Power (25 page)

“Things don't make much sense,” Mark Golden said slowly. “They don't at all. We'll try to get some money for their families, and we have a pretty good chance there. But it doesn't make any sense.” Golden seemed to have aged in the time I had known him; the lines in his face had deepened, the dark, deep-set eyes more tired-looking than ever.

Ben Holt spoke crisply and matter of factly to Wassilinski as he said, “You know, Paul, a strike is a rough thing for a union like ours. It always has been. Ordinarily, I would say that what happened to these two union brothers of yours deserves to be taken care of to the fullest extent by the union. But we've been punished. Every day of the strike eats up our treasury, and there's no more coming in. Mark here will sue the city of Pittsburgh and perhaps we can bring suit against certain operators. But that's dubious, and a long-drawn-out process at best. In any case, I can promise that there will be five thousand dollars out of union funds for the two families. That's two thousand five hundred dollars each. It's not much, but it will help them over the hump. You can tell them that. As for yourself, your medical expenses will be paid. I wish we could do more—I just wish we could.”

 

16

The next day, I spoke to Fulton Grove at Pomax, and his news caused Ben and me to take the next train back to Illinois. Briefly, this is what had happened. A miner named Mike Duffey lived three miles from the Arrowhead Pit. He had two sons, one fourteen, one seventeen, and the boys thought it would be fun to sneak up as close to the crater as they could. They were at the lip of the crater when they were spotted, and the guards opened fire. The seventeen-year-old boy was shot through the heart.

According to Grove, the feeling around Pomax about the Arrowhead operation had reached the boiling point. The funeral of the boy was scheduled for the following day, and both Grove and Mullen were agreed that there would be trouble. Already, armed miners were showing up at the Union Building. Grove told me to impress Ben with their feeling that he should return to Pomax before any serious trouble began.

Even before I could sit down with Ben Holt and Mark Golden for some kind of an intelligent discussion of the problem, the news of what had happened at Pomax filtered through to Pittsburgh, and our phone at the hotel was ringing steadily. The reporters wanted a statement from Ben Holt, and I told them he was not there. A half hour later, when he arrived, I continued to maintain that he was not there.

“And if you go back to Pomax,” Mark Golden said to him, “the same thing is going to continue. Everyone in Arrowhead holds a card in Gus Empek's union. You are going to be asked to make a statement about the Associated Miners. What are you going to say?”

“What can I say?”

“Stay here and say nothing.”

“You're crazy, Mark. I can't do that. I can't hide. Associated Miners is not a union—it's a pack of armed hoodlums at this moment, the dregs of the Chicago flophouses in the pay of the operators.”

“So we become a pack of armed hoodlums in response to that?”

“No! But neither can this situation continue.”

“Then stay here and let it simmer down,” Golden begged him. “Let me finish here and we'll go into the courts in Illinois. This is murder and we'll deal with it as murder.”

“The way we dealt with murder in Pittsburgh?” Ben snorted.

“That isn't finished either.”

“No? Well, suppose you try to finish it, Mark. Meanwhile, Al and I are taking the next train back to Pomax.”

We had three hours before train time, and we passed them at a meeting with the heads of the strike committees of the Pittsburgh area. In those days there was an endless succession of such meetings, the group of ten, twenty, or forty miners, the local leaders, the Slavic, Irish, Welsh faces and voices, the natives who had mined coal time out of memory, the hunger and the patience and the acceptance of men who gave up work and bread because they believed Ben Holt's assertion that miners could live and exist as other people did. And Ben's ringing declaration,

“We are going to win! So long as we preserve our unity, we are going to win!”

By then, already, for all my short experience, I knew that we were not going to win. I had become a part of something that was sliding downhill. I was living at the bottom of a black pit. Up above, in the sunlight of civilization or what passed for civilization, people ate and drank and made love and laughed and sang. They knew nothing of and cared less about the carbon-tattooed men who grubbed in the belly of the earth, nor was it important that they should know or care. For thousands of years, since men first mined in the earth, the diggers had crawled and scraped and died. What the diggers felt or wanted did not matter; their anger did not matter; their deaths didn't matter. They dug out of the earth what civilization needed, and civilization went on.

That was the temper of my thoughts as I sat on the train with Ben Holt, and he asked me what was eating me.

“Just thinking, that's all.”

“And what will it get you, Al?”

“Nothing, I suppose. I listen to Wassilinski talk about two men beaten to death. I hear about a seventeen-year-old kid shot through the heart.”

“And you're going to weep?” Ben replied coldly. “How many tears do you have? You got one for every man who died in that lousy war that made you such a hero? You got a tear for every man who died in a coal mine? I didn't rate you for a sentimentalist, Al. I didn't rate you for a weeper.”

“Thank you.”

“So I hurt your feelings—the hell with that! If you're going to stay, you'll stay. And if you're going to walk out, nothing I say is going to change anything.”

“Don't write me off!” I snapped at him. “When you want to fire me, just tell me.”

“All right. Take it easy. No one lives forever, but if you want to do anything or make anything, you got to live for a little while. Eat yourself up, and you got nothing. Nothing. You become like Mark Golden. He bleeds for every drop of blood that's spilled. He suffers for every blow that's struck. How long will he live? It's destroying him. He'll make nothing.”

“And you, Ben?” I whispered. “What will you make out of all this?”

“A union,” he said flatly. “A real union. A union big enough and strong enough to shake this whole friggen world. A union that will talk and the world will listen!”

“You believe that.”

“You don't.”

“No, I guess I don't, Ben,” I admitted.

“Because you're involved,” he said thoughtfully. “You bleed too. I suppose you think I'm a cold son of a bitch.”

“I've had that thought, sometimes.”

“I put first things first,” he nodded. “I'm in a fight, and I'm going to win. That's all that matters. I'm going to win.”

 

17

About an hour before our train pulled into Pomax, Ben said to me, “You've been through a war, Al. What would happen out there at Arrowhead if our people attacked the pit?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose there are eighty or a hundred men inside that crater. Suppose they have the two machine guns and rifles and pistols. Suppose they were attacked by three, four, five times their number. What would happen?”

“It depends.”

“Sure it depends. On what?”

“On the way the attack was conducted—No, I guess any way, the crater's indefensible.”

“Why?”

“Because of its nature. You can't defend a hole in the ground that's half a mile across. Everyone in it's a sitting duck. And if they try to defend the lip, eighty or a hundred men aren't enough.”

“You were out there? You saw the mine?” he asked me.

“I was out there,” I nodded. “I met your wife out there one Sunday afternoon—”

“I forgot about that,” he grinned. “She told me about it. I'm glad she had some company. That's a bad place.”

I agreed that it was a bad place, and Ben continued to grin. What he meant by the grin, I didn't know, but then there never was to be a time when I would know or fully comprehend his changing moods, his swift transitions from calm to anger, from fury to tranquillity, from contemplation to contempt. And now, surely, he could put no interpretation upon my meeting his wife one Sunday afternoon. For myself, at that time no woman interested me or moved me; not yet; all the wounds were too sore and too new. And as for Dorothy Holt, well, I had already made an adolescent decision, that she was a saint of sorts—which, ironically, and regardless of how absurd a judgment it was, still was no judgment that a man makes with total disinterest. So my own motives and feelings were confused; but when Ben Holt smiled that way, it could mean any one of many things. I think he was smiling at the thought of Arrowhead, because he said,

“You saw the mine and you say it can't be defended. Not even with machine guns?”

“Machine guns are overrated, Ben. But you're not thinking of an attack on the mine? I hope to God you're not.”

“I'm not. Others are, you can be sure of that.” His mood changed again. He seemed to forget me, and stared glumly out of the window until we pulled into the Pomax station. When we got off the train there, a young fellow, Oscar Suzic by name, who was Jack Mullen's assistant, was waiting for us. He shook hands with Ben and me, and then he said,

“Ben, Jack sent me over here to meet you. Gus Empek and Joe Brady are here.”

“No!” Ben said. “They have more brains than that.”

“They're here.”

“Where?”

“Right here in the station, in the baggage room.”

“I'll be damned,” Ben whispered. “I'll be everlastingly damned.”

It came out, from what Suzic said to us, that Empek had telephoned Jack Mullen that same morning and had insisted that he be allowed to speak to Ben. At first Mullen said that it was impossible, that under no circumstances would Ben have anything to do with Empek or Brady. But Empek persisted. He pleaded his case. He said that there was something terrible making up, and that anyone with at least a spark of responsibility had to do something to try to stop it. At first, he begged for a meeting in his headquarters at Cairo, and when Mullen refused flatly even to raise that possibility with Ben, he suggested a midway place. Mullen said, “If you want to talk to Ben Holt, come here and talk.” Empek pointed out that such a move could be a lynch sentence, considering the mood in Pomax. Then they worked out a procedure. Brady and Empek would take a train. Mullen would arrange with the stationmaster for their use of the baggage room, and Oscar Suzic would be on hand to meet them as well as us.

As Suzic detailed this, Ben's face darkened. His shoulders hunched, and his big fists clenched and unclenched. “I'm just carrying a message from Jack Mullen,” Suzic explained nervously. “He said for you to take it easy. Coming from him, he said don't blow your top—listen to what they have to say. Those aren't my words, Ben. Those are Mullen's.”

“I'll listen to them,” Ben nodded.

We went into the baggage room. Brady was sitting on a pile of mailbags. Empek was pacing nervously, and he stopped and spun to face us as we entered. In a way, I admired both of them; it had taken courage to come here and talk to Ben Holt, more courage than I would have given either of them credit for. Empek was visibly distraught; Brady fought his own battle to keep his pale face composed and expressionless as he rose to face us. After we entered the room, there was a long moment of silence—broken caustically by Ben,

“You wanted to talk to me. Talk.”

Empek licked his lips and nodded. “All right, Ben. You know me five years, Ben. Maybe we disagree five thousand different ways. Maybe I said some hard things about you—so you said some things about me. You think my union shouldn't exist. I don't think any union should be run like yours, one man sitting on top of it like a king and crushing any opposition—”

“Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“I'm putting my cards on the table, Ben. I'm not holding anything back. Whatever you can say about me, I'm not a strikebreaker. I'm not a fink. I'm not a murderer.”

“The hell you're not,” Ben replied, slowly and flatly. “Who gave your union cards to those flophouse bums in the Arrowhead Pit? Who put a veneer of legality on them?”

“They were miners, Ben!”

“Miners? With machine guns and rifles? What in hell did they ever mine?”

“Ben, if I ever thought that a kid would be killed—”

“What in hell did you think?” Ben roared. “What kind of games did you think we were playing?”

“I'm just asking for a chance, Ben. I want to rescind those union cards. I want to clear the air.”

“You want to clear the air, you son of a bitch!”

“Don't talk to me like that, Ben.”

“I talk to you any way I damn please! What a hell of a nerve both of you got, coming here with this cock-and-bull proposition! Of all the low, strikebreaking bastards I ever looked at, you two are the lowest—”

At this point, Brady lost control, reached inside his jacket, and leaped toward Ben. Ben hit him with an open palm. The blow, apparently effortless, sent Brady flying across the room, and with two long strides, Ben was upon him, ripped open his jacket and removed a gun from a shoulder holster. He looked at the pistol with disgust, and then tossed it to me. “They stink,” he said hoarsely. “Let's get out of here.”

Then he walked to the door without looking at them again.

 

18

People—labor specialists, newspapermen, legislators, and a good many others—have speculated endlessly on Ben Holt's power over the men around him, his hold on them, and the loyalty he finally commanded from tens of thousands of coal miners. By their lights, the nature of the man was obvious; he was part hooligan, part actor, part devil, a shrewd roughneck with a talent for dictatorship and an instinct for the dramatic. What they failed to grasp, I believe, is that he was a man who responded to a situation in the only manner he knew. In essence, he was himself; he was a coal miner with the taste of coal in his mouth and the precise understanding that coal is power—and he lived at a particular time.