Power (40 page)

“How many organizers?” Mullen demanded.

“I'll give you thirty to start, more if you need them. Dan Jessup will work with you, and you can use this building and whatever staff is left here as your working headquarters. Lena turned over her old Model T to the union. It runs, but not so good, but it runs. You also have the Chevy and the old pickup, so you'll have three cars at your disposal. Except for Pennsylvania, you'll have the biggest budget. You'll have Ruth as a working secretary, and you can hire another girl. You'll get all your printing here in Pomax on credit, and the mimeograph room in the building is at your disposal. I think that's a nice setup.”

“It's all right,” Mullen grunted.

“It's better than all right. What do you want, the sky?”

“What about Pennsylvania?” Mullen demanded.

“I think Mark knows Pennsylvania better than any of us.”

Never one to trouble about another's feelings, Mullen observed bluntly that Mark was anything but young. “Mark's tired,” he said. “He's a good lawyer but he's not a miner.”

“Thanks for everything,” Mark said sourly. “There's no need to be nasty, Jack. Try a little, and you can be a thoroughgoing louse.”

“Will you cut that!” Ben roared. “What are you—kids? Are we playing games? Just live a little, Jack, and you'll know as much as Mark does about mining and diggers. As for being a miner, who the hell is there in this room who put his hand to a pick in the past ten years? Soames—he's too young to have the belly fat of a pro yet, and Gus Empek. Not you, Jack, and not me.”

“Knock it off,” Mullen said.

“All right. Mark takes Pennsylvania. I'm giving him Fred Soames because you, Freddy”—he turned to Soames now—“you got the youth and energy, and some brains too. Lena will head up the staff in Pittsburgh, and we'll use local headquarters there and all the local staff that's left. There are good people there, and they'll give you whatever help they can.”

“How many organizers will we have, Ben?” Lena asked.

“About forty. More if we can spare them. You'll want a concentration in Scranton as well as the West, because there's no reason why we can't sign every damn digger in anthracite. You can make a secondary base at Ringman—what in hell am I going into this now for? I told you all that Mark knows Pennsylvania better than I do.” He turned abruptly to Empek. “Gus—you still want to thank me?”

“Where do you want me to go, Ben?” Empek asked softly.

“You ever been to Alabama and Tennessee?”

“I been there,” Empek nodded, smiling slightly.

“There never was a union there,” Ben sighed. “Not even a lousy little organization for them to break. But they tell me the climate's nice and the scenery's good. I want you to take twenty men down there and organize it.”

Empek nodded thoughtfully, and then he sat for a little while, turning it over in his mind. I have wondered sometimes whether he wasn't the only person in that room who truly knew Ben, understood him and loved him. In later years, when it was forgotten how much came out of a handful of organizers who set out to build a union in the coal fields, it was acknowledged that a good many persons in high places owed a good deal to Ben Holt. It was noted that they respected Ben, honored him, admired him, and all that goes with it, but it was never specified that they loved Ben. I think Gus Empek loved him. I think that even in the worst of times, when the name Associated Miners was the equivalent of scab in every town in Egypt, Gus Empek loved Ben. It has often been held that Empek was just a boob, and others said that from the very beginning he was Ben's boy and that Ben paid him to do his antics with the Associated Miners, the point being that he was Ben's foil and presented various opportunities for Ben to shine.

But Empek was neither a boob nor a cheap hired hand nor a traitor of any kind; and that kind of thinking was as specious as the thinking that Ben sent him down south in the hope that Empek would be knocked around or jailed or maybe beaten to death. The plain truth was that Ben had something of the same feeling about Empek as Empek had about him, and he sent Empek to the South because he knew that Empek had good sense and guts and that nothing on earth would stop him from doing what he had to do.

Empek knew this, and it was a consideration as he thought the thing through and finally said to Ben, “I got no complaints about that part of the country, Ben—but it's only half the job. Who's going to back me up in West Virginia and Kentucky?”

“I saved that for Al and me,” Ben said. “We both cherish old memories about West Virginia.”

 

13

It was no surprise to me that Ben had selected West Virginia as the state in which to begin the drive, and I would have staked my life on the fact that the town would be Clinton. Ben's memory was as long as his life, and the simple if primitive credo, “Reward your friends, punish your enemies,” could have served as a definition of a good part of his philosophy. He had been driven out of West Virginia. He had never been driven out of another place.

We had twenty organizers with us, and we rode to Clinton by day coach, sleeping in our seats through the night. We were now operating on the ultimate financial resources of the union with a foreseeable dead end; at such a point, unless we succeeded, bankruptcy would envelop us and the union with us.

So we rode day coach, ate sandwiches, and lived in our shirts. I never heard Ben Holt complain. He was indifferent to poverty, just as he was indifferent to the physical conditions that surrounded him at a given moment. In his mind, it was all flux, it was all motion. The very concept of standing still, of building in a single place, of permanence and security, did not exist for him. He was both driven and the driver, and chained to both conditions.

The evening before we arrived at Clinton, we sat together in the coach and Ben talked about old times and remembered the people he had known and still knew in West Virginia. He told me that he had telephoned Max Macintosh and wired him a retainer as our legal counsel, and that Max had arranged for us to have headquarters in the old Traveler's Mountainside Hotel.

“Funny about Macintosh,” Ben said. “We never got along and we never had any trouble working together. There's too much miner in him. He doesn't trust me. You been with me a few years now, Al—do you trust me?”

“I don't have to trust you,” I said. “I got nothing to lose.”

“That's a hell of a way to put it. Do you think I'm honest, Al?”

“That's an original question.”

“I don't know. It's almost fourteen years since we met. It's just a personal question, and I think I'm entitled to an answer.”

For a minute or so, I didn't answer, staring out of the window at lights moving past, at more stationary lights in the distance, at the dark, reflecting surface of the train window, thinking of all the train windows I had stared out of, just like this, through so many years, listening to the click-click-click of the wheels passing from rail to rail, counting my years against them, Alvin Cutter, thirty-five years old, worldly goods, none, worldly achievements, none—and then, at last, I replied to Ben.

“I think you're honest, Ben, as much as I know what honesty means.”

“Stupid question, stupid answer,” he shrugged. ‘Funny thing, Al, here we are, going back to West Virginia, and you never say a word about your wife. I don't think I heard you mention her half a dozen times these past ten years—”

“No, I don't talk about her.”

“Why don't you get married, Al?”

“On what your lousy union pays me?” I snorted.

“That will change,” Ben nodded. “You're good at arithmetic. Try adding up the dues from half a million members.”

The next morning, when we arrived at the Traveler's Mountainside Hotel, there was a telegram from Mark Golden waiting for us. Mark had gone to Washington a few days early, leaving Lena and Soames to bring the organizers into Pennsylvania and begin the operation there. Now Mark wired:
BILL PASSED BOTH HOUSES MAKING RIGHT TO JOIN UNION LAW OF THE LAND.

 

14

Almost ten years since I had seen Max Macintosh, and the years were gone and nothing. Ten years are long only when they're in front of you; when they are behind you, they are no account of time at all. The wind blows, and you feel it brush your face. Time spins like one of those twisted paper toys you buy for children, and the summer was over in the West Virginia valleys, the maples turning red, the oaks browning and the birch full of yellow. It had been no more time for Max Macintosh than for us, but Macintosh had stayed there in Clinton, where he was born and where he would live out his whole life and die. It sometimes seems to me that there is someone like Macintosh in every town in America, clear-minded and sensible and not taken in by the big lie and all the small lies that spin around it, but engaged in the observation of reality and curious about truth.

He had fattened around the girth. Poverty doesn't supply a reducing diet; you eat bread and corn-meal mush and fat back instead of meat. His hair was all gray now, going white in places, and what teeth remained in his mouth were yellow where they held his pipe. But he was pleased to see us, and he shook hands eagerly with Ben and me. He said a few words about Sarah McGrady, my mother-in-law, who had died in 1930; he remembered the old times a little, and he made some observations about the organizers we had brought with us. “They're good men,” Ben said, and Macintosh agreed that they would have to be. We all walked slowly through the town, toward the hotel, a small army in civilian clothes in a town not unfamiliar with armies in civilian clothes.

But word was ahead of us, and the people in Clinton knew who we were. You don't need a wire service; I don't think there was a coal town in America that didn't know that Ben Holt was in it for the big try, all out and the stops be damned, kill or be killed, dig coal like men or go and live and die somewhere else. So, although this was still before eight o'clock in the morning, there were people on the streets, a great many people, diggers and their wives and kids, people in patched denim, wash-bleached cotton and mended gingham, diggers barefoot and their wives barefoot and the kids barefoot, not cheering or yelling or whooping it up for us, but calm-faced, silent, and deeply intent on our progress through the town to the hotel.

We were bringing something, but we weren't coming with gifts, and it was a big question what we were bringing, maybe death, maybe misery beyond even what misery they knew, and maybe some realistic hope. They didn't know, and they waited.

The storekeepers, opening their shops, stood and watched us. A handful of diggers on their way to work stopped to watch us. The sheriff—we learned that his name was Jack Cavanaugh—along with his deputy, came out of his office to watch us, and the railroad people left the station to stand in the street looking after us.

It was a cold, sweet day in October.

 

15

At breakfast with Ben and myself, Macintosh said, “It's a funny thing, Ben, but the way I feel it is this. Either it's going to begin right and go right, or it's going to be the worst trouble either of us ever saw; and believe me, I have seen a little trouble in my time. Ill tell you something else. I feel this. The time is right. Everything's right, and if it goes here, you're going to be like a fire all over the damned state. Nothing will stop it then.”

Ben said, “Nothing will stop it, Mac.”

“Sure. I know that. It just happens that right at this minute there's a warrant out for your arrest.”

Ben nodded and went on eating.

“That doesn't bother you?”

“Sure I'm bothered,” Ben said. “I'm also hungry. Who's serving the warrant?”

“Jack Cavanaugh, the sheriff, and Paul Tillman, his deputy. You saw them standing in front of their office as we came down the street.”

“Why didn't they arrest me then?” Ben demanded.

“Good God, can't you wait? I had a long talk with Cavanaugh about this. You remember Fulton Oswick?”

“The big coal operator? I remember him,” Ben nodded, signaling for the waiter to come and fill his coffee cup.

“He's the biggest man in these valleys,” Macintosh said. “He has something to do with the warrant—perhaps he preferred the charges. Anyway, he's driving down from White Sulphur Springs, and he won't be here until ten o'clock. He's bringing one of the officials of the state police with him, and he sent word to Will Stevenson, our mayor, to hold up the arrest until he arrives. That might indicate that he's afraid it won't stick.”

“The mayor's in this too?”

“Ben, we're a small town. Ten years ago, we were a busted town. Now we're just used to it and maybe worse. I talked to Cavanaugh and I talked to the mayor, and I got them to agree to exercise the warrant in my office. I said that we'd be there, waiting for them, at half past ten.”

Finished with his ham and eggs and grits, Ben buttered a roll and asked Macintosh why he didn't have them swear him, Macintosh, in as a deputy, and save everyone a lot of trouble.

“Use your head, Ben. We're not going to run.”

“Who in hell said anything about running?” Ben growled.

“Then act like a client and I'll try to act like a halfway smart lawyer. If they're going to arrest you, the sooner the better. Last night, I called old Judge Kingsford. He burns when they start stacking the cards against the miners, and he promised bail on the same day. The point is to keep active, not to sit in some lousy can. I don't want to avoid this. It's got to come to a head, and the sooner the better.”

“All right,” Ben agreed. “Now tell me something about Fulton Oswick. Are his collieries working?”

“Some of them.”

“Why not all of them?”