Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“After He smote her, God spoke to her. He spoke to her for a very long time, and when she awoke, she knew the Almighty to be a fraud and a coward. A handsome young man had her in his arms and was standing up. He was whispering to her that it would be all right, she was fine and everything would be all right, she should not worry. Rosemary was not to worry. The handsome young man repeated this injunction. No stranger to the protocols of the fairy tale, she immediately trusted the young man and found herself as incapable of worry as of suspicion. His princely, heroic beauty held no trace of treachery or even vulnerability to vice — and in fact his only fault seemed to lie in an apparent double standard: he was visibly worried, stricken, it was not too much to say, with anxiety. If he was outwardly reassuring, he was also clearly gripped by a fear of what might happen if he failed to get Rosemary off the filthy floor and into a warm bed in a clean room. He carried her across, it seemed, the whole of Willimantic, me bouncing along next to them, moaning and whispering and petting Rosemary’s head, then through the door of a small house, up its main staircase, and into a room that was clean and warm but nearly empty. There was a bed in it, and he put her gently under its covers. I crawled in too, and he seemed not to think I was being presumptuous. He brought more blankets and more pillows. He brought some food, which we ate together, conversing with polite awkwardness about conditions at the mill, the weather, opera, and romantic poetry. There was evidence outside of a growing commotion, but we were able to ignore it. Rosemary was warm and happy and thoroughly amazed at the depth of the young man’s knowledge of beautiful, truthful things — as was I, even though I saw very clearly that I was not the object of his tender little attentions, but merely an object. We were as well unspeakably grateful to him — so grateful and so admiring we found it impossible to find out who he was or even where we were. After a while, in which we must have dozed, the commotion outside became so loud and strange that we could ignore it no longer. We stood at the window, the young man holding the curtain back just enough so that we could see. It was a strike. ‘They’re saying you started it,’ laughed the young man. ‘Me?’ asked Rosemary. ‘Yes.’ ‘Who is saying that?’ ‘The men who saw you take the shuttle to your head.’ ‘Oh,’ said Rosemary falteringly. ‘Is that what happened.?’ ‘Yes. They think you’re dead. Some of them do, anyway. It was too much for them to bear. You’re a legend in your own time.’ ‘I ought to join them.’ ‘Certainly, if you feel better. But do you in fact feel better?’ Rosemary suddenly found herself sobbing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Then,’ said the young man, ‘you must stay.’ ‘Perhaps until the morning.?’ Admitting her weakness made her feel even worse, and she sobbed wretchedly. ‘Certainly. But while you are resting, think about those men who know you are not dead.’ ‘There are men who believe I’m alive?’ ‘Of course there are, darling. But you’re safe here. If you expose yourself, whether you feel better or not, you will be less safe. You may in fact find yourself in terrifying danger. You might get shot. You might go to prison for the rest of your life.’ The young man stared out the window. ‘I’d lie low for a while,’ he said, not turning around. ‘You too, of course,’ he said to me, turning abruptly and putting his hand on my shoulder.”

“Rosemary sat on the edge of the bed. Her feet were cold. It was hard to believe, but she thought she could eat some more, if more was available. The young man said he would find more if it was the last thing he did. His pose of ardency seemed even more authentic than it had been earlier, but what he actually did was give me some money and send me out. Earlier, prepossessingly resourceful, he had found a Victrola and a complete recording, forty sides, by La Voce del Padrone of La Gioconda. We listened to this long masterpiece in its entirety, and then I went out for bread and cheese. Rosemary and the young man listened to it again, in its entirety, playing over and over ‘The Dance of the Hours,’ because it took me, no surprise, quite a while to get the food. We listened to it yet again, mad for it, really, as who would not have been, given all that had happened, all that was happening? The next morning, the young man gone, we decided we were finished lying low. Rosemary was pregnant. Though of course we didn’t know it at the time, she couldn’t keep the news of the fuck to herself. The young man had disappeared. Had he fathered the presence she suddenly insisted she unmistakably felt within her? She did not know. She did not know. How was one to know? I did not know. She did not care. I cared but was helpless. Strangely, her skirt was missing too, the one — the only — in which she believed she’d sewn the family document. Since her undergarments, stockings, boots, blouse, and sweater were all still available to her, but strewn here and there about the room, the corridor, landing, and stairs, she concluded she was merely being hysterical and could not trust herself to look carefully and search thoroughly an environment in which so much had happened in so little time. ‘I could be,’ she said, ‘looking right at it.’ Wrapping herself in the bedsheet with snug ingenuity, she dressed herself and we went out into the crowded street. It was a cold day but not so cold that we shivered, and if the gray sky threatened snow, it was still dry. Rosemary liked to speak of herself, and perhaps to think of herself, as a fairy-tale innocent, but she was not naïve. She knew she hadn’t caused the strike, but she felt in an obscure way responsible, even guilty. There is no explaining such guilt: it had something to do with a frivolous lightheartedness that informed or was at least present in or witness to her darkest deeds. There was no romance in a strike, and she knew it; it could only seem so in retrospect, in, as it were, a ballad. It took place in darkness and the light it shed was explosive. But it was not a darkness of evil, and that was the difference. It was a darkness of despair and fear, and a light of pain and anger, and so it was unreasoning and unrelenting. Good was not an inherent consequence. In fact no good could come of such a force, unless reason could be brought to bear upon it, unless people around whom the water was rising and swirling could be encouraged to somehow not mind the ominous roaring in the distance, could be encouraged to think and act calmly even in the face of. this is where Rosemary Thorndike eventually made her single historically documentable mark. brutal repression. And so we clung to the steps of the house while our people raged past us. If we had heard singing from the window earlier — it was possible but we viewed the possibility with suspicion, given what had been happening — no one was singing now. The flow of the crowd was so fast and turbid that it was impossible to stay in one place for longer than a few seconds. Some people we recognized who in turn recognized us, but nothing was made of these recognitions as nothing could be made of them in such uncertain circumstances: the mill had been struck and shut down and the street was a river in flood just as surely as if a dam had been dynamited. Men, women, and children would certainly drown, it was only a question of how many; and when their bodies finally fetched up in some psychological backwater, slowly rotating in the faint current, recognition would matter even less. We heard fragments of talk, asked a question here and there when we could, and, with what we already knew from the men on the docks and rumor, slowly fashioned a narrative, which went something like this: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun to take measures that would raise the standard of living for millworkers and protect them generally from the zealotry of mill owners and other smaller-minded, meaner-spirited capitalists, but Connecticut was slow in following suit. There was a corresponding diminishment of patience for the scaling down of the sixty-hour workweek. Fifty-four was the goal, and fifty-eight would be acceptable as a first step, but both goal and step were rejected as mill owners testified to insurmountable disadvantages in the marketplace: it could simply not be done, no matter what Massachusetts may, in its folly, have set out to do. Fifty-eight was nevertheless mandated. In acceptance of the mandate, the owners reduced wages. This was seen as a more or less reasonable compromise, but the 3 percent cut was felt by the workers receiving it as salt in a wound. Rosemary felt wounded, so wounded, as I have said, that she was in a nearly perpetual state of hallucination and understood as well as was necessary, with a mind not at all at ease with numbers — with in fact a mind in which numbers elicited a kind of feverish loathing — that the weavers had been forced to work twelve looms at forty-nine cents a cut instead of seven looms at seventy-nine cents. This was probably why she ran upstairs when she regained consciousness on the floor before her drum. These men did in fact respond to her cry. They were ready to walk out, and when ‘the little girl’ ran screaming into their presence, it was nearly impossible not to act. Most workers, however, in other parts of the mill, stayed at their stations. It wasn’t until the next morning, when she was feeling the first uneasiness of pregnancy, that pay envelopes were opened and the wage cuts made incontrovertibly manifest, and violence broke out. After a period of nervousness and actual embarrassment — Rosemary’s word for the general sentiment that universal principles of right conduct had somehow been subverted — shouts of anger could be heard here and there, and before anyone could think of doing it, some gear works were smashed and some drive belts cut. One man, who seemed lost and who had obviously been crying — she could see the tracks in the grime on his face, and his eyes were puffy and red — told her that someone had been killed, a little girl had been shot down by soldiers. ‘Soldiers?’ she cried. ‘Where did soldiers come from so quickly?’ ‘They shot her. I saw it,’ said the man with sudden disturbing calm. ‘No,’ said Rosemary. ‘No they didn’t. There aren’t any soldiers in this town.’ ‘A little girl was shot and killed,’ insisted the man, now with a kind of indifference. ‘NO SHE WASN’T!’ shouted Rosemary. ‘THAT WAS ME! I AM THE LITTLE GIRL AND I’M NOT DEAD!’”