Caleb always told any man who asked—and more asked than you might expect, which confused one of Caleb’s basic divisions of the world, into the sorts of people who wondered about things and the people who didn’t—that Berenice was an old lover of his. This seemed to amuse them. Maybe it even made them like him a little more. At least it used to. But that had been before the strike. Before the Mendosa. Before, now that he thought of it, the Scare. It had been years since Caleb stood before his men.
They lined up according to how long it took them to get to the Berenice from their positions: Berenice’s engineer, her brakeman, the boys who work the chains and pull the pin, the loaders, the draftsmen, the carvers, the cutters, the surfacers, the derrick operators, the fall men, the drillers, the chip men, the men who set the powder kegs and lit the match. Every one of them colored gray. “Asa Hood,” Caleb said, prompted by Sam Turpa, who stood to his right and knew the faces. “Jacob Soltti, Urjo Matson, Dominic Toneatti, Henry Hanka, Andrew Pearson.” Caleb knew how to pronounce these sorts of names—he had hired a tutor, years ago, to teach him. This had seemed to him a good idea. But as he looked down the line at the gray faces, Greeks, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Yankees, Irish, and called out the syllables that had taken not a small amount of effort to learn to pronounce, an effort he had thought of as wholly selfless—“Peter Lilja, Angelo Buzzi, Toivo Nikola”—as he waited for Sam Turpa to hand him each check, which Caleb then deposited into a gray hand, he felt a steam rising off the line, a thickening agitation, as if their strike had brought them no satisfaction at all, as if in their impeccably pronounced names they heard Caleb joking with the other quarry bosses: One left-handed Finn is worth three right-handed Yanks. Pay the Irish, watch them drown. As the line steamed, Caleb felt physically vulnerable for the first time in his life, and bewildered. Why were his men so angry? He paid them fairly and on time, let them have their little union meetings, never asked them to sign any yellow-dog contracts. He was not the tyrant his grandfather had been. Why should they fight to save a couple of anarchists? If it weren’t for the state, who would have stamped their papers when they arrived in America? Who would pay for the streets that took them from home to work? “Silas Procter, Octave Marcelles, Liam Murphy, Jeffrey Murphy, Johnny Murphy . . .”
Caleb paused. The Murphy boys didn’t look at him, but that’s not what made him stop—most of the men didn’t look at him. It was something else, a fleeting doubt that made him think of Berenice. She had been so small, like a child, so finely jointed at her wrists and knees, so tiny at her waist you could hook an arm round her and reach the same hand into your own pocket. Even Caleb could manage this. It was the pose of a carefree man, an adventurer.
Maybe it was his longing for his bride that made him turn to watch the Murphy boys depart. Maybe it was the steaming line, his exhaustion, his feeling that the men might rise up at any moment, light torches, run shrieking through the sheds. Generally, as a boss, Caleb did not abide doubt—in another era he would have gone on to the next man without hesitating. But he hesitated, and turned, and saw what he must somehow have sensed: that Johnny Murphy’s cap was bulging in the back, and that there, just above her collar, one dark curl had escaped.
? ? ?
Emma’s first thought was that the car sounded almost but not quite like the Duesenberg. Her second, seeing the small man she recognized as Caleb Stanton jump from a Rolls-Royce in her yard, was that the boys had been involved in some way with the strike. Watching Liam and Jeffrey climb out of the car, she felt a seam of pride, thinking of her father nailing up his Land League posters along the main road in Banagher.
She wasn’t expecting another boy to follow them, and she didn’t understand, at first, why the boy’s hair was so long, or why someone else’s child had been brought to her, until it struck her that Lucy Pear wasn’t standing with Janie and the others, who had come out of the perry shack to watch. Emma had arrived home from Sven’s half an hour ago—she hadn’t checked on the children yet.
Mr. Stanton pushed Lucy toward the house. “The quarry’s not a place for a girl,” he said as he deposited her in Emma’s arms. His voice was gentler than Emma would have guessed, nothing like his cold blue eyes.
“Emma?” Roland called.
“Everything’s fine!” she called back.
“Her father should know,” said Mr. Stanton, striding for the door, but Roland was already there, on his one leg, the first Emma had seen of him in sunlight in the month since he’d come home. His beard, she saw, had grown to be wider than his ears. Bits of crumbs stuck to his shirt. He was out of breath from hopping. “What’s going on?” he asked, but no one answered. He stared at Lucy in her costume. “Get inside!” he shouted. “Get your arse inside this house!”
It was shameful, how glad Emma was that Roland could not climb down from the step. She said, “I’ll bring her in, Rolly. Go sit.”
“What the fuck’s been going on?”
“Rolly! Boys, help your father get back to his chair.”