The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [98]
You could tell these so-called organizers were from out of town, said Reenie, who was telling us about all this as we sat at the kitchen table. (We’d stopped having meals in the dining room, because Father had stopped eating there. He was barricaded in his turret; Reenie took a tray up.) Those roughnecks had no sense of what was decent, bringing the two of us into it like that, when everyone knew we had nothing to do with anything. She told us to pay no attention, which was easier said than done.
There were still some who were loyal to Father. At the meeting, we heard, there had been disagreements, then voices raised, then scuffling. Tempers were set loose. One man was kicked in the head, and carted off to the hospital with concussion. It was one of the strikers – they were calling themselves the strikers, now – but this injury was blamed on the strikers themselves, because once you started that sort of disruption, who could tell where it would end?
Better not to start. Better to keep your mouth shut. Much better.
Callie Fitzsimmons came to see Father. She was very worried about him, she said. She was worried that he was going down the drain. Morally , is what she meant. How could he treat his workers in this cavalier and also cheapskate fashion? Father told her to face reality. He called her a Job’s comforter. He also said, Who put you up to this, one of your pinko pals? She said she had come on her own hook, out of love, because although a capitalist he’d always been a decent man, but now she found he’d turned into a heartless plutocrat. He said you couldn’t be a plutocrat if you were broke. She said he could liquidate his assets. He said his assets weren’t worth much more than her ass, which as far as he could tell she’d been giving away for nothing to anybody who’d asked. She said he hadn’t scorned the free handouts. He said yes, but the hidden costs had been too high – first all the food in his house for her artistic pals, then his blood and now his soul. She called him a bourgeois reactionary. He called her a corpse fly. By that time they were shouting at each other. Then there was a slamming of doors, and a car skidded away down the gravel, and that was the end of that.
Was Reenie glad or sorry? Sorry. She hadn’t liked Callie, but she’d got used to her, and Callie had been good for Father once upon a time. Who would replace her? Some other floozie, and better the devil you know.
The next week there was a call for a general strike, to show solidarity with the Chase and Sons workers. All stores and businesses must close, was the edict. All public services must be shut down. The telephones, the mail delivery. No milk, no bread, no ice. (Who was issuing these edicts? No one thought they were really coming from the man who actually spoke the words of them. This man claimed to be local, right from our own town, and was once thought to be – he was a Morton, a Morgan, something like that – but surely it had become clear that he was not local, not underneath it. He couldn’t have been, to behave like that. Who was his grandfather, anyway?)
So it was not this man. He was not the brains behind it, said Reenie, because he did not have any brains to begin with. Dark forces were at work.
Laura was worried about Alex Thomas. He was mixed up in it somehow, she said. She knew he was. He was bound to be, according to his lights.
In the early afternoon of that same day, Richard Griffen arrived at Avilion in a car, with two other cars accompanying him. They were large cars,