Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

After the kitchen crew had prepared the food, and it was cooked, they served it. Once, as Ira reached over to set a plate of stew before one of the scabs, the plate in his other hand tipped slightly, spilling gravy on the shirt of another scab. He sprang to his feet, snarling fiercely. And scared and quaking, Ira cried out, “I’m sorry, mister. You can see I’m not a waiter!” Thus mollified, the man sat down again.

The culinary and dining area occupied the space where the ticket booth and turnstiles usually stood. The dormitory was the station platform. On it were double rows of canvas cots, and the scabs slept there in the open air. They were a seedy bunch, especially in the morning, when Ira came to work to serve them their breakfast of bacon and eggs, a seedy bunch who sat blearily or groggily on the edge of their cots, sat yawning in their blue work shirts and dungarees. Where did they come from, where would they go afterward? To another strike-torn place? Ira could almost pity them — perversely — though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, and that he was no more scrupulous than they were, but they looked so surly and withdrawn — just like condemned men might look, he thought. Sometimes he thought he caught the glint of a hypodermic needle. They shot craps in the afternoon.

“The strikers won’t maul you?” Mom asked anxiously, when Ira told her what his new duties were. “I fear greatly.”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “They won’t maul me.”

“You’re mixing into a strike,” said Pop. “You don’t know what they’ll do. They’ll open your head.”

“Maybe you better not go to work,” Minnie worried.

“And get fired?” Ira retorted. “Nobody’s gonna open my head. Nothing’s gonna happen. What am I? A scab? I’m not gonna run the trains. They’re the scabs.”

“ Oy, vey ,” Mom moaned. “It goes ill with me. The first one they’ll pick on will be the Jew.”

“They won’t pick on me. I’m not running the trains,” Ira maintained doggedly. “If one of these scabs went into a restaurant where you’re a waiter, will the strikers beat up the waiter?”

“That’s right,” Minnie agreed. “Ira’s right. He’s only a waiter.”

“Indeed.” Mom remained stubbornly unconvinced. “Would that I never knew that shrew downstairs, Mrs. Mahoney. Evil befell me that I had to gossip with her.”

“Don’t worry,” Ira rebuked Mom wrathfully. “All I do is hang around, for Christ’s sake, and peel potatoes. It’s a cinch. And I’m making twenty-eight fifty a week.”

“We’ll see,” Pop said ominously. “We’ll see.”

And Minnie pleaded, “Yeah, please be careful, Ira.” She approached him, patted his shoulder tenderly. “Please watch out.” She clucked worriedly. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to work. Say you’re sick. You got flu. You can go to Dr. Weiner. He’ll give you a letter.”

As suddenly as the strike had been called, it was called off. Mr. Quackenbush (what a moniker!), the comptroller, came to terms, the newspapers all proclaimed, with the motormen. They again manned the trains. All subway services return to normal, the newspaper said. All trains running on schedule. Before quitting time on Wednesday, Ira and the others were told to report to their regular places of work. He gave scant thought to the fate of the strikebreakers: they were still standing around, sitting on their cots, or striding on the platform, waiting for their pay, some rumbling about the bastards wouldn’t even give us our supper, and some went to find the Italian cook for a handout or a sandwich, but he had disappeared. They’d like to wreck the goddamn station, they said, heave the cots onto the track — but they hadn’t been paid. And there were a couple of cops around — somewhere.

It was back to the subway barn for Ira. Nobody seemed to have missed him. Mr. Kelly smacked his lips when he glanced at Ira. Quinto said: “Hey, what’sa matter for you? You seek?” Maybe he pretended he didn’t know.

Ira answered, unsuccessfully nonchalant: “No, they wanted me to work uptown.”

Only Burgess seemed to take the measure of him with calm survey — without a word, quizzically, his brown eyes level, as if he were committing a thought to memory, or an object lesson: affirming the compulsions of reality. Who knew? No one said anything.

And at home, everything returned to normal also, to Mom’s great relief, to Pop’s noncommittal “ Noo , it became nothing out of nothing.” Fervently concurred in by Mom’s “ Gott sei dank ,” and Minnie’s terse “You gave me a real scare.”

Because Quinto was illiterate, and his command of English very poor, Ira would go on errands to the toolshed, in the charge of a cross-eyed, redheaded Irishman (the Irish were in the ascendant, needless to say), and fetch a leather gasket, new bolts, or other components needed to replace worn ones on the brake cylinders. Sometimes his errands took him to far corners of the barn, remote, almost mysterious places, visited once and not again, and as a result, imbuing the senses with imagery as vivid as they were pristine. He beheld with the eyes of childhood, with wondering gaze, the great emery grindstones truing the flange of a rusty car wheel, sending a comet’s train of sparks into the gloom of the workshop, starchy and ozone-laden. He loitered whenever he had a chance: how like a dawn lighting up the smithy were the heavy, white-hot forgings brought from their crimson beds of fiery coke. And the two brawny, bare-armed Irishmen hammering the white forging on the black anvil, rhythmically, like the automata of a clock beating out the hours, spoke to each other as if out of a trance. Said one: “Do you mind the time we were in Cork?” And the other: “’Twas a day like this.”

With eighty trains in the barn daily, eight rows of them, gobs of grease from the work of maintenance and repair fell in splotches everywhere, and mainly in the aisles: a hazard to the men traversing them. For safety’s sake, the sweepers broadcast clouds of slaked lime, “to cut the grease,” they said: to dry the smear left by the lubricant after it was cleaned up: to cut the grease. To cut the choking dryness of the clouds of slaked lime, men chewed tobacco. Ira soon got the hang of the vile habit. Ever impressionable, eager for every new sensation, he bought his package of cut plug chewing tobacco, and was soon squirting tobacco juice everywhere with the best of them, and proud of his ability to do so. Work made him oblivious of the cud in his cheek, except when time came to discharge a mouthful: Chew Star Navy. Spit ham gravy . It was easy. Wait till he got back to college. He’d show them. It happened he had a wide gap between his upper incisors, and could force a stream of brown fluid between them to arc over a considerable span. Also, chewing abated the craving to sneak a smoke. Quinto, who neither chewed nor smoked, was impressed. Chew Star Navy. Spit ham gravy .

IX

Ira dreamed at night, strange verbal, literary dreams. He often walked with literary and historical personages through the car barn, explaining the work that was being done: once with Mark Twain in his white suit, once with tense General Sherman. Again, in the company of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Ira took the poet on a tour of the place. Work was at an end, trains had been lowered down on the rails — and the barn was quiet and somber. Byron looked just as he did in Moody and Lovett’s Outlines of English Literature , handsome and sleek, with tousled hair above a fine brow, and shirt collar open at the throat. The two talked as they walked by the ends of the long lines of brooding trains. Suddenly the atmosphere darkened, became sinister — trains stretched away in ominous perspective. And turning to Byron, Ira said, “You see, Lord Byron: the Aisles of Grease, the Aisles of Grease, where burning Sappho loved and sung.” Byron laughed. A jubilant light spread over the entire car barn. Ira woke. “You’re priceless,” said Edith when he told her about the dream one evening early that fall.