Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a
Union for Good Works
AFTER he had been away from home two weeks, uncle sent us a letter from a Rhode Island mill-town, informing us that he had the malaria, bad. Would one of us come and bring him home? There was a postscript which read: “Be sure and come for me either on a Monday, Wednesday, or a Friday. They are the alternate days when I don’t have the shivers.”
The day he came home he and aunt patched up peace over a pailful of beer, and there the matter ended, save that echoes of it would be heard at the next wrangle. Uncle took his place in one of the long lines of unemployed that wait for work at the end of the mill alleys. The expenses of the household were dependent upon the four dollars and a half I was earning at the time.
Then came the oppressive hot days of summer, with their drawn-out days with sun and cheerful huckleberry fields in their glory, a summer day which I could not enjoy because I was shut out from it by the mill windows, and it was against the rules to look out of them. Some of the fellows left their work in the summer, and loafed like plutocrats, having the whole day and three meals to themselves. But if I had loafed I should have had neither money nor peace. My aunt would have made a loafing day so miserable for me that I should have been glad to be away from her scolding. Neither would she have fed me, and, all in all, I should have been the loser.
But the evenings were long and cool after the mill closed for the night. From half-past six to ten offered me many enticements, chief among which was the privilege of roaming the streets with the Point Roaders, a gang of mill-boys, into which I was admitted after I had kicked the shins of “Yellow Belly,” the leader. I was naturally drawn to make friends with Jakey McCarty, a merry fellow of deep designs, who would put a string around my neck while pretending to plan a walk somewhere, or have his finger in my pocket, poking for cigarette money, while talking about the peggy game he had last played.
In the winter we had a very lonesome time of it, as a gang. All we could do that was exciting included standing on a drug-store corner, where we splashed the icy waters of a drinking trough in one another’s faces, or attended, en masse, an indoor bicycle race at the “Rink,” then in its glory. But we kept very close to the drinking trough, as money was not very plentiful.
I grew tired of mere loafing, and I finally persuaded Jakey McCarty, who liked reading, to go with me and visit the public library at least once a week, when we secured books, and while there also rooted among the back numbers of illustrated magazines and comic papers and made a night of it. But the gang resented this weekly excursion and separation, and various members reproached us with the stigma, “Libree-struck!” which, I always supposed, carried with it the same significance as “sun struck,” i.e., crazy over books.
In the following spring, though, the gang put up a parallel bar in an empty lot, and spent the early evenings in athletic diversions. When darkness came on, there were usually Wild West hold-ups, Indian dances, and cattle round-ups, in imitation of the features we read in the five-cent novels we bought and exchanged among ourselves. Then, with the putting on of long trousers, the gang became more active, and roamed at night over a broader area than before. Two of the gang even left us because they were “love-struck.”
At the end of the following winter the catalogue of the various activities of the gang would read like a chapter from the Hunnish Invasion. There were Saturday night excursions up to the center of the city, which led us through Water street, through the Jewish and the Portuguese sections. As we passed by a grocery store, with tin advertising signs projecting from its doorway, we would line up, and each lad would leap in the air and snap his fist against the sign, producing a loud clatter and leaving it vibrating at great speed. Before the clerks had appeared on the scene we had passed on, and mixed with the Saturday night throng of shoppers. Our next stop was before a Jewish butcher shop, in front of which, on a projecting hook, hung a cow’s heart and liver. Forming another line, the gang would leap again and catch that a resounding slap with the palm. Then one of the fellows poked his head in the shop door, and called, “Say, daddy, we’ll give yer five cents if you’ll let us take three more slaps!” On the next block, we came across a venerable Israelite, long-bearded and somnolent, watching for custom before his one-windowed clothing shop. Jakey leaped forward, gave a vigorous tug on the venerable’s beard, and we broke into a run, with a shrieking, horrified group of Jews in mad pursuit.
