talk about mostly nothing. So somewhere in that nothing he figured I might be interested in making some extra dough.
“Think they need a shovel?” I asked him.
“Henry, the way my dad tells me, that place is pretty much made of dirt, so I think if you know how to handle a shovel, they can use you. He’s shoveling most times he’s working just to keep the place from washing away. Yeah, I think they need some.” This sounded suitable to me, as they say.
“Well you go ahead and tell him I can work on Sundays. I don’t know how many hours he’s looking for, but I can put in a full day. On Sundays round here I don’t do much other than get a bath and sometimes get to church. I can miss some church for awhile.”
I go to St. Luke’s on D Street on occasion, and to be honest, I often go just to put on a nice shirt and have a look inside a place that is better looking than the mill. I’m not generally fond of the inside of churches since my younger brother John was killed and we gathered for him at Holy Trinity back home. Still, Father McCabe keeps St. Luke’s clean as a whistle despite the smoke and ashes. He works the broom like it’s nothing and when you walk in if you look down at the steps you hardly notice a speck. The belfry alone is one worth seeing. It’s the highest spot in town that’s not attached to a mill, and when the bells chime and you are heading into church and look up at the stained glass it’s easy to forget the mill, at least for a stretch.
Reginald nodded back at me. It was close to the end of lunch.
2
My boarding house is on E Street, not too far from the clearing that once was Humphrey’s Creek but now is all filled in. Reginald would head across the clearing to the north side, which was the colored section of town. We would walk back home together from the mill sometimes, along with Stanley, and after a day of work we might have something interesting to say about a machine breaking or the coal coming in heavy or it being hot or how the belt seemed to be moving a little faster or a little slower.
It was good enough talk, and it got us across town, and Stanley would turn up a block before me into one of the rowhouses on D Street, and that was that, and then I’d head off another block with Reginald. Sometimes it didn’t go this way at all, and Reginald would fall in with a group of colored fellows, and me and Stanley would fall in with some of our boys. Stanley was married to a woman named Helen and she was nice enough, but didn’t care for me much. She really disliked Reginald for being colored, but also because we were two bachelors and had no kids and slowed down Stanley’s pace to what you might call very leisurely.
I can’t blame her on the leisurely part, I must say, because Stanley has two kids and for some reason they are a just plain rotten pair. That is not something people should say all that often about somebody’s kids, otherwise you come off as evil-spirited. I have to say it here, though, to explain why Helen could use having Stanley home and why a slow stroll with us might be a little agitating. She would sometimes have me over for dinner but not Reginald, and we never had to say anything to Reginald other than “bye,” and he’d keep heading for the clearing, and we’d turn onto D. Tonight was one of those nights, but I threw in, “Let me know what your father thinks, Reginald.”
He waved and walked on and Stanley and me started in towards his house.
Stanley’s house was a brick rowhouse, just two in from the end of the street on the west side. They was always covered with soot so they looked a lot older than they was, but they were roomy enough, and solid, and a leg up on living in a boarding house. They had little fenced in yards and some folks made a real point of making them look pretty with flowers and all. It could make people real proud those yards, being so close to a mill and all and still looking showy.
We were just a few feet from his front steps when damn if I didn’t get hit with a rock thrown by one of his kids from the lower floor window. It caught me square in the cheek and stung like hell.
“Well Goddamn, Stanley, your kids can’t even wait until I get in your house to be rotten!”
It came off worse than I wanted it to, but if you finish up a long hard day at the mill and are thinking about a nice dinner but instead get a rock in the cheek, that type thing might just fly out of you.
Stanley stopped in his tracks and stood there quiet, like he wasn’t sure what to say, and then he told his son to close the window. Helen had the other front window open. She was preparing dinner and heard me let out with “goddamn” and “kids” and “rotten,” which was all she needed—and she did not need much—to say, “Stanley, if that man thinks he can come up my walkway cursing at my children and then get a meal, he is sadly mistaken!”
She then slammed the window and skipped any mention at all of the rock that just hit me in the cheek. Their older boy, I should point out, is thirteen and it is not as if he just learned to throw or is a year or two past the diapers. He let rip good and hard and caught me square.
“I’m sorry, Stanley, but that hurt like the dickens. Your kids aren’t always rotten. Just sometimes after they do certain things they seem rotten.”
If you step back and look at what I said, saying somebody’s kids aren’t rotten, they just seem rotten, isn’t really improving things.
“Sorry, Henry,” said Stanley, “He’s playing baseball now and he’s always throwing things.”
I wondered what baseball had to do with hitting a guy in the cheek with a rock, but I was looking to patch things up after cursing and having Helen slam the window on us, so I did not ask this. And it was us she was slamming it on, because Stanley would be in more trouble than me. I’d just head home and have some bread and butter and take a good look at the cheek. He was the one heading inside and would have to explain his cursing friend who was often talking to a Negro when she saw him pass by.
“No, I’m sorry Stanley. A boy’s a boy, and I cursed with the window open and Helen right there, which isn’t much better than throwing rocks. I’ll head off and I’ll see you at the mill Monday. Tell Helen I’m sorry and tell the kid he’s got good aim but, well, good aim at somebody’s cheek, well…” I said it with a smile to show I wasn’t smarting anymore and hoping maybe he’d finish the sentence for me to his kid. He just smiled as best he could and nodded, like we were back at the belt, and I walked home to my place on E.
The Point was laid out so you knew where you stood in life. I was just on this side of the clearing, which meant I was as close to the bottom as you could be on this end of the town. The houses from C Street on up were where the higher-up employees lived, and in between were people like Stanley that weren’t real high up but had families and such or were somewhat high up and if things went well were supposed to move up the streets towards A. Guys like me got to know what it was like being in the better houses just by being able to see them. The folks in the better houses saw what was waiting for them if they started slipping over at the mill. Living on E marked me in town as not especially highly stationed.
Still, it suited me well enough. I will say the water nearby could smell God awful on some nights. I do not know what exactly goes in it from the mill, but there are so many things you throw out when you’re making steel that sometimes the steel seems like the smallest thing left. More than once there is smoke coming off the water near the mill, and judging by the color of water down at the bathing beach on some days, I’m happy not to know what exactly’s going in there.
The boarding house was a nice place, and we had a bathroom on the second floor with a few bathtubs and a shower, which, given how much dirt we all brought
