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.”

“How long has this being going on?”

“Three days. But tell me now if Laurie come with you, because I ain’t sure I want her to see her daddy like this.”

“Laurie’s dead, Mother. She passed away a few weeks ago.”

At first, Mrs. McGrady bent toward me, as if she hadn’t heard my words. She shook her head, and then she began to tremble. One of the women came over and put an arm around her. Mrs. McGrady forced her mouth into a grimace and said,

“I mistook you, Alvin, didn’t I?”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Laurie’s dead.”

“That old bullet wound?”

“That and pneumonia.”

“Poor child. Poor little child.” The tears ran down her face. The ragged, skinny men and women from the shacks stood around silently while the woman cried, and then Mrs. McGrady swallowed hard and said,

“We best go in and tell Frank. Laurie was the apple of his eye.”

I helped her to the shack and into it. It was a miserable, broken little hovel, one room, the whole of it like a great packing case, and in one corner, on the floor, some bedding upon which a cadaver of a man lay. The windows were covered with paper, and the press of people around the door blocked the light. In the gloom, there was a smell of poverty and decay. Mrs. McGrady went over to the man and asked whether he could hear her. He didn’t stir. Macintosh whispered to me, “He looks dead, Cutter.” I knelt down beside him and found his wrist and a weak pulse. He wasn’t dead but he wasn’t terribly alive either. “This here’s Alvin,” Mrs. McGrady whimpered, “and he come down here to tell us about Laurie passing away. So you better listen to him, Frank.”

Frank McGrady didn’t move, until Macintosh and I, after a hurried and whispered consultation, attempted to lift him—to carry him out to the car. Then, with surprising strength, he flung us off and cried at me,

“I hear you and her plain enough, Alvin Cutter. If Laurie’s dead, that just backs up my resolve. So don’t you lay a hand on me. I know what I’m doing, and I intend to do it.”

 

2

As we drove back to Clinton, Macintosh observed to me that he had seen a good deal in his time, and that now he had seen it all. “Just all of it, Cutter—my good heavens, yes!”

“Will he go through with it?” I wanted to know.

“Well, what do you think? If you’re asking me whether he’ll starve himself to death, why he most certainly will. Why, this county is just filled up with the worst, most stiff-necked stupid folk you ever met, Cutter. If they make up their minds to do a thing, they do it.”

“What can he hope to gain? That’s what I don’t understand.”

“You got to look at it the other way, Cutter,” Macintosh sighed. “Ask yourself what he has to gain by staying alive. Did you see that place? Do you know how they live? By begging from those who haven’t much more than they have, and since they’re proud, they have to be half dead of starvation before they beg.”

Back in Clinton, I went to the hotel and called Oscar Smith in New York. He had no idea where I was, nor had I spoken to him since Laura’s funeral. Now he got on the phone and wanted to know what I was doing in West Virginia. I told him about it. I told him what I had seen and what Frank McGrady was attempting. “Well, for Christ’s sake, stop him!” Smith said. “After all, he’s your father-in-law.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t let him starve himself to death.”

“I know that too. I can’t stop him either.”

“Well, call the cops.”

“Cops! God damn it, Oscar, I’m in West Virginia. Don’t you understand? A coal miner who doesn’t even understand the meaning of the expression ‘hunger strike’ has gone on one to protest the fact that he’s been robbed of his livelihood and his dignity. Doesn’t that make any impression on you?”

“Sure, Al, I’m impressed.”

“You once sent me down here on a big story—a story I didn’t recognize and you did. Well, as far as I’m concerned, here’s a bigger story. One man against the system. Pitting his life for his dignity—a man whose line goes straight back to the first pioneers who opened this country—”

“Al, it’s not a big story,” Oscar Smith said patiently. “It’s ten lines on page six, and that’s pushing it the limit for you.”

“Oscar, you’re wrong!”

“I’m not wrong, I’m right. You’re involved, I’m not.”

“Oscar, a front-page story could save his life.”

“Could it? Who reads a New York paper down there? I can’t do it, Al. Don’t ask me to. Call the cops.”

“Go to hell!” I told him. Then I asked him where he thought Ben Holt might be, and he said that the last thing about him over the wire was that he was testifying at an injunction hearing in Pittsburgh. That was the day before. I gave them enough facts in New York for the ten-line story on page six, and then I called the headquarters of the International Miners Union in Pittsburgh. They told me that Ben Holt would be there at five o’clock.

Because, I suppose, I had nowhere else to go and because I couldn’t sit with myself and let the hours go by, I went back across the street to Macintosh’s office and told him what I had been trying to do.

“You don’t know Ben Holt very well, do you?” he remarked.

“Not very well, no. I spent some time up there on Fenwick Crag back in 1920, but not too much with Ben Holt.”

“And you expect him to come down here to stop Frank McGrady from starving to death?”

“That was the general idea.”

“You’re plumb out of your mind,” Macintosh smiled. “From what I know of Ben Holt and hear about him, he wouldn’t cross the street to keep his own mother from starving.”

“That’s a hard reputation for a man to have.”

“I suppose it is. But even if he came down here, what makes you think that McGrady would listen?”

“McGrady worshiped the ground Ben Holt walked on.”

Macintosh shrugged, and we talked about some other things, and then I returned to the hotel and called Pittsburgh again. This time I reached Ben Holt and spoke to him. He remembered me, and he remembered Laura better. When I told him that Laura was dead, all he said was, “I’m sorry about that, Cutter, deeply sorry.” But he said it in such a way that I couldn’t be certain that he was moved at all. Then I told him exactly what I had seen at the McGradys’ place.

After a long pause, he asked me, “What do you think I can do for them, Cutter?”

“I think Frank McGrady will listen to you. Otherwise, he’ll die. I know how much I’m asking. It’s just the life of one half-dead unemployed miner.”

“There’s lots of miners,” Holt said coldly. “In many ways, Cutter, my original estimate of you stands. I think you’re an insensitive son of a bitch who is still teething. But the hell with that. You stay there in Clinton, and I’ll be down on the morning train.” Then he hung up; not a word more than that, and no opportunity to thank him or discuss it with him.

I was left with the impression of a man who disliked me deeply and earnestly, and I was young enough to react to this impression; but in the light of what followed, I hardly think I was right, even for the moment. The truth of it—somewhat harder to swallow—was that Ben Holt had never looked at me long enough or intently enough to distill any more than a name out of my personality. On my part, I had measured him by the cumulative newspaper history of the young miner from Ringman, Pennsylvania, who had fought and clawed his way to the top of the Miners Union. Add to that the fact that Laura adored him, and that I was young enough to be fiercely jealous, and you have the basis for my reciprocal opinion. So for all practical and realistic purposes, my relationship with Ben Holt began the following morning, not four years previously.

After I finished talking to Holt, I went back to Macintosh’s office and told him that Holt was coming.

“That beats me,” he said. “That sure beats the hell out of me. Why?”

“Suppose you ask him. He’s coming, that’s all. I was wondering if you could meet the train with me tomorrow. This is hard for me to say, but suppose I hire your services for tomorrow. I can’t keep imposing on you.”

“What are you hiring me as, a chauffeur?”

“You know what I mean, Macintosh. Your business is lousy. If I give you ten dollars for a day’s work, what’s wrong?”

“Get off my back and get out of here, Cutter,” Macintosh sighed. “I guess fresh kids like you grow up, but it takes so goddamn long. I’ll pick you up in front of the hotel, at six tomorrow morning. Take it or leave it. I’m a lawyer with an old, beat-up car, and sometimes I drive my friends around in it, but I don’t hire out with it.”

I nodded and left. The next morning, Macintosh was waiting for me, and we drove down to the depot and got there just as the train pulled in—the sweet, cool spring morning, the dark, shadowed sides of hill and mountain bringing me back to my first time in Clinton, four years ago.

Ben Holt was the only passenger to get off the train, and he swung down with that easy, almost feline grace that was a part of all his movements. He carried a small valise as if it were weightless, and he stood there, big and thoughtful, waiting for Macintosh and myself. In the time since I had last seen him, he had put on a few pounds, not much but enough to thicken him slightly; there was gray in his hair at the temples, and he looked more than his thirty-two years. He shook hands with Macintosh eagerly and warmly, and then gave me his crushing grip and told me that he was sorry for his bad temper of the night before.

“I was more to blame than you, Mr. Holt.”

“Forget it, Al. Forget the Mr. Holt. I don’t know you half as well as I might, but I knew that girl you married. Every time I looked at Laurie McGrady, I fought it out with myself and told myself that I was a married man. I don’t know whether I was in love with her or not—but when you told me she was dead, well, I couldn’t think of anything to say. What do you say?”

I shook my head. Macintosh said, “Do you want to go to the hotel first, Ben, or to my house and clean up? You can stay at my place. It might be better than registering at the hotel. Or shall we go straight out to McGrady’s? He’s bad, if he’s not dead already.”

“Go straight out there,” Holt said.

None of us said very much as we rode out to the little valley where the McGradys were living. Holt asked a few questions about the situation that drove the old man to it, and Macintosh explained, as much as explanation was needed. Ben Holt knew about West Virginia; he had been there before.

Again, the miners and their women and their kids stood in front of the rotten, crumbling shacks and watched us walk down the strip of cinder path to where the McGradys lived. Mrs. McGrady came out to greet us. It was very early in the morning, but people with empty stomachs sleep lightly. Mrs. McGrady apologized for her appearance. “Just think,” she said to Ben Holt, “that you come down here, all the way down here, God bless you, and all the hospitality we got is this poor place and not even a bit of breakfast to set out for you. That shames me, Ben, truly.”

“It’s all right,” said Holt. “It’s yourself and Frank that troubles me.”

“Not myself, bless your heart. Oh, I got my misery, sure enough, with Laurie hardly cold in her grave, but that’s done. I don’t want Frank taken. I don’t want him taken.”

“He won’t be taken,” Holt said. “He’ll be all right.”

“He’s poorly now. So help me, he’s so poorly.”

We went into the little shack. In the twenty hours since I had been there, Frank McGrady had literally withered away, as if the remaining and frail support for his flesh had simply collapsed. The picture of how he looked there and then was to remain with me for many years, returning when I saw the victims of Hitler’s concentration camps. He lay there with his eyes closed, breathing very slowly. Ben Holt felt the old man’s pulse. Then he shook his shoulder slightly trying to waken him, but McGrady did not respond. “Please now, wake up, Frank,” his wife pleaded. “There’s good friends here now who are going to help us.” I put my arm around her and told her that Frank was unconscious and that we would have to take him to the hospital. “I won’t leave him,” she protested, and I told her that she wouldn’t have to leave him, that she could come with us. I had thought, when Laura died, that nothing else could touch me and that I had been hurt as sharply and deeply as hurt reaches; but this broken old woman—who had been so strong and healthy and certain only a few years ago—opened every wound that Laura’s death had made. I felt that I had brought nothing but death to her, the news of Laura’s death, and now this; and if it was unreasonable, still I felt that way and I showed it. Ben Holt must have understood. If I implied that he lacked sensitivity, that must be qualified. It was a part of his own need, whether to be sensitive or not. He could build a wall around himself, or he could open himself and be receptive to the slightest quiver of pain or joy.

He noticed what I did and said. He whispered to me to take Mrs. McGrady out to the car, while he and Macintosh carried out the old man. They put him in the back of the car, with his head on his wife’s lap, and Ben Holt covered him with my topcoat and his own. We three, Holt, Macintosh and myself, sat in front as we drove to the hospital.

It was a long drive, almost two hours, through wild mountain country of almost indescribable beauty. Once Holt mentioned it,

“Rich and beautiful and sweet as honey—and it’s brought nothing but misery to my people.”

I noticed his use of the phrase “my people,” and remembered it long afterwards, for I never heard him use it again about coal miners. But his use of it at that moment was real and meaningful.

As for Frank McGrady, I think I knew already that he was dying. I had seen enough men die in France to know the look and quality of someone who no longer struggles for life, or wants it very much; and when that point comes, when you don’t want it and don’t fight for it, it’s easy to die. Frank McGrady died three hours after we reached the hospital. They didn’t like to have the word starvation on death certificates, so they put it down as malnutrition, which is, I suppose, a way of saying the same thing.

I found a room in the hotel at Charleston for Mrs. McGrady. Macintosh had to get back to Clinton, but he said that he would return the following day for the funeral. “You don’t have to,” I said to him. “We’ve taken enough of your time, and you’re not really involved in this, Mac.” “I’m beginning to change my mind about Ben Holt, Cutter, so don’t make me change my mind about you. ‘I am involved in mankind because it numbers me and troubles me.’ You’re an educated lad, so figure out who wrote that. I knew Frank McGrady longer than you did. God damn it to hell, I think I knew him longer than you been on this earth. So mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”

“There’s no need to blow your top at me. I only meant to save you trouble.”

“Sure. I’m sorry, kid. But trouble is legal currency in West Virginia. You don’t save it, only spend it.”

He left, and I managed to persuade Mrs. McGrady to have a little supper and then to lie down for a while. They had given me some sleeping pills for her at the hospital. She took them and slept through the night. She was about as exhausted and empty as a human being can ever be.

Meanwhile, Ben Holt had registered at the hotel, his deci sion to remain there for another day made without consulting me. I met him in the lobby, and he asked me whether he couldn’t buy me a dinner.

“Let me buy it. I owe it to you, and a lot more.”

“You owe me nothing, Al, and the sooner you realize that, the better off we’ll both be. I didn’t come down here because you asked me to. The McGradys did a lot for me—more than most human beings ever do for anyone else, as you may remember. Now I’ll see the poor bastard into his grave, which is little enough to ask of anyone. As for the dinner, I can afford it. I remember that you were quite impressed with the fact that I had raised my wages to five thousand dollars a year. I’ve raised them again since then. Eight thousand a year right now, if you’re going to file another story about me. So I can afford to buy you dinner.”

At dinner, I said to him, “What is it you’ve got against me, Holt—you and Macintosh, both of you? Is it the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I look? Maybe right at this moment I feel less kind toward the world than either of you, but I don’t spew it out in bile. If a man is hurt, he can keep the hurt inside, not use it as a sledge hammer.”

Holt regarded me thoughtfully for a long moment, before he nodded and said gently, “Maybe he can, Al. Maybe he can.”

He went on eating, but then suddenly paused with his fork in the air and said, as gently as before, “I’m sorry, Al. I owe you an apology.”

“You don’t owe me a thing.”

He went on eating. He finished the food on his plate, eating quickly, as miners do, and then looked up at me and grinned. It was the first time he had ever smiled at me just that way—and Ben Holt’s smile was a warm, ingratiating thing, rewarding and difficult to resist.

“Maybe it’s because we’re miners, Al—both of us, Macintosh and myself. You didn’t know Mac was once a digget did you?”

I shook my head.

“He was. And a digger lives with bile, not for another digger, but for the whole outside world. Maybe with reason. The world doesn’t know that we exist, and the world doesn’t give a damn whether we do or not. It makes us sour and nasty when we got no business to be sour and nasty.”

He offered me a cigar, which I accepted; but as I lit up, I pointed out to him that he himself was a little more than a miner.

“As one college man to another, Al?” he asked me, raising a brow.

“You had four years of college, Holt. I had a year in Princeton and then I enlisted. I never went back. So it’s not exactly as one college man to another.”

“Suppose you call me Ben, which will equalize things a little. And who’s using the sledge hammer now?”

“All right, Ben.”

“Did you ever taste a worse cigar?”

“Never,” I admitted.

“Three for a dime. That’s a miner’s smoke. Start with an already exacerbated set of lungs and bleed them on that cigar, and you shorten a man’s years of misery.” He looked at me inquiringly. “That’s a lousy joke, isn’t it? The hell with mining for a while! Tell me about you, Al. You know all about me, and I know nothing about you except that you disapprove of a man raising his own wages and that you remind me of my father-in-law. You had a year of college, and you went overseas. Then what?”

I found myself talking. When he wanted to be, Ben Holt was an easy man to talk to and a good listener. It was not often that he wanted to listen, but now he did, and I found myself telling him the story of my life for what it was worth, the son of a country-weekly newspaper editor in upstate New York who had to see what war was like and had to beat the big city at its own game. There wasn’t much to tell. A lot had happened to me and nothing had happened to me, depending on how you looked at it, and the important things did not bear talking about. I had no desire to discuss Laura with anyone.

“Now she’s dead,” Ben said. “What do you intend to do, Al?”

“I have a job.”

“What kind of a job?”

“A reporter on a New York paper is a pretty good kind of a job, I think. I’m not ambitious. I do my work. I’ll probably never be as rich as you.”

“What kind of work? They tell you, go down to West Virginia and kill Ben Holt, you do it. Right?”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“No. But it’s not so complicated either. Or maybe you never thought about it?”

“I thought about it,” I said.

He didn’t press the point, and we talked about other things; but running through my mind over and over again was one salient fact, that this was Ben Holt, the most discussed labor leader in the United States, the man who had already been designated as everything from a tool of the Kremlin to a paranoiac despot, and he had walked out of all his involvements and problems to be down here in West Virginia to do some kind of small homage to an old, stubborn mountain miner. Writing about it this way and looking back at it through all the years, it may not seem like a great deal; but to me at the time, it was the finest gesture a man could make, and I honored Ben Holt for it as I have honored few men. I never forgot it either.

 

3

Through their generations, the McGradys had been buried in the yard of a small Methodist church outside of Clinton. But the old, slow and traditional mountain ways of Hogan County had crumbled under the impact of coal, and some years back, Frank McGrady broke with the church and its pastor. Mrs. McGrady refused to allow Frank’s body to be returned to Clinton. She held that as a strong and willful man—which he was—a hundred deaths would not have driven him to make his peace with the people at that church. Macintosh had a cousin with a pulpit in Charleston, and though they were Baptists, Mrs. McGrady insisted that she wanted Frank buried there. She said that the denominational difference did not matter, since most of her people had been Baptists and it had never bothered Frank any. I purchased two plots in the cemetery, so that eventually Mrs. McGrady could lie next to her husband. Ben Holt went with me, and when I was short some twenty dollars in cash, Ben put it up for me. Later I cashed a check, and though I insisted, he refused repayment. With no sentiment he said the thought of owning twenty dollars’ worth of a miner’s grave in a state that had run him out at gunpoint was comforting.

Mrs. McGrady’s sister and her family drove in for the funeral, their car loaded with as many relatives as it could carry. It was the only car for rent in Clinton, so the funeral was limited to a handful of people. Mrs. McGrady drove back to Clinton with Max Macintosh and his wife. It had been decided that she would live with her sister, and I told her sister that I would do my best to send some kind of stipend every month, so as to ease the burden. At the time I left for West Virginia from New York, there had been between six and seven hundred dollars in my bank account. I left three hundred dollars with Mrs. McGrady. To her it was a fortune, more money than she had ever seen at one time in all her life; to me it represented some attempt to square myself with my former indifference to my wife’s mother and father and the beginning of an attempt to work out my own responsibility for what had taken place. It was not easy to get Mrs. McGrady to accept the money; she was proud and independent; but Ben Holt added his arguments to mine and she gave in. I left Ben Holt in Charleston; I planned to return to Clinton with Mrs. McGrady; but before we parted, he said to me,

“There’s an old saying, Al, that you seal a bond with birth and with death. I hate to think that we won’t see each other again.”

I nodded, and told him that I couldn’t properly thank him, so I wouldn’t try.

“Maybe you could.”

“Tell me how, Ben.”

“All right—and this isn’t off the top of my hat. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I got down here and met you. You know that I’m president of the union. That’s a title. The Miners Union is like the League of Nations, bound together with a title and nothing else. Every local in the union is suspicious of every other local. Every region has some grudge against every other region. The diggers spend more time fighting and hating each other than they do trying to win something for themselves as a group—and most of all they mistrust and fear the International organization. All right, this is complicated and parochial and I can’t explain the situation in five minutes. But there’s no hope for the miners or the union unless I can unite it, weld it together, and put it under the leadership of a single man. This is what I face over the coming years, and this is what I have to do. In the immediate future, I face a strike—a big one and a hard one.”

“How does that affect me?”

“I’ll tell you how. I can’t do this alone. I need a staff—a group of able and dedicated people who will work with me—to an end I think is pretty worthwhile, the raising of hundreds of thousands of working men out of virtual slavery. Well, I’ve been finding such people. I have some. I need more. I need someone like yourself, someone who is literate and intelligent and understands what it means to be a digger and to live a digger’s life. I need a man who can write and who can think and who can influence other people with his thinking—a man who can direct research and come up with the facts and figures, because the facts are going to be our tools, our weapons, our bullets. In other words, I need a combination of a writer, a public-relations man, and a research director. Someday, this man will have a staff and organization of his own. Today, he has to be everything himself.” He paused and watched me reflectively. “I think you’re that man, Al.”

I shook my head. “It’s flattering, and I have to thank you, Ben—but I’m not your man. I only know enough about mining to be aware of what I don’t know. As for writing, I’m a reporter, as good as some and worse than most.”

“Is it the pay? The pay isn’t much, sixty-five a week, but it will be better in time.”

“It’s not the pay—”

“I don’t expect you to decide right now, Al. Think it over. Our national headquarters are in Pomax, Illinois, and I’ll be back there next week. Send me a wire if you decide to say yes.”

 

4

I had a good many things to think about on the train back to New York, among them, Ben Holt’s offer. That was a time, then, in the middle 1920s, when the labor movement was beginning to bulk large on the American horizon. In the Northwest, during the wartime years, the International Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” as they were better known, had provided lurid headlines and meat for the anti-Bolshevik grinder. Against the background of the Wobblies, the Syndicalists, the Left Wing Socialists, and now, lately, the Communists, the National Confederation of Labor had emerged as a strong and almost respectable force. Under the sure, conservative and careful guiding hand of its careful leaders, it had laid down a pattern of American trade unionism that seemed destined to endure and become the blueprint for all the foreseeable future. Ignoring the great masses of American workingmen, it organized, where it organized, only the highest skills among workers, carpenters and plumbers and steamfitters and cigar makers and so forth—a so-called “elite” of working people.

The only fault in their plan of organization, at the moment, was provided by Ben Holt and his International Miners Union, a thorn in their side and a challenge to everything they stood for; for the Miners Union, based on the diggers, took in every workingman who had anything to do with coal, from the breaker boys to the highly skilled explosives experts. And whereas the Confederation held itself to careful, systematic exploration of every legal possibility, the Miners Union was as fierce and unpredictable as the individual coal miners who comprised its membership.

Ben Holt and the men around him were the “young Turks” of the labor movement, and already, in the few years since he had clawed his way to national leadership of the union, his name had become the best known and most discussed of any man in the labor movement. Whether he was conducting a private war in West Virginia or raging from the gallery of the Illinois or Pennsylvania State Legislature, Ben Holt made news and was news. Everything about him was flamboyant and dramatic, his great physical size and strength, his unruly, usually uncombed head of hair, his piercing blue eyes, his voice, which he used like a musical instrument, soft and gentle and cozening at times, and at other times booming with all the force of a bass drum, his manner of charging into legislative bodies and challenging the elected representatives in their own sanctuaries, his roaring anger at the condition of mines and miners, and the unremitting violence and purpose with which he pursued and fought his enemies in the internecine warfare that was tearing his union apart and which, according to those who commented on labor, would eventually destroy it.

All this about Ben Holt I knew. I knew that even among the miners, for every man who loved him and honored him, there were two who hated him and mistrusted him. I had personally witnessed him running the full gamut of his moods and violences, and only during these past few days, I had listened to Macintosh’s estimation of him, and then watched Macintosh’s grudging surrender to the man’s charm and purpose.

All in all, this was the last man in the world I should desire to work for. How, I wondered, could anyone work for and with such a man, adjust daily and possibly hourly to his varying moods, his violences, his infantilisms, his hatreds, his ambitions? Sixty-five dollars a week was precious small reward for that kind of existence. There were men, I knew, well-educated men, men of good families and wealthy families, who gave up all that might have come to them in the way of physical comfort, to join the labor movement and be a part of it. These were men of high ideals and unshakable purpose; but I was not one of them. When I was sent down to West Virginia in 1920, I had no more sympathy for the working class and its struggles than any other reporter on the Daily Mail. Perhaps less. I knew little about miners and I cared less. But that was in 1920, and in all truth, I had learned something, if not very much, about what it means to be a digger in a mine. I had married a miner’s daughter, and I had watched her die from the final effects of a bullet originally meant for a miner.

As I turned over and over in my mind Ben Holt’s offer, it made no sense—and still I could not put it aside. The man fascinated me. I was then and always have been suspicious of men who by some personal magic won the adoration of other men, and Ben Holt was such a man; but against my suspicions was his openness, his simplicity in the act of setting aside all that burdened him and coming down to West Virginia to watch a miner die. How much could Frank McGrady have meant to Ben Holt? True enough, when the miners were beleaguered and driven in 1920, Frank McGrady had turned his farm over to them; but he was a miner himself, and his scrubby, rock-strewn few acres were not much of a farm. Nor did he do it for Ben Holt. But when I asked Ben to come, he came—and I could not shake myself loose from that simple fact.

The truth of the matter is that the death of Frank McGrady, coming so soon upon Laura’s death, had shaken me more than I cared to admit, even to myself. Laura’s was a downhill road; she had never really recovered from the bullet wound; and I had seen the end months before it came. But never before had I known a man to do what Frank McGrady did; Gandhi and the whole history of non-violent non-resistance were still in the future; and there was no folklore or body of belief to assure a man that it was a noble thing to die silently for a principle. In fact, there was nothing visibly noble about Frank McGrady; to all apparent purposes, he was an ignorant mountaineer who picked his nose in public, spoke a grotesque, twisted version of English, and had spent most of his adult life scraping at a patch of poor soil or bent double in a coal mine. As a son-in-law, I had not been proud of him—and now I wondered whether there wasn’t more strange and noble pride in his body and soul than in all the people I respected put together.

I had not wept for Laura’s death, but that night, lying sleepless in my swaying berth in the train, I wept for her father and for all the mangled meaninglessness of man’s toil and hopes and existence. Before morning, I had made up my mind about what I would do. I would work for Ben Holt.

 

5

We sat in Oscar Smith’s small, partitioned office, able to look through the dirty glass at the whole length of the Mail’s city room, the place that had been my life and school and training ground for better than five years, and he said to me,

“When I fire a man, Al, I feel guilty and rotten and a real solid member of the human race, but I don’t doubt myself. When a young fellow like you quits, then I doubt myself.”

“Why?” I shrugged. “It’s no personal reflection on you. I just want to move on. I don’t want to sit alone in any lousy room and remember Laura.”

“You’ll remember Laura. And wherever you go, you’ll be sitting alone in some lousy room, because they haven’t figured out any other way for respectable existence.”

“I suppose so.”

“If you want more money …?”

“I don’t, but it’s nice to hear you offering more money to a punk you insisted was never worth the money you paid him.”

“Even punks grow up. Sometimes. Only it makes no sense for you to go out there and work for Ben Holt. It’s a quixotic impulse, and I think you have some notion of what would please Laura. I may sound like a person of no feeling, but let me tell you, Al, that you can’t please the dead.” I shrugged. “And for a man like Holt—you’re not one of those starry-eyed worshipers at labor’s shrine, Al, and you never will be. Not if I’m any judge. You can’t work for Holt—you can only belong to him.”

“You know him, Oscar?”

“I don’t have to know him,” Smith replied sourly. “I know his kind.”

My father also knew his kind. I had wired Holt that I would be in Pomax in a few days. I sold everything I had, every stick of furniture that had been Laura’s and mine, every possession, gave away her clothes, crated my books and sent them home to my father’s house, and then packed my three alternate suits and sufficient linen into a suitcase. This and a portable typewriter comprised my worldly goods. I took the train to Rochester, New York, and there I hired a car to take me the remaining twelve miles to my home town. I had left behind me in New York a few friends and more than a few memories.

My mother had been cooking all day. She wept a little, and then she fed me as long as I would eat, and I ate to double my capacity to please her. After dinner, my father told me what kind of a man Ben Holt was. I listened and saw no purpose in arguing with him. “The point—the important point, I mean—is that I hate to see you fritter your years away. I know that Laura’s death was a terrible blow, an awful blow. But you have to go on living. You had something important and worthwhile on the Mail. You were learning a profession we regard highly in our family. I had hoped someday you would come home here and take over the paper.”

“Someday,” I nodded. “You’re still a young man.”

“Not so young—not so young at all, Al. I just wish you’d think about this—”

I had thought about it. I always went home with high hopes and warm feelings, and it was never right. It wasn’t right this time either. I spent the next day with my father in the little building where he published his weekly, and the day after that, I left for Illinois.

 

6

I have spoken of the bitter natural beauty of the places where men mine coal, and while it is true of the eastern regions and Colorado too, the part of southern Illinois they call Egypt is an exception. At the best of a shining spring day, Egypt is tolerable and no more; but it was pouring rain when I got off the train at Pomax, and under the black sky, I saw a sprawling, silent, soot-streaked town, a fairly large central square, at one side of which was the railroad station, a pavement of rough cobbles and sidewalks of ancient red brick, and around the other sides of the square, brick and frame buildings of two and three stories, each having in common with the others a drab, dirty, unlovely exterior. Two or three automobiles were parked at the curb, and a miserable horse hitched to a delivery cart stood in the beating rain. But of a human being, there was no sight or sound, only the wind-swept, rain-swept square.

There is a distinctive mark on any coal town, not simply the stain of soot, but the singular and peculiar stain of poverty and frustration and unlike any other poverty and frustration; and by this a coal town signs its name, so that you know it when you come or when you pass by. But in Pomax, there was another factor—the unseen but felt aura of violence and bitterness that pervaded all of Egypt during the 1920s.

Why the southern counties of Illinois were called Egypt, no one really knew, but they had been called that for as long as anyone could remember. Some said it was because the conflux of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers formed a delta; others held that it was due to the presence of the city of Cairo, on the Mississippi, in the area; and still others repeated a legend of frontier days, when the farmers of the region were said to have saved the rest of the state with their crops during a drought year—although this last is hardly plausible to anyone who has seen the wretched farms of the neighborhood. But the most likely explanation is that given by the miners themselves, that they live their lives not too differently than the way the Children of Israel lived theirs in bondage.

Whatever the reason for its name, Egypt contained what was probably the richest bed of bituminous coal in the United States, the poorest farms in Illinois, the bleakest towns, and the angriest men in the state. It was a flat, wind-driven piece of prairie, unenchanting at its best and never unlovelier than the day I arrived.

At the station, there was no cab, no carriage, not even an umbrella to be borrowed. When I asked the ticket agent whether I could telephone for a cab, he said that I could but a cab was not very likely to come. “If you’re looking for a hotel,” he added, “the Pomax House is right over there across the square.” The wall of water that separated me from it appeared to give him pleasure; but the rain showed no sign of slackening and I decided to walk. When I finally entered the Pomax House, I was drenched and shivering, and the little love I might have entertained for Pomax had evaporated.

Abner Gross was the day clerk at the Pomax House then and for many years afterwards, a small, round man with pink cheeks, a pink mustache, spectacles, his face always ready with the saddest smile I ever observed on a human being. It had the effect of tears in another man, and he smiled now as I registered.

“What kind of a room do you want?” he asked me.

“The cheapest you’ve got.”

“Staying long?”

“It could be.”

“The cheap rooms got no baths. You want a room with a toilet and bath, I got to charge you two dollars a day or nine dollars a week. We only got five rooms like that in the hotel. You want it?”

The thought of a hot bath was irresistible, and I took it. Abner Gross whistled for the bellboy, a wizened, skinny man in his seventies. Aside from him, there was no one else in the lobby. He picked up my bag—I held the typewriter—and led me over the worn carpet, past threadbare overstuffed chairs that were upholstered in mohair and tasseled with a forlorn memory of elegance, to a broad mahogany staircase at the back of the lobby. There was a memory of wealth and opulence about the place, there and in the heavy dark furniture of my room and in the bathroom, which was more than adequate with its enormous tub and brass fittings. After he had opened a window and placed the key on the dresser, the old man turned to me and said,

“You a married man or single?”

“Single,” I replied. I gave him twenty-five cents.

“I got a nice girl for two dollars, you want some company after dinner, sonny.”

“No,” I sighed. “I don’t believe it.”

He took a long, level look at me, and then spat a mouthful of tobacco into the brass spittoon that decorated one corner of the room. He departed with disgust.

 

7

Stretched out in a hot bath, I reflected on the existence of a town with so improbable a name as Pomax, situated in the heart of a bleak flatland that covered an inconceivable wealth of coal. I found it hard to face the fact that this might be my home and center of operations for years to come. Whatever lightness of heart I might have taken with me had disappeared by now, and as I put on dry clothes, I found myself reviewing and doubting the sequence of events that had brought me here.

However that was, I could reverse it at will. I was not yet bound by any of the invisible strings that attach a coal miner to his place and work, and if I found the situation here unbearable, I could leave it. But I wondered how I could face Ben Holt with an explanation of my leaving.

It was about five o’clock now, and the rain had stopped. I picked up the house phone and gave Gross Ben Holt’s number at the union headquarters. “If you want Ben, he ain’t there,” the desk clerk said to me. I asked him how he knew, and he replied that he had seen him come past the hotel about fifteen minutes before, right after the rain had stopped. “He’s home by now,” Gross said. “You want me to get that number for you?” I said that I did, and a moment or two later, I spoke to Dorothy Holt for the first time. Strangely, whenever I think of her voice, I remember it best as it sounded that first time over the telephone in Pomax, gentle but strong, telling me,

“Of course—you’re Alvin Cutter. He didn’t expect you to go straight to the hotel, so we thought you had missed the train and would come on a later one. But now that you’re here, you must come straight over and have dinner with us.”

I made a few polite demurrals and then agreed and asked for directions.

“It’s very simple, Mr. Cutter, and now that the rain has stopped, you can walk. Your hotel is on the square facing the railroad station, on Lincoln Street. So when you leave the hotel, simply turn left along Lincoln, and when you come to the corner of the square, continue on Lincoln for three blocks. Then you’re at Fairview Street, and if you turn left, we’re halfway down the street, number 157, a white house with green trim and a porch in front. I will have a light on the porch.”

Feeling much better, I set off for Ben Holt’s house. The air had cleared, and a sharp, clean wind had torn the sky into a rummage bag of gray clouds. There was a sweet smell in this early evening, and here and there a human form was to be seen, dispelling the illusion that Pomax was a ghost of every drab and ugly town in middle America. Fairview Street was tree-lined and pleasant, graced with long shadows of the sun. It had never been a prosperous thoroughfare, but the reasonable size and pleasant aspect of the houses led me to feel that neither had it ever been the abode of diggers. Number 157 was a three-story frame house that might have been fairly elegant in the nineties. It was the kind of place a thrifty storekeeper might have lived in, but I was in no mood to moralize with myself concerning Ben Holt’s residence there. After all, he was the head of a great international union of workingmen, and it would profit neither himself, the miners, nor the union for him to live in a shack.

As I mounted the steps of the porch, Ben came out to greet me, offering me a warm smile and his powerful hand, nodding eagerly and telling me,

“By God, I am glad to see you, Al. I was afraid you wouldn’t take me up on it after all, and I just can’t tell you how happy I am that you did.”

But of course he had known that I would accept; he never had any doubts that I would accept, if the truth be told, and I think I knew it then as I said the appropriate things and moved through the door held open for me and into a lighted hallway to face the woman who stood there, three children crowding around her and behind her, the children giggling, hiding, peering out at me.

Dorothy Holt was twenty-seven then, when I first saw her in the house at Pomax, six months older than I, but so clear-eyed and youthful that I could not think of her in terms of age, not then or later. She was never a slim or delicate woman, but neither did her strength leave you with an impression of stockiness. She had a supple quality, an ease of motion that suggested repose and equanimity even when she moved. In defiance of or indifference to the style of bobbed hair—becoming so popular then in the middle twenties—she wore her honey-colored hair long and gathered at the base of her neck. Her brown eyes were wide-set and direct, her mouth full and sculptured, her manner easy and unhurried. Seeing her, you thought not of a beautiful woman but of a singularly fortunate woman. You also thought of Ben Holt as a remarkably fortunate man—possessed of a home that appeared to radiate contentment, three healthy children, and a wife of grace and intelligence.

Such, at least, was my own feeling that evening, a mixture of pleasure and envy, pleasure at being among people who were free of bitterness and poverty, and envy for all that Ben Holt had and I had lost. I was introduced to Norah, age five, Sam, age three, and Ben, Jr., approaching his second birthday, good-looking and healthy children. Dorothy Holt shook hands with me and said a few words about how pleased she was to have me there for dinner. Then she went off to feed the children and bed them down, and I noticed that there was a maid to help with this and dinner. Ben led me down the hall, past a dining room where the table was already set for dinner, into a charmingly furnished living room. The decor here was early American, mixed with a few pieces of Pennsylvania countryside furniture, which today is called Pennsylvania Dutch. There were two wing chairs, covered with bright fabric and flanking a fireplace, bay windows, upholstered and inviting, a large old couch of the Federal period, some overstuffed chairs, and with it all, appointments of taste and interest. Two large, handsomely framed Audubon bird prints dominated the walls, and to balance them some old prints and one delightful primitive country portrait. On the floor, a large hooked rug gave the room a casual unity; and the whole effect was rare and pleasant, such a room, while fairly commonplace today, being uncommon and unusual then. If the effect was not of wealth and luxury, it bespoke an undeniable elegance, but Ben Holt did not apologize for it. I think that pleased me, for I half expected some apology; but he gave credit to his wife, and said,

“I like it. It’s a beautiful room.”

“It is,” I agreed.

He waved me to one of the chairs in front of the fire, and asked me what I would have to drink. Then he mixed the drinks—of good scotch whisky and not colored, bootleg sugar alcohol—and seated himself opposite me. The drink was good, and I was tired and relaxed and glad to be in front of a warm fire after the cold and rain.

“How was the trip?” he asked me.

“Fine—except for walking across your town square in the rain.”

“You must have been soaked. Yet, you know, Al, I like that square. It’s the only generous, broad, handsome thing about this town. Someday, we’ll rebuild the whole place, but keep that square—build a fine, modern city of coal around it.”

I nodded and smiled, hardly knowing what to say.

“I always start with the future, Al. You’ve got to believe in the future if you work for me. The present stinks. Right now, today, we’re in a hole. That’s why I like to talk about the future.” I waited, and he went on, “We took the strike vote today—today.”

Watching him, waiting, I was uncertain as to what reaction he expected on my part. I was still too new to the labor movement, and specifically to mining, to respond properly to all the implications, emotional threads, fears, hopes, and possibilities contained in the word “strike.” And I doubt whether anyone who has not passed a great many years in labor in one way or another ever hears that word the way working people do. I waited, and he asked me whether I liked the whisky.

“It’s good.”

“Fine, fine—Hell, Al, I’m not going to beat about the bush. Do you think I tricked you into this because I never really explained about the strike down there in West Virginia?”

I shook my head and confessed that I didn’t have the vaguest notion of what he meant. He stared at me peculiarly, and then the telephone rang—as it rang again and again through the dinner. His wife came in to tell him that it was for him, and then she remained with me for a moment, pleasant and smiling, and said,

“I do hope you’ll stay with us, Mr. Cutter. From what Ben said, I know you’ll be good company. Pomax is not New York, or Chicago or St. Louis—”

“I’ve been in coal towns before,” I nodded.

“I know—” She paused uneasily, and then forced herself to say, “I do offer my condolences. I never knew your wife, Mr. Cutter, but I know she was a wonderful woman. I’m so sorry.”

I thanked her, and then Ben returned and said that there would be a meeting that night and there was no way out of it. Dorothy’s face fell, but she made an adjustment quickly. “Dinner in fifteen minutes, give or take a few,” she said, and I made some remark about how much I was impressed with the room and its decor. She left. Ben Holt paced away from me and back. He said he kept forgetting that I was new to this whole thing.

“I’ll learn,” I shrugged. “I’m not a kid, Ben. I didn’t come out here like a boy scout or a visiting congressman. I’m not a socialist or a communist, and I have no great desire to save the world or change it. I’d rather be here than working on a newspaper in New York, and that’s it.”

“Good!” He sat down facing me. “There’s no time for you to learn your job—you’ll be doing it, starting tonight, because we have half a dozen men to do the work of a hundred. Now I’m just going to fill in a background for you very sketchily, and you’ll complete it yourself in good time. Do you know anything about my union?”

“What I’ve read, and I’ve read everything I can find.”

“Then you know the general background and something of my own history here. The union, as it is today, actually came into being in 1882—it began here in Illinois. Tom Hennesy was the first president, and no finer man ever lived. That’s not in the way of praise. I’m explaining something. Hennesy was a decent, honest, modest man who lived for no other purpose than the miners, and he gave them his life, and they crucified him. Why? Because a miner trusts no one, because they’ve been sold out too much, too long, because at heart they’re anarchists. And the three presidents who followed Hennesy finished the same way. They weren’t either as devoted or as honest as Hennesy, but in the end it was the same. When they set out to do something and fell short of what they had promised, their own miners destroyed them, threw them out and maligned them. Believe me, Al, it’s no joy to be president of this union. My own father organized the first local in Ringman, and they voted him out of office after one term because some damn fool said he saw him talking to an operator in town.

“That’s the disease this union and this industry suffers from—fear, suspicion, hatred, and mistrust. We’ve never had any unity. We break our own unions and we break our own strikes—and not this union and not one goddamn miner in this country will amount to a row of beans until someone is strong enough to unite the union and hold it together and lead it. I don’t want anyone to work with me and hold any illusions about me. No one handed me the leadership of this union. It didn’t come through virtue and talent, like the chairmanship of a debating society. I fought and clawed my way to the top, and I hurt a lot of people and I made a lot of enemies. But I did what had to be done. I lead a union. It doesn’t lead me—I lead it. That’s the plain fact of the matter, which you have to take or leave. What about it?”

“I knew that,” I nodded. “A lot of people know that.”

“All right. That clears the air somewhat. Next, I’m building a machine. You don’t do what I did without a machine. I know what I’m after, but I can’t do it alone. I talk to communists and socialists, and I can see something of what they’re after. That’s not what I’m after. There’s not going to be any workers’ republic of social democracy here; there’s only going to be more of the same as now, and it’s the way the pie is cut that decides things. And it is power—power pure and simple—that will tell how the pie is cut. I have a very simple goal, higher wages and better working conditions, and that’s it.”

“It makes sense,” I agreed.

“Hell, yes, sense without simplicity. The fact is, Al, that it makes no sense. Every local in this union still claims the right to make separate agreements with the operators. One local undercuts the next—in effect, the union scabbing against the union—and the whole thing becomes chaos. An operator who signs an agreement with the union for higher wages, finds the operator in the next county underselling him and underpaying too. And on top of it all, West Virginia—pouring seventy million tons of coal into the market every year—and paying slave-labor wages with no union at all. That’s what we face, and either we face it or we’re finished. Well, we decided to face it, and we called a strike—forty-eight hours from now, and once and for all, we’re going to see this thing through and establish uniform and tolerable rates—here in the North, if nowhere else. That’s what you’ve walked into, and it’s going to be your job to sell this strike to the press and the people—and to make them understand that for us, it is survival, pure and simple.”

 

8

Long afterwards, Dorothy Holt admitted that her heart went out to me that first evening at the dinner table, sitting across from me and waching me toy with the pot roast. She said that I appeared alone, bewildered and uncertain, and that she could appreciate the response of a man who came not only into Egypt as a newcomer, but into the drab ugliness of Pomax in a pouring rain, into the home of Ben Holt, into a strike, and into a job that he was a tyro at. In all truth, she had come to the conclusion that our acquaintance would be of short order, that after a day or two in Pomax, I would turn away for greener pastures. Since I reminded her of some of the young men she had known before she married Ben, she judged me by them, and not with too much respect or admiration. Perhaps, to a degree, she was right. Sitting there, I was frank enough with myself to tell myself that if I had known the circumstances that would greet me, I would have turned down the job. Or perhaps not. Hindsight is never very dependable.

To ease things, she made the conversation. She described the geological history of Illinois that had resulted in Egypt, the thoughtlessness of the glaciers, pushing their rich earth deposits in front of them, stopping short of the delta, the poverty of the land in terms of anything but coal mining, and the set of historical circumstances that had created here one of the great coal-producing areas of the world. She chatted comfortably and serenely while Ben Holt applied himself to the food. His was the case of a very large man who expended enormous energy—and who ate enormously and efficiently, not as a glutton, but as a machine that had to be fueled. It was a digger’s habit, and I have seen many diggers eat just that way, with intense absorption. And while he ate, his wife completed her tale of Egypt and explained to me,

“That was my mistake, Mr. Cutter—an early attempt to like Pomax. You come to a place to live, and your natural instinct is to like it, to feel for it, to identify yourself with it. But that’s a mistake in Pomax. I don’t think anyone likes Pomax. All you have here are differing degrees of distaste for it.”

“But the people—”

“Ah, now that’s something else, isn’t it? I suppose you know something of the Pennsylvania miners, and certainly West Virginia, but Egypt is another matter, wouldn’t you say, Ben?”

“They’re miners,” Ben Holt said.

“As Ben looks at it, if they pay dues, they’re miners,” she smiled. “But these people—yes, you can become fond of them, very fond of them, Mr. Cutter, and they’re polite and they live decently. You should see the gardens some of them have. But they’re not of our time, Mr. Cutter.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“These are the people who started the Civil War three years before it began, and who fought it for five years afterwards. Time stands still for them. Ben laughs at me, and according to Ben, they’re no different from people anywhere else. But they are—they are something strange and wild and terrible, maybe admirable too, and they won’t bow their heads for anything or anyone in the world. That’s why the thought of a strike out here frightens me. They tell stories of strikes here in Egypt. At home, when the miners have no work, they pull in their belts and grit their teeth—”

“Is that good?” Ben Holt broke in.

“I didn’t say it was good or bad, Ben. But the other night I went over to a neighbor of ours, Mrs. Landrey, and her husband was sitting in the kitchen, polishing this beautiful old rifle, utterly absorbed—”

“Dorothy’s an incurable romantic,” Ben broke in. “When miners strike they go hunting. Sure these are hard men. You can’t live in Egypt and not be hard. The sun doesn’t shine here—”

We talked about other things, about where I would live, the possibilities among the boardinghouses in Pomax. The Pomax House was bad enough, but the thought of a boarding-house was more than I could endure, and Ben felt that the cooking in the dining room at the Pomax House was better than anywhere else in town. They had a Chinese cook, whose name was Hop Sin. Dorothy agreed about his ability. “He can’t find the ingredients here for the good Chinese dishes, but he has a sort of natural genius. Even when it’s as simple as frying a pair of eggs, they’re delicious. Ben and I go there sometimes to eat.”

“It’s up to you, Al,” Ben nodded. “You can save a few dollars at a boardinghouse, but I know how you feel. I’ve lived in boardinghouses too much to ever think about it again.”

Dorothy left to put the children to bed. The two older children, Norah and Sam, came to say good night to their father. They were round-cheeked, healthy children, good-natured and cheerful. My impression was of a happy home, but in my own state of mind, almost any family group would have added up to a happy home. I was too occupied with my own self-pity to examine them very closely.

Ben and I lit cigars over our coffee. Twice, he was interrupted by the phone while Dorothy was away, and twice before that during the meal. He was away from the table when Dorothy returned, and I had just a glimpse of an expression on her face that might have been sheer despair or perhaps it was nothing more than my imagination. Ben Holt returned pulling on a raincoat. “I hate to break this up,” he said, “but we have to get over there. This is the first time, but not the last, Al. I want you to feel at home here.” Dorothy was watching him. “I know,” he said to her, and shook his head hopelessly. They didn’t kiss as we left.

Clouds were gathering again in the growing dusk. As we walked, Ben Holt talked about the strike, about what faced him, and about what I could do. He admitted that no matter what the result of the strike was, they couldn’t change the situation in the South. “Someday we’ll go back to West Virginia—but that will wait.” The thing now, as he explained, was to separate the North from the South and get an agreement here. “And let the country know how miners live. That’s your job, Al. Convince them that we’re not a bunch of red Bolsheviks trying to overthrow everything.”

He was taking another way than that which had led me to their house. After a few blocks, we were walking through unpaved streets, the mud sucking at our feet. The tiny houses on either side were grimy and unpainted, a shade less wretched than those in West Virginia, but bad enough. Here and there, a man standing in his yard or sitting on the front steps would come over and pass a few words with Ben. Ben knew them by name. He had an incredible memory for names, and he used this gift consistently and shrewdly. The miners themselves were physically no different from other miners I had seen, lean men, the mark of their trade tattooed into their skin; but the bitterness and the anger were evident—or was that my imagination in terms of what Dorothy Holt had said?

At one house, a strikingly good-looking woman in her twenties came over to us, and she said to Holt, “Who’s your cute friend, Ben?”

He introduced me and asked how things were.

“Lousy. Living alone is lousy. Always was.”

“Find yourself another husband, Sally.”

“Another miner? The hell with that! The hell with the whole lot of you!”

We had started off, when she called after us, “I didn’t mean that, Ben. Come over sometime. A girl gets lonely.”

“She is poison,” Ben said to me. “Husband killed in a mine, no kids—she lives there alone. I suppose it’s all right for a night, but she’ll claw your heart out.” His comment was flat and indifferent; the indifference was like a seal on his attitude toward women. As I matched his long, rolling stride through the night, I began to sense some of the complexity that underlay the seeming simplicity of this big hulk of a man called Ben Holt.

 

9

The International Miners Union headquarters in Pomax, Illinois, has, in the course of years, become one of the famous buildings of America. In Hulter’s painting, “The Miner’s Family,” he uses the Union Building on Lincoln Street as part of the background, a fact that mystified art critics who knew little or nothing of Egypt or Pomax. However, in the course of time, the three-story, red brick building, with its two stunted, pointed towers, its ten ugly windows, and its flat, dead exterior became a symbol of sorts. The union still owns this building, and over the years it has undergone a process of modernization and sentimentalization. In 1924, there was no money for modernization and no mood for sentiment; it was an old and dirty building and its only advantage lay in the fact that the union owned it and that it was situated in Pomax.

Pomax was more than the geographical heart of the bituminous coal country of Illinois; it was a mining town or small city in which almost the whole adult male population were miners, and you couldn’t be mayor or chief of police or sit on the city council or the board of education unless you were a miner or had once been a miner. Before the war, half a dozen wealthy coal operators made their residence in Pomax, where they built large, handsome houses on Osborn Street. At the time, around the turn of the century, there was an anticipated future for Pomax; but when it failed to materialize except in coal, and when each successive year increased Pomax’s coat of soot and grime, the operators moved north to more pleasant locations, and their residences were turned into boardinghouses. The Union Building had originally been built as headquarters for the Midwest Coal Company, which was owned and operated by the Mid-Illinois Railroad; but after some years of what was in effect enemy territory, they sold the building to the union and moved to Cairo.

The building itself was located on Lincoln Street, one block south of the Pomax House. As I approached it with Ben Holt this evening, the windows were lit, the sidewalk outside crowded with men—indeed the whole street alive and active and very different from the dead and deserted aspect it had presented in the pouring rain. On either side of the entrance to the building were large bulletin boards, men pressed around them, crowding up to read the notices—and other men clustered in small groups and others went in and out of the building. A very tall, thin man in a policeman’s uniform, with a gold badge on his chest that read CHIEF, came out of the building as we approached. Ben, meanwhile, was surrounded by the miners in front of the building, greeting this one and that one, speaking a word here, a word there, trying to answer five questions at once, and exercising his uncanny ability to remember names. The tall man in uniform pushed through to him and said to the others,

“Look, boys, give me a minute with Ben, will you? I been waiting for him, and I still punch a time clock. I’m not going on strike.”

The miners were good-natured about it. It was evident that the chief was liked. He drew Ben aside, and Ben pulled me along with him, and introduced me,

“This is Alvin Cutter, Andy. He’s just joined our staff, and tonight’s his first night at work. Isn’t that a hell of a note? He’s going to handle public relations and see whether we can’t get through this one without every rag in America beating us over the head. So I want you to know him.” And to me, “Al, this is Andy Lust, our chief of police in Pomax. Andy was a miner and his father was a miner, and he’s a good friend of ours. I want you to know him and like him.”

Lust shook hands with me. Unquestionably, if I remained with the job, I would know him, but whether I would like him was another question entirely. His pale blue eyes were cold as ice, his lips so thin that his wide mouth gave the appearance of a slit. His greeting was formal, efficient and short; evidently he was not impressed by whatever I would add to the local situation; he turned to Ben Holt and declared,

“I got to know, Ben, just when and how this strike is going to come off.”

“I told you when and how, Andy. It’s no secret. A day after tomorrow at the end of the workday.”

“And suppose they lock you out at the beginning of the workday and jump the gun? That’s what I’m afraid of. That could mean a lot of trouble.”

“Hell, yes,” Ben Holt sighed, “it could mean trouble. There’s got to be lots of trouble all over. That’s the nature of it. Andy, it’s not just here, but Pennsylvania too, and out west, and Canada and the South—”

“The trouble’s going to come first right here, and you know it, Ben!”

“Maybe, maybe,” Ben nodded, smiling, pacifying. “You know Pomax better than I do, Andy. We’ll try to think through some approach to a lockout. I’ll talk to you about it.”

“And give me time, Ben.”

“Sure I’ll give you time, Andy—sure.”

We shook hands again, and Ben led me into the building. Just inside the door, he was stopped by a miner, desperate, almost in tears. The miner’s daughter had acute appendicitis. It had been diagnosed. The case was urgent, and she had to be rushed to the hospital in Cairo, but they would not admit her without money, and the miner was penniless. When he began to go into the facts of how penniless he was, Ben stopped him, reached into his own pocket, peeled five tens from a roll of bills, and gave the money to the man. Ben cut short his thanks and pushed him toward the door of the building, avoided my eyes, and led the way upstairs.

The inside of the Union Building was as beaten and poorly kept as the outside. The entranceway, the hallway, and the main stairs leading up to the second floor had been paved with what was once white marble—now almost black with grime. The walls, once buff, were brown, the paint peeling, the plaster cracked. On the main floor, two large rooms, left and right, opened off the entranceway. One was crowded with miners; the other was a duplicating room, mimeographs and stacks of mimeograph paper. I glimpsed them in passing then; we went upstairs to the union offices.

The main office, at the head of the stairs, was crowded, and there was a flow of men coming and going. Most of them were miners, but there were others, a few newspaper people, a coal operator, and various townspeople, storekeepers and others. Their attention centered around two men whom I saw here for the first time, but whom I was to see a good deal of during the coming years. The first of these two was Fulton Grove, a vice-president of the International Miners Union and Ben Holt’s administrative assistant. He was a man of average height, pudgy in aspect, in his middle thirties, blond, with mild blue eyes blinking behind steel-rimmed spectacles. He was as unlikely a candidate for leadership of the most unbridled and militant group of workers in America as one might find—unlikely and improbable, with the manner of a bank clerk and the meticulous reactions of a bookkeeper. The second center of attention in the room was Jack Mullen, dark, muscular, black hair, deep, restless eyes, a handsome head on a thick, strong neck, and a calm, forceful manner. He was thirty years old, a miner since the age of twelve in the bituminous fields outside of Pittsburgh, and Ben Holt’s chief field assistant. Curiously enough, Fulton Grove had also been a miner once, but only for a single year; then he had gone into clerical work at the mines, become a grade-school teacher, and served on the Pomax City Council.

As Ben Holt and I entered the room, the coal operator, a heavy, choleric man, strode over to him, thundering, “By God, Ben, I am going to see you and talk to you if it’s the last thing I do!”

“All right—all right,” Ben replied, spreading his arms. “I talk to everyone, don’t I? Give me a minute.”

“I been here an hour.”

“A man has to eat dinner,” Ben grinned. “Am I allowed? Did you eat? Do I?” He pushed past and nodded for Grove and Mullen, who joined him, and then he introduced me. Fulton Grove slid through the formalities of greeting; he was glad to see me; glad to see anyone who might help. Mullen studied me coldly and thoughtfully, and said, “Stick around, Cutter. This is an interesting place.”

“Can you talk to Al here now, Jack?” Ben Holt asked Mullen.

“Now? How the hell can I talk to anyone now, Ben? I got twenty people waiting to see me. Take him in to Mark. Mark will be able to tell him what to do better than any of us. Anyway, I don’t know what his job is. All I know is that we got a strike here we’re not one God damn bit prepared for.”

“We’ll be prepared,” Ben said softly. “Take it easy—easy.” He swung around and told the mine operator, “I’ll be with you in two minutes, Mr. Klingman.” Then he led me through the crowd and opened a door marked LEGAL DEPARTMENT.

In a room that was furnished with a desk, a few chairs, some filing cabinets, and a case of books, a man was in the process of dictating to a strikingly attractive young woman. The woman, lean, long-limbed, glanced up as we entered, to reveal a strong-boned face, high, wide cheekbones, a wide, full mouth, and shrewd, appraising blue eyes. The man was in his late forties or early fifties, tired, sallow in complexion, his face fleshy and lined, his dark eyes deep-set under shaggy brows.

“This is Mark Golden, our attorney. Lena Kuscow, his secretary,” Ben told me.

“Everyone’s secretary,” the woman remarked sourly.

“Alvin Cutter. I was telling you about Cutter, Mark.”

Golden nodded. Lena Kuscow studied me deliberately and thoughtfully. “I want you to talk to him,” Ben went on. “This place is a madhouse tonight. Klingman grabbed me as I came in. He wants to see me—”

“You know about what.”

“Sure I know about what. He’s got that damn steam shovel and the grading machines sitting in his open-strip mine, and he’s going to claim that the machinery will bankrupt him unless he can use it.”

“He’s a liar,” Golden said flatly.

“Why?”

“Because Arrowhead Pit isn’t his mine. Eighty per cent of it is owned by the Great Lakes Company in Chicago, and he’s just a cheap loudmouth they use as a front. They got the machinery on contract, but it won’t bankrupt them. It could sit there all year and it wouldn’t bankrupt them.”

“You can’t prove any of that, Mark,” Ben said tiredly.

“All right, I can’t. He’s going to ask you whether they can’t go on stripping the coal with the steam shovel and stock-piling it.”

“That’s right.”

“The hell with it! Do what you want to do. You’re asking for trouble.”

“Thanks,” Ben said angrily, and started for the door. I stood there, feeling like a complete fool, not knowing whether to remain or to leave with Ben Holt—feeling the effect of an accumulation of distaste and dislike directed toward me. At the door, Ben paused, turned back to Golden, and said,

“By the way, I gave fifty dollars to Gus Acuda.”

“What for?” Golden demanded.

“What for? His kid’s got a case of acute appendicitis, and he has to get her admitted to the hospital or she’ll die.”

“Why didn’t you let him put in a plea and application to the emergency medical fund?”

“Because the kid would be dead by then.”

Golden wrote out a voucher, handed it to Ben, and said, “You can’t go on doing this, Ben. You can’t dispense charity whenever the mood takes you. You’re not God and you’re not Morgan.”

“God damn it, what should I do?” Ben roared at him. “Let the kid die?”

“How many other kids die? How many die from pneumonia, from t.b., from pellagra, from scarlet fever and diphtheria—how many? You make me sick with this kind of sentimental paternalism! It’s as unbecoming to you as to Andrew Carnegie. I’ve told you a hundred times that we need a medical program. We got ten thousand miners in this union spitting blood morning, noon, and night, and we don’t have a doctor on our payroll or a hospital we can call our own—”

I had never heard anyone talk to Ben Holt like that before; I had never watched him listen to anyone begin to talk that way. Now he listened. His face became red with fury, but he listened, and when Golden had finished, he stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard behind him that bits of plaster fell from around the frame. Golden said to me, quietly, almost in a whisper,

“Sit down, Cutter. We’ll be through here in a few minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

 

10

During all this, Lena Kuscow had watched me, her face expressionless, her attitude seemingly indifferent, her interest almost clinical. She might have been bored by the whole thing. Golden finished his dictating, apparently an answer to injunction proceedings of some kind, and then asked me whether I would like some coffee. I nodded, and he said to Lena,

“Honey, would you?”

She rose slowly, her motion surprisingly graceful, and left the room. Golden then turned to me and smiled and asked me,

“You got in today, didn’t you, Cutter?”

“At three o’clock.”

“And now it’s a quarter to ten—so you’ve had a bellyful already, and hardly enough time to change your clothes. Ben took you home for dinner?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re asking yourself what ever brought you here in the first place and what kind of a lunatic asylum is this.” He had an easy, ingratiating manner about him, and he was as prepared to like you as he was to judge you. For the first time since I had arrived at Pomax, I had the feeling that I might make a friend here and not spend my days talking to walls. Everything I felt was boiling up inside of me, and I had no desire to talk to anyone or confide in anyone; yet I found myself talking to Mark Golden. Then Lena Kuscow came back with three tin cups of black coffee. As she handed me my cup, she said,

“Poor kid. What in hell ever brought you to Egypt?”

Since I was certain that I was older than she, I resented the “poor kid.” “I came here to do a job,” I said. “I was hired.”

Golden nodded and sipped his coffee. “And you walked into a strike. It’s not always exactly like this—well, more or less—but not exactly like this. I guess trade-union people use their heads as much as any other kind. But a lot of them, when they hear the word ‘strike,’ they stop thinking. They’re overcome by a need for action and they get excited. I’m as bad as the next one. I had no business talking to Ben like that, and he had no business acting as a one-man welfare agency. I hate it when he thinks like a slob—I don’t like it when anyone does. Now about you, Cutter—I don’t want you to pour out your guts to me, but I would like you to tell me what you see out here. All I know about you is that Ben likes you and trusts you and thinks highly of you. Ben is a pretty good judge of people—but he also has some axes of his own to grind. You come into this situation and, unless I miss my guess, people like Fulton Grove and Jack Mullen treat you like poison. No one welcomes you with open arms. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” I agreed.

“So you feel rotten. Are you an idealist, Cutter? Are you one of these dedicated young men out to help labor fight the good fight, and to show labor the proper way to do it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because if you are, give it up. You’ll hurt yourself and maybe the union too. This isn’t the Carpenters Union or the Cigar Makers—and maybe it isn’t even a union. It’s an attempt, a crazy hope, a lost cause led by some people too thickheaded to know that it’s lost. It’s a pack of ignorant diggers who had the temerity to get tired of choking and dying in the belly of the earth for three or four dollars a day. This strike isn’t the end of anything; it’s the beginning. It’s like the beginning of a war. Ben Holt has three hundred thousand members on the union books and six hundred thousand dollars in the treasury. It sounds good, doesn’t it, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing. Half of the membership is out of work, and the other half doesn’t make enough wages to keep body and soul together. The whole country is booming, but you only have to look at those diggers outside and the rags that constitute their apology for clothing to know what the boom means here in Egypt. So we’re going into a strike, and we’ve as much chance of winning as a snowball in hell, and we need someone like you desperately. But not someone with stars in his eyes. Someone with guts. Do you have guts, Cutter?”

“That’s a hell of a question, Mr. Golden, and beside the point. I was a reporter on the Daily Mail in New York. I gave up the job to take a job out here. To take a job out here—that’s all.”

“Why? Why?”

“I don’t know why,” I shrugged. “I have some ideas, and when I put them all together, I’ll bring them to you. If you’re still interested.”

He smiled at me then. He had a warm, pleasant smile. He took out a pipe and stuffed it and lit it. I got my cigarettes and offered them to Lena Kuscow. She accepted one, and Golden held a match to our cigarettes. We smoked and sipped our coffee, and Golden said to me,

“What about it, Cutter? Are you staying?”

“I’m staying.”

“For how long?”

“Until I’m fired. I got too much pride to go back to the Mail and ask for my job again.”

Golden looked at Lena Kuscow, and she nodded and said, “I think he’ll make it, Mark. He’s fancy, but you can’t tell about anyone these days. Can you?”

“Lena’s a pretty good judge of people too,” Golden nodded. “All right, Cutter. You have three jobs. We all have—three, five, ten—reach in the hat and pick a title. This is the kind of operation we are trying to run. I’m the union lawyer. I’m also comptroller. Also some other things. Eventually, you’ll be in charge of research, when we have some time for research. You’ll head up a legislative staff when we get around to creating one—and providing you’re still with it. Right now, the pressing need is the kind of propaganda that reaches the public. We need press notices that make sense, that are simply and directly written, and that allow for the smallest margin of error. We need to win some friends. You say you were a reporter—well, this place will soon be swarming with reporters, and it’s up to you to know them and blunt their fangs when you can—not only here, but in Pittsburgh and Scranton as well. As soon as the strike deadline is past, Ben will take off for Pittsburgh, and he’ll want you with him. We have to state our cause and keep stating it—which means that you must live and breathe this industry’s life. We’ll help as much as we can, but most of it is up to you. No one’s going to be kind to you here—and no one’s going to give you a break.”

“And what about information?” I demanded. “Do I just guess what this union and this strike is all about, or am I permitted to talk to people?”

“I know, I know. You should have had at least a few weeks to study this situation, but now there simply isn’t time. You’ll just have to bone up as best you can. Questions? Sure, ask questions. Some people will be snotty and others won’t. Read the releases and information bulletins on file in the mimeograph room. Most of them were put together by Lena and myself and Ben and his wife, and they’re not very professional. Ben said that you were with him in West Virginia in 1920, so you know something about miners.”

“Very little.”

“It’s a beginning—”

At that moment, the door opened, and a young man said that Ben wanted us in his office. Golden led the way. We crossed the main office, still full of people and a babble of talk and excitement, and went through a door that opened from the rear of this large room.

Ben Holt’s private office was as unadorned as the other rooms in the building. It was furnished with a desk, eight or nine chairs, a bookcase, a filing cabinet, and a clothes tree. As we entered, a bitter argument was in progress between Ben Holt and two men I had not seen before. Jack Mullen and Fulton Grove stood at one side of the room. The two strangers faced Ben. One of them, short, fat, a bullet head on a thick, red neck, was—as I learned later—Gus Empek, president of the Associated Miners Union, a small, independent union that numbered some ten thousand middle-western miners at its high point of membership. The other man, Joseph Brady, was vice-president of the Associated Miners. Supposedly a onetime miner, Brady looked more like a corporation executive, impeccably dressed in dark blue serge, white shirt, silk tie, his shoes shined to a mirrorlike glow.

Although I had some vague impression that there was a small union challenging the International Miners Union in the fields, I knew nothing very much about it at this time. The only factor that gave the Associated Miners importance was their strength in one part of Egypt and their potential danger as strikebreakers. Altogether, they were a dubious lot, and eventually it turned out that Joseph Brady had been, for years, on the payroll of the Coal Institute, the organization of the operators.

But at this moment, I knew nothing of these two men or what they represented. I entered the room and saw Ben Holt standing behind his desk, one arm directed toward Empek, his hand flat and menacing as he shouted,

“No! God damn it, no! Your men will not work! What in hell do you think we’re doing—playing a game of tiddly-winks?”

“Just take it easy, Ben,” Brady said.

“Say that once more—once more, and I’ll come around this desk and belt you the hell out of here, Brady! I don’t want to talk to you, so keep your trap shut! I’m talking to Gus Empek. Gus came here to see me. I opened my door to him because it was Gus Empek. If it was you, Brady, I would have had you thrown out of here on your ass.”

Brady’s pale, good-looking face contorted and began to twitch, but he kept quiet and maintained his control. Empek said wearily, “I wish you wouldn’t get so excited, Ben.”

“Don’t I have reason? We’re all being starved to death by that rotten southern coal undercutting prices and rates. It keeps on and this will be West Virginia all over again. We’ll be paying the operators for the privilege of digging coal. So we’re trying to do something about it, and you tell me you’re going to cut our hearts out?”

“It’s not that simple, Ben,” Empek protested. “I can’t just tell my membership that they’re on strike. We got to discuss it and take a vote.”

“Don’t make me laugh!” Ben snorted.

“All right—so you’re laughing. Where does that leave me?”

“I’ll tell you just where. We got three hundred thousand members in the International. Day after tomorrow, we go out on strike. Day after tomorrow, your ten thousand mem bers go out on strike. You don’t break our strike and you don’t scab. I’m not arguing about it. I’m telling you.”

“It’s easy to tell me,” Empek nodded. And turning to Brady, he said, “Come on, Joe. There’s nothing to talk about here. They talk and we listen. They don’t want to listen.”

They left then. Fulton Grove sat down, his face creased with trouble and unhappiness. Jack Mullen whistled a bar or two, and then stopped abruptly and shook his head. “What I like about the trade-union movement,” Golden said, “is the sense of brotherhood that pervades it.” And Grove asked querulously, “What’s in it for them? That’s what I don’t get.”

“They got a little pie and they want a big pie,” Mullen answered. And Ben Holt spread his hands and said,

“Forget it. Gus Empek’s nothing and Brady’s less than nothing. The time comes and they make trouble, why we’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, it’s late and I want to get out of here. The six of us are together now, and there’s a lot of things coming up. This is Cutter’s first day in Pomax, and it’s been quite a day. I know that no one rates in this union, especially where Jack Mullen’s concerned, unless he can show three generations of miners behind him. You know, that kind of an attitude makes me sick. Personally, I think Cutter’s an idiot to take my offer of a job and come out here; but he’s here. So let’s shake hands all around and get down to work.”

Mullen looked at me and nodded. “All right, Cutter.” He smiled slowly and grudgingly.

“Unless you want to run the union all alone, Jack,” Ben Holt said.

 

11

It was almost midnight when I left the Union Building to walk back to the hotel. I was just closing the door of the building, when a voice said, “Hold up a moment, Al. I’ll go along with you.” It was Lena Kuscow. She asked me whether I minded the first name, which struck me as rather peculiar. I would have said that she would call anyone anything she pleased and not think twice about it. She fell into step with me, and wondered if I was too tired to walk home with her. Four blocks there, four blocks back to the hotel. “Only for the pleasure of your company,” she assured me. “Pomax is a dangerous place, but not for girls who walk home at night.”

“For whom?”

“Anyone who values his sanity. There are places that don’t have much to offer, but Pomax is unique. It has nothing to offer—nothing but dirt and grime and poverty. It’s a country slum. Do you know, Al, we don’t even have a public library here. We have one movie house. A week after the strike starts, they’ll close it up. No money for admissions, no money to rent films. We have seven pool parlors and three churches. I’ve been to towns upstate half the size of Pomax where they have twenty churches. Nothing grows here, not corn or culture or religion.”

“But you live here—your family.”

“No. No, I’m from Chicago. I live in Mrs. Ellen’s boardinghouse on Cooper Street. Four blocks, if you have nothing better to do.”

“I have nothing better to do.”

We walked along the dark, dimly lit street. The diggers had disappeared. The town was deserted, utterly deserted. The clouds had gone, and it was a clear, starry night.

“You’ll be bringing your family out here?”

“I haven’t any.”

“Oh? I thought you were married.”

“I was.”

“Divorced? Ah, it’s none of my business. Ignore me, Al.”

“My wife died a month ago.”

“Oh. Oh—I’m so sorry, Al.”

I said nothing. I never felt any impulse to argue with people who offered sympathy, even when they couldn’t possibly feel any. It was at least a human gesture in a world not overstocked with human gestures.

“Why did you come here?” she asked suddenly. “This is no place to forget anything.”

“Why did you come here?”

“It’s a job. I worked for the union in Chicago. They had to close the office there. So I came here. I didn’t have much to forget or remember.”

“Neither do I.”

Then we walked along in silence. I left her at the boardinghouse and went back to the hotel. My first day at Pomax was over.

 

12

For the next ten days, with the exception of a single Sunday afternoon that I took for myself, I lived and worked at the Union Building, subsisted mainly on black coffee and sandwiches, and returned to my hotel at night for a few hours’ sleep, a change of clothes, and a bath. I had witnessed strikes before this, but I had never been a part of one and I had never worked within the mechanism of a strike. It had always appeared to me that when a labor union called a strike, it was a comparatively simple procedure. The men stopped work; they organized picket lines; and they proclaimed their demands to the world. I had never really considered the fact that nothing in so vast and far-reaching an effort as a national strike just happened; it had to be watched, pushed, nursed, co-ordinated. The pay checks of thousands of men were blotted out. That was 1924, and most of the miners who went out on strike were poverty-stricken before the strike ever began. Their larders were empty, their clothes patched and worn. In Illinois, as in West Virginia, at least half of them wore no shoes. Far from having savings, many of them had not seen hard cash in years, being permanently in debt to company stores and company housing.

And these were conditions that hardly varied at all from state to state. The technical blueprint of the strike projected a situation where the local unions, who clung to their autonomy with fierce possessiveness and suspicion of the national organization, would cover their own needs for at least the first ten weeks of the strikes. But already on the third day of the strike, pleas for financial aid were pouring into Pomax. Mark Golden, sitting like a tortured demon over the union funds, would be torn to figurative shreds, as he attempted to guard and husband the union’s shrinking bank account. Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, Fulton Grove, and the other union officials had already begun their own attacks on the precious store of money that spelled the difference between disaster and success. Faced with incipient revolts of various distant locals, locals claiming that they were unable to bring off the strike, endure it, stand the fury of operators and company police, and faced with the intransigeance of the Associated Miners, under Empek and Brady, they began a process of juggling strength and balancing forces. They played a vast chess game in which they were outnumbered, outmatched, and outclassed, and they played it with bluff, front, and arrogance.

In addition to this, they had the local situation in Egypt, the key strike of the thousands of miners in the incredibly rich bituminous fields of southern Illinois, the practical business of organizing relief stations, soup kitchens, and the whole complex table of command that supervised the closing of the various mines, the establishing of pickets, and the endless discussions with the operators, the state legislators, the local mayors, and the governor of the state.

For my part, I learned quickly. I had to. I had to learn not only to deal with my own material but to prevent myself from being pulled in five different directions, drafted as an assistant for anyone who needed an assistant—and sent off to do whatever errands had to be done. I learned the fine difference between truth and necessity. I learned how to deal with reporters who demanded,

“Just how many men are out on strike, Cutter?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“Now look, you know that’s a lot of crap, just as we do. You never had three hundred thousand men working. And the story goes that half the mines are still working.”

“That’s not true. As far as the northern states are concerned, the mines are closed. No coal is being dug.”

“How about New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming and Montana?”

“It holds there too. The mines are closed.”

“And how long do you think you can stay out?”

“As long as we have to.”

“And what about the Arrowhead Pit? They’re digging coal there.”

The full truth was that they were digging coal in a great many places where we claimed none was being dug. The strike was far from total, even in the northern states; but the Arrowhead Pit was right under our noses, five miles outside of Pomax, a great excavation where the first local large-scale stripping operation was under way.

Today, a vast and increasing amount of coal is mined by stripping, as opposed to the older method of tunneling. In stripping, the overlay of earth and rock is stripped away by steam shovel and earth mover; rock is blasted and removed; and the black pay vein of coal is wholly exposed from above. As tons and tons of earth are removed, a wide craterlike opening in the earth is formed, and finally the steam shovel bites into the virgin coal, tearing it loose half a ton at a gulp. The method has all the advantages of a machine operation, but with the drawback of requiring an enormous capitalization in advance—and is based, of course, on modern earth-moving machinery. In 1924, the method was unusual and partly experimental—and looked upon sourly and suspiciously by both the miners and the union. The Arrowhead Pit, outside of Pomax, was an attempt at truly large-scale strip mining, based on what was considered then to be the largest steam shovel in the world.

Though no coal was being moved out of the Arrowhead Pit, the shovel had continued to work since the first hour of the strike, digging the coal and stock-piling it. At first, Ben Holt was of half a mind to allow Klingman, the operator in charge of Arrowhead, to continue to dig, so long as no coal was moved. On the second day of the strike, we learned that Gus Empek of Associated Miners had enrolled the shovel men, the truck drivers, and bulldozer operators into the Associated Miners—which union was still against the strike and claiming their right to work. Until now, the Associated Miners didn’t have a member within twenty miles of Pomax. Arrowhead gave them their first opportunity and foothold.

The newspaper people kept pressing me with the question of whether we had worked out a separate arrangement for strip mining—and I dwell on this because of the subsequent sequence of events at Arrowhead Pit. It seems incredible today that the very name of Arrowhead is forgotten to all but labor historians; then, shortly, it was to become known to almost every person in the United States; but that was still in the future, and my own problem was to convince the newspapermen that we had made no separate deal with the strip mines. I was trying to sell the world a picture of a national strike called by the Miners Union and effectively carried out—the mines closed, the diggers firm in rocklike unity; and the picture simply was not true. Ben Holt and the others felt, however, that the projection of this picture was of prime importance. I, in turn, was carried along by my hasty immersion in the excitement of my first strike, the long days and sleepless nights, the thousands of miners crowding into the Union Building each day, their drawn, earnest faces, their determination, the picket lines I saw at the collieries I visited, the soup kitchens and relief stations. I accepted it because I wanted so desperately to become a part of it, and the more I worked with Ben Holt, the more my admiration for him increased. I accepted his views, his dreams, his decisions, and I tried, somehow, to convey them to the press.

And to tell the whole truth, I enjoyed the sense of immediacy, of urgency and struggle, the feeling of being an integral part of a great body of men fighting, in a sense, for their right to survival. I enjoyed the feeling of excitement and importance—and of belonging. I had been bitterly alone since Laura died, but in a way I had been alone since my discharge from the Army in 1919. I had walked in the city as a stranger and worked on the Mail as a stranger. I had made no friends that I regretted leaving behind me; and no strings were ever permitted to penetrate my veneer of the sharp, wisecracking young know-it-all of the twenties and tie me to anything. Now, I was able to let my defenses drop. I had people around me who valued me, and I was a part of something. When a committee of the state legislature came down from Springfield to investigate the strike, Ben appointed me their guide for one afternoon, leaving it up to me to say the right thing and do the right thing. And when I missed fire, as I often did, he seemed to understand.

 

13

During the first weeks after the strike was called, I took only one Sunday afternoon for myself. A combination of the need to get away from the Union Building for a few hours and a desire to see the Arrowhead Pit led me to borrow an old bicycle Abner Gross kept chained to the gutter pipe at one corner of the Pomax House. Gross and I had become good friends. I learned that he had been a drummer boy in the Civil War with the 5th Illinois Infantry—which put him into his early seventies. I had thought he was younger. He was a storyteller and I listened well and enjoyed the listening; also, the union was the best and only customer for the private dining room and the apology for a ballroom that graced the Pomax House. Gross worshiped the Spoon River Anthology, and when he discovered that I knew half the book by heart, our bonds were sealed.

He had told me that the bicycle was mine any time I wanted it. After lunch, I set out along the dirt road that led to Arrowhead. Once the dismal shacks of Pomax were behind me, the road led through a pleasant wood of second-growth birch.

It was a fine spring afternoon, cool but sunny, with the yellow-green of the budding birches giving this part of Egypt a strange and improbable beauty. For two miles, except for a muddy little stream, there was nothing but the birches; then there was a stretch of farms, poor farms with fields of new corn and pens of skinny brown pigs; then open country with the ragged edges of shelf rock showing. Here, where there was no overlay of glacial soil, the thick bituminous seams lay sometimes as little as fifty feet below the surface and never much more than three hundred. Now and again, one saw a dark hint of outcropping coal, and finally in the distance the piles of rock that marked the Arrowhead Pit. No one was working the mine today. It was deeply silent, and there was no one in sight except another bicyclist, who stood with her wheel at the lip of the crater, where the road bent for its first wide curve down to the bottom.

I dismounted and walked my own wheel toward her, and as I approached, she turned around and I saw that it was Dorothy Holt—but in appearance so young and fresh that I had to look twice; and she smiled at what must have been a foolish, gaping face.

“Hello, Mr. Cutter,” she said. “How nice to meet you here!”

I nodded and muttered something in response. Her honey-colored hair was drawn back and tied with a yellow ribbon. She wore a white shirt, a suede vest and an old riding skirt, long woolen socks and moccasins. Somehow, by the miracle of the spring day, the sunshine, the bicycle, and a yellow ribbon, the grave mother of three children had become a young girl. It was a magic I did not try to analyze; it reminded me of Laura and of every other girl I had seen wonderfully in spring sunshine, and it made my heart ache with a pain I had avoided during these past days of frantic activity and work.

“I’m not a ghost, Mr. Cutter,” she smiled. “I must explain that I come from a family of suffragettes, and I exercise the right of a woman to revolt and demand her privileges. That is, I exercise it on Sunday afternoons when the weather is good. They give me four hours for myself, and I use it to explore the backwaters of the Nile, and I am rapidly becoming an Egyptologist. Now isn’t that perfectly silly? I don’t know why I said it—except that I feel so good when I am able to get away by myself like this, and there is never anyone around to whom I can say anything foolish.”

“I didn’t think it was foolish,” I said lamely.

“Oh? You are very kind.” She waved a hand toward the open crater. “This is our famous Arrowhead Pit, Mr. Cutter. But then I am sure you know that.”

I nodded. “I rode out here to see it.”

“And isn’t it something to see?” She began to walk her wheel across the rough ground that formed the lip of the excavation. “There’s something dramatic and exciting about it. I’ve been out here half a dozen times, I guess, and I never get over the sense of excitement in seeing it. That steam shovel looks so small down there, yet they say it’s the largest one in the whole world—larger even than the shovels they used to build the Panama Canal. And those trucks—do you remember, when we were children, what an event the sight of an automobile was! Who ever thought that we would see anything like these Mack trucks—they haul ten tons of coal, twenty thousand pounds—” She was outgoing, ingenuous, and apparently delighted that she had someone to talk to. She was a woman, a mother, with the enthusiasm and the unaffectedness of a schoolgirl who had suddenly become the possessor of a great fund of fascinating information. I tried to estimate her age; she was twenty-seven at the time, but in spite of the three children, I felt that she was much younger. All this struck me even more sharply because on that night when I had dinner at her house, I was left with a sense of a somber, almost tragic person, not in any evidence that I could then put my finger on, but subtly. Now there was no trace of that.

“—doesn’t it excite you, Mr. Cutter?” she finished.

“It excites me, Mrs. Holt,” I agreed. “It also worries me. It’s the object of too much passion and hatred and fear on the part of the miners. That steam shovel does the work of two hundred men.”

“But when you think of the old way—crawling into the earth through those black tunnels and bent double to hack away at the coal with the whole world pressing on you—have you ever been in a mine, Mr. Cutter?”

I shook my head. “No—not yet.”

“I have been. Ben took me into one, and I was too proud to tell him how frightened I was, and when we were a mile or two underground—I don’t know how far, but it seemed terribly far—I panicked and I knew that if I didn’t see the outside I would die. Of course, I didn’t die, but I never will forget the feeling. I can’t believe that it’s a good thing for men to work under such conditions, no matter what is said of the pride of a digger in his work. And this”—she pointed to the crater—”this will someday do away with the whole business of tunneling—”

“If it doesn’t do away with the miners as well, Mrs. Holt.”

At this point, we were approaching a small shack, set back a few yards from the lip of the crater; and as we walked toward it, the door opened and a man carrying a rifle emerged. He had a flat, ugly face, and almost with a snarl, he informed us that this was private property and demanded to know where in hell we thought we were going. I reminded him that there was a lady present and that there was nothing much of any value that we could carry off on our bikes.

“All right, buster, so there’s a lady present. Now I give you and the lady two minutes to get out of here.”

I stood there watching him, trying to think of some way to retrieve my bruised manhood, but Dorothy pulled at my sleeve and begged me to go. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, Mr. Cutter.”

I nodded, and we turned away from the place. As we left the mine behind us, she said to me, “Thank you, Mr. Cutter. I live in dread of something like this happening when Ben is with me. Ben would have felt an irresistible obligation to take the rifle away from him and break it over his head.”

“Do they always have armed guards here on Sunday?”

“Not so far as I know.”

We reached the road, mounted our bicycles, and rode for about half a mile away from Arrowhead. At a place where a flat, white rock lay alongside the road, Dorothy braked her wheel and dismounted.

“Do you mind if we rest for a while?” she asked. I joined her, and we sat down on the rock. “I’m shaking,” she said, holding out one hand. “I’m ashamed of myself. But I hate guns. They frighten me so. I’m so ashamed.”

“Why?” I smiled. “Because you hate guns? I hate them. They frighten me, and I’m not ashamed.”

“You can afford not to be ashamed, Mr. Cutter. Ben told me about your war record. You were a hero—”

“No. No, that’s not true!”

“—but you were, and it gives you the right to be afraid of guns.”

“Believe me, it’s a natural right.”

“Then we won’t talk about guns. Tell me about your job. Do you like it?”

“I don’t know,” I answered slowly. “I really don’t know, because until today, I haven’t had ten minutes to think about it. I’m not even sure that I know what my job is.”

“Tell me about it. You know, after that first night—well, I told Ben that I didn’t think you’d stay. I was almost sure you wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, unless it was that you suddenly made me aware of Pomax. You can get used to a place—even a place like Pomax. We’ve been here a few years and it feels like we’ve been here forever. But when you came, I suddenly saw it with fresh eyes. Do I sound very disloyal, Mr. Cutter?”

“I can’t think of you being disloyal, Mrs. Holt. I don’t think you know how.”

She smiled, not as before, but with sheer pleasure and gratification, her whole face mobile, the way a little girl smiles, and she told me, “Why that’s the nicest thing I ever had said to me, Mr. Cutter, and I don’t think you were trying to be artful. I think you said it because you meant it.”

“I did.”

“Then I’m going to go around in a glow all day. But do tell me about your job.”

I told her everything I could think of, and then suddenly, it was late and she was wondering how she could have sat there and let the whole afternoon go by. We rode back to Pomax, and at the edge of town, I left her.

 

14

I turned over in my mind the question of whether to say anything to Ben Holt about meeting his wife, and the very fact that I should have dwelled upon it perplexed me. I realized then that Dorothy would come home and blurt it out; it was not in her to hide anything, and certainly there was no reason for me to have the slightest trace of guilt. I decided to mention it to Ben in passing, but then one thing piled up upon another so rapidly that I didn’t have a chance to bring it up.

Firstly, the International Miners Union threw a picket line around the entrance to the Dakota Pit. This was an Associated Miners colliery, and when their men reported to work, they tried to break through the picket line. There was a bad fight, and five men were hurt enough to require medical attention. The Chicago papers carried banner headlines about the violence at Egypt, and I found myself trying to convince the press that a splinter union was an enemy of the public as well as the great majority of mineworkers. It was not easy—and the more so since Ben and his associates had never properly worked out any real understanding of their relationship with the small Associated Miners Union. For my part, I could form no clear picture of what the smaller union represented. When I spoke to one of our men, I got a picture of vicious reactionaries, labor spies, company men in union clothes; when I spoke to another, I got as earnest a picture of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Wobblies.

There was a meeting that lasted half the night, centering around the problem presented to us by the big Arrowhead Pit. Although no more than a dozen men were required to conduct the steam-shovel mining and stock-piling that Hans Klingman, the boss there, had pledged to limit himself to, we received constant reports of a steady flow of new men from Chicago. Nor were the descriptions of these men in any way reassuring. They were not diggers; all reports agreed on that; and so far as we could learn, they were the pale, hard-eyed inhabitants of the Chicago back alleys and gutters. I didn’t put much stock in the stories that these were full-fledged gangsters, recruited from some of the big Chicago mobs; I felt that it was more likely these were drunks, loafers, petty hoodlums, and perhaps a scattering of flophouse bums; for even bonus wages would not bring mobsters into a strip mine in Egypt. But what was most disturbing was the fact that these men were not needed; they had no work to do; they were fed and lodged at the mine in hastily erected tents; and according to all stories, they were armed. Not only did we hear of rifles and pistols, but there was one not-to-be-dismissed report of two Browning machine guns.

And as fast as these men arrived at the mine, they were given union cards in the Associated Miners by Gus Empek.

Jack Mullen kept pounding on this during the meeting. “Ben,” he said, “I been telling you for years what Gus Empek and that lousy mob he calls a union is. We let them get fat on our flesh. Now look what that bastard is doing!”

“We know what that bastard is doing,” Ben agreed. “He’s using his union to break this strike. But do we have to be such damn hotheaded fools as to walk right into the trap he set for us? We already had the worst possible press with the business at the Dakota Pit. What does it get us? Headlines? Cries of violence—the lawless miners! Bring in the National Guard! Break the strike! The hell with that! I want to win this strike and win it legally.”

“No. We got to close down that Arrowhead Pit.”

“How? They’re digging coal, but they’re not shipping it out. What should we do? Go in there against their guns? Have some kind of a war? I’m sick and tired of wars. Let’s try this one without being killed. We got enough widows in the union already.”

“I agree with Ben,” Mark Golden said. “This is a trap—just as sure as God, this is a trap.”

“And if they start shipping coal?” Mullen demanded.

“We’ll face that when it happens.”

The meeting went on for hours, but always around the same points and coming to no solutions.

The next morning, a telephone call from Pittsburgh told us that injunctions had been issued, over fifty struck pits opened, and two hundred and twelve men had been arrested. Two of the men in prison had been beaten to death. A few hours later, Ben, Mark Golden, and I were on our way to Pittsburgh.

 

15

A man named Paul Wassilinski, one of a number of men Golden had gotten released on bail, was brought up to my hotel room for me to take down his story. This was on the third day after we had arrived in Pittsburgh. Golden brought him up to the room. He was a big, soft-skinned Lithuanian, with a broad, cowlike face and a child’s blue eyes. One of his arms had been broken and was in a plaster cast and a sling. He was also badly bruised around the face and neck, and an eye was closed, discolored and swollen. I gave him a drink of straight whisky, and then he sat down in the armchair in the room, looking around with admiration. He had never been in a hotel before, or, as he told me, in a room as fine as this one.

“Just try to make yourself as comfortable as you can, Mr. Wassilinski,” I said to him. “I’m going to ask you some questions.”

“Sure,” he nodded. “But you don’t call me Mr. Wassilinski, huh? You call me mister, it makes me feel like a boss. With all this pains and hurts I got on me, I don’t want to feel like a boss right now. You understand? Call me Paul.”

“All right, Paul. How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Married?”

“I got good wife—fine three kids.”

“You’re not born in this country, Paul?”

“No. I taken here I’m nine year old.”

“And how long have you worked in the mines, Paul?”

“Since I’m eleven. That’s twenty-five, twenty-four year.”

“And how long have you been a member of the International Miners Union, Paul?”

“Long as I work in mine. I tell you something—my papa say to me, in old country, Paul, no union, a man’s same as a slave. I come here, I see a union, maybe I don’t know nothing else, I know that. Everybody say, Paul, you a dumb Polack. I’m Litvak, but they see you from old country, they call you Polack. So I join union, I got enough sense for that.”

“And what is your post in the union, Paul?”

“I’m member strike committee for whole district.”

“And where were you working when the strike began?”

“Demerest Collieries.”

“And where were you arrested? On the picket?”

“No. They come to home. Some lousy fink tell them who is strike committee. They come to home.”

“How many other men were arrested at the same time?”

“I don’t know that. They take me Pittsburgh and put me in cell with two other members strike committee, Joey Shine and Alec Vostov. That’s all I see, poor Joey and Alec.”

“Did they give you a hearing? Did they take you into court? Did they arraign you before a judge?”

“Hell, no. Nothing like that.”

“How long did they keep you in the cell?”

“Overnight, maybe whole day. One glass water to drink, one rotten boloney sandwich. Then they take three of us to room in cellar. In room is six cops and table and chair. On table is paper for us to sign.”

“Did they let you read this paper, Paul?”

“Tell you truth, I don’t read so good English. I don’t read so good Litvak either. But poor Joey Shine, he smart. He reads. He tell them it God damn lie what they write there.”

It was at this point in the question-and-answer procedure of getting a statement from Wassilinski that Ben Holt entered the room. I paused, while he shook hands with Wassilinski; then he motioned for me to continue, sitting down on the bed and lighting a cigar. I recorded each answer in my own shorthand.

“Do you remember what was on the paper, Paul?”

“I remember what Joey Shine gets so mad about. He gets angry because they say Ben Holt is Bolshevik, agent Moscow, and we got dynamite stashed away to blow up tipples and car. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he yell at them, ‘you got to kill me before I sign this.’ So they kill him and Alec. That’s right. They kill him.”

“You don’t remember anything else that might have been written on the papers?”

“I only know what Joey yell about.”

“What happened then?”

“They start beat Joey. They push him up against wall and punch him in belly. Two of them hold arms, third punch him in belly. I try help him, they twist arm around my back and break it. Then they put Joey in chair and put pen in his hand. He throw pen at them. Then they beat him around face and head with little clubs. One eye come out. He fall down on floor, and they kick him. Alec try push them away from Joey, they beat Alec around head and try make him sign. Then they beat him more. I try stop them and they hit me in face. I’m no good with broken arm. Then I faint and don’t remember nothing until I wake up in prison hospital.”

The silence after that was broken by Ben asking Wassilinski whether he’d like a cigar.

“That’s nice, Ben. I don’t smoke. I used to smoke, wife say it take bread out of children mouths. So I stop smoking. Lose the taste for it.”

Ben nodded. Golden stared at Wassilinski moodily, and I said, “You understand, Paul, that I have been putting down the questions and answers. I’ll have them typed up, and then we’ll ask you to sign it in front of a notary public. You may have to give evidence in court about this. Will you do that?”

“I do it,” Wassilinski nodded. Then he sat in silence for a while. I guess there was nothing any of us wanted to say, so we sat there silently, and finally Wassilinski shook his head and said that it was a terrible thing to see two men die. They didn’t have to die. “Like they tell me in the old country, you go away to a war and die, but nobody make no sense of it.”

“Things don’t make much sense,” Mark Golden said slowly. “They don’t at all. We’ll try to get some money for their families, and we have a pretty good chance there. But it doesn’t make any sense.” Golden seemed to have aged in the time I had known him; the lines in his face had deepened, the dark, deep-set eyes more tired-looking than ever.

Ben Holt spoke crisply and matter of factly to Wassilinski as he said, “You know, Paul, a strike is a rough thing for a union like ours. It always has been. Ordinarily, I would say that what happened to these two union brothers of yours deserves to be taken care of to the fullest extent by the union. But we’ve been punished. Every day of the strike eats up our treasury, and there’s no more coming in. Mark here will sue the city of Pittsburgh and perhaps we can bring suit against certain operators. But that’s dubious, and a long-drawn-out process at best. In any case, I can promise that there will be five thousand dollars out of union funds for the two families. That’s two thousand five hundred dollars each. It’s not much, but it will help them over the hump. You can tell them that. As for yourself, your medical expenses will be paid. I wish we could do more—I just wish we could.”

 

16

The next day, I spoke to Fulton Grove at Pomax, and his news caused Ben and me to take the next train back to Illinois. Briefly, this is what had happened. A miner named Mike Duffey lived three miles from the Arrowhead Pit. He had two sons, one fourteen, one seventeen, and the boys thought it would be fun to sneak up as close to the crater as they could. They were at the lip of the crater when they were spotted, and the guards opened fire. The seventeen-year-old boy was shot through the heart.

According to Grove, the feeling around Pomax about the Arrowhead operation had reached the boiling point. The funeral of the boy was scheduled for the following day, and both Grove and Mullen were agreed that there would be trouble. Already, armed miners were showing up at the Union Building. Grove told me to impress Ben with their feeling that he should return to Pomax before any serious trouble began.

Even before I could sit down with Ben Holt and Mark Golden for some kind of an intelligent discussion of the problem, the news of what had happened at Pomax filtered through to Pittsburgh, and our phone at the hotel was ringing steadily. The reporters wanted a statement from Ben Holt, and I told them he was not there. A half hour later, when he arrived, I continued to maintain that he was not there.

“And if you go back to Pomax,” Mark Golden said to him, “the same thing is going to continue. Everyone in Arrowhead holds a card in Gus Empek’s union. You are going to be asked to make a statement about the Associated Miners. What are you going to say?”

“What can I say?”

“Stay here and say nothing.”

“You’re crazy, Mark. I can’t do that. I can’t hide. Associated Miners is not a union—it’s a pack of armed hoodlums at this moment, the dregs of the Chicago flophouses in the pay of the operators.”

“So we become a pack of armed hoodlums in response to that?”

“No! But neither can this situation continue.”

“Then stay here and let it simmer down,” Golden begged him. “Let me finish here and we’ll go into the courts in Illinois. This is murder and we’ll deal with it as murder.”

“The way we dealt with murder in Pittsburgh?” Ben snorted.

“That isn’t finished either.”

“No? Well, suppose you try to finish it, Mark. Meanwhile, Al and I are taking the next train back to Pomax.”

We had three hours before train time, and we passed them at a meeting with the heads of the strike committees of the Pittsburgh area. In those days there was an endless succession of such meetings, the group of ten, twenty, or forty miners, the local leaders, the Slavic, Irish, Welsh faces and voices, the natives who had mined coal time out of memory, the hunger and the patience and the acceptance of men who gave up work and bread because they believed Ben Holt’s assertion that miners could live and exist as other people did. And Ben’s ringing declaration,

“We are going to win! So long as we preserve our unity, we are going to win!”

By then, already, for all my short experience, I knew that we were not going to win. I had become a part of something that was sliding downhill. I was living at the bottom of a black pit. Up above, in the sunlight of civilization or what passed for civilization, people ate and drank and made love and laughed and sang. They knew nothing of and cared less about the carbon-tattooed men who grubbed in the belly of the earth, nor was it important that they should know or care. For thousands of years, since men first mined in the earth, the diggers had crawled and scraped and died. What the diggers felt or wanted did not matter; their anger did not matter; their deaths didn’t matter. They dug out of the earth what civilization needed, and civilization went on.

That was the temper of my thoughts as I sat on the train with Ben Holt, and he asked me what was eating me.

“Just thinking, that’s all.”

“And what will it get you, Al?”

“Nothing, I suppose. I listen to Wassilinski talk about two men beaten to death. I hear about a seventeen-year-old kid shot through the heart.”

“And you’re going to weep?” Ben replied coldly. “How many tears do you have? You got one for every man who died in that lousy war that made you such a hero? You got a tear for every man who died in a coal mine? I didn’t rate you for a sentimentalist, Al. I didn’t rate you for a weeper.”

“Thank you.”

“So I hurt your feelings—the hell with that! If you’re going to stay, you’ll stay. And if you’re going to walk out, nothing I say is going to change anything.”

“Don’t write me off!” I snapped at him. “When you want to fire me, just tell me.”

“All right. Take it easy. No one lives forever, but if you want to do anything or make anything, you got to live for a little while. Eat yourself up, and you got nothing. Nothing. You become like Mark Golden. He bleeds for every drop of blood that’s spilled. He suffers for every blow that’s struck. How long will he live? It’s destroying him. He’ll make nothing.”

“And you, Ben?” I whispered. “What will you make out of all this?”

“A union,” he said flatly. “A real union. A union big enough and strong enough to shake this whole friggen world. A union that will talk and the world will listen!”

“You believe that.”

“You don’t.”

“No, I guess I don’t, Ben,” I admitted.

“Because you’re involved,” he said thoughtfully. “You bleed too. I suppose you think I’m a cold son of a bitch.”

“I’ve had that thought, sometimes.”

“I put first things first,” he nodded. “I’m in a fight, and I’m going to win. That’s all that matters. I’m going to win.”

 

17

About an hour before our train pulled into Pomax, Ben said to me, “You’ve been through a war, Al. What would happen out there at Arrowhead if our people attacked the pit?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose there are eighty or a hundred men inside that crater. Suppose they have the two machine guns and rifles and pistols. Suppose they were attacked by three, four, five times their number. What would happen?”

“It depends.”

“Sure it depends. On what?”

“On the way the attack was conducted—No, I guess any way, the crater’s indefensible.”

“Why?”

“Because of its nature. You can’t defend a hole in the ground that’s half a mile across. Everyone in it’s a sitting duck. And if they try to defend the lip, eighty or a hundred men aren’t enough.”

“You were out there? You saw the mine?” he asked me.

“I was out there,” I nodded. “I met your wife out there one Sunday afternoon—”

“I forgot about that,” he grinned. “She told me about it. I’m glad she had some company. That’s a bad place.”

I agreed that it was a bad place, and Ben continued to grin. What he meant by the grin, I didn’t know, but then there never was to be a time when I would know or fully comprehend his changing moods, his swift transitions from calm to anger, from fury to tranquillity, from contemplation to contempt. And now, surely, he could put no interpretation upon my meeting his wife one Sunday afternoon. For myself, at that time no woman interested me or moved me; not yet; all the wounds were too sore and too new. And as for Dorothy Holt, well, I had already made an adolescent decision, that she was a saint of sorts—which, ironically, and regardless of how absurd a judgment it was, still was no judgment that a man makes with total disinterest. So my own motives and feelings were confused; but when Ben Holt smiled that way, it could mean any one of many things. I think he was smiling at the thought of Arrowhead, because he said,

“You saw the mine and you say it can’t be defended. Not even with machine guns?”

“Machine guns are overrated, Ben. But you’re not thinking of an attack on the mine? I hope to God you’re not.”

“I’m not. Others are, you can be sure of that.” His mood changed again. He seemed to forget me, and stared glumly out of the window until we pulled into the Pomax station. When we got off the train there, a young fellow, Oscar Suzic by name, who was Jack Mullen’s assistant, was waiting for us. He shook hands with Ben and me, and then he said,

“Ben, Jack sent me over here to meet you. Gus Empek and Joe Brady are here.”

“No!” Ben said. “They have more brains than that.”

“They’re here.”

“Where?”

“Right here in the station, in the baggage room.”

“I’ll be damned,” Ben whispered. “I’ll be everlastingly damned.”

It came out, from what Suzic said to us, that Empek had telephoned Jack Mullen that same morning and had insisted that he be allowed to speak to Ben. At first Mullen said that it was impossible, that under no circumstances would Ben have anything to do with Empek or Brady. But Empek persisted. He pleaded his case. He said that there was something terrible making up, and that anyone with at least a spark of responsibility had to do something to try to stop it. At first, he begged for a meeting in his headquarters at Cairo, and when Mullen refused flatly even to raise that possibility with Ben, he suggested a midway place. Mullen said, “If you want to talk to Ben Holt, come here and talk.” Empek pointed out that such a move could be a lynch sentence, considering the mood in Pomax. Then they worked out a procedure. Brady and Empek would take a train. Mullen would arrange with the stationmaster for their use of the baggage room, and Oscar Suzic would be on hand to meet them as well as us.

As Suzic detailed this, Ben’s face darkened. His shoulders hunched, and his big fists clenched and unclenched. “I’m just carrying a message from Jack Mullen,” Suzic explained nervously. “He said for you to take it easy. Coming from him, he said don’t blow your top—listen to what they have to say. Those aren’t my words, Ben. Those are Mullen’s.”

“I’ll listen to them,” Ben nodded.

We went into the baggage room. Brady was sitting on a pile of mailbags. Empek was pacing nervously, and he stopped and spun to face us as we entered. In a way, I admired both of them; it had taken courage to come here and talk to Ben Holt, more courage than I would have given either of them credit for. Empek was visibly distraught; Brady fought his own battle to keep his pale face composed and expressionless as he rose to face us. After we entered the room, there was a long moment of silence—broken caustically by Ben,

“You wanted to talk to me. Talk.”

Empek licked his lips and nodded. “All right, Ben. You know me five years, Ben. Maybe we disagree five thousand different ways. Maybe I said some hard things about you—so you said some things about me. You think my union shouldn’t exist. I don’t think any union should be run like yours, one man sitting on top of it like a king and crushing any opposition—”

“Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“I’m putting my cards on the table, Ben. I’m not holding anything back. Whatever you can say about me, I’m not a strikebreaker. I’m not a fink. I’m not a murderer.”

“The hell you’re not,” Ben replied, slowly and flatly. “Who gave your union cards to those flophouse bums in the Arrowhead Pit? Who put a veneer of legality on them?”

“They were miners, Ben!”

“Miners? With machine guns and rifles? What in hell did they ever mine?”

“Ben, if I ever thought that a kid would be killed—”

“What in hell did you think?” Ben roared. “What kind of games did you think we were playing?”

“I’m just asking for a chance, Ben. I want to rescind those union cards. I want to clear the air.”

“You want to clear the air, you son of a bitch!”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Ben.”

“I talk to you any way I damn please! What a hell of a nerve both of you got, coming here with this cock-and-bull proposition! Of all the low, strikebreaking bastards I ever looked at, you two are the lowest—”

At this point, Brady lost control, reached inside his jacket, and leaped toward Ben. Ben hit him with an open palm. The blow, apparently effortless, sent Brady flying across the room, and with two long strides, Ben was upon him, ripped open his jacket and removed a gun from a shoulder holster. He looked at the pistol with disgust, and then tossed it to me. “They stink,” he said hoarsely. “Let’s get out of here.”

Then he walked to the door without looking at them again.

 

18

People—labor specialists, newspapermen, legislators, and a good many others—have speculated endlessly on Ben Holt’s power over the men around him, his hold on them, and the loyalty he finally commanded from tens of thousands of coal miners. By their lights, the nature of the man was obvious; he was part hooligan, part actor, part devil, a shrewd roughneck with a talent for dictatorship and an instinct for the dramatic. What they failed to grasp, I believe, is that he was a man who responded to a situation in the only manner he knew. In essence, he was himself; he was a coal miner with the taste of coal in his mouth and the precise understanding that coal is power—and he lived at a particular time.

Perhaps some of this passed through my mind as we walked from the station around the big square to the Union Building. There were a lot of men in the square today. They stood in little groups, and they were armed. Almost every man carried a rifle or a shotgun, and at least half of them wore one piece or another of old army equipment, a bandoleer, a rucksack, a sheathed bayonet, and here and there, forage caps and tin hats. They were not enthusiastic in their greetings to Ben. They nodded or they muttered a word or two; but back of their minds was plainly the fact that he had made the original arrangement for the Arrowhead Pit to remain open.

As we neared the Union Building, Andrew Lust, the chief of police, joined us. “I want to talk, Ben,” he said.

“Come upstairs.”

There were at least a hundred men gathered around the Union Building, armed men with quiet, hard faces. The kids were still in school, but later that afternoon, they would be there too. Like the others, these men looked at Ben and speculated about him. They stood aside as we went into the building.

The building was strangely quiet inside, and compared to the streets, it was almost deserted. Grove and Mullen were waiting for us. Lena Kuscow asked me about Mark Golden. Their relationship puzzled me, and I found myself watching her curiously as I told her that he was all right. “But you left him there alone?” I informed her that he wasn’t alone, not by a long shot. We moved into Ben’s private office. Oscar Suzic carried in some extra chairs. Lust began talking, but Ben interrupted him with,

“For God’s sake, Andy, hold it a moment. The world’s not coming to an end. Let me call my wife and at least tell her that I’m back here.”

We sat there in silence, while he called Dorothy—and I began to understand the relationship that exists on the end of a telephone wire. When would he be home? He didn’t know that he’d be home at all. “I just may have to go to Springfield and get to the governor somehow.” He was uneasy with us listening to the conversation, but neither could he bring himself to ask us to go and leave him alone. He faced us, scowling, and when Mullen asked about the station incident, he snapped,

“The hell with those lousy finks! I took a gun away from Joe Brady.” He nodded at Lust. “Give it to him, Al.”

I handed the pistol to Lust, who examined it curiously, pulled out the clip, and emptied it. “What’s this?”

“I took that away from Joe Brady,” Ben answered morosely. “We met him and Empek at the station. Nothing came of it.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“All right, you got your troubles,” Lust said impatiently. “I got your troubles and mine as well. I swear I never seen anything like this in all my born days. We got an ordinance in this town about carrying weapons apart from the hunting season. This ain’t the hunting season, and there’s an army walking around downstairs. I swear there’s seven, eight hundred armed men in town right now. Supposedly for the funeral, but they come from all over the county and they never heard of the Duffey kid until yesterday. What about it, Ben? Just tell me what about it?”

“There’s nothing to tell you, because we don’t know.”

“The hell you don’t!”

“Just don’t call me a liar, Andy,” Ben said softly and dangerously. “Just don’t give me any lies, that’s all. We didn’t organize this. You ought to have enough sense to know that. The word gets around, and you know the diggers in Egypt as well as I do. This kind of thing isn’t new down here. It happened before. These damn diggers think with guns, not with their heads.”

“But I try to think with my head. I got twelve officers—twelve officers. What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s up to you, Andy.”

“What can I do?” Lust demanded. “I tell you, Ben, call it off! I’m not going to slaughter my men to protect those lousy finks out at Arrowhead. I can’t protect them anyway. So call it off.”

“I can’t call it off,” Ben growled. “God damn you, don’t you have a brain in your head? We didn’t organize this.”

“You went into West Virginia with guns in 1920, didn’t you?”

“No! No, I did not! The diggers there took up guns because it was a matter of life and death. This is no matter of life and death. What difference does it make to the union how many finks they put into that crater? Sure it’s a damned shame that the Duffey boy was killed, but do you think I’m so brainless that I’m going to organize a slaughter on top of that? Do you really think that, Andy?”

The chief of police hesitated, then shook his head. “No. You don’t work that way, Ben.”

“Thanks. All right, just cool off, Andy. We’ll go out to Arrowhead and talk to Klingman. If he agrees to clear out and take his bums with him, will you give them police protection?”

“What I can, I’ll give them, Ben. I got twelve men.”

“I understand. Still we can do it. We’ll offer them cars to drive them right out of the county. We’ll offer it tonight.”

“And when do you want to go out there, Ben?”

“We’ll go right now. Get your squad car, the one with the green light on top, so we can look official and not have some nervous hooligan pop off at us. We’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes.”

He left, and Ben looked at us, his eyes going from face to face. “Any better idea?” he demanded.

“You made up your mind,” Grove said. “You didn’t ask us.”

“I’m asking you now.”

“You can talk to those men in the street, Ben. You got the force of the union behind you. You can ask them to turn in their arms.”

“And they’ll do it?”

“They’re going to kill every last man out there in Arrowhead,” Grove cried. “Don’t you know that?”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t read the future.”

“Then maybe it’s time you did read the future, Ben. It’s plain enough.”

“You read it, Fulton.”

“I do. And if I was in your place, I’d call in the militia and disarm this mob.”

Ben smiled thinly. “I know you a long time, Fulton, but I never thought I’d live to hear you tell me to call in the militia against the members of my own union. I never thought it. I’ve heard of unions that were broken and died, but they died decently. They didn’t die because the president of the union turned the militia loose against his own membership. I never heard of that, and I don’t intend to be the first.”

“Just to be fair, Ben,” Mullen put in, “we heard you tell your wife that you might go up to Springfield and see the governor.”

“Yes. To ask him to clean out that Arrowhead crater before it became a grave. But that wouldn’t work. In the end, we’d get the militia—not the owners. Believe me, Jack, there’s only one way—to talk Klingman into getting out while he’s still alive.”

 

19

In a few minutes, we were on our way out to Arrowhead, Andrew Lust sitting next to the uniformed driver, and squeezed tightly into the back seat, Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, and myself. I think it was at this point that I first began to sense Ben Holt’s need for me, for my presence, for whatever he felt I gave to him. Just what that quality was, I still do not wholly understand, nor was it simple. He needed a balance, as if he knew that, brooking no interference, he tended constantly toward the brink of disaster. Yet it was not that entirely. He had a vast confidence in himself; his essence was wild and headstrong; yet he had a deep feeling of something missing. We were as different as two human beings could be; I came hard by judgments, he judged easily; he lived in a world of black and whites, I lived in a world of grays; he simplified, I saw nothing simple, nothing easy; he was as certain as I was uncertain, and I hated power as much as he loved it and needed it. Yet his deep need for someone like myself was evident—and basic to our working together.

On our way out to Arrowhead, he said to me, “Al, how would you put it to Klingman? You’re new to this.”

“Tell him he’s going to die if he stays there. That ought to be convincing enough.”

“No. No, it won’t be. We’re facing arrogance. There’s nothing in the world as arrogant as a coal operator. Even small potatoes like Klingman. Why, I have known operators to tell me to my face that God appointed them stewards of the earth’s wealth—and that they knew better than I did what was good for their diggers. I tell Klingman he’s going to die if he remains there, he won’t believe me. He just won’t.”

He didn’t. We drove up to the mine, and the day was as clear and bright as the last time I had been at the Arrowhead Pit. As we drove toward the road that led down into the crater, two men with rifles stepped out from behind rocks. When they saw that it was a police car with a uniformed driver, they let us pass, and we turned toward the entrance. It was true about the machine guns; at either side of the entrance road, at the lip of the crater, there was a nest of sandbags, each holding a Browning water-cooled gun and three men to serve it. Yet the emplacement was childish and thoughtless, as I pointed out to Ben.

“Why?” he wanted to know.

“Because it can be enfiladed, from the side and from across the crater. A machine gun is no good if you can get behind it. They’re trying to defend a circle, but the way they’re placed, the arc of both is only eighty or ninety degrees effective.”

“We won’t discuss that with Klingman. The hell with him. If he won’t move, let him depend on his goddamn machine guns.”

We were driving down the road that made a circular ramp inside the crater. Inside the crater, a whole village of tents had been constructed, as well as several shacks. As it turned out, ninety-two men were living there, all of them well armed, and there were six professional women, brought down from Chicago to ease the boredom of the nights. There were two big tank trucks to serve as the water supply, piles of canned goods in corrugated boxes, piles of smoked ham and sides of bacon, and at least fifty bushel baskets of potatoes and onions. No expense had been spared to make these Chicago imports comfortable, and indeed there appeared to be more food in that pit than in all of Pomax. A bar had been set up on two barrels, and a certain amount of bootleg whisky was sold there. For all that, there was no sense of order or discipline about the place. It stank of excrement and swarmed with flies. The cots in the tents were unmade, and there was filth and refuse everywhere.

As we approached the cluster of tents, dozens of men with rifles moved toward us, but again, as up above, when they saw the police markings, they fell back. We parked at the bottom of the road, fifty feet or so from the tents, the giant steam shovel looming over us, and waited there as Klingman and his foreman, a freckled, redheaded man named Babe Jackson, well hated by everyone I heard speak of him, pushed through toward us. Each of them wore a revolver belted around his waist, and Klingman affected a wide-brimmed western hat, which he took off now to wipe his brow. The day had turned hot, and he was sweating.

We climbed out of the car. No one shook hands. There were nods of recognition, and Klingman said,

“You took a hell of a chance coming in here like that, Andy. This is private property. You got a warrant to come in here?”

“No warrant,” drawled Lust. He too wore a gun at his hip; he was skinny, snakelike and dangerous, and he didn’t frighten. “I just took a chance.”

“Well, if you’re looking for the man who shot the Duffey boy, you won’t get him. Matter of fact, we don’t know who he is ourselves. Them Duffey kids were trespassing, and a dozen men shot at them.”

“I figure to find out who he is,” Lust said lazily. “All in good time. Right now, we want to prevent some murders.” He turned to Ben. “Tell him about it.”

“Just this, Klingman,” Ben said. “There are almost a thousand armed men in Pomax right now, diggers, and more coming in every hour. You know the kind of men who live in Egypt. They don’t wave guns for excitement. They never touch a gun unless it’s hunting season or they’re very angry. Right now, they’re very angry. They don’t like the murder of a kid who wasn’t doing any harm—just a curious kid. They don’t like this kind of Chicago scum brought down here to break a strike and given machine guns and rifles. They don’t like it a bit, and I imagine they plan for something to happen out here. If it does, not one of you will leave this pit alive. I don’t want that. Andy Lust doesn’t want it—and I don’t think you want it. So we’re here to tell you to get out. We were ready to furnish cars, but you have enough trucks to do it yourself. We want you out of here and out of the county before dark.”

Jackson, the foreman, grinned and said, “Listen to him talk, Mr. Klingman.”

Klingman said, “Don’t make me laugh.”

“We wouldn’t try to make you laugh,” Lust said.

“No? Well, let me tell you this—and it goes for you, Andy, and for Ben Holt and that whole goddamn Bolshevik union of his. This is private property. We are on this property, and we have the legal right to defend it from intrusion. Don’t try to frighten me with a pack of ignorant diggers with shotguns. We have two machine guns, and a hundred well-armed, trained men. We’re not moving. We stay here and we mine coal. So save your breath and get moving. And if you want your diggers to pay their union dues, keep them away from here!”

“That’s it?” Ben asked.

“That’s it.”

“There might be one other way,” the chief of police said. “You turn over to me the man who shot the Duffey kid, and I might have a fifty-fifty chance of taming those diggers. Maybe I can persuade them to legal ways if I can show them that there’s some legal way to enforce a law against murder.”

“I told you there’s no way of ever finding out who fired that shot. But let me tell you this, Andy. If there’s going to be trouble, you got an obligation to prevent it.”

Lust grinned and shook his head. “No, sir. This is outside of town limits. Anyway, it would take the National Guard to protect you, Mr. Klingman, and then some.”

“Don’t feel sorry for us. We’ll get along,” Jackson said.

“You damn fools,” Ben whispered. Then we got into the car and drove up the ramp and back to Pomax. Lust said nothing on the way back. I suppose it hurts the ego of a chief of police to walk into a place that shelters a murderer and not to be able to do one blessed thing about it; and it probably hurt Lust more than the average. He was a man who was used to getting his own way with things, but then so was Ben Holt.

 

20

Things are only simple when you look at them in retrospect; when you are a part of a thing and you know that it will happen, you can also know the hopelessness of trying to prevent it from happening. But that isn’t easy to explain. People make up their minds, and then they close all the shutters. Pomax was full of people who had made up their minds.

I had missed my lunch, but I didn’t feel hungry. When we returned to the Union Building, Ben and the others went upstairs. I remained on the street. The first few days of a strike are good copy, but after a week or so, the newspapers have pulled out all the reporters; for the tedious business of maintaining a picket line and becoming hungrier is nothing the public is very interested in. There were no more reporters for me to persuade or to tell lies to, and a press release would have to wait for the rest of that day.

I walked down Lincoln Street, past the knots of armed men and past the Pomax House. The Civil War monument, occupying a corner of the main square, was surrounded by a low granite wall, and now every inch of this wall was occupied by armed miners who sat in a circle, knee to knee, and simply waited. In their blue jeans and long-sleeved blue work shirts, they were like a shabbily uniformed platoon, their faces bleak, their eyes hooded. The shaft over their heads contained the names of the men from Pomax who had fallen in battle—twenty-two names, as I once counted them, a great many, considering how small a town Pomax had then been; but even then, a mining town, where miners had volunteered and formed their own regiment and marched away. The whole train of thought engendered here made me feel sick and empty, the guns a symbolic signature underlining my existence. If I felt no closeness and relationship to these diggers, neither did I feel it toward anyone else; but neither did I believe that I could cure myself by leaving Ben Holt and the Miners Union. In a world of hatred, violence, and behavior that would shame animals, there were islands of repose and gentleness; but my desire for such refuge had disappeared.

Turning away from the square, I walked down a tree-shaded street, lined with old houses badly in need of paint. The children were coming home from school now, and the good weather had brought the women out of doors, but there were no men. I saw kids go into the houses and then leave the houses and head for the square.

The First Baptist Church was not a handsome building. Like the houses, it needed paint; it bore the soot-brand of Pomax; and unlike most churches in the East, it had neither a tower nor stained-glass windows. A man in dark trousers and shirt sleeves was turning the borders of the front walk, and when I stopped by him, he smiled apologetically and explained,

“I try to put in some flowers around this time of the year. They’re the least expensive type of decoration. Mostly zinnias. We dry our own seeds.” He was a tall man with a low-slung chin and large, sad brown eyes.

“Are you the pastor?” I asked him.

He nodded. “George Frayne,” offering his hand. I told him my own name, and he said, “Oh yes—you’re the new man at the union. How do you like it?”

“I’m afraid I never thought of it as anything I like or dislike.”

“Oh?” He stared at me for a long moment, and then he observed that since it was so warm outside, I might care for a cool drink. I said I would, and he led me into the parish building, a small house alongside the church, no larger nor in any better condition than the miners’ houses up the street. I was introduced to his wife, a woman of fifty or so, gray-haired, shy, retiring, and then we sat down on the back porch and she brought us some lemonade.

“You know what’s going on out there?” I said to Frayne.

“Yes,” he answered slowly. “I know.”

“They’ll probably attack the Arrowhead Pit tonight. I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I do know that the men down in that crater haven’t a chance. A lot of men are going to die, miners as well as the hoodlums they brought in from Chicago.”

“That would be a terrible thing, wouldn’t it, Mr. Cutter? But why do you bring it up here? Do you think I can do anything about it?”

“Can you?”

“Then I must ask you first why Ben Holt doesn’t put a stop to this?”

“He tried,” I said listlessly, now regretting whatever impulse brought me to beard this sad-eyed man. “I was out to the mine with him earlier today. He practically begged Klingman and his men to get out before anything started. They refused.”

“That’s all?”

“What else could he do?”

“He could have the miners call it off. He could stop them.”

“How?”

“By talking to them. By putting himself against them and what they intend to do. They respect him. Many of them love him. They don’t respect me, Mr. Cutter. They don’t love me. Last Sunday, I preached to eleven people—eleven people, Mr. Cutter.”

“I don’t think Ben Holt could stop them.”

“You mean he wouldn’t stop them, Mr. Cutter. You mean he won’t risk separating himself from them, turning them against him. He won’t risk shaming them, because men never forget when they are shamed. Isn’t that it?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said.

“How old are you, Mr. Cutter?” he asked, almost apologetically.

“Twenty-six.”

“I am fifty-one, Mr. Cutter. When I came here, fourteen years ago, I was a young man. Oh, I know—thirty-seven doesn’t seem so young to you, but when you are thirty-seven, you will not feel very old, believe me. I felt young, and I was filled with confidence and hope. I am not a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Mr. Cutter. I believe in a God of love and compassion, and I came here to Pomax out of choice. I knew that Pomax had the reputation of a bleak and unlovely place, and I felt that such a place needed hope and faith. But, do you know, Mr. Cutter, there was nothing I could give to Pomax. You cannot win love or respect from hungry men unless you feed them, and you cannot read a funeral service over a dead miner and ignore the conditions that killed him. I can do nothing to stop what is going to happen. After all these years, I am alone in Pomax. I have spent many years brooding over whether that is my fault or the fault of what I try to teach. I am alone but Ben Holt is not alone. We both minister to a sick world, and my medicines are useless. It is up to him, Mr. Cutter, not to me—and I cannot tell you how ashamed it makes me to say so.”