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Show 54 Andy said. "My mother told him off, believe me. She said if we can't provide hospitality for our friends, then we might as well be back in the old country starving to death. Please, Karl, I only told you because you asked me. Promise it won't make any difference betwen us." "It won't," Karl promised, but he knew he'd never go to the Stulaks' for supper again, no matter how often they invited him. "It's this dang stupid way the mills are run," Andy went on bitterly. "The Irish and the Germans, and the Johnny Bulls, too, get all the good jobs. Slovaks like us can never be anything but laborers, and when the bad times come, the so-called Americans take over our jobs till times get better." Karl had never realized that. He tried to say something sympathetic, but Andy was working himself up into a real storm. "What the hell do I have to look forward to?" Andy cried. "My father made me quit school two years ago to take a boy job. When I'm sixteen next month, I'll try to get a man's job, but who knows if the mills will be hiring by then? If they are, I'll get hired on the labor gang, and I'll be a laborer all my life, just like my old man. Do you know what my father earns, after all those years? Twelve lousy dollars and sixty cents a week!" Andy had half risen, his eyes bright with anger. "What do they think we are -- boneheads? Sure I quit school at fourteen, but hell, I've read almost every book in the Carnegie Free Public Library. Andrew Carnegie gives us a classy library, but he won't give people like me a decent job in his rotten mills." |