Power (12 page)

“I'm glad you missed him and that you don't have anyone's life on your conscience.”

“When you say something like that,” he asked curiously, “you mean it, don't you? Everything you say?”

“Yes. Why did you want to kill him?”

“He was a cracker boss.”

“Oh? What's a cracker boss?”

“He runs the screen room,” he grinned derisively. “Now you want to know what a screen room is.”

“Yes.” I gave him more sandwiches and another egg and some pickles.

“I suppose you know what kind of coal we mine here?”

“Anthracite. I know some things about coal.”

“All right. You don't treat anthracite as you do bituminous. The bituminous falls to pieces as it burns, but the anthracite has to be broken into pieces of approximately the same size. It's what we call a fancy product, and some people think it's the best coal in the world. It is, for some purposes—but it's hard to fire. When it was first discovered here in Pennsylvania, back in colonial times, they couldn't market it in Philadelphia because people didn't know how to fire it. They called it ‘black diamonds' in contempt, but that's just what it was, and when you do fire it, it burns with a hot, beautiful flame and gives off almost no smoke. After the anthracite is mined, it's broken down into small pieces by a machine we call a breaker. But at this point, the coal is mixed with slate and other undesirable rock, and this rock has to be picked out of it. That's a job done by kids—even today—they're called breaker boys. The broken coal passes through a long chute, and the breaker boys sit on benches over the chute, and all day long they crouch over picking the slate out of the coal. They can't stop because the coal doesn't stop, and by midday, the chute is so full of coal dust that you can't see, and your eyes are burning and your throat and lungs are full of the stuff, and the roar of the chute has taken your hearing away, and in the summer you sweat and roast and dream of a drink of water and in the winter you shiver and freeze, and the dirty swine who sees to it that you never stop and never take a rest is the cracker boss; so I just made up my mind to kill him, and that was it.”

All this poured out of him casually, almost indifferently, between bites of sandwich and sips of hot coffee.

“How old were you, Ben?” I whispered.

“Thirteen, I guess—”

“How terrible!”

“It wasn't terrible, Dorothy. It was normal and ordinary.”

“For you.”

“Of course for me. I didn't resent working in the chute; it took away my summers—it took away the best part of being a kid, but I didn't resent it because I didn't know any other way, and you have to know another way to resent.”

“And now you know another way, and you're full of resentment,” I said.

“Yes and no. When I look at you, Dorothy, I see a girl like no other girl I ever knew. Maybe not. Maybe I don't know you well enough. But I tell myself that. And then I resent the way it's been for you, easy and clean and gentle all your life, and for your father, and that big house of yours—”

“Is it only hard your way? What do you suppose Father felt and I felt when my mother died?”

“What I felt when my mother died,” he replied bluntly. “And maybe something of what my mother felt when two sons and a husband died in the pits.”

“I'm sorry, Ben.”

“Sure. You're tender and compassionate, but you're in another world. How do I cross over? If I want to. I don't know if I want to. I don't know if you want me to.” He held up one of our tiny picnic sandwiches. “I've never eaten anything like this before. I'm twenty-two years old, and I've never eaten food like this before. Or been to a picnic before. I couldn't sleep last night for knowing I was going to see you today and be with you, but Jesus Christ, how I resent you!”

“I don't own a coal mine,” I said slowly. “I didn't make any of your world, Ben Holt, and neither did my father. The first time I saw you, I resented the way your hands looked. That makes as much sense as for you to resent me because I've never been hungry and because my father has a nice house.”

“I know that.”

“I'm glad you do—sometimes. And as for myself, I'm not very unusual. There are thousands and thousands of girls like me. You went to college. You must have met girls like me.”

“You think so?”

“I'm asking you, Ben.”

“I held two jobs one year in college. I waited table in the dining room during the day and I worked off campus late at night. In an all-night counter place. The kids with money used to wind up their dates there. I remember a girl came in one night with a feller—she was pretty enough to take your breath away. I guess I stared at her, and she said to stop staring at her and annoying her. You can imagine what I felt like. She ordered eggs and left the bottom of her plate covered with the yellow. Then she tipped me. She borrowed ten pennies and pressed each one of them into the yellow muck on the bottom of her plate.”

“You remember that,” I nodded. “I guess you'll remember that until the day you die. You don't want to ever forget it, do you, Ben Holt?”

“No! Because I dug those pennies out and washed them! Because I needed that ten cents!”

“I suppose there might be cruel miners—bad miners. Even plain wicked miners. Even a miner's daughter who was just nasty through and through. Or couldn't that be?”

I think the most wonderful thing about Ben was his smile. His face would become like a storm, dark and brooding and full of impending wrath, and then he would smile the way he smiled that day; and when he did, my whole heart went out to him.

“It could be,” he nodded.

And that was when our day began, really, a wonderful day with a Ben Holt so few people ever knew.

 

6

A whole week now, dear Alvin, since I broke off what is already a considerable manuscript. The truth is that during this time, I had to resist an impulse to destroy what I have written—and then talk you out of what you propose to do with all our memories of Ben's life. I read it through. What possible meaning or importance can such meanderings have? I have been quite depressed, which is unusual for me, and this searching back into our past makes life seem even shorter than it actually is—and if anything, more meaningless.

Well, I went down to Washington last week. The union had a large banquet—of course you know this—to celebrate the completion of their new building, and I had hoped to see you there. I was disappointed when you didn't come. You will recall the meeting we had with Frank Lloyd Wright—is it possible that twenty years have gone by since then?—when Ben first asked him to design the building. The excitement I felt watching them meet for the first time—what was it someone said? “Two giants of our time”—or something like that. They struck it off, didn't they, but really, neither of them knew or understood each other. I am so suspicious of the flashy “great men” meetings that are sprinkled through history. What excited Ben chiefly was the fact that he and the union were commissioning the greatest living architect to do a building for them. It was another step, another rung in the ladder; but I don't believe he ever cared about the building itself. Mr. Wright talked about the material and symbolic significance of a building to house the union that mined coal. Ben was a thousand miles away; he had a strike on his hands and he was being attacked from within the union again—

But all that is beside the point. They wanted me at the dedication of the building because, as they put it, “It marked the fulfillment of Ben's fondest dream.” What nonsense! I know the good and bad of Ben, but the last thing in the world he gave two damns about was that building or any building.

Well, I came and I went, and at least it lifted me out of my doldrums. The public-relations man at the union—the new one, Smithson, a bright, alert young thing with
ivy
written all over him; they tell me he majored in trade unionism at college—had made arrangements for me to lunch at the White House with the good mistress there; but at the last minute, it was called off, due to pressures of this and that. I suppose that one of the minor rewards for being a hostess in such a position is an exemption from explanations. If matters intervene they intervene, and that's all there is to it. Just as well.

I drove back from Washington to Ringman alone. I never used to enjoy driving, but lately I seem to have developed a taste for it. I drive slowly—I am sure every other driver on the road berates me and that I confirm all the clichés about women drivers—and driving gives me a chance to think, not thinking in any constructive sense, but to allow my thoughts to wander here and there and everywhere.

I lived through, once again, that golden September Sunday with Ben—much as I wrote of it and much different too; so I begin to mistrust all accounts of things that have happened, and I shall never again read anyone's account of a real life with any real pleasure. I have a sort of theory that in a person's life, any moment is an eternity and utterly peculiar unto itself. I am no more able to recapture the moods and fancies and exultations of a girl of seventeen than you are, my dear Alvin, and I do respect you as a writer. In my mind, I watched Dorothy Aimesley and Ben Holt with considerable detachment and some obtuseness. I watched him kiss her for the first time. I watched them sit there on the rock on top of the ridge for their own eternity, in the wonderful silence of discovery. I watched them walking, hand in hand, his big bulk in black looking over her small pink self.

I tried to remember why I fell in love with Ben Holt. Is the answer as unnecessary as the question? In the manuscript you sent me about your own first involvement with Ben in West Virginia, you mention the first time you saw your Laura. You saw her not as she was, but as you wanted her to be. Do we actually operate that way, like children who see toys in store windows and desire them? Perhaps we do, and with no more sense or purpose; and at least it provides for me a memory of a day that was rich and golden.

But nothing was consummated or finished on that day. Ben brought me home at five in the afternoon and left me at the door to my house, and he left without even a small kiss for farewell.

That was his own shyness at our house, and it lessened my state of beatitude not an iota. Up the stairs to my room, my feet never touching the steps; and at my mirror, I conducted a thorough examination of what had so fascinated and captured Benjamin Renwell Holt. At dinner, my father looked at me long and curiously before he said,

“Dorothy, are you in love?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure.”

He referred to it only once more. “Until now, Dorothy, you've known boys and dated boys. This is a man.”

“I know that, Daddy.”

“Then the only advice I have is to use common sense.”

I told myself that it was good advice, and I determined to follow it. In any case, I would be leaving for school on Friday, and after that, my romance would mark time. As for seeing Ben again before Friday, I hardly thought that it would happen. But it did. Tuesday night, he telephoned and asked whether he could call on me the following evening. I invited him to dinner. He protested but I insisted, and finally he agreed. I didn't know that he would have to take the day off at the mines, pleading illness, to be at our house on time and clean and presentable.

When I told Father that I had invited Ben to dinner the following evening, his only reaction was to say that Ben was always welcome. Then I asked Father why Ben had turned down the job with the Pittsburgh law firm.

“Did Ben tell you that? Why didn't you ask him?”

“Ben didn't speak about it. I listened at the register the first time he was here.”

“Did you? If you lack other virtues, Dorothy, I'm gratified that you're honest.”

“I've always been too curious. Why did he turn down the job, Daddy?”

“I'm not sure I know,” Father replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps he didn't want to be a lawyer. There are people who don't, you know.”

“Did you have something else in mind when you asked him here?” I pursued it.

“Oh—possibly. My own law practice is nothing to write home about, but I could take a young man on.”

I nodded. “It could never happen now.”

“Why?”

“I think he likes me a great deal. He's too proud to work for the father of a girl he likes.”

“I see.”

But at dinner the next evening, Ben was as formal and reserved as he had ever been—more so, for he said next to nothing compared to the last time he was here. He and Father talked a little about the case of one Steve Padowski, a miner who was accused of theft and assault, and whom Father was defending. It happened that Ben knew the man, and was able to tell Father something about him. Then the war and local politics. After dinner, Father pleaded work and retired into his study. Ben and I sat in the parlor. I showed him an album of family pictures that evening, and I remember that I was a little disappointed at his lack of interest. He tried to appear interested, but made a poor show of it. Then we talked about one thing and another and then about my going away.

“You'll forget about me soon enough, Dorothy,” Ben said flatly.

“I hardly see why in just two months. I'll be back for the Thanksgiving Day weekend.”

“It's not a question of time.”

“Then what is it a question of?”

“The two different worlds we exist in. You know that, Dorothy.”

“You keep talking about two different worlds. I haven't mentioned it once, but you can't forget, can you?”

“Because you've never seen my world, Dorothy. You've never walked into it the way I walked into yours.”

“I'm sure that if I spent an evening in a coal miner's house, I'd never want to see you again,” I smiled.

“Perhaps so.”