CHAPTER 13

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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 condemncd 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.

Read next: CHAPTER 14

Read previous: CHAPTER 12

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