Page 34 of Working for Keeps

I set it on the table in front of Red, with the point still open, and the hall goes so quiet I can hear the fluorescent tube ticking overhead and the baby in the doorway starting to fuss.

“You’re right,” I say to Bo. “You can’t tell. That’s what four days of lying buys a man. It buys you not being able to tell. And it doesn’t matter how good my reasons were, because you weren’t in the room when I decided, and I decided anyway, and that’s the one thing a steward can’t do.”

I push the pin across the wood.

“So it’s on the table. Take it. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m past being able to ask that.”

I look out at them. Kowalski, Danny, the wall of canvas and iron dust and forty years of my life.

“I’m asking you to look at the paper instead. Not at me. At Lila’s stamp. At the date on it. At Section fourteen, Clause B, which is in your own contract and has been for seventy years, and which you can read for yourselves without taking one word from me or from her. Add it up yourselves. If you walk tonight, they win, and they win everything, and it costs them nothing.

“Take the pin. Vote me out. Elect a new steward before the shift bell, I’ll second the motion myself. But don’t walk off that floor tomorrow, because they are begging you to.”

I put my hands in my pockets so nobody can see them shake, and I step back from the table.

And I wait.

It’s Artie who stands up.

He does it slowly. He is fifty-eight years old and he has been on that line since he was nineteen and he takes his time about it, and the room lets him, because it’s Artie.

“I’ve been angry for about six hours,” he says, “and I’d like to stay angry, because I’m good at it.” A couple of men laugh, low and ugly and grateful. “Mick lied to me on Wednesday. He’ll pay for that with me for a long time. He knows it. Look at his face.”

He turns around and looks at the hall.

“But I’ll tell you what he didn’t do,” Artie says. “He didn’t take the easy one. The easy one was walking us out the gate on Monday, and standing out front with a bullhorn, and being a hero for about nine days, and then we all go home with nothing and he still gets to keep his pin.” He lets that sit. “He took the one that cost him. He came in here and told us himself, on his own legs, before anybody made him, and he put the pin on the table before anybody asked for it. That’s not a man managing us.”

He looks at Bo Rasmussen.

“Bo. You’re right that you can’t tell. So do what he said. Look at the paper.”

He picks up a copy off the nearest chair, and he holds it up over his head, and his hand is shaking.

“They mailed us this,” Artie says. “They mailed it to us. Nobody hands you a knife because they want you to put it down.”

Nobody moves.

Then Red Holloway reaches over, and picks the pin up off the table, and turns it over once in his big cracked fingers.

“I’m going to be sore about this until I’m dead,” he says. “I’d have called the strike by noon Monday and cost every one of you your pension and felt like a damn hero doing it.”

He looks at the paper in Artie’s raised hand.

“And I said my piece about the woman,” he says, “and I’m not taking it back, because it needed saying. But I’ve been reading company paper since before most of you were born, and nobody at Vantor Industries wrote that ordinance in 1914 to trap this local. I’m voting the paper.”

He looks out at two hundred and eight men.

“Motion to hold the floor,” he says. “Again. Nobody walks. All in favor.”

The hands go up.

Not all of them. Not right away, and not fast, and not happily. They go up the way men vote when they are furious and frightened and doing it anyway, one after another after another, and Toby’s lips are moving and I am not counting, because I cannot see well enough to count.

“A hundred and sixty-one,” Toby says.

“Motion carries,” Red says.

The hall breaks up, low and rough, men talking in twos and threes and nobody laughing. Kowalski goes out the front door without looking at me. Bo Rasmussen stands where he is for a second, then gives me one short nod, not forgiveness, just an accounting, and goes to find his coat.