Bread and Roses, Too

"So you run away?"

"Yessir."

"You was afraid of own poor dead papa?"

He didn't want to say so; it seemed suddenly so cowardly. "Well, I was scared someone—the police, maybe—would find him and blame me."

"Why they blame you? Is freezing cold. He drink too much. It happen, yes? Not your doing."

"I bought him the whiskey."

"Ahh." Mr. Gerbati leaned back against the settee to ponder this. "So then you run and sneak onto train...."

"I thought it was going to New York City. Rosa said she was going to New York."

"New York City is better for you?"

"I could get a job. Take care of myself." Jake studied his hands. They were chapped and the nails were black crescents. "I didn't mean to be trouble for her. As soon as we got to New York, I was going to make a run for it."

The man sat forward again. "Why you always run, boy?"

"I just told you."

"No, I don't think so. I think you run away from la morte—from death." He pronounced it "det," which made it sound harsher. Jake wanted to argue but realized he could not.

"So ... you leave your papa there. Who will bury him? Who will make a stone over his grave?"

"I ain't got the money to do that," Jake mumbled. "Even if I was there, I couldn't do nothing for him."

Mr. Gerbati leaned back again. He patted his pocket, looking for his pipe, but it wasn't there. "So," he said. "We make uno patto, what you say, bargain? You and me, we make bargain. You no lie to me no more. You got something to say, you say to me, not send Rosa, okay? You do this, I write union in Lawrence. Tell them to bury your papa. Is not good he not buried yet. Then in spring, I make stone for Papa, okay?"

"Why would you do that?"

"I don't like no man go to grave forgot." He stood up. "We no tell Mrs. Gerbati. Wait for strike to be over, yes? For now, you still her Salvatore."

Home at Last

The Bread and Roses strike! Pride ran like a scarlet ribbon through the anxiety of Rosa's days. People had not only taken notice of their "best sign," some, like Mr. Savinelli, had chosen it as the name of the strike itself. Their sign—hers and Mamma's. The one that she had made on their own kitchen table. And Mrs. Gerbati was right; it was Italian to want beauty almost as much as food.

Rosa was painting a new picture of Mamma and Anna in her head. They were in jail, but Mamma was singing, and all the women and girls and children were singing with her. The guards were amazed and then ashamed as they heard the lovely music coming from the throats of the very people they had despised and abused.

She wandered about in a kind of fog. "We shall not be, we shall not be moved...." Mamma was singing and everyone else would echo:

"We shall not be, we shall not be moved.

Like a tree planted by the water,

We shall not be moved."

That was Mamma—a beautiful tree. She had been green and lush in the spring of Rosa's childhood, when Papa was alive and there was food and fuel, but even in this, the cruelest of winters, she still stood, her strong branches bare, like silver against the snow and wind. She would bend, but she would not break.

There was no more news for two long days, but Rosa was dry-eyed and somehow less afraid than she had been since before the strike began. When she was able, finally, to turn her attention outside herself, she realized that something was going on with Sal. He was too quiet. He ate—he always ate as though he was scared the food before him might suddenly be snatched away—but he kept his eyes on his bowl or his dinner plate. He didn't slurp his soup as noisily or chew with his mouth so wide open. It was as though he was willing himself to seem smaller, less noticeable. When Mrs. Gerbati ladled more zuppa into his bowl or piled more pasta on his plate, he'd glance up quickly and murmur, "Grazie."

Mr. Gerbati was quiet, also, but that was not strange. He rarely spoke during a meal. But now his quietness was different, not the closed-in feel of a man keeping everything so tightly under control that he didn't dare open his mouth. No, his whole body seemed looser, more at ease.

Mrs. Gerbati noticed something, too. Rosa could tell, catching the woman watching each of them carefully, giving her husband a smile for no reason. once, while standing to fill his coffee cup, she rested her free hand lightly on his shoulder. He looked up at her and his eyes were as gentle as Mamma's when she was singing Ricci to sleep.... Ah, Ricci, where was he now? Was he somewhere lonely and afraid?

Saturday had been the worst day of her life. Worse than the day Annie Lopizzo had died. Yet here she was, scarcely four days afterward, feeling better. Nothing had changed. There had been no more news, and then she realized what it was. We shall not be moved. She had never been able to believe it before.