Free Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood Page A

brother’s life would turn out very, very warm. It never occurred to me to include in Tim’s instruction the sin of crossing a picket line.
    The cameras stayed awhile, setting up behind the gauntlet three times a day as strikers spit on scabs’ pickups and brand-new Buicks, hollering things they’d slap their kids for even thinking. I was there, too. I got in their faces and threatened their babies and told them there was a special ring in hell with their names traced in fire. I didn’t do this to my little brother, but I let others do it. That’s the part that shocks you, the parts of yourself you get introduced to when push comes to shove.
    Timmy wasn’t the only one who crossed, not that it matters. Superscabs, we called them, the ones from our own ranks. There was Earlen Lampry, who surprised exactly nobody by crossing since he came from scum and will be scum till his dying day. There were the Blake brothers and Zoo Pritchett and Millard Thibodeau. There were some guys from the west side, and a few girls, shiftless punks looking for beer money, no sense of obligation, no forebears writing union songs and waiting in the snow for a call-up. Thirty-one in all. Tim was the surprise, though, the one nobody could figure.
    The other scabs were imports from the South, easy to hate for all kinds of reasons, their Bubba drawls and new trucks and big, stupid belt buckles with
Elvis
and
Jesus
welded into the clasp. And some of them were black, which inspired a fresh set of vocabulary words on the gauntlet, a turn of events that interested the hell out of the Barbie-doll newslady, who stuck that fuzzy microphone in all the likely faces. Then, there’s Timmy on the news, telling her we’re not a bunch of racists, just papermakers who want to make paper.
    This was a mistake. Tim the Superscab defending his hometown. This was a bad, bad mistake, on national TV, and heseemed to know it, his eyes darting beyond camera range like he was taking cues from someone, when I knew—and I was one of the few to be in a position to, I guess—that what he was doing was second-guessing, changing his mind after it was too late.
    Which it was. Even if he’d crossed back over that very night, it was too late. Atlantic Pulp & Paper is a big operation, drawing from at least eight towns, but this town took the brunt, and what’s more the mill is right in front of our faces, looming up from the riverbank with its uneven row of windows. It makes a good backdrop, the smokestacks pushing out bluish clouds that look kind of beautiful scraping past the top of the hills. Tim’s a small guy, and you could see what they were shooting for: this helpless kid caught in the maw of something more powerful than himself, etcetera. It was no secret whose side Barbie was on, though she did her best to hide it, getting guys like Roy and Bing to pose as America’s backbone. She dragged one would-be denim-shirt movie star after another in front of the camera, but the message was that unions had gotten big and crooked, that America’s backbone had a whole lot of fat on it, that the sainted corporations had no choice but to put down the screws or move the whole shebang to Guatemala where people don’t whine about give-backs. They’d get pictures of us pummeling the cab of some guy’s waxed sky-blue pickup or racking up the paint with keys and nails. Sweaty-faced, eyes bulging, neck cords standing out like tree roots, we looked like lunatics out there, a mob of dangerous rabble-rousers who hated blacks and Southerners and were bent on bringing down America the Beautiful just to buy a new snowmobile.
    Timmy’s moment on camera came right after one of these rabble scenes, which I was watching on the news over at Elaine’swith my five-year-old niece, Linney. “There’s Uncle Timmy!” she squeaked, squirming out of my arms. She barreled over to the screen to touch his face. Bing got up to turn off the set. “Wait,” I said, “let me see this,” and man, I saw