Power (13 page)

“Then you ought to try me, Ben Holt.”

“It's not as simple as that, Dorothy. I'm a miner. That's the basic thing. You don't just walk into a miner's house. You walk into a miner's world and remain there, day after day, year after year. Could you ever see yourself doing that?”

“You are also a college man, and a person of will and intelligence. Do you intend to be a miner all your life, Ben?”

“Possibly.”

“You can't be serious.”

“I was never more serious. Doesn't it make any sense to you that a person should want to be a miner?”

“No,” I said plainly. “No, not at all. It's a cruel and heartbreaking life, and it makes no sense to me that anyone should choose it when he has an alternative.”

“I imagine there are a lot of things about me that make no sense to you,” he said bitterly.

“Well, for heaven's sake—of course there are, and there must be any number of things about me that make no sense at all to you. But that doesn't make things impossible, does it? And that's no reason to have a quarrel, is it?”

“I'm not quarreling!” he snapped.

“You're angry.”

“I'm not angry at you. I'm just angry. I'm angry at a world that makes you ashamed to think of yourself as a miner's wife.”

“Ben—Ben, believe me, I'm too young to think of myself as anyone's wife.”

“In your middle class, sure you are. In my class, it's different.”

“Ben—” I shook my head. “It takes time to know people.”

“There's only one thing I can do for you, Dorothy,” he said dramatically, “and that's to walk out of here and never see you again.”

“You'd be doing that for yourself, not for me. And I don't see that you're obligated to do anything for me—or that I am to do things for you. We're good friends, and I would like it to remain that way.”

“So that you could turn the whole thing into a suitable middle-class fairy tale!” he snorted.

“What whole thing?”

“Whatever we feel for each other.”

“Ben,” I said gently, “I like you a great deal. You said you never knew anyone like me before. Well, I never knew anyone like you before. So we have to give it time—don't you understand?”

He nodded, and I must give him credit for trying to be polite and amiable about it; but Ben was never much good about being polite and amiable. About a half hour later, he said good night to me, and a year went by before I heard from Ben Holt again.

 

7

Why did I finally marry Ben? That's a poor question for sixty-one to ask seventeen, or twenty, for I was almost twenty before Ben and I were married. I think I loved him; I admired him; I made a hero out of him; and he was intelligent and positive and filled with a wild violence of energy. I felt proud and fulfilled when I was near him, and all those are reasons, aren't they? But after I said good-by to him, there was no letter, no word from him all winter long. When I came home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I telephoned the boardinghouse where he had been living, without giving them my name. They said that Ben had left during the first week in October and that they had no forwarding address. I asked Father whether he couldn't find out what had happened to him, and meanwhile all sorts of dread possibilities crossed my mind. I was not without imagination, as you may have gathered. Father tried, and came up with the information that Ben had left Ringman, apparently for good. A few of his friends supplied the information that he had intended to go out west, naming places as far apart as Texas and California, but no one knew for sure and no one Father spoke to had heard of Ben.

“Why would he go away like that?” I asked Father. “Why would he cut himself off like that?”

“That's hard to say. Maybe he's having a turn at running away from something. Or looking for something. I don't know.”

“Why wouldn't he write to me?”

“Perhaps that's part of the point. To forget you. But I can't say, honey. We'll wait and see, but believe me, we'll hear from Ben Holt again one of these days.”

I was less optimistic than Father, and as the winter wore away and turned into spring, and spring into summer, I came to the conclusion that Ben Holt had passed out of my life for good. A healthy young woman of eighteen does not pine away over a lost love. I had eligible boys clustering around, dances and parties to attend, and my responsibility as president of the Junior League for Belgian Relief. Time passed. I visited with my Aunt Martha in Massachusetts during the latter part of August, and when I returned to Ringman a letter from Ben was waiting for me.

That was the letter I spoke of before, a long letter, which I am enclosing with this apparently endless letter of my own. It will interest you, I believe, and you may use any part of it or all of it, just as you wish. I don't feel that I am violating any confidence by allowing you to read it—or the whole world, for that matter. So far as I know, it is the only writing of Ben's that is uninhibited, emotional, and unguarded, the last being particularly important. In all truth, I don't know whether Ben would want it published or not, but I can never know that, can I?

You must make the decision yourself, Alvin. Here is the letter, a little yellow with time and somewhat faded—but as alive, to me at least, as the first time I read it.

Denver General Hospital

Denver, Colorado

October 3, 1915

Miss Dorothy Aimesley

Ringman, Pa.

Dear Dorothy:

Or should I call you Miss Aimesley? It is so long now since I received your permission to call you by your first name that I wonder whether it is still in effect?—that is, if you remember me? In case you have forgotten, I am the oversize miner with the dirty hands who once ate three quarters of a picnic lunch on the top of Belfast Ridge. In case you feel that my own memory is at fault, I can remind you that it was the first time I ever ate a sandwich composed of a mixture of stuffed olives, anchovies and cream cheese. It was very good, too, much better than the hospital food here.

The fact that I am in this hospital is nothing to worry you, if you are disposed to worry about me. That is a presumption on my part, but then I guess that even daring to write this letter after a year of silence is just as presumptuous. I could say that I am writing to you because I have no one else to write to, but you would know that to be untrue. I have three aunts, two uncles and better than twelve cousins back in Ringman, so I could write to any one of them. I am trying to be light and make small of things, but it doesn't become me too well, does it? I keep telling myself that you may be married by now and that I have no right at all to express any sentiments to you, but I cannot keep from saying that there was never a day since I left Ringman that you weren't in my thoughts. There also was no day when I didn't consider writing to you, but that always slammed up against my purpose of getting out of your life completely and leaving you alone. If you prefer it that way, just tear up this letter and leave it unread. If you read on, I will take it for granted that you are interested in what I have to say and in the things that happened to me.

About the hospital, I am here with an infected leg that was badly cut up. They operated, and now it is healing successfully, and they tell me that I won't even limp. I will be here another week if all goes well—longer if it doesn't. But everything seems to be going well.

A few days after I saw you the last time, Dorothy, I made my final payment to the university. I had been on scholarship and on jobs there, but I had to take a loan to round it out. I sent them a money order for two hundred dollars, and that completed payment on the loan. I had thirty-seven dollars left, and a miner I know, Tom Llewellyn, was caught under a beam and brought home with a broken back. I put the thirty-seven dollars in the kitty for him. He'll never walk again, and we all tried to salve ourselves off with a little money. That night, I walked out to the yards and climbed into an empty boxcar. I had no money, no destination and no love for anything that lived. Not even for you, Dorothy, at that moment; I wanted only to put distance between us and forget that I ever knew you or Ringman or Tommy. I rode that string of empties out to St. Louis.

I spent a month in St. Louis working as a freight checker in the barge terminal on the river … It was easy work, just checking manifests and keeping a simple set of books, and the first day I learned all there was to know about it. I lived in a furnished room, ate in cheap restaurants, and spent most of my time after the job reading in my room. Sundays, I took long walks and poked around old bookstores. My boss at the terminal was a Swede, Jack Thorsen, and he took a liking to me, and had me over to dinner once, and wanted me to stay there and learn the business. He paid me fourteen dollars a week, fair enough pay when you consider how light the work was and how I came to it with no experience at all. But it wasn't for me.

I never looked at a girl there either. I feel foolish saying that, but I want you to know.

I had no reason to remain in St. Louis and no reason to leave. My existence was rootless and meaningless—and if there is anything in the world more meaningless than to live in a furnished room and go to work each morning and come back each evening, then I don't know about it. It wasn't the loneliness. I'm used to being alone, to doing for myself and fending for myself. But I used to tell myself that I had a direction. Even if I was never sure just what that direction was, I had a direction to cling to. Now I had none. I left St. Louis because it was no better and no worse than remaining there.

In turn, I tried Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita. In Kansas City, I found a job in a cotton warehouse. It was heavy work and I hated it, which is strange, because I always enjoyed heavy work. After a week, I moved on. In Topeka, the only work was as a laborer on a big city sewer project, and if there's one thing that's an anathema to a miner, it's to work as a laborer. There's another puzzle to add to your book of miners. In Wichita, no work at all, and I was running out of money. But there in Wichita, at the Royal Hotel, a miserable hostelry where I put up for one night, I ran into a kid called Larry Hurst. He was nineteen and broke and he reminded me of my brothers, and for some reason or other, I took a liking to him and bought him supper. He had been working as a cowhand at a big ranch west of Dodge City—for eighteen dollars a month. That's the gospel truth, eighteen dollars a month. I had thought that mining was a rotten deal in dollars and cents, but after I listened to his story of work and hours and treatment on a big ranch, I had new respect for the whole mining industry.

Anyway, he had sworn an oath to himself never to take ranch work again, and he was in Wichita trying to make some kind of a stake to get up north to Montana, where, as the story went, there was work at good wages in the copper mines. His father had mined copper in Montana twenty years before, when hell was a gentle word for the conditions in the mines there; but he had heard that things were different now and that working conditions and wages were good.

The next morning, after I had paid my hotel bill and the price of breakfast, I had about two and a half dollars left. Larry was broke. It wasn't much of a stake for two men, but we decided to take off and see how far we could get, one place being about as good as the next.

There's no way directly out of Wichita to the north, but the Atcheson runs west, and at a little place called La Junta, there's a spur line to Pueblo and the main line through Wyoming to Montana. But when you ride the railroads without tickets, you can't plan it as well as you might like to. We found an empty car on a slow freight, supposedly for Dodge City, fell asleep and found ourselves in Kansas City. It took three days more to make Pueblo, and we were close to starving then. We hired out for a week on a sheep ranch, three dollars each as wages and as much boiled mutton as we could eat. I can make myself sick now just by thinking about boiled mutton, but it was preferable to starvation. When we left there, the rancher dropped us off at a coal mining town called Serpo, and I talked Larry into trying the mines for a stake.

It was to be for no more than a week or two. With the war in Europe, no mine could produce enough of anything, and wherever there were mines, they were taking on men. Larry had never mined coal before, but we hired on as a team, and I took him as my day man or helper. He was a goodhearted kid and learned quickly—not that it isn't more back than learning that a man wants; but what there was to learn, he learned, and he had the back too. He was strong and willing and cheerful, a good man to work with.

The mine itself was a rotten mine, a deep shaft and two and a half miles underground to the cutting face. It was bituminous, not anthracite, and the operators were greedy. Colorado never was a first class coal region, and until this year, the going was rough for the owners. Now the world has a lust for coal that nothing seems to satisfy.

So instead of going on to Montana, we remained at Serpo and worked in the mine. I don't know what we had in mind. We talked about a lot of things—in particular about saving our money for a good stake and then going prospecting on our own for silver and gold. Every miner, no matter what he digs, has at one time or another made a little daydream out of prospecting. We read books on metallurgy and mineralogy, and we only got drunk once, and Sundays we'd go out to mule farms and talk prices and mule lore, and other Sundays, we'd sit around at the Muskat Saloon, where the old men gathered to talk about the days when there was a gold strike over every hill. Weeks passed. Twice, we decided to quit, and each time, they raised the tonnage price.

It wasn't a good life and it wasn't a bad life, Dorothy. I wanted you, to be with you—well, more than I can say, and I had some crazy dream of returning to you rich and mighty.