would I want to take a look at it?”
“It’s good. It’s political. It’s funny. John Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Lincoln Steffens write for it.”
She waits. She knows him well, she knows more is coming.
“In Paterson,” he goes on, “I wrote some speeches and articles for the strike pamphlets. Max liked them. He said I had a gift. This week I got a letter from him. He said when I get out he’d like to get me on board. As an editor or a writer. Better than working for Bill, no? From your perspective, I mean.”
From her perspective, Gina sits on the side of the table from which, come two o’clock, she can get up, walk through the doors and out into the blinding sunshine. That’s her perspective. She can take a bus and go to the sea, she can buy gloves, listen to the radio, drink a cold beer, go to the library to borrow a book and to the butcher to buy a sausage. She can take a train to anywhere in the country.
“Yes,” Gina says. “From my perspective anything is better than working for Big Bill.”
“Anything?” He smiles. She wonders what else he’s got in store for her. Instead of telling her, he lowers his head into the newspaper, and reads to her stories weaved from fine print as she listens and watches him.
“Why do you read so much?” she asks in the lull. “What are you looking for?”
“The meaning of life,” he replies. “Isn’t that what everyone is looking for? Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”
Gina doesn’t reply. She wants to tell him that she thought she had found hers, but doesn’t. Until she becomes a mother, she can no longer answer. Immigrants don’t usually ask themselves these questions. They haven’t the time. Yet her father who brought her to America by the sheer force of his longing and his passion demands nothing less from her. For her dead father she will ask herself this question over and over until the answer comes to her by the awful grace of God.
“Like many men,” Harry says, “Henry David Thoreau included, I wish to discover the essential parts of life.”
“Me too,” says Gina.
“I don’t want to miss them while I’m toiling like the worker bees in the mills.”
Is there much danger of that kind of toil, she wants to ask, but doesn’t. “Are you looking for the essential parts while you’re on the picket lines in New Jersey?” she asks instead.
“Clearly. I don’t want to discover when it comes time for me to die that I haven’t lived.”
Me neither, Gina thinks, but doesn’t say, doesn’t dare say.
“But you live in prison,” she says quietly. “Away from me.” Even quieter.
“Here I am simplicity itself,” he says. “I have so few needs, so few wants.” He catches his breath when he says it, almost as if to stop himself. She waits. He is silent. “I have some wants,” he says, almost whispers.
“Me too,” she says, almost whispers.
“But I am pared down to my most basic elements. I’ve got to rise above the purely elemental, don’t you agree?”
She doesn’t know if she agrees. She fears she doesn’t. She tries not to glance above his head where the hands of the clock are stopped motionless, as if dead.
May the Lord remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. May he give you the desire of your heart.
Two
GINA HAD NEVER SEEN anyone get as animated and lost in the topic of conversation as Ben when he was talking about his years in Panama.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Harry would get the same intense, far-away look, maintain the same consuming focus when they would talk about harmonizing the world, remaking it into the image of what he thought it should be and not what it was. And though she still, as always, admired Harry’s learned passion, she had heard all she could stand for the time being about the Reeds and the Debs and the Haywoods. What she wanted to hear about was Panama.
“All forest and mountains. Impassable forest combined with tropical temperatures. And mountains like a spine. I should’ve just thrown up my hands. We couldn’t get a canal from north to south to connect. We excavated, we dammed off the Chagres, we built a lake. We worked from two seas inland, from Cristobal to Miraflores into the center of the country, we were diligent as beavers, and when we designed and built the concrete locks that moved the sea levels up and down, I thought there was nothing harder than that or more accomplished than that. Until we got to the Continental Divide. There was no river, no water, no field, no stream. It was just mountain.” Ben shook his head.
Gina shook hers. “I don’t know how you did it. I still don’t understand it.”
“Me neither.”
“But seriously.”
“We blew it up.”
She laughed.
“I’m not being metaphorical. Or rhetorical. We actually blew it up.”
“You blew up a mountain?”
“We drilled holes, placed explosives in the holes, and detonated the mountain, yes. After the rubble settled, we used enormous steam-powered shovels to load the loose rock onto freight trains which carted it away to landfills.”
Gina exclaimed in frightened but impressed astonishment. “You must have had to drill a lot of holes to make a valley in a mountain, no?”
“Six hundred holes a day,” Ben said. “We drilled the holes and detonated twice a day. Then the trains would come. So we had to build a railroad and lay new tracks constantly as the valley got longer and wider.”
“Oh, my word. How long did this valley become?” It was called the Culebra Cut.
“Nine miles.”
“Ben!”
“What? Too long or too short?”
“Impossible!”
“That’s what everyone said to my boss, Colonel Gaillard, the most gallant and patient of men. What you’re doing, it will never work, they said to him. It had been my honor to work with that dedicated, quiet man side by side, but I can’t tell you how often he expressed his doubts to me, how often he would say, This is just a fool’s errand, isn’t it, Mr. Shaw, what we’re attempting here? To move a mountain to let ships pass through? And I would reply, despite my gravest doubts, no, Colonel Gaillard. We must succeed, and so we shall.”
“The newspapers were merciless,” Gina said. “It will never work, they wrote, just like it didn’t with the French. It will cost tens of thousands of lives, like it did with the French. This is a waste of human and material resources.”
Ben sighed, as if even success in the present was not sufficient
