Pool_1

an innocent wide eyed eight year old when she entered the grind as just another set of nimble fingers in the Patterstown silk mill sweat shops. He was youthful muscle and stamina working the vats and tending physical fetching tasks in the killing acid atmosphere of the dye plants that supported the Patterstown silk industry. Silk mills. Dye plants. This was a boom town,except not for anybody living or working in it. Beautiful silk for beautiful people. Yet, no refinement of the product could decorate a memory worth future reminiscence by the young workers thrown to those mills. It was all pain, relentless quotas, and searing burning of the lungs on every inhalation. It was a place and time to forget but not forget so much as to ever allow reliving. Mere existence IS death. Human spirit requires more than life. For no more apparent reason than that, although he had made a personal oath of sacrifice, the young Macaluso did more than just endure. He volunteered. As a volunteer, he shouldered bottled milk packed in heavy steel jointed oak crates to the inmates, who in like manner to his milk bottles, packed the TB sanatoriums. There were so many of them. There were no carts. "Samson of the milk." was his early nick name, that is, before "Jazz Man". He wondered who shouldered these poor wretches. The haunts of the sanatoriums were not places where his tapping rhythms on the wooden "milk coffins" might get notice. Rattling of glass and of lungs competed too effectively. He was up at four AM, bleary eyed, blind to the possibility of swapping a bleak future for a short future of physical wasting, spitting blood in paroxysms of explosive coughing. This was a plague without a cure. Who would dare go there? Who?