Power (33 page)

Suddenly, Ben Holt reached up to the lapel of Brady's jacket, and, calling into play that extraordinary strength of his, ripped off not only the lapel, but half of Brady's jacket, exposing the shoulder holster and gun that Brady always wore. As the Associated Miners' strong-arm men began their rush toward the microphone, Ben Holt roared out, in a voice that shook the rafters of the auditorium,

“What is this—a miners' convention or a meeting of Chicago hoodlums? Since when are cheap gunmen allowed to address this convention! I took that gun away from Brady four years ago in Pomax, and I'm taking it away again!”

And with that, Ben tore off the holster and flung gun and holster onto the stage. His roaring voice had stopped the muscle men cold in their tracks. Now he turned his back on them and walked to his seat without another word. But even if he had spoken, no one would have heard him. Pandemonium reigned in the hall as the delegates charged up to the stage and forcibly ejected the Associated Miners. Through all that, Ben Holt never moved, only sat there with an expression of utter disgust on his face.

So there is the cutting and the story, Alvin, and were you going to tell it as Kingsley Rowe did, in the same simpering style the
National Post
uses to force any man of stature or individuality into the Madison Avenue mold—even a trade-union leader, safely dead? Or were you going to tell the truth?

Or are you saying to yourself now, that I am on both sides of the fence, worshiping Ben and hating him, loving him and despising him, and that it makes no sense? But it makes a great deal of sense, my dear Alvin—the only sense in my whole life with Ben. And as for the truth, I do know it, wholly and completely.

You may remember that from Chicago, Ben came to Ringman. By then, the children and I had been at Father's house in Ringman for three weeks, and those three weeks had worked wonders for all of us. Kingsley Rowe's picture of the “pinched” faces of my children, as they “whimpered” with hunger leaves something to be desired in terms of the truth. I have seen hunger and even starvation among miners too often to suggest that my children ever knew either. The worst that ever happened was a flattening of their diet, with perhaps too little good protein and too much starch, oatmeal twice a day and almost no eggs or milk or meat, but that is a far cry from either hunger or starvation.

However, after three weeks of fresh farm milk and eggs, orange juice and all the meat and chicken they could eat—as well as the freedom of the house and the fields—the children glowed, and some of the growing network of lines on my own face were being ironed out. When Ben arrived and saw me, his grin of pleasure was so real and boyish that my equanimity only increased. He was to remain with us in Ringman for a full week, the first real vacation he had taken in years, and I had a wistful hope that somehow we could go back to our first days together in Ringman and make new beginnings. But isn't that always the hope, twice-lived youths and new beginnings?

Father had always liked Ben. My father recognized no virtue as superior to intelligence, and he was ready to forgive a myriad of sins, so long as the sinner was well salted with common sense. Next to boors and hypocrites, he hated fools most, and once he had gotten over the shock of Ben Holt marrying his daughter, he was rather pleased with the notion of having his daughter dedicate her life to what he regarded as a high social service. While he knew a great deal about coal miners and the Miners Union, I don't think he ever had the vaguest notion of how we lived or what life with Ben Holt was. He had noted Ben's increase in salary to five and then eight thousand a year. We had not bothered to inform him or the world that subsequently it shrank back to five thousand, then to four and now to two thousand a year—when there was enough money in the treasury to pay the forty dollars a week.

With Ben's arrival, Father was as excited as a boy at the prospect of having someone at the dinner table each night for seven nights, with whom to discuss politics, history, the situation in labor, the international situation, plus whatever other abstruse subjects might be raised. By now, Norah was nine years old, Sam seven, and little Ben six. Father loved his grandchildren, but there was no denying that they were a trial for an entire summer; he expected to find repayment in Ben and he looked forward impatiently to our first dinner. And when we had finally seated ourselves, Ben already beginning to look like the elder statesman with his graying hair and increasing girth, Father couldn't suppress a smile of delight.

“I've looked forward to this for a long time,” he said. “You've been too long away and too far away.”

We agreed, and our talk filled in the years and the empty spaces, and that took us through most of the meal. It wasn't until Mrs. Privit's excellent roast had been cleared away that we got to the convention.

“I want to hear all about it,” Father said. “The whole story—the inside story, if you don't mind, Ben.”

“How do you know there is any inside story?” I wanted to know, a little annoyed with Father's habit of romanticizing things that were not in the least romantic.

“Because there certainly is, Dotty, make no mistake. Am I right, Ben?”

“You could be right.”

“There you are. Why, you couldn't read the papers without reading between the lines. They not only had written Ben off; they had printed his obituary. He was finished. He didn't have a chance in the world, and the only question was who would fall heir to the fragments of the union. Would it be Gus Empek? Or would it be Fulton Grove, called back by acclamation?”

Ben's laughter roared his appreciation. Father filled their wineglasses, and said, “And the gun, Ben! My word, that was lovely—that was as gracious and fine as anything.”

“And the interesting thing is,” said Ben, “that the newspapers were not so far from wrong. So far as we could see, it was the end of everything—and I was there to be the roasted goose. That's the history of the miners, isn't it—break your heart and back for them, and when you're down, they'll stamp on your face.”

“That's what they did to Tom Hennesy, who founded the union,” Father agreed, “and a saintlier man never lived. They did it to Joe Kempton and they did it to McClellen.”

“Miners,” Ben sighed. “Hate—suspicion—and mistrust, their definition of any man who leads them. I swear, sir, I had no place to turn, no idea, no notion—only the simple fact that a union which once numbered almost four hundred thousand members was now down to a handful. No one cared to remember that it was a handful when I became president, and that I had built it up to where it was. Oh no—that was nothing anyone wanted to remember. They wanted a victim, and they wanted to tear him into pieces. Empek knew that. Grove knew it. And I knew it too.”

“Then you knew that Empek would try to raid you?” Father nodded.

“Not quite,” Ben replied. “No, that took a little doing.”

“Ben, what on earth do you mean?” I asked him.

“Dotty, Dotty,” Ben grinned, “wake up. The bad things happen, no matter what. But when something helps, it's because you make it happen.”

“And you engineered that whole thing?” I whispered.

“Myself? No. The truth is, it wasn't even my idea. It came from our own pillar of integrity, Alvin Cutter.”

“No. I don't believe it.”

“Then you'll ask him,” Ben said flatly.

“It's your story of what happened that I want to hear, Ben,” Father said.

“All right, sir. I tell it from the point of view of hopelessness, sheer hopelessness. We sat there in a hotel room in Chicago—Jack Mullen, Oscar Suzic, Mark Golden—you know who they are?” Father nodded. “There was Lena Kuscow; she's Golden's secretary and a sort of prop for all of us, and Al Cutter—he's the man I met eight years ago down in West Virginia. I believe you know that story. We sat there and beat our brains out and talked around in circles and tried to see some way out, but there wasn't any way out. Then Cutter recalled an incident that had happened some years back in the railroad station at Pomax. I don't want to go into all the details of that, but at that time, Gus Empek and Jack Brady wanted a meeting with me, and they were afraid to show in Pomax, the way feeling there ran against them. So we met in the baggage room at the railroad station. Now Jack Brady is a man with a gun. That's a sickness, like being a rummy, but it takes the form of needing a gun and wearing a gun. I read an article by a doctor, once, who said it was an expression of sexual impotence, and that the gun became a phallic symbol of some sort, but whether that's the case or not, I don't know. I do know that Jack Brady would no more walk around without his gun than walk naked. He never shot anyone, but the gun is his need. That day when we met in the baggage room, Brady lost his head and went for his gun, and I took it away from him—and that was the incident Cutter recalled. He kept harping on it, even though I got annoyed and told him to forget it. Then he said to me, Ben, what would happen if you took that gun away from Brady up there on the stage? I mean, suppose he tried to draw on you, and you took his gun away in front of the whole convention? By golly, wouldn't that take the delegates' minds off you and switch all the irritation to Gus Empek and Jack Brady and maybe Fulton Grove as well?

“I told him that he was crazy, and so did everyone else except Mark, who seemed to be fascinated with the idea. Mark insisted that we pay some attention to Cutter's notion and find out what Cutter had in mind. Cutter didn't have any of the details worked out at that point, only the picture of what should happen up there on the platform, and then the two of them convinced me that maybe it should happen and that there might be a way to make it happen. So we put our heads together and spent half the night hashing it out and putting the pieces together in working order. The result of it was that we worked out a crazy, kid routine that no one in his right mind would fall for, but then greedy men at a convention are not exactly in their right minds.”

“Hold on and let me guess,” Father chuckled. “You dropped an apple into the lap of the National Confederation of Labor.”

“Exactly. They were in the same hotel, and there was nothing in the world they—by they, I mean Fulton Grove and two other members of the executive who were present as observers—nothing in the world they desired more than the demise of Ben Holt and Ben Holt's friends. I was the bone that stuck in their craw—the leader of a union that insisted on being an industrial union in the face of their damn craft unions and didn't play ball in their lousy genteel league. They were wrong, but they had gotten it into their heads that if they could only get rid of me, everything would be on ice for them. Well, we decided that Mark Golden and Al Cutter would go to them and hand them our union. It made sense in a way. Al and Mark were not miners; they hadn't come up the hard way; they held jobs with the union, and what was more natural than for them to look for something else when the union became a sinking ship? So the next day, Al and Mark met with Fulton and his playmates. Fulton's own notion of tactics was as subtle as his Sunday-school mind. He planned to demand time on the platform and to offer the delegates the full support of the National Confederation, providing that they dumped Ben Holt.

“Al and Mark said that this would never work, and that the delegates would not throw me out unless they had someone there ready to replace me. Now Gus Empek and his crowd were already at the convention, and there had been quite a battle in the credentials committee as to whether or not they should be admitted. The fact that they were given observers' credentials was a defeat for me, and this was something Fulton Grove knew. But Fulton had enough sense to know that there was a difference between an observer and a candidate for international leadership. Empek's name still had the stink of Arrowhead all over it, and although that was four years ago, time had not rubbed it clean. It was the job of Mark and Al to talk Fulton into believing that Gus Empek and Jack Brady could make a real bid for leadership—and I guess they were pretty damned eloquent. They worked out the whole approach with Fulton at first, and then subsequently with Brady and Empek.

“And that was the way it happened,” Ben finished. “It was staged perfectly. It went through perfectly—and it ended just precisely as we planned for it to end. If we hadn't intervened at the very end, I think the delegates would have killed every last one of those Associated Miners—”

Father was rising now, and he led the way into the parlor, for the brandy and coffee, and cigars for himself and Ben. That harked back to the old days when Ben would dine with us, yet I wondered whether then, a decade and a half ago, Father would have listened to a story like this, nodding and grinning his approval. Ben had to point out that I didn't approve. He read my face more easily than Father did, and perhaps he had his own guilts where I was concerned. Father interpreted this as an expression of my own anxiety over the incident of the gun.

“No,” I said. “I don't think Ben was ever in any danger, as far as Jack Brady was concerned. I think Ben described Brady very well—except for one thing that is perhaps a little clearer to a woman. Brady lives with fear. I don't know about the rest of it, but to me, that's the main reason for the gun. Brady couldn't use it. He's a coward—poor devil.”

“There are better candidates for your sympathy than Jack Brady,” Ben growled.

“I imagine so. I'd rather not name them.”

“Now just what is that supposed to mean?” Ben demanded, angry and hurt that I had taken the wind out of such a fine and clever story. Father was a little upset too, and he hastened to say,

“One moment, Dotty—you can't make a moral judgment of this thing Ben did, because I am not sure you understand it at all.”

“What!”

Ben threw up his hands in despair, and let Father know that there was no arguing with me, not when I had made up my mind about anything. Father said,