Power (19 page)

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.