Chapter 25 #3
“And I do like glassblowing,” Chary said earnestly. “I like it. It’s exhausting, but it’s precise, and I don’t have to think. It makes me feel useful. At the end of it, it’s done.”
At the end of it, he was still a millionaire with a mansion awaiting him.
“All right… so, that’s why. But nobody found you out? Working at your own father’s factory?”
Long gone were the days of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian industrialists, who would keep their heroic hands in their business on the daily.
Nowadays, the truly rich ones wanted to be gentlemen, divorced from cotton fluff and coal soot and track-laying; Wright Sr. wouldn’t have overseen anything of the actual warehouses.
And of course, he wouldn’t have noticed Chary was gone, either.
Not if he’d put him out of the house years earlier.
“I was one of very many. Faceless. The laws weren’t the same then,” Chary said.
“Only affidavits of age were needed at the time, and nobody asked me for one.” His voice had gained r’s again, dropped into the same New Yorker cadence that he’d had in the boxcar.
As though it was easy. “I looked older than I was.” Chary gestured to his face, then took a huge bite. “Wha’bout you?”
“Me? It wasn’t like this.”
Chary gestured him on.
“Ah… I hopped a train outta the mountains at seventeen. Pa was makin’ noise about marriage, settlin’ down. It was time.”
“Your face wasn’t helping you,” Chary said thickly.
“No.” Laurie laughed. “No, it wasn’t. But aside from that, my father’s a populist. I wanted books. University. Not to run a dairy farm with no brothers to help me, right?”
Chary nodded.
“Although I soon found out that Columbia wasn’t especially feasible on a rail-rider’s wage.” Laurie winked, since Chary already knew about Sam. “So, I tried to wed the work instead. Domestic service.”
Chary looked him up and down through feathery lashes—still damp with sweat. “Oh, please tell me you were made footman.”
“Well, they didn’t put me in the carriage house,” Laurie said, and Chary smiled.
“Yes, I was first footman. I won’t tell you for whom,” he said quickly, as interest lit in Chary’s eyes, “because it’s really not relevant anymore. It was fine until things went south with a visiting valet.”
Chary hummed. “I see.”
“Yep. No references.”
Chary paused in unwrapping the second sandwich. “You weren’t forced into anything… desperate? After?”
Laurie narrowed his eyes at the river.
Questions were sometimes the most revealing of all. This was maybe Chary trying to keep things from him, even as his curiosity and concern overrode his self-preservation. Had Chary himself been forced into something desperate? August seemed to have been.
“No,” Laurie said carefully. “Both you Wright brothers had it worse than I, trust me.”
He brought out the rest of his lunch pail, piece by piece.
A hunk of cheese, three eggs—blueberries staining a handkerchief.
Chary took it all tentatively at first, though Laurie pushed it firmly into his hand.
He wasn’t hungry anyway, but overheated, nauseated, emotionally wearied.
Even if he had been starving, he’d have given it; Chary needed it more.
An impromptu—or perhaps ongoing—game of football had begun on 9th between the glassworks boys.
Laurie hadn’t the faintest idea how any of them had the energy to run and play in their leisure time, but they surely did.
Up and down and back again, all for the sake of a rubber ball they had to fight the dogs for.
For play. Something they should’ve been doing the majority of the day, not running their soles holey with glass crumbles.
Chary wanted him to write up the glassworks? He’d write up every damned glassworks on the Eastern Seaboard.
Chary followed his gaze and stiffened.
Three boys had sloughed off the football game’s bystander group; they approached now. All three were from Chary’s shop, Laurie realized, and all of them were wet like they’d jumped from the river. Surely, even on a summer night, they’d catch cold.
One of them tossed a makeshift garbage-ball between two hands: Chary’s gatherer-boy. He spoke first.
“This is it, then. You’ve a shadower. You’re leaving us early.
” The ball wasn’t enough to keep his limbs occupied—he also kicked the cobblestone with one foot, heel-toe, heel-toe, landing hardest on the last syllable.
He sounded more defeated than angry. Laurie didn’t miss the lack of formal address.
Chary stood. “Soon,” he admitted. He rubbed his palms on his overalls.
Maybe he hadn’t demanded so much as a mister from them. Figures.
“When soon? We thought that Ira…” the boy began. Then sheer bravado—fear, and self-defense—came boiling back into his expression. “Every’un wants me as gatherer. Nobody else’s as fast.” The boy’s glance flicked to Laurie. “He doesn’t look fast.”
“I know that they do,” Chary said gently. “You don’t need to worry about that, Milo. Or Ira. Everything will be fine.”
Wrong move. Milo’s eyes narrowed. Children, as humans in miniature, hated platitudes. The boy didn’t believe it for a second.
He crouched and jettisoned the ball of garbage into the river.
“Yeah, me. And Ira,” he spat. “But what about the rest of ’em?” His spoken-for entourage stood, scuffling their feet.
Chary had no answer.
“Whatever,” Milo said. “You’re old. Slowin’ down, anyway. Good for glue and nuthin’ else.” He stopped short of actual spitting, adjusted his cap, and about-faced.
They ran back to the football game.
“I think you just got called a nag,” Laurie teased. It should’ve been much funnier than it was.
He wanted to know why Chary would put himself through this, year after year after year, watching boys come and go, when there was no need.
No longer a personal need.
“How old are they?”
Chary clutched his arms to himself. “Their school age or their real age?”
Most children were taught by their schoolmasters to say they were thirteen, minimum, even if they were half that.
There wasn’t much stopping them. The most recent law passed by the state now required legal birth certificates for employers to have on file, replacing the affidavits Chary had mentioned, but actual compliance was rare.
Laurie paused to think. When, again, had the first Factory Act passed in the New York legislature?
’86? ’87? Maybe ’92? He worked in and reported on so many states, he knew more about national legislation.
But New York led the nation in labor laws, and he lived there.
The Factory Act had gone through the legislature so many times.
Practically once a year since the late seventies.
1886, for the first passage. He was almost sure. He’d look it up later.
“Their real age,” Laurie said. “If you know it.”
Chary didn’t even pause. “Milo—Milovan—is eleven. The mold-tender, Liam: thirteen. The snapper-up…” Chary grimaced. “Filip. Nine. As close as I can tell. He won’t ever say.”
“Nine?” Laurie said, as though he hadn’t seen tinier fingers picking strawberries.
“Go ahead, tell the Deputy Inspector for the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Chary said heatedly. “I wish you all luck. He was here last week. Did you see him walk in?”
Laurie shook his head. He said nothing for a little while. They listened to steamboats sound their night horns, watched the train chuff across the bridge and blink out the lights as it went.
He wished they could touch.
“What about the apprentice? Presumably Ira?”
“Sixteen. He’s very skilled. I did mean for him to take the place of blower eventually.”
“He looks skilled,” Laurie agreed. “Eventually… or soon?” Very soon, if he’d already warned his shop it would happen. “What did your brother’s death do to that plan? Anything?”
August’s death had done something to Chary’s life besides inheritance. Something catastrophic. He knew that. But for the first time in his career, Laurie was almost afraid to look too hard, for fear of what he’d see. For fear of what it would change about the man sitting beside him.
From the corner, the bell rang for meal’s end. They stood. Chary tried to crack his back, failed, and sighed.
“I’ll tell you in the morning. Tomorrow.” He managed a small smile, for it was twelve-thirty again. Already morning. “Until then, I have five hours left on shift.”
Laurie stopped him with a hand on his arm. “And how long do I have?”
Chary looked down at the hand. “For the story?”
No.
“Yeah. How long can I shadow you without raising suspicions?”
“How long do you need? You’re not going to ask questions yet, are you, about the gaffers? Not here.”
“I would if I thought I could get away with it.” Laurie wished, for the umpteenth time, that he could ask things of other workingmen directly without getting his block knocked off.
Hello, what injustices have you been pitted against lately?
Anybody been murdering ya? Not how people worked, though.
“Probably I can’t. If Irving—my source—knew about the deaths third-hand, it’s been making the rounds long since, and folks’ll be more wary than they’d be otherwise.
More importantly,” he said softly, “I’m here with you.
” He squeezed his hand. “I won’t risk you drawing attention like that, not when you’ve already been targeted. ”
Chary slid free—with a strangely guilty look. “Well, then, a few days or so. Today, tomorrow, as well as next week. I’ll have to talk to Ira.” He glanced over, unsure. “Is that enough?”
No, no, no.
“It’ll have to be.”