The early shift guy got there at 6:51.
By 7:02 the clerk, the bottle in a brown paper bag in his hand, walked step by rote step to his room.
There, he drank.
When the redhead came he would not, in the rise and blur of days, break the silence with a mention of the colored woman and her blind, scarred sapling of a son. And the two of them would drift from him like the sight of his chilled, huffed breath on that trek in France, marching through mud—concentrating on each step, each step, sloughing, sloshing, the hup, two, three along, abandoned kilometer after kilometer through the void of cold and dull throb of weapon and kit weight, hunger, lack of sleep, dragging, step by rote step, or like smoke . . . when whatever belief he’d ever had evaporated.
God did not know what He was doing. There was no reason for things. No order to His blessing or punishments scattered in dibs and dabs or in floods or flames. Take what comes. And wait. In the pig muck trenches in Rheims-Soissons, or behind that counter, or in a room . . .
And one evening, when from a room down the hall the smell of burnt biscuits floats under the door of his room, the clerk will, in the silence, choke the redhead until her tongue, red as her hair, lolls like raw liver . . .
Clara thought R.W. would get around to telling them one day. Out of the blue at morning meeting, or when the train was pulling out, while they would think they were on one subject, it might be a month, six months, a year, but in his own time he would say something about Pearl—whatever her name really was, and Son, whatever his name was or was going to be, and their leaving. Clara thought they’d been fired. Martha thought they had quit. Until they knew better they had to wonder and hypothesize.
Everybody had their own firsthand version they heard from somebody else secondhand. According to Bump, Pearl, showing the other side of herself, had got in it toe to toe with R.W. about how much or little they were being compensated for their contribution.
Pearl’d said, Bump said, she thought as little as R.W. paid people the only reason they stayed with him was because they didn’t think they could do better.
Clara humphed.
Whereas, Bump continued, Pearl’d said she thought if she couldn’t do better then she’d just jump over in somebody’s river and drown.
Let her, Clara humphed again.
Rather, Bump said Pearl’d said, than be underpaid and underappreciated she’d just as soon go back to doing what they were doing before them joined up. And to prove it they were leaving his cheap behind.
The way Pete Ratliff told it, Pearl had to pull a pistol on R.W. to get him to pay her what she thought was fair. R.W. said, Pete Ratliff said, he would do it this one time but the budget couldn’t stand it on a weekly basis. So be it, Pete said Pearl said, but this one time at least Son was going to get his fair compensation. R.W. didn’t see that insults were called for, Pete said, they were just talking he said. No. They were talking about money, Pearl, according to Pete Ratliff said, which was negotiating she said. She thought she held the upper hand because the draw from much of what they were discussing was because of Son’s being in the show and singing his little blues. She said in so many words Son was the golden egg and she was the goose that had laid and hatched it. She knew, she continued, repeating his phrase, we all just trying to make a living, but she had to look out for herself and her son. He understood that. If she felt like they weren’t getting out fair what they were bringing in then something had to change. He didn’t think she was bluffing and he told her he appreciated all they had done—she cut him off saying the only appreciation she gave a damn about was the green kind she could put in her pocket. Right then he said he couldn’t see his way clear to do any better by them than he was already doing. She knew when a bluff was a bluff. He had set his stakes in the ground, marking his boundaries. She told him then that was the way it was. They shook hands like two white men. That was Pete Ratliff’s version of it.
“She was going to miss us a sight more than we do her,” Clara said. “We a world on this train.”
She and that boy going to do all right, Martha predicted to herself.
“Our own universe,” Clara continued, warming up. “They won’t never be in another organization like this again. Not colored from root to top branch to limb tip. Proving night after night Jim Crow is a lie.”
For her part Clara was glad Pearl and Son were gone and said so to R.W. and any and everybody else she wanted to say it to and could corner long enough to say it. Martha on the other hand didn’t say it but she was sorry to see them go. Not so much Pearl, though she liked the way she’d stood up to everybody, including R.W.
Martha had spent little time with Pearl. Alone only twice she could remember. A costume fitting, having strands of fake pearls the size of peas tacked onto the red velvet dress Pearl had made. Martha listening as Pearl, a staggered row of straight pins in her mouth, not so much talked as kind of hummed, words but unconscious ones. It was in response to something Martha had asked, trying to sound casual, but probing for information on the mysterious seamstress and all else she was. Not understanding every word, straining so as to be able to give an exact or at least a reasonable word-for-word account to satisfy the grilling she would get from Clara when next they met.
Pearl: “I met the Chinaman. He took me in. He had his reasons, but I had mine too. I learned—about me, what I could and would do. Learned how to do. How to run something. How to do with people get them to do what was needed. That was good. Good to know that. It got me though. Made me see what it took.”
With Clara afterwards, Martha couldn’t interpret what had been good to know. What that was.
“She didn’t say, Clara! Didn’t say who the Chinaman was, didn’t say what people, or what she got them to do.”
Martha listened, as Clara complained that she knew less now than before Martha’d told her what’d gone on.
“I didn’t want to say nothing,” Clara said, afraid Pearl’d realize she was being overheard and stop.
“Oh, she Pearl now, is she?”
“That’s her name, Clara.”
“It’s the name she go by.”
Martha laughed.
Clara would’ve found a way to get some answers, she said. Them little scraps Martha’d brought back was useless as hen shit against a hurricane. Martha’d smiled and didn’t argue. Martha hadn’t told Clara the last thing Pearl had said that day, said directly to her, mouth free of the pins pushed back into the purple ball of a cushion on an elastic band around her wrist. Pearl holding up a looking glass big around as a straw hat, for Martha to approve the repair.
“Son says he likes you,” said direct and as information, not in passing. “Says he likes you because you’re nice.”
And anyway, it was Son Martha thought most about; especially him with the dreamy look on his face as he listened to the crystal radio him and carpenter had assembled. And the way him and carpenter worked together. It’s a sorry hen don’t think her chick’ll grow to a peacock and prove to be a rainbow for the world. But Son had something special about him a non-mother could see as well.
Agreeing with Clara about how tough it was going to be for a woman on her own with a blind child, Martha in her silence rooted for their wellbeing.
“They call me one-armed,” Carpenter said as he was saying goodbye to Son, “they wrong as usual. I got two arms. It’s a hand that’s missing. And since we been together you’ve been that other hand for me, and a good one. And if they’d thought big enough to ask us we could’ve found a way to build the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China. They just didn’t have sense enough to ask us.
“Everybody is what they called handicapped, boy. Yours and mine’s just more obvious, but that don’t mean nothing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It has been a pleasure working with you,” Carpenter said.
“You too, sir.”
“I’m going to hear about you some day.”
“I’ll make it something good.”
“Deal.”
“Deal. Thank you for teaching me.”