The Wedding Debt and Winter's Cruelty — The Jungle

All summer the family toils until Jurgis and Ona can marry with decency, then November's feast leaves them more than a hundred dollars in debt. Love has barely opened when the lash of want drives them to work the morning after the wedding: exhausted Ona, sick Stanislovas at his lard machine, the household sour with children and cross adults. Jurgis clenches his fists and returns to the yards for her. The feast debt drives them to the yards the morning after the wedding.

Packingtown teaches a new war of each against all. Store windows lie, telegraph poles advertise lies, and the corporation that employs you is one gigantic lie. Ona loses a streetcar transfer through a rule designed to cheat riders who do not demand their rights; she walks to the yards in pouring rain and works two weeks with chills while a bitter forelady punishes her for wanting a wedding day. They live above a cesspool, drink watered milk with formaldehyde, and buy gypsum insect powder that cannot kill roaches. Ona loses a transfer and walks in rain to a bitter forelady.

Old Antanas coughs in a freezing pickle cellar until saltpeter eats through his boots and his feet ulcerate. He will not quit; he dies at home after hemorrhages, and the family strips the funeral to a hearse and one hack, Jurgis bargaining in front of witnesses so the undertaker cannot inflate the bill. Twenty-five years in the Lithuanian forest end in a Packingtown room with no money for decency. Antanas dies after saltpeter eats his boots; Jurgis bargains the undertaker publicly.

Winter comes as renovation for the packing machine: pneumonia, grippe, tuberculosis harvest the weakened, and thousands fight at the gates each dawn for the unfit one's job. Durham advertises two hundred ice cutters and three thousand men riot for twenty places. Blood freezes on the killing beds; men thaw their feet in steaming carcasses. Saloons offer the only heat, paid for in drinks and check-cashing traps. Jurgis takes one noon beer for Ona's sake and carries Stanislovas on his shoulders through blizzards while the demon cold waits in the cracks of their house. Saloons sell heat; blizzards force Jurgis to carry Stanislovas while rent and debt share one ledger.