Chapter 13

by Upton Sinclair

　　During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred thedeath of little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta.Both Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latterhaving lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas havingcongenital dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for himever to walk. He was the last of Teta Elzbieta's children, andperhaps he had been intended by nature to let her know that she hadhad enough. At any rate he was wretchedly sick and undersized;he had the rickets, and though he was over three years old, he wasno bigger than an ordinary child of one. All day long he wouldcrawl 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 asource of endless trouble in the family. For his mother, withunnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children, and madea 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 thatmorning--which may have been made out of some of the tubercular porkthat was condemncd as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour aftereating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hourhe was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina,who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after awhile a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl.No one was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who wasinconsolable. Jurgis announced that so far as he was concernedthe child would have to be buried by the city, since they had nomoney for a funeral; and at this the poor woman almost went out ofher senses, wringing her hands and screaming with grief and despair.Her child to be buried in a pauper's grave! And her stepdaughter tostand by and hear it said without protesting! It was enough to makeOna's father rise up out of his grave to rebuke her! If it had cometo this, they might as well give up at once, and be buried all ofthem together!. . . In the end Marija said that she would helpwith ten dollars; and Jurgis being still obdurate, Elzbieta wentin tears and begged the money from the neighbors, and so littleKristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white plumes on it, and atiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark the place.The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the meresight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about wouldmake her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow,she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only shehad heard about it in time, so that she might have had that greatdoctor to cure him of his lameness!. . . Some time ago, Elzbietawas told, a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a greatEuropean surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same diseasefrom which Kristoforas had suffered. And because this surgeon hadto have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he would treatthe children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papersbecame quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers,and no one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then theywould not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait uponthe 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 shadowhanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in thepathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approachingthe place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown,and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There isa place that waits for the lowest man--the fertilizer plant!The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more thanone in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contentedthemselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door.There were some things worse than even starving to death. They wouldask Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgiswould debate the matter with himself. As poor as they were, and makingall the sacrifices that they were, would he dare to refuse any sortof 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 givena chance, and had not had the nerve to take it?--And yet he mightargue that way with himself all day, and one glimpse into thefertilizer works would send him away again shuddering. He was a man,and he would do his duty; he went and made application--but surelyhe 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 outlooking like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had beeninto hell. To this part of the yards came all the "tankage" andthe waste products of all sorts; here they dried out the bones,--andin suffocating cellars where the daylight never came you might seemen and women and children bending over whirling machines and sawingbits of bone into all sorts of shapes, breathing their lungs fullof the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of them, within acertain 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 yourselfas in the great caves of Kentucky. In the dust and the steam theelectric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars--red andblue-green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist andthe brew from which it came. For the odors of these ghastly charnelhouses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English.The person entering would have to summon his courage as for acold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming under water;he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to cough andchoke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find his headbeginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb, untilfinally 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 massof brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of thecarcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This driedmaterial they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they hadmixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock whichthey brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for thatpurpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent outto the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standardbone phosphate. And then the farmer in Maine or California or Texaswould buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it withhis corn; and for several days after the operation the fields wouldhave a strong odor, and the farmer and his wagon and the very horsesthat had hauled it would all have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizeris pure, instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton or sospread out on several acres under the open sky, there are hundredsand thousands of tons of it in one building, heaped here and therein haystack piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and fillingthe air with a choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm whenthe wind stirs.It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged byan unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one,and his secret prayers were granted; but early in June there camea record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wantedin 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 doorabout two o'clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasmof pain shoot through him--the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutesmore Jurgis had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teethtogether and gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him tomeet and conquer!His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was oneof the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground--rushing forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finestdust flung forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and alongwith half a dozen others it was his task to shovel this fertilizerinto carts. That others were at work he knew by the sound, and bythe fact that he sometimes collided with them; otherwise they mightas well not have been there, for in the blinding dust storm a mancould not see six feet in front of his face. When he had filledone cart he had to grope around him until another came, and if therewas none on hand he continued to grope till one arrived. In fiveminutes 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 upwith it and his ears from filling solid. He looked like a brown ghostat twilight--from hair to shoes he became the color of the building andof 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 andCompany lost a great deal of fertilizer.Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at overa hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis'skin, and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen wasalmost dazed. The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine'sthrobbing; there was a frightful pain in the top of his skull,and he could hardly control his hands. Still, with the memory ofhis four months' siege behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy ofdetermination; and half an hour later he began to vomit--he vomiteduntil it seemed as if his inwards must be torn into shreds. A mancould get used to the fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he wouldmake up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it wasa question of making up his stomach.At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He hadto catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and gethis bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straightfor a saloon--they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poisonin one class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking--he couldonly make his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had asense of humor, and later on, when he became an old hand, he used tothink 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 gaspand sputter, to put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfixhim with furious glances. Jurgis only knew that a man in front ofhim immediately got up and gave him a seat; and that half a minutelater the two people on each side of him got up; and that in a fullminute the crowded car was nearly empty--those passengers who couldnot get room on the platform having gotten out to walk.Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill aminute 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 notmerely 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 thatnewest discovery of the savants, a substance which emits energy foran unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminishedin 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 daysbefore 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 filledwith the poison?And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches hewould 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 theend of the week he was a fertilizer man for life--he was able toeat again, and though his head never stopped aching, it ceased tobe 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 packinghouse 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 alittle sum; but there were one or two sacrifices they consideredtoo heavy to be made for long--it was too bad that the boys shouldhave to sell papers at their age. It was utterly useless to cautionthem and plead with them; quite without knowing it, they were takingon the tone of their new environment. They were learning to swearin voluble English; they were learning to pick up cigar stumps andsmoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling with pennies anddice and cigarette cards; they were learning the location of allthe houses of prostitution on the "Levee," and the names of the"madames" who kept them, and the days when they gave their statebanquets, which the police captains and the big politicians allattended. If a visiting "country customer" were to ask them,they could show him which was "Hinkydink's" famous saloon, and couldeven 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 anda possible carfare riding out to the stockyards every night whenthe weather was pleasant and they could crawl under a truck or intoan empty doorway and sleep exactly as well? So long as they broughthome 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 wouldnot be a very long step, and so it was decided that Vilimas andNikalojus should return to school in the fall, and that insteadElzbieta should go out and get some work, her place at home beingtaken 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 alsoof the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes andclean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home inthe evening. She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but shedid all this without a murmur; and her mother went out, and aftertrudging a couple of days about the yards, settled down as a servantof 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 fromseven o'clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again fromone till half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to herthat she could not stand it--she suffered almost as much as Jurgishad from the fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her headfairly reeling. Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes,by electric light, and the dampness, too, was deadly--there werealways puddles of water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moistflesh in the room. The people who worked here followed the ancientcustom of nature, whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leavesin the fall and of snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is blackwhen 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 thecolor of the "fresh country sausage" they made. The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two orthree 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 soit would be interesting to know how many workers had been displacedby 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 thousandrevolutions a minute, and when the meat was ground fine and adulteratedwith potato flour, and well mixed with water, it was forced to thestuffing machines on the other side of the room. The latter weretended 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 putthe end over the nozzle and then work the whole thing on, as oneworks on the finger of a tight glove. This string would be twentyor 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 streamof sausage meat would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came.Thus one might stand and see appear, miraculously born from themachine, a wriggling snake of sausage of incredible length. In frontwas a big pan which caught these creatures, and two more women whoseized them as fast as they appeared and twisted them into links.This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work of all; for allthat the woman had to give was a single turn of the wrist; and insome way she contrived to give it so that instead of an endless chainof sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands a bunchof strings, all dangling from a single center. It was quite likethe feat of a prestidigitator--for the woman worked so fast thatthe eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mistof motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In themidst of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice thetense set face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and theghastly pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollectthat it was time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she stayedright there--hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twistingsausage links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was aptto have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic lawshad 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 glanceat the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her,as at some wild beast in a menagerie.