The Island Walkers Read Online Free

there was no response. On the fire escape, the talk turned to softball and the summer holidays. Bannerman’s had changed hands, but the mills, it seemed, were entirely unaffected. The steam whistle above the boiler plant continued to howl up the dawns, calling the workers from sleep. The tall machines continued to pour out their rivers of soft, fragrant cloth. It’s like the phoney war, Alf thought, remembering the fall of ’39. Canada had declared war on Germany, but when he’d looked up at the sky, suddenly thrilled and frightened by the thought, We’re at war, the huge, white clouds had moved on with an unruffled stateliness, declaring all earthly business an illusion.
    On the bulletin board over the washing-up sink, the notice faded under its blue-headed tacks. Every morning as Alf climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, he looked for it in trepidation. Its continuing existence seemed a judgment, an unfavourable one that said, “We’ve considered your application and found it wanting. We continue to search.”
    “Everything’s up in the air with this Intertex business,” Matt Honnegger told him one day, his fleshy face expressionless. “It’ll be a while before they get around to the likes of you and me.” Matt’s resignation put Alf off even more. He wanted to be used. He imagined his letter waiting under a mountain of hundreds of others, while men he did not know, in offices he would never see, ignored his fate. And what did it matter, he thought bitterly. Wasn’t he a fool todepend on something like this, over which he had no control, depend on it to the point of sleeplessness?
    Then in mid-July an earnest young man in a yellow hard hat appeared in front of Alf carrying a clipboard and demanding answers in a shouting voice to such questions as “When you go to the yarn room, how many bobbins do you bring back, on average?” Alf looked into the evasive eyes swimming behind thick glasses. “I’m a fixer,” he said. “I don’t go into the yarn room.” This was not, strictly speaking, true, but he couldn’t resist a poke at the automaton. He was rewarded with a brief flutter of panic — something human — but the young man quickly found another question on his board. “How many times a day, on average, do you go to the washroom?”
    The place was crawling with them — young men whose excruciatingly detailed questions and bright helmets spawned a bitter hilarity among the workers. Hard hats in a knitting mill! What were they afraid of, falling threads? The hard hats measured, they watched, they timed, they noted down, they disappeared, they came back for more measurements, they disappeared for good. A month later the layoffs began. Twenty from the night shift, an additional sixteen from day. Three from Alf’s floor alone, including his young friend Rick Stevenson, who had two kids to support and a wife going crazy with migraines. Those who were left were working harder: Alf often wasn’t home till eight o’clock. The political discussions on the fire escape resumed. Time to look at a union again, a few workers said, breaching a taboo. But most, perhaps remembering 1949, argued No: at this stage a union would just act as a red flag, it would bring on more firings. Better to hunker down, ride out the bad times, and (though this was never openly expressed) hope it was your neighbour who got hit, not you.
    Alf had kept silent. The firings troubled him a great deal. He lent money to Rick Stevenson and spoke his concerns to Matt Honnegger, hoping that Matt would pass them up the line, up the chain of command that led, through ever more comfortable offices, to the holy-of-holies where someone with half a heart might belistening. At the same time, he tried to grasp the rationale behind the turmoil — tried, as a foreman-in-waiting, to see things from management’s point of view. He felt that, as foreman, he would bring a special understanding to the situation — that he could bridge, somehow, the gap