Part Two

Interlude: January 15, 2003

 
By now you’ve guessed this story’s partly mine.
I’m forty-eight years old, a college teacher
southbound on the Interstate. Three years
of drought and wildfire summers, little snow,
and high winds lift the topsoil in dark clouds.
All Pueblo huddles in the grit, its mill
a relic of a bygone era, stacks
rust-colored in the dusky blue of sky.
 
 
At eighty miles an hour, I seem to force
my aging Subaru against the wind,
then south across Apache Creek until
Huerfano Butte, that isolated cone
of black rock, juts beyond the smoking semis.
Now to the west the Huajatollas rise,
imposing, rocky, veined with ice. I move
into a lost familiarity,
 
 
and take the back road into Aguilar,
named for a doctor who once settled there.
Shift down, go slow past yards of wrecked cars,
cartwheeling tumbleweed, dry rabbit brush
and leafless trees. A town of broken houses,
though at noon the Sunset Tavern’s open.
Slow-moving women shop at Ringo’s Market
where I find a copy of Hispania News.
 
 
An arbitrary route, but it will do
for traveling in time as well as space.
The road winds west along the Apashapa,
that flows in sunlight, freezes in blue shade.
Then snowpack on a washboard road, or mud
where light cuts through the gaps in rocky woods.
At the closed post office of Gulnare, I pause
to check the map, wheel down the narrow road
 
 
southeast through leaning fences, double-wides,
along the tree-edged Canyon del Agua track,
number 44.0, toward Ludlow.
A journey made on paper many times before,
but new, and somehow moving as I near
the opening of mesas onto prairie,
the gravel intersection, monument
with statue, plaques and testimonials.
 
 
This is where it happened. There’s the flat
where striking miners pitched their tents, the pit
protected by a chain-link fence as if
even now the dead were under guard.
There the gaping ruins of a stone saloon,
the shuttered schoolhouse. The road to Berwind
and Tabasco passes under Cedar Hill.
The railbed passes, raised like an old scar.
 
 
Even here, even in these haunted canyons,
people come to speculate in land.
They promise houses where the concrete ruins
and sandstone walls with tidy buttresses
are terrible to anyone who knows
their story. Who could bear to live here now,
I wonder, with this weight of shattered dreams?
Yet people do. People can live anywhere.
 
 
The ovens, once an aquaduct of fire,
are smothered by an avalanche of slag.
I climb the sliding hill among juniper
and pine, then take my sandwich from a bag,
my bottled water, a ruminative meal,
sitting on needled ground. The cold wind whirs
among the topknots overhead. I feel
a presence where no other human stirs.
 
 
This much is true. I made this trip alone,
my wife and cats back home in Woodland Park.
My sweater stuck with needles, hair wind-blown,
I found a small motel before the dark
closed over Trinidad, and wrote these lines.
My ancestors were business folk who ran
a pluck me store. They visited the mines,
moved on to hopes and failures of their own.
 
 
Their lives are part of my life’s inventory;
my role grows smaller when I glimpse the whole.
Today I pocketed a lump of coal.
These are the facts, but facts are not the story.
 

6. Escape from Underground

 
There are photographs and there are books,
the best by Papanikolas, who found
more because he sought more—in libraries,
in voices of the old. All are dead now
who saw what Louis Tikas did at Ludlow;
Zeese Papanikolas heard the rambling men
who patched their memories, stitching the rags
of hearsay, myth, and resurrected desire.
 
 
These and the touched-up photos of the time
are, with varied testimony, what we have.
We piece together Tikas as we make
our own past from what evidence we find.
Imagination’s arrogance is all
I bring to this, a storyteller’s hope
of touching life in others, a poet’s love
of tropes and cadences, the sway of words.
 
 
Because this story hooks into desires
I’ve always felt to know the land I come from,
Tikas is one figure I summon back.
Because I lived in Greece, I once reversed
his journey, hoped to find my life abroad
and failed, though not for any lack of love,
I know the salt and brilliance of his sea,
the heat that stuns you, the cicadas’ whir,
 
 
the bite of ráki on a lover’s tongue. . . .
 

* * *

 
From the naked bed of a Denver whore
named Alice—weazened and tubercular—
Ilias Spantidakis moved back in
to his American skin and his new name,
from leading man in Greek to character
in English who confused the tenses, lost
the proper names for abstract principles
and left some articles to faith. Tikas.
 
 
Louis. “Louie the Greek” who did not go
to war, who drifted through another day
of making coffee, talking, selling sweets
and reading newspapers for immigrants:
tales of strikes in Utah copper mines—
gun-toting Cretans opened fire at scabs.
Dimitris came, but took no coffee, held
a paper he had brought for Louis to read.
 
 
“This says you have a job at the Frederick mine,
Weld County,” Louis said. “They pay your train.”
“That’s what they told me,” said Dimitris. “Tools
and housing for all workers who break the strike.
Once you get in they keep you safe from unions,
let you earn your money.
Nothing to spend it on up there—you save
the wages and you buy your passage home.”
 
 
Louis took a chair to think it over.
First there was Dimitris—always dreaming—
and contracts from Americans always lied.
Then there was the way his body felt,
the dampness of the whore all over him
beneath his shirt. His far off father’s voice
that came in letters hinting that more money
might just save the family from ruin.
 
 
What am I doing, sitting here like this?
I could grow old here, sweeping old sawdust,
talking to men who are growing old
without pride or women.
He stood and called to Gus. The two men talked,
smoking, arm in arm—a verbal contract
in which Louis could leave his suitcase here,
his Cretan costume and boots, to try the mines.
 
 
A matter of percentages and trust—
each man would take a share in the other’s work,
and so had nothing to lose. They shook hands,
slapped each others’ backs. “If only we had
a little glass of ráki for a toast,”
said Louis. But Denver was a dry town.
Dry too the irony of the Scholar’s voice
when he saw Louis wadding up his apron:
 
 
“My boy, what have you done? What have you done?”
 

* * *

 
November 9th brought news to the coffee shop.
The Scholar wore his threadbare coat upon
his shoulders in the heated room, and waved
a wire received by one of his companions.
“I have news,” he said in Greek, his spectacles
becoming wet with tears as he read aloud:
“November 8, 1912. Salonica
has fallen to the Greeks. The Turks retreat!”
 
 
A cheer went up. More Greeks came in to see
what all the fussing was about, and Gus
Kutsofes hugged the Scholar, kissed his cheeks,
demanded silence while the wire was read
half a dozen times, each time to cheers
and then to songs, the words of Solomos,
and finally to dances in a ring,
the chairs and tables pushed back to the walls.
 

* * *

 
By that time Louis Tikas was in hell
or, as he muttered to his fellow Greeks
crouched in the dark, digging in its direction.
The train unloading men at the Frederick mine
had passed through camps of strikers, barbed wire gates
where guards with gunbelts and long rifles stood,
keeping the union out, the poor scabs in.
A clutch of shacks inside the fence, a scar
 
 
of black earth gaping in the low hill’s side,
a crowd of pickers, diggers of all ages,
nationalities, the rails for trundling
coal, the flumes for loading trains—all within
the bustling, pounding, smoky, hacking compound
where generators whined, electric lights
on long wires flickered in the gloom. Each day
men rose in darkness in their crowded shacks,
 
 
and those who worked in seams the bosses hosed
hoped that their socks and sweaters had dried out.
All life was lived inside the wire, as if
self-sentenced to a concentration camp—
those compounds British soldiers had invented
for the Boers. But here were Greeks, Italians,
Slavs, black slaves’ descendents trained from the South
to work in black-face equally with others. . . .
 
 
The first day Louis Tikas hauled a pick
beneath the earth, smelling sweat and mule shit,
kerosene and dust, he felt his heart
screaming to be let out. The men wore hats
with safety lamps in glass cases at the front,
and when the lights went out he felt the air,
darker than any burial, gone dead
like air unfit for healthy men to breathe.
 
 
He heard the earth above him and the timbers
creaking, bosses barking orders ahead.
One candle lit, and he could see the walls
around him, chiseled passages and rooms.
And every whisper, every digger’s step
so amplified it seemed the earth was speaking,
but in a language none could understand.
They followed rails deep in as they were told,
 
 
then deeper down—a cabled elevator
scraped its stanchions, agonies of steel
that echoed up the shaft. He heard a prayer
in Greek. The elevator stopped. A boss
gave him a shove. “Number 12. Wops out here.”
Louis translated for the other Greeks,
all except the man’s mistaking who
they were, and by default he led his crew
 
 
into a moaning chamber full of coal.
That day they trundled blasted rock above
from Number 12 to load in larger cars
on rails so mules could haul
the tonnage out to men who kept the scales.
The work in Number 12 made Louis scream
inside, but like the other men who worked
shoulder to shoulder with him in the seam,
 
 
he seldom spoke, afraid to show his fear.
39 cents a ton,
and now he learned what weight men called a ton.
His wages garnisheed to cover costs
of transport, housing, all he had to buy
at the company store, he worked that day
for nothing but new calluses and sweat
and the happiness he felt when it was done.
 
 
Louis Tikas walked out of the Frederick mine,
one of the working men who saw the light
and laughed, and tried to hold themselves erect
though they were tired and hungry, and felt the weight
of all the earth no longer on their backs
as if to smother them, then saw the fence,
the guards, and out beyond, the striker’s tents
where union men stood watching—out of range.
 
 
I’ll stay, he thought, until I’m making money.
I can’t go back until I’ve seen it through.
That night he shaved his mustache in gray water
because it had only held the dust too close,
and in the spotted mirror saw his face
would not come clean. The lifelines in his palms
were creased with black that he could not wash off.
He ate a tin of beans and went to sleep.
 

* * *

 
Mountains. Distant sea a dream above the olives.
His sisters going out to milk the goats
while he repaired a terrace wall. The weight
of stones.
He woke with burning hands,
the pain of blisters, in a man-packed room
dark as the chambered pit but full of snores.
The freedom of his dreams
far off as sunlight on a swirling cove.
 
 
For all the years he’d lived in America
he’d felt the torture of its emptiness.
The quiet of a village just at nightfall,
goat bells, women’s voices, rustle of leaves,
came back as steadily as waves, as wind
in olive branches he had climbed as a boy
to feel them swaying like small boats at sea.
He felt that constant sway and almost cried.
 
 
Already Louis knew that he would quit,
but when and how, how many Greeks he’d take
straight to the union hall in Frederick—
those were the questions that disturbed his sleep.
How they would leave. How pass the guarded gate.
He’d seen detectives in a motorcar,
armed men from Baldwin-Felts,
the agency well known for breaking strikes.
 
 
And so he rose and worked, went down the pit
and learned to push his fear still deeper down.
The men who argued at the scales were beaten
senseless by the guards while Tikas watched,
but each night after work the Greeks would talk
of apergíes, strikes, and what it meant
to be a scab, and how long they would wait
and what some unarmed men could do to guards.
 
 
Now men brought news about the Balkan war,
while others talked of Democrats elected
here in America: Woodrow Wilson,
the landslide President whose coattails swept
Elias Ammons, Colorado’s new
and sympathetic governor, to office.
Outside the wire men had another life.
“Our task,” said Tikas, “is to get outside.”
 

* * *

 
“So who’s the little Wop out front?” the Pit-boss
asked the man from Baldwin-Felts. Midday,
November 17th. Louis had dropped
his pick. “Eláte, paidiá. Páme!”
Come, boys. We’re going! Now he stood
with sixty Greeks—too many for the guards
to shoot—and said, “You gonna open gate?
We got a right to go. You can’t stop us.”
 
 
The Baldwin-Felts man and the Pit-boss stood
a hundred yards away, and watched the gate
swing open. “Tikas,” the detective said.
“Some pain in the ass. Maybe a union plant.”
The Pit-boss shook his head. “That little runt
has wrecked our total for the day and riled
the men below. You keep an eye on him,
and while you’re at it, send me some more guns.”
 

* * *

 
The shantytown of Frederick had a hall,
a clapboard building where the men on strike
lined up each week to get their union pay.
These men were shouting when the throng of Greeks
marched to the head of the line.
Some little guy named Tikas, ram-rod straight
in sweater and work boots like he owned the joint,
said, “I bring to the union sixty-three Greeks!”
 
 
Two days later the entire working force
of the Frederick mine walked out in one block.
The boys from Baldwin-Felts were mad, broke up
a meeting claiming Tikas had a gun,
but he slipped out before they could arrest him.
Two months later, in a boarding house
in Lafayette, Tikas dove from the back door
ahead of detectives shooting guns at him
 
 
while Greeks shouted, “Run like the hell, Louis!”
He felt a bullet bite the flesh above
his right elbow, but kept on running fast
around a stable and away from lights
into a darkness that protected him.
About this time John Lawson down in Denver
heard of the Greek who could speak English well
and keep his head whenever bullets flew
 
 
and said, “Now you go out, you find that boy.
You patch him up, buy him a suit and tie
and bring him here—he’s in the union’s employ,
okay? Three-fifty for a working day
and all he’s got to do is follow me.”
So Lawson’s word went out. Tikas was hired.
He gave up digging coal and selling coffee,
though he stopped by the shop to be admired.
 
 
“A new man.” Gus and the Scholar touched his coat.
“The union’s got you now, my boy. Watch out.”