T. Boyle - The Women

Wrieto-San tried not to show favoritism, selecting one or the other of us at whim to accompany him to a potential job site, run an errand or simply pick up a hoe and listen to him expatiate on whatever subject he was revolving at the time. On this particular day, he strode right up to our little group — Esther and Gwendolyn were working with us, as I recall — and sang out, “Tadashi, how about joining me in a little excursion to Madison. To pick up those tools for the Hillside project, I mean, and a few other little necessaries?”

He drove with the top down, though, as I say, the day was brisk and made brisker by the winds generated by the Cord as he accelerated at will past farm vehicles, looming trucks and the creeping shapes of less powerful automobiles. He kept up a discourse the whole way, talking of his lectures and the money and recognition they were bringing Taliesin and how within the coming months we were sure to have a plethora of commissions piling up, enough to keep us all busy in the drafting room six days a week. I wrapped a muffler round my throat, patted at my flying hair and listened. As we came into the outskirts of the city, I couldn’t help feeling a sudden swell of pride — Wrieto-San had selected me as his companion and all the world could see it. There I was, seated at his right hand, trying to look worthy and oblivious at the same time, and failing, I’m afraid, to suppress a smile of the purest bliss. The superlative automobile growled as he shifted gears, the hood shimmering under a fresh coat of apprentice-applied wax, the wheels chopping at the light, and we glided through those depleted streets with their spindly Fords and down-at-the-mouth Chevrolets in an aura of grace and privilege. Everywhere we went, heads turned.

We stopped to eat at the sort of establishment Wrieto-San preferred — a drugstore lunch counter given to excesses of gravy, chopped meat and great mounds of potatoes and succotash — and then went into the hardware store, the Cord stationed at the curb out front and attracting an army of small boys and gaping men in overalls and winnowed hats. Wrieto-San focused all his charm on the man at the counter, paid something on account — he was in arrears for several hundred dollars — and we collected the tools and made our way out the door, Wrieto-San strutting ahead of me while I brought up the rear, burdened with packages.

Just as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, one elbow bracing the door as I stood aside for a stout farmwife in a patched cloth coat who managed to look fleetingly familiar, I was seized from behind. Two arms looped round me, tight as cables, and I was drawn back into a kind of shuffling dance as I lost my grip on the packages and a pair of crowbars and a shingling hatchet rang on the pavement at my feet and wood screws exploded from a brown paper bag. I fought back, twisting my head to get a glimpse of my antagonist, but he’d burrowed his forehead into the crook of my neck for leverage and all I knew of him was his furious reeking breath that came in hard bursts and grunts of labor. “Let go of me!” I shouted, and people were stopping on the street to gaze up in alarm. “Are you mad? Let go!” I jerked furiously. He held tight. We danced across the sidewalk, rebounding from the display window of the hardware store not once but twice, the glass shuddering with the impact. I didn’t know what was happening. I fought to work my right arm free and rake at my attacker’s throat.

And then I saw Wrieto-San and understood. He’d been arrested at the door of the Cord by a farmer in overalls and a sweater torn at the elbows. All the blood was in the farmer’s face. His eyes were squeezed almost shut and there was a single deep trench of animosity dug between them. “You son of a bitch,” he said, and he wasn’t shouting, wasn’t making it a curse or an accusation, merely a statement of fact. “You think you can cheat my wife out of her wages and then ride around in your fancy machine like some sort of king? You think you’re so high and mighty?”

Wrieto-San was puffed up like a rooster, the cane raised in a defensive posture. He backed up against the car, shouting “Stay away from me! Stay away!”

But the farmer wouldn’t stay away and he had no more words. He took a step back to brace himself and then suddenly lashed out, the oversized wedge of his fist jumping out of the sleeve of his sweater to make audible contact with the bone and cartilage of Wrieto-San’s unresisting nose. It was a shattering blow. Wrieto-San — he was in his mid-sixties, remember — floundered, sliding across the polished fender of the Cord like a seal slipping into an incarnadine sea, the cane clattering to the pavement, his hat glancing away all on its own and only his overcoat to break his fall.

“Wrieto-San!” I cried out — bellowed, bleated — and everyone froze in place for the smallest fraction of an instant. And then the arms broke their grip and I whirled round on my attacker — the same slab of a butter-stinking Irish face as the farmer himself, the same eyes, only wider and younger — and there was a swift exchange of meaningless blows even as Wrieto-San, as he described in his account of the incident in the revised edition of An Autobiography , sprang up off the pavement and locked arms with his adversary (only to be flattened again), the two rolling off the curb and into the mud and refuse of the gutter. For a moment, Wrieto-San was on top, the unremitting flow from his mashed-in nose washing over his assailant in such volume and with such force I thought he was bleeding to death, but then the two were tangled again and the farmer was on top, his fist rising and falling in swift violent thrusts. “Take him off!” Wrieto-San was crying. “Take the man off me, for Christ’s sake! He’s killing me!”

I grabbed the farmer by the shoulder and there were others there now too, a big-bottomed shopkeeper in shirtsleeves and galluses wading into the fray while a man in some sort of regimental regalia commanded, “Get out of that now!” in a voice of iron. The farmer whirled round — his neck inflamed, his face the size and color of a prize ham — gave me a violent shove and darted off into the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere.

Several of us helped Wrieto-San to his feet, where he stood woozily against the fender of the Cord, his hair disarranged, one cheek scraped and muddy, a dripping red handkerchief pressed to his nose. “Get that man,” he ordered in an unsteady voice. “I want him arrested. Do you see what he did to me? ” He let his gaze wander over the crowd of storekeepers, farmwives, urchins. “Lawlessness is what it is. Lawlessness right here in the streets of Madison.”

No one moved. The farmer had vanished, along with his son and wife (Mrs. Dunleavy, if you haven’t guessed). It was up to me to help Wrieto-San into the passenger’s seat and tame the violent mechanism of the Cord long enough to get us to the nearest medical facility, where I waited while a stooped old country doctor set and bandaged his nose in a spidery arrangement of gauze and antiseptic tape. And it was up to me to drive us home to Taliesin in the chill of the declining day, with the wind up and Wrieto-San in pugilistic mode. I don’t recall if Boris Karloff had made his dramatic appearance in The Mummy by then, but this was what Wrieto-San looked like, his face lost to its bandages, the cane poking at the darkening sky, his voice rising in wrath and fulmination all the long way home.

As it developed, that wasn ’t the end of it.

We’d no sooner come up the drive and rolled into the courtyard than a handful of apprentices, curious over our late arrival and eager for any sort of diversion from the routine, streamed out of the studio at the sound of the Cord’s mighty engine in its dying fall. Wes was in the vanguard. “My God,” he boomed, bursting through the outer door. “What happened? Was it an accident?” In the next moment everyone had crowded round, goggling at Wrieto-San’s bandages and taking in the spectacle of me sitting behind the wheel in the privileged position, my color high and a shining stippled contusion painting my right cheekbone.