I must be gone and live, or stay and die!
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
For those who stay in Calumet, the winter grinds on in serene indifference. The union still exists, although its men seem stunned during the meetings, unable to come to any decision about the strike.
The women of the Copper Country have more immediate concerns, as always. The next meal, the next pile of laundry, the next crying kid. And in the crowded Caretto household, the gloom is sometimes punctuated by news of an impending birth and a rush to a mother’s bedside.
Apprenticed to Lucia Caretto, Eva now goes with the midwife on every call. Her tasks are mostly fetching and carrying. She heats water and soaks rags to press comfortingly into the laboring woman’s bottom. “Makes ’em warm, see?” Lucia says. “So she don’ be so tight like this,” she says, balling her hands into fists.
“It’s wonderful,” Eva tells Annie one night when they are sitting around the table with Lucia and Carla. “It’s scary, but then when the baby is born, everybody is crying and laughing, and it’s just so wonderful.”
Lucia says, “Not too many right now. April, May, June? We gonna have a lotta strike babies. Glad I got some help for that.” She inclines her head at Eva. “She pretty good! Nice an’ calm.”
There is an odd silence then. Annie smiles briefly, but working with the midwife has gotten Eva into the habit of detecting distress in other woman so she can do something for them. Annie had begun putting on weight when she got back from the workhouse. Now she’s as bony as she was after her hunger strike. She is pale, too. Of course, it’s midwinter in Calumet. Everyone is as colorless as a day-shift miner. Still, there’s something wrong here. Eva can tell.
“Annie, you wanna stay with us?” Carla asks. “Till you know what you gonna do?”
Annie shakes her head. “I’m all right. But thank you.”
“You know you welcome, eh?” Carla says.
“My husban’, he say the same,” Lucia says. “We make room.”
“Thank you. I’ll come next door if I need anything.”
“Annie . . . you think Joe, he suspect?” Carla whispers, leaning over the table.
“He always suspects.” Annie puts her head in her hands, fighting nausea. “Eight years we’ve been married. Almost nine. All that time, he always suspected. I never gave him any reason, but he expected it.”
“Wait,” Eva says. “What? Wait. You mean you’re . . . ?”
Lucia nods, then shakes her head: Yes, but stay out of this.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” Annie says. “Maybe I’m just late.”
Lucia shrugs eloquently: It’s early, but I’m not wrong.
“Joe gonna find out soon,” Carla says. “What you gonna do?”
“I don’t know yet. Something. I have to do something.”
“Annie,” Lucia says cautiously, “if you don’t want—I can . . . you know.”
Eva looks around, astonished. “Annie, why would you . . . ? You always wanted children! Why wouldn’t you . . . ?” They all just look at her, waiting for her to figure it out.
“Oh,” Eva says. “Oh, dear. It’s not Joe’s. It’s . . . Michael’s?”
Annie freezes, then gets up so abruptly, her chair tips over. She pushes Carla aside and vomits into the sink. For a time, she stands still, hands on the rim of the sink. “I’m sorry,” she manages to say before the nausea hits again.
“Sit,” Carla tells Annie. “I clean up.” She hands Annie a soda cracker, then drains the boiling water from a pot of macaroni into the sink, swirling it to wash the puke away. Filling a bowl with the noodles, she grates a little donated cheese she got from the Auxiliary over the top.
“Take this next door,” she tells Eva, giving her a look that warns, Be careful what you say. “Joe gonna want his breakfast.”
“He’ll need lunch, too,” Annie says, despairing.
“Go lie down. I figure something out,” Lucia says. “Eva, get over there now. If he ask, you say him: ‘Annie’s sick. She gonna stay here a little. Till she feel better.’ ”
* * *
The warning whistle for the night shift shrieks. The mines are running with managers, and scabs, and men like Joe Clements, who have renounced the union and gone back to work. Holding the macaroni dish close, Eva scuttles across the twenty feet between the two houses and climbs up the tall stairs to the Clementses’ back door.
Joe opens it, and she almost falls off the little landing when he does. Standing above her, he looks like every giant in every fairy tale. Six foot six, shoulders that all but fill the doorway. Glowering as though he’d eat her. Fee fie foe fum . . .
“What do you want? Where’s my wife?”
“Annie’s sick,” Eva tells him. “Carla sent this over.” She lifts the bowl of macaroni up toward him, like a supplicant. Here, Giant, please don’t eat me.
He glares down at it and grumbles, “Dago slop.” Eyes narrowed, he looks at her sideways. “I’m night shift. I need a lunch, too.”
“I know. Carla’s making something. I’ll bring it over in a few minutes.”
“What kind of sickness?” he calls as she starts back to the Caretto’s.
She hesitates for just a moment, and when she turns to him, he can tell that she’s thinking up a lie. Because she is.
“Nothing you can get,” she says with sudden inspiration.
And that’s the truth.
* * *
There are no dancing green ribbons in the sky that night. Just a black blanket of heavy cloud above the Copper Country.
More snow coming, Michael Sweeney thinks, watching the weather beyond the window. Have to be careful about leaving footsteps up to the house.
The great bronze bell in the Civic Theater clock tower tolls twelve. The sound is faint, noticeable chiefly because he has been listening for it. He pushes himself out of the broken-spring chair in the corner of the room he shares with Charlie Miller.
“This is crazy,” Charlie says, watching him pull on his coat. “You’re crazy.”
“Go to hell,” Mike says genially.
“Keep this up, and you’ll get there first,” Charlie replies.
“Most likely,” Mike admits. It is a stupid risk, for so many reasons.
“Leave,” Charlie urges. “Get out of this town while you can.”
“That is the plan, but I’m not going until she agrees to come with me, and she wouldn’t leave until after the . . . After Christmas.” Mike pulls an anonymous-looking knit cap low over his ears. “You know Annie.”
“It’s like arguing with a dress-store dummy.”
“Or a statue of the Virgin.”
Gloves on, Mike lifts his chin in farewell. “See you later.”
He pulls the door closed behind himself and starts down the corridor. Usually the boardinghouse is quiet at this time of night, so he slows when he hears the landlady’s voice insisting, “Come back in the morning!”
Heavy footsteps. Several men pounding up the wooden stairway. His instinct is to hide. He has no wish to explain to anyone where he’s going or why. Stepping backward, he shrinks into a little hallway that leads to the fire escape, intending to wait this out.
The footsteps pass by; a moment later, he realizes they’re headed for the end of the corridor. Damn it, he thinks. They’re going to arrest Charlie again. There were rumors. A big sweep. MacNaughton’s deputized army, making life miserable again.
He hears the voices, if not all the words. A demand, a defiant response.
Charlie or Annie. Stay or go. He has to decide. Right here. Right now.
Annie, he decides. He’s sent a note. He can’t disappoint her.
Then he hears the gunshots.
* * *
She has heard women talk about utter exhaustion and a dull mind in the early months. The funeral march was probably a mistake, but she had to see it through. Soul-sick, gut-sick, heart-sick, she had to bear witness. To do penance.
Think, she tells herself. Think. You have to decide.
Lucia has given her a choice. She can make everything go back to the way it was before or turn away from everything she ever thought she was. A good woman, a good wife, a good person.
She and Michael have not met since . . . since before. Now the time has come. Tonight, she thinks. I’ll tell him tonight. Then I’ll decide what to do.
By midnight, the snow has tapered off. There is no noise apart from the wind against the clapboards, the ticking of the clock, the tapping of her own fingers on the table. The clock ticks and ticks, and with each passing minute, she is more frantic, the muscles between her shoulder blades tightening with that old, familiar sensation of worry and dread.
He’s not coming, she thinks. He’s guessed. He’s run away. What will Joe do? What is it like—to end it before anyone else knows?
At last, exhausted, she climbs the stairs and falls into bed, fully expecting another of the long, awful dreams she has had so often lately: running and running and running from something that hasn’t caught up with her. She awakens with a start, not knowing why, but in those first few moments, she lies still, remembering the dream.
Not running. Floating. Looking up at red and white and blue silk billowing in the clear sky above the Copper Country. And in those first few moments, the decision is made. She will hold her head up. She will have this baby, and be damned to those who damn her.
A daughter, she thinks. Please, God: a little girl who’ll be a tall woman who will stand up straight and see beyond the place where she is born, wherever that may be—
Someone bangs on the back door. Louder, faster, more insistently than the first attempt. Realizing now why she woke up, she waits, eyes wide.
She can see no sign of dawn through the burlap curtain on the little gable window. It can’t be Joe, home early. He wouldn’t knock on the door. He’d come straight in. Michael. It must be Michael.
Fighting nausea, she hurries down the stairs. Hair wild, in her nightgown and wearing a blanket as a shawl, she pulls open the back door and with a rush of heedless certainty and unrepentant joy, she tells him, “I’m pregnant. It’s yours. It’s ours. It’s mine. I want this baby. You can do as you please, but I . . .”
Except it’s not Michael. It’s Father Horvat.
For a moment, they are speechless, both startled by what has just been revealed and to whom.
“Mrs. Clements—Annie,” the priest amends, for this is surely not the time for specious courtesy. “Let me in. Michael isn’t coming tonight. Something’s happened. He came to me. Read this.”
She can’t move. She just stands there, like Lot’s wife. Turned into a pillar. The priest knocks snow off his boots against the door jamb outside and pushes past her into the kitchen. She closes the door and takes the note he holds out to her.
She recognizes the handwriting. She has seen it before on the backs of photographic prints. Usually the neat, regular letters are nearly as nice as Jack Kivisto’s; this is a hasty scrawl. Cruse came with six goons. Told Charlie to recant his testimony about the CA man. Charlie refused and they shot him. He died a few minutes later. I was with him. I have to leave now. Come to me.
She puts out a hand, steadying herself against the kitchen sink as the walls reel and the floor rises toward her. The priest catches her arm and tells her to sit, but she shakes her head and looks again at the note. There is an address at the bottom. She memorizes it.
“I have to get dressed,” she says. “I have to go—”
“Annie, wait!” Albin Horvat orders in a low and steady voice. “MacNaughton’s men are all over town. Deputies are watching the depot and the road to Houghton. They don’t expect anyone to go north. I can get Michael up to Copper Harbor. He can wait a few days and then catch a freight south. When he gets to Wisconsin, he’ll be safe, I think.”
She nods, only half-hearing him. Smoothing out the note in her hand, she reads the address again, making sure of it before she opens the stove door. A flame flares up in the oven, and she watches Michael’s words become ash. Then she vomits into the sink. When it’s over, she rattles through the confessional prayer, not meeting the priest’s eyes. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . . I—we—Michael and I—I never meant for—”
Albin Horvat waves a cross at her and murmurs, “Ego te absolvo. Does Joe know?”
“No. I—I’m afraid of what he’ll do.” She starts to cry. “He’ll hate me. He’ll hate the child. He’ll kill Michael!”
“Do you want me to tell Mike? He’s a good man, Annie. I think he’ll do the right thing. Should I tell him?”
She shakes her head, snuffling in snot decisively. “I want to talk to him. I want to tell him.”
“Annie, no! They’ll see you come to the church, and they’ll suspect. You need to stay out of sight. I’ll find a way to get you out of town, too, but you have to wait. There are goons everywhere. They’ve already killed Charlie Miller and—”
She straightens, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, finally able to think past her own crisis. “I have to get word to the union officers. I have to warn them. Everyone is in danger now, Father. I have to—”
“No! You can’t go out there. They’ll be looking for you, too.” The priest holds up a hand while he thinks. “Annie, does Lucia Caretto know? About . . .” He glances at her belly, and Annie nods. “All right. Priests and midwives can be out at night with no one asking questions. I’ll rouse Lucia and Carla and we’ll raise the alarm.”
“I’ll make a list. You have to know who they’ll come for—”
“Annie! I know who to tell! You’ve done all you can. You’ve done more than anyone could ask of you. It’s our turn now. Let someone else carry the flag.”
* * *
She goes back to bed but does not sleep, listening for the sound of gunshots and shouting. When at last the steam whistle blasts end of shift, she swings her legs out of bed, groans, and lunges for the chamber pot, puking neatly into the enamel bowl.
You are all my hopes and dreams, she tells the child in her mind and in her belly. Still, it would be nice if you didn’t make me sick.
When her stomach settles, she opens the window to air out the bedroom. Gathers her hair into a loose pile on top of her head and pins it out of her way. Washes her face in the basin on the bureau and spits the sour taste from her mouth. She puts on a secondhand woolen dress, its cuffs and hemline lengthened with corduroy bands to accommodate her frame, arranging its folds over her middle to hide the slight swelling below her waist.
Pulling on a thick knitted cardigan, she carries the chamber pot downstairs and pukes again. She leaves the back door open when she trudges through the snow to dump its contents into the privy.
The cold air does her good. She goes back inside, scrubs the pot with salt and vinegar, and wipes every surface in the kitchen thoroughly. She feels a draft on her wet hands. She’s left the window open upstairs. That is easily dealt with, although panic threatens as she straightens the bed. What else would give her away? She has to make this nightmare into an ordinary morning. Joe must not see anything amiss. He must not suspect anything.
She gets his supper started. He expects a good meal now that he’s bringing in a salary again. She can’t bear the thought of meat, so she dices turnips, carrots, and potatoes for a soup. No cabbage. Nothing with a strong odor that could make her throw up again. When at last she sits at the table and looks at the clock, she is sure that all is in readiness, but Joe is late. There was a time when she would have worried. Now, unbidden, it comes to her: if he’s killed, it would make everything easier.
A little past nine, he arrives at last, smelling of liquor. “Big doings in town,” he reports. “Word is Cruse is arresting union men, left, right, and center.”
She waits, but he says nothing about Charlie. Or Michael. Or Father Horvat. “On what charge?” she asks, letting indignation rule her voice.
“Interfering with loyal workers.”
Loyal workers. Like you, she thinks. Like my own husband. “I’ll have to call an Auxiliary meeting,” she says neutrally.
“Oh, for Crissakes, Annie. It’s over! You lost.”
She waits, as though thinking about it. Sighing, she shrugs her defeat. “I suppose you’re right. Sit down. Your soup is getting cold.”
This will be over soon, she tells herself. One way or another, it will all be over soon.