Girl Waits with Gun Read Free Page B

Everyone had seen what happened to the strikers. The mill owners got it into their heads that a worker could operate four looms at a time, instead of two, and do it for ten hours a day instead of eight. Three hundred mills shut down. Factory workers in New York City walked off the job in solidarity. The streets in Paterson were choked with outraged strikers. Even the children who worked as pickers and twisters in the mills took up their placards and marched.
    The mill owners used their considerable influence to have the police turn up at rallies and arrest as many people as the jails would hold. When the police were overwhelmed, the silk men hired their own private force. That’s when houses started burning down. That’s when speeches were interrupted by gunshots. That’s when bakeries and butchers were warned not to sell food to the strikers. Eventually the workers were too starved and defeated to do anything but return to their looms.
    The silk men behaved as if they owned Paterson. But none of them had the right to run us down in the street and get away with it.
    â€œMr. Kaufman doesn’t frighten me,” I said. “He will pay what he owes.”

3
    THAT BUSINESS about us moving in with Francis began on the evening of our mother’s funeral, after a supper of ham sandwiches and pickles and Bessie’s lemon cake. While Norma and Fleurette washed the dishes, I sat with Francis on his back porch and watched him fill his pipe. From the lane behind the house came the sound of his children playing some game whose rules were known only to them, but which seemed to involve tossing a stick through a large metal hoop. I settled into a reed chair next to him and breathed my first calm breath of the day. It did not last.
    â€œYou know Bessie and I would love to have you girls come live with us,” Francis said once he’d gotten his tobacco to smolder.
    I groaned and kicked my feet up on the porch rail. “That was very unconvincing. Besides, you don’t have room for the brood you’ve already got.”
    â€œWell, the uncles don’t have room for you back in Brooklyn, either. I don’t know where else you’d go.”
    There had been a sudden shower after the burial, but the sky had cleared while we were eating our supper. Against the gathering dark the first few stars appeared. I looked up at them and realized that on that night, and forever after, my mother would be sleeping outdoors, under the stars, under her blanket of earth. She despised dirt and rarely went outdoors, and would have been horrified by her new circumstances if she’d given any thought to it at all before buying that burial plot.
    â€œWhy do we have to go anywhere?” I said.
    â€œYou can’t stay on the farm by yourselves. Three girls, all alone out there?”
    â€œHow is that so different from when Mother was alive? Are four girls any better than three?”
    If Francis understood that I was teasing him, he didn’t show it. He tapped his pipe and thought seriously about it for a minute. “Well, the only reason you were out there in the first place—”
    I leaned over and shushed him when I heard Fleurette in the kitchen. We waited with our heads inclined toward the window, but we couldn’t tell where she’d gone.
    Francis lowered his voice. “All I mean to say is that she’s nearly grown now. What are you going to do when she’s ready to go off and get married? Live out there like a couple of old spinsters?”
    The idea of Fleurette as a bride sent a jolt through my rib cage. “Marriage? She’s only fourteen! Besides—” Before I could finish, Fleurette’s voice sailed through the window screen.
    â€œI’m fifteen!”
    Francis rubbed his eyes and shifted around in his chair to face me. “You girls are my responsibility now, and you should be with us. You could help Bessie around the house, and you could