Power (17 page)

“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.