The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [97]
The people doing the stirring up were ruffians and hired criminals (according to Mrs. Hillcoate). Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money – any money at all – or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.
It was also said that Father’s factories were in trouble.
Both rumours – the outside agitators, the trouble – were publicly denied. Both were believed.
Father had laid off some of his workers in September – some of the younger ones, better able to fend for themselves, according to his theories – and had asked the remainder to accept shorter hours. There just wasn’t enough business, he’d explained, to keep all the factories going at full production capacity. The customers weren’t buying buttons, or not the kind of buttons made by Chase and Sons, which depended on high volumes to be profitable. Nor were they buying cheap, serviceable undergarments: they were mending instead, they were making do. Not everyone in the country was out of work, of course, but those with jobs did not feel very secure about holding on to them. Naturally they were saving their money up, rather than spending it. You couldn’t blame them. You’d do the same in their place.
Arithmetic had entered the picture, with its many legs, its many spines and heads, its pitiless eyes made of zeroes. Two and two made four, was its message. But what if you didn’t have two and two? Then things wouldn’t add up. And they didn’t add up, I couldn’t get them to; I couldn’t get the red numbers in the inventory books to turn black. This worried me horribly; it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk at the button factory – those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it – which was what had been going on at Chase and Sons for some time – this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour – without love, without justice, without mercy – but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter.
In the first week of December, Father announced a shutdown. It was temporary, he said. He hoped it would be very temporary. He talked about retreating and retrenching in order to regroup. He asked for understanding and patience, and was greeted with a watchful silence by the assembled workers. After the announcement he went back to Avilion and shut himself up in his turret and drank himself blind. Things were broken up there – glass objects. Bottles, no doubt. Laura and I sat in my room, on my bed, holding hands tightly and listening to the fury and grief rampaging around up there, right above our heads, like an interior thunderstorm. Father hadn’t done anything on that grand a scale for some time.
He must have felt he’d let his men down. That he’d failed. That nothing he could do had been enough.
“I will pray for him,” said Laura.
“Does God care?” I said. “I don’t think he gives a tinker’s damn, actually. If there is a God.”
“You can’t know that,” said Laura, “until after.”
After what? I knew well enough, we’d had this conversation before. After we’re dead.
Several days after Father’s announcement, the union revealed its power. There was already a core group of members, and now they wanted everyone in. A meeting was held outside the locked