Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [68]
There’s only a minute left until the dinner horn sounds. McDermott doesn’t need a watch; he knows this with his inner clock. Sean Rasley, a weaver, looks over at him, and it is just a look — steady, no smile, no nod — but it says everything McDermott needs to know.
I’m ready, it says.
Rasley means the strike. He means Monday. Today could well be their last day at the looms for weeks.
McDermott nods his head. There are only ten, fifteen seconds until the horn. One by one, the weavers around him stop their machines. Lunch break. Thirty minutes. The first chance they’ve had to sit since they entered the mill at 6:30 this morning.
The air is soft and hits McDermott full in the face as he steps out of the mill door. Summer, he thinks; it’s officially summer now. The air has a hint of the sea beyond the city, and the sky above him is an almost unnatural blue. He puts his hands in his pockets and sets out for the boardinghouse.
He searches in his pocket for a piece of gum and finds instead a crumpled piece of paper — one of the leaflets that he and Ross and Tsomides were putting out just before the raid. Thinking about the raid makes McDermott’s stomach clench, even though it’s been three weeks since the men in masks that looked eerily like those of the Ku Klux Klan broke into the abandoned warehouse where McDermott and five others were printing up posters for the coming strike. For a moment McDermott froze, too astonished to move when the men smashed doors and windows and entered the building. Swinging sledgehammers, they shattered the press that had been sent up from New York and hit Paul Tsomides a glancing blow on the head that put him in the hospital. McDermott, crouching behind a barrel, watched the rout before fleeing through a side entrance.
Eighteen months of owner-ordered lay-offs and wage cuts have left most workers nearly disastrously destitute, he reads as he walks.
A half dozen craft unions have been made operational and have joined forces for a strike that will commence on Monday. Twenty-five hundred union men and women, who boldy speak for ten times that many non-unionized workers, have already voted unanimously and in a heart-felt manner to strike. Union members will be paid twenty percent of their hard-earned wages during the strike. Non-union members will receive necessary relief in the form of contributions from their comrades in other trades. The Citizen Welfare Committee, the Catholic Relief Bureau and the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Fund will be making soup kitchens available starting on Monday. Throw off the shackles of oppression and join forces with the international brotherhood of workers!
Telling the mill families where they can get relief is essential, McDermott has been told, since New England workers are notorious for not accepting relief of any kind in the belief that assistance goes against the grain of their own (or their inherited) Yankee culture. Thus they starve more quickly and give in more rapidly to management’s demands. In order for the strike to succeed, Mironson has stressed, strikers have to be persuaded of the necessity to accept relief.
Management has pared wages down to next to nothing, McDermott reads, and he thinks of fingernails scraping a cement wall as they go down. The bosses live in high style on the other side of the river. McDermott can see the massive houses from