned his sunken, furious blue gaze on the man, and he, too, headed for the fire doors. Foremen and khaki uniforms joined the exodus.

A deep voice boomed in chanting rhythm, “When they tie the can to a union man—”

Other voices joined in, “Sit down, sit down.”

The deep voice, solo again, “When they give the boot to a union man—”

“Sit down, sit down.”

The spontaneously roaring voices carried through the enormous brick building and out the windows, crossing the cold, dark yards, a thin, incongruously human sound for Woodland.

V

As foremen and Security guards jostled their way out of the tirebuilding room, Justin sat at the nearest foreman's desk, picking up the phone. He knew the instant the switchboard got wind of the strike no calls would be put through.

The chanting had ceased, and now men jabbered excitedly of their actions and emotions during the past few minutes. Justin pressed his hand over his free ear, and hearing the feminine babble of the Ladies' Auxiliary in the other, envisioned Elisse making the same gesture.

“We've done it, Elisse! It's a sit-down. Get in touch with Mitch right away. He and I have this all planned.” He was lying. Not to deceive her but to reassure the men crowding round the desk. Though at meeting after meeting the AAW had discussed sit-down strikes, Mitch and Justin and the other officials had not even the sketchiest of strategies.

Understandably.

This night, December 2, 1935, was the first time in North America that industrial workers had sat down at their machines. But Mitch, involved in the labor movement since birth, would improvise.

A husky tirebuilder next to Justin was shouting. Most of Elisse's response was inaudible. “… so sudden,” she said.

“Good for us! There's no book on warfare that doesn't recommend surprise.”

“What about Security?”

“Shuffled out into the night like lambs.”

“There's a lot more of them, Justin. And police, too.”

“Nobody's going to touch us. They're too terrified about the machinery.”

“How long will you be in there?”

“Until Tom Bridger agrees to negotiate.”

“Until there's good skiing in hell, then.”

“Track down Mitch,” he said crisply.

“I didn't mean to sound negative, darling. It's come as a big jolt. I'm worried. And so very proud—”

The line went dead.

The other departments in the tire shop had also stopped working, and the queer absence of machine noise was replaced by loudly wrought-up voices as men crowded in to report on their victories and to be regaled with differing versions of how Prof had pulled the safety switch. Justin's hand was wrung and his shoulders clapped. Coleman, center of another circle, had recovered, and his protruding, blond-downed ears were crimson.

Justin alone grasped the forces aligned against them: Dickson Keeley's Security force, the Detroit police, the National Guard, the weight of city, state, and federal governments, newspapers, public opinion, and—in his legally qualified opinion—the courts.

He looked around at the flushed, exultant men. Soon their elation would ebb away and they would be three thousand bundles of gloomy confusion ready to surrender. They must be organized. Justin's mouth set firmly, and his brows lowered thoughtfully.

He opened the foreman's drawer, finding a pencil and a stack of salmon-colored work sheets. He lined up four sheets, and without thinking reached into his work-shirt pocket for cigarettes. For economy's sake he had broken the habit that had become ingrained during those executive days when he had made out lists. Sighing, he dropped his hand.

At the top of one sheet he wrote
Committees
. Each department of the tire shop would need policing, cleaning, as well as groups to sign up those who did not yet have a union card.
It's just as well
, he thought parenthetically,
that there are no loom girls
—Onyx hired women only for the day shifts.

Food and Living Arrangements
. The building had a cafeteria in the basement, and Justin knew that Security, paranoid about strikes, had been squirreling away cases of canned goods and barrels of flour to feed possible scabs. Maybe there were army cots somewhere.

Strike Leaders
. Justin's cheeks flattened as he considered the different men. He shivered.
I shouldn't have sat down in sweat-drenched clothes
, he thought absently.

“Them shitheads!” shouted a livid mill-room worker. “They turned off the heat!”

“Oh, Jesus, we'll freeze. All we done here tonight is get ourselves fired.”

A muscle moved in Justin's forehead. He climbed on the desk. Forming a megaphone with his hands he called, “So they think they can freeze us out, do they?” He turned so all could hear. “Well, the top brass don't want to get the sack either. The boss isn't in Detroit right now, but everybody knows he's a maniac about his machinery. We won't damage it for him, but there's no harm letting them worry we might.”

Men shouted, stamped their feet, banged machine tools on the pipes. After an eruptive volcano of sound, steam hissed once again in the pipes.

As Justin had not shown his anxiety before, now he gave no sign of his jolting surge of relief. His hands steady, he realigned the pages of lists. He no longer viewed his opponents as some massive, crushing weight. He was battling Caryll, decent, gentle Caryll.

At quarter to ten three men with cold-roughened faces and collars pulled to their ears burst into the idle shop. Batteries and Axles had gone out right after Tires, they said, and the intricately meshed network of conveyors and belts had sputtered to a halt. Picket lines and police had already gathered outside the gates. The police and Security had been instructed by Caryll to let everybody out; the pickets, under Mitch's command, had been instructed to prevent scabs from getting in. The machine guns positioned atop the gatehouses had been moved to the roofs of nearby shops, and now there were Security manning them.

In less than two hours Woodland had become a besieged fortress.

CHAPTER 29

The rough flight from New York had temporarily deprived Tom of proper balance, and he gripped the aluminum rails. Caryll, at the bottom of the ladder, took his arm, and the two buffeted through the wind from the plane to the waiting Swallow.