A Bright Tomorrow by Gilbert Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

the shoulder and smiled. “I put half an apple in your lunch, Amos.”
    â€œThanks, Mama Anna.” Tired as he was, Amos came up with a faint smile for her, then turned and followed Nick out of the house.
    It was bitter cold, had been since the new year of 1898 had descended on the city. A fresh snow had fallen, laying a glittering white icing over the old covering of dirty yellow. It had stopped snowing, but the wind cut through Amos’s thin coat and rasped against his throat and lungs like a razor as he breathed. His rough shoes were so worn that, despite the pieces of leather he had inserted to cover the holes in the soles, he could feel the cold dampness seeping in. When he inadvertently stepped onto a sheet of ice that broke beneath his weight, he felt icy water fill his shoes and knew he was doomed to have aching cold feet all day.
    The two young men trudged along the murky streets, past block after block of tenement houses, saying nothing at all to each other. They were part of a silent stream of laborers, clothed in black and muted by the cold and the dullness of fatigue, who moved like specters toward the big smoke-stained buildings that blotted out the darkness of the sky.
    As they approached the building, Nick burst out in a spasm of defiance, “I ain’t gonna stand this no more, Amos. This is my last day at this dump!”
    Amos turned to stare at him. “You’re quittin’?”
    Nick glared at the bulk of the dark, many-eyed building, whose opaque windows seemed to glare blindly back at him. He cursed roughly, then shook his head, and when Amos asked what he was going to do, replied sharply, “I’ll get by…and I’ll make more dough than I ever made before, too, see if I don’t!”
    Amos said nothing, but he had not been unaware of the strain between Nick and his mother. Their arguments had been loud and frequent—she, accusing him of running with a wild bunch and warning him that he’d get into trouble if he didn’t watch out; Nick, shouting that he was old enough to choose his own friends.
    Amos had gone with Nick a few times and had formed a low opinion of Nick’s crowd. At least, they didn’t appeal to him . None of them had jobs, yet they had good clothes and money for beer and dance hall girls. They were all Italian, of course, and Amos had felt out of place, preferring to stay home after the first two or three times. He knew they were hooked up with some sort of shadowy organization that had its roots in the old country, and Nick had warned him, “Don’t get crossways with nobody in this crowd, Amos. They got connections.”
    Nick need not have worried, for Amos had neither time, money, nor inclination to join that crowd. He was an intuitive young man and understood that they were on the fringe of lawlessness. But the few times he’d tried to mention his uneasiness to Nick, the other boy had only laughed at him.
    A shrill whistle split the air just as the two young men entered the building. They hurried across the massive room, lit only by a few gaslights along the wall. Getting a hard look and a curse from their foreman, they took their places.
    The work was simple enough, for all Amos did all day long was to tie glass stoppers into small bottles. He carried a bundle of twine at his waist and held the bottles between his knees so that he could work with both hands. Sitting in this cramped position, his shoulders began to ache after only a few hours. And by glancing around at his fellow workers—some of whom had done nothing but this monotonous work for years—the fear took root that he would become like them, gnomes with rounded backs and blunt faces, devoid of all other interests in life.
    Amos was strong, but not particularly dexterous. His father, with his nimble musician’s fingers, could have tied twice as many bottles. Added to his native ineptness was the freezing cold in the unheated factory.