Power (28 page)

During all the years that have passed since then, I've turned over and over in my mind the question of whether Ben Holt could have stopped it. I don't know; I didn't know then, and I still don't know. I made one poor effort of my own, talking to a leader of the miners during the attack. He replied to me,

“Cutter, it's time for this. You can't stop a thing when it's time for it. You're here, but so help me God, don't interfere with us. Leave us alone.”

We went up to the lip of the crater, where the miners were sprawled on their bellies, shooting down into the cluster of tents and trucks. Where the machine-gun emplacement had been, there was now a hole in the road and six mangled, shattered bodies. The sun was dipping below the farther rim of the crater when we got there, and all of the bottom of the mine was in deep shadow, but we could see darker shadows here and there where dead men lay. From the mine itself, there was a certain amount of firing, and as the darkness increased, you could see the pinpoints of light; but this firing from the bottom of the pit had no effect, and it was only by chance that one or two of the shots from below took a toll of the miners. Klingman and his Chicago gunmen had chosen an utterly indefensible position, a stupid, thoughtless position, in which they had no cover at all and faced an enemy whose cover was excellent and whom they could not see.

Gradually, the miners spread out around the whole rim of the pit. They were in high spirits, released from the tension of inaction, facing something they could see and hate and kill; and in the deepening twilight, their voices echoed back and forth. It was like a shooting match, with pinpoints of light down below as the targets. At this time, the men from Chicago had taken refuge beneath the trucks and the steam shovel. We could hear their voices clearly as they cursed the miners and flung up their empty threats, but by now it was almost impossible to see them. Then we heard a motor started, and the lumbering tread of a piece of machinery. I guessed that it was something on a caterpillar carriage, and in a few minutes a bulldozer, its blade held high, appeared as a blurred image on the road out of the crater. Immediately it became a target for a hundred guns, and we heard the scream of a man who was hit. Then the miners dropped a bundle of dynamite over the crater edge, and with a roar, tractors and road went up in a fountain of rock and smoke. The explosion echoed and re-echoed back and forth across the crater, while from the darkness below came the screaming hatred of the men trapped there.

Night fell. From below, there were no more shots and no sound of voices, as if they had finally realized that their only hope was in the darkness. In the black bottom of the pit, one could still make out, although vaguely, the lighter blurs that were the tents and the darker blurs that marked the trucks and machinery, and from around the rim, there was intermittent fire at these targets. Then a miner came by and told them to stop firing until they got the signal, although what the signal would be I didn't know. Silence settled down over the mine, broken only by the voices of the miners and the sound of their movement in the darkness. I noticed now that opposite the place where the road debarked from the crater, miners were gathering brush and deadwood together into two large piles. At this point the man who had spoken to me before came back and said,

“What do you intend to do, Cutter?”

“What can I do?”

“That ain't what I asked. What do you intend to do?”

“I'll tell you what I think,” I replied with disgust. “I think you've had your pound of flesh. There are maybe twenty, thirty dead men in that pit now—”

“Why don't you shut up, Al?” Lena snapped at me.

“—yes, twenty or thirty. That's enough, isn't it?”

“Let us decide when it's enough, Cutter,” he said coldly. There was a circle of miners around us now, listening. “What in hell's your position that you talk so big?”

“I work for the union. That's my whole position.”

“We don't work—we're on strike, remember? How many strikes have you sat through, Cutter? How many kids have you watched starve? You ever been hungry, Cutter?”

“Oh, leave him alone,” Lena said. “He's all right. Maybe what he says makes some sense.”

At that moment, one of the wounded men in the mine began to scream. We stopped talking, held momentarily by that wild wail of pain. I felt my stomach contract with horror. Less than five years ago, I had stepped off the train at a tiny coal town in West Virginia, and since then the story of coal had been for me an unremitting procession of terror, bloodshed, and death. I had seen cruelty and insanity compounded and then compounded again. Without mercy or logic, an endless war went on for the black gold that was the food and blood of what we so lightly called civilization. It had brought me a woman to love and then had taken her; it had given me hope and despair, and now, in a night as savage as any in the so-called Dark Ages, it was placing an added fillip on its bloody history.

“How can we leave him alone?” the miner said. “Look when he's seen. Do you want him to testify against us?”

“He won't testify,” Lena said.

“Talk for yourself, Cutter.”

“Don't threaten me,” I said. “I didn't come out here to testify. I came out here because I still think the only hope in this whole rotten business is the union—if there's any union left after this.”

“It would be a lot easier to kill you.”

“Sure. Who else? You'd have to kill her too. Where do you stop? Why don't you use your brains? Why don't you think?”

Another miner said, “Leave him alone! For Christ's sake, don't get us started against each other! Leave him alone!”

That broke it up, and they moved away. I took Lena's arm, and she was trembling all over. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Oh, Holy Jesus—I never want to get closer to dying than that. Let's get out of here, Al. Please—please, let's get out of here. You be a hero sometime all by yourself. For me, this hero business is overrated. Just let's get out of here.”

“All right,” I agreed. “I've seen enough.”

At that moment, a flare exploded. It was an army flare, part of the surplus that was still sold at that time in the army and navy stores, and someone had fired it up over the pit. A second flare followed and then a third, and like a chain of blazing diamonds they drifted down into the crater. Night turned into day, and suddenly, the whole bottom of the crater was visible. The Chicago hoodlums had come out of their hiding places under the trucks and equipment. Some of them were standing around in little clusters; others were sprawled on the ground; still others had made their way in the darkness to the wall of the crater and were slowly and painfully climbing up the rough shelving in an attempt to get out of the crater and escape. The flares caught them where they were, blinded and frozen in bewilderment and uncertainty—but only for an instant; then they broke and ran wildly for cover, all, that is, except those on the inner face of the mine. They could not run. They were frozen where they were, like beetles pinned on a board.

And then, from the whole rim of the crater, the miners' rifles blazed out. The roar of gunfire was like the sound of a full-scale battle in progress, and as the first flares faded, a fourth and fifth and sixth arched over the pit. The men on the side walls fell, some of them clawing at the rock edges and dirt, others rolling down like bundles of rags. Of the men on the mine floor, some gained the safety of the trucks and machinery; others rolled over and lay where they dropped.

Lena was pulling at me, and I went with her now. As we stumbled through the darkness, I could feel her reaction, a convulsive sobbing that the gunfire muted. The car wasn't hard to find. There were fires blazing at the parking place, just as there would be fires blazing at the top of the road, in case anyone should be alive to make his way out of that hole, and here women still dispensed food and coffee, good women, their faces drawn with toil and poverty and the premature aging of the miner's wife. Lena asked me whether I could drive a Model T, and when I said that I could, she sighed with relief.

We drove back toward Pomax. We must have gone more than halfway before the gunfire was reduced to the sound a crackling fire makes. Then Lena burst into tears. I pulled off the road, stopped the car, gave her a cigarette, and took one myself. She drew in the smoke hungrily, trying to control her sobbing. I offered her my handkerchief, and after she had dried her eyes, she sighed and said slowly,

“You know, Al Cutter, you're quite a guy.”

I've had very few compliments in my time. This was one of the best.

 

22

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?”