Warp & Weft

By Edward J. Delaney

Set in the gloomy depths of the granite-block textile mills of the industrial Northeast, Warp & Weft illuminates the lives of three generations of men who toil together. Carey, the leader of the small crew who load and unload the endless procession of trucks at the Chace Mill, worries about his wife’s illness and tries to distract himself by pouring all his hopes into the fortunes of the mill’s ragtag softball team; his wife, Joyce, finds herself facing the void more and more on her own. Dominic, the new hire who quit high school and arrived at the mill on his sixteenth birthday, tries to free himself from the inexplicable disapproval of his father, who was paralyzed years before when he, too, worked in the mills, and who has extolled his life of honest work he lost. Bento, who immigrated mid-life, worries about the decline of the strength he so proudly possessed, but fends off his wife’s pleadings to move back to the old country before they die—she has become determined to not be buried in a place that never stopped being foreign from her beloved islands. As the summer of 1978 wears on, each man finds himself in more untenable struggle with gathering events, and with each other. Each will see his life changed, the interlocked threads of life’s fabric in a world of unrelenting work and scarce circumstance. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504023825

Edward J. Delaney

Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. His books include the novels Follow the Sun, Broken Irish, and Warp & Weft, and the short story collection The Drowning and Other Stories. His short fiction has also been published in the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories, and featured on PRI's Selected Shorts program. Among other honors, he has received the PEN/New England Award, O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is also the co-author of Born to Play, by Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia. As a journalist, Delaney has written for publications including the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune, received the National Education Reporting Award, and has served as an editor at the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. As a filmmaker, he has directed and produced documentary films including The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus and Library of the Early Mind. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Delaney has also spent time in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado, and now lives in Rhode Island, where he teaches at Roger Williams University and edits the literary journal Mount Hope.

Book preview

Part 1

1

At sixteen, he’s thin. Five foot seven last time he checked, with bony birdlike legs and narrow shoulders. But the ribs, they’re embarrassing. Dominic Furtado has this mirror—it’s actually the largest shard of his parents’ fractured bedroom mirror, which he saved from the trash and carried back up with towels wrapped around his hands—and in its acuteness it’s a dagger of visual truth, a truth he sometimes thinks he can mitigate by turning his body in certain angles, lighting it with the fill of sideways sunshine. At high noon on the beach he’d look to be striped, down there, and even when he puffs out his chest and spreads his shoulders, to stretch the skin more tautly across the frame, he’s still never seen anyone with slats like this. So he regards this as almost a mild birth defect (admittedly a subtle one, like a mole, or a gap in the teeth), to be blamed on his mother’s prepartum love of cigarettes and highballs. Yeah, there’s a cracked Kodak black-and-white his mother keeps in the frame of the new mirror in the bedroom; in it, she’s dressed in black, smiling wickedly at the camera in black-red lips, cigarette in her pincer-like right hand and drink in her dangling left and her stomach round at the bottom of the frame—16 years ago, 1962. We didn’t know then! she says whenever he looks at that picture, which he always looks at sourly. The picture has stayed slotted in the mirror frame year after year, the evidence of his mother’s youthful beauty now curled on itself like a crabbed hand.

He’s wearing two T-shirts to cover the ribs and to effect a bulkiness. He dresses this way even on the hottest of days, as this one is, even this late in the afternoon. He can feel the sweat clinging and freeing down the small of his back as he marches across the scorched grass of Lafayette Park and toward the playground, with clenched fists, and resolute stride, to where Janice and her friends are, as they always are, swinging on the swing set and smoking cigarettes. Janice, who is fifteen, is sitting cross-legged, grinding the remnants of her Marlboro into the dirt, working it as if it were a challenge that right now keeps her from looking up and noticing Dominic’s approach. Two of her friends, maybe thirteen or fourteen, are on the swings, cigarettes clenched in their teeth as they lurch to get more height on their arcs. Dominic hangs his arms out from his body in a way meant to suggest a muscularity he doesn’t remotely possess, and he brings his chest up and out to cull the most out of his doubly T-shirted form. He inhales deeply, inflating himself like a balloon tiger. Janice has never quite said so, but he has nonetheless concluded that his thinness, combined with the unnatural way that certain bones and joints rise blade-like beneath the skin (like those compound fractures in the first-aid pamphlets they’d handed out at school), was the primary reason she has so steadfastly refused to be his girlfriend. Janice was the first to get tits and she’s been way out in front ever since. Her body has made things different for her, made it so guys will ignore her lesser qualities, and she knows it. Her eyes are lined with makeup in a way that makes him think of sex, every time, and her lips are done in a manner that the lipstick spreads out beyond the actual boundaries of her mouth. He can’t really say she’s pretty, in fact he sometimes thinks she’ll grow into a kind of hardened ugliness of the women he sees in too-tight pants, hanging on for dear life; but this is exactly why he believes he has a realistic shot here.

He stops a few feet away from her, and waits. She slowly looks up.

It’s my birthday, he says. He feels the need to say it, because no one else has, all day, and now the day is drawing in, and there’s only been trouble so far.

In the days leading up to this moment, Dominic hasn’t told his parents anything—even as he formed the plan; even as he skipped school on some days to make the long walk from mill to mill, filling out application forms; even as he let his schoolwork, which had always been good, dwindle and lapse. He had done these things with a certain strained confidence that this was in order. After all, his father had done exactly what he was now conspiring to do. He expected the old man should not have objected. So as he had slowly come to the table for supper last night, the eve of his sixteenth birthday, he was jittery with the excitement of his as-yet unannounced news.

His father sat solemnly at the table, slumped in the wheelchair. The old man breathed heavily through his nose, the hiss of inhalation and exhalation long and whistling. He had once been a thin man, sinewy from those long days at a hard job. But now, in his wheelchair he was ponderous, his gut wedged against the table and his upper arms fatly folded across his chest.

He looked at Dominic.

What’s so funny? he said.

Dominic let his grin die. Nothing’s funny. Just something good.

The old man didn’t ask. Dominic’s mother was in the kitchen, and through the door he could see her scooping mashed potatoes into a bowl.

Come on, Ma, I got something to tell you, he said.

One more minute, she said.

It felt strange, that Donald no longer sat at the table with them. Up until a few months ago, he and Dominic had shared a room, always more brothers than uncle and nephew. Donald just turned twenty, and Dominic wished Donald were here, to be at the table and hear the news.

His mother came in with the potatoes. The table had already been laid with beans and bread, a plate of papery slices of chicken, and glasses of water. His mother sat herself at the table and arranged a paper napkin on her lap.

He says he’s happy about something, his father said, as if an accusation.

Good! What are you happy about, Dominic? his mother said.

I’m happy about a decision I made.

His mother had the frozen look of someone no longer sure she wanted to hear what was coming. His father’s mouth curled skeptically.

Today was my last day of school, Dominic said. I’m going to work.…

His father scowled. Any mention of money was something better left unsaid. His mother dropped her eyes, wishing she could suck the words back in. His father rubbed his hands up and down the wheelchair’s padded armrests.

You’re being a dope, he said to Dominic. Where’s this gonna get you?

I want to work, Dominic said, evenly. I want things, and I’ll pay for them myself.

Yeah, I get it, his father said. I don’t need an anvil falling on my head.

I’m not trying to be an asshole here, Dominic said.

So it just comes natural to you?

Dominic shut his mouth then.

You like your food? his father said. The food I paid for?

Well, eat then, his mother said. Because no food is worth wasting when money is so tight.

Dominic ate.

Good, huh? his father said. You mother makes good stew.

Dominic kept eating.

Ah, shit, here he goes. His father was shifting in the wheelchair. The little boy’s gonna pout now. You gonna pout at work, too, little boy?

His father now addressed no one in particular. The pouty little boy thinks he’s gonna be a working man.

Dominic shifted his attention to his mother. He watched until she met his eyes, and she quickly looked away, saying in so low a voice Dominic felt as if he was reading the words, I’ll do the dishes.

Dominic was looking at his food but could feel the heat of his father’s gaze. What his father called pouting Dominic preferred to view as a nonviolent protest, like Gandhi, on whom he’d written a report as one of his final academic acts before quitting school. He imagined his social studies teacher, holding the graded paper, wondering where he went: Dominic’s quitting school was not something he’d announced. He simply walked out of the building with everyone else, knowing he wouldn’t be back.

Dominic listened to his father’s growling bites and grunting mastication. After what seemed like a thousand years Dominic heard the creak of wheels and the rumble of floorboards, and he was alone.

He’s waiting for Janice to say something now. But she’s still working at that cigarette butt, mashing it down to nothing. He wants to get on to the important part, more than just that it’s his birthday. Janice sits in the dirt, no reaction. He wants her to realize everything is about to be different, but she issues only a barely discernible shrug.

So it’s your birthday, Janice finally says. So?

One of her friends, whose name he doesn’t know, snorts in derision. But that was to be expected.

Janice is still working the butt into the dirt, her fingertips dirty with the effort. Now she tosses the defeated stub away, and turns to him.

Ya got any cigs?

I don’t smoke, he says, as if he had to tell her that.

Oh, she says. Yeah.

So what did you get for ya birthday? she says.

Nothing.

Ya getting your permit? Janice likes getting rides.

No. Nobody’s got a car I can drive.

Janice turns to her girlfriend, the one who laughed at him. Ya got a cig?

The friend reaches into her pocket and comes up with a soft pack that she’s stolen from her mother’s bag, as usual. She tosses them onto the ground. They almost reach Janice.

Hand me those? Janice says to Dominic. Dominic moves his foot out and uses it to sweep the pack toward her.

No more high school for me, he says. He sees Janice’s eyebrow rise across an otherwise stolid mask of indifference. The swing squeaks and groans at the pivots. Her friend, whom Dominic is now guessing to be about twelve, speaks for her.

What are you, too stupid?

I got a job. I’m going to work.

What kind of work are you gonna do? the girl says. You gonna work at McDonald’s or something?

No. I’m gonna work down at the mill. Down Chace Finishing. He waits, because if there is any one reason he has made this decision, it is for the reaction he hopes will now come, but doesn’t. Janice takes another hit from the cigarette and closes her eyes as she blows out.

What kind of work are you gonna do at the mill? the girl on the swing says.

Whatever they need for me to do.

So you’re just gonna stop going to school? Just like that?

Just like that, Dominic says.

It took three days of skipping school to get the job. At the first place, Arkwright, the secretary looked at him with a maternal sympathy and told him there just weren’t any jobs. At the second place, Joan Fabrics, the girl at the desk sat watching him fill out the forms and then asked him his age, more than once. I swear to God I’m sixteen, he said, even though he had no driver’s license and had no idea where his mother kept his birth certificate. The girl, maybe twenty herself, winked at him and said they’d call, but he knew they wouldn’t. At the third, an old security guard patted him on the shoulder and then watched him do the paperwork with sad eyes. It went on like that, and then late that Friday afternoon he walked into the office of Chace Finishing, where a girl named Cheryl handed him a clipboard, took the information into an office, and then came back and told him he was hired.

Janice says to her friends, I’m going home.

She gets up and brushes the dirt off the seat of her jeans, off an ass that other girls he knows don’t have yet. The two other girls get off the swings and begin to wander toward Eastern Avenue.

Dominic walks after them, not really sure why. The younger girl looks over her shoulder, and then whispers something to Janice, and the three of them giggle.

Janice casts a quick glance backwards.

So I guess I won’t have to worry about you bothering me at school anymore, she says.

He sits under a tree watching the sky darken. It’s still cool at night, still mid-May, and even with the two T-shirts he jolts with a chill as night comes on. He isn’t going home, not for a while. He wants them to be asleep. It’s Sunday evening; tomorrow morning at seven o’clock he’ll punch in at the new job, and he doesn’t feel like arguing about it. He doesn’t even want to go there now. No way can he go back to school—Janice would never respect anything he did or said if he went back to school. He wonders if this is the last time he’ll ever see her. So he sits, shivering, waiting. He has no money. He thinks about how, with a job, he could go buy a Coke over at the Gas-Mart anytime he wanted, and how that would be good. School is a pain in the ass, even though he always kind of liked it. Janice would make him feel stupid if he showed back up.

And his parents. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He hopes they’ve gone to bed.

2

Machado is at the dark end of the warehouse floor, his thick fists clenching and unclenching. He’s begun to sweat, as he always does before he has to fight. It’s not a sign of fear, only readiness. He has rolled up the sleeves of his green workshirt, and hung his cap in the lunchroom. He’s been in a lot of fights over the twenty years here, and now, even now at the age of sixty, he doesn’t fear anyone and isn’t afraid of losing. He sweats, bathed in the firm knowledge that he is about to give out a beating.

Antonio Joao Machado has seen it all, seen every kind of dope and flunky and pothead float through this mill, this place he regards as his and his alone. It doesn’t particularly matter that he works in the loading dock, or that he makeslittle better than minimum wage, as he’s made all the time since he came here, or that this language that has surrounded him for those two decades has always confounded him.

His power here comes from the work, the lifting and shoving and pushing, and that power has never left him. At the other end of things, up in the offices, the money is the power. But his is a power that is the most elemental, his ability to take on any man in the place and be the one left standing. Since he came from the Azores, he’s been in dozens of fistfights, most often out by the sea wall behind the mill, where it overlooks the place where the river pours into Mount Hope Bay. If he had ever ended up on the ground, there’d be no claim.

The last time he’s been in a fight was a while back, three or four years, maybe. The man he’d fought had been carried bleeding to the floor of the warehouse, where it was reported to the foreman that this man had been hit by a dye drum falling off a three-high pallet.

This morning, Monday, he’s waiting for Kelley, because it’s come to this. Kelley has been pushing him for months, with his attitude and his laziness. Whether anyone else believes it, Machado sees it as his responsibility to be sure everyone pulls his weight. Foremen come and go, and are highly suspect themselves. Kelley simply needs to be dealt with.

Machado hears a noise, down the line. He pulls in a breath. But he sees, at the far end, that it’s only Levasseur, carrying a propane tank to mount on the forklift. Levasseur, thick and of middling age, grunts with the effort, not noticing Machado in the shadows. The grunts rise up into the rafters; Levasseur moves on; Machado relaxes now, if only a bit. It’s 7:20, already twenty minutes after punch-in and no Kelley, which is very much the problem. Machado has been waiting all weekend to set things straight.

Friday is what put Machado into this violent and righteous mood. Three trucks had come in after lunchtime, all needing to be unloaded before the three-thirty bell. The warehouse men had dripped and grunted through the afternoon, with its heat and closeness and the slackening feeling that it was Friday. Levasseur and Sheehan drove the forklifts and the others did the hand labor, rolling ammonia barrels out to the lip of the truck to be taken by the forks, stacking loose bags of dye powder onto pallets. Then, at some indeterminate point, in the midst of the furious work, someone spat out, Where the fuck is Kelley?, and after a while Machado again made note of Kelley’s absence. The foreman, Parry, was in the shipping office, his head bent over paperwork, not noticing. Barrels and boxes and bags, pulled and piled and stacked, sweat in rivers, the stink of them and of dye and of ammonia, and finally the bell for afternoon break—halfway home! They stood in the sound of their own breathing, deep and gasping, hands on hips, heads bowed. Machado said quietly, I find Kelley, and all of them—Carey, Levasseur, the other ones coming off the upper floors to help—they were all nodding, Yeah, as they shuffled toward the water cooler near Parry’s glassed-in office.

Machado began walking the lines. He was forsaking water for this search; he checked the dead ends and small pockets in the walls of pallets and boxes that changed into a never-soluble maze, small lairs where a man could hide. Machado found nothing, just cigarette butts and crumpled candy wrappers. He walked then to the time clock, to look at the cards. Touching another man’s card was a firing offense, so he tried to peer into the slot on the metal card rack that held Kelley’s card, trying to see if he had punched out early—another firing offense, this was what he was dealing with. Machado could not see through the thin slots, and as much as he wanted to he could not bring himself to touch that card, even just for a peek.

Finally, he found his way to the men’s room. That small chamber’s one lightbulb hung dimly on its frayed wire, and when Machado looked in he saw, beneath the battered door of the stall, the feet, splayed lazily in their work boots. Machado walked slowly to it, and when he pounded the door he heard the feet sliding in defensive contraction. Machado peered over the stall door. Kelley was sitting on the can, his pants up, the sports pages in his hand.

Hey, what the fuck? Kelley shouted.

Machado said nothing, but Kelley kept shouting.

What’re you, a fuckin’ quiff or something? Kelley wailed. Tryin’ to see something?

Machado drew a breath. Get to work, he said evenly.

Kelley was fortyish, a thin guy, and was like a lot of guys who would do the work for years and then realize, like they’re being let in on some new secret, that the work is unrelenting, the repetition unyielding. The realization would hit those kinds of guys like a slap. And then they would begin to start figuring out ways of avoiding the real work. The drivers tended to be that way, stretching two-hour runs into four-hour runs, but they had a skill, and maybe that gave them the right. Forty-year-old guys who walked into a bottom-wage job like this were just fuck-ups, for sure, and this place wasn’t a rest cure.

Kelley was standing in the stall now, looking over the door.

Six guys’ work divided by five, no good, Machado said.

I’m in the fuckin shitter here, Kelley said.

Pants not down—you shitting your pants? Machado said.

Kelley’s eyes had the look, angry but scared, pinwheeling.

What, you want to see something, homo?

Machado was drenched, his clothes soaked through from the work, but now Kelley’s forehead was beaded from the adrenaline.

Back to work, Machado said.

Hey, Kelley said, not letting it go. Hey, fuck off. I’m going already.

Yeah, Machado said. You’re fuckin going. When Kelley came out of the stall Machado marched him back to the loading bay like a prisoner of war, while the others stood staring in blank disgust. Kelley worked the rest of the afternoon, not that hard but enough to keep him out of trouble, and as they began to wait for the three-thirty shift bell to ring, they were still not done.

Parry came wandering out of the office, looking alarmed. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a cheap tie, and in the heat his armpits were circled in blooms of sweat. He smoothed his thick hand back over his bald head.

Why aren’t you guys done? he said. I can’t pay overtime for this.

They all kept working. Machado was shooting Kelley looks now, and when Kelley caught those fierce glances, he’d look away, seemingly vanquished.

When the short bell went off at three-twenty-five, there were three barrels left. The truck driver sat in the cab, running the engine, and Carey looked at the others and said, You guys clock out. I’ll finish this up. Machado nodded to him, owing him the favor some other day, and then fell into the line to the lunch room, where they picked up their thermoses and moved to the clock at the end of the warehouse. Kelley said nothing, and no one spoke to him. Carey would be done in ten minutes, Machado knew. But there was a sacrilege to a man working after the bell without pay, especially when another man had put him in that position. Machado fixed his eyes on the back of Kelley’s head, and kept his stare on him even as Kelley took out his card and leaned against the granite wall, waiting. Kelly took out a pack of cigarettes, flipping them in his hand. He glanced over and Machado narrowed his eyes.

I swear this guy’s a fuckin homo, Kelley said to no one in particular. I swear to God because he’s been looking at me all fuckin day.

Machado stepped closer. You call me a homo?

All I know is, you keep looking at me.

Machado smiled. I tell you what: Monday morning I show you whether I’m a homo or not. You and me, we settle it, Monday morning, hey, tough guy?

Kelley puffed his chest a bit. Yeah, you old bastard, let’s see. We’ll fuckin see. We’ll see on Monday. He snorted, amused.

The others were standing with their cards in hand, staring at the floor and smiling uncomfortable smiles. If Carey were there he might have said something, but he was not, and the moment hung like a bad smell. The bell rang and everyone rushed the clock.

The weekend was laden with thoughts of the fight he would have on Monday morning, and Machado moved slowly through Saturday and Sunday, rolling his shoulders and twisting his neck to unbind the muscles he would need. In front of the radio at the kitchen table, as he listened to the Red Sox, he found himself clenching and unclenching his fists, popping the fingers out, as if flicking water from them, trying to get them to feel right. In the shower, Sunday night, he let the hot water scald his shoulders and then stood in a towel and began throwing light punches, watching himself in the fogged mirror so that he was a phantom, a swamp creature roaring in the shroud. He let off a rattle of uppercuts, because all fights outside a boxing ring were close in and clenching, fights where you heard the other guy’s breath in your ears and could read it like the look in his eyes.

All weekend, Ana wandered by him giving quizzical looks. She could tell something was up, but she had learned a long time ago not to ask. Work was a place to which he went and returned, went and returned, home with an empty lunchbox and a Friday paycheck and sometimes a welt on the eye or a loosened tooth that would make him chew his dinner sideways for a month or two. He had made only a few mentions of some of the men he spent his days with—he had mentioned a Carey, maybe ten years ago, and then Carey again three or four years later. When he said, quietly a few weeks before, that his friend Carey had troubles at home, she thought, Carey is still there, and that after all those years they must be friends, although she could paint no picture in her mind’s eye of what Carey must look like, or the sound of his voice.

Her own husband was a man who seemed, in these twenty years since they had come as refugees at mid-life from the Azores, to have broadened and solidified, and to have become a man of fewer words, humbled by the language he could not speak well and she chose not to speak at all. He spoke beautifully in Portuguese, like a patrician, but he had nonetheless seemed to dismiss language of any kind and communicated in simian grunts and burning glares. He frightened her sometimes—she wasn’t frightened of him but frightened instead that he was a good man who had become something else beyond her view. To her