Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [70]
Beside him a carder belches from having eaten his stew too fast. McDermott reaches for a pitcher of milk. He can’t get the stew down, but if he has some bread and milk, he’ll be fine. The men are squeezed around the table, more of them it seems than there were just the day before. Madame Derocher must be packing them in like rats, he thinks. Anything to make a buck.
McDermott hears the words business and machines.
He sets the milk pitcher down and searches for the speaker. A man who looks vaguely familiar to him gestures with his hand and says the word salesman. McDermott’s seen this man before, but where? He bends forward and cups his ear, turning it so that it might catch the entire sentence. The man has dark blond hair, parted in the middle, and bloodshot eyes. He gestures with a kind of military precision.
The weaver on the other side of McDermott starts to laugh at what must have been a good joke. Mule spinners and slasher tenders are knocking spoons against bowls, glasses against wood, hitching chairs forward, shouting to be heard. Someone demands more food and says that if he is paying eight dollars a week for room and board, he wants more bread. Madame Derocher sits in her chair in the corner as if she hasn’t heard a word. In the din, three words float the length of the wooden table, and McDermott strains to catch them. Three mundane words of no apparent interest to anyone except McDermott. McDermott, whose heart lifts as he takes them in.
Typewriter, he hears.
And Copiograph machine.
Alphonse
Across from him, McDermott is ripping open a waxed packet of bread. The packages are stacked by the hundreds on wire shelves, with Alphonse wedged between them like an oversized loaf. McDermott and Ross and Rasley and another guy take three slices apiece and when they are done, Alphonse will get the heels. That’s the way it goes, and Alphonse doesn’t mind one bit. He has never eaten as well as he has the last couple of months, ever since McDermott told him to walk off the job, he had work for him to do, and he would pay him the same wage he was being paid in the mill. Alphonse almost fainted with happiness because there practically isn’t anything worse than having to do bobbins.
All he does all day now is run. He runs with the leaflets and gives them to mill workers as they’re leaving the mills. He has to be quick enough to get away before any of the bosses can nab him. He puts posters on telephone poles and he is so fast it is as if the posters blossomed on the poles all by themselves. He takes messages to men in the mills and in rooms he has sworn never to talk about, and he fetches food and cigarettes and newspapers and lifts boxes and practically never leaves McDermott’s side after hours except when he is doing an errand. Shopkeepers give McDermott and his friends food, and sometimes Alphonse just cannot believe his good luck.
Ross hands him the two heels. Alphonse wishes they would break open the cupcakes, though he knows better than to ask. The secret to keeping his job, he has learned, is to say absolutely nothing. He never speaks unless it is really important, like the time he told McDermott that Father Riley came out of St. André’s and tore a poster down. Once McDermott asked Alphonse if he wouldn’t rather go back into the mill because the work wouldn’t be as dangerous and he would at least know people his own age, and Alphonse was so shocked by the question that he couldn’t even answer. He just shook his head back and forth until McDermott laughed and put a hand on his shoulder.
Alphonse wonders who the new guy is, because he looks kind of familiar. Nobody introduced him, and nobody will, Alphonse knows. In fact, hardly anybody is talking at all because it’s so noisy in the truck. A guy named Mahon is driving. Alphonse has ridden in the truck four or five times now. He loves the smell of the bread that leaks out of the waxed wrappers. He’s always hungry, even though he is eating better than ever before, and McDermott says it’s because he is