Art thou a man?
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
She’s queen of the May, Joe Clements is thinking as he stalks toward the nearest saloon. She writes handbills. She runs a clothing drive. She plans a goddamn picnic. She marches down a street. And now she’s Joan of Arc. She’s worth a thousand MacNaughtons! Christ.
I’ve got a meeting, she says. I have to get to the union office, she says. What about me? he fumes. Everybody thinks she works so hard. She hasn’t got any idea what hard work is. I’d like to see her last one day in a mine. One goddamn day.
You get up, you dress, you eat, you walk to the change house. You clock in and climb down flight after flight of slippery cut-stone stairs before a hike through miles of tunnels—just to start the day’s work. It’s cold underground. It’s wet. It smells of rock. Beyond that dim little funnel of light from your headlamp, there’s a hellish nothing, and Christ, the noise! After a few weeks, you’re half-deaf from the pounding of the drills. So you listen hard all the time to the crunch and scrape of shoveling, the squeal of tram wheels grating on rusty rails, because a few seconds can make all the difference when a wall starts to come down. And then there’s the dynamite. When you hear the warning call, you hustle half a mile away and wait for the muffled WHUMP of the explosion. A rush of air makes your ears pop, but you don’t move, not yet. You wait again, listening again. Listening to the creak of long-dead trees trying to hold up the world, or the groan of rock settling, or the crack of a support pillar giving way, or the rumble of a stope sliding. Or the scream of a man being crushed.
A good day in the mine is a day when nobody gets killed or crippled. Or if somebody does, at least it’s not you. At the end of a shift, if you’re lucky—still alive, still on your feet—you trudge back through tunnels that seem a lot longer than they did thirteen hours ago, and you climb back up those cut-stone stairs on rubbery legs. Everything hurts. Shoulders, arms, back—everything is cramped and aching. Dislocating a finger is so ordinary, you just grit your teeth and yank it back where it belongs. Without even knowing it, you’ve been scared all day and you’re tired, tired, tired. Filthy, but almost too tired to clean up. Hungry, but almost too tired to eat.
When you walk in the door, maybe you glance at a crippled-up father, if he’s still alive. Maybe he meets your eye and maybe there’s a nod, for fathers harden sons to this life, and only another miner can really understand. It’s a Christ-awful way to live, and you’re proud of that, even when you fall into bed knowing that you’ll get up and do it all again the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next. . . . You’ve made your peace with it. Because that’s what a real man does. And you want some goddamn respect for it! Is that too much to ask?
He shoves open the door to the Truro Pub, and a silence settles as everyone turns to look at him.
“Hey, Joe,” the boldest barfly says. “I saw your wife in the papers!”
“You must be real proud, eh?” someone else says.
The laughter is general and mocking.
Joe Clements sits at the bar and taps the walnut surface. “Šlivovitz.”
“I’ve got vodka,” the bartender tells him.
The big man nods, and Owen Lloyd pours him the first of many shots, while hoping for the best.
* * *
The conversation returns to its usual rumbling buzz, but Owen is more alert to his saloon’s clientele than usual. He is the fourth of his family to own the Truro Pub in Calumet, an establishment passed down from Lloyd to Lloyd since 1863. That was when word of the glorious Michigan copper deposits reached destitute villages above Cornwall’s played-out mines. That was when his great-grandparents immigrated to the Upper Peninsula with little more than this nugget of familial wisdom: the only way to make money in a mining camp is to mine the miners.
In Calumet, as in the old country, Lloyds have slaked the thirst of generations of Cornish miners whose ancient ancestors once prized flint from the ground with picks made from deer antlers. As for copper, Cornishmen have worked it since Merlin’s beard was short, and they’ve done it in conditions none of these soft-handed immigrant bastards could stand for more than half a shift. So they have no truck with the union that’s idling the pits. “Their wives made ’em do it” is the sneering observation, always followed by grunted agreement: “Women! Meddlin’ in men’s affairs . . .” And who’s the worst of the wives? Annie Clements. That’s what every man of them will tell you.
Even if Big Annie were the sweetest little lady that a man could go home to, Joe Clements has no business here in the Truro Pub, and that’s what worries Owen Lloyd. In Calumet, Slavs drink with Slavs. Finns drink with Finns. Eye-tyes drink with Eye-tyes. Each to his own. Those are the rules of the city, and always have been, until the union began dividing the town in a new way. Most of Calumet’s Cornishmen are loyal to the company, but there are others—old stock, but ones who’d not say no to another dollar if it were to come their way. They drink here, too, and it makes for a bad mix. Too many men spending the long, idle days together. Bored. Drunk. Looking for trouble.
And some of those fools have decided that Joe Clements might be fun to bullyrag.
Saloonkeepers talk, and Clements has a reputation. A man who fills a doorway side to side and top to bottom, he has an immense capacity for drink. He’s good for a fight under the best of circumstances, and in Owen Lloyd’s professional opinion, Big Joe Clements is going to tolerate perhaps one more remark before he takes an opportunity to flatten someone.
“Last one’s on the house, Joe,” Owen says quietly, shoving a shot glass across the bar.
That’s when one of the Clementses’ dago boarders peers through the window. The little wop has sense enough to hesitate before coming inside a Cornish pub. When he finally screws up his courage and approaches Joe, he pulls his cloth cap off respectfully and the room falls silent in gleeful anticipation.
“Meester Clemens, sir, Mees Clemens she say you supper ready.”
Joe lifts the glass and tosses the slug back without a shudder before turning ever so slowly toward the wop. “I want you and your brothers out of my house by Friday,” he says. “And I want you out of my sight now.”
The little dago bobs his head and backs away. Joe watches him leave and taps the shot glass. “Another.”
“Hey, Clements,” someone calls, “your food’s getting cold.”
“Not to mention your wife!”
Owen groans, “No, no, no . . .”
“Hey, Joe! Better hurry. That photographer fella’ll eat your dinner!”
“Take it outside!” Owen pleads, but it’s too late.
The first idiot goes down, and then another in no more than the time it takes Owen Lloyd to grab the cricket bat he keeps behind the bar for occasions just such as this.
* * *
Loretta Devlin has set herself a mission. It has taken her a long time to screw her courage up to the sticking place, but today is the day she will leave the MacNaughton mansion. Today is the day she’ll make her way to Big Annie Clements, for Loretta has a story to tell about what a nameless maid can hear when a heedless boss doesn’t deign to notice her and today, by God, is the day she will tell it.
The master has gone down to Houghton for a meeting with the other mine bosses. He won’t be back until late tonight. The cook goes out shopping for groceries every morning. The butler has bought Loretta’s phony story about going to the pharmacy for headache powder. “Finish the ironing first,” he said. All you have to do is hint that a malady is some sort of woman trouble. Men will shudder and wave you away.
She has timed her escape: the cook will be back in forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes! Loretta thinks with a snort, annoyed that she’s keeping track of time like MacNaughton: in minutes, not hours or days, like a normal person. Folding laundry by the back window, she watches for the moment when the strikers’ parade rounds the corner, ready to make her dash. Only wouldn’t you know it, the tall woman is missing and it takes three others to hold that giant flag by its upper edge, off its pole but spanning half the street.
“Shite, shite, shite,” she mutters.
She spots a friendly-looking girl she’s seen at Mass and tells herself, Now or never. Thumping a neatly folded sheet onto the ironed linen, she throws a coat on over the black-and-white uniform MacNaughton makes her wear, plunks a felt hat over her braided ginger hair, and eases into the parade.
“Seen you at church,” she tells the other girl by way of introduction. “Where’s herself, then?”
The girl makes a face. “Did you hear about the brawl at Truro’s?”
“Sure, didn’t everyone?”
“Well, that was Mr. Clements. Annie’s husband. She hasn’t been marching since. She’s probably home nursing him. That’s what I hope, anyway. I’m Eva. Eva Savicki.”
“Loretta. Loretta Devlin.”
They march along side by side for a block. Fish or cut bait, Loretta thinks. “Look, I work for Old Man MacNaughton, and he’s a hard, cold bastard if ever I met one. I’ve got something might be useful to them as fights him. Can you take me to someone? It’s gotta be quick. I can’t be gone very long.”
They stop, taking each other’s measure as the marchers split around them like a stream around rocks.
“What do you know?” Eva asks.
“Plenty,” Loretta says, and when she’s done telling it, Eva nods.
“You’re right,” she says. “Mr. Miller and the others should hear this.”
* * *
The union office is a shambles. Two boys, both a little older than Eva and Loretta, are packing up boxes of papers. Furniture is shoved to one side of the room, though the walls are still papered with posters and newspaper clippings with photos of Annie Clements.
“The landlord threw the union out, so we’re moving the office,” Eva explains. “Moishe Glass offered us part of his storeroom. It’s even more crowded than this, and Mr. Miller is afraid Sheriff Cruse will find an excuse to wreck the store or set fire to it or something, but we don’t have a choice. Mr. Miller? This is Loretta Devlin. She works for MacNaughton.”
Charlie, too, listens to the girl’s story, and she has only just finished when they hear footsteps on the stairway. Everyone goes quiet, expecting a direct attack on the union’s officers. The two boys grab hammers and stand, ready to fight whoever appears. Loretta shrinks into a corner, thinking, Oh, Lord, I’m for it now! But, it’s Annie Clements who appears at the door, without Joe in tow.
“Oh, Annie,” Eva cries softly, and Loretta tsks sympathetically when she sees the swollen jaw and the blackened eye, though they both know it’s not nice to notice a wife’s bruises.
“Good morning,” Annie murmurs around a fat lip. She hangs up her hat and coat, sitting at her desk to sort through the pile of mail that’s accumulated in her absence. She looks up only when Charlie Miller comes over with a new girl. Gorgeous red hair, pert snub nose, and a charming freckled face. Kaz’s age or thereabouts, which has not gone unnoticed by that young man.
“Mrs. Clements, this is Loretta Devlin,” Charlie says softly. “Loretta is a maid who works in James MacNaughton’s house.”
“And he is a hard, cold bastard if I ever met one,” Loretta’s story starts again. Annie Clements is now the third person she’s told it to, and Loretta has been working on the recitation in resentful silence for months. “I’ve been a maid for that family a whole year now, and he has never even learned my name. His wife and daughters are no better. They all just call me Bridget, like all Irish maids are the same—”
“Tell her what you told me, Miss Devlin,” Miller says. “About the union.”
“Well, now, y’see, I hear things,” Loretta confides. “There’s dinners for the big bugs, and I serve, and nobody notices me, but I listen.”
Some of it, they knew already. Enough company men have stayed on or gone back to work to keep the pumps going on the lower levels and prevent damage to the equipment. Governor Ferris is pulling out the rest of the Michigan guardsmen. The company will be bringing in men from a private security firm that advertises itself as “staffed by the very finest strikebreakers from Chicago and New York.”
“But Mr. MacNaughton, he doesn’t think they’ll need to bust too many heads,” Loretta Devlin says now. “Last night, he had all the other mine operators to the house for a fancy dinner party, and I heard him tell them—all full of himself he was—he says, ‘Time is on our side. The longer the strike goes on, the more pressure there is for the miners to go back to work.’ ”
“Tell her the rest,” Miller says. “His exact words.”
“He told them others, ‘The union has eighteen hundred and twenty-seven dollars left in the strike fund.’ He said, ‘It’ll take a miracle for the union to get past the end of September.’ ”
Annie’s mouth drops open. She looks at Charlie and asks Loretta Devlin, “He said that? Those were his exact words?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Loretta confirms, though she doesn’t know why this news has had such a remarkable effect on her listeners. She herself thought the part about the governor was the most interesting gossip she had on offer. “Now, begging your pardon, I should be getting back to the house before that bitch of a cook marks me gone.”
“Kaz?” Annie calls. “Walk Miss Devlin home. It’s not safe on the streets anymore.”
Eva giggles. “I’ll come, too, Loretta. My brother is a terrible flirt. You’ll need a chaperone! C’mon, Jack! We need to watch out for Miss Devlin!”
Kaz socks his sister in the arm for her trouble, but he grabs his coat and hat, as do Eva and Jack, and the four of them clatter down the staircase.
Miller pulls up a chair across from Annie, his face impassive, waiting for her to say what they’re both thinking.
“The exact amount,” she whispers. “How could MacNaughton know the exact amount we had left . . .”
“Somebody told him,” Annie says. “Somebody from this office.”
He waits.
“Who was here when you said that?” she asks. Still he waits, and she begins to tick off the names. “You, me, the kids. Moishe . . . not him, surely!”
“Well, he’s been taking a lot of chances and doesn’t seem too worried about the store getting burned out.”
She shakes her head. “I won’t believe that. It has to be somebody else. . . . Who would do such a thing? Not Michael! Was he even in the office when you said that?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
Charlie Miller is not shocked by her bruises. Men beat women. It’s the way of the world. Big Annie can defend herself better than most, and he wonders if she’s put Joe into the hospital with a frying pan to the head. Serves the bastard right if she did, he thinks, and it is with a certain satisfaction that he sees the penny drop.
Battered face in her hands, she slumps over her desk. “Joe was there,” she says, looking up. “And he . . . Bože moi, what if it was Joe.”