Grit

By TRISTRAM TUPPER
From Metropolitan Magazine

Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow.

Grit's widow was "Great" Taylor, whose inadequate first name was Nell--a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.

Returning from the long, wearisome ride, she climbed the circular iron staircase--up through parallels of garlic-scented tenement gloom--to her three-room flat, neat as a pin; but not even then did she give way to tears. Tears! No man could make Great Taylor weep!

However, drawing the pins from her straw hat, dyed black for the occasion, she admitted, "It ain't right." Grit had left her nothing, absolutely nothing, but an unpleasant memory of himself--his grimy face and hands, his crooked nose and baggy breeches.... And Great Taylor was willing that every thought of him should leave her forever. "Grit's gone," she told herself. "I ain't going to think of him any more."

Determinedly Great Taylor put some things to soak and, closing down the top of the stationary washtubs, went to the window. The view was not intriguing, and yet she hung there: roofs and more roofs, a countless number reached out toward infinity, with pebbles and pieces of broken glass glittering in the sunlight; chimneys sharply outlined by shadow; and on every roof, except one, clothes-lines, from which white cotton and linen flapped in the wind at the side of faded overalls and red woollen shirts. They formed a kind of flag--these red, white, and blue garments flying in the breeze high above a nation of toilers. But Great Taylor's only thought was, "It's Monday."

One roof, unlike the rest, displayed no such flag--a somewhat notorious "garden" and dance hall just around the corner.

And adjacent to this house was a vacant lot on which Great Taylor could see a junk-cart waiting, and perhaps wondering what had become of its master.

She turned her eyes away. "I ain't going to think of him." Steadying her chin in the palms of her hands, elbows on the window-sill, Nell peered down upon a triangular segment of chaotic street. Massed humanity overflowed the sidewalks and seemed to bend beneath the weight of sunlight upon their heads and shoulders. A truck ploughed a furrow through push-carts that rolled back to the curb like a wave crested with crude yellow, red, green, and orange merchandise. She caught the hum of voices, many tongues mingling, while the odours of vegetables and fruit and human beings came faintly to her nostrils. She was looking down upon one of the busiest streets of the city that people sometimes call the Devil's Own.

Grit had wrested an existence from the débris of this city. Others have waded ankle-deep in the crowd; but he, a grimy, infinitesimal molecule, had been at the bottom wholly submerged, where the light of idealism is not supposed to penetrate. Grit had been a junkman; his business address--a vacant lot; his only asset--a junk-cart across the top of which he had strung a belt of jingling, jangling bells that had called through the cavernous streets more plainly than Grit himself: "Rags, old iron, bottles, and ra-ags."

This had been Grit's song; perhaps the only one he had known, for he had shoved that blest cart of his since a boy of thirteen; he had worn himself as threadbare as the clothes on his back, and at last the threads had snapped. He had died of old age--in his thirties. And his junk-cart, with its bells, stood, silent and unmanned, upon the vacant lot just around the corner.

Great Taylor had seen Grit pass along this narrow segment of street, visible from her window; but his flight had always been swift--pushing steadily with head bent, never looking up. And so it was not during his hours of toil that she had known him....

Nell closed the window. She was not going to think of him any more. "Ain't worth a thought." But everything in the room reminded her of the man. He had furnished it from his junk-pile. The drawer was missing from the centre table, the door of the kitchen stove was wired at the hinges; even the black marble clock, with its headless gilt figure, and the brown tin boxes marked "Coffee," "Bread," and "Sugar"--all were junk. And these were the things that Grit, not without a show of pride, had brought home to her!

Nell sank into a large armchair (with one rung gone) and glowered at an earthen jug on the shelf. Grit had loved molasses. Every night he had spilt amber drops of it on the table, and his plate had always been hard to wash. "Won't have that to do any more," sighed Nell. Back of the molasses jug, just visible, were the tattered pages of a coverless book. This had come to Grit together with fifty pounds of waste paper in gunny-sacks; and though Nell had never undergone the mental torture of informing herself as to its contents, she had dubbed the book "Grit's Bible," for he had pawed over it, spelling out the words, every night for years. It was one thing from which she could not wash Grit's grimy fingermarks, and so she disliked it even more than the sticky molasses jug. "Him and his book and his brown molasses jug!" One was gone forever, and soon she would get rid of the other two.

And yet, even as she thought this, her eyes moved slowly to the door, and she could not help visualizing Grit as he had appeared every evening at dusk. His baggy breeches had seemed always to precede him into the room. The rest of him would follow--his thin shoulders, from which there hung a greenish coat, frayed at the sleeves; above this, his long, collarless neck, his pointed chin and broken nose, that leaned toward the hollow and smudges of his cheek.

He would lock the door quickly and stand there, looking at Nell.

"Why did he always lock the door?" mused Great Taylor. "Nothing here to steal! Why'd he stand there like that?" Every night she had expected him to say something, but he never did. Instead, he would take a long breath, almost like a sigh, and, after closing his eyes for a moment, he would move into the room and light the screeching gas-jet. "Never thought of turning down the gas." This, particularly, was a sore point with Great Taylor. "Never thought of anything. Just dropped into the best chair."

"It's a good chair, Nell," he would say, "only one rung missing." And he would remain silent, drooping there, wrists crossed in his lap, palms turned upward, fingers curled, until supper had been placed before him on the table. "Fingers bent like claws," muttered Great Taylor, "and doing nothing while I set the table."

Sometimes he would eat enormously, which irritated Nell; sometimes he would eat nothing except bread and molasses, which irritated Nell even more. "A good molasses jug," he would say; "got it for a dime. Once I set a price I'm a stone wall; never give in." This was his one boast, his stock phrase. After using it he would look up at his wife for a word of approval; and as the word of approval was never forthcoming, he would repeat: "Nell, I'm a stone wall; never give in."

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