Power (21 page)

“It's up to you, Al,” Ben nodded. “You can save a few dollars at a boardinghouse, but I know how you feel. I've lived in boardinghouses too much to ever think about it again.”

Dorothy left to put the children to bed. The two older children, Norah and Sam, came to say good night to their father. They were round-cheeked, healthy children, good-natured and cheerful. My impression was of a happy home, but in my own state of mind, almost any family group would have added up to a happy home. I was too occupied with my own self-pity to examine them very closely.

Ben and I lit cigars over our coffee. Twice, he was interrupted by the phone while Dorothy was away, and twice before that during the meal. He was away from the table when Dorothy returned, and I had just a glimpse of an expression on her face that might have been sheer despair or perhaps it was nothing more than my imagination. Ben Holt returned pulling on a raincoat. “I hate to break this up,” he said, “but we have to get over there. This is the first time, but not the last, Al. I want you to feel at home here.” Dorothy was watching him. “I know,” he said to her, and shook his head hopelessly. They didn't kiss as we left.

Clouds were gathering again in the growing dusk. As we walked, Ben Holt talked about the strike, about what faced him, and about what I could do. He admitted that no matter what the result of the strike was, they couldn't change the situation in the South. “Someday we'll go back to West Virginia—but that will wait.” The thing now, as he explained, was to separate the North from the South and get an agreement here. “And let the country know how miners live. That's your job, Al. Convince them that we're not a bunch of red Bolsheviks trying to overthrow everything.”

He was taking another way than that which had led me to their house. After a few blocks, we were walking through unpaved streets, the mud sucking at our feet. The tiny houses on either side were grimy and unpainted, a shade less wretched than those in West Virginia, but bad enough. Here and there, a man standing in his yard or sitting on the front steps would come over and pass a few words with Ben. Ben knew them by name. He had an incredible memory for names, and he used this gift consistently and shrewdly. The miners themselves were physically no different from other miners I had seen, lean men, the mark of their trade tattooed into their skin; but the bitterness and the anger were evident—or was that my imagination in terms of what Dorothy Holt had said?

At one house, a strikingly good-looking woman in her twenties came over to us, and she said to Holt, “Who's your cute friend, Ben?”

He introduced me and asked how things were.

“Lousy. Living alone is lousy. Always was.”

“Find yourself another husband, Sally.”

“Another miner? The hell with that! The hell with the whole lot of you!”

We had started off, when she called after us, “I didn't mean that, Ben. Come over sometime. A girl gets lonely.”

“She is poison,” Ben said to me. “Husband killed in a mine, no kids—she lives there alone. I suppose it's all right for a night, but she'll claw your heart out.” His comment was flat and indifferent; the indifference was like a seal on his attitude toward women. As I matched his long, rolling stride through the night, I began to sense some of the complexity that underlay the seeming simplicity of this big hulk of a man called Ben Holt.

 

9

The International Miners Union headquarters in Pomax, Illinois, has, in the course of years, become one of the famous buildings of America. In Hulter's painting, “The Miner's Family,” he uses the Union Building on Lincoln Street as part of the background, a fact that mystified art critics who knew little or nothing of Egypt or Pomax. However, in the course of time, the three-story, red brick building, with its two stunted, pointed towers, its ten ugly windows, and its flat, dead exterior became a symbol of sorts. The union still owns this building, and over the years it has undergone a process of modernization and sentimentalization. In 1924, there was no money for modernization and no mood for sentiment; it was an old and dirty building and its only advantage lay in the fact that the union owned it and that it was situated in Pomax.

Pomax was more than the geographical heart of the bituminous coal country of Illinois; it was a mining town or small city in which almost the whole adult male population were miners, and you couldn't be mayor or chief of police or sit on the city council or the board of education unless you were a miner or had once been a miner. Before the war, half a dozen wealthy coal operators made their residence in Pomax, where they built large, handsome houses on Osborn Street. At the time, around the turn of the century, there was an anticipated future for Pomax; but when it failed to materialize except in coal, and when each successive year increased Pomax's coat of soot and grime, the operators moved north to more pleasant locations, and their residences were turned into boardinghouses. The Union Building had originally been built as headquarters for the Midwest Coal Company, which was owned and operated by the Mid-Illinois Railroad; but after some years of what was in effect enemy territory, they sold the building to the union and moved to Cairo.

The building itself was located on Lincoln Street, one block south of the Pomax House. As I approached it with Ben Holt this evening, the windows were lit, the sidewalk outside crowded with men—indeed the whole street alive and active and very different from the dead and deserted aspect it had presented in the pouring rain. On either side of the entrance to the building were large bulletin boards, men pressed around them, crowding up to read the notices—and other men clustered in small groups and others went in and out of the building. A very tall, thin man in a policeman's uniform, with a gold badge on his chest that read
CHIEF,
came out of the building as we approached. Ben, meanwhile, was surrounded by the miners in front of the building, greeting this one and that one, speaking a word here, a word there, trying to answer five questions at once, and exercising his uncanny ability to remember names. The tall man in uniform pushed through to him and said to the others,

“Look, boys, give me a minute with Ben, will you? I been waiting for him, and I still punch a time clock. I'm not going on strike.”

The miners were good-natured about it. It was evident that the chief was liked. He drew Ben aside, and Ben pulled me along with him, and introduced me,

“This is Alvin Cutter, Andy. He's just joined our staff, and tonight's his first night at work. Isn't that a hell of a note? He's going to handle public relations and see whether we can't get through this one without every rag in America beating us over the head. So I want you to know him.” And to me, “Al, this is Andy Lust, our chief of police in Pomax. Andy was a miner and his father was a miner, and he's a good friend of ours. I want you to know him and like him.”

Lust shook hands with me. Unquestionably, if I remained with the job, I would know him, but whether I would like him was another question entirely. His pale blue eyes were cold as ice, his lips so thin that his wide mouth gave the appearance of a slit. His greeting was formal, efficient and short; evidently he was not impressed by whatever I would add to the local situation; he turned to Ben Holt and declared,

“I got to know, Ben, just when and how this strike is going to come off.”

“I told you when and how, Andy. It's no secret. A day after tomorrow at the end of the workday.”

“And suppose they lock you out at the beginning of the workday and jump the gun? That's what I'm afraid of. That could mean a lot of trouble.”

“Hell, yes,” Ben Holt sighed, “it could mean trouble. There's got to be lots of trouble all over. That's the nature of it. Andy, it's not just here, but Pennsylvania too, and out west, and Canada and the South—”

“The trouble's going to come first right here, and you know it, Ben!”

“Maybe, maybe,” Ben nodded, smiling, pacifying. “You know Pomax better than I do, Andy. We'll try to think through some approach to a lockout. I'll talk to you about it.”

“And give me time, Ben.”

“Sure I'll give you time, Andy—sure.”

We shook hands again, and Ben led me into the building. Just inside the door, he was stopped by a miner, desperate, almost in tears. The miner's daughter had acute appendicitis. It had been diagnosed. The case was urgent, and she had to be rushed to the hospital in Cairo, but they would not admit her without money, and the miner was penniless. When he began to go into the facts of how penniless he was, Ben stopped him, reached into his own pocket, peeled five tens from a roll of bills, and gave the money to the man. Ben cut short his thanks and pushed him toward the door of the building, avoided my eyes, and led the way upstairs.

The inside of the Union Building was as beaten and poorly kept as the outside. The entranceway, the hallway, and the main stairs leading up to the second floor had been paved with what was once white marble—now almost black with grime. The walls, once buff, were brown, the paint peeling, the plaster cracked. On the main floor, two large rooms, left and right, opened off the entranceway. One was crowded with miners; the other was a duplicating room, mimeographs and stacks of mimeograph paper. I glimpsed them in passing then; we went upstairs to the union offices.

The main office, at the head of the stairs, was crowded, and there was a flow of men coming and going. Most of them were miners, but there were others, a few newspaper people, a coal operator, and various townspeople, storekeepers and others. Their attention centered around two men whom I saw here for the first time, but whom I was to see a good deal of during the coming years. The first of these two was Fulton Grove, a vice-president of the International Miners Union and Ben Holt's administrative assistant. He was a man of average height, pudgy in aspect, in his middle thirties, blond, with mild blue eyes blinking behind steel-rimmed spectacles. He was as unlikely a candidate for leadership of the most unbridled and militant group of workers in America as one might find—unlikely and improbable, with the manner of a bank clerk and the meticulous reactions of a bookkeeper. The second center of attention in the room was Jack Mullen, dark, muscular, black hair, deep, restless eyes, a handsome head on a thick, strong neck, and a calm, forceful manner. He was thirty years old, a miner since the age of twelve in the bituminous fields outside of Pittsburgh, and Ben Holt's chief field assistant. Curiously enough, Fulton Grove had also been a miner once, but only for a single year; then he had gone into clerical work at the mines, become a grade-school teacher, and served on the Pomax City Council.

As Ben Holt and I entered the room, the coal operator, a heavy, choleric man, strode over to him, thundering, “By God, Ben, I am going to see you and talk to you if it's the last thing I do!”

“All right—all right,” Ben replied, spreading his arms. “I talk to everyone, don't I? Give me a minute.”

“I been here an hour.”

“A man has to eat dinner,” Ben grinned. “Am I allowed? Did you eat? Do I?” He pushed past and nodded for Grove and Mullen, who joined him, and then he introduced me. Fulton Grove slid through the formalities of greeting; he was glad to see me; glad to see anyone who might help. Mullen studied me coldly and thoughtfully, and said, “Stick around, Cutter. This is an interesting place.”

“Can you talk to Al here now, Jack?” Ben Holt asked Mullen.

“Now? How the hell can I talk to anyone now, Ben? I got twenty people waiting to see me. Take him in to Mark. Mark will be able to tell him what to do better than any of us. Anyway, I don't know what his job is. All I know is that we got a strike here we're not one God damn bit prepared for.”

“We'll be prepared,” Ben said softly. “Take it easy—easy.” He swung around and told the mine operator, “I'll be with you in two minutes, Mr. Klingman.” Then he led me through the crowd and opened a door marked
LEGAL DEPARTMENT.

In a room that was furnished with a desk, a few chairs, some filing cabinets, and a case of books, a man was in the process of dictating to a strikingly attractive young woman. The woman, lean, long-limbed, glanced up as we entered, to reveal a strong-boned face, high, wide cheekbones, a wide, full mouth, and shrewd, appraising blue eyes. The man was in his late forties or early fifties, tired, sallow in complexion, his face fleshy and lined, his dark eyes deep-set under shaggy brows.

“This is Mark Golden, our attorney. Lena Kuscow, his secretary,” Ben told me.

“Everyone's secretary,” the woman remarked sourly.

“Alvin Cutter. I was telling you about Cutter, Mark.”

Golden nodded. Lena Kuscow studied me deliberately and thoughtfully. “I want you to talk to him,” Ben went on. “This place is a madhouse tonight. Klingman grabbed me as I came in. He wants to see me—”

“You know about what.”

“Sure I know about what. He's got that damn steam shovel and the grading machines sitting in his open-strip mine, and he's going to claim that the machinery will bankrupt him unless he can use it.”

“He's a liar,” Golden said flatly.

“Why?”

“Because Arrowhead Pit isn't his mine. Eighty per cent of it is owned by the Great Lakes Company in Chicago, and he's just a cheap loudmouth they use as a front. They got the machinery on contract, but it won't bankrupt them. It could sit there all year and it wouldn't bankrupt them.”

“You can't prove any of that, Mark,” Ben said tiredly.

“All right, I can't. He's going to ask you whether they can't go on stripping the coal with the steam shovel and stock-piling it.”

“That's right.”

“The hell with it! Do what you want to do. You're asking for trouble.”

“Thanks,” Ben said angrily, and started for the door. I stood there, feeling like a complete fool, not knowing whether to remain or to leave with Ben Holt—feeling the effect of an accumulation of distaste and dislike directed toward me. At the door, Ben paused, turned back to Golden, and said,