What About Reb
Reb and Other Anarchists
The setting of What About Reb is the milieu I grew up in. Eastern Massachusetts, Greater Boston, little enclaves of immigrant Italians, most of whom worked in the building trades. We lived near and frequented a colony of anarchists, extraordinary men and women who refused to let others - Church or State - do their thinking for them. I loved them, was intrigued by them, and their example set me on my own independent path.
My novel's central incident may have happened in the way I describe to a young man of my acquaintance. The characters in the book - some whole, some in parts - are all people I once knew. Bits of my father, bits of my mother, other relatives, childhood friends. I myself am in it, but in a role so minor no one would ever guess. And yet, and yet ... the novel is a complete fictional invention.
Only last year, a London publisher who wanted it went into receivership, and I was back to square one. But no matter, for in the scramble the novel found its ideal reader in Stuart Christie, one of Britain's best-loved anarchist thinkers and writers. Of my book, he has said:
What About Reb is an unusual thing in fiction, a beautifully crafted and perceptive novel set against the backdrop of the Korean War about the duality of human nature and the passing on of an idea, the anarchist idea, from one generation and one culture to another. As this story makes clear, unlike more doctrinaire ideologies, an understanding of anarchism is not something that can be achieved by reading the 'texts' or be transmitted from parent to child or teacher to pupil; it is something that has to come from within and its tactics and strategies have to be learned, developed and fought for anew by each succeeding generation in a constantly evolving world. In my view, What About Reb has undoubtedly set the standard for anarchist fiction - the best since Steppenwolf.
What follows is the book's prologue and first chapter.
Opening
What About Reb
A woman watched at a window.
The way she told it later first she noticed a ladder up against their house, then she noticed Patsy's truck at the foot of the driveway. Before the whole thing dawned on her, before snatching the bottle out of her pantry and dashing to the door, she had said to herself why did they still let Emilio climb up ladders at his age, him with two grown sons. And if Patsy were there what was he doing. The woman was looking across the hedge by chance, she was to say, and it was only when she saw the ladder flying through the air and Patsy's head come bobbing up out of the cellar and Emilio standing there that she realized what happened.
'That was when I yelled,' she said. 'That was when everything came clear to me and I thought and what about Reb.'
'He almost came down in my own hands,' Patsy said. 'The hammer and the ladder almost on my head. All I could be thinking though while I seen him on the ground was what about Reb.' And Emilio said, 'All I felt inside me was him. What about my son. What about Reb.'
Part One
On the Run
1
Bang bang bang. Bangety bangety bangety bang.
The morning air rang with a tattoo of hammers. Massachusetts, a suburb west of Boston, back in nineteen fifty or fiftyone. Near the ridgepole of a house under construction a crew of six sunblackened carpenters kneeled together boarding in the sloped roof.
Reb said something about his father to the man beside him.
'But the inspector was here yesterday and stamped the permit,' the man said. 'Does Emilio know that?'
'Look, Dom, I'm only saying what he told me last night.' Reb kept driving nails. Something about Dom irked Reb more than ever this morning, making him add, 'Since when does he care about the inspector anyway? He wants to look the job over for himself.'
'Be-eautiful,' Dom said.
Reb worked on. Once more Dom began tapping. Only a small section of roof remained to be closed in. Getting to his feet Reb hooked his hammer in a clip by his side, took a thick pencil from a pocket of his overalls, and, moving back and forth across half the length of the roof, he alternately marked and sawed the boards he laid over the last gap of open rafters. Sun poured down on his bare shoulders and glared off the new lumber. The sweat ran. He fit four or five rows of sawed boards loosely together, grooves enclosing tongues. Into the ribbed edge of the uppermost board he drove a single nail at an acute angle, drove it hard and deep. At the last blow from his hammer the boards were locked tight against the finished section. He worked effortlessly, as usual, but thoughts about his father gnawed at him and there was nothing he could do to empty his head of them. A few days earlier Reb had received a notice to report for induction. Shocked and in disbelief, he had not yet mentioned the news to his father or to anyone else.
Dom sidled along on his knees behind Reb, putting in the rest of the nails. He called Reb's father Mister Reinforce because on his inspection tours old Soderini always told them to reinforce this and reinforce that. 'Why bother giving Bowles the cigars?' Dom rested on his hammer. 'Everything's way better than the inspection calls for anyway.'
'Cause my old man ain't like you, Dom. He likes good work and we can't let him down.' Reb's tongue went thick and dry. His father was an immigrant, an anarchist, and Reb knew that between the old man and him trouble of some kind lay just around the corner. Around the corner? Hell, it was at the doorstep. What did it mean that his father had brought the encyclopedia to him to read the night before? Reb could see himself sliding helplessly to doom the way once, on a slick roof, he had lost his footing, sailed on all fours to the edge, and pitched over into thin air. Did Soderini already suspect something?
Dom's face wore a sheepish grin. He began telling Reb how when he worked for Pozzi they used to give the inspector two quarts of whiskey and Bowles never set foot inside one of Pozzi's houses. 'VO, not cheap stuff. I think for the whole house we'd use one keg of nails and that's counting the shingles on the roof too. That's all right, we used to say. The plaster'll hold it together.' He laughed in hopes of making Reb laugh.
'Keep nailing,' Reb said in a fit of impatience. 'I'll finish what I was doing.' He marched toward the ridgepole, hauling half a dozen boards on the way. The rest of the crew, Sal and Wiggy, Teddy and his son Chub, were strung out nailing the other slope. Reb's brother, who was foreman, was somewhere inside the house. Dropping his load in a clatter Reb glanced over at the others. He saw bobbing heads. There was a steady rise and fall of hammers. Stooping to do his own work he planned what the six of them would tackle next.
Below him, shafts of sunlight streamed down into the house, slicing the geometry of evenspaced ceiling joists and two by four studs in a slightly distorting diagonal and at the same time lighting up the pale hemlock uprights and the reddish fir of the intersecting joists. A fragrance of new lumber swam up through the remaining foot of open roof. Reb kicked a bit of sawdust into the slant of light and watched it fill the sunny air like a tiny shower of gold. Before reaching the floor it passed into the dimness and vanished.
He hammered a board down and snapped the tongue and groove joint tight. Naked studding, open joists, rough board floors: strong neat work there for anyone to inspect. It had always come naturally to Reb to please his father by doing the kind of work for which, before his retirement, Emilio had set the standard. The craft had neither been taught nor learned. Reb simply fell into it as if he had inherited it, as if he breathed it. With this patrimony had come the unquestioned fact that his father's way was the only way a job could be done. Reb wore it like a badge that Emilio had never once had to tell him to redo or to reinforce any bit of his work. Now, when he looked into the framework of one of their houses, what Reb saw was his father's face.
But there was a war in Korea, Reb had been called up, and Emilio was one of those passionate dreamers of a world without wars or armies or uniforms. Reb felt himself slipping toward a precipice.
He flung a warped board aside, selected another, and tested it for trueness. Reb grew indifferent to a house the moment its skeleton disappeared under lathing and plaster, sheathing, shingles, and paint. He was for getting up the corner posts and bearing walls, raising the ridgepole, ripping along, sweating rivers. He hated finish work: fitting windows and doors, moldings and baseboards, installing locks. That was snail's pace, his brother's speed, slow finicky work for which Reb had no patience. Teo, his brother, was temperamentally suited for finish work and he excelled at it. Reb fit and nailed his board.
What sort of miracle would snatch him out of this? The Soderinis were not Catholics and did not believe in miracles. Or if they did the miracles they believed in were the everyday ones of drawing breath, eating food, keeping friendships, and, more particular to them, combining the timber of the forests and the minerals of the earth and by the skill of their hands erecting dwellingplaces.
There were a couple of plumbers at work below him, fitting copper tubes through holes in the bathroom partitions that his brother Ateo bored for them in the studding. Patsy and two men were in the cellar raising a brick chimney. Big yellow flue pipes stuck out a foot through a hole in the living room floor and courses of sandlime brick were just coming level with the floor joists. Patsy was an anarchist too and he was Emilio's closest friend.
Reb caught a glimpse of Patsy's trowel spreading mix and his left hand squeezing a brick into the ooze. There was no sign of Teo or the plumbers. It seemed an age before Patsy's hand let go and the trowel came round again to tap the brick and scrape the joint clean. It made Reb smile knowing that Patsy was attacking some priest or politician and forgetting what his hands were doing. That's where Teo had to be. Patsy was telling him some long story.
Reb stood at the peak of the gable along the newly closed in section of the ridge. Below in the unpaved driveway Vinnie, Patsy's helper, scraped a mortar tub, working the mix with a hoe.
'My brother down there?' Reb said.
Vinnie motioned to a drum of gray muddy water and with a laugh told Reb to try a swan dive into it. He then called out to Reb's brother.
Teo waddled into sight. He was shorter than Reb, stockier in build, and twice Reb's twentytwo years. Like Reb he wore baggy white overalls and went bareheaded.
'What's the matter?' Reb said. 'Patsy and Lee can't lay bricks down there without you?'
Teo blinked, then held a hand over his eyes to shield them from the blazing sun. 'What do you want?'
'Pa's coming today you know.'
'Oh, christ. Again?'
'Yah, again. You finished with those partitions in the bathroom yet?' He knew the answer was no.
'The plumbers went back to the shop for a box of fittings they left behind.'
'Both of them? Couple of fuckoffs them too.'
'I don't interfere with the subcontractors,' Teo said. 'How they spend the morning is none of my business.'
'Pfff. Laying bricks with Patsy ain't your business either.' Reb told his brother he'd speak to him later, and, drawing back, he stepped into Dom, who had come up behind him for a look. 'You and my brother are a pair,' Reb snapped. 'Get one of you working and the other stops.'
'Aw, Rebbie,' Dom whined.
'Everything nailed down?'
'Except that little bit up there you just finished.'
'What's that then?' Reb pointed with his hammer.
'I guess I didn't see over there.'
Reb went to the place and hammered in the missing nails.
'Shit, Reb,' Dom said. 'On Pozzi's jobs the only board that saw two nails hadda be twelve inches wide ha ha. And then it was lucky.'
'You ain't with Pozzi anymore,' Reb said as he straightened up. 'This is Soderini and Sons. Put in the goddam nails.'