Banner Poles

He went to the ones that were moving.

That was the rule. He had made it at Grand Central, on the floor, in the first minute, without knowing he was making it, and it held here. The nearest one that was moving. Then the next. Not the ones that were not. He did not look at the ones that were not, except to see that they were not, and then he did not look at them again, and the thing in him that stood in front of the door kept the door shut, and he let it, and went to the next.

There was no sound.

He worked in it the way you would work under water. Everything was slow and clear and very bright and had no noise in it. A woman on her back in the road in a bus company’s uniform, with her eyes open, looking at him, moving her mouth. A man sitting against the wheel of a stopped car with his hands round his leg, and the leg wrong. A girl of about twelve, standing up in the middle of the junction, perfectly still, in a school blazer with a transport union badge pinned to the lapel, with blood all down one side of her face and nothing in her face at all, looking at nothing, and he went to her and put his hand on her shoulder and she did not look at him, and he walked her out of the junction to the pavement on the Queens side, where people were, and sat her down against a wall, and a woman knelt beside her at once and put her arms round her, and the girl’s face did not change.

He went back in.

---

The woman in the bus company’s uniform had something in her side.

He knelt by her. Her mouth was moving. He could not hear her. He looked at her mouth and could not read it, because she was not saying words, he thought, only making the shapes a mouth makes when it is trying to say something and has forgotten how. He looked at her side. He did what the academy said, and then what his mother had taught him at the kitchen table at fourteen with a tea towel and an orange, you press, Tommy, you press and you don’t let go and you don’t look at what you’re pressing, you look at their face, and he took off his jacket, white with the dust of Grand Central, and folded it, and pressed it there, hard, with both hands, and did not let go, and looked at her face.

She looked back at him.

After a while, he did not know how long, she stopped moving her mouth, and only looked, and her hand came up off the road and found his wrist and held it, and they stayed like that, the two of them, in the silence, on the road, in the sun, with the smoke going up past them.

Somebody knelt down on her other side.

A man in a green uniform. An ambulance man. He came from nowhere; there had been no siren, or there had been and Tom had not heard it. He looked at Tom’s hands on the jacket and nodded and put his own hands where Tom’s were and pushed Tom’s away, gently, and his mouth moved, close, and Tom read it.

Okay. I’ve got her. Okay. Go.

Tom got up.

His hands were red. They had been white, and they were red now, both of them, to the wrists, and his shirtsleeves were red to the elbows, and the cuts from the glass on his palms were in there somewhere, and he could not tell which was his.

---

There was a fire appliance on its side at the south corner of the junction.

He saw it when he stood up. It was red, with its ladders on its back, the same as the ones that had gone away down Vanderbilt Avenue an hour ago towards Kennedy, and it was on its side against the front of a building, with its wheels towards the junction, and its windscreen gone, and its lights still going round on top of it, very slowly, blue, in the sun, in the silence. Beside it, in the road, a second one, upright, with its front stoved in. Beyond them, an ambulance with its back doors open and nobody in it.

They had come from the north. From the firehouses on the east side, from the stations uptown, down the avenues, the way he and Teresa had come, going south, past the march, to the Battery, to Whitehall, to the boarding hall at the busiest crossing hour of the day. They had come down to the junction to go through it and on south to the harbour, the way he had.

They had been going where he was going.

He stood in the road and looked at the appliance on its side with its lights going round, and he understood that. He understood it the way you understand a thing that is not a thought yet, all at once, in the stomach: that they had been going to the harbour, and he had been going to the harbour, and they had all been in the same place at the same minute, the fire and the ambulances and the police, all of them, going to the third one, and the fourth one had been there.

He did not think anything else about it. He did not have anything else to think it with.

---

There was a hat in the road.

It was the City’s. He knew it by the badge. It was lying on its crown in the glass, near the foot of the ramp, upside down, like a bowl, with the dust in it, and nobody near it.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he went to the next one.

---

He did not know when the stewards opened the line. He did not hear it. He looked up from the next one, a man on his side by the kerb with his arm under him and his face cut, whom he had got onto his back and was holding still, and they were there.

They came out of the smoke from the Brooklyn side. Not running. Not a crowd. In lines. The men of the local, from under the old red banner, from behind the steward line where Frank had held them, coming forward into the junction four abreast, in their work jackets and their caps, the way you would walk out onto a beam, carefully, looking where they put their feet, and at the end of every line of four, on the outside, a steward, with his armband, walking beside them, the way the City’s police walked beside the march, keeping the line, pointing. You four, there. You four, that one. You four, with me.

The line had opened when the stewards said, and not before, and it had opened in order. He saw that. He did not hear one word of it and he saw it: the lines coming forward, and the stewards at the ends of them, and every line of four going to one place, to one person on the ground, the way he had been going to one at a time, the nearest one that was moving, and kneeling there.

He looked for Frank.

He looked along the lines of men coming forward and the stewards at the ends of them, at the armbands, and he did not see him. He saw the chief steward, an old man he knew from the yard, Dinny Shea, seventy if he was a day, in his good jacket, with his armband, walking at the front of the first line with his arm up, pointing, his mouth going. He saw two of the other stewards from the section. He did not see Frank.

He looked back at the steward line at the foot of the ramp, where Frank had been, where Frank had held him by the sleeve and let go.

There was nobody at it now. The line had gone forward. There was only the foot of the ramp, and the glass, and the last of the marchers coming forward off it in their lines, and behind them, at the top of the ramp, on the bridge, the rest of the Brooklyn column, the steamfitters and the electricians and the rest, standing on the bridge, held, by their own stewards, all the way back across the river to Brooklyn, a mile of them, in the sun, under their banners, waiting, looking.

---

They took the poles from the banners.

He saw it happen at the foot of the ramp. The men who had been carrying the banners, all of them, all along the section, the carpenters’ green and gold and the bricklayers’ blue with the trowel and the rest, took them down. They lowered them, and laid the silk on the road, carefully, even now, the way you lay down a thing you were taught to respect before you were taught anything else, and then they took the poles out of the sleeves at the edges of the silk, long poles, ash and pine, eight feet, and they took off their jackets, their work jackets with the locals’ crests on the back, and threaded the sleeves of the jackets onto the poles, two jackets, three, buttoned, between two poles, and that was a stretcher.

He had never seen it done. Nobody had ever taught it to him. He watched them do it, at the foot of the ramp, in silence, twenty men, thirty, kneeling in the road in their shirtsleeves threading their jackets onto the poles of their banners with their big cut hands, fast, without looking at each other, as if they had all known how to do it all their lives and had been waiting for a day to need it.

And the old red banner.

It was in the road where it had come down, at the foot of the ramp, the dark red silk and the gold fringe, in a heap. Somebody had picked it up off the road. Two men had it. They had put its two poles back through its sleeves, the old sleeves, and they had not taken the silk off; they had rolled it round the poles, a turn, two turns, and pulled it tight, so that the silk was between the poles, flat, a sheet, with the painted man on his beam on the underside of it facing the road, and they had laid a woman on it.

She was in a coat. He could not see her face. They lifted her, the two men at the front and two at the back, on the old banner, the silk taking her weight between the poles the way a hammock does, and they turned and carried her up the road, past him, towards the north, towards the park, where the ambulances were coming in now, and as they carried her past he saw the corner of the silk, the bottom left corner, hanging down below the pole, swinging with their steps.

A line of small dark red stitches. Very close. Very even. You would only see them if you knew where to look.

He watched them carry her away up the road on it until he could not see the stitches any more.

---

The road was open.

He saw that when he stood up from the man by the kerb and looked for where to take him. The road north from the junction, along the park, towards the avenue where the ambulances were coming in, was clear. It was the only clear thing in sight. It was clear from the junction to the avenue, a long straight empty lane down the middle of the street, with nothing in it but the ambulances coming down it one after another with their lights going, and the stretchers made of banner poles going up it the other way, at a run, four men to a pole, and it was clear because there were people on either side of it holding it clear.

The marchers. The ones who had not gone forward. The ones whose stewards had held them. They were standing along both sides of the road from the junction to the avenue, shoulder to shoulder, in a line, hundreds of them, with their arms out. Linked. Men and women in the uniforms of the buses and the trains and the docks and the building sites, and men in suits who had come to march with their fathers’ unions, and old women, and boys, standing in a line on either side of the road with their arms linked and their backs to it, facing outward, holding back the crowd that was coming from every street round the park to see, to help, to find somebody, holding it back so that the ambulances could get down the middle.

Nobody had told them to. He did not think so. He did not hear anybody tell them. They were just there.

He took the man by the kerb up the clear road to the avenue on a door. Not a door; there were no doors; a board, a long board off a builders’ hoarding, with two men from the local, and a girl in a transport union T-shirt who took the fourth corner without being asked. They went up the clear lane between the lines of people with their arms out, at a run, and the people in the lines turned their heads to watch them go past, and their faces were all the same face, and nobody said anything, or everybody did, and he heard none of it.

At the avenue the ambulance men took the board.

He turned round to go back.

The girl in the transport union T-shirt caught his arm. She was about twenty, with her hair in a scarf. She said something. He could not hear it. He pointed at his ears and shook his head. She looked at him, at his ears, at his face, and then she took his hand, his red hand, and turned it over, palm up, and with her finger, slowly, on his palm, in the blood and the dust, she wrote two letters.

OK?

He looked at them on his palm. Then he looked at her and nodded.

She looked at him for a second longer. She did not believe him. He could see that she did not believe him. Then she let go of his hand and nodded too, and turned, and went back down the clear road towards the junction at a run, and he went after her.

---

He worked. He did not know how long. He did not look at his watch again; it was red now, like his hands, and he did not want to rub it clean and see what it said. He went to the ones that were moving, and pressed, and carried, and when the ambulance men came he gave them the one he had and went to the next, and when the men of the local came with their banner poles he took a pole, and when there was nothing to take he knelt and held a hand.

Nobody spoke to him. Or they did, and he did not hear, and after a while they saw that he did not hear, and stopped, and pointed instead. A steward with an armband pointing: there. An ambulance man pointing: him. A fireman with a grey face and no helmet pointing at the building on the corner with its windows gone and then making a flat chopping movement with his hand: not there. Not that one. Not yet. He understood all of it. It was the easiest he had ever been understood in his life. Nobody needed him to say anything, and nobody needed him to hear anything, and he did not, and he went to the next one.

The sun was very bright. The smoke went up past the black windows. The sheets of paper had stopped coming down out of the sky.

He did not see Frank.

He did not see Teresa.

He went to the next one.