Power (15 page)

“They put their trust in others. That doomed them.”

“They had to,” Father insisted. “They were Indian tribes facing a powerful federal government. What else could they do?”

“Put their trust in themselves. In their own power and unity. That's the only thing anyone respects.”

“Ben, they faced an army.”

“What is an army? It's a part of the whole power idea—and the question was not one of army or government—the question was, where does power lie and how can it be used?”

“And where did this power lie, Ben?”

“In the land they occupied, in where they were and what they were, in what they stood for, a people of their own land. But most of all, their power lay in their unity. In knowing how to use it, and that's something they never knew and they never learned!”

The argument went on, but I heard only snatches of it. I was watching Ben. When an idea took hold of him, his face lit up; his reserve vanished, and there was something thrilling in his excitement and fervor—and when that excitement finished, it was as if he retreated deep, deep into himself. As if he removed himself utterly, and this was the case when we went into the parlor after dinner. I played the piano. Ben sat in a chair in the corner and listened without hearing. Father left. I finished playing and looked at Ben. He rose and walked over to the piano.

“I guess you heard about it,” he said.

“The fight?”

He nodded.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I don't want to talk about it, Ben.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's over. You did whatever you had to do. You always said that we lived in different worlds, and that I didn't understand your world.”

“Even if that's true, I want you to understand my world. You have to.”

“Why do I have to, Ben?”

“Because I love you.”

So there it was, finally, plainly and straightforwardly, and I stood up and asked him what it meant or what he thought it meant when he said that to me.

“I want to marry you, Dorothy. I want you to be my wife, if you love me.”

“Don't you know whether I love you, Ben?”

“I'm afraid to know or not know.”

Then, for the first time, he wholly took me in his arms and kissed me, and it was over and I had agreed to be Ben Holt's wife. There was the culmination of our courtship and the agreement, no stranger, I suppose, than anyone else's. We sat and talked and made plans and raised our defiance to life and fate and the future; and it seems to me that it was very ordinary and unusual only in the fact that I was a middle-class girl and Ben was a miner. In that way, it was not usual; that made no sense or reason to me; and even in the middle of all the excitement of being asked this question that is so meaningful and absolute to a young woman, I was asking myself what would be now, and would he expect me to move across Belfast Ridge and rent one of those tiny soot-grimed sections in the long tenements where the miners lived, and was this to be my life, raising a family in the squalor and poverty of a miner's home, rising at four o'clock in the morning, in the pre-dawn gloom to cook his breakfast and then watch him go off to the diggings, myself broken and middle-aged at thirty and an old woman at forty, and to live each day through waiting for the awful howl of the disaster siren—was this it, and was this what he was promising me and what I, in turn, was accepting?

My elation, you see, was not unmixed with a sense of being caught and trapped in something I never knew or bargained for, and my questions couldn't be asked or answered. Ben, on the other hand, was swept along by his own plans and victories, and he spelled it out for me.

“Do you know when we'll be married, Dorothy?”

I shook my head.

“I should let you decide that, shouldn't I? I was going to say two months, but whatever you wish.”

“Why two months?”

“Because in six weeks, the union elections come up. I'm going to run for president of the local union here.”

Oh, he was like a little boy at that moment, and he couldn't have been more excited or alive if he had announced his candidacy for President of the United States. For my part, I didn't know, I didn't have the vaguest idea of what it meant or where it would take him. Nor did I know whether the presidency of a local union was a full-time job or a part-time job, whether he would continue to be a miner or not; and in all truth, my own simple and direct wish was for him to be anything but a miner. When I asked him, he said,

“Oh, it's a full-time job, all right, Dorothy, and the pay is no better than a miner's pay, but that's not the point. You were always outspoken about how much you wanted me to stop working in the mines—”

“I only mentioned it twice, Ben.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it's been on my mind more than on yours. Don't misunderstand me; it's all mixed up, and I'm trying to make you see it the way I do. To be a miner's wife is not the most attractive life in the world, but there it is, and if you love a man, you go where he goes, don't you?”

He flung this at me, but I couldn't answer him.

“You see, I'm not doing this for you. I'd do anything for you, Dorothy, but I always have to go where my own blood leads me. I can't tear myself away from the mines. No matter what happened, I'd always go back. I'm a miner. But I think I have enough sense to know what it is to be a miner. There's no one in this world gives two damns about the miner except himself. For five thousand years, he's been crawling under the earth and leaving his trail of blood wherever he goes. Now it's changed; now the whole world needs him! That world out there—by God, it can't exist a week without the mines. And now's the time for the miner to have his due—but only if he understands his own power. Few enough of them do. They can think as far as the next side of bacon and the next bag of flour, and no further. I can. I understand power—and I understand the power of the miners, and someday I'm going to be at the top of a union of every miner in the United States—at the top, Dorothy!”

He knew where he was going. Perhaps he had always known, perhaps from the first day I met him and before then. But he was the first one like that I had ever known. He talked about power, and his sense of his own power infused him and communicated itself to others. Think of the boys I had known and gone with, college boys who were polite, gentlemanly, well mannered. They would go into their fathers' firms, they would read law, and a few of them would study medicine and some would find proper jobs for their place in life. But none of them knew or cared very much what their ultimate destiny would be. Should I have been perturbed or frightened by Ben's declaration? But the plain truth is that I was thrilled and delighted.

 

9

I told Father about Ben's decision to run for the president of the local union, and I thought he would be as thrilled as I was. Instead, he seemed disturbed, and I found myself asking him whether he wanted Ben to go on being a miner for the rest of his life.

“No. But you see, Dorothy,” he said, “I never shared your fear that Ben would go on being a miner. Being a miner was in the way of marking time for Ben. I just didn't know what his direction would be when he began to move. But that he would move—well, I had no doubts about that.”

“Then don't you think he'll be elected?”

“He'll be elected, all right. Ben is in the way of being a local hero among the miners here. They know what it takes for a miner to fight his way through college. They know his worth, and they knew his people; and the fact that he went back into the pits after the university doesn't hurt either. He's one of them, and still they feel that he's a little more than any of them. It's just that I wish he didn't have to run against old Kusik.”

“But it's not like taking someone's job,” I protested. “Believe me, Ben doesn't care two pins about the job. The pay is no better than a miner's pay, about thirty dollars a week, I think, and Ben's not doing it for the job or the pay. He's doing it because this way he can serve his own people. He can make life a little better for them. He can see to it that they have something better to look forward to than a life of privation and danger.”

“All by himself, Dorothy?”

“Not by himself. Of course not. That's what the union means. Father, I want you to understand Ben and to understand his motives—because he asked me to marry him.”

Father stared at me in silence for a while. Then he nodded and said softly, “What was your answer, Dorothy?”

“I love him, Daddy. What could my answer be?”

“You're sure of that?”

“Since the first time.”

“If you're sure, then that's all that matters to me. But you know what you're getting into, honey.”

“I think so.”

“It won't be easy. Whatever one might think of Ben Holt, there's one thing about him that's evident—he is what our society calls ‘a man of destiny.' That's a stiff piece of elocution, but in plain English it adds up to a man who will place himself and his own needs above everything else. It goes deeper than selfishness. Nothing is going to stand in his way, and nothing is going to interfere with what he wants.”

“How can you say that? What has Ben ever wanted?” I was indignant and hurt. “He could have had a career and money too! He put both aside to remain a miner and to remain with his own people!”

“Baby,” Father said gently, “I'm not tearing Ben down. I'm simply stating a fact of his character. Ben is a wonderful man—an unusual and brilliant and purposeful man. I told you that the first time I brought him here to our house. In a way, I share the responsibility of your decision to marry him, for I made it possible for you to see him and to know him. But I want you to know what you're doing.”

“I do know. You feel that Ben is ruthless because he's running against Stanley Kusik? Well, what has Kusik ever done for the miners?”

“A great deal, but that's not to the point. Kusik is experienced and honest and he does the best he can. Maybe his day is over. Maybe the miners need a young, bold man. I don't know. I know little enough about mining or the local here, too little to pass any judgments. And I'm sure there are sides of Ben you know far better than I do. I only want you to know all of him before you make up your mind.”

“I have made up my mind, Daddy.”

“Then God bless you. There it is. I'll be the first to kiss you and congratulate you.”

And in all the years that followed, I can hardly remember a time when Father didn't defend Ben—except once, as you know, Alvin. He put his own thoughts aside, and accepted what was inevitable.

What else to tell? I think a part of this was the annual meeting where the election took place; we were married after that. Father and I went to that meeting. Ben invited us and sent us passes. Father was eager to go, and I—well, I had never been to a miners' meeting, and it was high time that I began.

The miners had a hall in Ringman, but it was limited in size, and for large, important meetings they used the Shrine Temple at Lanton, twelve miles away. The night when we drove over there was bitterly cold, and though Father and I arrived early, almost every seat was already taken. The auditorium at the Shrine Temple had seats for twenty-five hundred people, but before the proceedings began, well over three thousand men were jammed into the place. I noticed a handful of women who were helping with the paper work, at most a dozen; I was the only one actually seated among the men, and thereby the target of numerous eyes and whispers. I wondered how many of the miners knew that Ben and I were to be married, and who I was and what I was doing there. At least enough of them knew Father to keep us from feeling entirely out of place, and as we entered, half a dozen men went out of their way to shake hands with Father and say a few words to him. Like many sheltered young women of that time, I had a far from complete knowledge of my father's work or world, and it gave me a warm, good feeling to know that through him Ben's world and mine touched.

It was a Saturday night, and the miners were scrubbed and dressed in their good black suits, each of them armed with a pocketful of those indescribable cigars. The air was rapidly becoming unbreathable, when one of the men on the platform stood up and shouted, through the roar of conversation and greetings,

“Brothers, since we're here without masks or lamps and there's no hope of any compensation if this here hall blows up, the committee asks me to announce that there'll be no more smoking tonight. So when your stogies burn down, just don't light up again.”

That may have helped a little, but miners are not easily told what to do and when to do it. Another thing that amazed me was the reading of the administration reports against the roar of conversation on the floor of the hall. I asked Father about this, and he explained that no one really listened to the reports, and that the miners had long ago learned that it was better to read them against the noises than to spend a fruitless half hour trying to impose silence.

“When they want to hear something, you'll be amazed at how quiet they'll be, Dorothy. There's nothing else in the world just like a miners' meeting, just as there's nothing else just like miners. Their union is the main rationale of their existence. They don't respect leadership and administration—they suffer it and mistrust it, and they won't give an inch to show it respect or obedience, unless they're moving toward a strike or a demonstration. It's not only that they're the most independent people on earth; they're men who spend their lives working with death at one hand and darkness at the other. It does something to them. It makes them different.”

While the reports were given and the business of the night attended to, I watched the miners and tried to see this difference my father spoke about. There was a certain physical similarity among them. Their faces were lined and hard, and ingrained with coal dust. Ready-to-wear suits were not cut for people like them; the miners bulked too wide, and they were too heavily muscled across the arms and shoulders. Many of the younger men were strikingly handsome, blond, large. The older men were invariably bent. As the temperature of the hall went up, they took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves and relaxed. A good many of them chewed tobacco and took snuff. I can't say that I was at my ease. I had never been in a hallful of men like these before; the smoke and the noise and the smells affected me badly, and I had to argue with myself to remain cahn and self-possessed and in my seat. On the other hand, the men around me went out of their way to make me feel comfortable. They stopped smoking, and they said nothing that could be calculated to offend me. I had thought, as so many people like myself do, that because I had an intermittent relationship with repair men and delivery people, an occasional carpenter, the men around the stables, and the mechanics who serviced our car, that I knew what there was to know about working people. All my life, I had seen miners on the street, and always in the distance were the tipples and the man-made mountains of culm; but strangely enough I had spent the best part of almost twenty years of living in Ringman, and yet I had never been among miners before, not this way where there could be no separateness and I was an integral part of three thousand talking, shouting, snorting, smoking men.