1919 (55 page)

It was a road job. Ben stayed there for two months earning ten dollars a week and his keep. He learned to drive a team and to keep books. The boss of the canteen, Hiram Volle, gypped the construction workers in their accounts, but Benny didn't think much about it because they were most of 'em wops, until he got to be friends with a young fellow named Nick Gigli who worked with the gang at the gravelpit. Nick used to hang around the canteen before closingtime in the evening; then they'd go out and smoke a cigarette together and talk. Sundays they'd walk out in the country with the Sunday paper and fool around all afternoon lying in the sun and talking about the articles in the magazine section. Nick was from north Italy and all the men in the gang were Sicilians, so he was lonely. His father and elder brothers were anarchists and he was too; he told Benny about Bakunin and Malatesta and said Benny ought to be ashamed of himself for wanting to get to be a rich businessman; sure he ought to study and learn, maybe he ought to get to be a lawyer, but he ought to work for the revolution and the working class, to be a business man was to be a shark and a robber like that son of a bitch Volle. He taught Benny to roll cigarettes and told him about all the girls that were in love with him; that girl in the boxoffice of the movie in Mauch Chunk; he could have her anytime he wanted, but a revolutionist ought to be careful about the girls he went with, women took a classconscious working man's mind off his aims, they were the main seduction of capitalist society. Ben asked him if he thought he ought to throw up his job with Volle, because Volle was such a crook, but Nick said any other capitalist would be the same, all they could do was wait for the Day. Nick was eighteen with bitter brown eyes and a skin almost as dark as a mulatto's. Ben thought he was great on account of all he'd done; he'd shined shoes, been a sailor, a miner, a dishwasher and had worked in textile mills, shoefactories and a cement factory and had had all kinds of women and been in jail for three weeks in the Paterson strike. Round the camp if any of the wops saw Ben going anywhere alone he'd yell at him, “Hey, kid, where's Nick?”

On Friday evening there was an argument in front of the window where the construction boss was paying the men off. That night, when Ben was getting into his bunk in the back of the tarpaper shack the canteen was in, Nick came around and whispered in his ear that the bosses had been gypping the men on time and that they were going on strike tomorrow. Ben said if they went out he'd go out too. Nick called him a brave comrade in Italian and hauled off and kissed him on both cheeks. Next morning only a few of the pick and shovel men turned out when the whistle blew. Ben hung around the door of the cookshack not knowing what to do with himself. Volle noticed him and told him to hitch up the team to go down to the station after a box of tobacco. Ben looked at his feet and said he couldn't because he was on strike. Volle burst out laughing and told him to quit his kidding, funniest thing he'd ever heard of a kike walking out with a lot of wops. Ben felt himself go cold and stiff all over: “I'm not a kike any more'n you are. . . . I'm an American born . . . and I'm goin' to stick with my class, you dirty crook.” Volle turned white and stepped up and shook a big fist under Ben's nose and said he was fired and that if he wasn't a little f—g shrimp of a foureyed kike he'd knock his goddam block off, anyway his brother sure would give him a whaling when he heard about it.

Ben went to his bunk and rolled his things into a bundle and went off to find Nick. Nick was a little down the road where the bunkhouses were, in the center of a bunch of wops all yelling and waving their arms. The superintendent and the gangbosses all turned out with revolvers in black holsters strapped around their waists and one of them made a speech in English and another one Sicilian saying that this was a squareshooting concern that had always treated laborers square and if they didn't like it they could get the hell out. They'd never had a strike and didn't propose to begin now. There was big money involved in this job and the company wasn't going to work and see it tied up by any goddam foolishness. Any man who wasn't on his job next time the whistle blew was fired and would have to get a move on and remember that the State of Pennsylvania had vagrancy laws. When the whistle blew again everybody went back to work except Ben and Nick. They walked off down the road with their bundles. Nick had tears in his eyes and was saying, “Too much gentle, too much patient . . . we do not know our strength yet.”

That night they found a brokendown schoolhouse a little off the road on a hill above a river. They'd bought some bread and peanut butter at a store and sat out in front eating it and talking about what they'd do. By the time they'd finished eating it was dark. Ben had never been out in the country alone like that at night. The wind rustled the woods all around and the rapid river seethed down in the valley. It was a chilly August night with a heavy dew. They didn't have any covering so Nick showed Ben how to take his jacket off and put it over his head and how to sleep against the wall to keep from getting sore lying on the bare boards. He'd hardly gotten to sleep when he woke up icycold and shaking. There was a window broken; he could see the frame and the jagged bits of glass against the cloudy moonlight. He lay back, musta been dreaming. Something banged on the roof and rolled down the shingles over his head and dropped to the ground. “Hay, Ben, for chrissake wassat?” came Nick's voice in a hoarse whisper. They both got up and stared out through the broken windowframe.

“That was busted before,” said Nick. He walked over and opened the outside door. They both shivered in the chilly wind up the valley that rustled the trees like rain, the river down below made a creaking grinding noise like a string of carts and wagons.

A stone hit the roof above them and rolled off. The next one went between their heads and hit the cracked plaster of the wall behind. Ben heard the click of the blade as Nick opened his pocketknife. He strained his eyes till the tears came but he couldn't make out anything but the leaves stirring in the wind.

“You come outa there . . . come up here . . . talk . . . you son of a bitch,” yelled Nick.

There was no answer.

“What do you think?” whispered Nick over his shoulder to Ben.

Ben didn't say anything; he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Nick pushed him back in and pulled the door to. They piled the dusty benches against the door and blocked up the lower part of the window with boards out of the floor.

“Break in. I keell one of him anyhow,” said Nick. “You don't believe in speerits?”

“Naw, no such thing,” said Ben. They sat down side by side on the floor with their backs to the cracked plaster and listened. Nick had put the knife down between them. He took Ben's fingers and made him feel the catch that held the blade steady. “Good knife . . . sailor knife,” he whispered. Ben strained his ears. Only the spattering sound of the wind in the trees and the steady grind of the river. No more stones came.

Next morning they left the schoolhouse at first day. Neither of them had had any sleep. Ben's eyes were stinging. When the sun came up they found a man who was patching up a broken spring on a truck. They helped him jack it up with a block of wood and he gave them a lift into Scranton where they got jobs washing dishes in a hashjoint run by a Greek.

 

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all fixed fastfrozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. 
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Pearldiving wasn't much to Ben's taste, so at the end of a couple of weeks, as he'd saved up the price of the ticket, he said he was going back home to see the old people. Nick stayed on because a girl in a candystore had fallen for him. Later he'd go up to Allentown, where a brother of his had a job in a steelmill and was making big money. The last thing he said when he went down and put Ben on the train for New York was, “Benny, you learn and study . . . be great man for workingclass and remember too much girls bad business.”

Ben hated leaving Nick but he had to get home to find a job for the winter that would give him time to study. He took the exams and matriculated at the College of the City of New York. The old man borrowed a hundred dollars from the Morris Plan to get him started and Sam sent him twentyfive from Newark to buy books with. Then he made a little money himself working in Kahn's drugstore evenings. Sunday afternoons he went to the library and read Marx's
Capital.
He joined the Socialist Party and went to lectures at the Rand School whenever he got a chance. He was working to be a wellsharpened instrument.

The next spring he got sick with scarlet fever and was ten weeks in the hospital. When he got out his eyes were so bad it gave him a headache to read for an hour. The old man owed the Morris Plan another hundred dollars besides the first hundred dollars and the interest and the investigation fees.

Ben had met a girl at a lecture at Cooper Union who had worked in a textile mill over in Jersey. She'd been arrested during the Paterson strike and had been blacklisted. Now she was a salesgirl at Wanamaker's, but her folks still worked in the Botany Mill at Passaic. Her name was Helen Mauer; she was five years older than Ben, a pale blonde and already had lines in her face. She said there was nothing in the socialist movement; it was the syndicalists had the right idea. After the lecture she took him to the Cosmopolitan Café on 2nd Avenue to have a glass of tea and introduced him to some people she said were real rebels; when Ben told Gladys and the old people about them the old man said, “Pfooy . . . radical jews,” and made a spitting sound with his lips. He said Benny ought to cut out these monkeyshines and get to work. He was getting old and now he was in debt, and if he got sick it would be up to Benny to support him and the old woman. Ben said he was working all the time but that your folks didn't count, it was the workingclass that he was working for. The old man got red in the face and said his family was sacred and next to that his own people. Momma and Gladys cried. The old man got to his feet; choking and coughing, he raised his hands above his head and cursed Ben and Ben left the house.

He had no money on him and was still weak from the scarlet fever. He walked across Brooklyn and across the Manhattan Bridge and up through the East Side, all full of ruddy lights and crowds and pushcarts and vegetables that smelt of the spring, to the house where Helen lived on East 6th Street. The landlady said he couldn't go up to her room. Helen said it wasn't any of her business but while they were arguing about it his ears began to ring and he fainted on the hall settee. When he came to with water running down his neck Helen helped him up the four flights and made him lie down on her bed. She yelled down to the landlady who was screaming about the police, that she would leave first thing in the morning and nothing in the world could make her leave sooner. She made Ben some tea and they sat up all night talking on her bed. They decided that they'd live in free union together and spent the rest of the night packing her things. She had mostly books and pamphlets.

Next morning they went out at six o'clock, because she had to be at Wanamaker's at eight, to look for a room. They didn't exactly tell the next landlady they weren't married, but when she said, “So you're bride and groom?” they nodded and smiled. Fortunately Helen had enough money in her purse to pay the week in advance. Then she had to run off to work. Ben didn't have any money to buy anything to eat so he lay on the bed reading
Progress and Poverty
all day. When she came back in the evening she brought in some supper from a delicatessen. Eating the rye bread and salami they were very happy. She had such large breasts for such a slender little girl. He had to go out to a drugstore to buy some safeties because she said how could she have a baby just now when they had to give all their strength to the movement. There were bedbugs in the bed, but they told each other that they were as happy as they could be under the capitalist system, that some day they'd have a free society where workers wouldn't have to huddle in filthy lodginghouses full of bedbugs or row with landladies and lovers could have babies if they wanted to.

A few days later Helen was laid off from Wanamaker's because they were cutting down their personnel for the slack summer season. They went over to Jersey where she went to live with her folks and Ben got a job in the shipping department of a worsted mill. They rented a room together in Passaic. When a strike came he and Helen were both on the committee. Ben got to be quite a speechmaker. He was arrested several times and almost had his skull cracked by a policeman's billy and got six months in jail out of it. But he'd found out that when he got up on a soapbox to talk he could make people listen to him, that he could talk and say what he thought and get a laugh or a cheer out of the massed upturned faces. When he stood up in court to take his sentence he started to talk about surplus value. The strikers in the audience cheered and the judge had the attendants clear the courtroom. Ben could see the reporters busily taking down what he said; he was glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying he'd give him another six months for contempt of court if he didn't keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail in an automobile full of special deputies with riot guns. The papers spoke of him as a wellknown socialist agitator.

In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram Hicks, a tall youngster from Frisco with light hair and blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labormovement he ought to get him a red card and go out to the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy broke. He'd been working on the repairshift of one of the mills and had gone out with the rest. He'd pushed a cop in the face when they'd broken up a picketline and been sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept Ben going in jail.