The air was smoke-filled. Loud incessant noise of machinery. Against the wall were hills of mud-coloured sand. At the far end of the foundry stone crucibles glowed in sunken furnaces. The men were covered with grime. They heaved heavy sand moulds. Through the smoke they looked like figures in one of those old engravings of Purgatorio.
Then a red-hot crucible was raised out of the furnace by a pulley system and swung towards the row of moulds. It was lowered to the ground and the slag scooped off the surface.
Now a huge man wearing an asbestos apron and goggles took over. He guided the crucible over to the moulds. With a lever device he tilted the stone pot and poured the molten brass into the lead-holes of the moulds.
Breavman gasped at the brightness of the liquid metal. It was the colour gold should be. It was as beautiful as flesh. It was the colour of gold he thought of when he read the word in prayers or poems. It was yellow, alive and screaming. It poured out in an arch with smoke and white sparks. He watched the man move up and down the rows, dispensing this glory. He looked like a monolithic idol. No, he was a true priest.
That was the job he wanted but that wasn’t what he got. He became a core-wire puller. Unskilled. Pay was seventy-five cents an hour. The hours were seven-thirty to five-thirty, half-hour for lunch.
The size of the core determines the size of the hole running through the faucets. It is made of baked sand packed along a length of wire. It is placed between the two halves of the mould, and the brass flows around it, creating the hole. When the moulds are broken up and the rough-cast faucets extracted they still contain the wire on which the cores were suspended.
His job was to pull these wires out. He sat on a box not far from the long, low roller tables on which the moulds were placed for filling. Beside him was a heap of hot faucets with these core-wires sticking out from the ends. He seized one with his left gloved hand and yanked out the twisted wire with a pair of pliers.
He pulled several thousand wires a week. The only time he stopped was to watch the pouring of the brass. It turned out that the moulder was a Negro. It was impossible to tell with the grime on everybody’s face. Now there’s a heroic proletarian tale if he ever heard one.
Pull your wire, Breavman.
The beauty of the brass never diminished.
He took his place in the fire and smoke and sand. The foundry was not air-conditioned, thank heaven. His hands grew callouses which were ordinary to working girls but they were stroked like medals by others.
He sat on his box and looked around. He had come to the right place. Chopping machines and the roar of furnaces were exactly the right music to purge. Sweat and mud on a man’s pimpled back was a picture to give perspective to flesh. The air was foul: the intake of breath after a nostalgic sigh coated your throat with scum. The view of old men and young men condemned to their sandpiles added an excellent dimension to his vision of lambs, beasts, and little children. The roof windows let in shafts of dirty sunlight which were eventually lost in the general fumes. They laboured in a gloom tinted red by the fires. He had become an integrated figure in the inferno engraving which he had glimpsed a few weeks before.
The firm was not unionized. He thought about contacting the appropriate union and helping to organize the place. But that wasn’t why he had come. He’d come for boredom and penance. He introduced an Irish immigrant to Walt Whitman and talked him into going to a night school. That was the extent of his social work.
The boredom was killing. Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at will. It numbed his mind, but the anaesthesia was not sufficiently potent to deliver it from awareness. It could still recognize its bondage. He would suddenly realize that he had been chanting the same tune over and over for the last hour. Each wire represented a small crisis and each extraction a small triumph. He could not overlook this absurdity.
The more bored he became the more inhuman was the beauty of the brass. It was too bright to look at. You needed goggles. It was too hot to stand close to. You needed an apron. Many times a day he watched the metal being poured, feeling the heat even where he sat. The arch of liquid came to represent an intensity he would never achieve.
He punched the clock every morning for a year.
16
His friend was leaving Montreal to study in England.
“But, Krantz, it’s Montreal you’re leaving, Montreal on the very threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.”
“The Frogs are vicious,” he said, “the Jews are vicious, the English are absurd.”
“That’s why we’re great, Krantz. The cross-fertilization.”
“Okay, Breavman, you stay here to chronicle the Renaissance.”
It was an early summer evening on Stanley Street. Breavman had been in the foundry for a month. The strolling girls had their bare arms on.
“Krantz, the arms, the bosoms, the buttocks, O lovely catalogue!”
“They’ve certainly come out.”
“Krantz, do you know why Sherbrooke Street is so bloody beautiful?”
“Because you want to get laid.”
Breavman thought for a second.
“You’re right, Krantz.”
It was great to be back in the dialogue with Krantz; he hadn’t seen him very much in the past few weeks.
But he knew the street was beautiful for other reasons. Because you’ve stores and people living in the same buildings. When you’ve got only stores, especially modern-fronted ones, there is a terrible stink of cold money-grabbing. When you’ve got only houses, or rather when the houses get too far from the stores, they exude some poisonous secret, like a plantation or an abattoir.
But
