He reflected: “My wife’s a wonderful woman. I have been with her nine years, and she learns me something every day, and she still looks good in her Sunday clothes.”
He became lighter in tone again. “What these Bohunks need is a priest and a church to make them behave. They mind a priest some, if he is a good priest. They’re all Catholics, or no church....”
“Seems though sometimes a man’s got to shoot. Some of them devils over there used to throw rocks at my door, but one Sunday I filled ’em full of buckshot and they quit. The justice upheld me. I didn’t have to pay no fine. They’ve been pretty good neighbors since, pretty good neighbors.”
There was a sound as though the flagstones of eternity had been ripped up. He saw I didn’t like it and said consolingly, “They’ll stop and go to supper pretty soon. They eat too much to do anything but set, afterwards. They don’t have nothin’ to eat in the old country but raw turnips. Here they stuff themselves like toads. I don’t see how they save money the way they do. The mine owners squeeze the very life out of ’em and they wallow in beer. I’ve always made big money, but somehow never kept it. Me and my wife are spenders. But I ain’t afraid, for I am the only man on the street that can dig the hardest coal. I could dig my way out of hell with my pick, and by G—— once I did it, too.”
The wife came to the door newly decked in an elaborate lace waist, torn, alas, at the shoulder. Husband was right. She looked good. She announced radiantly: “Come to supper.”
Then she rushed down between the houses and shouted: “Jimmy and Frank, come here! What you doin’? Get down off that roof. What you doin’, associatin’ with them Polack children? What you doin’ with them switches?” Then she swore heartily, as unto the Lord, and continued, “They’re helpin’ them Polack kids switch that poor little drunk American child. Come down off that coal shed!”
They slunk into sight. She snatched their switches from them.
“Who started it?”
Jimmy admitted he started it. He looked capable of starting most anything, good or bad. He had eyes like black diamonds, a stocky frame, and the tiny beginnings of his mother’s voice.
“I don’t know whether to lick you or not,” she said judicially. Finally: “Go up to bed without supper.”