ing up. If there’s anything we can do, we wantcha to let us know.”
She hadn’t told them she was working, and she’d warned her mother
not to tell them; her mother had anyway known not to.
They gathered around the table, and Mom Wrobleski put out a
cake, which had an epic tale behind it to tell, how it had come to be, as
every cake did that year—the sugar, the raisins, the eggs. They took
turns holding Adolph and feeding him cake. Connie had dressed him
in his little brown suit like a soldier’s with the tie attached—Mom said
he looked like Herbert Hoover, but Buster said John Bunny. And all
234 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the time the hollow of absence and guilt and fear opened and shrank,
opened and shrank again inside Connie.
His parents too had had letters from Bunce, and they brought them
out to read while the percolator burbled comically. His letters to them
were more detailed, less jaunty. He described the work he did to his
father; he complained more expansively to his mother, who shook her
head in sympathy and made that noise with tongue and teeth that has
no name. And he gave them, carefully and thoroughly, the addresses
where they could write back to him. Gosh I miss you old folks at
home.
“I had a letter just yesterday,” Connie said. They turned toward
her, leaned in even, smiling and eager. The cake-matter turned in her
stomach. “Well he’s doing fine,” she said. The coffeepot burped power-
fully, not only throwing coffee up into the little glass bulb at the top
but also lifting the lid to emit a puff of steam; Adolph laughed and
made the noise too, and they all laughed together. Connie could go on.
“He’s moved on to a new plant,” she said. “Everything’s wonderful
there. It’s all new. He just went. They needed people.”
“I’ll be,” said Mom. “Where did you say?”
“Ponca City,” Connie said. “Van Damme Aero.”
Buster clambered from his chair, making noises, going from chair-
back to chair-back to his own big mauve armchair with the antimacas-
sars on the arms and back, where he spent most of his day. Beside it
there was a maple magazine holder, and from it he pulled a big picture
magazine. “Here,” he said. “For gosh sakes it must be here.”
They laid it on the table amid them. The cover showed a vast semi-
circle that you could only tell was a building because workers were
streaming into it, tiny figures, maybe one of them Bunce. Harsh sun-
light cast their black shadows on the macadam. building the great
warbird in indian country, it said.
Buster flipped through the pages, past the ads for whiskey and
cleaners and radio tubes and life insurance, every one telling how they
were helping win the war. “Here it is,” Mom said.
In the great hangar the wingless bodies were lined up one behind
the other, each one with its crowd of workers around it. Married
couples worked on the factory floor together, it said: one couple were
midgets. In another part of the plant drafting tables went on farther
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 235
than you could make them out, men and some women too bent over
them and the fluorescent strip lighting overhead matching their white
tables. Women who carried messages through the vast spaces to the
designers and engineers went on roller skates!
“ ‘The cafeteria is larger than a city block,’ ” Mom read. “ ‘Seven-
teen hundred people can be served at a time.’ ” You could see them, six
lines of workers in their uniforms, trays in hand, passing the steam
tables. Mom looked again among them for Bunce, but Buster said they
would have taken these pictures long ago, before the boy got there, use
your head. The white walls, gleaming as though wet, were all made of
tile.
“ ‘Each worker receives a health code number and a card, listing job
capability and description and any health conditions,’ ” Mom read.
“ ‘Three clinics serve the plant, and a full hospital is being built in the
city nearby.’ Imagine.” There was a picture of a large man in a double-
breasted suit, meeting with a delegation of Indians: Henry Van Damme.
The health cards were his idea. He’d even thought of having a psy-
chologist in the clinics. For instance to talk to, if someone lost someone
in the war.
“Oh look,” said Mom. A picture showed the nursery: you seemed
to be looking in through wide high plate-glass windows at a bright
indoors. In playrooms protected from plant traffic trained nurses cared
for workers’ children, hundreds of them, Mexican, Indian, black and
white children all together. Cost was seventy-five cents a day, a dollar
and a quarter for two kids. “Why that’s not more than I—” Connie
said, then stopped, but she hadn’t been heard or understood. “Oh pre-
cious,” she said: a boy in rompers, a smiling nurse bent down to hear
him. “ ‘Fresh fruits and vegetables are abundant, grown in the huge
Victory Gardens in surrounding fields.’ ”
They each turned the magazine to themselves to look, and passed it
on. The sweep of the corn rows was like the curving sweep of the win-
dowed nursery wall, like the sweep of the drafting tables under their
banks of lights. They read every word. “If the world could be like this,”
Buster said.
When it was growing dark, Connie and his grandmother wrapped
Adolph up again in his warm suit as he looked from one face to the
other. Sometimes doing this Connie thought she could remember what
236 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
it had been like to be handled this way, by big loving smiling people
who did everything for you.
It was so clear outside you could see stars, though the sky was pale
and green at the horizon, the thin bare trees and the buildings and the
metal trellis of the overpass as though drawn in ink with fearful preci-
sion. Adolph lay against her, put to sleep by her motion. Bunce had
said that ages ago, when we all were living in the woods, you had to
keep quiet as you traveled so the wolves and such wouldn’t hear you,
which means it’s natural that babies would fall asleep when their moth-
ers walk. It makes sense.
You have to fight for him. Your man. She heard herself say it to her-
self. You have to not let him go, you have to fight, you can fight and
you have to. The hard heels of her shoes struck the pavement. You have
to go and fight for your man. It was part of what you had to do, and
she knew she would.
The next day at the plant it was evident that something big was wrong.
Lines had stopped moving that were always going when she got there;
some of the ever-present racket was stilled, which made the place seem
somehow bigger, empty and expectant. Before noon Connie ran out of
parts to shape, and the little electric truck didn’t roll by with more.
Sometimes that had happened before, but she’d never had to wait more
than a few minutes before it came, driven too fast by the man with one
built-up shoe on his short leg. Connie looked around for the supervi-
sor, but he wasn’t where he usually was. There was nothing to do but
stand by her machine, ready to go. She felt conspicuous even though no
one was looking her way, except the man at the next machine whom
she distrusted, who left his place with a foxy grin her way, took a seat
on some boxes and lit a forbidden smoke.
Just then the noon horn sounded, though it wasn’t nearly lunch-
time. Everyone stopped working; some people downed tools and drifted