Power (14 page)

But, you see, the mine was worked out, and now they were robbing the pillars. That calls for some explanation, and without a treatise on coal mining, you can think of it this way. The seam of coal runs more or less horizontally with the surface of the earth, although it can pitch sharply in one direction or another. In what we call
pillar mining
—the way most coal is mined in the United States—a shaft is sunk to the depth of the coal seam. Then a main entry, or corridor, is driven into the seam and along it. On either side of this main entry, rooms, as we call them, are dug, that is, the coal is mined out of sections and these sections are separated by walls of coal. These walls support the roof and keep the mine from falling down around our heads—that is, the coal pillars and the timbering that we put up as we work into the mine. After a mine is pretty well worked out, they sometimes go through a process called “robbing the pillars,” that is, taking out the sections of coal seam that were left to support the roof and collapsing the mine from the finish of the entry back to the shaft. This can be very dangerous—or no more dangerous than first mining, depending on the conditions in the mine and the skill with which the pillars are removed.

In this case, we had too many new hands for real skill, a mine that was badly ventilated, and a bad case of operators' greed. The thing happened one day when we dynamited the face of a section. Afterwards, I learned that one of the blowers in the ventilating system had broken down. The other blowers continued to operate, but at best, it was a poor system, and now a dust mixture began to build up in the rooms. At the same time, there must have been a heavy firedamp, or methane, where we were working.

Briefly, Larry and I and four other men who were working in the room took cover in the entry while a charge was exploded. The room we had left blew and then the entry blew, and then the blast skipped from room to room, where the dust-air mixture had built up. I have very little heart to try to tell you exactly what happened, and I remember it poorly at best. Think of yourself suspended in darkness, explosions on every side of you, smashed and thrown by the concussion, your lighting gone, mules and men screaming with pain and horror, dust thick enough to feel, your sense of direction gone, and a certainty that the whole world is collapsing on you. Or somewhat like that. Or any other nightmare you care to put in its place.

In such a situation, the plain fact of your existence is unbelievable. Human sound, beyond the fact of terror and pain, is meaningless. It took me a while to understand that Larry was calling for me, and it took more time to find him, crawling around in that obscene blackness—not darkness the way you know it on the earth's surface, but a darkness beyond all darkness. I found him. There was a beam across his staved-in chest and half a ton of coal on the beam and on his body, and he died there under my fingers without me ever seeing his face again. I had matches, but to strike one there might have started the dust explosions all over again and more violent and lethal this time.

I got out. You look back, and it's impossible to understand why one person gets out and another doesn't. But I got out with no more damage than some bad cuts on my leg, which in time became infected and landed me here in the hospital at Denver. Larry died there, and with him one hundred and sixty-seven miners. I brought one man out to the shaft with me, but that didn't save his life. He died before they could bring him up. I got up the shaft and I went down again, not because I was brave, Dorothy, but because I was filled with guilt. I wanted to bring Larry's body out, but there were more explosions. Why, we'll never know. We worked there the rest of that day, and all night long I was at the shaft, while they brought up the bodies, while the wives and the mothers kept the deathwatch there. It's hard to remember too much of that night, but I remember hearing someone say,

“Anyway, at least half the dead are Mexicans, so what the hell!”

I felt an impulse to kill the man who said that, but there had been enough killing and enough pain and suffering—and all of it added up to nothing, no sense or rhyme or reason except the fact that a blower went out and the dust-air combination piled up in the rooms.

I feel that you are asking yourself whether he hasn't had enough—whether Ben Holt isn't content now to turn his back on mining forever. I don't know what the answer to that is, Dorothy, so help me, I don't. I am filled with all kinds of unreasonable fury and anger, and sick to death of a society that builds itself on a foundation of the dead bodies of miners, and the other day, as a sort of macabre game, I added up the statistics of miners killed on the job since the Civil War, as much as I could remember them, and I got a figure of over a hundred thousand, but maybe my statistics are wrong, and I left out those who are maimed and broken, and I got the feeling that it was like a war. A war that doesn't end. And when I fall asleep, the explosions start, the booming from room after room as the chain reaction ignites the dust—

So there is my story, and since you have read this far, I presume that you are interested. Here in the hospital I have thought of nothing else but you, and if nothing else makes sense, then I can fix my mind on you, and in some way, that makes sense and logic out of my existence.

But I make no claims. I have no right to, and I never had. If you are in love with anyone else, or engaged to be married, or married, I will not intrude on your life again. But if none of these are the case and you should see fit to write to me here, I would be both grateful and happy. If I was uncertain about my feelings for you once, I have absolutely no uncertainty now. I hope that this finds you in the best of health, and I look forward to seeing you soon and to hearing from you.

Very sincerely
,

BEN HOLT.

 

8

I think that after you have finished reading the letter, Alvin, you will say that there is much of Ben in it, and also nothing at all of Ben. The terrible tragedy at Serpo, which, with our national passion for alliteration, we have put into history as the Serpo Slaughter, left a mark on Ben that was never eradicated; he was unable to forget the simple fact that the miner lives with death. You've heard him lose his temper at wage negotiations and roar out, “What's the price of death! Name it!” I heard that for the first time—but I'm going ahead of myself, and by now this document, which you so artlessly asked for as a letter concerning Ben's courtship, has become a needle in my side, and I'll know no peace until I have finished it and sent it off to you.

I showed the letter to Father. Did I tell you that one of Ben's suspicions was true, or almost true? I wasn't formally engaged, but I had an understanding with George Cummings, an eligible and very nice boy from Scranton, and I wore his fraternity pin. His people owned the Cummings Mills, and I suppose they were very rich—real rich, I mean, and not the genteel state we were in, which in those days was defined as “comfortable.” But I can truthfully say that George's financial prospects played no part in the matter. He was a nice and good-natured boy, and my Aunt Alice approved of him because, as she put it, he was “my kind.”

Well, after Father read the letter, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, “An interesting letter, Dorothy. Don't you think?”

“Interesting?”

“To me, I mean. He says he's in love with you. I wonder what that means in Ben Holt's terms?”

“I don't know. But it's going to be hard to give George's pin back to him and tell him I can't be his wife.”

“Oh? You feel you must tell him that?”

I nodded.

“Suppose Ben doesn't come back?”

“He'll come back,” I said.

He did. He returned in December, and he brought me, as a Christmas present, a gold bracelet. You've seen it, a striking piece, two serpents intertwined, a strange design and a strange choice. He had spent all that remained of his compensation money on it. Father debated the wisdom of my accepting it, but I pleaded that Ben would be hurt if I refused; and after remarking on the wide range of variation my solicitude included, Father agreed with me.

I passed my nineteenth birthday, and Ben was working in the mines. Father never brought up the subject of law again, not with Ben and not with me. My friends were getting engaged and married, but Ben did not ask me to marry him. We saw each other on Sundays, and often enough, Ben had dinner with us. My aunt suggested that I go to Massachusetts for a long visit, and when I put my foot down about that, she began to work for a long cruise, one of those five-week affairs through the islands and the Panama Canal to California; but the U-boats were already skirting our coast, and Father wouldn't hear of any sort of boat ride.

Father usually knew pretty well what went on among the miners, and one day he remarked that Ben was making something of a name for himself.

“In what way?” I asked him.

“A number of ways. He called a stoppage at one of the collieries and the men followed him out. He held that the ventilation was no good and the mine was a deathtrap.”

“He never mentioned that to me.”

“No? Well, perhaps he thought you'd worry.”

“You said a number of ways.”

“I meant he's been getting around among the miners. They like him and respect him.”

“Why shouldn't they?” I demanded.

“There's every reason why they should. The operator who owns the pit where Ben works is a damn fool by the name of Nate Stisson. I've had some dealings with him. He's a bullhead who takes every man's measure by his own image, and he sent his cracker boss over to buy Ben off with five hundred dollars and a foreman's job. He probably figured that it was an irresistible offer and that he could use a man like Ben as a straw boss, and with the price of coal what it is today, half the operators have gone out of their heads completely.”

“To buy Ben off?”

“That's right. It was an idiot scheme, and only an idiot would send a cracker boss to do business with Ben. Ben beat the man. He broke his jaw and four ribs and put him in the hospital.”

“Oh no. No, I don't believe that,” I cried. “Not Ben. He wouldn't do that.”

“He did it,” Father said. “Stisson had Ben arrested, and old Stanley Kusik, the president of the union local here, talked me into taking the case.”

“You had to be talked into defending Ben?”

“In this case, I'm afraid I did, honey. Oh, I could see Ben's side of it. He was being bribed. His whole basic sense of integrity was being impugned, and worst of all, he was being asked to forget the conditions in the mine—conditions that threatened the lives of the men who worked there. So he had every right to be angry and indignant. But he had no right to beat a man so savagely that he had to be hospitalized.”

“But you asked Ben why and how it happened, didn't you?”

“Of course I did. And Ben said he lost his head—that he was still too close to what he had been through out in Colorado.”

“You believe him, don't you?”

“Yes,” Father said after a long moment, “I believe him.”

But there was no defense, as such, nor did Ben have to appear in court. Father went to see Jack Brady, the largest of all the operators in Ringman, and convinced him that if Stisson pressed his charges, the whole area would face the very real possibility of a strike. That was a year when operators had nightmares at the thought of a strike. Brady and some of the other operators talked to Stisson, and the charges were dropped. I happened to be in Father's office in town when Stanley Kusik, the president of the local union, came in to thank Father and to hand to him, personally, the union's check in payment for the case.

I learned later that Kusik was only fifty-five, but he had the appearance of a man ten or fifteen years older. He was a small, bent man, white hair, white mustache, tiny blue eyes and a seamed, leathery face. He had spent his whole life in the mines, and his election to the union post two years before was in the way of a tribute to his knowledge of the conditions in Ringman, as well as to the affection the miners felt for him. He greeted me warmly when I was introduced to him, a shy but charming smile of approval underlining his words as he said to Father,

“She is a very beautiful woman, your daughter, Mr. Aimesley.”

“At times,” Father nodded. He held the check for one hundred dollars that Kusik had given him. Most of Father's work was with estates and bequests, and he had served two terms in the past as county surrogate. Cases like this one were taken because he could not bring himself to reject them, and now he said to Kusik, “I am going to accept this check, Stanley, because I like you. I don't have much respect for a man who gives away his skill for nothing. However, my daughter here is one of the pillars of the local league for Belgian Relief. I am sure the union will not object to my endorsing this check over to her.”

“The union won't object, Mr. Aimesley. In fact, our finance committee will feel good about it both ways.”

After Kusik had left, Father turned to me and said, “I've been thinking about this whole business, Dorothy, and I've come to the conclusion that I've been unjust to Ben.”

“Whether you were or not, you managed to have the charges dropped. That's what counts, isn't it?”

“I'm not sure. I'm not only thinking about what Ben means to you, but about him in a sort of basic way. Ben Holt is not just any man. Do you know what I'm getting at?”

“I'm not sure,” I said slowly.

“Well, he's important—and it's all of him that makes for that importance, his violence, his anger, his brain—perhaps his ruthlessness as well.”

“Ben's not ruthless—”

“You don't think so? Well, we won't argue the point. Let's have him over to prove I'm saying all this in good faith.”

At dinner, neither Father nor Ben referred to the incident of the bribe. Instead, they talked about the West in general, Colorado in particular, about Mexicans and Indians and the treatment of both. I had come to expect and accept from my father a fund of knowledge about out-of-the-way subjects, but Ben continued to amaze me. It was not his knowledge of things, but the depth of his knowledge; if he went into a. thing, he went into it thoroughly. They started with the treatment of Mexicans and Indians in general. Then Ben chose the Osages and the Cherokees in specific, detailed their history, and made his point flatly,