Mohawk

playing a number or double when Untemeyer came around in the afternoon, never getting into the baseball pool, which cost only fifty cents, no matter how much money had accumulated when no one had won it for weeks on end. He never spoke up at shop meetings, though everyone else griped. And there was plenty to gripe about. Low wages, the poor quality of the leather, the seasonal layoffs, widespread rumors that some of the shops were going to close. Many speculated that before long the cutters would not be needed at all. In these meetings nothing was ever resolved, but everyone had the opportunity to blow off steam and went home happier for having voiced their opinions in a free country. Mr. Maroni, a wizened Italian who had worked leather for fifty years, always had the last word, and it was always the same. “Mr. Chair!” he would cry, his smallvoice all but lost in the shouting, until the noise finally subsided and he was recognized. “Mr. Chair! I wanna say wonna thing about the peep. You no can satisfax ever one. Ever one make a mistake. I am too.”
    Since Mather Grouse sat almost apart from these proceedings, he was not to be trusted. Some whispered that he might be an informer, working for the owners, a thesis that would have gained more currency had it not been for the fact that Mather Grouse prospered less than any man present, routinely getting the worst leather to cut, expert and diligent as he was at working around the flaws, carefully, methodically, unwilling to give in to them. The men were paid according to the number of skins they cut, and while Mather Grouse was universally considered one of the finest cutters in Mohawk, come Friday afternoon his pay in no way reflected his talents.
    Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney had little enough to do with each other until the former, much to the surprise of everyone in the shop, was suddenly promoted to foreman when the man he replaced was discovered stealing leather and fled town before he could be arrested. Mather Grouse had hardly assumed his new duties when Rory Gaffney followed him into the washroom one afternoon. Nothing would be required of him. He would simply look the other way. Skins were always disappearing, and had been disappearing for so long that if they stopped disappearing it would be noticed and then a lot of people would be in trouble. Besides, the owners were the biggest crooks of all, only for them it was all legit. That’s the way it was in America. The owners saw to it that the workers remained poor and desperate. Why did Mather Grouse suppose they allowed and even encouraged Untemeyer to comearound during working hours? Why did they promote Mohawk as the leather capital of the world and encourage new workers to settle there when everyone knew there wasn’t enough work to go around as it was? They paved the swimming pools in their back yards with the sweat and dedication of men like Mather Grouse. This was his chance to get even, at least a little.
    “What about the others?” he had objected. “What about Mr. Maroni?”
    Rory Gaffney shrugged. “Like the old guy says, ‘You can’t satisfax all the peep.’ ”
    And so Mather Grouse had contrived an excuse to return to his old job and, when the bad season came, was laid off like Mr. Maroni and the rest. He never told anyone, not even Mrs. Grouse, partly because the situation was ethically complex. Though he considered himself an honest man, Mather Grouse knew that in the last analysis he had been no less appalled by the dishonesty of Rory Gaffney’s proposal than by the notion of throwing in with a man whose fingernails, though always cut obscenely close to the quick, were black. Gaffney was the sort of man he had always held in utter contempt—crude and vulgar and unapologetic. A man who smelled of his own fermented sweat and sperm and wanted no more out of life than what he already possessed. Only more of the same and more regularly.
    Two men could not be more different. Mather Grouse never thought of himself in terms of his profession. Not that he harbored dreams of grandeur, though there was a time when he had dreamed. But necessity had made a realist of him, and he learned quickly that to be anything more than a simple leather cutter he needed either luck or daring. But he was conservative by nature, and luck was seldom a factor for those who didn’tchoose to roll the dice. Actually, he had nothing against being a leather cutter. He had mastered his craft and derived