Sea Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

workers are allowed in the afternoon. He once discovered a trapdoor that leads onto the roof, and as soon as the horn sounds, he pretends to head for the lavatory and instead takes a quick turn near the back stairs. On the roof he smokes a cigarette and looks over to the falls because he needs the quiet like some men need drink. He can see across the rooftops of the mill housing — every brick building precisely the same: four floors, one chimney, three dormers on each top floor — to the railroad bridge that crosses the river. On good days, he can see all the way to the ocean, a thin, hazy blue line on the horizon. When the weather is poor — when there is a blizzard or it is raining so hard he can’t open his eyes — McDermott stands in the shelter of the air shaft, shivering, just so he can see the sky.
    * * *
    There isn’t a day that goes by that McDermott doesn’t think of taking off like his father did. He imagines his father in Iowa or Saskatchewan, working a combine in an enormous field, stopping every now and then to watch the wind make waves in the wheat and the clouds point still farther west — not a building or a chimney stack or a rickety wooden fire escape in sight. But then, as if it were a daily ritual he needed to observe, McDermott will think about Eileen and about his younger brothers who are a handful. He is determined to keep Eamon and Michael out of the mills. It’s no place for a man, never mind for a boy. All you have to do is look at the faces around you when you go back in from the break — faces waxy with exhaustion or resignation or grim determination. The women’s faces are the worst. When the men get off work, they head for a meal or a drink. The women go home to hungry children and cramped apartments that need tending. Some of the women weavers have admitted to McDermott that they count to themselves on the looms to pass the time — to eight, say, repeatedly; or to four thousand and eighty. They swear it makes the clock move faster. McDermott thinks about entire lives spent counting simply to make the days go faster, and that fact, out of all the miserable facts he knows about mill life, seems to him the saddest one of all.
    “There’s a meeting,” Ross says.
    “What about?” McDermott asks.
    “The speed-up.”
    “What about it?”
    “It’s killing the men,” Ross says. “No one can keep up. Everyone is getting docked. They can’t feed their families.”
    Left unmentioned is the money the men in the speak are pissing away on whiskey. McDermott doesn’t want a family of his own. Since the speed-up, the men are taking their sons and daughters out of school and putting them in the mills. What’s the point, McDermott wants to know, of having children at all?
    “We want the elimination of piecework,” Ross says, ticking off the demands on his fingers. “We want the clock system out. We want a standard wage scale. Forty hours, five days a week, minimum of twenty dollars a week. We want decent housing. We want a reduction of rent and light charges.”
    “You’ll never get it,” McDermott says.
    “We won’t if we don’t demand it,” Ross says.
    “Where’s the meeting?”
    “Nadeau’s. Make sure you’re not followed. Last time, Hurd stood outside and made a list of everyone going in.”
    “I don’t know,” McDermott says. He means he doesn’t know if he will go to the meeting. He means he doesn’t know if he wants to get involved. He sucks on one of the white tablets the mill quack gave him. The English girl is sitting on a stool.
    “They’re starving in Gastonia,” McDermott says.
    “You get relief,” Ross says. “There’s organizations that send relief.”
    “Communists,” McDermott says.
    “It’s the unions,” Ross insists. “It has nothing to do with Communists.”
    “If we starve, it’ll be the Communists who’ll feed us. Tell me there weren’t Communists in Gastonia.”
    Ross downs his shot, signals for another. “They’re sending