Bread and Roses, Too

"It's that or school," she said sweetly.

Jake followed the old man out the door onto the porch. His new boots crunched on snow blown up from the yard; several more inches had fallen in the night. He plunged his hands into his coat pockets. The fingers of his right hand curled around his napkin-wrapped bread. It was still warm. He stared out toward the street, almost blinded by the brilliant white landscape.

"Come, come," the old man called. "Already I am late."

Jake went carefully down the snow-covered steps and then scurried to catch up, noticing for the first time that Mr. Gerbati was carrying a briefcase. In Jake's experience, only the big shots at the mill carried cases like that. Wasn't Mr. Gerbati a workingman? What was he doing carrying a briefcase? Not that Jake was going to ask. Hell's bells, the only thing the man had said to him in two days was to hurry up.

It was a long enough walk from the house to Mr. Gerbati's shed to freeze his nose and the tips of his ears peeping out from under his new cap. The boots were wonderful, though. His feet were as warm as they'd been under the quilt in bed. Now, if only he had something to cover his face and his hands, he'd be able to stand the cruelest weather.

The old man could walk amazingly fast. He seemed to be paying no attention at all to Jake. If he don't care whether I live or die, how come he agreed to let me go to work with him? He wants something out of me, most like. Well, I want something out of him, too. And I bet I get mine first.

They went down the hill past a school, the one he was escaping, no doubt, and on to Main Street. There they turned left, walked a block or two, and turned right for a couple of blocks until they came to a series of long shedlike frame buildings with a branch of the railroad track running into each one.

"Is here," Mr. Gerbati said, going down the length of one of the smaller sheds, past huge bolted double doors with a large sign above them that announced, Jake could only guess, the names of the owners. The track ran underneath the doors. Jake followed Mr. Gerbati around the shed to a small door toward the back corner of the building. Here the old man took out his watch fob. With the key that was hanging from it, he unlocked the door, then pushed it open and nodded for Jake to go in. The shed was a large, high-ceilinged area. To the right of the door, in the corner, was a smaller windowed room. There was no one inside the building. Count on the old man to be the first guy to show up for work. In the dry, dusty light, the room looked to Jake almost like a mill floor, except that instead of rows of spindles or looms, there were large blocks of granite sitting around here and there, and, at the far end to the left, some kind of massive machinery.

Mr. Gerbati turned a switch, and electric lights hanging from the ceiling brightened the area. Then he went into the small room in the corner and turned on the light in there. It was an office. Through the window Jake could see the old man hanging his coat on a peg and putting on a large tan-colored apron. That might explain the briefcase. He worked in the office, not as a laborer as Jake had thought. After all, the man did have his own house.

Suddenly, his ears were pierced by the high pitch of a factory whistle, then others, as though the whole town were exploding into whistles. Mr. Gerbati went to the door and opened it wide, letting in a blast of winter wind. Before long, men began to come piling through. "Buon giorno, Signor Gerbati." Mr. Gerbati nodded and smiled and murmured a greeting to each man as he came in. Most of them took notice of Jake with a smile or a greeting. But there was no loitering. The men headed for a line of pegs against the wall and exchanged their overcoats for large aprons like the one Mr. Gerbati had put on. Most of the men kept their caps on, but a few exchanged their caps for little paper hats that seemed to have been folded out of newspaper.

The men scattered then, some toward the end of the room where the machinery stood, others to various stations around the room where there were a few statues of angels and what Jake figured to be saints. But most of the men went to what appeared to be tombstones in various stages of completion. Jake swallowed. He didn't want to spend his days in a place that looked like a fancy graveyard, surrounded by reminders of death.

But no one else seemed to mind, and soon they were all busy at work. Some of the men used powered drills; others carefully chipped away at the rock with hammers and chisels. He counted eight men in this part of the shed—nine if you included Mr. Gerbati. Four or five had gone to the other end, from which he could hear the noise of massive machinery starting up. Only Mr. Gerbati had gone into the office. There he was, sitting at a desk. Jake had to co

nclude that Mr. Gerbati was the overseer of this shed.

So what was Jake supposed to do? Stand there by the door like a dummy in his new boots and overcoat? The floor was covered with stone chips. He was glad for his thick-soled boots. The air was quickly filling with dust. Just like the mill but worse, somehow. This dust had a bite to it. Jake coughed to clear his throat. Mr. Gerbati, just as though he could hear Jake's cough over the noise of drilling and pounding of the machinery, got up from his desk and came to the door of the little office. He looked about the shed, then walked over to where a large man with a freckled face and a mustache the color of rusty pipe was working. Mr. Gerbati said something to him. The man looked toward Jake and nodded. Mr. Gerbati, apparently satisfied, went back into the office.

"I understand you're one of the Lawrence boys," the man said, coming over to where Jake stood and putting out a dusty hand for him to shake. "I'm Duncan, and you're...?"

"Sal," Jake said.

"Welcome to Rossi and Gerbati's, Sal."

"Gerbati is one of the owners?"

"Mr. Gerbati is the owner. Old Mr. Rossi died last year from—well, we call it 'stonecutter's TB.'" Duncan laughed. "It's likely to get us all in the end, but meanwhile.... Hey, hang your coat on a peg and then come over and make yourself at home. You might want to leave your cap on—the dust, you know." He started back toward the stone he'd been working on.

Jake hung up his coat and went to Duncan's station, still puzzling over what the man had said. Owner? Owners were like Mr. Billy Wood. But there were small owners, too, weren't there, like the baker and the grocer? Well, it was a small shed, not as large as several they'd passed on the way here or the great horseshoe buildings he had seen from the train window.

"Yeah, Mr. Gerbati is the best boss I ever had, including my own father. We start coughing, and home we go to rest up. But I'd work for Mr. Gerbati even if he was mean as old man Rossi, because he's one of the greatest artists this side of the Atlantic."

"Artist?"

"Yeah, look here, Sal." He pointed to the stone he'd been working on. "See these roses?"

Jake looked, and out of the gray of the granite flowers were blooming. They were as delicate as the real thing, which he'd only seen once over the fence in a rich man's summer garden. But here they were in stone, every petal fresh and alive. "Mr. Gerbati did those?"

"He's a genius with flowers—roses, lilies, daisies, daffodils, morning glories, pansies.... He can even do a perfect thistle for us Scots. He's a genius, he is."

"I didn't know."

"No, I'm sure he wouldn't have told you. He's as humble as Rossi was arrogant. But every one of us is here because we want to learn from him."

Duncan was chipping at the stone to carve a name. "Hey, would you hand me that point?" He indicated a sharp chisel lying on the stone near where Jake was standing. "Yeah, we call them points, and this"—he raised his mallet—"is a hammer. I'll try to teach you what we call our tools as we go along." He took the point that Jake handed him and began to work again. It was a tombstone, no question about that, but with Mr. Gerbati's roses blooming on it, more beautiful than any stone Jake would ever have seen or imagined.

"Mr. Gerbati wants me to keep you busy," Duncan said, carefully holding his point in place as he spoke, "but I've never had an assistant, so I'm not sure what you ought to be doing. You could sit down and watch, if you like. Pull up a slab and make yourself comfortable."

Oh, he was joking. Jake smiled to show he'd understood, and perched himself on a block of granite nearby. Duncan grinned and went back to his task.