He woke with a start. The fire in the stove had long since gone out, and he was stiff from lying on the wooden floor. Why hadn't he gotten into Angelo's bed? He must be crazy, passing up a good chance to lie in a comfortable bed. He examined Giuliano's clothes. He wouldn't get the blood out of the shirt if he scrubbed from now till Christmas. The pants were black, so the stain didn't show, but the white shirt was rusty with the blood he'd tried to wash out. He folded it up so the worst of the stain was underneath and hardly visible. Giuliano would be mad, but how could Jake help it? Maybe the man would blame the police more than he'd blame Jake. If not, so what? Giuliano was rich enough to buy himself another shirt, wasn't he? Still, maybe it would be better not to be here when the men returned. Angelo was good at explanations. Let him do it.
He went down the rickety stairs to the outside door. While he slept, the city had come to life. union Street seemed to be crawling with people. He'd go north, he decided, away from the mills, away from the river and his father, away from Giuliano's unhappiness. The weather was bitter as he headed up union Street with no place to go. He had used up all the refuges he knew—the big Catholic church of the Irish, the bakery, Angelo's—better to just keep walking. He turned off into a narrow street lined with mill-owned tenement houses. Women were everywhere, talking excitedly in all their peculiar languages. The words "strike" and "scab" and the name "Ettor" popped out of the foreign words. Angelo had said that he should go hear Ettor speak at the Italian hall tonight, but Giuliano might still be mad. He'd better not go. Still, he was curious. Who was this guy the men all waited for so eagerly?
Actually, he was bored. He had no desire to join the picket lines down by the mills, although he knew that was where the excitement was, if there was any to be had. He was tired of excitement—the kind that meant you got hosed down with freezing water, anyway. He'd steal something, but that seemed stupid when he had pennies rattling in his pocket. So he just walked around the Plains, winding in and out of the narrow alleyways where the garbage was piled. It didn't stink so much in winter. He watched the wo
men. His own mother, long dead ... would she have been like these foreign women, their heads wrapped in dirty shawls, talking so fast that spit came out of their mouths with the words? No, she was poor, but she was native-born. There was a huge difference, wasn't there? Some of these women carried infants tucked into their shawls and had toddlers clinging to their skirts—dirty kids, all of them, with chilblains and chapped faces. But at least they had mothers, which made him envy them, although he didn't recognize the feeling well enough to name it. He passed the tenement where he'd once spent the night. That funny little shoe girl—what was she doing now that the strike was on?
"Hey, Jake!" He turned abruptly to see who in the Plains might have hailed him. This was foreigners' territory. He dimly recognized the face of the boy who had called out to him. Those few months when he'd been in and out of that awful school learning nothing—yes, it was someone from Newbury Street School. It wasn't one of the boys at work.
"Saw that hose blow you down. Holy Mother, what a sight!"
It was one of the Irish, Jake was sure of that. What was he doing in the Plains?
"Don't you remember me? Joe o'Brien—from Newbury School."
"Oh, yeah." Jake wasn't in the mood for schoolboys.
"Are you still on strike?"
"Well, I ain't no scab!"
"Thatta boy."
It made him furious. This shanty Irish schoolboy patting him on the head for striking. What did he know about slaving in the mill? Choking on the dust? Risking your limbs in the machinery and getting paid pennies to do it? He turned away and began to walk fast.
"Hey, I'm talking to you." The boy skipped to catch up. "Where you going to picket today?"
"I gotta go to the hall and get me orders," Jake growled.
"Can I go, too?"
"Strikes ain't child's play." He left Joe standing in the street staring after him with a look that could only mean respect on his wide face.
Jake sniffed. He was somebody. A striker. A real man.
Sunday dawned gray and snowy. The whole household was up and stirring. Rosa rolled over to the middle of the bed. It was still warm in the trough left by Granny J.'s body. She didn't want to get out of bed. The flat would be cold—there was barely enough money to buy coal to cook with and certainly not enough to make the stove warm enough to heat the apartment. She pulled her clothes up from where she kept them at the bottom of the bed and put them on under the covers—all but her worn shoes. She remembered the strange boy in the trash heap and smiled in spite of herself. She had been very brave that night, hadn't she? A little crazy, but really quite brave. And she had done a good deed—not one she could ever brag about, but it was a good deed, bringing that poor boy in out of the cold.
She made her morning trip to the toilet down the hall, holding her nose against the stench. The landlord—who was, in fact, Mr. Billy Wood, although, of course, he had an agent to oversee the tenements—was supposed to keep the toilets working well, but none of them did. At least the tap water was still running in the kitchen sink. The pipe hadn't frozen yet.
"Well, good morning, Mees Sleepy One," Mrs. J. said when Rosa appeared at the kitchen door. The women were clustered around the kitchen table, Mrs. J. and Granny had the two chairs, and Mamma the stool. Ricci was clinging to a rung of the stool, as though he didn't trust his thin, little legs. Anna and Marija were leaning against the wall eating their bread and molasses. Rosa couldn't tell if anyone had bothered to go to early Mass. Was this what happened when people went on strike? They forgot everything else, God included?
"Oh, Rosa," Anna said. "You should have been there! Joe Ettor is the handsomest man you've ever seen."
Marija giggled.
"He went to all the halls and talked to everyone about the strike! It was so exciting."
"He talk good Italian," Mamma said. "Better than me." She gave a laugh that ended in a cough.
"No good Liduanian," said Mrs. J. "But no matter—very good look." She winked at Anna, who smiled, and at Marija, who blushed as though someone had mentioned a sweetheart.
"Then how he speak to you?" Mamma asked.
"He speak English, Mr. Aidas do same word in Liduanian. Very good speak. Everyone yell big."
Rosa could tell no one was thinking of going to Mass. "Here, Rosa—" Mamma got up from the stool, Ricci grabbing at her skirt. "Here, Rosa, eat your bread."
"I can't eat yet," Rosa said. "I'm going to Mass, but I guess no one else is."