Hardcastle (42 page)

Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yes, the work of our hands establish thou it.

The preacher stood for a moment longer at the foot of the grave, his chin raised, his eyes on the mountain rising above the pasture as though he were looking after the sound of his own voice. “Amen and Amen,” he said at last, and as he went over to speak to the Tucker woman, Music took himself back to the barn. He was there, sitting on the milking stool among the shavings, the drawing knife idle in his hands, when Regus entered and squatted by the stanchion.

Music pondered the unfinished beam of the plow, not bothering to acknowledge him. “One of these days I’ll need to get into town,” Music said after a while. “I’ve got to have some big bolts and a clevis or two.”

Regus looked around at the bound hickory handles, the singletree, the beam. He nodded. “Hit’ll be as fine as any I could order from a catalogue, I’d vow, when ye get her done.”

“No,” Music said, “but I guess it will serve. It’s gonna cut a little shallow, I think, but if you can’t get a good team, that might be better.”

Regus let out a long sigh and shook his head. “Hell, you may be right after all,” he said.

“About what?” Music said.

“About me farmin this place,” Regus said.

“Ah,” Music said, as though he had forgotten that was a possibility, as though he had forgotten that was the purpose behind building the plow. “We’d have been a leg up on it, anyway, if we hadn’t got mixed up in a goddamned union. We’d have had the hogpen built, and a plow, and maybe a loft in this barn,” he said, musing up at the rafters.

“I’ve heard people say a hundred times that one miner by hisself might have a little sense; but if you put two together, they’d have half as much sense as one; and three would have less sense than two; and any more than three wouldn’t have any sense at all.”

“I’ve heard you say it,” Music said.

Regus tipped his head toward the highway. “Down yonder in squatterville you can see the proof if ye doubt me. They’s three or four of them suckers wanting to load up their guns and take over Hardcastle Coal Company. I mean right now!” Regus said. “Then they’s Bydee Flann, and I’ll be goddamned if he don’t want to go straight to Kenton Hardcastle, the sheriff, the county judge, the preachers, the schoolteachers, and every other soul in Switch County and tell em the Communists have come to overthrow the government and carry us all to hell.” Regus wagged his head from side to side. “I believe we could do without goons for makin trouble in squatterville. I believe we could just about make enough of our own from here on in.”

“What are you going to do?” Music said.

Squatting jug-butted and weary by the stanchion, Regus sighed and rubbed the copper stubble on his face. “That’s sholy the question, ain’t it? What Zigerelli thinks is that the coal operators have got to be hurt. Have got to be put in danger of losing what little contracts they’ve won. And he thinks it’s got to happen right now and all across the state. He’s trying to make his bosses understand if the National Miners Union doesn’t make a strong move soon, they won’t have any membership left.”

“It sounds to me,” Music said, “as though he’s talked you around.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “miners ain’t never been able to win out against just the operators. What chance we got with this communist stuff puttin us crosswise of damned near everybody? No, what I think is that we have shit and fell back in it.” Regus rubbed his hands together and seemed to muse upon them. “But at least the little son of a bitch never took up a collection on us.”

“Somebody took up a collection somewhere,” Music said.

“And he ain’t run out and left us flat, and that puts him ahead of anybody my poppa ever dealt with. No, he ain’t talked me around, Bill Music, but it’s hard not to listen just a little bit.”

“You listened to me once too,” Music said.

“Ha,” Regus said, his eyebrows assuming for a moment their old humorous posture, “you ain’t gonna hold that against me, are ye?”

“Yes,” Music said. “Absolutely.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “you are the peculiariest man I ever run up against.” He braced his hands on his knees and rose. “I expect I’ll let ye get back to yer plow makin, if that’s what ye’ve a mind to do. But I come to tell you that we’re gonna have a meetin in squatterville this evenin, and I’d be obliged if ye’d help us talk this mess over. Hit’ll be right hard, I’d vow.”

“You can ask me to do anything but that,” Music said.

“I’d be obliged all the same,” Regus said. “Squatterville needs to make peace amongst itself, if it can, before Zigerelli comes back. Hellfire, don’t go soft on me now. It wouldn’t be a’tall right if you weren’t in it with us.”

In his eyes Music saw the spark of humor, or maybe it was simply a strange sort of tolerance which he had always mistaken for humor. Still, it was there, appearing to take a longer view of things than seemed quite humanly possible. And under its influence, Music nodded, and Regus nodded too and winked.

25

THE FINAL ATTACK

SOMETHING WAS WRONG in the very fabric of the night. Music could feel it in the pit of his stomach and along his spine, although he thought it came from the men standing about the fire, who were so full of their futility and their anger. Later, when Regus had been shot down and killed, he thought otherwise. But he never mentioned it to anyone, for if such instincts existed, he suspected a man ought not to have them, any more than he ought to have dewclaws or bristles down his back.

“They said they wasn’t no hell ner any heaven. They said the closest thing to hell was here in this country and the closest to heaven was Russia. They’d hired out this big, grand auditorium for a meetin and ever soul in it had a red flag to wave. They give me one too, but I throwed hit down, and I tore up my union card before the meetin was over. They said they could make Jesus and sell him for a dime and get richer than airey capitalist has yet got,” Bydee Flann said. “I’ll not cast my lot with such as them, and they ain’t any kind of hard times, ner any man here, that can make me.”

“I don’t want to make ye,” said the angry young miner. He spat into the fire they were all gathered around. “I want ye to shut yer Bible-thumpin mouth!”

“Tom Loflin!” Charles Tucker said and aimed his finger, “you speak to the preacher with a better tongue and some manners or I will undertake to keep you quiet.”

“You think you can do that, do ye?” Loflin demanded. “Step right up then!”

“If he can’t, I reckon I can,” Worth Enloe said.

“Or me, or the three of us together anyhow,” Lewis Short said.

“He ain’t even a preacher,” Loflin said. “He just decided to call hisself one. I got youngins a-wearing rags patched together; their stomachs ain’t been proper full in years; my wife sick and not a nickel to fetch a doctor ner any medicine; and he’s tellin me about folks wavin red flags and sellin Jesus. I don’t want to hear it! He ain’t even a preacher.”

“He got the call just like Moses and John the Baptist done,” Charles Tucker said. “I reckon he’s preacher enough for me.”

“No,” Bydee Flann said, shaking his head slowly, “I ain’t no Moses. I ain’t a thing but a lay preacher and a coal miner like the rest here, but I don’t aim to sell my soul for a few victuals or a coat for my back. Hit’s a trade no child of God ought to make.”

“All that means to me is that you are whipped like a dog and happy with it. Don’t talk to me about no god that made the hell me and mine been livin in! I’d sell anything I got to get out of it,” Loflin said, “my soul first off!”

“God made the world and suffered folks to make the hell,” Bydee Flann said. “If you understood that, ye might be more content, son.”

Music stood on the dark outside fringe of men gathered around the fire. He had nothing to say, and even Regus had not yet spoken a word. But it was easy to see how the lines were drawn. Three of the men were anxious to do whatever Zigerelli wanted: Turl, whom Music remembered struggling up the road with his arms around his radio, who had soaped his tent hoping to keep the rain out; Clifford Smith, the only one of the three who had been to Chicago; and Tom Loflin, who seemed to have only anger to brace himself against his troubles, his children, his wife, pale and listless with consumption. The others were moved by the preacher, and if they were not ready to confess to Kenton Hardcastle that they’d been tricked into joining a bunch of godless Reds and beg him to put them back to work again, as Bydee Flann was, they were in deep despair.

Afflicted with his strange sensibilities, Music had listened to the miners returned from Chicago, seldom even looking at whoever might be talking, yet hearing things they didn’t quite say. In the timbre of their voices he heard the distances they had traveled, the cities beyond imagination they had seen; the distances alone able to both belittle and make more precious the narrow Kentucky valley they had come from; the cities, no less than the Communists, able to confound them and make them skeptical. Even in Clifford Smith’s voice Music had heard an edge of doubt, as though he wondered if the currency he’d brought back from Chicago hadn’t somehow lost its value along the way. Worth Enloe sounded weary, almost too weary to be angry, as though he’d made a long journey only to witness a circus, a freak show. But in Bydee Flann’s voice Music heard outrage and alarm. What he had seen was no plan to help the miner, nor merely a joke or a sideshow, but an offense to God which could spread itself like a disease through the land. Music heard all that and more, or at least he imagined he did.

When each of those who had been to Chicago had spoken and ceased, Lewis Short wagged his grizzled head and scratched the back of his neck. “I reckon I know Kenton Hardcastle as well as any man here, save maybe Worth. Before his health went bad on him, he used to spend as many hours down at the mine as the foreman did. He was a stubborn man even when times were good and he had it all his own way, but he’s worse now. He’s growed old and sour, and I have to tell ye, Preacher, I don’t think he’d take airey one of us back on, no matter how ye crawled.”

“He won’t,” Worth Enloe said, “not when it ain’t to his advantage. He’s got more than enough men left to fetch his coal without the help of any here; the best way he can use us now is for a lesson to them others.”

“Yer a-talkin whipped too, then,” Turl said. “Sayin we’re beat where we stand.”

Perhaps because he didn’t want to hear himself admit it, Worth Enloe did not speak at all; he merely looked at the fire and, after a moment, spat a stream of tobacco juice into it.

“If you’ll hear me,” Regus said, “I ain’t had my say about this National Miners Union business.”

“Ye’ve as much right to speak as airey man in this crew,” Lewis Short said.

“All right then,” Regus said, “it ain’t nuthin new for a coal miner, but I reckon we been flimflammed. We joined an outfit that didn’t tell us what they were up to. And even if we could make peace with that and were all of one mind, I reckon we’d still get skinned.” There was a solemn nodding of heads except for Turl, Clifford Smith, and Tom Loflin, who cursed and muttered and seemed about to break in with opinions of their own. “I don’t look for Hardcastle Coal Company to be unionized by this bunch here, nor the rest of the Kentucky coalfields either,” Regus said. “So I’m willin to own up that we are beat. I just ain’t willin to say that we’re whipped.” Regus ran his finger back and forth under his nose. “How much tucker we got left, Lewis?” he asked.

“Not much,” Lewis said; “grub is gonna run thin in less than a week, I’m thinkin.” He rubbed the back of his head and looked around at the circle of men apologetically. “Hit’s gonna come down to beans and bulldog gravy, except without the beans,” he said.

“Well, boys,” Regus said, “if it was summer, we might last a good while on nearly nuthin, but not this time of year. The weather’s been good to us, but hit could clamp down cold tomorrow. Folks can put up with cold, or they can put up with nearly nuthin to eat, but it’s damned few who can stand both for very long. So,” Regus said, “that’s where we stand. Now that little guinea tells me they’s supplies aplenty down in Knoxville, Tennessee, if we got the grit to collect em and try to run em back into Switch County. Me and Bill Music made one haul from Bristol, and I reckon we could try another from Knoxville. If we took off west, where they ain’t so much coal minin, and then dropped down to Knoxville and come back the same way, we might not run into bad trouble this time. And we ought to make a good haul, since we don’t need no tents. Anyhow,” he said, tipping his head toward Music and grinning wryly, “if we took a couple of men with shotguns and left off all that hay.”

“I’ll ride with ye,” Turl said.

“Yes,” Charles Tucker said, “I’ll travel along.”

Bydee Flann shook his head. “We should have nothing more to do with this outfit boys, for they ain’t no proper union.”

“Preacher,” Regus said, “these here folks have got to eat, but they don’t have to believe nothin they don’t want to. Them Communists ain’t got the power for that. Did they make you buy what they were sellin?”

“No,” Bydee Flann said, “they did not.”

“Sure,” Regus said, “they got no power when all a man has to do is say
no
.”

“You were not in Chicago to see them,” Bydee Flann said.

“I can’t deny it,” Regus said, “but they ain’t down here in Switch County to see me either, and I’d say that puts us even.”

For a while no one spoke. They stood around the low, guttering fire, shoulders hunched against the approaching cold of the night. “I reckon it’s hard to fault what ye say,” Worth Enloe said at last. His ruined eye twitched as though in memory of the powder charge that had gone off in his face and blown in coal dust where vision used to be. “But it galls me to throw in with them that’s played us fer fools. It galls me, that’s all,” he said and sucked his teeth.