In Dubious Battle (10 page)

A change was in the air. The apathy was gone from the men. Sleepers were awakened and told, and added themselves to the group. A current of excitement filled the jungle, but a kind of joyful excitement. Fires were built up. Four big cans of water were put on to boil; and then cloth began to appear. Every man seemed to have something to add to the pile. One took off his undershirt and threw it into the water and then put on his shirt again. The men seemed suddenly happy. They laughed together as they broke dead cottonwood branches for the fire.

Jim stood beside Mac, watching the activity. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Come in with me. You can help me in the tent.” At that moment a cry came from the tent. Mac said quickly, “Bring me a can of hot water as quick as you can, Jim. Here,” he held out a little bottle. “Put about four of these tablets in each of those big cans. Bring the bottle back to me when you bring the water.” He hurried away toward the tent.

Jim counted the tablets into the cans, and then he scooped a large bucketful of water from one of them and followed Mac into the tent. The old woman was crouched in a corner, out of the way. She scratched her hands and
peered out suspiciously while Mac dropped two of the tablets into the warm water and dipped his hands into it. “We can anyway get our hands clean,” he said.

“What’s the bottle?”

“Bichloride of mercury. I always take it with me. Here, you wash your hands, Jim, and then get some fresh water.”

A voice outside the tent called, “Here’s your lamps, Doc.”

Mac went to the flap and brought them back, a round-wick Rochester lamp and a powerful gasoline lantern. “Some poor devil’s going to do his milking in the dark,” he said to Jim. He pumped up pressure in the gasoline lamp, and when he lighted it the mantles glared, a hard, white light, and the lantern’s hiss filled the tent. The crack of breaking wood and the sound of voices came in from outside.

Mac set his lantern down beside the mattress. “Going to be all right, Lisa,” he said. Gently he tried to lift the dirty quilt which covered her. London and the white-faced boy looked on. In a panic of modesty Lisa held the quilt down about her. “Come on, Lisa, I’ve got to get you ready,” Mac said persuasively. Still she clutched at the quilt.

London stepped over. “Lisa,” he said. “You do it.” Her frightened eyes swung to London, and then reluctantly she let go her hold on the quilt. Mac folded it back over her breast and unbuttoned her cotton underwear. “Jim,” he called. “Go out and fish me a piece of cloth and get me some soap.”

When Jim had brought him a steaming cloth and a thin, hard piece of soap, Mac washed the legs and thighs
and stomach. He worked so gently that some of the fear left Lisa’s face.

The men brought in the boiled cloths.

The pains came quicker and quicker.

It was dawn when the birth started. Once the tent shook violently. Mac looked over his shoulder. “London, your kid’s fainted,” he said. “Better take him out in the air.” With a look of profound embarrassment London slung the frail boy over his shoulder and carried him out.

The baby’s head appeared. Mac supported it with his hands, and while Lisa squealed weakly, the birth was completed. Mac cut the cord with a sterilized pocket-knife.

The sun shone on the canvas and the lantern hissed on. Jim wrung out the warm cloths and handed them to Mac when he washed the shrunken little baby. And Jim washed and scrubbed the hands of the old woman before Mac let her take the baby. An hour later the placenta came, and Mac carefully washed Lisa again. “Now get all this mess out,” he told London. “Burn all these rags.”

London asked, “Even the cloths you didn’t use?”

“Yep. Burn it all. It’s no good.” His eyes were tired. He took a last look around the tent. The old woman held the wrapped baby in her arms. Lisa’s eyes were closed and she breathed quietly on her mattress. “Come on, Jim. Let’s get some sleep.”

In the clearing the men were sleeping again. The sun shone on the tops of the willows. Mac and Jim crawled into a little cave in the undergrowth and lay down together.

Jim said, “My eyes feel sandy. I’m tired. I never knew you worked in a hospital, Mac.”

Mac crossed his hands behind his head. “I never did.”

“Well, where did you learn about births?”

“I never learned till now. I never saw one before. The only thing I knew was that it was a good idea to be clean. God, I was lucky it came through all right. If anything’d happened, we’d’ve been sunk. That old woman knew lots more than I did. I think she knew it, too.”

“You acted sure enough,” Jim said.

“Well, Christ Almighty, I had to! We’ve got to use whatever material comes to us. That was a lucky break. We simply had to take it. ’Course it was nice to help the girl, but hell, even if it killed her—we’ve got to use anything.” He turned on his side and pillowed his head on his arm. “I’m all in, but I feel good. With one night’s work we’ve got the confidence of the men and the confidence of London. And more than that, we made the men work for themselves, in their own defense, as a group. That’s what we’re out here for anyway, to teach them to fight in a bunch. Raising wages isn’t all we’re after. You know all that.”

“Yes,” Jim said. “I knew that, but I didn’t know how you were going to go about it.”

“Well, there’s just one rule—use whatever material you’ve got. We’ve got no machine guns and troops. Tonight was good; the material was ready, and we were ready. London’s with us. He’s the natural leader. We’ll teach him where to lead. Got to go awful easy, though. Leadership has to come from the men. We can teach them method, but they’ve got to do the job themselves. Pretty soon we’ll start teaching method to London, and he can teach it to the men under him. You watch,” Mac said, “the story of last night will be all over the district by
tonight. We got our oar in already, and it’s better than I hoped. We might go to the can later for practicing medicine without a license, but that would only tie the men closer to us.”

Jim asked, “How did it happen? You didn’t say much, but they started working like a clock, and they liked it. They felt fine.”

“Sure they liked it. Men always like to work together. There’s a hunger in men to work together. Do you know that ten men can lift nearly twelve times as big a load as one man can? It only takes a little spark to get them going. Most of the time they’re suspicious, because every time someone gets ’em working in a group the profit of their work is taken away from them; but wait till they get working for themselves. Tonight the work concerned them, it was their job; and see how well they did it.”

Jim said, “You didn’t need all that cloth. Why did you tell London to burn it?”

“Look, Jim. Don’t you see? Every man who gave part of his clothes felt that the work was his own. They all feel responsible for that baby. It’s theirs, because something from them went to it. To give back the cloth would cut them out. There’s no better way to make men part of a movement than to have them give something to it. I bet they all feel fine right now.”

“Are we going to work today?” Jim asked.

“No, we’ll let the story of last night go the rounds. It’ll be a hell of a big story by tomorrow. No, we’ll go to work later. We need sleep now. But Jesus, what a swell set-up it is for us so far.”

The willows stirred over their heads, and a few leaves
fell down on the men. Jim said, “I don’t know when I ever was so tired, but I do feel fine.”

Mac opened his eyes for a moment. “You’re doing all right, kid. I think you’ll make a good worker. I’m glad you came down with me. You helped a lot last night. Now try to shut your God-damned eyes and mouth and get some sleep.”

THE afternoon sun glanced on the tops of the apple trees and then broke into stripes and layers of slanting light beneath the heavy branches, and threw blots of sunshine on the ground. The wide aisles between the trees stretched away until the rows seemed to meet in a visual infinity. The great orchard crawled with activity. Long ladders leaned among the branches and piles of new yellow boxes stood in the aisles. From far away came the rumble of the sorting machines and the tap of the boxers’ hammers. The men, with their big buckets slung to baldrics, ran up the ladders and twisted the big green pippins free and filled the buckets until they could hold no more, and then they ran down the ladders to empty the buckets into the boxes. Between the rows came the trucks to load the picked apples and take them to the sorting and packing plant. A checker stood beside the boxes and marked with a pencil in his little book as the bucket men came up. The orchard was alive. The branches of the trees shook under the ladders. The overripes dropped with dull plops to the ground underneath the trees. Somewhere, hidden in a tree-top, a whistling virtuoso trilled.

Jim hurried down his ladder and carried his bucket to the box pile and emptied the load. The checker, a blond young man in washed white corduroys, made a mark in his book and nodded his head. “Don’t dump ’em in so hard, buddy,” he warned. “You’ll bruise ’em.”

“O.K.,” said Jim. He walked back to his ladder, drumming on the bucket with his knee as he went. Up the ladder he climbed, and he hooked the wire of the bale-hook over a limb. And then in the tree he saw another man, who had stepped off the ladder and stood on a big limb. He reached high over his head for a cluster of apples. He felt the tree shudder under Jim’s weight and looked down.

“Hello, kid. I didn’t know this was your tree.”

Jim stared up at him, a lean old man with black eyes and a sparse, chewed beard. The veins stood out heavy and blue on his hands. His legs seemed as thin and straight as sticks, too thin for the big feet with great heavy-soled shoes.

Jim said, “I don’t give a damn about the tree. Aren’t you too old to be climbing around like a monkey, Dad?”

The old man spat and watched the big white drop hit the ground. His bleak eyes grew fierce. “That’s what you think,” he said. “Lots of young punks think I’m too old. I can out-work you any day in the week, and don’t you forget it, neither.” He put an artificial springiness in his knees as he spoke. He reached up and picked the whole cluster of apples, twig and all, skinned the apples into his bucket and contemptuously dropped the twig on the ground.

The voice of the checker called, “Careful of those trees, over there.”

The old man grinned maliciously, showing two upper and two lower yellow teeth, long and sloped outward, like a gopher’s teeth. “Busy bastard, ain’t he,” he remarked to Jim.

“College boy,” said Jim. “Every place you go you run into ’em.”

The old man squatted down on his limb. “And what do they know?” he demanded. “They go to them colleges, and they don’t learn a God damn thing. That smart guy with the little book couldn’t keep his ass dry in a barn.” He spat again.

“They get pretty smart, all right,” Jim agreed.

“Now you and me,” the old man went on, “We know—not much, maybe, but what we know we know good.”

Jim was silent for a moment, and then he lanced at the old man’s pride as he had heard Mac do to other men. “You don’t know enough to keep out of a tree when you’re seventy. I don’t know enough to wear white cords and make pencil marks in a little book.”

The old man snarled, “We got no pull, that’s what. You got to have pull to get an easy job. We just get rode over because we got no pull.”

“Well, what you going to do about it?”

The question seemed to let air out of the old man. His anger disappeared. His eyes grew puzzled and a little frightened. “Christ only knows,” he said. “We just take it, that’s all. We move about the country like a bunch of hogs and get beat on the ass by a college boy.”

“It’s not his fault,” said Jim. “He’s just got a job. If he’s going to keep the job, he’s got to do it.”

The old man reached for another cluster of apples, picked them with little twisting lifts and put each one carefully into his bucket. “When I was a young man, I used to think somethin’ could be done,” he said,” but I’m seventy-one.” His voice was tired.

A truck went by, carrying off the filled boxes. The old
man continued, “I was in the north woods when the Wobblies was raising hell. I’m a top-faller, a damn good one. Maybe you noticed how I take to a tree at my age. Well, I had hopes then. ’Course the Wobblies done some good, used to be there was no crappers but a hole in the ground, and no place to take a bath. The meat used to spoil. Well, them Wobblies made ’em put in toilets and showers; but, hell, it all went to pieces.” His hand went up automatically for more apples. “I joined unions,” he said. “We’d elect a president and first thing we knowed, he’d be kissing the ass of the superintendent, and then he’d sell us out. We’d pay dues, and the treasurer’d run out on us. I don’ know. Maybe you young squirts can figure something out. We done what we could.”

“You all ready to give up?” Jim asked, glancing at him again.

The old man squatted down on his limb and held himself there with one big skinny hand. “I got feelings in my skin,” he said. “You may think I’m a crazy old coot; them other things was planned; nothing come of ’em; but I got feelings in my skin.”

“What kind of feelings?”

“It’s hard to say, kid. You know quite a bit before water boils, it gets to heavin’ around? That’s the kind of feeling I got. I been with workin’ stiffs all my life. There ain’t a plan in this at all. It’s just like that water heavin’ before it boils.” His eyes were dim, seeing nothing. His head rose up so that two strings of skin tautened between his chin and his throat. “Maybe there’s been too much goin’ hungry; maybe too many bosses’ve kicked hell out of the men. I dunno. I just feel it in my skin.”

“Well, what is it?” Jim asked.

“It’s anger,” the old man cried. “That’s what it is. You know when you’re about to get fightin’, crazy mad, you get a hot, sick, weak feelin’ in your guts? Well, that’s what it is. Only it ain’t just in one man. It’s like the whole bunch, millions and millions was one man, and he’s been beat and starved, and he’s gettin’ that sick feelin’ in his guts. The stiffs don’t know what’s happenin’, but when the big guy gets mad, they’ll all be there; and by Christ, I hate to think of it. They’ll be bitin’ out throats with their teeth, and clawin’ off lips. It’s anger, that’s what it is.” He swayed on his limb, and tightened his arms to steady himself. “I feel it in my skin,” he said. “Ever’ place I go, it’s like water just before it gets to boilin’.”