Power

About ten o’clock, we pulled up in front of Ben Holt’s house. Dorothy must have been watching, because she had the door open as we came up the steps. She was distraught and magnified her own fears about Ben, and she begged us to tell her what had happened. Very briefly, I did, not in all detail but in the general sense that there had been a fight between the diggers and the strikebreakers brought down from Chicago, and that their fight still continued although there was no question about its outcome.

“Then why isn’t Ben here?” she burst out.

“You know that, don’t you? You know where he is.”

“He’s in Cairo. I know that—but he should be here.”

“He’s not here, Mrs. Holt,” I said, “because he can’t be implicated in all this. If he is, that’s the end of the union. Completely the end. I guess he did the only thing he could think of doing. Have you heard from him?”

“He called about a half hour ago.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“At the Parker House.”

Lena told her that I hadn’t eaten all day, and she led us into the kitchen where she poured milk and made sandwiches. I had no appetite until I began to eat, and then I found that I was ravenous. Dorothy watched me, and after a while she said,

“You weren’t telling me the truth, were you, Mr. Cutter?”

“What do you mean?”

“About what happened out there at Arrowhead. It was a slaughter, wasn’t it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mrs. Holt. We didn’t stay until the end. I just don’t know.”

When we finished eating, we left, to put Lena’s car away for the night, and then to go back to the Union Building. Lena said to me, “How do you suppose a woman like that came to marry Ben Holt?”

“I never thought of it. Maybe she loves him—did you ever think of that?”

“Don’t jump all over me, Al. It’s a funny world where mostly you don’t end up marrying someone you love.”

Lights were on all through the Union Building, the doors open, and quite a few miners there now. Whether they were men who had come back from Arrowhead or never gone there, I didn’t know; but whispers of what took place had preceded us. There are winds bad news rides on; I have never known it to fail.

Going up the stairs, we met Andy Lust on his way down, and he stopped me and said, “This is a hell of a business, Cutter, with everyone gone. Where in hell’s name is Ben Holt and the others?”

“I don’t know.”

“My uncle’s elbow, you don’t know! Where is he, Lena?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Were you two out at Arrowhead?”

“We just finished having dinner with Mrs. Holt,” I said.

“You eat dinner late, Cutter, don’t you? You’re full of fancy ways. The way I hear it, there’s been a slaughter out at the Arrowhead mine, but you don’t know a God damn thing about it, do you? Well, just in case you talk to Ben Holt, tell him I got my neck to think about. I can’t sit on this. If I don’t call upstate now and ask for help, I’m finished.”

“I can’t help you, Chief.”

He stormed on down, and we went into the outer office, where Oscar Suzic and Dan Jessup, a dry, thin-faced man of sixty or so who was president of the local union attached to the International, faced the mayor, newspapermen from nearby towns, two members of the council, and three or four others who were strangers to me. He threw us a hopeless, desperate glance, but we pushed past him without stopping and into Ben’s private office. Oscar joined us there, and said to me, “This your job, Al. I don’t know what to tell them. So help me God, I don’t!”

“Poor Oscar,” Lena said. “Oh, what a fine bunch of representative trade-union characters we are! Al here was almost shot by a firing squad, and I’ve had the shakes for two hours now. Doesn’t Ben keep a bottle somewhere in his desk? I need a drink like I’ve never needed one.” She found the bottle in the desk, and poured liquor into paper cups. It was plain bootleg sugar alcohol, raw and hot, but it tasted good that night. I told Suzic that I knew no better than he did what to tell the people outside. “This is nothing,” I added. “Before the night’s over, the whole world’s going to move in on Pomax. This town is going to be famous. But right now, the thing to do is to try to get some medical aid out to the mine, just in case some of them survive.” But we couldn’t solve that. There were two doctors in Pomax and we called both of them. Both of them refused to go out to Arrowhead at this time of the night. They knew what was happening out there, and they didn’t want to be involved. They didn’t want to be put on a witness stand to name the miners they had recognized.

Oscar and Lena went back to the outer office to try to answer questions and divert questions, and I called Ben at the Parker House in Cairo. He was there, and I suppose he was waiting for me to call. I told him what we had seen, and he promptly told me what a damn fool I had been to have gone out to the mine at all. But I was in no mood to listen and I told him that at least I had seen what happened there, which was better than trying to operate on the basis of rumors and secondhand stories. He softened somewhat and said to me,

“Al, I just can’t believe that they were all killed. There were almost a hundred men in that pit. What about the women?”

“When a thousand crazy men are shooting in the dark, they can’t bother to be chivalrous.”

He said that he and the others would be back by nine in the morning. When I asked him what our position would be, he replied that our position was plain enough. The union leadership had done everything in its power to persuade Klingman and his men to leave the mine. They had refused. The union had absolutely no part in what followed. Then he said, “Wait a minute, Al.” I heard a whispered conference at the other end, and then,

“Al, what about the communists?”

“What about them?”

“Do you suppose they were involved?”

“Ben, I don’t know any communists. I didn’t know there were any in Pomax.”

“All right,” he agreed. “Play it carefully and cool as it comes. Don’t make any statements. Tell the press that I’ll have a statement and put them off.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “Ben, I’ll try.”

Then he offered a few words of praise. That too was in the nature of Ben Holt. A few words of praise from him made you forget all that had led up to the praise. You felt proud and rewarded—or at least you felt that way if you were young enough.

Lena came back into the room, to tell me that she had disconnected the switchboard for the moment. Calls were coming in steadily by now, from Springfield, from the state police, from Washington, from the United Press and the Associated Press. She didn’t know what to do. Did I?

“No, I don’t,” I admitted. And then I asked her about the communists.

“Not in Pomax,” she said. “Not that I ever heard of, Al. There are a few in the union, but not enough to even make a ripple. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged it off and said that we’d have to open the switchboard and try to do something with the calls. Then I got Oscar Suzic aside and told him to keep his mouth shut about Lena and myself being out at Arrowhead. As far as he was concerned, he knew nothing about it.

From then on, it got worse and worse, and it was three o’clock in the morning before we were able to close up the building and get some sleep. By then, we had managed to get an ambulance from the county hospital out to Arrowhead, and we had also learned that three men and one woman had survived. They were all badly injured, and it was not believed that the woman would live through the night. She died the next day, as did one of the men. Two of the men, both of them drifters from Chicago, flophouse alcoholics, survived. Klingman and his foreman, Jackson, both died in the crater. Back in the hotel, I left word to be awakened at seven. Then I fell on my bed, too tired to take my clothes off, and for a few hours slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.

As I walked from the hotel to the Union Building the next morning, I saw the first detachments of the National Guard debarking from the train at the station; by midday, Pomax was a town under military occupation and the Pomax House host to an increasing congregation of reporters from all over the state and many more from outside the state. By nine o’clock, Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, and Fulton Grove were back in their offices, and by ten, Fulton Grove was telling an audience of reporters that the bloody slaughter out at Arrowhead was the work of communist agitators. When I put it to Ben and asked him how he could allow that kind of tripe to be handed out by Grove, he replied that so much was said about the communists already that a little more couldn’t possibly hurt. I refused to include the charges in my own press releases, coming officially from the union, and we had a bitter argument about it. The argument was never finished, for that was a day of unending turmoil. Several of the newspapermen had somehow gotten wind of my being out at Arrowhead the night before, but I refused to affirm or deny this. Meanwhile, the bodies from Arrowhead were brought into Pomax, where an empty barn was converted into a mortuary. Rumor had it that two of the miners had been killed and several more wounded, but the bodies of these two were buried quietly and not publicly identified until months later.

Through that day and the days that followed, the union held firmly to its position, that we had tried to prevent trouble in the only way we knew, and that, failing there, we had no part in what followed. Police Chief Lust insisted that he had no knowledge of what happened at Arrowhead until it was over, that no calls for assistance had come into the police station, and that if, in any case, he had tried to stop the incident, he would have been leading his men into disaster as well as violating his territorial restrictions, since the mine was well out of the town limits. This last was debatable, since Lust had certain county privileges in an emergency, but he stood on it because it helped to support his general position.

Strangely enough, the chief effect of the Arrowhead Slaughter was felt outside of southern Illinois, particularly in Pennsylvania where it led to an immediate and brutal assault on the striking anthracite and bituminous miners, an assault that eventually smashed the strike and broke the power of the union in Pennsylvania. In those weeks that followed, Ben and I went to Pennsylvania five times, but we could only be witnesses to deepening poverty and increasing brutality. One after another, the pits opened, some with union miners who left the union, some with strikebreakers brought in from the South.

In Egypt, the strike held much longer, the miners drawn together in a dark and bitter unity. From the first day, they shared the guilt of Arrowhead and swallowed it among themselves and pressed it deep into their flattening bellies. Reporters and investigators roved town, but they could find no one who knew anything of what had happened the night before, or who had taken part in it, or who had spoken to anyone who had taken part in it. So far as the people of Egypt were concerned, the Arrowhead Slaughter had never happened, no one had killed anyone, and if there were dead men, the cause of their death could not possibly be ascertained; so far as the miners were concerned, they had been home with their families, as the women and children testified.

Angry and frustrated, the newspapermen turned on me. I spent almost an hour at the mortuary because both Lust and Colonel Sevard, who commanded the National Guard detachments, insisted that someone from the union be there. I was supposed to identify bodies, but the only two I could recognize were Klingman and Jackson, and when they forced me to stare at the shattered remains of the men who had been blown to pieces by the dynamite, I mentally cursed Ben Holt and the day I had ever met him. The newspapermen were there, and they said to me, “Come on, Cutter, you were a working newspaperman, so give us a break and open up this goddamn business. What do you want us to do, take it all out on the union! Someone killed these men.” I agreed that someone had killed them. The National Guard colonel was hating my guts, and he said that if he had his way, I and Ben Holt and the rest of the union officers would be hanging from the rafters of the same barn.

As yet, no one had come forward to identify bodies, or claim them or swear out a warrant for the arrest of anyone. Klingman lived in Chicago; whether he had relatives or not, I don’t know; Jackson was out of state; almost all of the others were drifters and the kind of women that don’t have families. It was a heartbreaking and terrible thing to see the bodies laid out as they were, but sadder to realize that in death, these people were as alone as they had been in life. They were strikebreakers and hired gunmen and flophouse drifters, but they were also the flesh of what had once been human, and I had no defense or retort when Sevard snarled at me, “Why don’t you look at the women, Cutter? I want to see your face when you do. All the little birds around here say that you watched it happen. Did you lead it, Cutter? I’m told you were a big man in the war. Is this your idea of war, Cutter?”

Five weeks later, in Pennsylvania, thirty miles from Pittsburgh, I stood looking at the bodies of five miners beaten to death by coal-company police. But one didn’t cancel another. Ben and I stood and looked at what had been a miner’s family—that was a year later—and five children were skin and bone, dead from starvation in the United States in 1925, but still nothing canceled. Mullen roared at me that same evening, “For Christ’s sake, those dames were hookers, the lowest kind of hookers!” It didn’t balance any better.

I got out of that place of death, with the reporters crowding around me and pleading for a break, and I don’t know whether I hated myself in my present position any more than I hated what I had once been—a working member of the press. The man from the Chicago Tablet said, “Let me tell you this, Cutter—you give us nothing, we give you nothing, not one inch. We’ll cut your goddamn heart out—you and that lousy union of yours.”

They did. That evening’s Tablet carried the banner headline: MASS MURDER IN POMAX, and below: OUTRAGE WITHOUT PEER IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and the story under this read:

Last night, in Pomax, Ill., in an act of savage revenge that has no equal in our past, the miners of Pomax County gunned down a hundred miners of a rival union. The men who were killed, in a slaughter reminiscent of the Indian wars, were trapped in the Arrowhead Pit, an open-strip mine about five miles outside of Pomax. Of the hundred, only two survived. Five women, trapped in the pit with the miners, were also shot to death.

Local sources say that over two thousand armed miners took part in the attack, which adds the bloodiest chapter to the already bloody history of that part of the state known as Egypt. Almost every dead man was found to be carrying a membership card in the Associated Miners Union, a rival union to the larger International Miners Union. So far no clear-cut evidence has been unearthed to prove that the attack was mounted and carried out under the aegis of the International Miners Union, but the implication can hardly be avoided. Highhanded, powerful Ben Holt, president of the International Miners Union, who has already gained national notoriety in his constant defiance of law and order, disclaims any and all responsibility. Vice-President of the IMU, Fulton Grove, charges communist inspiration for the outrage. But it is more likely—

And so forth and so on. The other papers took the same line, some more strongly than others in the matter of direct accusation. A New York City tabloid said:

Justice can only be served by the indictment of the entire Pomax County membership of the IMU, on charges of murder in the first degree. Force must be met by force—if it means an armed federal invasion of Pomax County.

Another Chicago paper limited its charges to Ben Holt and the union leadership, thus:

“Ben Holt and the men around him must be made to stand trial for murder, and to prove under oath that they are innocent of this dastardly and heinous crime.”

Thereby reversing the stipulation that a man is innocent until proven guilty.

At that time, I would have said that anything could happen as a result of this and I was pretty certain that a great deal would happen. The last thing in the world that I looked forward to was for nothing to happen, so far as Pomax and the miners of Pomax were concerned. But nothing happened. The state government was in an uproar over a series of scandals that had been coming to light during the past three years; the local judge and district attorney were up for reelection, and in Egypt, nine men out of ten who voted were miners. No indictment was ever brought forward, nor—not so strangely—did Gus Empek or Joe Brady make any statements or accusations. They were too deeply involved, and they preferred to wait their time. In any case, having so few members to begin with, their union was perishing more quickly than ours.

For a few weeks, the papers made the most of the Arrowhead Slaughter, and then other news became more important. It is surprising how quickly the whole matter was forgotten, but then other things were also forgotten. I once did some calculation on the decade of the 1920s, totaling up the number of miners killed by police, company police, private detectives, and strikebreakers. This total came to three hundred and forty-seven men, apart from those who died in mine accidents, or from rotten lungs or plain starvation. This too was forgotten in a surprisingly short time.

I guess no day was as long as that first day, yet it ended. Pomax had become a peaceful, quiet town, most of whose inhabitants remained indoors, and toward evening rain started. Both the local district attorney and Police Chief Lust testified to their ability to maintain law and order, and by nightfall, an order had come from upstate for the National Guard units to be withdrawn. At the same time, other National Guard units were moved into the eastern part of the county, where three collieries, with the assistance of more than two hundred armed private police, began to mine coal. It was the first major break in the strike in Egypt, but not the last.

Early that evening, during the first lull in the day’s excitement, Ben Holt called me into his office, asked me to sit down, and offered me a cigar. His desk was covered with newspapers, releases, telegrams, the remains of a sandwich, and half a container of coffee; and he himself was disheveled, his suit rumpled and shapeless, his shirt gray and limp with two days’ wear. For some reason, I felt the beginning of age in him, noticed the increasing streaks of gray in his hair and the first fold of a paunch around his waist—very little as yet, but beginning. We lit our cigars, and then he leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, and stared at me in a moody, quizzical manner that was not without humor.

“Well, Al,” he said, “nothing but trouble since I first laid eyes on you. If I were superstitious, I might say you were bad luck.”

“You could say that, Ben,” I nodded. “You could also say that this whole rotten business of coal mining is bad luck—to anyone who touches it with a ten-foot pole.”

“I could but I wouldn’t,” Ben sighed. “Hell no, I wouldn’t. Was it Bobbie Burns who said that there is drama and meaning in the lives of kings and shepherds and not much of either in the lives of those who live in between? Or something of the sort. Don’t knock coal, Al, because the dirty, filthy stuff is all the power and the glory that makes sense in the world today. I wouldn’t want any other life.”

“You might think differently if you spent a little while at Flexner’s barn, where the bodies are. Did you see that, Ben?”

“I don’t have to see it, Al,” he replied softly. “I got just so many tears, and I’m not going to waste them on strikebreakers and hoodlums. I never liked Klingman alive, and he’s no more to my taste dead. You could have all kinds of feelings about what happened out there at Arrowhead, but remember one thing, Al. The operators have their money, the police, and the National Guard and a cellar full of groceries at home. The miner’s got only one weapon that counts, the strike, and when he sees that strike being broken, he’s going to hit back. All right. What did happen out there at the mine? Tell me the whole story, all of it. Don’t leave anything out.”

I told him the story, all of it, every detail, and he listened without interrupting. When I finished, he sat in silence for a while; then he said to me, very quietly and directly,

“Do you think I could have prevented what happened out there, Al?”

I thought about it for some time before I said, “I don’t know.”

“But you’re not sure that I couldn’t have stopped it?”

“That’s right, Ben. I’m not sure.”

“I guess I could have stopped it,” Ben said thoughtfully. “Maybe even short of bringing in the militia myself. I could have fought it out with the local leadership here. I could have threatened them, bullied them—and I could have gone out to the mine last night and fought it out on the spot. Oh, I don’t say that I could have kept anything from happening. This isn’t Pennsylvania. You can’t come in here the way Klingman did and murder a miner’s kid and walk out scot-free. It just isn’t in the cards for Egypt, and things don’t work that way. There would have been violence, but less of it and not the way it happened. But if I had thrown myself into it to stop it, all that would have been the end of my position here. You have to know miners to know about that—and you will, someday, but I don’t think you do yet. One act of betrayal, one single act, and you’re finished.”

If I had known him longer, better, I might have asked him why he needed the leadership of that union so desperately—what it meant to him. If I had been a little older, I might have carried out my original resolve, that I would walk into his office and resign. I did neither.

The following evening, the same question was brought up somewhat differently. I was eating dinner alone at the Pomax House, when Mark Golden, who had just returned from Pennsylvania, and Lena Kuscow came in and asked whether they could join me. As I dislike eating alone, I was pleased and begged them to sit down. We talked for a while about the incident at Arrowhead. Golden had already spoken briefly to the district attorney and would see him again the next day, and I was relieved to hear that a possibility existed that no charges would be brought against anyone. “It’s a very complicated business,” Golden said. “Not only the boy being killed by the guards around the mine, but for a week before the actual attack on the mine, the guards had fired at anyone whose appearance they disliked. The laws of trespass do not include the right to shoot indiscriminately at any passer-by. The whole question of selfdefense enters into it, and there are some interesting local statutes here that go back to the pre-Civil War days. Lena told me what happened out there, and that’s one thing that can’t be changed. But to let it destroy the union and everything these miners have fought for, well, that’s something else entirely.”

“Why is the union so important to you?” I asked him. “I mean that seriously—I mean I’m asking it because I’m puzzled. I don’t really understand. I do understand to a certain degree about Ben and Mullen and Grove and Suzic—they were miners. I’ve listened to Ben talk about his life, his experience as a breaker boy, what he’s seen in the mines—but you and Lena here, you’re not miners—”

“And what about you, Al?” he interrupted. “Did you tell Ben you’re leaving?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Then what keeps you here? Pomax is the bottom of creation. Your pay is miserable. What keeps you here?”

“That doesn’t answer my question, because my own reasons are too complicated. It has to do with my wife and who she was and how she died, and with Ben and with other things. I’m younger than you are, Mark—and I stay on this job from day to day. I don’t like to walk out of anything when the going gets rough. Maybe I’ll be here next week and maybe I won’t, but I don’t feel about the union the way you do.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do,” Mark nodded. “You see, all of us—Ben, Lena, and myself—we came out of the bottom. We came out of the hopelessness of poverty, and what is worse, out of the hopelessness of ignorance. It’s hard to describe that to someone like you, Al, not because you had so much—I can pretty well guess what your background was like—but because you were a part of something that made sense and had meaning, with roots in the past and some kind of connection with the future. We didn’t have that. No roots in the past, no connection with the future. I was born in 1878, on Hester Street, on the East Side of New York, and I was born at home, in a lousy, ancient wooden tenement, because there was no money to pay a midwife, much less a doctor. I don’t intend to bore you with my life history, and I don’t know how much sense it would make to try to explain what it means to be a Jew in an East Side ghetto, with a father who died over his machine when I was ten years old and a mother who coped with five children and tuberculosis. Like Ben and the others, I survived, I got an education, I went through City College and I became a lawyer. But I didn’t relish the law of survival. Three of my brothers didn’t survive. That’s not unusual, Al. Lena here was one of a family of seven children. Three survived. Her father worked in the slaughterhouses in Chicago, and sometimes he didn’t work. One of her brothers starved to death—yes, in Chicago. So survival isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I survived and read law and passed my bar, and I eventually became a part of a very estimable and successful firm of lawyers. In 1912, I made over thirty thousand dollars, and I was beginning to collect a fine portfolio of securities, as well as other investments calculated to make certain that I never slid back into the ghetto I had climbed out of. I also acquired a wife, who had never been faced with the necessity of putting the law of survival to a test. She was a beautiful woman, and I suppose that for a while she loved me, but my own trouble was in the past. I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t adjust, and because of this a number of things happened. My wife left me, and I left the law firm. My wife was well taken care of, and she bears me no malice and I bear her none. Indeed, I am grateful to her for curing me of the beginning of a penchant for collecting things. I took this job with Ben, because it’s the first job I ever really wanted, and probably the first time in my life that I have ever been at least partly content. As for the union, which started this long outburst of mine—why, Al, to me it’s simply an instrument for human dignity as opposed to the old-fashioned law of survival. I don’t idealize it, I don’t glamorize it, and in many ways, the men who were my partners in the law firm in New York were as decent and honorable as the men who lead this union. It’s just that I sleep poorly as a part of a law firm and I sleep well as a part of a union.”

“And what happened at Arrowhead doesn’t disturb you?”

“Of course it disturbs me, Al! It’s a nightmare! I hate violence, I loathe violence! I think there’s no cause that honors or justifies murder, whether it’s illegal murder that’s called crime, the judicial murder they call execution, the social murder called poverty, or the political murder that is so euphemistically called war and filed under the heading of patriotism. I look at all of them with equal loathing. But what happened at Arrowhead is an effect that is not without cause, and a precedent of cause and effect that reaches back through the whole bloody history of coal mining. That doesn’t lessen or efface what happened, but it does put it apart from sheer barbarism and savagery, and it allows for understanding. The only way such things will stop happening is for the miners to have a union strong enough to allow them the dignity of living like human beings. I know as well as you what Ben’s role in this was, and maybe I know Ben Holt a little better than you do. I don’t judge him. He wants a union, I want a union. Men like myself don’t build unions and lead others; men like Ben Holt do.”

For three weeks, I was in western Pennsylvania with Ben Holt, and for part of the time Golden was with us. Lena came down for a week to help us take depositions, and I remember one pleasant day the four of us spent in Pittsburgh, sharing a good dinner and then an excursion trip up and down the rivers in a tourist boat. It was a few hours of pleasure in what was essentially an unpleasurable time. Yet those days brought me very close to Ben Holt. I was with him constantly, day and night. We shared the same room in a miner’s shack, and for twenty-four hours once, we shared the same cell in the Iron City jail. We worked together, which is, I suppose, the best way to know a man. A newspaper story of the time referred to me as Ben Holt’s errand boy, and it was not without truth. I ran errands, but I also arranged interviews, handled the press, carried on correspondence, developed my diplomatic faculties with every type of law-enforcement agency, from policemen to company detectives, hired halls, and arranged meetings. It was a curious job, but there were times when I enjoyed it, and I prided myself that I was getting better at it. Among other things, at that time, I arranged for Ben to see an important coal operator in Pittsburgh. It was Ben’s feeling that if one strong and powerful operator were to sign an agreement with the union, it would make an important opening wedge, and unlike some trade-union leaders of the time, he was not averse to talking with the owners. Every conceivable accusation has been thrown against Ben Holt except one—that he would make a deal with an operator to sell out his union; and because the thought itself could not take shape in his mind, he met with the operators frequently, argued with them, swore at them and denounced them in their own living rooms. In this case, the meeting was to no effect; but arriving at the man’s offices before Ben did, I was invited in and had a few minutes alone with him. He asked me what my job was, and I tried to explain it to him.

“In other words,” he said, when I finished, “it’s up to you to make the union taste sweet in the public’s mouth and to keep the horns off Ben Holt’s image?”

“Yes, that’s part of it.”

“I like that, but you’ll have one hell of a time. How would you like to work for me? Do for me what that cookie in New York does for John D. Rockefeller. I’ll even give away the dimes.”

I shook my head.

“I’ll double your pay.”

“No, thank you. I have an obligation to Ben Holt that I haven’t worked off yet.”

“When you work it off, come and see me,” he grinned.

But a few minutes later, he and Ben were shouting at each other and threatening each other, and I think we both forgot his offer.

Back from Pennsylvania, I plunged into my work at Pomax. The strike did not formally end; bit by bit, it disintegrated, and one after another, the various locals of the union voted to abandon the strike and return to work. Summer came, as hot and bleak in Pomax as anywhere in the country, and Ben left for Colorado to attempt to salvage what remained of the union in the West. Life at Pomax consisted of hard work, dull evenings, and very little to look forward to; but in that same process, I learned a good deal about the coal industry, its history in America, its manner of development, and the attempt of its workers to create a union of some strength and consequence. I came to know the miners, and I had the feeling that after the Arrowhead incident, they began to trust me just a little.

As for the men who worked with me, I could never penetrate the strange shell that enclosed Fulton Grove or decide whether it was compounded out of reserve or stupidity. I fell into a working accord with Jack Mullen and the beginning of what was to be a long friendship with Oscar Suzic.

A month after the Arrowhead incident, when it became apparent that the union would not win the strike, the National Confederation of Labor denounced Ben Holt and the Miners Union. The denunciation was couched in insulting and angry terms, and I begged Ben to answer it in kind. Fulton Grove opposed me, and we had our first serious argument. The denunciation remained unanswered, and Grove and I continued on the coldest terms of forced cordiality.

I suppose that this period of my life was an important time of growth and change, even though so little happened. Yet there was one thing, and I can hardly avoid it. If this is a story of Ben Holt, it is also myself doing the telling.

Almost every Sunday, I was out on the bicycle, which Abner Gross had practically surrendered to me by the right of sole usage. I think I explored every road and track and path within ten miles of Pomax, but not until mid-July did I find Dorothy Holt again. I suppose there was never a time when I rode out without having in mind the possibility and hope that I would see her. This, I rationalized to myself. She was a charming person, and I was desperately lonely—and it was no more than that. I met her this time alongside a little pool or lake which, for all its stagnant and motionless water, made a shadowed and pleasant spot in the generally unlovely countryside. She had dropped her wheel, and was standing pensively by the water when I rode up; and she turned to me, and smiled, almost as if she had been expecting me. She had a quality of calm acceptance that never failed to astonish me, and although we had not seen each other for weeks, she simply nodded and said,

“How nice to see you again, Mr. Cutter.”

“It’s all my pleasure.” I don’t know whether my appearance showed it, but I felt as excited as a schoolboy.

“It does seem that the only way to meet each other is to resort to bicycles. It’s been so very hot, and this place is cool and delightful, don’t you think?”

“It’s a very nice place,” I agreed. “I didn’t know it existed until today.”

“Neither did I. So it does seem that fate is determined for us to meet each other. Tell me what you have been doing all this time.”

We sat down on a fallen tree trunk, and I talked more than I had in a long time. She listened well, as if truly interested—which she might have been—while I poured out my experiences. At last, I paused to protest that certainly I was boring her to tears.

“No, you’re not boring me,” she said softly. “Not at all, Mr. Cutter.”

“You never talk about yourself.”

“No? I suppose I don’t. I lead a very uneventful life, Mr. Cutter, which is mostly occupied with the raising of three children.”

“Still, you’re Ben Holt’s wife—”

“Yes, I’m Ben Holt’s wife, as you put it, Mr. Cutter. And Ben is in the way of being an idol of yours, isn’t he, Mr. Cutter?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it just that way—not an idol exactly. I think he’s quite a man—”

“And therefore, his wife must be quite a woman?”

“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?” I said.

“No, not laughing, Mr. Cutter. I have nothing to laugh at, not even your attempt to bestow some glamour upon me as the wife of Ben Holt. When have you last seen Ben, Mr. Cutter?”

“A week ago, just before he left for Colorado.”

“That was when I saw him—and before then, not for weeks, and when he’s here in Pomax, Mr. Cutter, if we have two hours of Ben at dinner, we are fortunate. Do you feel that I shouldn’t speak of this to you or to anyone else? That it’s an act of betrayal toward Ben?”

“No—well, no. I mean—”

“I’m a very lonely woman, Mr. Cutter, and I don’t talk about myself because there is nothing that I want very much to discuss. I married a trade-union leader, and I live in Pomax, Illinois, and all of this is of my choosing and I should have nothing to complain about. At least, that is the way I see it, and at this moment I thoroughly despise myself.”

“Why?” I cried. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

“Because I am so delighted to have you here with me—to have the companionship of a man and a human being, even for a few hours.”

We were both silent for a while after that. She was not the type of woman who resorts to tears, and I don’t know that I have ever seen her weep. After a time, I said,

“If that’s the case, do you suppose that you could call me Al? And that I could call you Dorothy?”

Turning to me, she smiled and asked me, “How old are you, Al? I knew, but I’ve forgotten.”

“I was twenty-seven last week.”

“I’m only six months older than you, but it feels like so much more. You’re very nice, you know.”

We walked most of the way back to Pomax, wheeling our bicycles, just slowly and talking about one thing and another as if we had known each other a very long time. We made a tentative appointment to meet a week later and ride together.

The following Sunday, we rode out to the Arrowhead Pit. At one time, I had been certain that I would never want to see this place again as long as I lived, and now something drew me back there. I think Dorothy felt the same way, because she made no protest when I suggested that we go there. When we came to the mine, we wheeled our bikes up to the edge of the crater, looked at it for a little while, and then turned away. It had not changed very much. The road had been repaired, and the mine was being worked again, and there were more trucks and a second steam shovel down at the bottom. Non-union men were working the mine, and as far as this place was concerned, the strike was over.

As we walked away from there, Dorothy said, “I don’t feel anything. That’s strange.”

“Not so strange. I don’t feel anything much. It’s just like a dream, that’s all.”

“Is a great deal of life just like a dream, Al? I feel that way sometimes.”

“I don’t know. I wonder.”

“I’ve never asked you about your wife, Al. Is it something you don’t want to talk about?”

“I don’t like to talk to most people about it. As far as you’re concerned, Dorothy—I don’t think there’s anything I couldn’t talk to you about.”

“You loved her very much, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. Very much.”

“Ben told me about how you met—how she was hurt and you took her through that roadblock to the hospital. I’m ashamed of the way I complained last week. You must be lonely.”

“No. It’s been lonely, but I’m all right now.”

“What does all right mean, Al?” I glanced at her sharply, and she added, “I want to know. Maybe I want to say that I am also all right now.”

“Well—it means—I don’t know. I suppose it means that I’ve learned how to live with myself, how to be alone.”

“Philosophically? Is that it, Al? Do you look forward to long, comfortable years of being alone?”

“No,” I snapped.

“I’m sorry, Al. We’ll forget that we ever spoke about this.”

Now I tried to apologize and persuade her that she did not understand.

“What don’t I understand, Al?”

Of course she knew. She knew and she was pushing me toward it, and that was because she couldn’t help herself any more than I could, and she was pressing toward the point where I would say, “Because I love you, Dorothy Holt. Because I am caught in something that makes me sick with shame and guilt, for it seems to me that all at once I am betraying a man I have come to consider the best friend I have in the world, and betraying my wife’s memory too.” And it was in no spirit of virtue that I refused to be pushed the last bit into an open expression. It was because I knew that at such a point, it would be over between us.

Then, after that, I lived with Dorothy Holt more than I lived with Laura. Laura was dead and Dorothy Holt was alive. But it was a question of dreams, and I lived with Dorothy Holt nowhere else but in my dreams, quite sensibly aware in my waking moments that she was the wife of Benjamin R. Holt, the mother of three children and the last person in the world who could make any constructive difference in my life. Or perhaps my waking approach was less sensible than hopeless.

I was glad that the work I did was demanding. As the summer drew to a close, the strike in Pomax collapsed, and at a meeting of the International leadership and Egypt’s local leadership, it was decided to vote a back-to-work order and see what could be salvaged of union membership. At this point, the beginning of an increasing despair that was to continue for years to come, only Ben Holt remained confident and unshaken. His ferocity and brutal handling of all opposition changed into something almost as gentle as it was enduring. He coaxed, supported, and had faith. In southern Illinois, the heart and strength of the union movement, we had lost 50 per cent of our membership. What it would be in the rest of the country, we could only guess—and expect the worst. But when Fulton Grove raised the question of the total destruction of the union, Ben, without anger, replied,

“That never happens—not any more. They may get rid of you and me, Fulton, but not of the union. It will survive.”

It survived. By November, we had completed a national membership-and-dues drive. From better than three hundred thousand members, the union had shrunk to a total national membership of a hundred and six thousand. And of those, almost half were black-listed, locked out of work.

I saw Dorothy during that time, but only once when Ben was not present, and that was when some business took me to her house, and I stayed for supper and spent the evening playing with the children and then talking. Nothing passed between us.

Christmas at Ben’s house could have been bleak and dismal, but he was determined that it should not be so—even though he had just begun that fight for his life, as leader of the International Miners Union, which lasted through 1925 until January of 1926. This night, he had invited Mark, Lena, Jack Mullen, and Oscar Suzic and myself to be with him. Grove was also there. He was to leave for Chicago the following day to make, as we learned later, final plans to leave the Miners Union for a good-paying job with the National Confederation of Labor. For the first time I met Mullen’s wife, a shy, pale wisp of a woman who always moved quietly in the background of his life. It was a good evening, even though we had all of us recently taken a 50 per cent pay cut, and it was the time when Ben Holt was at his best. Whatever went on within him, on the surface his heart was high. To his children, he was the big, shaggy giant who, if they saw him only infrequently, was nevertheless a wonderful person to have at home with them on Christmas, playing with them and singing carols.

At dinner, we toasted each other from a bottle of bootleg wine that Mark Golden had provided, good, imported French wine. “Nineteen twenty-five,” Ben said. “The best year—the year we win!”

Outside, snow fell, a white blanket over the scarred and barren plains of Egypt.