"Promises! Promises!" Mamma said. "Promises don' mean nothing to such. He say we be violent. I say, 'Who be violent?' You stab dead Syrian boy. You shoot dead our sister! Who be the violent ones, eh?"
Next morning the kitchen meeting began before dawn. The pronouncement had come down: Only one car would be allowed to follow the horse-drawn hearse. No marchers. Only the single car, carrying Annie Lopizzo's one living relative and a friend or two—that was it. The mood of the women gathered in the Serutti kitchen was bleaker than the winter sky outside. Their leaders were in jail, and Colonel Sweetser's men had made it deadly clear that they meant to follow his orders. They would shoot to kill, and any resulting deaths would be blamed on the strikers, who would, no doubt, hang for the crime.
"I got m
e a good kitchen knife—long asa my arm," Mrs. Marino muttered.
"No, no." Mamma laid her hand down on her friend's arm, as though afraid the knife were there already. "No violence. Mr. Joe Ettor say, 'No violence.'"
"Then they shoot us, every one."
"No, no, we keep together. Solidarity. Remember, Mrs. Marino. Solidarity, and no matter what, we win."
"No matter if we dead, who gonna win." Mrs. Marino was shaking her head. "They—" She stabbed the table with her fist. "They poke their bayonet into boy, never have a beard. They shoot young girl, never have chance to marry, have children. Who they don't kill now? Dio mio, don't they have no heart?"
Rosa, standing against the open bedroom door, was trembling so hard she put out one hand to steady herself on the frame. Mrs. Marino was right. Who wouldn't they shoot or stab? That day she'd followed Mamma to the march, she had seen the fear in the Harvard boys' eyes—like stray dogs cornered in an alley. They'd attack if they felt threatened. And they would blame the strikers. The lucky ones, like Joe O'Brien's snowballers, might go to jail for a year—the rest, like Joe Ettor, were likely to be hanged.
How could Mamma believe for one minute that the strikers could win? Maybe, as Mamma claimed, they didn't plant the dynamite or attack the trolleys, but they would soon. They were cornered and desperate, too. Already black hands had appeared on the doors of scabbing workers. You didn't have to be Italian to know the meaning of a black hand painted on your door. Why, even here in their own home, there was talk of kitchen knives.
Anxiously, she scanned the faces in the room. The women weren't all close neighbors. They weren't even all Italian. Suppose—the thought chilled her—just suppose there were a spy among them? Joe Ettor and Mr. Giovannitti were in jail for murder, but they hadn't even been near Garden and Union and the two of them were always pleading, "No violence." What of women who talked openly of kitchen knives as long as their arms? What of a woman in whose kitchen such words had been spoken? Oh, Mamma, Mamma, don't be such a fool. There is no winning. Only death. Her heart was pounding so hard against her ribs that she was in pain from it.
"Anna, Marija," Mamma was saying. "Go to Chabis Hall. See if there is soup tonight. We need our strength, eh?"
Had Mamma forgotten there were troops all over everywhere, with orders to shoot to kill? Was she out of her mind? Rosa couldn't help herself. "No!" The word came out in a squeak. "Mamma, no! Don't make them go to the hall. They'll get killed!"
"Oh, Rosina," Mamma said. "They big girls. They know how to behave." And Anna and Marija were gone almost before she had finished the sentence.
Mamma came over to where Rosa stood crying by the door. She put her arms around Rosa's shaking body, "Shh, shh." She began rubbing Rosa's back, murmuring to her so low that the women around the kitchen table couldn't hear her. "Shh, shh. Don' be so 'fraid, bambina. I don' send your sister out to die. I send her to find can we eat tonight. Soldier, or no soldier, we gotta eat, eh? Is there bread in this house? I don' see none. Do you? So what we do? Sit like scared rabbit in our kitchen and shake and starve? We can't do that, eh? Now, go wash your face and read your book or something. We be all right, you see."
Rosa went to the toilet in the hall. It stank to high heaven, but it was the only private place in her world. She sat down on the seat without pulling up her dress and let out the sobs that had been building up ever since the first riot alarms had rung. It seemed like years. It was hardly three weeks. But it would go on forever. She would always be hungry and cold and afraid. She was sure of it.
She was back in the front room lying on her bed when she heard the big girls rattling up the staircase outside. They burst through her door and ran into the kitchen without even stopping to close the door behind them. "They're coming, Mamma, they're coming!"
"Who?"
"What she say?"
All the women in the kitchen were on their feet, crowding around the girls for the news.
Rosa got up to close the door, one ear toward the other room. Despite everything, she had to hear what had happened.
"Mrs. Gurley Flynn and Big Bill! They're coming back. The strike committee wants them to lead the strike while Joe Ettor's in jail."
"Santa Maria! Grazie, grazie."
The strike would go on. The union was making sure that it would. And how many more would die?
An Unexpected Bath
She was coming back! Mrs. Gurley Flynn and the one they called Big Bill were coming back to Lawrence to lead the strike. The most beautiful woman in the world was coming back to help them ... to help him. Wasn't he on strike against Mr. Billy Wood as much as anybody? Well, he hadn't scabbed, had he? No matter how cold and hungry he was, he, Jake Beale, had never once crossed that cursed bridge and gone through those iron gates.
Jake brushed aside the times he had been on the verge of crossing the bridge and heading back into the mill. He hadn't, though, had he? Something or someone had always stopped him. God or fate or furious little Giuliano. He wouldn't have to feel ashamed when he saw her again. He could hold his head high. He was one of the oppressed workers she was coming to save.
There was soup in the halls these days after Annie Lopizzo's death. It had got them a lot of sympathy. In the halls where he sneaked in to eat, in the shops, on the streets, people talked about how, in the rest of the entire U.S. of A., everyone knew how the law in Lawrence was twisted to suit the mill owners. That fool Breen laying that dynamite—and who had paid him? Not the strikers, that was for sure. The girl in the Polish bakery told Jake that the stupid man had no more sense than to wrap the sticks in copies of his undertakers' journal, with his own name on the address label—not likely that a striker would have copies of that lying around.
"But now undertaker Breen is out on bail while the men who threw snowballs are in jail until next year. And what, what will become of Mr. Ettor and Mr. Giovannitti, who had nothing to do with Annie Lopizzo's death? They'll probably hang."
Jake listened, trying hard to look properly sorrowful, but all he could think about was that Mrs. Gurley Flynn was coming back. She would know the truth behind all the government lies. She'd make them own up to all their plots and wickedness. He had to see her. Since Ettor and Giovannitti's arrest, meetings on the common had been outlawed. The only places left to meet were the national halls. She mostly went where the women and children gathered, but, by golly, he'd be a kid—or even a woman—Italian, Polish, Turk, whatever it took to weasel his way into every meeting where she was to speak. He might even get himself a bit of grub while he was at it.