The Beaufort Sisters Read online

  ‘I don’t think there’s a Red down in the yards,’ said Tim. ‘Except Red Ludwig, the feed man, and he makes you look like Joe Stalin. I didn’t think it was possible for a man to be so far to the right without falling off the edge of the world.’

  ‘Well, someone’s stirring up this trouble. Wanting seventy-five cents an hour as the minimum wage – if we give them that, there’ll be no end to their demands. You get that now, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But the minimum is forty cents an hour.’

  ‘Are you supporting the demand?’

  ‘They’re letting me stay neutral. The chaps appreciate my position. But there’s a lot of solidarity down there, Lucas. You won’t employ union labour, but these chaps are as solidly together as if they were a union.’

  ‘You sound as if you do support them.’

  ‘I told you, I’m neutral. But I’m leaning a little your way in telling you just how strong their feelings are. They’re not going to back down. I think you ought to meet with them.’

  ‘I’m not meeting with anyone. I’ve got fellers down there to run the company – I don’t believe in interfering.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Nina, who had been sitting quietly listening to their discussion. ‘I’ll bet you’ve already told management to say no to the men.’

  ‘A Red in my own family,’ said Lucas. ‘Emma Goldman.’

  They were sitting on the enclosed back porch of the Davoren house. Tim and Lucas had played two sets of tennis on the court behind the main house, then they had come across for a beer. Even though they had played late in the afternoon, the July heat had been too much for Lucas and he was exhausted and testy. He was also very red, but in the circumstances of the discussion Nina diplomatically did not mention it. She placidly knitted, a pursuit she had taken up in the past month, telling Tim it would not only keep her occupied but would save them money on Michael’s clothes, a thriftiness which Tim, with a perfectly straight face which she hadn’t missed, said he appreciated. Occasionally she looked out towards the lawns where Michael was crawling around under the benevolent eye of George Biff. The nurse had been got rid of and George, without asking or being asked, had taken over.

  ‘You’re behaving like Grandfather.’

  ‘You don’t know how your grandfather behaved.’ Something more personal than the strike had made Lucas irritable. He had always fancied himself as a tennis player, but Tim, playing at only half-pace, had beaten him without the loss of a game.

  ‘I do know, Daddy. We had a teacher at Vassar who gave us a short course in labour history. Grandfather wasn’t quite as bad as Rockefeller and Henry Ford at breaking strikes, but he was bad enough. I was ashamed when the teacher told us what Grandfather did here in, I think it was 1924, some time then, when he locked out the railroad workers.’

  ‘Your teacher didn’t show much taste by mentioning that with you in his class.’

  ‘You don’t learn history by being squeamish. I knew he was trying to make me uncomfortable, he was that sort of man. But I checked and found out he was telling the truth.’

  ‘There are two sides to every dispute.’

  ‘Maybe you should go down to the yards and listen to the men’s side.’

  Lucas, still red and sweating, wiped his face with his towel. He looked at his favourite, sensing, as he had for some time, that he was losing her day by day. He supposed this happened to all fathers when their daughters married; he wondered how Edith’s father had felt. A father’s rival was his son-in-law and all at once he felt a stab of jealousy towards Tim. He stood up, picked up his racquet and headed for the door with the abrupt departure that was an occasional characteristic of his, as if he had heard a whistle that called him to some other place.

  ‘Thanks for the game, Tim.’ The screen door banged behind him, a thudding first-act curtain.

  ‘That’s not the end of our argument with him,’ said Tim.

  ‘Do you think you should take a week off till all this blows over? We could go down to the plantation, you could do some fishing – ’

  ‘It’s not going to blow over in a week. The men are as stubborn as your father. And I think it would be cowardice for me to walk out before it was over.’

  ‘You’re not neutral, are you? You’re on their side.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not if you think they’re right. I just can’t imagine how people live on those sort of wages. They can’t live much better than those people I worked amongst in Germany.’

  ‘Oh, they live better than that. Nobody down at the yards is starving and they’ve all got a roof over their heads when they go home. But Bumper Cassidy told me, even with him and his wife working, they’ve never been out of debt in the fifteen years they’ve been married.’

  ‘Is he going on strike?’

  ‘He’s one of the leaders.’

  She folded up her knitting, put it away in the expensive embroidered sewing bag that had cost her ten times the price of the wool she was knitting. ‘Don’t get involved, darling,’ she said and went out to Michael and George Biff, closing the screen door quietly behind her.

  George picked up the baby, brushed the grass from him. ‘You stopped spoiling him, Miz Nina, he’s a good kid now.’

  ‘George, when did you become an expert on child raising?’

  ‘I had six brother and four sisters, all younger’n me. They started yowling, I belt ’em over the ear. They’s all grown up, nice people.’

  ‘But all deaf in one ear.’

  He grinned, bounced Michael up and down in his arms. ‘Miz Nina, a little paddy-whacking never hurt nobody.’

  ‘If ever I see you paddy-whacking Michael I’ll knock you down.’

  His grin broadened. ‘Ain’t never gone a coupla rounds with a lady. You want six-ounce or eight-ounce gloves?’

  Each of them knew how far their banter could go before she lost her authority. There were always certain hints, which she recognized, that he loved and respected her: he had said ‘ain’t never gone a coupla rounds with a lady’ instead of ‘with a woman.’ Such small gestures were always there behind his easy cheek.

  She took Michael from him, kissed the flushed chubby face. He was blond like her, but there were traces of his father in him, glimpses of the future. ‘I’ll let my son defend me when he grows up. You just watch out.’

  Tim went to work next day and came home that night worried and upset. He showered and changed and went out with Nina and the baby for their walk round the park. She could see that something was troubling him, but she contained her impatience. It was after dinner, when they were having coffee in the living-room, before her patience finally ran out.

  ‘Well, what happened today?’

  Inger, the Swedish maid, brought in fresh coffee. Nina had a staff of three helping her run the house and Inger was the brightest of them, a plump plain girl whose eyes and ears were like magnets for every splinter of gossip dropped about the house. Nina waited till she had gone out of the room again, then she repeated her question.

  ‘Nothing happened.’ He sipped his coffee, then leaned back in his chair, the big red leather wing-back that she had bought specially for him, and sighed. ‘It’s tomorrow something’s going to happen. Your father is bringing in scab labour.’

  ‘Daddy or the company managers?’

  ‘Same thing. He’d have to okay it. They’ve recruited them from down in Arkansas and they’re bringing them in by truck tomorrow morning. They announced it to us this afternoon, just as if they were asking for a flat-out confrontation. We’ve been locked out.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I’m with the men. I can’t be otherwise – I think they’re entitled to what they’re asking for. I don’t want to be an agitator or anything like that, but I have to support Bumper and the other chaps. I find I have a social conscience, something that’s never troubled me before.’

  ‘Do you think you should go over and tell Daddy what you’re going to do?’

 
; ‘It wouldn’t do any good. If he doesn’t understand the men’s reasons for the strike by now, no amount of explanation will convince him I’m doing the right thing. He’s living in the past. He still believes in the sanctity of capital, right or wrong.’

  ‘I don’t understand him.’ She could feel anguish boiling up inside her, less bearable because she was unprepared for it. She had wanted her father and Tim to be friends, though she had known there would always be powder there to explode a division between them. She had not expected the powder train to come from the direction of the stockyards. ‘He’s basically a kind man. He’s charitable – look at the money he’s given to charity. The Foundation isn’t just something he inherited from Grandfather – he believes in it.’

  ‘It could be from a sense of guilt. I don’t know, I’m not judging his charity. But he’s like a lot of rich men – we have them in England, too – as soon as the workers start demanding a little more, they think they’re endangered, they’re going to have another revolution on their hands. From what I’ve read, John D. Rockefeller was like your father. He gave away millions with one hand and with the other hit a worker over the head with an iron bar. I don’t mean he wielded the iron bar himself, but he condoned it when it was done by others.’

  ‘Daddy would never allow any violence.’

  ‘There’s going to be violence tomorrow when those scabs turn up.’

  ‘You better not go to work tomorrow, then. I don’t want you getting hurt.’

  But when she woke in the morning he was already gone. Distressed, she couldn’t eat breakfast. She tried to bathe the baby, but he was in one of his playful moods and she got short-tempered with him and finally called in Inger to take over. She dressed without showering, careless of what she put on, then hurried across to the main house. Her mother was having breakfast in her bedroom, planning her day with Miss Stafford.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  Edith looked at her, then nodded at Miss Stafford. ‘That will be all, Portia. Tell one of the gardeners to look at the tennis court. Mr Beaufort was complaining about it night before last. He said he got some bad bounces.’

  ‘Another beautiful day,’ Miss Stafford said to Nina and went out of the bedroom.

  ‘Now what’s all this? You know your father is always downtown by this time. He’s in his office at eight every morning.’

  ‘Did he say if he was going down to the stockyards?’

  ‘He and I never discuss his business.’ But she patted the newspaper that lay on the bed beside her breakfast tray. It was yesterday’s Star; it was one of her idiosyncrasies that she always waited till the news was at least a day old before she read it. That way, she said, she got a better perspective on whether the doom-sayers of yesterday had been proved correct today. It also buttressed her optimism because the doom-sayers were usually wrong. ‘You’re worried about the strike? I think you can leave it safely with your father to deal with. He’s a reasonable man in business, they tell me.’

  ‘Mother, how would you know? You said you never discuss business with him. This strike is serious. And Daddy is being pigheaded about it. I’m worried, Mother. Tim has gone to work this morning – there’s going to be trouble – ’

  ‘Darling – ’ Edith put her tray aside, patted the bed. ‘Sit down here. I can’t remember when I last saw you so upset. You’ll have to trust Tim. That’s what wives must do – ’

  ‘Oh Jesus!’ Edith said nothing, but her face stiffened and a deep frown appeared between her eyes. Nina flopped on the bed, hugged her mother. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to swear. But you don’t know what could happen down there this morning. It’s not just a question of trusting Tim – ’

  ‘Darling, I know we both live a sheltered life. Me more than you. But I don’t think that even out there – ’ She waved a hand vaguely towards the windows, towards the green thrones of trees, the pikestaffs of the iron fence, the outer world beyond the moat of wealth. ‘Even out there I don’t think women interfere in their husbands’ affairs. We just have to trust that they know what they are doing, that they are doing the right thing – ’

  ‘One of them will have to be wrong this morning, Tim or Daddy. They can’t both be right, not about this strike. And I think Daddy is the one who’s wrong this time.’

  Edith looked at the newspaper headline covering the strike story: perhaps the doom-sayers were going to be right after all. She was not foolish, she did not believe she lived in the best of all possible worlds, only in a tiny corner of it; but she had not been bred to go looking for what was wrong with the world, her plea for perspective was only play-acting and she knew it. Her equanimity was only cowardice genteelly disguised.

  ‘I’ll talk to him tonight – ’

  ‘It may be too late then.’ Nina kissed her mother, slid off the bed. ‘Whatever happens down at the stockyards today, there’s going to be a hell of a scene here tonight. I’m going to tell Daddy a few truths.’

  She left her mother, ran downstairs, out of the house and back towards the stables where all the cars were garaged. She drove her MG out into the cobbled yard and almost ran down George Biff as he stepped in front of her.

  ‘Where you going, Miz Nina?’

  ‘None of your business! Out of the way – please, George!’

  He came round, slipped into the passenger’s seat beside her. ‘You rushing off down to the yards, right? You damn foolish. You ain’t gonna solve nothing like that.’

  ‘I’m not trying to solve anything – all I want is to bring Mister Tim home before the trouble starts.’

  George looked at his watch. ‘It gonna start, it already started. I talked to Mister Tim this morning when he come to get his car. He told me about them scabs coming in. You gonna drive or you want me to?’

  She argued no further. It took them twenty-five minutes to get to the stockyards, caught as they were in the morning peak-hour traffic. One or two of Nina’s friends saw them, waved cheerfully; they had no problems, none of them had a husband on his way to do battle, scabs, scabs. The morning was already hot, the eye-scalding sunlight an omen in itself. As they drove down towards the yards the smell of livestock hit them suddenly, as if they had driven through an invisible gate into another atmosphere. Police cars blocked the roadway up ahead and beyond the cars they could see trucks and a crowd of men. Nina parked the car, switched off the engine and at once they heard the shouts and booing of the men above the bellowing of the cattle in the yards.

  George Biff put a hand on Nina’s arm as she started to get out of the car, but she took his hand by the wrist and dropped it back on his knee. ‘I’m going up there, George, so don’t try and stop me. I want to know what’s happening.’

  ‘I can find out – ’

  She relented. ‘We’ll find out together. Come on.’

  As they got to the line of police cars a sergeant blocked their way. ‘Okay, you two, this is no place for you. You with the lady, boy?’

  ‘He’s with me, yes,’ said Nina, squarely facing the thickset, overweight officer. He had a Southern accent and she resented his calling George ‘boy’. She wondered what his attitude was towards the strikers. ‘My name is Davoren – my father owns the Beaufort Cattle Company, where all the trouble is.’

  ‘You can say that again, there’s trouble, all right.’ The sergeant’s tone hadn’t altered. He knew who she was, even if he hadn’t seen her before; but he wasn’t impressed by rich girls who took niggers driving with them in imported sports cars. ‘That’s why you better turn round and go back home. We’ll take care of the trouble if it gets any worse.’

  A young policeman came running down from the trucks, looking hot, angry and as if wishing he were somewhere else. ‘Sarge, you better come on up there. Those pickets, they’re not gonna let the trucks through. It’s getting rough.’

  ‘You buzz off, you understand?’ the sergeant said to Nina, then he lumbered up the road after the young officer.

  ‘We better do what he says,’ said George, swea
t beginning to glisten on his dark face. ‘Looks like it gonna get pretty bad in a minute.’

  The yelling had increased and the horns of the trucks had begun to blare; strident echoes rang in Nina’s ears, Frankfurt and Kansas City merged, she was suddenly as afraid of the past as of the present. She started to run towards the disturbance, but George grabbed her arm, held her back. Utterly distraught now, as if the yelling and the truck horns blaring were an omen, she struggled against his grip. The cattle in the yards on either side of them began to mill, bellowing loudly, raising dust that blew up and floated across the road like the smoke of an explosion. Down here on the flats beside the river the sun bounced back from the roadway, splintered itself on the windshields of the police cars. The stockyards became a cauldron of heat and dust and panic and anger.

  ‘Stay here! Don’t come any closer – you hear me? Stay here!’

  George pushed her back towards the MG, then turned and ran up towards the trucks and the yelling crowd.

  In the front line of the crowd Tim was struggling to edge towards the side. He had no desire to be a ring-leader in what was going to be an ugly encounter. He had been standing talking to Bumper Cassidy, both of them watching the blocked trucks carrying the scab labour, when suddenly the situation had got out of hand. The pickets had been rocking the trucks, trying to force the drivers to reverse; one of the drivers lost his head, threw a wrench and a picket went down with blood gushing from his face. Next moment the whole mob had surged forward, pickets clambering to get up at the men in the trucks like pirates boarding a convoy of galleons. Whistles blew and the police came in at the mob of strikers from the other side of the trucks.

  Tim knew he was in danger. Mob mindlessness had taken over; if there was a cool head among the three or four hundred men it was having no effect. Bumper Cassidy, beside Tim, had responded to the uproar with a reflex action; he was a big, bald-headed man who, if he was lost for words, was never lost for fists. A man fell out of a truck and Bumper hit him on the way down, stopping him for a moment in mid-air as if the blow from his fist was stronger than the pull of gravity. Then a police baton hit Bumper on the side of the head and he fell sideways against Tim, who went down in the stampede.