Power (27 page)

“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.”

 

21

By five o'clock, the streets of Pomax were empty. The Duffey boy had been buried and the armed miners were gone. A disquieting stillness hung over the town. In the distance I heard the mournful wail of the five-fifteen train from Chicago, and it was answered across the fields by the faint cry of crows. From the Union Building, the only human being visible was Shutzman, the butcher, who stood in front of his pork store in his blood-stained apron.

Upstairs, in the outer office, Oscar Suzic and Lena Kuscow stared moodily at each other. When she saw me, Lena said,

“Join the wake, Brother Cutter. We got almost enough now for a poker game.”

“I'll buy you some supper,” I said to her.

“I'm not hungry.” She pushed a bag of pretzels toward me. “Help yourself. Be my guest.”

I munched the pretzels and asked them where Ben was.

“He and Grove and Mullen drove over to Cairo.”

“What? Why in hell's name did they go to Cairo at a time like this?”

“Al, grow up,” Lena said tiredly. “It's going to happen tonight if it's not happening already, and Ben can't afford to be here when it does happen. There's nothing he can do now to stop it from happening, and it's best for everyone if he's not here.”

“If he's not here? He's the only one who can do anything.”

“What? What can he do?” Suzic demanded.

I shook my head hopelessly.

“I'll tell you what he can do,” Lena said flatly. “Just what he's doing. Keep clear of the whole thing. Not be implicated. This isn't the end of the world. There's still the strike. There's still the union.”

“All right. But I'm going out there,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because one of us has to see what happens. Otherwise, we're blind.”

“Al,” Lena said, “if you go out there and try to interfere, they'll beat the living daylights out of you. Don't you understand that? You're new here. Even after five years, these diggers wouldn't trust you. As it is, they think you're some kind of a company spy.”

“I'm not going to interfere. I just want to see what happens.”

“Ben said we were to stay here in the building,” Suzic insisted.

“You stay here,” Lena said. “I'm going with Al, because at this point it would only complicate things for him to get his head broken. We'll get back as soon as we can.”

Lena had an old Model T, which she drove with great competence and which she kept in the livery stable behind the Pomax House. In a few minutes, we were on the road out to Arrowhead, and halfway there, we heard the distant sound of rifle fire. I asked Lena where Police Chief Lust and his force were. “In the station house, where they will remain, you can be sure. There must be a thousand men out at the mine now, Al. Not just miners, but farmers too. The farming around here is nothing to write home about, but the farmers make out by selling their produce directly to the miners. Now there's no money to buy anything.”

A half a mile from the mine, some trucks and cars and wagons were grouped on the side of the road. There were also more than a hundred bicycles, and a good many youngsters and about a dozen women. They had fires going, heating cans of coffee, and on a trestle table they had set up, they were making sandwiches. A steady trickle of miners moved back and forth, from the crater to the camp and from the camp to the crater. The firing was very heavy and very close now, but the people in the camp, sheltered by a fold of rock, paid little attention to it—except for the women screaming dire threats at any kid who showed signs of wandering.

Lena parked by the other cars, exchanged greetings with some of the women and some of the miners, and then followed me toward the lip of the open mine. A few hundred feet from the edge of the crater, we saw a dozen or so miners running toward us, and then, behind them, there was a tremendous explosion, a lifting mushroom of rock and dirt and a cloud of smoke. At the sound of the explosion, I flung Lena down, myself next to her, the reaction on my part being instinctive and going back to that experience in my life which had left its deepest mark on me. Dirt and rocks pattered around us. We sat up, unharmed, and the miners who had been running toward us were grinning and smacking their hands with delight. As more and more miners converged on where we were, one of those who had run toward us shouted for them to get back to the road and stay there. Among all of them, I saw only one wounded man, he with a bandage around his arm.

If the miners mistrusted me, they talked readily to Lena, and we learned what had happened. Almost half of the miners had seen service during the war, and they were not impressed with machine guns. They had divided their forces in half, and had sent one half around to the opposite lip of the crater. The sun was low by then and to their backs, making it almost impossible to see them clearly at a distance of six or seven hundred yards, and when they had taken their positions, they opened heavy fire on the rear of the machine-gun emplacement. Under this provocation, the men in the machine-gun emplacement turned their guns completely around to sweep the opposite edge of the mine, and no sooner had they altered their position than a miner raced down the road and threw a bundle of twenty sticks of dynamite with a short fuse between the two nests. They didn't see him until he had started back, and then, apparently unaware of the dynamite, they opened fire on him with side arms. As he was running and leaping from side to side, the pistol fire missed him completely. A moment later, the dynamite went off, destroying the machine-gun emplacement, the men in it, and a section of the road. The miner who had thrown the dynamite suffered no other damage than bruises when he was flung on his face by the concussion.

To understand what was happening and what would happen, one must realize the frustration and bitterness of those miners of the Pomax area. Hungry, desperate, and with a growing awareness that their strike was hopeless in the face of the river of coal flowing north from the southern pits, they were filled with an increasing anger that had no outlet. They were not for the most part, as in the East, immigrants or a first generation. The majority of them stemmed from the pioneer population movement into Illinois in the early years of the nineteenth century, and now they were full of a sense of being singularly dispossessed, of being those who had planted seed but had no harvest. Unlike the West Virginians, they had not lived their generations in a mountain fastness that the world passed by; they were no backwash, but squarely in the center of the great basin of middle-western wealth, from which they gleaned only the scrapings, and their anger against the operators was part of their anger against the cities, against the vast Chicago complex to the north, that owned in absentia and squeezed blood in absentia. The big strip mine that continued to dig coal in a place where every other pit was closed down by their strike had been for weeks the focus of their attention and hatred.

It was no new thing for thugs and hoodlums to be brought in to break strikes, but in Egypt it was new; in Egypt, the miners had guns, and always their guns had been an unquestioned part of their existence. They hunted small game in the canebrake and the worthless second-growth scrub, but even if they had never hunted, they would have considered the guns a normal part of their existence; and when a seventeen-year-old boy was shot and killed by the men in Arrowhead, something inside of these Pomax diggers exploded.