Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Sisu keeps his mother silent, but every morning, Jaak Kivisto can hear what she doesn’t say. We got no money. You ain’t down in the mine. We gonna lose the house. Company man gonna come throw us out.
“Don’t worry about the rent,” he tells her when he sees that look on her face this morning. “I’m paying.”
“How, Jaaki? You stealin’?”
She always thinks the worst. He makes a face: Don’t be stupid.
Then how? her worried eyes ask.
“The union,” he tells her.
That doesn’t help. She was afraid of the union even before the strike. She knows that everybody in town is angry, but she doesn’t understand why, though she’s aware that her own widowhood is somehow part of the problem. People say things when she goes out, though she doesn’t understand the remarks. She has always kept to herself. Now she won’t go outside at all if she can help it, and she keeps the smaller children in as much as she can. She knows that Jaak goes away every morning, but not to the mines. Sometimes he brings home a bundle of food. Sometimes he takes his younger brothers and little sister out, and when they come back, they’re wearing somebody else’s clothes. She asks questions, and when he can’t or won’t explain it, she keeps asking and he yells at her and she cries.
Jack understands all that, but he is fifteen. The effort of producing a single sentence in any language can feel overwhelming. Her English is bad, his Finnish isn’t good. Explaining things to her is just too much.
Besides, it’s his load to carry, and her worry annoys him almost beyond bearing. She has to trust him. She and the younger kids depend on him. He’s all they have. And he hates that. So he flicks her concerns away with a wave of his hand. You wouldn’t understand, that wave says. You don’t understand anything.
He himself sees things more clearly than anyone he knows.
Eva talks like being a miner will be fine if the pay is better and the hours are shorter—that’s because she doesn’t know anything. None of the women do. He was only underground a couple of weeks before the strike, but that’s two weeks more than any girl. With every jolt of the shovel into the ore, with every swing of it heaving rock into the tram, Jaak Kivisto felt the awful weight of his family’s future on his bony, pimply shoulders. Every time he wiped away the sweat that blurred his vision, he saw the dark snarl of tunnels and drifts that would lead him nowhere. If he stayed down there, he would become just like the men around him: blind, stupid mules whose sense of duty and responsibility keeps them in Calumet, like their blind, stupid fathers.
So he didn’t eat with the others. Would not talk to them. Like his father before him, he kept his distance from the miners who tried to befriend him. Especially if they were union.
When it came, the strike was as welcome to him as it was to the union men, just for different reasons. Like them, he laid down his tools and climbed back out of the guts of the earth, and blinked at the sunshine. He shared this much with them: he could sense change coming. This was an ending. This was a beginning. There was a future where everything would be different.
Every morning for months now, he has gone to the parades. He’s been welcomed by men whose pace he matches, whose voices he joins as they began to chant, “Union! Union! Union!” He stamps his feet with them, and keeps their cadence, only the words he hears in his mind are those he thought, hour after hour, when he was underground: Not me. Not me. Not me.
Every morning, he wishes that his mother would stop talking to him, stop looking at him with her big worried eyes. He wishes the union men in the parades would ignore him. He just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t want any friends. And he certainly doesn’t want a girlfriend.
He groans when he opens the door to leave and sees Eva Savicki out there on the sidewalk. Waiting for him. All prettied up. Without even her brother, Kaz, to glower at her and get in between.
Jaak grabs his cap and jacket, hoping to be gone before his mother can notice the girl, but it’s too late.
“Who she is?” his mother asks, smiling timidly.
“Nobody.”
“Nice girl? She look nice.”
“Jesus!” he cries. “Just . . . just leave me alone!”
* * *
Scowling, Jack pulls the door closed behind himself and clumps down five tall stairs to the summertime street level. “I told you not to wait where my mother can see you.”
“I know,” Eva says quickly, “and I’m sorry, but Kaz went in early this morning to help Annie hand out the new banners. So he told me to wait right here. So you could walk with me. Because he doesn’t want me to walk to the office alone. Because of all the strangers around.”
Kaz thinks Jack doesn’t want his mother to see them together because Mr. Kivisto was against the union, so probably Mrs. Kivisto is, too. Or maybe Jack’s afraid his mother won’t like Eva because she’s Polish. And Catholic.
But Mrs. Kivisto is looking out from behind the curtain in the front room, and she’s smiling a little. So Eva smiles back and they exchange a little wave. So that must mean she doesn’t mind too much that her son is seeing Eva. And anyway, Eva really doesn’t have a choice, does she? Because Kaz told her to wait in front of the Kivistos’ place and let Jack walk her to work. So, it’s not being too forward, right? Because her brother told her to. And that must mean Kaz is warming up to Jack a little, too.
“I don’t know why Kaz doesn’t trust Jack,” Eva told Annie once. “Jack is a nice boy! He’s very polite with me, and he’s at the union hall every day to pitch in. All Kaz says is ‘I just have a feeling about him.’ ” Eva rolled her eyes. “I know Jack likes me, Annie! I can tell! But he’s so shy, and Kaz watches us like a hawk!”
“He’s your brother!” Annie pointed out. “Brothers are supposed to look out for their sisters.”
That’s more true now than ever. The Michigan militiamen are mostly decent, but they’re being sent home, and now knots of hard-looking men stand on street corners, chewing toothpicks and smoking cigars. Sheriff Cruse has sworn them in and handed out cheap tin badges, so now they’re deputies, though as Michael Sweeney said, “These gentlemen don’t appear to be as well schooled in the nuances of constitutional law as our Major Van Den Broek.” The new men work for Waddell-Mahon, which calls itself a private security company but really just rents out thugs from New York and Chicago to companies like Calumet & Hecla. They carry guns and billy clubs, and say awful things to women and girls who try to pass them on the sidewalks. When Annie leads the morning parades, they call her “whore” and “bitch,” and another word that Eva had never heard before but is so terrible that Kaz wouldn’t tell her what it meant when she asked, and made her promise she would never say it again.
Eva stays quiet for two blocks before she breaks the silence. “Brrrr,” she says, shivering. “Getting cold! Do you like my new coat? I got it from the clothing bank.” She steps out in front of Jack, twirling once to show him, then waiting for him to say something before she gets out of his way.
“It’s good, I guess.”
“I’m glad you like it! Did those trousers I picked out for your brothers fit?”
“Yeah,” he says, and after a time, he adds, “The dress for Pria did, too.”
Progress, she thinks. “You could bring your mother in sometime, too. There are some dresses and some . . . other things . . . that a nice lady in Laurium donated. Like this coat. And I think your mother might enjoy the Auxiliary meetings. She must be lonely at home all by herself. I could introduce her around.”
Jack grunts and waves his hand in front of his face to signal that she’s talking too much. He’s usually grumpy in the morning. Kaz and Uncle Tomek are both snarly when they wake up, so she tries not to talk right away, but it’s hard. Eva herself loves the mornings. “Look at the colors in that sky! I can’t decide if I like sunrise or sunset best.”
There’s no response. Still, when she accidentally stumbles over a place where the pavement is uneven, Jack catches her by the arm and it definitely seems like maybe he holds on a little longer than he really has to, though she doesn’t try to hold his hand or anything after that. Because that would definitely be too forward.
“Thank you!” she says. “I’m so clumsy in these new shoes! They’re a little too big, I think. I might exchange them when we get to the office. I think the union should keep the clothing exchange going after the strike, don’t you? It’s fun! You just bring something in and swap it for something new. Well . . . something that’s new to you, anyway. Still, it makes a nice change and saves a lot of money. I like the food bank, too. Instead of eating the same thing day after day, you can try new things.”
There’s another small noise of acknowledgment. He’s shy, she tells herself again, but he also ate a whole plateful of her pierogies at the last union supper and even danced with her once.
“Kaz and I are moving out of my uncle’s house. He’s getting married again, and his new wife doesn’t want us around. We’re going to move in with Annie! Because those nice Italian boys have moved out now. Kaz and I can help Annie with her chores and things. I’ll do her housework and Kaz will take care of the outside, so she can do more for the union, and Mr. Clements won’t get mad. I’m a little scared of Mr. Clements,” she admits. “Annie says if he gets drunk and she’s not there, we should go next door and stay with the Carettos. They’re really nice and the children are so beautiful. Those big dark eyes! I’m learning to cook some new things, like macaroni with cheese. Do you like Italian food?”
Jack shrugs a kind of assent, so she burbles on until they reach the corner where the day’s parade is forming up.
“I’ll see you after,” Eva calls, waving cheerily as they split up and take their places among the marchers.
He nods again and feels the blood rise in his face when an older man nudges him in the ribs and says, “Lucky fella! That Eva—she’s a good’un.”