MAÑANA - Part Two: El Cierre

They held Seventh Avenue for three days and the city gave them the three days the way a man gives ground he means to take back.

On the fourth morning the gates were chained with a length of new chain bought for the purpose, and a printed notice under glass beside the man door, and Otero standing on the company side of it with his key ring in his fist and his eyes on the middle distance, which was a place none of them had ever seen him look before. The notice said the factory would reopen when conditions permitted. It did not say what the conditions were. Two hundred men read it in shifts through the morning, the way men read a thing that has already been read aloud to them by whoever got there first, and by ten they had all read it and there was nothing further to do with the standing.

Nando put his hands in his pockets and said, "They have the Christmas stock."

Nobody answered him. Everyone on that sidewalk had rolled it. October had been ten hours a day and Sundays for some, and every crate in the shipping room carried a December date, and the leaf for January would not be worth touching until the spring anyhow.

Aurelio walked home. The pouch went with him, because it went everywhere now.

---

Ofelia kept a page of the children's weights.

She had begun it in the fever year and never stopped, and the entries ran in a column down the left of a school copybook, dated, the numbers in a hand that was better than his. The scale was at the Centro Español clinic, free to members, and she took them the first Sunday of the month and wrote what it said and said nothing about the number either way. She wrote.

On the second Sunday in December she took them out of turn.

Aurelio was in the kitchen when she came back and set the copybook on the table and opened it to the page, and turned it around so it faced him, and put her finger under the last three lines and left it there.

"Take the coins to the market," she said.

"They're not ours."

"They are not his either, since he does not read." She did not raise her voice. She spoke in a way that put a period in the middle of the room. "Seventy-three quarters is eighteen dollars and twenty-five cents. That is rice and lard until the middle of January, and beans, and the milk for the little one, and I will pay it back to the lectura in the spring when there is a lectura."

"It's the floor's money."

"The floor is my sister's boy in a cell and my children on that page." Her finger stayed where it was. "You are the treasurer. Treasure something."

He looked at the numbers a long while. Then he took his coat off the nail and went out with the pouch still in it, and the door behind him made the sound it always made, and he stood on the step until his eyes worked again in the cold.

---

Esteban's room was over a shoe repair on Fifteenth, up an outside stair with a rail that moved when you took it.

He answered in his shirtsleeves and there was no fire and the window had a folded newspaper wedged in the sash where the frame had gone loose. Three green volumes stood on the table. The ribbon hung out of the second one.

Aurelio set the pouch beside them.

"Seventy-three," he said. "Two weeks and the back of November. It's short by the men who left town." He did not say that one of the coins was still knotted into the handkerchief it had come in.

Esteban looked at the pouch the way he had looked at it in the café, and then he did something he had never done in nine years. He picked it up. He weighed it in his hand a moment, and set it back on the table, and pushed it with two fingers until it sat in front of Aurelio again.

"I have not read," he said.

"The month is paid to the month."

"The month is paid for reading." He sat down on the edge of the bed because there was one chair and he had not offered it, which meant he intended the conversation to be short. "Take it back to the floor. Give it to the widows, or take it home. I am not a pension."

"It's owed."

"Aurelio." He said the name the way he said a name in the novel, which was the only place either of them had ever heard him use one. "For nine years you have handed me an envelope on a Friday and I have said thank you. That was a wage. There is no wage now, because there is no work now, because there is no platform. If you carry that pouch around until somebody takes it off you, you will still be carrying it in the spring, and it will be the only thing you are carrying."

The ribbon lay along the tabletop where the book had shifted. Aurelio put out his hand and set two fingers on the volume without lifting it.

"How far were we?"

"You know how far."

"Say it anyway."

Esteban was quiet. Then he reached over and opened the book at the ribbon and did not look down at the page, because he did not need to, and read four words of it in a room with no fire and one chair. His voice off the platform was medium-sized and grained at the edges and it did not carry to the walls and did not need to.

He shut the book. "That is where we are," he said. "That is where we will be."

Aurelio took the pouch off the table and put it back in his coat.

---

The watchman slip was blue and there were four of them left when Aurelio got to the office window on Thursday, and eleven men in the line ahead of him, and by the window there were two.

Mr. Hays wrote the name himself. He asked the spelling twice and got it right the second time, and turned the slip around and set the pen on it and said, "Six to six. Rounds on the hour, punch the clock at each station, no lights above the second floor after ten. There'll be men in and out doing the electrical." He watched Aurelio sign. "Approved," he said, in the voice other men keep for amen, and pushed the slip into a box with a lid on it.

Outside, the eleven men were still in the line, and Nando was fourth in it now. He looked at Aurelio's hands, which had nothing in them, and then at the window, and moved up one place.

He walked home past the Labor Temple, where a hand-lettered sheet in the window listed the families taking meals, and past the corner where the dominoes table stood empty under its awning with the box gone inside for the winter, and nobody on that whole walk said anything to him at all. Two men he had known since the '20 strike came the other way and one of them looked at his shoes as he passed and the other one said good afternoon in a voice with nothing in it, and Aurelio said good afternoon back in the same voice, because he found he had one too.

Ofelia took the rice off the shelf that night and made it with the last of the lard, and the children ate, and afterward she came and stood behind his chair with her hands on the back of it and did not say the word either. She stayed there with her hands on his chair until the little one called from the other room.

---

He punched the clock at the shipping room, at the stair head, at the selectors' room, at the galera door, and the punch made a sound in that building like a nail driven in a church. The benches sat in their rows with the cloths folded on them. The middle aisle had been swept. Whoever swept it had done the whole floor and not just the wreck, so that the boards showed their bare grain in a broad clean lane where the tribuna had stood, and the pile of stove wood was gone, and there was nothing at all to mark the place except that the varnish there was one shade lighter than the varnish everywhere else, in the shape of four square feet.

In the shipping room the crates went to the ceiling in a wall. He had rolled some fraction of what was in them, a fraction he could have calculated and did not. The tags on the ends were stamped with a date in the middle of December and a name of a city in Ohio. He put his hand flat on the end of one crate the way a man puts his hand on the flank of a horse, and stood there with his lantern down at his knee, and the crate was exactly as warm as the room.

The electricians came in the daytime and left their work where it stood. By the second week there were four radios on the galera floor, mounted high on the posts in wooden cabinets with the grille cloth the color of weak tea, one to each quarter of the room, wired in a run of new conduit that went straight down the wall and did not follow any line the building had. On his ten o'clock round he stopped under the nearest one and held the lantern up and looked at the underside of it the way a man looks at a wasp's nest in a rafter, and the wood was pale and unmarked and smelled of shellac, and the two knobs were set at the bottom of their travel, and there was a paper company tag on the cord that said the date of installation and the word APPROVED and a set of initials that were not Hays's.

On the fourteenth the meals list at the Labor Temple had eleven new families on it. On the fifteenth the paper carried the citizens' committee and the federal injunction in the same column, and under them a line saying the factories would open on the eighteenth, and men who had been sleeping until noon shaved.

That night Aurelio made his eight o'clock round early and his nine o'clock round on the hour, and between them he sat on the end of a bench in the dark in the galera with the lantern out, which was against no rule anyone had written down, and let his hands lie on the bench top where the cloth would have been.

At ten minutes to ten something in the wall gave a soft knock.

Then a hum came up in the cabinet over the second post. It was not loud. It was the sound of a thing warming, and under it, faint, the crackle of empty air, and then the empty air stopped being empty, and the room had a voice in it.

It came in at conversational volume from eleven feet above his head. It was not the wireless out of Tampa. It was a reader's voice, unhurried, sure of the sentence before the sentence arrived, and it began in the middle of a word.

"—undo," it said. "He venido a pedirte la vida de mi hijo."

Edmundo. I have come to ask you for the life of my son.

The lantern was cold in his hand. Somewhere below the floor the boiler was out and the building had no other sound in it, and the voice went on into the next sentence and the next, unhurried, giving Mercédès the small voice, giving her the crossing of the room, and the reading did not sound like a thing being played back.

Aurelio did not move off the bench. His hands had already turned on the wood, palms up and slightly cupped, the way they lay when the leaf was coming, and he let them stay that way, and in the breast of his coat, against his ribs, the pouch hung with its seventy-three quarters and the one still knotted in its handkerchief, and did not make any sound at all.

The voice reached the end of the page. It waited exactly as long as a man waits who is turning one.

 

To Be Continued...