Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [77]
Mr. Bridge, who was worried about the condition of the yard which was thick with dandelions and crab grass, was not sure he had heard his son correctly. “Stop prancing around,” he said.
Douglas clutched his heart and collapsed on the lawn.
“All right, now. Behave yourself,” his mother said.
He sat up, put his cap on backward, and explained that he had gotten a job as a helper. He would be paid three dollars a day and would be given his lunch. “Ordinarily a route took eight hours,” he said, “but with a fast driver, if everybody on the truck worked hard, a route could sometimes be finished in five hours. So he might earn a full day’s pay in five hours. How many jobs were like that?”
Mr. Bridge asked what his duties would be. Douglas replied that he would follow the men while they were emptying the cans and clean up whatever they spilled.
“Oh, well, I just don’t know about this,” said his mother, who had been listening uneasily.
Mr. Bridge agreed. He told Douglas he would have to find another job. Douglas promptly flung his arms wide apart to indicate despair.
“For the love of Mike, why? I mean, why? I mean, what’s the matter? I don’t get it!”
“I don’t want you to come home smelling like a pig.”
“So we’re too ritzy to let me work on a garbage truck?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Bridge said with a thin smile. “I have done manual labor myself. From the time I was old enough to know what money was I knew that if I wanted it I had to earn it. My parents never had enough to give me an allowance. You don’t know how lucky you are. And, as a matter of fact, there were plenty of times when I was a kid that it never occurred to me to keep what I earned. I handed it over to my parents without question so they could buy enough to keep us alive. You seem to be under the impression that because we live in a decent neighborhood and have plenty to eat I do not know what poverty is all about. Nothing could be further from the truth. I tell you this: I do know it. I know the smell of it and the sight of it and the anxiety of it firsthand, and I thank the good Lord that you and your sisters and your mother have had no such experience. I hope you never know what it means, because it is not very pleasant. It is not fun. It is not amusing. I do not look down on laboring men. We are not too ‘ritzy,’ as you express it, for you to work on a garbage truck this summer. However, there are other jobs available. You will have to find something else. You may take any sort of work you wish to, provided it is legal and reasonably clean. I do not mean you cannot get your hands dirty, but there is no necessity for you to clean sewers or pick up garbage.”
Mr. Bridge paused; but then he continued, moved by the memory of things he had not thought about for a long while: “I used to get up before dawn to work on an ice wagon pulled by a couple of old broken-down nags. Lord, I’ll never forget. I worked until time to go to school. And I don’t mind letting you know it was not very agreeable chipping and carrying ice at five or six o‘clock on a January morning with the snow coming down in blankets and a north wind howling. To this day I remember the sight of my fingers raw and bleeding. And many’s the morning I sat down at my school desk with my fingers too stiff to hold a pencil. That was no fun, let me tell you, but I did it without complaint. I never thought I was too ‘ritzy’ for hard work. Never. As Abraham Lincoln once observed: ‘I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer.’ ”
Douglas was bored.
“All right, I won’t lecture you. Go out and find yourself a job. It’s what you need. But you are not going to work on a garbage truck. Is that clear?”
“Right-o,