The American: A Middle Western Legend (5 page)

XV

He drifted through Indiana and lllinois. He wasn't afraid of work, and in that season there was a meal or a dollar to be gotten at almost any farm. Actually, he enjoyed work; it was the state of his life; he had worked since he could remember, but now it had to be work without chains and without bonds. Sometimes, at a farm, he would be invited to dinner with the family and the hired man; he was farm-wise, so he got along, and he was a veteran, which was a bond with men he met everywhere, that being before public sentiment turned against veterans of the war who were out of jobs and labeled them loafers and bums. Sometimes, for a few hours, he could be near a round-cheeked, smiling girl, and knowing that she was his now, for the moment, not before and not after, be more at ease than with any other of the women he had once known. He got a feel of the country too, realizing that the only way to know the land is to let it seep into your bones and flesh and blood, moving slowly through it, becoming a part of the fields and hills and woods. This was the rich, ripe heart of America, this black-loam land of the middle states.

Nor could he escape the intense surge of the country, even if he had desired to. He moved west on an almost visible tide, and along with him moved thousands and hundreds of thousands. Along with him moved the railroads, the farms, the factories, and families and tribes and whole provinces. Sometimes he spoke German, sometimes English; his tongue had loosened; movement gave him the flavor of speech, and although he didn't know it and would have denied it, all the books he had packed into his head so mechanically were reasserting themselves, breaking apart and coming together, as he needed them, as he wanted them.

Talking to the people, he found something of himself; under their surface slowness they were a fierce people, with many of the qualities he had known in his father, and their reticence was a part of the drive westward, for freedom and bread, which had obsessed them and their fathers.

But then winter took them into their clapboard shells; the fields were gleaned, and the homeless moved to the cities. He moved with them, and now, the road turned cold, the fruitful-ness of the fields a thing of the past, the dwellers of the road were demarcated. They were the homeless, the disinherited, the men without family or land, unemployed workers, veterans, field hands, and those others who scavenged, who had never worked and never would, and in this latter category were those who had turned against life and who preyed on both the farmers and the drifting workers.

It was with them that Pete had to make his break; what they were drove him to St. Louis to join the lines of unemployed. Otherwise, you stole, whored, and went down lower and lower. That wasn't for him; he was going to win out and stand on top, but even to begin that you had to have a place to sleep and food to eat. Only, for each job, there were four men, and you had to fight, cut, scramble, climb onto the shoulders of a man who was weaker. And then, if there was nothing and you had spent your last nickel on some beer and free lunch, you cut the price, sold yourself cheaper and cheaper as the crying will to live became louder. That was how he came to work over the stinking sulphur vats for seventy-five cents a day.

And now there were no songs to sing, no dances to dance, just keep alive, keep alive, and on Sunday go to a beer garden with twenty-five cents for the only kind of a good time you can afford, make eyes at the girls, eat and drink slowly, and listen to the steins being stamped in unison as the voices chanted out the waltz. But life can't cherish and foster itself and grow rosy and bloom on four-fifty a week. He was starving by inches. He sank back down and became beastlike, and beastlike he watched the milling crowds of those who had no jobs and listened to their voice, feeling something he had never felt before.

But then, when it was at its worst, the railroad agents came into town, recruiting with torchlight processions and bands for anyone who would take up a pick and shovel at from three to four dollars a day. Ride to heaven on the M.K.&T.! America was going west, and it was a free ride for any Yank or Mick or Hunky who had a strong back and a weak head. So they proclaimed, with free beer flowing golden from the broached kegs, and Pete Altgeld climbed on the bandwagon to glory.

XVI

You worked for three dollars a day. The gangs were shipped west and south, to where the yellow prairies rolled on and on, over the horizon and apparently forever. The iron horse chewed forward, with, as the men told Pete, sonovabitch Jay Gould riding that boiler up there, his——looking like a smokestack, and he rode the backs of more Irishmen than had ever lived in County Mayo. Pete took his place in a line of hammer, pick, and shovel men, and the line stretched on for miles. The song of iron on iron and spike in wood ushered in a new age, and the men roared, “Lay it in, lay it in, with that hammerhead, That iron's so heavy that you'll soon be dead!” The tracks pushed forward like a thing alive, ten thousand men, three hundred chow wagons, a traveling brothel, and a canvas hospital where they took those who had lain down to die. The camps sprang up every few miles, and they were wild and sinful places, run by the same companies who put through the roadbed, taking every Saturday night what the men had worked six days from dawn to dusk to earn, liquor at a dollar a shot and women at twenty times more, and three-card faro, roulette, the shell game, and blackjack to pick up what was left.

In this, Pete worked. The first day on the job, he learned why they had held torchlight processions in St. Louis, why beer flowed like water, and why they were paying three and four dollars a day against seventy-five cents in St. Louis. For one thing, in the summer, heat casualties were greater than on a battlefield; men dropped like tenpins from the heat. There had to be replacements. Men wore out. At the spot of dawn, you picked up your pick, hammer, shovel, or spike-brace; when it became too dark to work, you dropped it. The railroads were pacing across the continent, and men had to walk fast.

Pete Altgeld was young and strong; he prided himself on his strength. When the Irishmen on either hand warned him, ‘Take it easy, youngster, or they'll lay you out under this dirty Kansas sod,” he laughed and snowed them what he could do. As everyone knew, the Irishmen were shipped over like cattle, sent by the carload to work the roads, and they didn't have the fire inside them that he did, the certainty of sitting on the top. And he could work! The muscles were laced over his broad back like piled-up leather, and his lean hands had clasped some tool for as long as he could remember. And, anyway, it was only natural that when a man became old and couldn't keep up, he should be thrown aside. If you had imagination, you saw the iron rails going through, hell-bound for glory; it needed a man to put them down. These Irishmen were skinny and underfed, and after twelve hours' work, they'd take out what was left with drink. If a man held onto his three dollars a day, he'd soon be rich! Pete Altgeld would hold onto it; day after day, under the broiling sun, he told himself that.

And then, one day, he began to burn, and his legs turned into rubber. They carried him into a tool shack, and by then he was trembling with cold. The Irishmen shook their heads over the damfool kid, and he lay there under a load of sacking until a harried doctor came and suggested that he be admitted to a hospital at three dollars a day.

Pete refused. He said he would die first.

“You'll die all right,” the doctor agreed. “There's nobody going to bring you grub here. You'll die sure as hell.”

“Three dollars a day! For three dollars I work all day.”

“That's right,” the doctor agreed.

The fever loosened his tongue, and Pete Altgeld raved about the money. He needed the money; it was going to ride him right up to the top of the world. He was going to study law; he wasn't going to swing a pick and shovel for the rest of his life. Hadn't he put his money away, dollar by dollar, and now they wanted it back, three dollars a day. He'd die first.

“All right,” the doctor agreed. “But you can't die here. This is company property.”

He struggled to his feet, and then collapsed. The doctor called the two litter-bearers, who were waiting outside. They took him to the hospital, a long clapboard and canvas lean-to, where they undressed him. The money was in a belt around his belly. The company stood for no nonsense when it came to diggers' savings, and all the money was delivered over to the staff accountant. There were sixty dollars in all, and this was entered against twenty days of service. But when, on the fifth day, it seemed that Pete Altgeld was dying, seventeen dollars was allocated for a pine coffin and a grave, certified to be at least three feet deep. However, he took a turn for the better and lasted the full time. By then he was able to walk, if uncertainly; he had lost twenty pounds, and he had severe and chronic headaches, and he was penniless. Since his gang had moved twenty miles along the line, he asked the hospital superintendent for a pass to ride free.

“Ride where?” the superintendent wanted to know.

“To the job.”

“You got no job,” he was told. “You're not fit to work, and we're not paying three dollars a day to corpses.”

He pleaded. He reminded the superintendent that he had outworked the Irishmen. Hadn't the foreman said that he was one of the best men on the job?

“I can't give you a pass,” the superintendent said stolidly. “You want to join your gang—then walk it.”

Pete set out along the line to walk it. It was a hundred degrees in the shade, but there was no shade. After a while, it seemed to Pete that the prairies were rising and falling like a sea of ochre sulphur. He crawled into a toolshed and lay there until dark, sleeping a little. At nightfall, he came out and began to walk again. At a chow house, he talked the sleepy cook into giving him half a loaf of bread and a piece of sausage, and by morning he staggered into his old camp. The Irishmen, just coming onto the job, rubbed their eyes and stared at him. “The strong man,” they nodded, but without hatred; if Pete could have seen himself, he would have known why. When he found the foreman and asked for his old job back, he was ready for the swift reaction.

“No good, Pete.”

“What's no good?”

“You. You're no goddam good. Why don't you get out of here and push up north? This is fever country.”

“I got no money,” he said. “Please, please, mister, give me the job.”

“Get some rest and then we'll talk about it.”

“I'm all right. I tell you I'm all right now. Put me on the job. Put me on the job and see.”

The foreman shrugged and nodded for him to join his gang. But now the Irishmen set the pace. For two hours, Pete kept up with them; then his legs buckled and he rolled over on the ground. They carried him into the shade, and that night the foreman gave him a pass to ride back along the line. The foreman gave him some good advice, too:

“Clear out, or you'll be dead inside of a month.”

XVII

During the war he had felt fear, but it was not the kind of fear that gripped him now. Turned twenty-two, in the prime of his. young manhood, his power to work was gone, and he was thrown out like a used-up tool. In the whole world, no one gave two damns about Pete Altgeld. Whether he lived or died simply did not matter. Society had laid down a demand, and when he couldn't meet it, it turned its back. Now he was a bum, a tramp, a creature of the roads. He walked north, and his clothes became ragged, shabby; his beard grew. He had no strength, none at all, and when he tried to take a job at a farm, the fever returned. He begged for food; that he had never done before, nor had he ever considered that he would do it, but his body cried out to keep alive, and he answered its demands. He slept in barns or in the open field, and in the morning he rose, stiff, aching, and hopeless. Sometimes as he shuffled along the roads which led north, straight as arrows, binding the sections, his old dreams would return, and out of the impossibility of reality would come the confidence in his own power, but his dreams were drugs now, not plans. He had only one plan, to remain alive.

Some of the people he met were kind, and others were cruel, and others were just indifferent. Some met him with a shotgun, for he was, by appearance and definition, one of a ravenous pack, cast out by society, and preying on those who had turned them into beasts. But others met him with kindness, and one Kansas family nursed him through an illness, giving him food and shelter for a while at least, remembering that not so long ago they were the dispossessed and the disinherited, searching westward with nothing but their own strength; yet even they recognized the law and bowed to it and sent him on his way.

He took his path across Kansas, into Missouri; if it had been winter, he would have died; but in this gentle weather he was able to stay alive, to move on—to retain a small hope concerning what lay over the next hill. Yet as the days passed, even that hope waned. His young strength had ebbed away, all of it, and presently both past and future merged into a confused pattern, senseless and purposeless. He went on only because the will to live was a strong, demanding call, prodding him when all other prods were bent.

PART TWO