Chapter 28 #2
“Fewer boys per shop, he said,” Chary interjected, and did some easy math.
“It’d be a hundred fifty boys out of our New York factory alone, not counting Jersey.
Out of the factory and into school. But the boys aren’t represented, not even working in a union shop.
Why should the unions care about boys losing work? ”
“Back in school or working elsewhere.” Laurie hummed.
He turned back to August. “You kept the machine from Raberding but not from the unions. But wanting the patronage of union-led shops is just the same as handing the business advantage to Brooklyn Glass. It makes no sense. So, what’d you want from it? ”
Chary knew before August could answer; it was in the reluctant twist of his lips and the quick, desperate glance over to him, not quite for approval but close. A taking of temperature. The boys.
“I wanted to make my brother proud of me. To do something good in his name for once.”
“August...” Chary whispered, because Laurie didn’t know who he truly was yet, Chary hadn’t been honest with him, and August didn’t know he hadn’t.
“Nothing to do with Raberding?”
“No. I don’t give a shit about Tjo anymore or his unionized, unified profit utopia. He can do what he likes. I’ll even lease the thing to his shops. That was the idea, in fact; you are right.”
Laurie still looked skeptical. Perhaps it was just his default.
“So, why haven’t you just put them to work in Wright glassworks—and lease them out then?”
August shrugged. “No sponsor to build more. She’s not much to look at, but she’s ten automobiles apiece in costs, more or less. I couldn’t afford it, not before nor after.”
Not before nor after. Chary sweated miserably, and not from summer or the heat of the furnace. He should’ve told Laurie days before, and now he was going to find out secondhand.
But Laurie was focused on something else. “No sponsor… except Raberding?” he asked.
“He would’ve, on conditions.” But he wanted too much, Chary knew. And even the hint of such a thing had made Raberding froth at the mouth and leap for more.
“Horizontal integration?” Laurie murmured.
“I wouldn’t do it. And you know, Tulley, if we put them into our non-union place first, it would fuel even more sentiment against them.
I wanted the machine to do for the industry what you called inevitable.
I thought, even if I had to go through a hundred Locals…
if they could see what they would do for the boys?
If that could be Chary’s legacy? But they have opposed her at every turn.
And then they tried to kill him for it.”
“August.” Chary’s voice was thick. He hadn’t known August knew how he felt about the boys working the factory, except that he’d known he’d been one. “Brother.”
Laurie, who did not look unmoved, was nevertheless still mired in his role as investigator. “Who forced you outta there again? You said he was your referral at Brooklyn Glass—he turned out to be an enforcer instead?”
“Oh, Sawyer. He shoved me out of Walhalla, right onto Orchard. I think it was just personal. We met as fairies, years and years ago, and I had recalled he also worked for Wright Glass at the time. Privately, it’d tickled me.
Papa raising a cross-dressing whore, employing a part-time one, too.
Enh, we are truly everywhere.” August shrugged.
“I never liked him. He was a bit of a bigot. Remembering what he used to do was useful. He didn’t know who I was born as, of course.
And I can’t blame him for being angry. I was a risk to him even only as a fellow former whore. ”
Laurie had grabbed hold of the marver, like it’d cost him not to speak during all of this revelation. Now he croaked, “Sawyer—Irving Sawyer?”
Chary hadn’t heard the name before, he was pretty sure; to Laurie, it seemed to have been devastating. Someone he’d known?
“Yes, Irving,” August said. “I knew him as Erwina, but he didn’t keep that up for long.
It didn’t suit, you know? Sometimes it doesn’t.
I figured he’d have done anything to keep his normal job, and he did; he did what I asked.
” He shrugged again. “I hold no blame with him for throwing me out, as I said. I used him casually.”
“Oh, dear God,” Chary said. “You didn’t blackmail the man?”
“No!” August flushed an ugly, shamed red. “Not with anything spoken aloud,” he muttered.
“You wore out your welcome with him, at the very least.”
But was it enough motive to try and kill a man for?
“Sorry, Chary. I did what I thought I had to. I didn’t think he’d attack you for it.”
“Odd jobs. Well, there you go,” Laurie said, and groaned. He had a hand over his face. “Look. I knew the man. Sawyer was my source at Brooklyn Glass. He’s dead now. He was mur— He was killed.”
Oh, God. Oh, no. If they were the same man— the man that Chary had killed, accidentally, in desperation? Had he done that, killed Laurie’s source? He, Chary?
“Dead?” August said, just as Chary said tremulously, “Do you think him my attacker?”
“Do I think a man would kill to avoid being outed and ousted from his job? The thing that keeps him and his family fed and clothed and off the streets? I mean, yeah. I do. Jesus, Chary.”
Not recrimination; sympathy.
“Now wait a moment. Sawyer’s dead?”
I maybe killed him. Chary met Laurie’s eyes, thinking it, seeing it reflected there; neither said a thing.
August swore, as their silence was answer enough. “I did not wish him dead,” he whispered. “How did it happen, d’you know?”
“Stabbed, the report said.” Once, twice, barely enough to kill, and Chary hadn’t meant it, not at all— “Outside Boone’s bar,” Laurie lied.
He sighed, heavily, tapping the steel marver.
“I also think he could’ve done murder to keep himself and his family fed and clothed.
He could’ve been a gun for hire atop everything else… Sure, I’d believe it.”
It sounded too much like good old hearty self-deception for Chary’s conscience.
“But why would he inform to you about the missing men if— No. Why would he kill those gaffers?”
August said, “Missing men?”
“Was he a racialist?” Laurie said, back to interrogating. “Sawyer. You called him a bigot.”
“Not in so many words… but it was half why he was so angry to have to refer me, I think. They were not, absolutely not salting Wright Glass, so who was I to try? Wright Glass didn’t hire ‘the union type,’ he said.
A good few at the Local looked relieved to find me white on introduction.
English-speaking.” He smirked, though painfully. “I didn’t mention being papist.”
“Criminy,” Laurie said, and of course, that was him holding back.
August went to unplug the bottle-spider. When he returned, he sat on his wheeled stool with slumping shoulders, fingers plucking at the rubber curtain.
“So, I have fucked everything for you again, Chary. I’m sorry.”
“No!” Chary exclaimed. “What? When have you done that? No, no, no. I wasn’t killed; I lived. You were trying to help those boys, like I would’ve. I absolutely would have tried something like that. I feel ashamed I haven’t.”
“I was trying to help them and make money,” August said, with an absurd sniff. “You don’t care about that.”
“I haven’t—” He meant to say I haven’t ever found it lacking, so how could I? but he couldn’t go on. Laurie didn’t know the truth. “I don’t, no. But you do. That’s all right. Laurie?”
“Yeah?” At Chary’s pleading look, he started. “I mean, yeah. He’s—you’re—a capitalist. Born into wealth. That’s the majority opinion of you capitalists—making money is the point…” He rubbed at his neck.
August began to laugh. “He doesn’t— Oh, no. You didn’t… Oh, no. It’s all right, Chary; you should tell him.”
“August,” Chary said frantically, and August thankfully scowled and shut his mouth against whatever else he would’ve given away.
“Laurie’s written a whole piece on child labor in the glassworks.
Did you know? A firsthand account, the first of its kind.
I-I’m sure if he mentioned the machine in some way—perhaps as a call to action, at the end? ”
Laurie was not pleased to be volunteered in this way or so spontaneously. “What now? You want me to tack on an advertisement to the glassworker-boys piece?” he said, incredulous.
Chary winced. Advertisement. “Yes. For a good cause. Why not?”
“Hm. You want me to—what? Invoke the public indignation? Cap off the boys’ tragedy with a call to arms? ‘Please to solicit the Wright brothers—not those, the other ones’”—he quoted with fingers—“‘for a modern-industrial solution to the monstrous evil of boy labor’?”
“Well…” Chary began. It sounded… lesser when he put it like that. “It doesn’t have to be this machine. There are others. A man named Owens has a similar semiautomatic in production…”
Laurie shook his head. “Look, Chary. I had a call to action in the piece already. It’s voting on national compulsory public education. Child-labor legislation. You know? You read it.”
“Legislation spans years.”
“So does the production of genius inventions. This one isn’t even yours.”
Chary recoiled. “It’s partly mine. It is obliged to be. August can’t patent it under— August is legally dead.”
August himself had recoiled. “Chary…”
There was nothing truly stopping August from filing a patent under Charles Edward. But of course, then everything would come to Chary, currently embodying Charles Edward.
It was a tricky thing, straddling one identity.
Laurie said, “Then he definitely won’t want me to be disseminating it without his name on it, will he? Will you?” he asked August. “Or are you angling for investors?”
“It isn’t a new idea—I have just said there are other semiautomatics! And—and,” Chary said, “aren’t you supposedly for common ownership of the means of production?”
“Yeah,” Laurie said, clearly unconvinced. “But I still live in this society, where laws are decidedly in favor of the US Patent Office. I’ve avoided lawsuits up ’til now and don’t wanna get hit with one, even from a dead man.”
“I wouldn’t—” August tried.