She gave him another dirty look when the food arrived. He didn’t think it was because he spread mustard on both the fragrantly steaming meat and the cabbage. In fact, he didn’t see any reason for it. But when her glare didn’t go away, he finally asked, “Is something wrong?”
“That,” she said through tight lips, pointing to his plate. “While you’re at it, why don’t you give us a few choruses of ‘McNamara’s Band’?”
“Oh,” Bushell said, and then muttered, “Hommony grits,” under his breath. Stanley, who was with great gusto carving a piece off a slice of roast beef while eating another, swallowed wrong. Bushell pounded him on the back. When he decided Sam wasn’t going to choke to death after all, he gave his attention back to Kathleen. “The only reason I ordered that” - he tapped the corned beef with his fork - “was that I figured it had better be good in a town full of Irishmen.”
She studied him as if he were a painting that had come before her for authentication: was he an Old Master or just a worthless modern forgery? “All right,” she said after that long, measuring stare, and then, perhaps feeling that wasn’t enough, “If you knew how many times I’ve had being Irish thrown in my face - If I do my job well, who my father is shouldn’t matter a farthing’s worth.”
Bushell raised his glass of whiskey and solemnly drank in salute to that. All the same, he could not help remembering that Kathleen’s father - Aloysius Flannery, that’s what his name was - bought her a subscription to Common Sense every year.
X
Bushell had never seen so many black men on the streets in his life. The miners heading away from the mines after their shift ended were not merely brown, as Samuel Stanley was - they were black. Black as coal, Bushell thought, and no wonder.
They bantered with one another as they spread through the town, some going home, others hurrying to the taverns to slake their thirst. Had Bushell been among their number, he would have had a drink, or more likely several, before he’d have wanted to face anyone he loved. Putting in a day’s work hundreds, maybe thousands of feet underground in tunnels barely tall enough to stand up in, never knowing when those tunnels would flood or come crashing down on your head or collapse somewhere behind you, sealing you off from any hope of rescue . . . The very idea made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
But what had Shakespeare said of the gravedigger? “Custom had made it in him a property of easiness,” that was the line. It held with the miners, too. They were raucous and cheerful, almost to a man. If they worried about how they made their living, they didn’t show it on the outside. They were magnificent-looking men, too, despite, or maybe because of, the coal dust that coated their bare torsos. Whatever evils that could be ascribed to it - and Bushell know how many they were laboring in the mines kept a man fit - till blacklung got him, anyhow. For his age, he was in good condition, but miners who had to be ten years older were far firmer and stronger. He felt himself drawing back his shoulders, tightening his belly. Walking along beside him, Samuel Stanley also held himself quite erect.
As soon as the two RAMs and Kathleen Flannery got out of Charleroi’s business district, Kathleen’s attention swung from the miners themselves to the homes in which they lived. “How can we expect human beings to put up with conditions like these?” she said, pointing. “And how long can we expect human beings to put up with them?”
Looking down the long rows of hovels jammed against one another, Bushell had a hard time finding an answer for those questions. The whole block of houses on Lantern Way leaned from the vertical; doors and windows were ten or even twenty degrees out of true. Grass grew rank on the thin strip of lawn between the sagging houses and the street. A few houses had decrepit steamers in various states of disrepair up on the lawn. Most, though, were without motorcars of any sort. Swarms of boys played on the grass and in the street. With bats that looked carved from branches, wickets made of piled jackets, and a sixpenny India-rubber ball, a mob of them had a spirited, if disorderly, game of cricket under way. They paused in their action while Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen walked through the makeshift playing field toward Percy McGaffigan’s house at number 39. The older lads followed Kathleen Flannery with their eyes; young and old seemed to view the presence of well-dressed strangers with suspicion, for Bushell and his companions brought silence with them, the usual racket resuming behind them after they’d passed.
Only a worn path in the grass served as a walkway up to number 39. The door leaned enough to the left to be disconcerting. Bushell wanted to lean that way himself, to make the world look straight. Running into the effect without having several Jameson in him was new, but not particularly welcome.
“I feel like I’m going into one of those crooked houses they have at carnivals sometimes,” Samuel Stanley said, so Bushell wasn’t the only one the off-kilter door bothered. He looked for a bell. Not finding one, he rapped on the door. A dog yapped inside the house. The door opened with a squeal; Bushell wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t been capable of opening. A plump, pale, tired-looking woman in a cheap cotton dress of a bilious green stared at him as if he’d just dropped from the moon. Behind her, two small boys and a somewhat larger girl looked equally amazed.
“Does Percy McGaffigan live here?” he asked, showing his badge.
The woman’s eyes got even wider. “No,” she said quickly. “Never heard of no McGaffigans. You got the wrong house, Mister. Go away.”
“It’s all right, Maggie,” a man’s voice said from behind her. “Leastways, I think it is. These are the blokes from New Liverpool I was telling you about. Let ‘em in. They’re just sniffing after The Two Georges, nothing more.”
Reluctantly, Maggie McGaffigan stood aside. She didn’t look happy about it, whether because she still feared for her husband’s safety or because she didn’t want strangers inspecting her housekeeping Bushell couldn’t have said. By the way the parlor looked, she didn’t do enough housekeeping to make inspection worthwhile. The room was small and dingy, the furniture - mismatched pieces looking as if they’d been found at jumble sales - falling to bits, dirty clothes strewn everywhere. The place smelled of sweat, grease, and dog.
Percy McGaffigan squatted in a corner of the parlor with an enamel basin half full of water, a rag, and a bar of soap. His face and arms and most of his chest were pink, the rest of his chest, his ridged belly, and his back still the coal-dust black they’d been when he emerged from the mine. The rag and the water had already gone gray with the dust he’d washed from himself.
“Don’t mind me,” he said, lathering the soap in the dirty water. “Just cleanin’ up a bit afore supper, I am. Some o’ the fellers, they eat first and then wash, but I figure I been breathin’ coal all day long, an’ I don’t much fancy swallowin’ it, too, that I don’t.” He soaped the left half of his belly, scrubbing away at the grime there with the washrag.
In a rather faint voice, Kathleen Flannery said, “But, Mr. McGaffigan - haven’t you got a bathtub?”
“If I did, Miss, you think I’d be doin’ this?” McGafflgan’s voice had been mild, even affable. Now it turned sharp. “Dang few miners hereabouts with bathtubs, Miss, or toilets either. Can’t afford such. These here houses are back to back, is what they are, with others just like ‘em built against the far wall there. Us, we get to look out on the street, but we got to go round the corner to visit the loo. Them others back around there, they have themselves a short walk, but they get to look at the backhouses and the rubbish pitch all year long. You had your druthers, Miss, which’d you sooner do?”