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CHAPTER 13
During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of little
Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta.
Both Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having lost one
leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital dislocation of the hip,
which made it impossible for him ever to walk.
He was the last of Teta Elzbieta's children, and perhaps he had been intended
by nature to let her know that she had had enough.
At any rate he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though
he was over three years old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child of one.
All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little dress, whining and
fretting; because the floor was full of drafts he was always catching cold, and
snuffling because his nose ran.
This made him a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family.
For his mother, with unnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children, and
made a perpetual fuss over him--would let him do anything undisturbed, and would
burst into tears when his fretting drove Jurgis wild.
And now he died.
Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning--which may have been
made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export.
At any rate, an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in
another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions.
Little Kotrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a
while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl.
No one was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have to be buried
by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at this the poor woman almost
went out of her senses, wringing her hands and screaming with grief and despair.
Her child to be buried in a pauper's grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear
it said without protesting!
It was enough to make Ona's father rise up out of his grave to rebuke her!
If it had come to this, they might as well give up at once, and be buried all of them
together!...In the end Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis
being still obdurate, Elzbieta went in
tears and begged the money from the neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a
mass and a hearse with white plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a
wooden cross to mark the place.
The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the mere sight of the floor
where little Kristoforas had crawled about would make her weep.
He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say.
He had been handicapped from his birth.
If only she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor
to cure him of his lameness!...Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago
billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a
great European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease from
which Kristoforas had suffered.
And because this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he
would treat the children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papers
became quite eloquent.
Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers, and no one had told her; but perhaps it was
as well, for just then they would not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to
wait upon the surgeon, nor for that matter
anybody with the time to take the child.
All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over
Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the pathway of his life, and
he knew it, and yet could not help approaching the place.
There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the
prospect of reaching the lowest.
There is a place that waits for the lowest man--the fertilizer plant!
The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers.
Not more than one in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented
themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door.
There were some things worse than even starving to death.
They would ask Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis
would debate the matter with himself.
As poor as they were, and making all the sacrifices that they were, would he dare to
refuse any sort of work that was offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could?
Would he dare to go home and eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and
complaining as she was, knowing that he had been given a chance, and had not had the
nerve to take it?--And yet he might argue
that way with himself all day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer works would
send him away again shuddering.
He was a man, and he would do his duty; he went and made application--but surely he
was not also required to hope for success! The fertilizer works of Durham's lay away
from the rest of the plant.
Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking like Dante, of
whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell.
To this part of the yards came all the "tankage" and the waste products of all
sorts; here they dried out the bones,--and in suffocating cellars where the daylight
never came you might see men and women and
children bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts of
shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of
them, within a certain definite time.
Here they made the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things
still more foul-smelling.
In the corridors and caverns where it was done you might lose yourself as in the
great caves of Kentucky.
In the dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling
stars--red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the
brew from which it came.
For the odors of these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian,
but there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon
his courage as for a cold-water plunge.
He would go in like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief over
his face, and begin to cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would
find his head beginning to ring, and the
veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would be assailed by an
overpowering blast of ammonia fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come
out half-dazed.
On top of this were the rooms where they dried the "tankage," the mass of brown
stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the carcasses had had the lard
and tallow dried out of them.
This dried material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had mixed
it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they brought
in and ground up by the hundreds of
carloads for that purpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out
to the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone
phosphate.
And then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would buy this, at say twenty-five
dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn; and for several days after the operation
the fields would have a strong odor, and
the farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled it would all have it
too.
In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure, instead of being a flavoring, and instead
of a ton or so spread out on several acres under the open sky, there are hundreds and
thousands of tons of it in one building,
heaped here and there in haystack piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and
filling the air with a choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind
stirs.
It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an unseen hand.
The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and his secret prayers were granted;
but early in June there came a record- breaking hot spell, and after that there
were men wanted in the fertilizer mill.
The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and had marked
him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about two o'clock this
breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm
of pain shoot through him--the boss beckoned to him!
In ten minutes more Jurgis had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth
together and gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to
meet and conquer!
His labor took him about one minute to learn.
Before him was one of the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground--
rushing forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung forth in
clouds.
Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen others it was his task to
shovel this fertilizer into carts.
That others were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he sometimes
collided with them; otherwise they might as well not have been there, for in the
blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet in front of his face.
When he had filled one cart he had to grope around him until another came, and if there
was none on hand he continued to grope till one arrived.
In five minutes he was, of course, a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they gave
him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the sponge did not
prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with it and his ears from filling solid.
He looked like a brown ghost at twilight-- from hair to shoes he became the color of
the building and of everything in it, and for that matter a hundred yards outside it.
The building had to be left open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a
great deal of fertilizer.
Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a hundred, the
phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis' skin, and in five minutes he had a
headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed.
The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine's throbbing; there was a frightful
pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly control his hands.
Still, with the memory of his four months' siege behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy
of determination; and half an hour later he began to vomit--he vomited until it seemed
as if his inwards must be torn into shreds.
A man could get used to the fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he would make
up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his
stomach.
At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand.
He had to catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his
bearings.
Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a saloon--they seemed to place
fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one class.
But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking--he could only make his way to the
street and stagger on to a car.
He had a sense of humor, and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it
fun to board a streetcar and see what happened.
Now, however, he was too ill to notice it-- how the people in the car began to gasp and
sputter, to put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious
glances.
Jurgis only knew that a man in front of him immediately got up and gave him a seat; and
that half a minute later the two people on each side of him got up; and that in a full
minute the crowded car was nearly empty--
those passengers who could not get room on the platform having gotten out to walk.
Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute after
entering.
The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin--his whole system was full of it, and
it would have taken a week not merely of scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get
it out of him.
As it was, he could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest
discovery of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an unlimited time, without
being itself in the least diminished in power.
He smelled so that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the whole family
to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he could keep anything upon his
stomach--he might wash his hands, and use a
knife and fork, but were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?
And still Jurgis stuck it out!
In spite of splitting headaches he would stagger down to the plant and take up his
stand once more, and begin to shovel in the blinding clouds of dust.
And so at the end of the week he was a fertilizer man for life--he was able to eat
again, and though his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he
could not work.
So there passed another summer.
It was a summer of prosperity, all over the country, and the country ate generously of
packing house products, and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite
of the packers' efforts to keep a superfluity of labor.
They were again able to pay their debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there
were one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long--it was too
bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age.
It was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without knowing it,
they were taking on the tone of their new environment.
They were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick up
cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling with pennies and
dice and cigarette cards; they were
learning the location of all the houses of prostitution on the "Levee," and the names
of the "madames" who kept them, and the days when they gave their state banquets,
which the police captains and the big politicians all attended.
If a visiting "country customer" were to ask them, they could show him which was
"Hinkydink's" famous saloon, and could even point out to him by name the different
gamblers and thugs and "hold-up men" who made the place their headquarters.
And worse yet, the boys were getting out of the habit of coming home at night.
What was the use, they would ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible
carfare riding out to the stockyards every night when the weather was pleasant and
they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep exactly as well?
So long as they brought home a half dollar for each day, what mattered it when they
brought it?
But Jurgis declared that from this to ceasing to come at all would not be a very
long step, and so it was decided that Vilimas and Nikalojus should return to
school in the fall, and that instead
Elzbieta should go out and get some work, her place at home being taken by her
younger daughter.
Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made old; she had to
take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and also of the baby; she had to
cook the meals and wash the dishes and
clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the evening.
She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all this without a murmur;
and her mother went out, and after trudging a couple of days about the yards, settled
down as a servant of a "sausage machine."
Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for the reason that
she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven o'clock in the morning till
half-past twelve, and again from one till half-past five.
For the first few days it seemed to her that she could not stand it--she suffered
almost as much as Jurgis had from the fertilizer, and would come out at sundown
with her head fairly reeling.
Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric light, and the
dampness, too, was deadly--there were always puddles of water on the floor, and a
sickening odor of moist flesh in the room.
The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby the
ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the winter, and the
chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a
stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf.
The men and women who worked in this department were precisely the color of the
"fresh country sausage" they made.
The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three minutes, and
provided that you did not look at the people; the machines were perhaps the most
wonderful things in the entire plant.
Presumably sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be
interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these inventions.
On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men shoveled loads of meat and
wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great bowls were whirling knives that made two
thousand revolutions a minute, and when the
meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour, and well mixed with water, it
was forced to the stuffing machines on the other side of the room.
The latter were tended by women; there was a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose,
and one of the women would take a long string of "casing" and put the end over the
nozzle and then work the whole thing on, as
one works on the finger of a tight glove.
This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would have it all on in
a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press a lever, and a stream of
sausage meat would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came.
Thus one might stand and see appear, miraculously born from the machine, a
wriggling snake of sausage of incredible length.
In front was a big pan which caught these creatures, and two more women who seized
them as fast as they appeared and twisted them into links.
This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work of all; for all that the
woman had to give was a single turn of the wrist; and in some way she contrived to
give it so that instead of an endless chain
of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands a bunch of strings, all
dangling from a single center.
It was quite like the feat of a prestidigitator--for the woman worked so
fast that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist of
motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing.
In the midst of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set
face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the
cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was time he was going on.
The woman did not go on; she stayed right there--hour after hour, day after day, year
after year, twisting sausage links and racing with death.
It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and
ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as
she did, with all her soul upon her work,
and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who
came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie.