Power (16 page)

Gradually, my fear and discomfort disappeared, and I was able to relax. When at last Ben walked up to the platform to speak, I was intent on him and what he had to say, and not even disturbed by the miners who rose to their feet and shouted,

“What do you say, Benny boy!” “How are your knuckles, laddie!” “Reach out, Benny—I want to hear what you got to say!” And more of the same. Oh, he was liked, all right, and he liked it, standing up there, a great bear of a man, with his shaggy head of hair and his disconcertingly pale blue eyes. He was of this group of men, but not like them, and they saw in him what they would want to be themselves, something young and strong and very powerful and very fearless.

There was no transcript of what Ben said that evening, and I don't pretend to remember his words or even all of the ideas he advanced; but I do remember the theme he put forward and that very clearly. It was the first time I heard Ben speak in public, and even then he had the basis for the manner and delivery that became so famous in later years. Between sentences, he paused and studied the men in front of him. He never hurried and he never spoke thoughtlessly. He despised the clichés of labor oratory, and he always tried to say what he meant in plain, simple English. But that didn't make it less studied. I have seen him stand in front of a mirror for an hour, practicing a manner of delivery; but when he used it, he managed to give the feeling of impromptu words and feelings.

Now, as he spoke, the hall quieted. He had them listening almost immediately. He was making small of things like the walkout he had led. “It's holding the line,” he said. “It's standing still. It's coddling the damn little we have—and make sure, what we have is very little indeed. We don't have any of the safety measures we asked for—measures we've been asking for for half a century. There isn't a mine in this county with adequate ventilation. There isn't a mine with adequate safety measures, and because there's a coal hunger, we're working harder and longer than we ever worked before. And when do accidents happen? When a man's tired, when his reactions are a little slower, his response a little duller, his muscles too weary to respond to the demands of a situation. No, I'm not satisfied by the fact that we're working. Nor should you be. Because you and me, we know why we're working. We're working because there's a hunger for coal—and the name of that hunger is war. W-A-R—war! We don't love war. Our whole lives are war, and we know what it means to live with death. So don't anybody ever tell me that the miner loves war or wants war! Ask my mother, may she rest in peace, what it means for a woman to lose two strong sons and a husband—ask her that, and she'll tell you what war means to a woman! But don't ever tell the miner's woman that miners want war! Because it would be a lie!”

A storm of applause here.

“Still, the war is there, and an appetite for coal such as the world never knew before, and profits such as the operators never dreamed of before. But we work for the same wages. Yes, I know—we make more money. We mine more coal. We break ourselves that much faster. And in the end, we pay the price, not the operators. That's what I call standing still. But if we don't move now and make our demands now and win them now, we never will!”

That was Ben's theme, and he drove it home as long as was necessary, and when he sat down, even I could see that he was as good as elected. Stanley Kusik couldn't say anything that would change the outcome. I don't even know whether the old man wanted to. He admitted Ben's arguments, and he admitted that it was possible that the union needed a younger and more energetic man. He stood on his record, honesty and concern for the miners, but it wasn't enough. Ben had thought the thing through, and because he listened and knew what the miners were thinking and saying, he was able to not only echo their thoughts but to go a step further. When Kusik's vice-president got up to speak for the administration, he was shouted down and howled down. The miners had made up their minds. Ben was elected president of the local—almost by acclamation.

Three months later, Ben and I were married. It was not as happy a wedding as it might have been. Some of my relatives washed their hands of the whole affair. The rest mixed poorly and gingerly with Ben's relatives and friends. For myself, I knew that I was marrying a wonderful, strong man, whom I loved and admired—and at the time it seemed to be enough.

PART
III

1

Three and a half years went by after I first met Ben Holt in West Virginia in 1920, and during that time I didn't see him; and it is possible that I might never have seen him again if my wife, Laura, had lived. She died of pneumonia—and indirectly of the bullet that had ripped through her lung in West Virginia. Of the life we lived together, I have no intention of writing here. It is not pertinent to this story, nor is it anything that I desire to recall. We had no children. We were very close, and possibly we had as much from our three and a half years as most people get out of a lifetime together. Or, at least, so I told myself at the time.

Ben Holt said to me once that since Laura had died from a strikebreaker's bullet, intended for a miner, I was left with a miner's heart and a miner's suffering; but that was precisely the kind of romantic hogwash that Ben Holt sometimes gave out with. I don't have the kind of nature that hates or remembers or connects in that way; and when Laura died, all I felt was my own personal grief.

We had not heard from Laura's parents for about six months before she died. Her letters were not returned, but neither were they answered. When Laura became too weak to write, I wrote for her, and that letter was returned. The McGradys had gone, leaving no forwarding address—or so the post office informed us. Laura wanted me to go down to West Virginia, but I was unwilling to leave her, and she died without ever seeing her parents again.

After that, there was nothing to keep me in New York or anywhere else. The only purpose I remained with was the need to discharge a few obligations to Laura, and first among these was the task of informing her parents that she was dead.

Four years after I had left there, I returned to Clinton, West Virginia. That was 1924. I was twenty-six years old, but neither young nor brash nor boyish, and in the process of discovering that the world was not my oyster. I was a thin man—some would call me skinny—about six feet tall, with sandy hair that was going prematurely gray about the temples. I had changed enough in those four years to educe no sign of recognition from people I had met before. At the Traveler's Mountainside Hotel, there was a new clerk but not much else was different. Max Macintosh, who had been mayor during my last visit, was now out of office, clinging to the sustenance of a tiny law practice. I spoke to him, reminding him of our former introduction; but before that, I hired a car to take me out to Fenwick Crag, where the McGradys had their farm.

As I suspected, the McGradys were not there. The farmhouse was posted with a tax notice, abandoned and rotting. The barn had been burned, and the whole place gone to seed. Back in Clinton, I talked to one or two people about where I might find the McGradys, and they suggested that I see Max Macintosh. His office was in a loft over the coal company's grocery and supply store on Main Street.

Macintosh had not changed a great deal, but he had not been anywhere nor was he going anywhere. His suit was shiny and his eyes were tired, his office small, dusty, and unimpressive.

“Sure, I remember you,” he nodded, after I had properly identified myself and jogged his memory. “You're the wise-guy reporter who married Laura McGrady.”

“That's right.”

“A nice kid. How is she?”

“She died two weeks ago,” I told him.

“God, no! Well, what can you say? I'm terribly sorry to hear that, Cutter. I can't tell you how sorry I am.”

I nodded, being tired of the inanities that go with an expression of sympathy and the small guilt of people who face what is called the bereaved.

“Was it the bullet—that time down here?”

“That and pneumonia.”

“By golly, I'm sorry to hear all this.”

“I'm trying to find her parents,” I said to him. “They don't know. Our letters were returned, so there was no way of telling them.”

He nodded and asked me if I had been out to Fenwick Crag.

“I was there.”

“Then you know about them losing that place. They had nothing but hard luck, Cutter—nothing else. But that's a broad label you could put on the whole county down here. I think that when God was most irritated with the human race, he invented mining, I do, indeed. You can talk about hard times and not even scratch the subject. Down here, the miners who work have it bad enough and maybe they just manage to keep body and soul together, but the three, four thousand who were black-listed after that stupid war in ‘twenty—well, their lot is indescribable, it sure enough is indescribable.”

“So you know where the McGradys are?”

He nodded again. “But you'd never find it by yourself. I'll take you there.” He heaved himself out of his chair as I began to protest about him leaving his office and his work. He said that all the work he had could be accomplished with his breakfast, between the bread and the mush. “I'm a miners' lawyer,” he explained sourly. “There's no union here to pay their fees, and as far as cash is concerned, there ain't one of them has two-bits to his name—or seen the sight of two-bits these past few years. I tell you, Cutter, if I had a brain in my head, I'd be out of here and never set foot in West Virginia again.”

His car was an old Model T, and after I had cranked half a dozen times, he had to explain shamefacedly that he was out of gas. He felt around in his pockets and came up with fifteen cents. It took me a while to talk him into allowing me to pay for a tankful of gas. “Pride,” he muttered, as we drove out of Clinton. “Short on cash and long on pride. This lousy state is full of that kind of virtue, Cutter.”

It was full of beauty, too; with the exception of southern Illinois, where you find coal you will find more beauty than almost anywhere else in the world, and this was the kind of a spring it had been four years ago, crisp and moist, with the new yellow-green all over the mountains, the spring flowers and the rushing freshets, and the sky as blue as a sky can be. The old car rocked and jolted over winter-ruined dirt roads, and then we came down into a valley where coal was mined, full of haze and dirt and man-made mountains of slag and culm, the ugly tipples spread out before us, the road paved with cinders. The spring sweetness of the air gave way to the smell of coal; the slag heaps smoked, and the sky turned gray and clouded.

There were people there, and they lived in what, for want of another name, one would have to call houses. Broken, crazy, dirty, ugly shacks. Paintless, the wood warped, the inside and outside joined with holes, spaces, cracks. Children played in the dirt outside, and other children crawled like insects over the smoking slag heaps. Women came to the doorways to look at us as we rattled by, skinny, hollow-faced women in shapeless dresses. Movements were slow; the soot-laced air was pervaded with the very slow motion of apathy and hopelessness. We passed through that place into another that was like it, and then into another. The tipples were strung like beads; the smoky, coal-scented air lay in the hollows.

“Pretty country,” Macintosh muttered.

We turned into a little hollow where two old and broken tipples stood. The tracks that led to them were rusted, and one broken coal car lay on its side. We pulled up in front of a cluster of shacks. Half-naked children scattered in a mixture of terror and shyness, while barefooted men and women came to the doors of their shacks, to stare at us bleakly, hostilely, and hopelessly.

“These are all black-listed,” Macintosh whispered. “Unemployable, and they squat here and rot and die of starvation. This is a bad place, Cutter.”

He got out of the car and led the way toward the shacks. No one moved. “We're looking for Frank McGrady,” Macintosh said. “This here is his son-in-law.”

Still no response.

“Well, by golly, half of you know me,” Macintosh said in exasperation. “I'm Max Macintosh, so don't just stand there looking at me.”

“We don't know him,” a man said, nodding at me.

“Now didn't I just tell you who he is? His name's Alvin Cutter, and he married Frank's daughter Laura and they been living up north. All I'm asking you is where Frank is.”

At this point, a woman came out of the last shack and walked slowly toward us. She was barefooted, wore a loose gingham shift that was torn and patched, and moved slowly and tiredly; and though she moved like an old and sick woman, I recognized her as Sarah McGrady. She came up to us, looked over Macintosh, looked me over, then smiled wanly and nodded and said,

“Hello, Alvin. It's good to see you. How's Laurie?”

When we remained silent, she added, “I been poorly. We all been poorly, I guess.”

“Mother, why didn't you let us know how bad things were. My God, why didn't you let us know?”

“Frank and me never did like to lean on the young ones,” she said slowly. “We been independent.”

“Where's Frank?”

“Inside. He'd come out to greet you himself, but he made him a vow.”

I shook my head. Men and women now left the doorways of the shacks and gathered around us. More warily, the children were returning.

“Made him a vow,” she said listlessly. “He always been a proud and headstrong man, and when there wasn't no place left for him in this world, no work, no respect, no dignity whatsoever, why, he laid down on his bed and wouldn't let no morsels of food pass his lips.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“It's his way,” she shrugged. “He just holds that if a man's life ain't worth one cent or nod of attention, then he might as well be dead and try to make his death count for something. I suppose that's what Frank had in mind,” she sighed. “But it don't seem that any more attention's being paid to his death than to his life—it just don't seem so. It just don't seem that anyone gives a snap of their fingers whether Frank eats or don't eat, or lives or dies. It's a mighty poor thing, Alvin.”