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Jim Gorman Her Brothers, For Whom She Sewed |
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When dark
came, the boys had another idea. They would just light cigarettes so Mary
could go on sewing. They closed in around her machine and sucked on the
cigarettes furiously, making a game of it, who had the strongest lungs, and
so forth. Little Johnny showed the others how to stand the butts up between
their fingers, like candelabra at church, he snickered, the little altar boy.
He and Dominick, the heartless ones, blew smoke at Mary, while sad Joe went
along but also yearned for her love. “The likes of
us,” Johnny said. “The likes of us ain’t got no
work, but precious Mary—” “She’s saving
us—” “Working day
and night and taking care of Papa too—” The boys
looked toward the curtain covering Papa’s doorway. “Shush,” Johnny said. “You
don’t want to keep Papa from dying.” Her brothers
huffed and puffed, then doubled forward with laughter and coughing. They
dropped their cigarette butts, then lit several
more, doing tricks with the matches, tossing lighted ones at each other and
reaching to burn the hair on their hairy arms. Johnny held two butts up to
his head like horns, then charged at the others like
a grunting bull, pawing at the threadbare carpet, which he mistook for
threadbare dirt. The reddish
glow from their butts did help Mary see her work just a bit, and oddly their
crude fun delighted her too—her brothers, glum for so long, seemed lit up
again with glee. But the smoke overcame her too and she coughed and waved her
hands. Fortunately,
the boys were running out of cigarettes and something else was taking charge
of them, their empty stomachs. Johnny threw away his butts, then crouched in a dark corner where he nibbled at his
fingernails. Dominick crushed the last of his butts against his palm,
shouting, “Parched.” He pulled open the squeaky
cellar door and said, “Easy, big fella, speak
easy,” then stepped down. And Joe—in his hunger, Joe didn’t move away from
Mary, only closer. He rubbed Mary’s cheek with the coarse stubble on his own,
then said, “Mama’s good boy hungry.” Mary
whispered, “You are, Joe, you are.” Without the
glow from their cigarettes, the rooms around Mary fell to blackness, but
Joe’s movements were still unmistakable to her. She heard his sad shoes
shuffle into the kitchen, then heard the clangings
and bangings of his search for Mama’s blue agate
pot. When he found it, he sighed loudly, then shuffled past Mary and out
through the front door. Mary knew Joe was headed the wrong way but she didn’t
move until she heard him fall into the unruly thicket of Papa’s roses. She slid
away from her machine, found the front window by groping with her hands at
the black wall, then raised the window and called, “Around back, Joe. The
vegetables, around back.” “Ah, thank
you, Mary,” Joe said. Then she heard his clothes tearing away from thorns. When she
turned from the window, Mary backed smack into little Johnny again, who was
crouched behind her, his face about even with her rear end, sniffing at her. His
crude trick used to fill her with heat and shame, but now she just pushed his
muzzle away and said, “Haven’t you got work of your own? Where’s tonight’s
work, Papa’s work? Go get it.” But rather than going, Johnny just lay down on
the carpet, belly up. He made happy puppy sounds until Mary gave in. She
said, “Fetch, you little puppy,” and then Johnny bounded to the door. Mary waved at
the smoke in the front room. She opened another window. Then a moan from Papa
drew her to his curtain. She poked her head through—Papa’s room seemed filled
with an even blacker smoke. She could hear the faintest whisper of words she
no longer understood, “Pietra, pissotier,
vino,” but when she went closer, she heard nothing
more, as Dominick’s racket had begun in the cellar. As usual, he was pounding
something. Johnny’s racket had begun too, the rusty wrenching sound of the
iron cart coming through the front door. Johnny wheeled
the cart into what used to be their dining room. He struck a match and held
it up. He was out of cigarettes, so Mary knew he was waiting for her. She
turned to one of her secret drawers and pulled out the stub of a candle and
just got it to him before his match burned away. In the
flickering light, Johnny looked almost like a full-grown man. He had slicked
back his hair and buttoned up the collar on his shirt, so maybe his dog ways
were behind him for the moment—Mary could only hope. She watched him lift the
first crate from the cart up onto the table that was covered with blankets
and sheets and with many nights of black filings and empty cigarette packs. At
this table, where they used to do their plusses and minuses and pass down
from one to the next what was known about unread books like Silas Marner
or Pilgrim’s Progress, now they
used Papa’s steel files to smooth and finish the plastic pieces from the Speciality, Papa’s factory before he was sick or laid-off
or fired, Mary couldn’t remember which at moments like these when the boys
had her so distracted. Johnny went at
the lid of the first wooden crate with a screwdriver, but quickly his effort
turned to cursing. He said, “Help me, Mary. Help me, Jesus.” Mary scowled, then took the screwdriver from him. Johnny had it turned
the wrong way, slapping his palm into the pointed end. Mary pried the
crate open. Inside, she saw what she expected: smaller pieces, smaller than
last night, smaller and smaller every night. And just the two boxes—the men
at the factory friendly to Papa and his hungry children, they must be dying
off too. Johnny grabbed
the stubby candle, held it up near his face so as to give Mary the best view
of his performance. “Them no-good bosses,” he said, “giving our work to
somebody else, somebody else starving in this town.” Using his eyes and his
open mouth, Johnny struck the pose of a laid-off worker. But then Mary saw
his bluster turn foolish again. The pieces were black discs about the size of
a half dollar, with a hole in the center. Johnny put the candle into Mary’s
hands, then grabbed a disc, stuck his baby finger into the hole so that the
tip showed through, pink and wiggly. “Nipple,” he said. “What you call a
nipple goes in here.” He held two of the discs up against his shirt, then glanced to make sure he had Mary’s attention. He
sprayed the delicious word at her again, “Nipple, nipple, nipple,” he said,
extinguishing the candle with his wet breath. A complete
blackness fell between them. Even so Mary felt heat and shame this time, so
much so that she retreated to the front room, the room that used to be Mama’s
parlor, where you could go to whisper your beads or light a candle before the
Virgin. Now the room held Mary’s huge sewing machine. In all these years
since Mama’s passing, Mary had succeeded in keeping the boys from tearing up
the parlor. Many times they had wanted to bust up the furniture for kindling
or haul away all the pictures of the Virgin to antique dealers. Mary had kept
the boys away by whispering prayers to the right saints, but recently a great
depression had grabbed hold of them, a blackness that seemed to beat all
prayers. Their sad state had made them do an unthinkable deed, even for them:
in the middle of the night, they had picked the lock at Mary’s sweatshop and
had stolen her machine. The boys had dropped the huge machine from a third
floor window on stout ropes, had dragged it down Center Street on rollers cut
from samplings, then inched it up the muddy alley and all the way home, many,
many pounds of steel and wood and rubber belts. The boys had
slapped themselves they were so satisfied. “They can’t beat us Carelli boys! Let’em shut that sweatshop, we’ve got our own factory now.” Mary thought
of the police, she thought of Purgatory, or worse, Hell, but also—giving into
their madness too quickly—she thought of the machine’s uselessness if there
was no work. “What do I sew, boys,” she asked. “I can’t make a dime unless
there’s something to sew.” Oh how Mary’s
earnest tone had made the boys hop and cavort then! Dominick pointed through
the window where Johnny had popped open the trunk on Papa’s old Chevrolet. There
they were, what she’d been smelling many nights as
she thrashed in her bed, flimsy underthings, pink
and shiny and wafting with a perfume that might disturb even a Catholic girl.
Dominick said, “Johnny’s opened a house,
I mean, a store. He sells things, girls mostly, I mean, clothes for girls.” So in Mama’s
holy parlor Mary sewed girly things each day as long as daylight held. Then
the garments went back through the window and the Chevrolet raced off into
the night. Some days the car’s trunk held other garments, especially green
ones for men, heavy green shirts and trousers made of coarse wool. Mary
joined the inseams, hemmed the cuffs and wondered what fashion might call for
men to wear such drab clothing, and all of it the same, pants, shirts, coats… Mary heard Joe
coming in from the garden. He was not at the back door, but instead stood
rattling the side door, the one they didn’t use anymore because the hinges
were loose. Forgetting herself, Mary unlatched the door and it crashed away
from the house, a tangle of vines going with it. Mary only kept herself from
falling by grabbing at the door frame. Joe took no
notice of the door, just pushed his pot through the opening and climbed in
after it. The pot was heavy now, as Joe’s rooting around had gone well—it was
brimming with the whitest of small round potatoes, already peeled, Mary saw,
or were these onions? Mary had to reach into the pot to determine which, but
when she did the hardness of these round things showed her that they were not
potatoes or onions, but stones, perfectly round small white stones. They were
grown, Mary knew, from the pebbles that Papa had unwittingly brought from
across the ocean, pebbles that lined the inside of his pants pockets and the
bottom of his suitcases. In the rich backyard soil of Mary helped
Joe drag the heavy pot to the stove. Johnny came over, and he and Mary sighed
as Joe sifted the stones in his fingers. Then he crooned their old counting
song, “One tasty stone, two tasty stone…” Joe said,
“Can’t be soup unless we cook it.” This was something their Mama used to say,
her way of asking for help. Mary and Joe and Johnny struggled to lift the pot
to the stove top. Joe opened the firebox and scratched around in the embers. Johnny
handed him part of a chair, then an empty wooden picture frame, things from
the parlor that Mary’s machine had displaced. Mary wanted to grab them back,
but even she had been hungry and cold and in the dark for too long. Johnny
also grabbed their broom. “What the Hell, who needs a clean house,” he said
and broke the handle across his knee. The three of them squatted on the
floor, puffed their cheeks and blew, and then rocked back with happy giggles
as a yellow flame spurted up, tickling their faces with warmth. Joe stood back
and said, “What else for Joe’s soup tonight?” He found one of Dominick’s
bottles, half-filled, left over from yesterday’s thirst. He uncorked it and
poured in the amber liquid, singing again, “three little stones, four…” Mary
and Johnny smiled, though until the broth mellowed they had to turn their
noses away. Mary heard
Dominick’s shoes next, on the cellar steps coming up. The door swung open and
Mary saw Dominick’s face but barely recognized him—the yellow flame from the
stove made his skin flicker purple and black, and he was much bigger too, not
just his face, but all his upper body, bloated so that he had to squeeze
through the door frame. Dominick was
dragging the twenty-gallon jug of his liquid. Immediately its stink reached
Mary’s nose. She often wished she could breathe around Dominick without using
her nose. The stench of his liquid was like a viscous arm reaching out to hit
her, hit her, in the nose. Dominick
pulled the wooden stool from under the table and sat down. He had already
dropped his trousers somewhere, was wearing only those shiny white shorts
that the others had chipped in to buy one Christmas—how long ago? EVERLAST
they said at the waist and they did, Mary thought, sewn with thread that
never broke. Johnny handed
Dominick one of the glass bottles that the boys recovered on their morning
visits to the dump. He positioned the bottle on the stool, squeezed it
between his thighs, set the funnel in the bottle’s mouth, then
struggled with the large jug to pour his liquid. The pouring proceeded
sloppily and it took some time, as Dominick was wearing his round, black
gloves. These gloves had no separations for the fingers, just for the thumb,
so they were mittens really, Mary knew that much, yet she couldn’t call them
mittens as Dominick hated mittens—mittens were for babies. These were round,
shiny, black mittens but you called them gloves if Dominick was in the room. They
were made of leather and went pop-pop when Dominick smacked them together,
which he was always doing, another of his nervous habits, standing before
mirrors, knees bent, his face turned down in a frown and his gloved hands
hitting each other, pop-pop. Every day he wore these gloves and his shiny
white shorts and also the black boots that laced high up on his calf. Dragging
his big jug, he went down into the cellar for hours and came back up
discolored and puffy. Sometimes his face swelled with welts or black blisters
filled with blood. He would beg Mary to burst these with one of her needles. “A
door,” he’d say, “so dark down there, the door hit me.” When her needle poked
his leathery skin, he would gasp but then quickly try to catch the dripping
blood with his funnel—it was the blood dripped in together with the
foul-smelling liquid that gave Dominick’s mixture the sharp taste that the
boys liked so much. “What are you
doing down there,” Mary asked years ago, pointing to Dominick’s gloves and
feeling one of the welts on his face. Dominick had winced and said, “Boxing,
boxing things up.” “Ah,” Mary had said, Johnny files the pieces smooth and
Dominick boxes them up. Almost before
Dominick got the first bottle full, Joe took it and poured the contents into
the soup pot, which was now steaming. Like their Mama years ago, Joe catered
to their individual tastes: he filled Dominick’s bowl mostly with stones;
Johnny, whose baby teeth had fallen out never to grow back, got nothing but
broth; and Mary got what was left. Joe didn’t eat, of course, hungry as he
was, but watched the others, his hooded eyes lifting in a way that brought
their Mama back, at least to Mary. Mary took in
several stones but spit each one back into her spoon politely, lining them
under the rim of her bowl. The stones were not quite done enough for her. But
she liked the broth. She didn’t understand how Joe, with just a twig or a
crushed-up leaf, could turn Dominick’s foul liquid into such a mellow broth. She
wanted to stick her tongue into the bowl and lick up the last drops, but she
knew the boys would store away such a discretion,
using it against her forever. She was about
to clear away the bowls when Dominick admitted he couldn’t pick up all the
stones with his spoon because of his big round gloves. Mary took Dominick’s
spoon and lifted stone after stone up into his strong jaw. Dominick crunched
even the biggest stones into fine gravel, which he swallowed down. A new
friskiness came up into his wide, flat face. He turned round on his stool and
worked against his awkward gloves to fill a second bottle with his liquid. Then
he refilled Johnny and Joe’s glasses. Johnny scratched a match and lit butts
all around. The boys coughed and laughed. Joe and little Johnny were now as
frisky as Dominick. They took off their shirts and then more, dropping their
trousers on the floor. Since they had spent their Christmas money every year
on something foolish, they had no shorts, so Mary had to look away. Johnny
said, “It’s all right, Mary, all right.” He covered his groin with his paws
and gazed up at the cross on the wall where a mostly naked Jesus looked down
at them. Dominick
reached to pour liquid into Mary’s glass, but she covered it with one hand
and with the other squeezed her nose—more broth she would take, but none of
this yellow-and-red liquid straight from these rubbish dump bottles. It only
ran up her nose like acid and gave her such odd notions . . . brought people
to life who had been dead for years, or made her sew such revealing little
whimsies for women she couldn’t abide, or worse, kept her sewing the same
pair of trousers again and again, green pair after green pair, trousers for
some ball team with a million legs. This liquid made her nothing but fearful,
then pushed her down into these dark sleeps where men with her brothers’
names—Bill, Harry, Dick, Rudy—all of them naked and frisky, chased her for
the pants she sewed, then once they had them, kept dropping them down,
dropping them down. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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