Power (10 page)

“Year-round work? Yes, sir, just about the only time.”

“But I thought last year was a good year.”

“In a way of speaking, because war was in the air. In a normal year, it's work when the market wants coal and layoff when it doesn't. As a kid, even when my father was alive, I can't remember a time when I wasn't hungry, and when my father died and I went into the mines—why, my stomach became a bottomless pit. I heard an operator once say that miners eat too much.”

“How callous!”

“Yes and no, Miss Aimesley. He had watched miners eat. What he didn't understand is that the kind of work a miner does burns up food like a fire. Miners do eat more than anyone else I ever heard of—but if they don't eat, they can't work. Have you ever seen a fat miner?”

I shook my head and said, “But, Mr. Holt, I've heard so much of the horrors and suffering of a miner's life. I don't remember the great disaster of 1904, but just this past summer, I heard the disaster whistles screeching twice, and every other summer too. Perhaps I'm not as sensitive as I should be, but I do live in a mining town, and I know something about how hard it is for the miners. I remember one winter, before Mother died, when she said to me, ‘I won't have to take the curtains down for cleaning, Dorothy.' But her face was so sad that I asked her why, and then she said, ‘When the curtains stay white, the miners are starving.' I mean—some of it I can understand. Only, one thing I never understood—”

“Yes, Miss Aimesley?”

“Why miners remain miners. They're not slaves. Those people you told us about in England, well, they were indentured servants, weren't they? But today in the United States, no one is forced to stay with one job. When there's no work, why don't the miners go somewhere else where the work isn't so cruel, perhaps? Why do they stay in the mines until they are hurt or killed or worn out?”

“We need coal and someone has to mine it,” Father said.

“But that's not the answer. Not to my question.”

“I guess it isn't,” Ben said. “And I think that if I heard your question once, I heard it a hundred times. Last week, your father told me that miners were too proud—”

“Not too proud. Just damn proud to a point of irritation!” Father interrupted.

“But you're right, sir. They are proud and headstrong and independent, and they're that way because they're miners. It's hard to explain a miner to anyone who hasn't lived with them, and the hardest thing to get across is that most miners love their work and they take pride in it and—well, it's just what they want to do. As dangerous and dirty and back-breaking as it, it's what a miner wants and what he loves. I work in the mines because I want to and because I'd rather work in the mines than do anything else.”

“But how can you say that?” I burst out. “You're a college man, Mr. Holt. Surely you want something more from life than to be a miner?”

“Do I? Should I, Miss Aimesley? I'm not being impertinent—I'm perfectly serious. I love the mines and I love the men who work in the mines, and I hate them too. I love them and hate them, and there have been nights I couldn't sleep, trying to understand what it all means to me. I remember the first time I went down a shaft. I was only fourteen then, and when the elevator car sank into that pit of black—blacker than any black in the whole world—I wanted to scream with terror. And down in the pits and tunnels, the terror became worse and worse. All I wanted was to get out of there before the whole weight of the world fell on me and choked the life out of me, and all I could say to myself was that I'd die of hunger before I'd ever be a miner. And other miners have told me that it's always that way the first time. But the second time, the fear is less. And a time comes when it goes—and the tunnel is your home and your life, and you live with danger and death and it nourishes you and it makes you proud. Because no one else in the whole world is as skilled as you and as brave as you. Every time you put up a timber, your life depends on your skill and judgment, and every time you set off a blast, it's the same thing. You hate it and curse it, but you want it—and a time comes when you're its prisoner just as surely as if you were indentured.”

He finished, and Father and I sat there in silence. Remember that I was not yet eighteen, and I had never seen a young man like Ben Holt before or sat across the table from him. The young men I knew talked about tennis or the shows they had seen on their visits to New York or how much money they hoped to make and how successful they hoped to be. They did not talk, vibrantly and poetically, of Stygian pits of darkness, where men drove dynamite into a black rock face and lived and worked in clouds of coal dust and deadly gas. Nor must you feel that this was a pose or a charade on the part of Ben. Ben knew as well as anyone else what a deadly, hopeless hell the life of a miner was; but, as he told me afterwards, confronting me, he had to paint a picture that was brave and romantic. And to a very large extent, he believed it. You see, in the beginning, then, I did not fall in love with the Ben Holt you knew—no, not even with the headstrong, desperate man you met in West Virginia, leading an army of armed miners, and certainly not with the white-haired, somber giant who taught a whole world the meaning of power. I look back through time as an old woman, my dear Alvin, and there was not one man but many men. In some ways, we don't change at all; but in other ways, we do change so much.

Shall I finish my story of that evening? I am not putting down the actual words that were said—you must realize that—it was so very long ago; but not so different, either, for while there are things that have become vague and fuzzy, those first days with Ben are clear and unclouded. We talked some more at the table, or rather he talked while Father and I listened. Once the barrier of place and class was broken, the words poured out of him in an endless torrent, and nothing he said was dull or familiar. From his point of view, he found there in our home a sweetness and warmth that he had never encountered before. He had no illusions about the virtues of the rich, but neither did he promote the legend of the virtuous poor. He had lived with poverty all his life, and he had sufficient knowledge of the degradation and suspicion and ignorance and hatred it breeds. In later years, I have seen Ben stalking like a raging lion in the homes of millionaire coal operators, filled with and voicing anger and contempt; but there was another Ben, and we were not millionaire coal operators, only a small-town lawyer who lived alone with his daughter.

After dinner, we went into the parlor, and Father asked me to play something for them, while he and Ben smoked cigars. Father's one extravagance was cigars, and he always kept a large humidor of panatelas, fragrant and mild, that he had sent to him from Cuba. Ben, on the other hand, smoked a brand of cigars which I remember seeing only in the coal towns of Pennsylvania, and which has today suffered a well-deserved demise. They were referred to as “the digger's” or “miner's consolation,” and in those days sold two for five cents, and no one who ever smelled their fragrance will forget it. Ben had a pocketful of them and longed for a cigar, but did not dare light one in our house. I remember his face as he lit the panatela Father pressed on him, and in after years, whenever he speculated on the psychology of a union leader who sold out, I would twit him about that cigar. Anyway, there he sat, with a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other, trying his best not to look self-conscious, scrunching his long arms and legs, so that he would show less shirt cuff and less skin between pants and socks, and listening to my rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata,” an important part of the repertoire of every serious young lady pianist of the time.

He had been wonderfully possessed and at ease all evening, but now he began to withdraw into himself and become surly. It was not that he didn't enjoy the music; I have almost never known a miner who didn't have a feeling for good music—perhaps because there is so much of the Welsh blood and influence in them; but rather because he suddenly saw himself in his position and resented it, the fact that he did not dare to smoke his own cigars and had to sit there in silence and listen to my less than noble performance. He felt that he was being patronized. When I had finished playing, he made some polite remarks, and a little while after that, he took his leave.

Then, as always, I was sensitive to his every mood and action. Father was not. After he had seen Ben to the door, he turned to me, rubbing his hands with delight and grinning, and asked me,

“Well, what do you think of your unwashed digger now?”—for all the world as if Ben was something he had created specially for that evening.

“I think that's a dreadful way to characterize him!”

“Honey,” he cried, exploding with laughter, “that was your characterization, not mine.”

“At least I want to forget it.”

“Then he got through to you.”

“I found him quite interesting,” I said demurely. “I just wonder what happened when I was playing. He became very surly and unhappy, I think.”

“Did he? Well, a young man's to be forgiven his moods. The point is, he's quite a man with quite a mind. You'll agree to that, won't you?”

“He's certainly the most opinionated young man I ever met.”

“You mean that he has opinions and voices them. That's not exactly the same thing as being opinionated.”

“He's very sure of himself.”

“And with reason,” Father said. “He's had no one to depend on but himself.”

Should I have told Father that I was in love? It was something I hardly dared to admit to myself—that for the first time in my life, I wanted a person so desperately that I could not think of anything but Ben Holt. I don't believe that these things are accidents. If I had left it alone, perhaps I would never have seen him again, although Ben insisted that he was already in love with me. But that was after the fact, and people love differently, and to be in love—if indeed he was—meant something else to Ben than it meant to me.

So here is a whole day, another day, gone with my writing, dear Alvin, and now for the first time, this journey so far back into the past is beginning to trouble me just a little. But I will finish it as truthfully as I know how, which is little less than truthful. I mean that the Dorothy Aimesley and the Ben Holt I write about are like two people I have read about or been told about. Have you ever remarked on the fact that in a dream you will see yourself in the third person, so to speak? This remembering is somewhat like a dream.

 

5

Two days, and I have written nothing, but I have gone back into a past I never thought I would revisit. What sort of people are we, Alvin, that we look upon growing old with such skepticism and fear—yet avoid the past as the plague and revisit it with even greater fear? But I have been prowling over the old house, going through drawers and rummaging in the attic, and I have even wept a little over this and that. In my old bedroom, just where I had placed it more than forty years ago, I found a long, long letter from Ben, and I am sending it to you but in its proper place. You may peruse its intimacies without embarrassment and use it just as your own judgment dictates.

I thought that I had the letter I wrote to Ben after the Sunday evening I spoke of above; I had some notion that he kept it and gave it back to me some time later. Well, perhaps he did—or perhaps he threw it away. Ben did not suffer from sentimentalism—and I mean that more as praise than criticism. In any case, I could not find it, but I remember the general tenor of it. The evening after, Monday evening, I wrote to him:

Dear Mr. Holt:

I enjoyed our evening with you, and would like to see you again, if you can find time. Since I am leaving for school soon, I have only this coming Sunday free. If your day is also free, I think it might be nice to pack a picnic basket and spend the day out of doors. Providing the weather is suitable. If you can let me know before the weekend, I will be happy to fix the picnic basket.

Or in much the same sense, if perhaps even more restrained. Still, then, in 1914, it was a piece of impropriety, and shattering in that I addressed myself to a coal miner, a person of no family, figuratively and literally. It explains my state of mind better than anything else might, and when I had mailed it to Mrs. Tarragon's boardinghouse, I felt that I had indulged in an action little short of criminal. Don't smile at the desperateness of my situation, for that would only be evidence of the poverty of your own later years. A girl of seventeen, truly in love for the first time, experiences something as rash and wonderful as anything that will ever happen to her again—and more so, believe me. So if I could not eat and could not sleep and breathed air as sweet as honey and walked in a world of music wherever I went, this was not unmixed with guilt and remorse. My advances were improper and reckless, and whatever Ben Holt had thought of me before, surely he would think only less of me now.

I had planned not to tell my father of my action until I received some reply from Ben, but on Wednesday, at dinner, he said to me,

“Dorothy, even if you have fallen in love with that young miner, you'll prove nothing by a death of starvation.”

I stared at him in amazement and mumbled denials, but he had lived with me too long not to recognize the first substantial break in an appetite that had been healthy, to put it mildly. So I blurted out what I had done, indulged a few tears, and surprisingly was able to eat a proper dinner. Father was responsible for that. He shrugged and pointed out that at worst, Ben Holt could only say no.

“Then you're not angry at me?”

“When you decide to marry Ben Holt or John Doe or anyone else, we'll get down to basic things. Meanwhile, you've only invited a boy to a picnic. If your mother were alive, she might sensibly insist on a chaperon—”