into the Bull works.
“It’s crazy,” a woman said to her in the lunchroom, lifting a sand-
wich to her mouth with hands not quite cleaned of metal dust, in her
nails and the ridges of her knuckles. “They build the planes here but
there’s nowhere to fly ’em, you know, test ’em out. So when they’re all
built they take them apart, put the pieces on a train, and take ’em out
to a field out there somewheres, and put the pieces together again to fly
the things.” She chewed, seeming delighted with the craziness of it. “I
guess they know best.”
Though the work itself didn’t seem hard, it was continuous, unre-
lenting, in a way nothing she’d ever done before was; the only thing it
resembled was the couple of days in the late summer when her dad
went out to the country and bought bushel baskets of peaches, and she
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 231
and her mother and her mother’s and father’s sisters all canned peaches,
skinning and cutting and scalding the fruit, heating the huge black
kettles, lowering the pale green Ball jars in their racks into the boiling
water; then filling the jars, pouring the melted paraffin over each top to
seal it, over and over, never done, her father carrying the filled jars to
the basement, climbing up again, weary and persistent. Like that, but
every day, endlessly, and without the steady accumulation of good
things to eat in the sweet steam. At evening she made it to the bus and
walked back up the hill feeling made out of sticks and stones, watching
her building come into view with a longing so fervent it was as though
she’d never make it.
“Was he good?” she asked Mrs. Freundlich, who seemed to watch
from her window to see Connie approaching and was always there to
throw open the door before she reached it, displaying Adolph ready
to go.
“Well,” Mrs. Freundlich said, looking down at Adolph as though
trying to make a decision.
He was dressed and clean, in fact his little cheeks shone like a car-
toon kid’s, one of the Campbell’s soup kids, and his hair was combed
and wet on his head. He looked up at his mother with that huge happy
but questioning look, and—unable to answer it—Connie swept him
up, and he held tight to her, smelling of something like Florida water
and his own good smell; and she thanked Mrs. Freundlich briefly and
took him away, since she’d learned that the woman found it a chore to
describe what she and Adolph had done all day. It was all right was
about as explicit as she got. Connie wondered if she even spoke to
him.
Holding him on her hip with one arm she fingered a letter from
Bunce from her mailbox. She glimpsed Mrs. Freundlich, half-hidden
behind her unclosed door, studying her through the door’s window.
Honey, Well I have changed jobs again and am working for Van
Damme Aero in their big plant here. The moneys better and the
place is swell, all new built, the best of everything. They even
have a bank right here in the plant! Mostly women work here I
have to say they don’t know much tho they would learn faster if
somebody took an interest in them. They are ready for anything.
232 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Say this is the place to be, out west, I doubt I’ll be able to live in
that smoky old town again. Bye for now, Bunce.
There was a postal money order for twenty dollars in the envelope.
The postmark on the envelope said Ponca City, but the letters signify-
ing the state were smeared and there wasn’t any return address on it.
You should always put that on, so that letters can find their way back
to you if they are misdirected. Always.
She folded the letter back up along the folds he had made and
thought she would quit her job. She felt certain she’d done something
to make him not want to come home, and all she could think of was
that she’d gone out and taken a job and not told him, and it was as
though her having done that had been somehow communicated to him
over the spaces between them, between here and the West, maybe in
the war news they all shared, no matter that it was crazy to think
that.
Why hadn’t she pleaded with him to stay, back then when he had
decided to quit? She saw as though arrayed across the nation those
smiling willing women of the magazine covers and the newsreels,
marching to work to stand all day beside a helpful man, rising on tiptoe
to nail this or screw that, his hot eyes on her, cap lifted in admiration.
He wasn’t coming back. He was just going to go on farther into the
war, and when it was over he would be where he was, he’d go on from
there rather than turning back.
That night she woke in the deep dark, startled out of sleep by her
own cry. Something she had dreamed or learned, she couldn’t remem-
ber what. She thought of that letter from Bunce and all that it had left
unsaid, the thing that had been going on all along and that she hadn’t
really known and now she did. She lay entirely still, feeling that she
was on the point of dissolution, that she would fall to pieces, not just
as a way of talking but actually: that what made up her would dissoci-
ate and shrivel away like ash. He would never come back. She knew it,
it had been what was going to happen from the beginning, like a dealt
hand of cards. If she could go back now to before he left, she’d hold
him tight and promise him anything.
Night went on unrelieved. She was aware of the ticking of the clock,
warning her with disinterested compassion of the time passing, that
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 233
before the light was full she would have to get up to get to work. She
began a rosary: not wanting to move to get her beads from where they
hung on the dresser mirror, afraid that if she moved she’d come apart
somehow, she counted on her fingers. Pray for us sinners now and at
the hour of our deaths. When the alarm went off at last it woke her,
though she had no memory of having slept again.
The day after that was her day off, and she went to visit Bunce’s par-
ents, as she had promised Bunce she would do, to bring Adolph for
them to see. She took a city bus to the station and the interurban to the
neighborhood they lived in, in a square plain house covered in some-
thing meant to look like bricks. For some reason it was a hard house to
be glad to go into—stern or forbidding—but once inside it was nice,
and Bunce’s parents were as warm as little stoves. Like her, Bunce was
an only child.
“Oh my gosh, how he’s grown! Dad, come see!”
Bunce’s father had been a machinist too, but he’d been in an acci-
dent at work long before, bones crushed in the overturning of a
mechanical bin, Connie had never been able to picture it exactly,
though she could a little better now, the Bull plant seemed like it was
made to cause awful accidents, she saw two or three nearly happen
every day. He lived on a workmen’s compensation pension and was in
pain a lot, though rosy-cheeked and always smiling. He grabbed for his
cane and got up with effort from his chair, though Connie tried to
keep him there.
“Well hello, little fella,” he said, tottering above Adolph. “Say you’re
doing a wonderful job with him, Connie, we’re so proud of you, bear-