Mohawk

Mather.”
    He had been paying so little attention that it took a minute for Mr. Anadio’s words to register. And when they finally did, Mather Grouse didn’t know what to say.
    “They killed us, Mather. All them years. They just plain killed us, and I told ’em so, too. Young Ralph Tucker and Mike Littler both, right to their face. Ten times the national average. It was right in the
Republican
. Ten times the average, but the bastards still won’t admit they done it. Killed us, but they won’t admit it.” Tears were welling up in his eyes. “They wouldn’t admit it if it was a thousand times the average. A million. Not them bastards.”
    Suddenly Rory Gaffney was standing with them.Mather Grouse didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know it. When Gaffney’s soothing voice interrupted, he was prepared.
    “You made your living in those shops, Mr. Anadio,” he said mildly. “Who else would’ve paid a man like you? Men like all of us.”
    “But they made us
sick
, Rory Gaffney,” Mr. Anadio pleaded. “They didn’t have no right to make us sick.”
    Gaffney put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not sick, Mr. Anadio. I worked in the shops all my life. And look at our friend Mather Grouse here. He’s a different kind of sick, but you don’t hear him running down the shops that gave him a living. Mather Grouse is a man who keeps his peace. If I
was
sick, I’d thank the shops anyway. Where would men like us have been without work? We’re all of us the same, men like us.”
    Mr. Anadio had lost interest in the dispute. He was too intent on fighting back the tears. He wished he could stop crying, but he couldn’t. “No kee-mo,” he said to Mather Grouse, his voice suddenly full of defiance. As far as he was concerned Rory Gaffney was no longer there. “I told ’em, too. Not me, I said.”
    “I’m very sorry, Mr. Anadio,” Mather Grouse said.
    “Not me,” the little man insisted. “I told ’em, too.”
    “You should let the doctors cure you,” Gaffney said.
    Mr. Anadio spit. “Cure! Not me, Mather. Maybe I’m sick, but no kee-mo. I even told young Tucker that.”
    Then Mr. Anadio turned and walked out into the early evening. He left Mather Grouse weak and sick to his stomach, as if he had just given blood. “I had better go home,” he muttered. Mr. Anadio’s troubles had somehow made clear to him that he wouldn’t say what he had come to say. It was the boy’s courage hehad felt, not his own. Men in their sixties did not make new beginnings.
    “Yes, Mather, home,” Rory Gaffney said. “That’s the place.”
    Untemeyer watched Rory Gaffney and Mather Grouse thoughtfully from the other end of the bar. His work for the day was finished and with money and slips safely tucked away in his deep pockets, he indulged himself with a boilermaker, as he did every day when Greenie’s emptied out. Once the two men were safely out the door, he and Woody the bartender would have the place to themselves. A strange pair, Untemeyer thought, as Rory Gaffney took Mather Grouse’s arm and steadied him toward the door. Then he remembered a strange story Dallas Younger had told him on the QT. If he remembered right, Mather Grouse had appeared one afternoon at the garage where Dallas worked and thrust twenty-five dollars into Dallas’s jacket along with instructions to buy a heavy winter jacket for, of all people, Wild Bill Gaffney. Give it to him yourself, Dallas had suggested. No, you, Mather Grouse had insisted, and to sweeten the pot he said that if Dallas did this one favor and never let on to anyone, he would consider Dallas’s debt squared. A strange story, Untemeyer thought. Maybe even true, and stranger still.
    The door swung shut behind the two men, and Mr. Untemeyer grunted, downing his whiskey. Strange indeed. Somehow he had the impression that Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney might even be blood enemies. But then life was strange, it occurred to him, as
it
did every afternoon at Greenie’s as he drank his boilermaker and looked to the silent Woody for companionship.

26
    That men who don’t make friends easily seldom have any trouble making enemies is perhaps ironic, at least in the sense that intimacy is at the core of both relationships. In the leather shops where Mather Grouse worked, he had no friends, though with the majority of his fellow workers he was on congenial terms. Even so, they had cause to be suspicious of him—the way he went directly home after work each day, never