Hardcastle (24 page)

And he resigned himself, following Regus down the skidway, then along an old logging road, and finally along a game trail through the woods. At last, above the Bear Paw, they found a hemlock blowdown which was yet alive and green, and they settled themselves under it to watch. His thigh pained him very little even when he sat on it, and he was surprised that Ella’s concoction could work so well. He was grateful for the sweater too, for, as Ella had predicted, it had grown colder. Fitfully it began to drizzle, and here and there wet, heavy snowflakes fell, barely slower than the rain.

Regus had grown quiet and thoughtful and sat under the partial protection of the hemlock with his elbows propped on his knees. He watched the six or eight houses, among the many abandoned ones, from which chimney smoke struggled to rise, curled over the rooftops, and lazed away not far above the ground. Music turned the collar of his suit coat up, rolled himself a cigarette, and settled in to wait. He had been more uncomfortable; and at least until the hemlock got soaked and began to leak, it wouldn’t be bad. Then, too, there was some hope that, his luck otherwise deserting him, the weather might turn grim enough to keep a union meeting from taking place.

Before long the rain turned to snow, and under it, in the failing light, the Bear Paw coal camp looked even more forlorn. The snow did not stick on the ground; still, the roofs of abandoned buildings turned white, and the architecture of briars and scrub and long grasses was rimed with it. And against such whiteness the contrast of the blackened tipple, the unpainted sides of buildings soiled with coal dust, the black outcroppings of coal seams along the railroad cut, even the dark, littered and trampled earth around the company shacks, was sad and sharp. Music had no idea why the look of it should remind him so strongly of home, but it did; and so, his shoulders hunched against the cold, he was soon adream and not aware of the men leaving the woods no more than thirty yards to his left until Regus touched his shoulder and pointed. Music counted ten of them, although he recognized only the little preacher and Worth Enloe. Somehow he had not expected the men to sneak into the Bear Paw from the woods, although it made perfect sense: they wouldn’t wish to be on the road at the Bear Paw either. Music suspected Regus hadn’t thought of that either, and only chance had kept the miners from walking right over them, or him from choosing just the wrong moment to light a cigarette or speak to Regus.

“Gettin an early start, ain’t they?” Regus said.

“Yeah, and they damned near stepped on us too,” Music said.

Regus jerked his head to the side and gave a wry smile. “One of us ort to have been smart enough to figure that,” he said.

They watched the men pass down the grade of the mountain, through the stubble of a small cornfield and the remains of a vegetable garden someone had tried to scratch into the soil behind the leaning and dilapidated outhouses. If they spoke at all among themselves, no hint reached Music and Regus. At last the men filed into a house on the second row, where no smoke rose from the chimney and no lamp had been lit.

“Well,” Regus said, “there them suckers are; already a half a dozen stronger than last night, if you seen the lot of them when they come home.” In almost the same position as before, the inside of his elbows resting on his knees, his big hands hanging loose at the wrists, he shook his head slowly back and forth. “Shit,” he said. He was silent for a moment as though deep in thought. “Well, Bill Music, we might as well go down and listen to that son of a bitch pitch em,” he said. “We don’t want to miss the show.”

“What if there’s men still comin that’s late?” Music said.

“Yeah, all right,” Regus said. He appeared to be embarrassed, undecided. He rubbed his hands together, got out his plug of tobacco, and cut himself a chew. “We ort not to commence till after good dark noway.”

When he offered the plug to Music, Music took it, fearing to smoke lest someone at the camp see the flare of the struck match or even the glowing coal of the cigarette. Still, the chewing tobacco was not so calming as a cigarette.

“Yore daddy’s always made his livin as a farmer, then,” Regus said.

Music wasn’t sure whether he’d been asked a question or not. “Well, sure,” he said, “he fed his daddy and my mother and us three boys for as long as I can remember.” Music laughed. “I sure didn’t know the first thing about being hungry till I left. But he does other things. He makes shingles and sells em, and sometimes he’ll even take the job of shingling a man’s barn. He’s a good wheelwright. I’ve known him to make ox yokes, a sledge. Once he built a wagon for a man. But he does those things for the cash money and because he’s a good hand at foolin with wood. It’s a mountain farm he’s got,” Music said, “mountain land, don’t you know, and not the best for crops.” Music spat and spat again and tried to collect the tobacco and keep it in one spot in his cheek. It seemed to cause him much more trouble than it caused Regus. “Most folks up around Shulls Mills have a hand in something else besides fanning, even it’s only doing a little trapping, or gathering ginseng to sell or something.”

“Sure,” Regus said.

“It’s the farm that feeds them,” Music said, “but if they want anything extra, or a little fancy, a few nice clothes, or a new cookstove, or something …”

“Sure,” Regus said.

“But it’s the farm that feeds them.”

They sat for nearly an hour. Lamps had long since been lit in the occupied shacks of the Bear Paw, and they could even pick out the house the miners had entered, although something—a blanket, a piece of canvas or cardboard—seemed to be blocking the window that faced them, so only a dull, warm glow could be seen; and even that was so faint it teased the eye, lost itself in the dark and falling snow, and seemed to reappear always a little to one side of where it was expected. But the valley was losing definition, and at last the squares of yellow light from the windows and the planes and arches of snow floated on a pitch-black background.

“Okay,” Regus said and got up. “Let’s swing a little around to the south in case some more boys come to call from up to Hardcastle. I reckon they might have a lookout, too, so we ort to take it easy and slow.”

“Amen,” Music said.

They crept down the mountain. Their breaths and even their bodies steamed in the damp, chilled dark; and the intermittent snow was cold and slushy when it struck bare skin. In the deep shadow of one of the outhouses they paused for a long time looking and listening before they crept forward again.

The window had a gunnysack hung over it, but there was a little open space at either edge. Music knelt on one side of the window and Regus on the other. At the end of the room Music could see, there were two men who were strangers to him. One was short and dark and heavyset and appeared to be in his middle thirties; the other was medium tall and slight and looked no more than twenty. Music realized that Regus, from his angle, might not be able to see them at all, since he himself could see nearly nothing of the miners. He touched Regus on the shoulder and held up two fingers, and Regus nodded.

One of the miners was saying he didn’t trust niggers, since they had come to Hardcastle, by God, as scabs.

“They were lied to,” the young man said, “just the way labor always gets lied to. Nobody told them they were scabs. Nobody told them they were being sent up here to take the food out of your mouths.”

“I reckon, fer sure, nobody told them they were goan get the shit shot out of them,” someone else responded.

There was a smattering of grim laughter before the original voice insisted stubbornly that a nigger wasn’t to be trusted and nobody ought to say the first word to them about organizing.

“They broke your strike once because they were ignorant and they didn’t have any choice,” the young man said. “If you leave them out of this, you’re just about forcing them to do it again, when they know better now. They’ve been here and they know.”

“They’ve been slaves,” the older, heavyset man said. He was leaning against a wall from which rags and tatters of wallpaper hung. He had his arms folded across his chest and looked impatient. “They know the truth.”

The younger man nodded slightly to acknowledge the other. “They come from slaves anyway,” he said, “but slaves were better treated than coal miners are. They were valuable property and could be sold and traded, and the man that owned them was wise to keep them fed and healthy. If one of them died, hell, he had to go buy another to take his place. But the coal operator don’t care about you. He can get you killed, starve you out, work you to death, and it doesn’t matter; there are other men standing in line to get your job when you’re gone, maybe younger and stronger than you. The operator’s got no investment in you; he don’t care about your lives. He just wants your labor as cheap as he can get it. He’s got no reason to pay you a living wage.”

“That’s right,” someone said.

“He sure ain’t doin it,” another said. “If hit won’t fer the county relief truck comin in and that one sack of Red Cross flour I got last month, I’da starved out. I drew less than two dollars in clacker all month, time they took cuts fer rent and lights and coal and insurance and doctor. I got enough powder to make maybe two more shots, and then I don’t know what the hell I’ll do. I ain’t got the money to buy carbide, never mind powder.”

“Ha,” another voice said. “I didn’t draw but thirty-five cent last month. I’d like you to tell me how yer a-doin so well.”

“He loads more rock than coal; that’s how he does it,” someone else said.

“Well, I reckon I do a little better,” said a calm, slow voice Music recognized: Worth Enloe, the one-eyed man who had talked to him weeks before.

“Yeah, you company suck,” someone said, and there was the sudden scuffling of feet and the side of the building jarred. Music looked at Regus, who merely wagged his head. “Well, how come he was brought here?” the voice asked, but it was strained this time and breathless. “You know damned well he’ll turn us in.”

“Shut up, Jesse,” someone said, his voice tight as well, “you afraid you can’t make it without yer thirty-five cent a month?”

“Don’t tell me to shut up.”

Again feet scuffled and thumped and the building jarred a little.

“I am tellin ya,” the second voice said, sounding as harsh and ragged as the edge of a saw.

Like Regus, the heavyset man wagged his head. “That’s right,” he said, “fight each other like dogs. That’s what this Hardcastle wants, so fat and fine in his big house; that’s how he will like it, that you fight each other while he steals the bread from your mouths. Has he not always done so?”

Regus tipped his head toward the building. “Sounds like a foreigner,” he whispered. “Is he a Welshman or a guinea or somethin?”

“I don’t know,” Music whispered back. “The Italians I ran across in Chicago put
A
’s on the end of everything.”

Regus duck walked around to Music’s side of the window and looked in a moment. “Looks like a guinea to me,” he said and duck walked back.

“I reckon I do a little better,” Worth Enloe was saying in the same slow, calm voice he had used before, “but I give my workin life and one eye to the mines, and I got nuthin to show. And if I get turned out tomorrow, who will feed my youngins? Will you?”

“Yes,” the heavyset man said. “It is about your children that we speak.”

“And you don’t want no dues?” Enloe asked.

“Have we asked for any?” the young man said.

“We want you to stand on your feet!” the heavyset man said.

“You see me standin,” Worth Enloe said. The heavyset man smiled grimly, shook his head, and opened his mouth to speak, but Worth Enloe’s voice took up instead. “You talk so good and so fine, but ye’ve yet to tell me how you are gonna make a union work when the United Mine Workers have tried for nearly fifteen years to organize Kentucky. They’ve throwed men out of jobs, got the mines tore up, made trouble, got folks shot. This last summer they wuz all over Harlan and Pike and Perry signin folks up and makin promises. And they called their strike, and they got it broke, and they got run out; just like they allus done before. I’m fifty-two year old,” Enloe said, “and I’m lookin at ye outten one eye, but I don’t see nuthin new.”

“I do,” another voice said. “The U.M.W. had the sense to make a fuss in the summertime, where, if a man got evicted and lost his job, well, a tent ain’t so bad, and he might gather a little poke greens and take a few victuals off the land.”

The heavyset man made a farting sound with his mouth and looked disgusted, but the young one held up his hands. “We are better organized than the U.M.W. We’ve got the working classes up north behind us. Tell me the United Mine Workers tried to organize Hardcastle!” the young man said. “No, they didn’t! They went after some of the big outfits and that’s all. We’re after everybody. We’re not askin for dues because we know you don’t have them to pay. We’re askin you to stick. We’re tellin you we’ll bring in food and clothes. We’re askin you not to put up with bein starved and cheated and maimed and pushed around.”

“I don’t see it,” Enloe said. “Back when the mines were makin money, the unions couldn’t do no good. These times is only worse. Mines goin broke all over. Hardcastle cain’t be makin no money with the little ole contracts he gets, and when he lands one, he has to nearly give the coal away, so he still don’t make nuthin. You come along and tell us we got to make him treat us right. Well, I tell you the old son of a bitch couldn’t treat us right if he wanted to, not the way things is now.”

“He is a suck, listen at him,” a voice said from the other end of the room. “Shut up,” said another. “You cain’t trust no company man,” said a third.

“No, no,” the young man said, raising his hands, “the man is right as far as he goes. Probably Hardcastle Coal Company makes no money, and if it does, only a little.”

“Ever one of ye knows how she works,” Enloe said. “The biggest cost of gettin coal are the wages we men are paid. The coal operators bid for contracts, and the contracts go to the smallest bid. So our wages get cut to bring a contract in, and then they get cut again, and then another time, till finally the operators have underbid each other, till they ain’t hardly nuthin left.”