I began to realize as we talked that she was no older than I was. I was stunned — I was not yet twenty — I equated power and position in the world with age.
“You live here?” she said. “How do you stand it?” I rubbed my palms on my knickers. I looked with alarm at Warren Penfield, who said, “Clara, he’s my surprise for you,” and came back to his place on the floor.
She had a throaty voice with a scratched quality. Her diction was of the street. “Whats ’at mean!” She gazed at me, her eyes widening, and I was certain, as if a chasm were opening around me, that she was as fraudulent in this place as I was. I drank off my wine.
“You remember the night you heard the dogs?” the poet said to her, and leaned forward to refill my glass. “Joe here is taking each day as it comes — like you, Clara.”
I saw realization light her eyes. She went to the fire and sat down before it with her back to us. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I drank more than I should have. The fire looming her shadow across the low-ceilinged room. Later we heard the rain falling, a heavy rain that seemed to do something to the draught. Wood smoke came into the room on gusts. At this point we were all standing, I had removed my shirt, and she was tracing the scars on my chest and arms and neck with her fingertips.
I could smell her, the soap she used, the gel of her hair. The firelight flared on our faces as if we were standing with the poet in his war.
“He told me it was a deer, that they took a deer,” she said. “That was a lie.”
“Yes,” Penfield said, watching her fingers.
“What class,” Clara said. Tears were suddenly coming down her cheeks.
“I could help you leave,” Penfield said. His eyes closed and he began moving his head from side to side like someone in mourning. “I can get you out of here. We can leave together.” His sentences became a hum, a soft keening, as if he were listening to some private elegy and had no hope of an answer from her.
“That son of a bitch,” she said with the tears streaming. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
16
Certain contracts having quietly been made in mountains
certified convicts having mislaid their companions
I direct you eight hundred Mercator miles west
to the autobody works on the flat landscape
dawn whitening the frost on the corrugated shed roofs
the smokeless stacks the endless chain-link fence
the first trolley of the morning down Division Street
discharges workers in caps and open jackets but not workers.
The pickets roused from their sleep huddled by steel-drum fires
the cops awakened in their cars rubbing their misted windshields
the second trolley of the morning tolls down Division Street
discharges workers or workers at first glance
but somehow not resembling the strikers grouping uneasily
in front of the main gates of the autobody works.
The cops make calls from phoneboxes on the corners
the third trolley of the morning grinding its flanged wheels
on Division Street stopping the arrivals stepping down now
seen in the light their expressions of newly purchased loyalty
appearing as an unaccustomed cause in their shrewd appraising eyes
the insignia of their dereliction, jackets with pockets of pints
shoes tied around with rope, medals of filth,
mercenaries with callused fingers discovering
the cobblestones pried so easily
by ones and twos and hefted as many as until the tracks
of the trolleys of Division Street stand up from unpaved beds.
Open trucks arrive filled with the faces not of workers.
This army can take the city apart and put it back together
if it so wishes or perhaps wrap the electrified lines
stringing the utility poles overhead around each individual striker
until he may go self-powered into eternity.
Cops start patrol-car engines drive quietly away
certain black sedans now arrive between arrivals
of the crowded streetcars and trucks some men in overcoats appearing
among the seeming workers resembling only slightly now the pickets
with the eyes of lepers staring at them
no saints present on this wet gray morning to kiss them,
so numerous now they do not even have to look at whom they will face
when they walk over them into the plant and throw the switches.
And primly planning the action deploying forces
is a slim and swarthy man in overcoat and pearl-gray fedora
a dark-eyed man short but very well put together
friend of industrialists, businessman who keeps his word
and capable of a gracious gesture under the right conditions.
Only now, as with a gloved hand he beckons one of the strikers
an aged man with white hair and rounded shoulders
who has called out brothers don’t do this to your brothers
to meet him between the lines alone in no man’s land
does a small snapshot of rage light his brain.
He impassively demonstrates the function of the cobblestone
a sudden event on the workingman’s skull who has met him
surprised now at the red routes of death mapped on his forehead
turning to share this intelligence with his brothers
hand lifted too late as the signal for the engagement to begin.
17
And then the life quickened, suddenly the people in green were scurrying about purposefully, there even seemed to be more of them, and I knew without being told that the master of Loon Lake, Mr. F. W. Bennett, was in place.
One morning I was mucking out the stables. Two horses were made ready for riding. The wide doors swung open admitting a great flood of light, the horses were led out, and I caught a glimpse of her in jodhpurs, velvet riding jacket, she was fixing the strap of her riding helmet. The doors closed. I climbed over the stall gate and ran to a window. A bay flank and a shiny brown boot moved through my field of vision. I heard a man’s voice, a quiet word of encouragement, and then she, on her lighter mount, passed my eyes, the boot not quite secure in the stirrup.
I ran to the doors and put my eyes to the crack: the back and head of white hair were all I could see of Bennett before Clara’s figure loomed up on her fat-assed horse, she didn’t roll with its footfalls but took each one bumping, her black riding helmet slightly askew.