Power (3 page)

“I'm a reporter,” I said. “I told you that before.”

His face was cloudy with rage and frustration and the attempt to remember how this devilish day had begun. “How did you get here so quick?” the mayor wanted to know. I told them that I had been here, and then they wanted to know whether I had filed a story.

“Of course I did. Mister, this is news—the biggest news in a long time!”

“Then you better kill that damn story and kill it quick!” Flecker roared at me.

Looking back at myself then, at the whole incident and what it began and what would flow from it—looking back at the kind of fresh and ignorant kid that I was, I can take some satisfaction from the fact that I was not afraid or intimidated, but was able to face Sheriff Jim Flecker and tell him that the story wouldn't be killed because it was already in New York and probably everywhere else in America, and that within a few hours the whole town would be swarming with reporters, and that the best thing he could do would be to talk to me as he might to a human being. I think he would have killed me if he hadn't been restrained by the mayor and the other men present; and then the mayor took me outside and said that I shouldn't mind Jim Flecker, since the state he was in was understandable and only to be expected. “This is a thing that happened,” he told me, glancing at the crowd around the bodies. “Great God Almighty, don't we all wish that it had never happened at all! But you put two trains on the same track and start them off at each other at eighty miles an hour, and by golly something terrible's going to happen, isn't it?”

“What I would like,” I said, “is to look through the personal effects of the dead men so that I can get their names and addresses. Where are their personal effects?”

“With Jim Flecker, but for heaven's sake let that rest for a while, Mister—?”

“Cutter.”

“Mr. Cutter—suppose you wait a spell, and I'll see if I can't get you what you need. Not that I'm trying to hide anything. What happened here can't be hidden. But first things first—”

He was interrupted by people who wanted to speak to him; just about everyone present wanted to speak to that poor man, from the doctor, who reported that the wounded man in the hotel had just died, making the score an even twelve, to the undertaker, to the town clerk, who had just spoken to state-police headquarters.

Then a small boy pulled at my jacket and wanted to know whether I was Mr. Cutter. When I replied that I was, he told me that he had been sent from the hotel, where a long-distance call was waiting for me.

 

6

Instead of telling me what a fine story I had filed, Oscar Smith, who was calling from New York, suggested that I stick to reporting the facts instead of making judgments and pronouncements.

“Well, damn it all,” I began, “what kind of judgments have I been making?”

“Never mind that now. Did you interview Ben Holt?”

“Do you know what's been happening here?”

“I read your story.”

“I haven't even had lunch.”

He sympathized with me and suggested that I find Holt and get a story from him, and that I could send it in along with a follow-up on the gun battle. I left it at that and went down to the dining room of the hotel, where I had a sandwich and a glass of beer, and where a traveling man gave me his views on the gun battle and the rumor that the entire county would be placed under martial law, a rumor, incidentally, that had no foundation in fact. When the bus boy came to clear the dishes away, I told him who I was and said that he could earn a dollar by taking me to Ben Holt. He swore that he did not know where Ben Holt was.

The doctor who had been called in to attend the wounded man was eating lunch in the dining room, and I went over to him, introduced myself, got his name and address, and learned that the wounded man had bled to death before he arrived. “I drove twenty miles for nothing,” he said with annoyance. He was one of those men with no opinions and no attitudes. From the way he spoke, one would conclude that gunfights which left twelve men dead happened at least once a week.

His name was Phelps—Tecumseh Phelps—and, like others involved in that incredible sixty-second massacre, he went down into his own tiny niche in history, indexed and cross-indexed in the files where ancient newspapers are remembered. He was fat and tired, and he told me how bad his heart was, so bad that it was a plain wonder that he went on from day to day. “I could drop dead right here,” he said, “right now this minute, right here. Maybe it's a medical miracle that I don't. So you see, sonny, everything isn't as simple and clear as you'd like it to be. I killed a half a day, by golly. And who's going to pay my fee, that's what I'd like to know. The mayor? I put it to him straight, and he says he has no responsibility for the Fairlawn detectives. So then I ask him how about this deputy's leg I took a bullet out of and bandaged up. Collect from the deputy, he says. Do you know what I collected from that deputy?” I shook my head. “Guess,” he urged me. “Go ahead and guess, sonny.” I shook my head again. “Well, fifty-five cents—won't even pay for my lunch here. Said it was all the money he had in the world. Can't get blood from a stone, can you? Good heavens, sonny, this is the poorest town in the nation. Why, this town is so poor the sparrows tell each other to avoid it. You know what they say—nothing poorer than a miner, nothing poorer than a miner's town. And now I got to go and take care of an infection in Ben Holt's hand. You ever heard of Ben Holt?”

I nodded.

“I'll collect five dollars for that or I won't touch him. You can be sure of that.”

“Where is Ben Holt?” I asked, picking up his check.

“You don't have to do that, sonny.”

“My pleasure.”

His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he asked me what I had in mind. He was not such a fool as he appeared to be, and I put it straight to him that my editor in New York wanted a personal interview with Ben Holt.

“You think he's a big man? A comer?”

“My editor seems to.”

The doctor pursed his lips and nodded. “It could be. There never was no union down here. My own opinion is there never will be. Sure, I'll take you along to Ben Holt, and let him bitch about it and be damned! He's at McGrady's place up on Fenwick Crag.”

 

7

It was a beautiful country of flat-sided mountains covered with a mat of verdant forest, and it was clad in the pale green of spring. It was a country that reminded me of the pictures I had seen of the Scottish Highlands, but without the damp and the mists; and the people who lived there were the descendants of others who had in the beginning come from the Scottish Highlands, bringing their own names and their place names with them. And if not for the pits and the piles of slag near them, the country would have been as wild as it ever had been; for it was bad farming country and almost no way for a man to squeeze a living out of it except to mine coal.

The doctor drove a Franklin, a good car for the mountains with its air-cooled motor—as he explained—and in it we labored up into the hills, up a dirt road past the red brick miners' houses, where the locked-out miners sat on their front steps sullenly watching us, and past other company houses naked and empty, where the Fairlawn operatives had dispossessed the tenants, down into a valley scarred with idle pits, and up again into the hills they called Fenwick Crag. This road was as bad as a cart track, and it taxed the Franklin's powers to the utmost. We were moving slowly up a sharp grade, when a man with a rifle stepped out into the road and motioned for us to halt.

He was a tall, skinny man, like so many of the men in that area, dressed in faded work pants and a cotton shirt. As cheap as the cotton pants and shirt were, they were patched all over; and he wore the badge of the miner, reddened eyes and dark lines of soot permanently engraved in his skin. He called out for us to stop, and when we did, he walked over to the car, looked at us carefully, and then said to Phelps,

“You the doctor?”

“I am. And what kind of damn nonsense is this, stopping us with that gun in your hands?”

“Who's he?” motioning with the gun at me.

“Friend of mine. He's a newspaperman, going to interview Ben Holt.”

Without taking his eyes off us, he shouted for Charlie, and in a minute or so, Charlie appeared from up the road and around a bend. He gave Charlie the facts, and then continued to cover us with his rifle while Charlie, enough like him to be his brother and similarly armed, went back to get Ben Holt's opinion of the whole matter.

It was midafternoon now, the sun warm and pleasant, the little glade where the doctor had stopped the car full of the sweet smell of growing things and forest decay and the hum of insects and the pattern of insects dancing in the bars of sunlight. I wondered what would happen to me if Benjamin R. Holt had emphatic feelings against newspapermen, and considering what I had experienced of tempers and guns in West Virginia so far, I was not cheered by the thought. But from what I had learned, this was also Ben Holt's first venture into West Virginia. He had been born in eastern Pennsylvania, in a small coal town called Ringman, and he had built his union and fought his way into its command in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Conceivably, he was reasonably civilized, yet I had some uneasy moments before Charlie returned and said that it was all right and that we could go ahead.

We drove about half a mile more before the road leveled off onto a sort of cleared plateau, a space of a dozen acres with an old frame house set in the middle of it, a small cornfield, a pen of pigs, and a garden. There was also a rough pasture, where eight army-surplus tents had been pitched. Two big cook fires were going, a whole young pig roasting over one of them, and here and there around the place were at least twenty men.

Some of the men at this place were native West Virginia miners, and others were union organizers that Ben Holt had brought in with him. Even apart from the way they dressed, you could not possibly mistake the one for the other. The miners' features were etched with sadness and defeat. It was not anything of the moment, but out of their lives and the way they stood and the slow way they moved. They were stooped men, bent men. Their lives were spent working with their bodies bent and they had forgotten how to stand straight, and their heads were bent from the angry words of their wives and the rapacious appetites of their children. They were victims of a particular kind of starvation—something I learned much later—for a miner's body burns food like a furnace burns coal, and what another man will fatten on, a miner will starve on. On and off through the years, I have watched working miners eat and never ceased to wonder at the enormous quantities of protein-rich food they needed for plain survival. I suppose that some of Ben Holt's organizers had been miners once, but in a different world than Hogan County.

Phelps stopped his car in front of the frame house, and we got out. Some of the men moved toward us, and then the door of the frame house opened and Ben Holt came out onto the porch. That was the first time I saw Benjamin Renwell Holt, and it was a long, long time ago, a long time before people got into the habit of opening their morning paper to see what Ben Holt had done or what he intended to do. It is possible that he had a sense of the future then. I didn't. He glanced at me with that quick, searching, half-contemptuous look that was to become so familiar to so many, and then his eyes passed by me to the doctor. For myself, I saw a big man of about thirty years—no, he was twenty-eight then—broad-shouldered, heavy, a large, square head on a bull neck, wide mouth, full lips, large, fleshy nose, and blue eyes as clear and placid as water. The expression was in the mouth, the tilt of head, the tension of the cheeks; only in moments of great anger did the eyes change. His hands were enormous, hamlike, one of them bandaged.

Even such a cursory glimpse of the man is retrospective, of necessity bolstered by hindsight. You see someone for the first time, and you see a large, heavy-fleshed man in motion, and not much more than that. His hand hurt him, and he was interested in the doctor then; pain can wall you away from anything. The doctor went inside with him, and I stood by the car and smoked a cigarette and looked around me at the headquarters that Ben Holt had made for himself in that curious West Virginia world that was half primeval wilderness and half coalpits and company towns where the miners worked and lived. This was the wilderness part of it, with the mountains looming above us on every side, walled in by a silence and beauty as old as the ages.

It was a big camp, the tents, piles of cut cordwood, boxes of canned goods heaped six feet high, and behind the frame house, four automobiles parked neatly side by side. There was an old barn behind the house; it leaned crazily from disuse and lack of repair. The McGradys were miners, not farmers.

McGrady's wife and daughter were in the house; there were no other women at the camp. The men went about what they were doing, cooking, splitting wood, sitting around and chewing tobacco and talking or pacing aimlessly—but ignoring me. No one spoke to me or approached me. I realized that there were guards all around the camp, for men with rifles came in from the forest and other men with rifles went out to take their places; and it moved easily if raggedly, with no one giving orders or instructions.

In about twenty minutes, Phelps came out of the house, Ben Holt with him, Holt's hand in a sling and with a clean bandage on it. Holt shook hands with the doctor, and then the doctor climbed into his car and Holt motioned a man over to crank it. “Good luck, sonny!” the doctor shouted at me as the motor turned over and caught. He drove off, leaving me with Ben Holt, who said,

“The old man talks a lot, but he knows his business. This damn hand of mine was driving me out of my mind, and that's why you got a poor welcome, Cutter. Now we can go inside and have a cup of coffee and talk.”