Long-legged and agile, the native scrapper
hunting alone or in packs, feasting, starving,
tricking its small prey to leave their burrows,
coyote was no friend to local ranchers.
They shot the beasts and hung their carcasses
as fenceline warnings. Still coyote preyed
by day or night, survival’s worshipper,
and skirted camps so humans wouldn’t see him.
Sometimes he picked clean what others killed—
the catamounts or men with guns, the blizzards
that left cattle frozen on the prairie
and drove hardscrabble ranchers to despair.
Some sign of death could meet a fellow’s eye
wherever he looked: knives in a saloon,
the typhoid spread by dirty water, diggers
buried by the dozen deep in the mines.
Mole’s death was one more sadness in the towns:
Tabasco, Berwind, Ludlow, Aguilar. . . .
Las Animas County had La huerfana
as yet another cause for discontent.
“It was her father’s life,” one digger said,
“his twelve years working for the C. F. & I.
The bastards tried to pay her damages
in scrip, then set her packing up the house.”
Another shook his head: “Mole should’ve known.
He should’ve sat and waited for the Fire-boss
to test for gas. It wasn’t safe to go
but he went anyway—his own mistake.”
And of the girl, “She still a child,” said one.
“She need familia. Where she go spend
the paper they give her for the pluck me store?
Now they got strangers in the house with her.”
Most kept their voices low or did not speak
for fear of company spies. Too Tall and Lefty
chanced it the afternoon the mine was closed
and walked the dozen miles to Trinidad.
The union man, John Lawson, had come down
from Denver. In a sympathizer’s house
he met small groups of men. Big, steady-eyed
as he shook their hands, he had a boxer’s build.
He spoke of work as a man who knew work:
“I was a picker back in Pennsylvania,
nine years old and all day climbing the slag.
I’ve done my share of digging, timber cutting.
I was down here for the strike in ’03,
seven years ago. Damn near lost my wife
and daughter when they dynamited our shack.
I took a bullet for the cause. We lost
because they sent militia with their guards
and trained in scabs—new starving immigrants.”
He paused, seeming to face each man who stood
in the lamplit room, and for that moment he
was P. T. Barnum and he knew his crowd
by heart. “You boys, maybe you were the scabs?
You needed work and they had work to give?
It starts that way. The scabs take union jobs
and soon enough the scabs learn why we struck.
We’ll get no help from William Howard Taft
or Guggenheims and Rockefellers, the New York
money-grubbers. They see you as capital.”
And Too Tall thought he’d never heard a man
speak on his feet like this one, who could use
words and fists in equal measure. He smelled
the unwashed bodies of men pressing close
to listen as John Lawson told of fights,
of sneaking into Walsenburg one night
where “King” Farr ran saloons and whorehouses,
ran the county as his own demesne
in fealty to those greater kings back East,
and deputized any man who’d wear a gun
or wield a blackjack on the law’s behalf.
Lawson took his lumps there, as did others.
That was how John Lawson worked at first—
in small groups, winning men with words and not
hysterics, careful to talk of fairness, bonds
a working man could understand, the things
he saw himself, from cheating weight men to
the beatings meted out by Sheriff Farr.
The company had eyes in Trinidad
as well, so one man stood watch at the door.
“Our time is coming,” he told the men. “Tonight
you see a handful whispering in a room,
but when we shut down every mine, stay clear
of their illegal scrip
and douse coke-oven fires, you bet your life
they’ll notice.”
“We’ve only scrip,” said Too Tall.
“It’s company beans we eat or we eat nothing,
company homes or we’re in cardboard boxes.”
“That’s why the union’s here. Only in a group,
only together can we win the day.”
“They’ll fight,” said Too Tall, “as they always have.”
He thought of his dead friend and had no heart
to see more death.
“And we’ll fight back,” John Lawson said. “The union
wants a victory and the nation needs it.
We’re hoarding guns. Now the job’s to win peace.”
The fierceness in his face had disappeared.
“Peace among the miners. Stop Piedmontese
from scrapping with Sicilians, keep the Slavs
from back-stabbing Japs, restrain the Greeks
when a Cretan picks a fight.
A regular Mexican riot’s what they want.
The company pretends to be paternal,
pretends they give a damn who lives and dies.
They want you tribes of miners to say thanks
for the table scraps they give of their good hearts.
But men, these rich rats are getting fatter
daily on your sweat, your sweethearts’ hunger.
Now’s the time for an alternative
to pissing your days in someone else’s dirt.”
Collar loose, sleeves rolled, big hands on hips,
Lawson paced, then looked at Lefty and Too Tall:
“You blasting crews take home a wage—it’s scrip
but it’s pay by the job. What’s a digger get?
He’s got a weight man tagging every ton
he wheels out—coal, not slag. He’s got to pick
the bony from the coal—that’s unpaid dead-work.
And then there’s timbers and props to make it safe—
no pay for that so a man just timbers less
with one result—more dead Dagos and Japs,
and what mine owner ever cared for them?”
He thumped his chest. “We’re here to say a Jap’s
as good as a Mexican Dago Greek
and they’re all as good as any Rockefeller.
We want a union. We want an eight-hour day
and the free choice of where to spend cash wages
and fair pay for dead-work. We only ask
what’s ours, but if it’s war the company wants
we’ll find a good use for your dynamite.”
They left the meeting in the predawn dark
and started north. Outside of town they took
the moonlit footpaths cutting the dirt roads.
Lefty seemed to feel in his right hand
a ready fist—who needed fingers to fight?
With each step his mind was naming the names
of men he’d pick for beatings. There was Coyle,
for one, who weighed coal on company scales.
There were diggers like Pacheco, Fante, Smith,
who whispered to bosses what they heard men say
below in the dark. The spies were obvious
because they fried more bacon with their beans
and all their kids wore shoes. He was a scrapper,
Lefty was, and never dodged a fight.
From the day he reached New York at age ten,
he fought hard and he learned American.
Mostly he learned to swear. He had a nose
for women, could sniff a whore out of a pew
(not that he went to church)
and seemed to fight and fuck his way through life
when he wasn’t blowing rock walls to bits.
“Do you think we’ll do it?’ he asked the Scot.
“We could make those bastards piss their britches,
couldn’t we? We could bust a few noses.”
“Aye,” said Too Tall. “We could that. And our own
could bleed a little too. Both sides are scunnered.
They’ll make a scrimmage or a heap of bones.”
He paused on the footpath, hands in trouser pockets,
and then looked down at Lefty. “I’m afraid
the fight you’re looking for will come too soon.”
Some movement caught his eye. He turned to look
but it was only moonlight catching glints
of broken glass beside the path. He stared
a long time at night shadows from the scrub.
And though the land was high and dry out here
he thought of Ayrshire where he used to walk
on nights like this, a moon to light the way.
“I wonder,” he said. And Lefty answered him:
“That’s your trouble, always wondering something.”
And Too Tall: “If I’ll stay on here, I mean.”
“This is my home,” said Lefty. “I’ll kill the man
who says it isn’t. I’ll kill him with one hand
if I have to.”
“No,” said his friend. “Not I.
I mean I’ve no objection to a union,
but I won’t kill. And won’t stay here forever.
What I want’s a cash wage for a day’s work,
and one day I’ll pack up my wife and boys
and buy a passage home.” A wooden snap
made both men stop and look. The four-legged shadow
scooted from behind a tree and crossed
the scrub, a furry critter in its jaws.
“An early breakfast,” Too Tall said, and laughed.
“Who knows what’s to become of the likes of us?
I wonder every time I set a wire,
and now I wonder what our friend John Mole
would make of all this talk.”
Mention of the dead man changed his mood
as if a cloud had crossed the moon, and sight
of that coyote with its pulsing food
darting for cover at the end of night.
He felt so tired and hungry. They stopped to eat
dry bread they’d brought along for the long hike.
“I know,” said Lefty as he rubbed his feet.
“He’d go too slow at first. And then he’d strike.”