1
In October 1912, when I was fourteen, the front room of my uncle Edwin's print shop shook from morning until supper. The great iron press swallowed blank paper and returned election notices, theater bills, and menus, each with the same stern clap. A long run on the Albion took two people, my uncle at the platen and an apprentice lifting each sheet away by its corner, and both counted under the noise because it was easier than shouting a number twice. On a heavy day the front room turned out eleven hundred impressions before the light went. I had learned to hear that sound as my uncle's answer to the world: if words deserved an audience, he would give them one. So when Mrs. Vale of the Equal Franchise League entered carrying a handwritten page, I expected him to reach for his composing stick before she removed her gloves.
2
Instead, Uncle Edwin read the page twice and glanced toward the broad shop window. Across the street, Mr. Pritchard, who owned the grain warehouse, stood beneath the awning pretending to study a seed catalog. Two weeks earlier, after we printed a workers' meeting notice, someone had chipped that window with a stone. The stone had come in at an angle through the lower corner, and the crack ran up beneath the gilt lettering of the shop's name, so that for eleven days the E of Edwin had a line drawn through it. Nobody was charged. The constable wrote that the street had been empty, and asked whether we meant to go on taking that class of work. Handbills from that meeting still lay on the counter, their corners browned where rain had entered through the cracked pane. Uncle Edwin had paid the glazier with money set aside for new type and had told our apprentices only that orders might be scarce for a few days. Uncle Edwin laid Mrs. Vale's page beside the register. “Not through the Albion,” he said, naming the large press. “And not tonight.” Mrs. Vale gathered the page without arguing. I pushed my broom so hard that a row of metal type rattled in its case.
3
His refusal seemed worse because of something he had told me when I first began setting type. A press, he said, could not decide which words were respectable. “Machines don't choose what deserves paper. People do.” I had admired that sentence enough to copy it inside my arithmetic book. Now I decided it had been meant only for harmless words. Yet as Mrs. Vale reached the door, Uncle Edwin quietly asked, “Two hundred copies, still?” She nodded. He examined the street once more before saying that the morning train left at six-ten.
4
After she departed, he did several things that did not fit my conclusion, though I forced them to. He counted three unopened packages of cream paper. Cream stock was wedding paper and cost nearly twice what handbill paper cost; we had laid it in that spring for an order which never arrived. He wrote nothing in the day book, which he had filled in every evening for as long as I had been in the shop. He put a tin of blue ink into his coat instead of returning it to the cabinet. From the hook above his desk, he took the narrow key to the carriage house, where an old foot-powered press stood under a canvas sheet. When I asked whether the little press was broken, he said only, “Its hinge complains.” I told myself he planned to sell it for scrap.
5
At supper, a blue crescent marked the edge of his cuff, although every job we had printed that day used black ink. He ate quickly and did not ask about school. The parcel was tied before he named it, in butcher's paper and string, and it sat heavier at one end than a bundle of almanacs had any reason to. He asked me to deliver a parcel of “almanacs” to Mrs. Vale's boardinghouse. The wrapping slipped as I carried it, revealing the corner of a blank cream sheet and a line of fresh blue type: ...voice in the laws... I stopped under a gas lamp. Perhaps, I thought, Mrs. Vale had found another printer and Uncle Edwin was merely delivering the work. It was an awkward explanation, but it allowed me to remain angry.
6
Near midnight I woke to a soft, regular thump behind the house. It was not the Albion's commanding clap. The sound was more like a careful heartbeat trying not to wake a patient. Light showed beneath the carriage-house door. Inside, blankets covered the windows, the canvas lay folded on the floor, and Uncle Edwin pressed the old machine's treadle while Mrs. Vale lifted damp pages onto a drying rack. The press was the size of a sewing table and took one sheet at a time. The type had been set by hand on a stone laid across two sawhorses, with the composing stick and a candle at its edge, and a horse blanket lay folded beneath the frame to keep the treadle's shock out of the floorboards. At the top of each sheet, in blue letters, were the words A VOICE IN THE LAWS.
7
Uncle Edwin did not look surprised to see me. He pointed to a stool and explained while he worked. The Albion could be heard halfway down Market Street, and Mr. Pritchard had begun lingering outside whenever Mrs. Vale visited. Printing the pages was lawful, but a second broken window could close the shop for days and leave our two apprentices without wages. The carriage-house press was slow, yet its sound stayed inside the blankets. He had oiled its hinge that afternoon and moved the paper before supper. “Courage is useful,” he said, feeding in another sheet, “but it should not send someone else's supper bill unpaid.”
8
The evidence I had arranged against him changed its meaning all at once. His glance toward the street had been reconnaissance, not embarrassment. The key and ink were preparations, not plans for scrap. Even “not tonight” had contained a narrow truth: the Albion would not print the pages that night. I understood, too, that his hands were trembling slightly as he aligned each sheet. He was not fearless, and he was not the bronze hero I might have invented after discovering the secret. He was frightened enough to plan carefully and committed enough to continue.
9
I worked the drying rack until the eastern sky paled. Before opening the shop, we removed the blankets and carried the little press's blue-stained rollers back under their canvas. At eight, Uncle Edwin started the Albion on a stack of restaurant menus. Its familiar clap filled the front room and traveled through the window to Market Street. The day before, I had heard that noise as proof that my uncle would speak plainly or not at all. Now I heard something else in it: useful cover for the quieter answer already bundled aboard the six-ten train.