Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

All this talk was part of the excitement for Lucy. At first she paid it only as much attention as she paid to the suspenders digging into her shoulders, or her ever-present fear that her hairpins would come undone, or the hard, heavy way she tried to walk. Which is to say she attended it as a way of neglecting the growing desperation she felt when she was not at the quarry. Roland was drinking again, his old self and his new one joining forces. He pulled the children in but roughly now, tickling them too hard, squeezing them to the bone. As Lucy sat on his lap he poked and pinched her, pinches that left welts: in the crease where her leg met her body, in the tender flesh near her armpit, on the undersides of her thighs, where there was more to pinch than there had been a year ago. No one noticed — if anything, he appeared to be more gentle with her than the others, not wrestling but just holding her, his fingers doing their quiet work — and she did not cry out. If she cried out, she feared he would do something worse. If she cried out, no one in the house would know what to do, not even Emma. Or maybe especially not Emma, who left the house early now for Sven’s and came back late, who for the first time in Lucy’s memory hummed to herself as she cooked and cleaned and bathed the little ones. She hummed to cheer them, Lucy supposed, but her hum was not cheerful and it had the opposite effect, on Lucy at least: the need for cheer proved how cheerless things had gotten. The more loudly Emma hummed the further Lucy felt from her, and from the other children, who often hummed along. They barely seemed to notice. It was that natural for them, a funnel pouring straight from their mother’s throat to their own. Lucy wondered, sometimes, if Roland pinched them in almost-private places, too, if maybe they, like Lucy, endured him silently, if all of them together were like the idiot men in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. She almost wished it sometimes, shamefully: that she was not the only one. But she did not believe it, because Joshua and Maggie would not have been able to hold back their tears and because the others, all of them, even as they wrestled their way out from him, even as Lucy perceived beats of fear in their eyes, laughed as they fled.

Lucy began to sense things she could not name. That Roland did not want to hurt her but to make some kind of mark. That if he outright hit her, he would give up some of his power. That his pinches were not unrelated to his being a man without a leg and her being a girl with two growing ones. A new heaviness had begun to gather in her legs, along with a fear that soon she would not be able to climb as nimbly, or run as fast.

It was a comfort to wear her brothers’ clothes. She changed in the perry shack — Janie and Anne inspected, adjusted, nodded — then darted out and down through the woods, and she was as fast as ever, her feet finding the right rocks, her toes digging into roots, launching herself like a bird-boy toward the quarry.

It was her haven. The beating hammers, the filth, the men barely noticing her as they thanked her for a drill or laid a broken bit in her palm. On breaks she sat with Liam and Jeffrey on a pallet and watched the men hammering in the pit. She admired their strength but more so the steady, thoughtful way they worked — in her mind the care they took stood for a variety of kindness. Each man had his own system for hammering, depending on his size. A left-handed man and a right-handed man would stand together to bang in an especially large set. On the shallowest shelves they moved around each other as gently as deer.

• • •

The only risks the men took that summer they took in the sheds. Once the foreman had passed — and sometimes when he hadn’t — they rested their tools and talked about Sacco and Vanzetti. They brought the papers and folded them ingeniously so they could pinch them between their thighs and spread a given article open in their lap, peering down between jobs as if to stretch their necks. A juror’s house had been bombed. The IWW was calling for strikes. Lucy began listening to their talk as she went in and out. She walked slowly to hear more. They talked about the Mendosa, too, which was connected, it seemed, to Sacco and Vanzetti, in that there were rich people to blame on both counts. They called Beatrice Cohn a mad bitch, and they called her a kike. One called her a cunt. One said he hoped she would marry Governor Fuller, and that the next bomb sent to Fuller’s house would be a great success. One said if he was one of the men who got hurt (not noticing one of Roland Murphy’s boys, listening, or not knowing he belonged to Roland Murphy) he would hitch a ride to her house and shoot her.

As Sacco and Vanzetti’s day neared, as more facts came out about Beatrice Cohn and her factory-owning father, not to mention her conniving mother, the men’s breaks grew longer, their courage greater. Lucy walked more slowly. The papers were not allowed in the Murphy house since the wreck. Who were these anarchists? Who was this woman Emma had worked for, and why had she dared work for the family they stole the pears from? One afternoon Gap Palazola, rushing for the outhouse, left his paper on the floor next to his bench. It was folded open to advertisements for garage doors and piano lessons and an adding machine and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and there, in the far-right column, the second part of an article about Beatrice Cohn. Above the article was a small photograph of the woman. It was so small Lucy had to squat, then squint, then bring the paper to her face, to make sure she was seeing it clearly. She was. She ripped it out and stuffed it into her pocket. “Whatchyou doin’?” chuckled one of the blacksmiths. But Lucy was already walking toward the next shed, her carry bag clanking, so he muttered, “Crazy kid,” repaired Gap’s paper the best he could, and got back to work.

Bea drank Templeton Rye, two bottles of which Oakes had left in the pantry. She had begun by rationing it into a jigger and sipping slowly, then had moved on to Vera’s crystal lowballs, which provided room for an ice cube, which allowed Bea to imagine herself drinking less even as she drank more, because by the end of a glass the stuff tasted mostly of water.

She wasn’t at the end of a glass. It was nearly midnight and she had just poured herself another, plopped in an ice cube, plopped herself down on the edge of Ira’s bed, and taken a large, stinging swallow. Before he fell asleep, they had argued again, Ira saying the people were right to hate her, which wasn’t the same, he pointed out, as her deserving their hatred, and Bea saying if there was a difference then it had no effect on the hated, and why, anyway, couldn’t he put aside his politics and see that she was suffering? “I can’t even begin to parse that question,” Ira had said, laughing in a way that might have seemed gentle to Bea if she weren’t in such a grave mood, but she was and so she took it as admonishment.

He had drifted off. Again she had forgotten to change his sheets while he was out of the bed.

Drinking rye fast was a little like drinking fire.

She and Ira had been over every inch of the situation too many times to count. There was nothing left to talk about. Still, it was easier to talk than to sit by herself with her infinite circling, If only this, if that, if that then this, if this then not that, if only… the tired, torturous track she’d been circling since she was seventeen. The specifics were new — introducing the shiniest, latest-model engine, the shipwreck! — but the rails were the same, and they led, circling, back and back, a seamless heritage of regret, the genealogy of her mistakes, a lurid line in her mind from the shipwreck to the whistle buoy to her fit to her jealousy and disappointment to her first temperance meetings to dropping out of Radcliffe to more fits to leaving the baby like a parcel, all the way back to the lieutenant pressing her up against the wall.