Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (5 page)

"Nobody comes up here much anymore," he said. "Too much trouble. Too many stairs." He turned the doorknob of number 8. "Jack stayed in here."

The door swung inward and open.

"Did you ever hear of the 'Battle of Toledo?' " Stanley Matusik stepped aside and let me precede him into the room.

A white-painted iron bedstead. A wooden-veneer chest of drawers. Venetian blinds. A blue upholstered easy chair, facing an RCA black-and-white TV. An oak wardrobe with a mirror inset in the door.

"No," I replied. "I haven't."

The door to a small bathroom was ajar. I could see the wall sink and a towel bar.

"It happened fifty years ago."

I turned to look at him.

"Was one of the reasons Jack left Toledo, came to Ashland."

"I don't know what you mean."

"This room's got its own bathroom. There's a few that do. Was one of the reasons Jack took it, way up here on the third."

"Toledo. Jack," I interjected. "What happened?"

He looked at me. "It was the Depression. In nineteen thirty-four, everybody seemed to be on strike. Must've happened even up there in Canada." He waited.
 

"It did."

He went over to the chest of drawers, leaned on it. "Toledo was a little Detroit. Automobile parts," he said. "Depression ruined Toledo—especially in thirty-four. It was big news even down here. Willys-Overland—made that jeep—employed thirty thousand people. Went bankrupt. Ohio Bond and Security Bank closed its doors. City couldn't make payrolls." He shook his head. "It was bad." He stared off into space. "Electric Auto-Lite, though. That was the one."

"Why don't you sit down, Mr. Matusik?"

He glanced at me, then at the easy chair. "Might be a good idea." He sat down.

I faced him, sitting on the side of the bed.

"You never heard about it?" he asked again.

"No."

"Was in all the newspapers." He thought about this, then shrugged. "Auto-Lite made lighting, starting, ignition systems. Had contracts with Packard, Nash, Studebaker, Hudson, Willys." He looked at me. "All of them gone now. Strange, isn't it?"

I nodded, as kindly as I could.

"In thirty-four, they got the Chrysler account. A whopper. You could see it coming: lots of product, low wages. Same old story." His eyes focused far away. "They went on strike." He frowned. "Company brought in strikebreakers, special deputies, armed its company guards and stored munitions in the plant."

"Where was Jack in all this?"

"I'm gettin' to that." He continued, lost in his own memories. "There was mass picketing—thousands. City police couldn't handle it all, so the sheriff deputized special police, paid by Auto-Lite. After a few days, the crowd, they say, had reached ten thousand. One of the hothead deputies grabbed an old man and beat him, in front of everybody, and that was it."

I waited.

"The Battle of Toledo. May nineteen thirty-four. It had started. The picketers cordoned off the fifteen hundred strikebreakers inside the factory—kept them there from noon till midnight that day. Deputies in the plant and on the roof fired tear gas, covered an area four blocks around in the stuff. They hurled bolts and iron bars, used water hoses—even some gunfire. Crowd fought back with bricks and stones. Some fires were set." He shook his head again. "Ugly stuff. Ugly."

I listened, his story coming alive for me.

"Dawn, the next day, the Ohio National Guard was ordered in. Nine hundred men. Eight rifle companies, three machine companies, and a medical unit. Was rainin'. They managed to lift the siege, got the fifteen hundred strikebreakers out. But things were still boilin'. Picketers grabbed a strikebreaker, beat him, stripped him naked. More tear gas. There was actually a bayonet charge. Then, they started shootin'." He became silent and grim for a moment. "Two were killed. Fifteen wounded. Four more companies were ordered in. Largest peacetime display of military power in the state's history. The plant shut down for two weeks. When it opened again, the union had won. They got a five-cent increase. Thirty-five cents an hour."

We were both quiet.

"I know all this because Jack told me. Many times. He was there. Inside." A pause. "He was one of the strikebreakers."

I was speechless when he had finished. To have stumbled about blindly for as long as I had, and now this: a sudden flood of information. Jack's life suddenly taking shape—a shape I could never have guessed.

A strikebreaker.

I must have looked dazed, for the old man broke the silence. "I know what you might be thinkin'." He scratched his head. "Don't be too hard on him."

I still hadn't spoken.

"He was a kid. Hell, we were all just kids. Hadn't thought things through. But we all needed money. Needed it in a way you can't even imagine."

"He never mentioned any of this in his letters to my mother."

"Course he didn't. He was ashamed. He saw what takin' a man's job could lead to, saw what he'd done. He'd ended up pitted against other fellows just like himself—guys tryin' to get by, feed themselves and families. But he was just like them— needed the money. That picture-takin' stuff—didn't lead to nothin'. Who could afford to get their picture took?"

I sat in Jack Radey's room, listening to Stanley Matusik expand and recast this bubble from the past, increasingly awed at his perceptions. His face grew more animated.

"You can't judge. Any of us might of done the same thing."

It was true.

"Fat cat named Miniger owned Auto-Lite. Drug huckster. Coal operator. Used to sail around Lake Erie on a yacht. They said he was worth ninety million dollars." He shook his head in disgust. "And the union thought they'd won when they got thirty-five cents an hour."

I crossed my legs, leaned back on the bed, thinking.

"And two men died."

Like separate drumbeats, his last words echoed from the past.

"His job as night janitor at the hospital."

"Good, honest work," said the old man. "Stupid, dull, boring work. But honest. Jack didn't have many illusions left." He paused. "None of us did."

"Tell me about it?"

"What's to tell?"

I wasn't sure. "How long did he do it?"

"Don't know. I'd have to think about it."

"Weeks? Month?"

"Months. I already told you."

I waited for more.

"They paid him for eight solid hours of work, but Jack said he could get all his chores done in two or three hours. Lots of times he came home and slept. Others, he'd just wander around."

"Wander where?"

"Around. Go for walks."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Sure. What else was he gonna do?"

I didn't know. I had no idea.

"Nineteen thirty-three," he said. "Roosevelt became president. Inherited Hoover's mess. There were twenty million unemployed." He considered me anew. "You were born in the forties, right?"

"Yes."

He shook his head. "Still look awful familiar to me." He frowned. "Must be the likeness to Jack." He shook his head again, continuing. "Anyway, born in the forties, you've never seen anything like it."

He was right.

"Ever hear of Barbara Hutton?"

The name rang some sort of bell. Unable to place it, though, I shook my head.

"Woolworth heiress. Got forty-five million dollars for reaching the tender age of twenty-one. Newspapers were full of it. Five-and-dime business was booming. Profits were twenty percent, net." He fell silent, retracting a memory more finely. "Teresa worked as a salesgirl at Woolworth's." His eyes hardened as the detail he had been seeking crystallized: "She made eleven dollars a week."

"The thirties." He touched his forehead. "Christ. What a mess." He looked at me. "You better let me quit this ramblin'. Get my blood pressure up." He began to rise.

"Don't let me stop you, Mr. Matusik. This is exactly why I'm here."

He assessed me quietly. I realized that what I had just said belied my earlier contention that my visit was some sort of casual afterthought—a sidebar to a haphazard vacation.

He was standing now, silent.

I stood, too.

"Maybe," he said, "we can talk some more after dinner."

The door closed behind him.

Until I slowly exhaled, I hadn't realized that I had been holding my breath.

I was alone in Jack’s room.

I had traveled the Lincoln Highway, had come to Ashland.
 

On a small table at the side of the bed was a silent, round alarm clock, both hands frozen at twelve. I picked it up, turned it over, cranked the winding mechanism, and listened as it began to tick.
 

Exhausted, I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. I drifted briefly into the warm cavern of sleep, dreamless.
 

FOUR

And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country.

—John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

1

When I woke, I was sweating. I'd fallen asleep on a hot August afternoon, in a room with air as still as its furnishings.

I checked my watch. 4:40 p.m.

I pushed myself to a sitting position, groggy and with a slight headache, and stared at the closed window. I got up and opened it. The warmth that greeted me was as stifling as that within, but differed in that it was alive, smelling like a city: fragments of oil, pavement, and steel.

I leaned forward on the ledge and looked out at Jack's world.

At an angle across the street was a church turret. To my right, a bit farther away, was what appeared to be a large bank or trust company. When I peered farther left, I could see a theater marquee that read "Paramount." And below, for someone from Toronto, traffic appeared to be nonexistent.

I stood back, assured by the ordinariness of it all.

The only sound in the room was the ticking of the bedside clock that I had wound earlier. It read one o'clock. I had slept for an hour.

Picking it up, I adjusted it to read 4:40, uncomfortable at yet another blatant specter of differing timelines. It was something small. But it was something that I could control. And understand.

Twenty minutes later, I stood on the corner of Winchester and 14th, letting the late afternoon sun beat down on me. The church turret that I had seen from my room belonged to the Calvary Episcopal Church, an elegant Gothic structure. The bank farther right was the First Bank and Trust Company: commercial dignity with financial stability. And the Paramount Theater to my left seemed to round off the triad of the spiritual, the realistic, and the imaginative bridge between the two spheres quite nicely.

In no hurry, I began to walk.

F. W. Woolworth Co.

My ambling had brought me to a point across the street from the store, and recalling Stanley Matusik's anecdote, I was curious.

I crossed the street and went inside.

If the store didn't date back to the thirties, then it was in its own time warp. Large fans hung from the high ceiling at intermittent points throughout the store, stirring the heat lethargically. The fluorescent lights in rows about them hummed like insects. And as I strode forward, the long slats of the hardwood floor creaked with age.

Stopping, I pictured Teresa Matusik, young and pretty, toiling behind a counter for $11 a week.

As in most Woolworth stores that I could remember, there was a restaurant area to one side, consisting of a long counter and swiveling red-and-chrome chairs. There were only two customers there; the waitress was sitting on the end seat reading a magazine.

After I sat down, she glanced up at me, then returned to her magazine, giving me time to read the wall signs behind the counter that served as menu.

Liver and Onions

Vegetable & Potato

Coffee or Small Soda 2.99

Grilled Chopped Steak with Fried Onions 3.49

Freshly Grilled Hamburger Platter 2.79

Club House Sandwich with French Fries

Coffee or Small Soda
3.
79

It was intriguing. It must have been thirty years since I'd eaten in a Woolworth's, and that had been the one that used to be on the northwest corner of Yonge and Eglinton, before the days of the shopping center.