Power (18 page)

I found a room in the hotel at Charleston for Mrs. McGrady. Macintosh had to get back to Clinton, but he said that he would return the following day for the funeral. “You don't have to,” I said to him. “We've taken enough of your time, and you're not really involved in this, Mac.” “I'm beginning to change my mind about Ben Holt, Cutter, so don't make me change my mind about you. ‘I am involved in mankind because it numbers me and troubles me.' You're an educated lad, so figure out who wrote that. I knew Frank McGrady longer than you did. God damn it to hell, I think I knew him longer than you been on this earth. So mind your business and I'll mind mine.”

“There's no need to blow your top at me. I only meant to save you trouble.”

“Sure. I'm sorry, kid. But trouble is legal currency in West Virginia. You don't save it, only spend it.”

He left, and I managed to persuade Mrs. McGrady to have a little supper and then to lie down for a while. They had given me some sleeping pills for her at the hospital. She took them and slept through the night. She was about as exhausted and empty as a human being can ever be.

Meanwhile, Ben Holt had registered at the hotel, his deci sion to remain there for another day made without consulting me. I met him in the lobby, and he asked me whether he couldn't buy me a dinner.

“Let me buy it. I owe it to you, and a lot more.”

“You owe me nothing, Al, and the sooner you realize that, the better off we'll both be. I didn't come down here because you asked me to. The McGradys did a lot for me—more than most human beings ever do for anyone else, as you may remember. Now I'll see the poor bastard into his grave, which is little enough to ask of anyone. As for the dinner, I can afford it. I remember that you were quite impressed with the fact that I had raised my wages to five thousand dollars a year. I've raised them again since then. Eight thousand a year right now, if you're going to file another story about me. So I can afford to buy you dinner.”

At dinner, I said to him, “What is it you've got against me, Holt—you and Macintosh, both of you? Is it the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I look? Maybe right at this moment I feel less kind toward the world than either of you, but I don't spew it out in bile. If a man is hurt, he can keep the hurt inside, not use it as a sledge hammer.”

Holt regarded me thoughtfully for a long moment, before he nodded and said gently, “Maybe he can, Al. Maybe he can.”

He went on eating, but then suddenly paused with his fork in the air and said, as gently as before, “I'm sorry, Al. I owe you an apology.”

“You don't owe me a thing.”

He went on eating. He finished the food on his plate, eating quickly, as miners do, and then looked up at me and grinned. It was the first time he had ever smiled at me just that way—and Ben Holt's smile was a warm, ingratiating thing, rewarding and difficult to resist.

“Maybe it's because we're miners, Al—both of us, Macintosh and myself. You didn't know Mac was once a digget did you?”

I shook my head.

“He was. And a digger lives with bile, not for another digger, but for the whole outside world. Maybe with reason. The world doesn't know that we exist, and the world doesn't give a damn whether we do or not. It makes us sour and nasty when we got no business to be sour and nasty.”

He offered me a cigar, which I accepted; but as I lit up, I pointed out to him that he himself was a little more than a miner.

“As one college man to another, Al?” he asked me, raising a brow.

“You had four years of college, Holt. I had a year in Princeton and then I enlisted. I never went back. So it's not exactly as one college man to another.”

“Suppose you call me Ben, which will equalize things a little. And who's using the sledge hammer now?”

“All right, Ben.”

“Did you ever taste a worse cigar?”

“Never,” I admitted.

“Three for a dime. That's a miner's smoke. Start with an already exacerbated set of lungs and bleed them on that cigar, and you shorten a man's years of misery.” He looked at me inquiringly. “That's a lousy joke, isn't it? The hell with mining for a while! Tell me about you, Al. You know all about me, and I know nothing about you except that you disapprove of a man raising his own wages and that you remind me of my father-in-law. You had a year of college, and you went overseas. Then what?”

I found myself talking. When he wanted to be, Ben Holt was an easy man to talk to and a good listener. It was not often that he wanted to listen, but now he did, and I found myself telling him the story of my life for what it was worth, the son of a country-weekly newspaper editor in upstate New York who had to see what war was like and had to beat the big city at its own game. There wasn't much to tell. A lot had happened to me and nothing had happened to me, depending on how you looked at it, and the important things did not bear talking about. I had no desire to discuss Laura with anyone.

“Now she's dead,” Ben said. “What do you intend to do, Al?”

“I have a job.”

“What kind of a job?”

“A reporter on a New York paper is a pretty good kind of a job, I think. I'm not ambitious. I do my work. I'll probably never be as rich as you.”

“What kind of work? They tell you, go down to West Virginia and kill Ben Holt, you do it. Right?”

“It's not as simple as that.”

“No. But it's not so complicated either. Or maybe you never thought about it?”

“I thought about it,” I said.

He didn't press the point, and we talked about other things; but running through my mind over and over again was one salient fact, that this was Ben Holt, the most discussed labor leader in the United States, the man who had already been designated as everything from a tool of the Kremlin to a paranoiac despot, and he had walked out of all his involvements and problems to be down here in West Virginia to do some kind of small homage to an old, stubborn mountain miner. Writing about it this way and looking back at it through all the years, it may not seem like a great deal; but to me at the time, it was the finest gesture a man could make, and I honored Ben Holt for it as I have honored few men. I never forgot it either.

 

3

Through their generations, the McGradys had been buried in the yard of a small Methodist church outside of Clinton. But the old, slow and traditional mountain ways of Hogan County had crumbled under the impact of coal, and some years back, Frank McGrady broke with the church and its pastor. Mrs. McGrady refused to allow Frank's body to be returned to Clinton. She held that as a strong and willful man—which he was—a hundred deaths would not have driven him to make his peace with the people at that church. Macintosh had a cousin with a pulpit in Charleston, and though they were Baptists, Mrs. McGrady insisted that she wanted Frank buried there. She said that the denominational difference did not matter, since most of her people had been Baptists and it had never bothered Frank any. I purchased two plots in the cemetery, so that eventually Mrs. McGrady could lie next to her husband. Ben Holt went with me, and when I was short some twenty dollars in cash, Ben put it up for me. Later I cashed a check, and though I insisted, he refused repayment. With no sentiment he said the thought of owning twenty dollars' worth of a miner's grave in a state that had run him out at gunpoint was comforting.

Mrs. McGrady's sister and her family drove in for the funeral, their car loaded with as many relatives as it could carry. It was the only car for rent in Clinton, so the funeral was limited to a handful of people. Mrs. McGrady drove back to Clinton with Max Macintosh and his wife. It had been decided that she would live with her sister, and I told her sister that I would do my best to send some kind of stipend every month, so as to ease the burden. At the time I left for West Virginia from New York, there had been between six and seven hundred dollars in my bank account. I left three hundred dollars with Mrs. McGrady. To her it was a fortune, more money than she had ever seen at one time in all her life; to me it represented some attempt to square myself with my former indifference to my wife's mother and father and the beginning of an attempt to work out my own responsibility for what had taken place. It was not easy to get Mrs. McGrady to accept the money; she was proud and independent; but Ben Holt added his arguments to mine and she gave in. I left Ben Holt in Charleston; I planned to return to Clinton with Mrs. McGrady; but before we parted, he said to me,

“There's an old saying, Al, that you seal a bond with birth and with death. I hate to think that we won't see each other again.”

I nodded, and told him that I couldn't properly thank him, so I wouldn't try.

“Maybe you could.”

“Tell me how, Ben.”

“All right—and this isn't off the top of my hat. I've been thinking about it ever since I got down here and met you. You know that I'm president of the union. That's a title. The Miners Union is like the League of Nations, bound together with a title and nothing else. Every local in the union is suspicious of every other local. Every region has some grudge against every other region. The diggers spend more time fighting and hating each other than they do trying to win something for themselves as a group—and most of all they mistrust and fear the International organization. All right, this is complicated and parochial and I can't explain the situation in five minutes. But there's no hope for the miners or the union unless I can unite it, weld it together, and put it under the leadership of a single man. This is what I face over the coming years, and this is what I have to do. In the immediate future, I face a strike—a big one and a hard one.”

“How does that affect me?”

“I'll tell you how. I can't do this alone. I need a staff—a group of able and dedicated people who will work with me—to an end I think is pretty worthwhile, the raising of hundreds of thousands of working men out of virtual slavery. Well, I've been finding such people. I have some. I need more. I need someone like yourself, someone who is literate and intelligent and understands what it means to be a digger and to live a digger's life. I need a man who can write and who can think and who can influence other people with his thinking—a man who can direct research and come up with the facts and figures, because the facts are going to be our tools, our weapons, our bullets. In other words, I need a combination of a writer, a public-relations man, and a research director. Someday, this man will have a staff and organization of his own. Today, he has to be everything himself.” He paused and watched me reflectively. “I think you're that man, Al.”

I shook my head. “It's flattering, and I have to thank you, Ben—but I'm not your man. I only know enough about mining to be aware of what I don't know. As for writing, I'm a reporter, as good as some and worse than most.”

“Is it the pay? The pay isn't much, sixty-five a week, but it will be better in time.”

“It's not the pay—”

“I don't expect you to decide right now, Al. Think it over. Our national headquarters are in Pomax, Illinois, and I'll be back there next week. Send me a wire if you decide to say yes.”

 

4

I had a good many things to think about on the train back to New York, among them, Ben Holt's offer. That was a time, then, in the middle 1920s, when the labor movement was beginning to bulk large on the American horizon. In the Northwest, during the wartime years, the International Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” as they were better known, had provided lurid headlines and meat for the anti-Bolshevik grinder. Against the background of the Wobblies, the Syndicalists, the Left Wing Socialists, and now, lately, the Communists, the National Confederation of Labor had emerged as a strong and almost respectable force. Under the sure, conservative and careful guiding hand of its careful leaders, it had laid down a pattern of American trade unionism that seemed destined to endure and become the blueprint for all the foreseeable future. Ignoring the great masses of American workingmen, it organized, where it organized, only the highest skills among workers, carpenters and plumbers and steamfitters and cigar makers and so forth—a so-called “elite” of working people.

The only fault in their plan of organization, at the moment, was provided by Ben Holt and his International Miners Union, a thorn in their side and a challenge to everything they stood for; for the Miners Union, based on the diggers, took in every workingman who had anything to do with coal, from the breaker boys to the highly skilled explosives experts. And whereas the Confederation held itself to careful, systematic exploration of every legal possibility, the Miners Union was as fierce and unpredictable as the individual coal miners who comprised its membership.

Ben Holt and the men around him were the “young Turks” of the labor movement, and already, in the few years since he had clawed his way to national leadership of the union, his name had become the best known and most discussed of any man in the labor movement. Whether he was conducting a private war in West Virginia or raging from the gallery of the Illinois or Pennsylvania State Legislature, Ben Holt made news and was news. Everything about him was flamboyant and dramatic, his great physical size and strength, his unruly, usually uncombed head of hair, his piercing blue eyes, his voice, which he used like a musical instrument, soft and gentle and cozening at times, and at other times booming with all the force of a bass drum, his manner of charging into legislative bodies and challenging the elected representatives in their own sanctuaries, his roaring anger at the condition of mines and miners, and the unremitting violence and purpose with which he pursued and fought his enemies in the internecine warfare that was tearing his union apart and which, according to those who commented on labor, would eventually destroy it.

All this about Ben Holt I knew. I knew that even among the miners, for every man who loved him and honored him, there were two who hated him and mistrusted him. I had personally witnessed him running the full gamut of his moods and violences, and only during these past few days, I had listened to Macintosh's estimation of him, and then watched Macintosh's grudging surrender to the man's charm and purpose.