They seconded him, Nowak, Cappello, and the others.
I wriggled out, but not before they had put in a curious question or two about "Old Shoe's" call upon me. It was their name for Zillah Gruber. "Himmel!" Gutz had once exploded, "she's an old shoe, that woman, for wearing and kicking about."
The appellation had stuck; it was used less contemptuously than pityingly. Chiefly it furnished a means of veiled allusion in Gruber's presence: was a part of the code against Gruber—grunts and syllables which could be uttered before Gruber and which Gruber wasn't in on—that secret code which develops inevitably under tyranny.
"Sure, I wish Maggie'd take half the lip off me that she takes off him!" growled Murphy. "But Maggie, I'm tellin' you boys—"
I wandered off by myself, away from their racket; I was still pondering Zillah Gruber. I recalled that memorable first meeting with her. It was my first Sunday with the gang, and I had been passing Gruber's place, where Zillah was hanging out clothes in the yard, when the boss came from the house in a fury. He was an unwashed, bulging creature in trousers and a pink undershirt; and he flourished in his hand a lavender-striped outer shirt, which was clearly a favorite with him, judging from the howling rage with which he displayed a bad scorch on its bosom. He had been going up to the village on a spree, but how could he go to town, on a Sunday, in a thing like that! He advanced on the woman, called her unprintable names. She cowered. Then he struck her—
According to every code I had ever known, there was only one thing to be done. He was a big man, but I tackled him in the orthodox fashion. It was a brief scrimmage, and—well, I came off alive. Gruber himself was laid up for two days, thanks not to me but to a bad heart. (I dreamed of it as a puffy old fungus of a heart, as unhealthy as the man himself.)
It was a good two days for the men—most of them had witnessed the fight from the shacks—and I was popular. Really, my row with Gruber was the thing that established me with the gang, and mighty lucky for me, considering my position as rank outsider. If, as professional laborers, they failed to see road-building in the light of a combination vacation and football training, at least they accepted me. They even listened to me with respect not due my years when I explained to them how I had done scrub last year, but this year hoped to make the team; and they left me in peace when they grasped the fact that the "math" I was boning over was the only thing that stood between me and my coveted Team!
But to get back—I was now one with them: leagued with them against the boss, to grumble against him when he wasn't listening, to loaf on him when he wasn't looking, to put any little safe thing over on him on every occasion—but to break against him openly, in a big way, never! Their sympathy was all with me. Nevertheless, they predicted there would be the devil to pay when old Gruber found his feet again.
Nothing came of it. Why Gruber didn't fire me, I can't say, beyond the fact that I had got onto the gang through a certain drag with the superintendent.
Not that Gruber conciliated me at all. On the contrary, he now seemed to take a special delight in bullying Zillah in my presence. In me, Gruber had found some one to show; I became his chief audience, saw that enormous egotism of his at its thickest.
As for Zillah, she approached me where I was nursing a bad eye on the peaceful Sunday afternoon of the rumpus.
"You hurt?" She insisted upon bathing and bandaging the eye with a dirty strip of cloth; she knew what to do for black eyes—she was used to them.
"He's hurt, too?" I asked.
"Here—in the heart. It's why he's boss; he can't stand the digging. But he's hurt most in his—his big feeling of himself. You should not do it; you won't do it again—you promise? It's worse—he makes it up on me—"
That was the first time I posed my question: "But why do you stand it—why? He's no right to treat you so! Let me report him to the company—to the town authorities—"
"No."
I flung into my arraignment of him all the impatient, hot rebellion of a youth.
She opposed to me the dull passiveness of a servile womanhood, ages old in its habit of acceptance.
There was no stirring her. In the end she had my promise not to interfere again. She agreed to come to me in times of stress; she humored me to that extent. But I had established myself on a basis of confidential friendship with Zillah, and more and more, as the days went by, I became her outlet.
Yet, mulling over-the enigma of Zillah Gruber there, reviewing my knowledge of her from the beginning, I was shocked less by these definite, brutal clashes of her life than by the drab setting of it: a drabness that spread and penetrated like the dampness of the July night; a drabness with which that later drama, which was tied absurdly to the crescent earring, was soaked through and through. That people could live like the Grubers was a revelation to me—as much a revelation as the Dark Age slavery of Zillah herself.
There, in an abandoned frame house, they squatted. It was a house of wrecked windows, sad, peeling, with a bare dirt yard about it where chickens must once have scratched, but where no life existed now, not even chickens. You would have said it would be hard to find such a barren spot in this luxurious region of fruit and wheat and growing green things; indeed, it was as though the barren spot had prepared itself on purpose and had stood waiting for this sodden, hopeless couple to come to it.
Beyond and above were the shacks and the torn-up road. All day long, when the wind was that way—and it seemed always to be that way—the Gruber place was swept by the yellow sand of the road, until there was thick yellow coating over everything, like the coating of white lime that chalks the country about a limekiln: the very blades of grass, what few there were, hung heavy under their yellow dusting; it was a veritable desert oasis in a green country. There were no flowers—only the faded, dust-dimmed colors of sad clothes flapping on a line. It was tenement stuff against a farm background. As though the home touch which some women can bring even to a forlorn spot were reversed in Zillah's case, and she could bring only the tenement touch! That was odd, too, for Zillah had lived the life of the open roads, away from cities. But gypsy life, I've noticed, is not what it's cracked up to be; your gypsy camp is apt to be a nasty litter, a human mess, with the sordidness of it accentuated by its ideal setting. . . .
The house was, of course, unfurnished. The kitchen held the only furniture: a rusted stove, a table, a few chairs, some broken dishes, and a stewpan or two, mended by Zillah. It was there Zillah presided, not too cleanly—cooked for Gruber, stared out of the broken window. The roof leaked badly, and in rainy weather Gruber sat within and cursed while Zillah patiently set cans to catch the water. When it became too bad, he ensconced himself under a big yellow umbrella with an advertisement printed across it, and from there taunted Zillah and swore at her in comfort.
