Power (38 page)

“You understand, Al,” Cofferman said to me, “the boy's got to be punished, but it wouldn't be the right punishment to send him to jail. We've had things pretty bad, not too much to eat, not much of anything, and this damnfool kid decided to take things into his own hands. I don't hold with that, and I'll read him the law, believe me, I will. But if he goes to jail, he's going to come out bad, the way they all do. It would break his ma's heart.”

Hank Cofferman was skinny, hollow-cheeked, cough-ridden, and full of weariness and despair. When he walked out, the memory of every meal I had eaten during the past month rose up and turned to ashes in my mouth, and the taste was not improved by Mark Golden's irritation.

“Why did you tell him that, Al?”

“He's got trouble enough.”

“Well, he's going to have more trouble. Andy Lust won't release his son.”

“What? Is this something new?”

“Andy Lust is a rat who left a sinking ship. I happen to know that the Amsterdam Coal Company is paying him twenty-five dollars a week. It's a cheap price, but everything comes cheap these days.”

His prediction turned out to be correct. Ben and I went to see Lust, who, as a pillar of law and order, explained that unless examples were made and the law enforced, Pomax would be the equivalent of a jungle.

“So you're going to start with this poor kid who was half-starved and wanted some groceries for his family?” Ben demanded.

“He broke the law, Ben.”

“What law! What did he do, make a bluff with a toy pistol? I hear he was shaking like a leaf all the time.”

“Ben, the law's the law. I'm sworn to uphold the law.”

“Then you're going to make this stick?”

“That's right, Ben.”

“You're forgetting, aren't you, Andy? This is a mining town, a union town.”

“You're forgetting, Ben,” Lust answered thinly. “What's left of your union is stuck together with spit and tissue paper, and the first time it rains, that also goes. Don't tell me about union towns. I recognize one when I see it.”

“I want that kid released,” Ben said softly. “Do you hear me?”

“I don't hear you. I don't even listen to you.”

Grabbing Lust by the front of his jacket, Ben pulled the chief of police to him. “You lousy, tinhorn cop—who the hell do you think you're talking to?”

“Just one more word, Ben, and I pull you in for assault and battery and resisting a police officer.”

Ben flung him away, and we turned on our heels and walked out. Panting with suppressed anger, Ben said to me, “Al, I don't ever want cops on my side—nothing but grief from these cheap, dirty sellouts. They sell out one, they sell out another. You remember that crazy Jim Flecker down in Clinton?”

“I remember,” I nodded.

“Same thing. Brought us nothing but grief and misery. But Andy Lust—well, I'll see him again.”

 

8

That was the day Mark, Lena, and I had dinner at Ben's house, and Ben outlined his plan to Mark and myself. Ben was late because he was with the district attorney. The Cofferman business stuck in his craw, and he would have to spit it out before he could taste food. Mark and Lena and I walked over to Ben's place, and had a drink with Dorothy, waiting for Ben.

Norah Holt opened the door for us. She had grown into a long-legged, sullenly good-looking girl, soon to be fifteen, tall, full-breasted, and already seething with the frustration of a place like Pomax.

If she had been a saint, Norah's role would still have presented difficulties; but she was far from a saint. A combination of Ben's big frame, his drive and burning desires, and Dorothy's beauty, she was trapped, thwarted, and angry. Education in Pomax left much to be desired, and a poor high school of necessity truncated its curriculum to the lowest possible median. Nor was Pomax a place sought out by good teachers. So Dorothy and Ben, but in particular Dorothy, gave their children what they could, tutored them, led them into reading—and on Dorothy's part, if all unwittingly, into desires that could never be realized. It told less on Sam and Ben, Jr., who were younger, but Norah learned to hate and resent all too early. She was torn between contempt for the miners' children and her need for companionship, between hatred of poverty and her mother's dignity and pride in poverty, between the fact of being the daughter of a trade unionist and the dream of upper-class life—or so it seemed to her—that filtered through from Dorothy's memories and the summers at Ringman. At Ringman, she could act out her dreams, but across Belfast Ridge, there were the collieries and pits. Thus, she hated what she was, yet had to take refuge in pride of what she was; and she had enough of Ben, his charm and boldness, to be popular among the miners.

Now, as she opened the door, she wanted to know about Sam Cofferman. Was it true that he was in jail and to be indicted for robbery? It was true, I told her.

Dorothy entered the living room as Norah said to me, “And you allowed it, Al—you and Dad! Because a decent kid couldn't watch his family starve to death, you let him go to jail! Oh, you both make me so ashamed!”

“Norah!” Dorothy exclaimed.

“She's right,” I shrugged. “I make her ashamed. I'm ashamed too.”

“No! You don't talk to Al like that, Norah.”

“Now wait a minute,” Mark said. “This thing isn't over by a long shot. Ben is with the district attorney right now. It's not as open and shut as you might think, Norah.”

“I know one thing,” Norah cried, “that if anyone belongs in jail, it's Andy Lust!”

Tight-lipped, Dorothy said to her, “That's enough, Norah. That's quite enough. Come with me.”

They went into the kitchen, and Lena followed them. Mark stood there, regarding me moodily. I asked him whether the Cofferman boy would get off. “No, he won't get off,” Mark said, and then he went to the window and stared out at the darkening street. “I hate this lousy place,” he said slowly. “I hate myself, and I am beginning to hate every day I spend here. I was fifty-five years old last week. You know, Al”—he turned to me—”I never said anything like this before. I never felt this way before.”

I nodded. There was nothing I could think of to say, and a half hour later, when Ben came home, Mark's prediction was confirmed. The district attorney went along with Andy Lust, and the Cofferman boy was to serve as an example of a basic shift in the balance of forces at Pomax. But at dinner, Ben said,

“You know, they're wrong.”

He brought that out of the air, apropos of nothing. We had been praising Dorothy's food, something we did uneasily, for the truth is that she was not a very good cook. I think that on this night, we had a stew of some kind. The children had eaten, and it must be said of Lena that she lightened Dorothy's load. She was an easy kind of a guest, helping and never pushing, as if she found in the Holt house in Pomax all that she had ever desired. Like so many women, single and past the age of her best dreams and hopes, she played house.

Now we were relaxed, eating the stew and praising it when Ben made his remark, and Mark asked him who was wrong.

“Lust and Jerry.” Jerry Hurst was the district attorney in Pomax County.

“About what?”

“About the union,” Ben said between mouthfuls, chewing as he spoke. “About us being finished. That's a damnfool kind of judgment. A year from now, we'll have half a million members.”

“Why don't you whistle that?” Mark smiled.

“I can't, I'm eating.” He chewed and said, “Look here, Mark—what about the treasury? How much money have we got?”

“Don't you know?”

“I never could keep track of money worth a damn,” Ben replied.

Mark had barely tasted his food. He had a small appetite and ulcers. Now he looked at Ben rather strangely, a trace of amusement on his face, as he said,

“I love you, Ben. So help me God, I do. What do you want money for?”

“I want to hire two hundred organizers,” Ben replied mildly, still eating and talking through the food as he chewed. “I'm going to organize this damned industry from top to bottom. I'm going into every damned state where there's a single pit, and I'm going to tell the miners, ‘The President says, organize. It's the law of the land!'“

“And when do you intend to do this?” Mark asked, a trace of his smile still with him.

“Al,” Ben said to me, “how long do you think it has to take to find two hundred organizers?”

“A month.”

“A month?” Ben frowned.

“It's not the law of the land yet.”

“It will be,” Ben said.

“Maybe not.”

“I'll gamble on it,” Ben said.

“I wish to hell you wouldn't eat and talk at the same time!” Mark snapped at him. “How much do you need to satisfy that appetite of yours?”

“I always had a good appetite,” Ben said. “What about the money, Mark?”

“You're out of your mind.”

“Maybe. The money?”

“You can't just put your hands on the money,” Mark said with sudden irritation. “We got a little over eleven thousand dollars; we also have bills and debts to fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Don't pay any bills or debts. Let them wait.”

“Ben, try to understand me. We pay our bills. We always have. That's why our credit is good. One thing this union's always had is a sound financial structure and reputation. You can't just dip into the treasury and clean it out for some harebrained scheme.”

Ben finished eating, wiped his mouth, and said, “If our credit is that good, go out and borrow, Mark. We'll need about twenty thousand dollars for the first big push.”

Suddenly all three of them—Mark, Lena, and Dorothy—realized that Ben was quite serious. Ben looked from face to face. Then he grinned and said,

“That poor, stupid bastard, Andy Lust. I won't forget him. Indeed I won't.”

 

9

When I walked over to the desk to get my key, back at the Pomax House, Abner Gross said to me, “Evening, sonny. How was the food over at Ben's?” The old man was eighty-three, and this was just a few months before he died. We had become good friends, and when Abner died, he left me a hundred dollars in his will, “to buy a decent set of clothes with.” He had no one in the whole world; they had all died, even the ancient, profane bellhop had passed away, and a pimply-faced seventeen-year-old had taken his place.

I told him that food was food.

“And that counts now,” Abner nodded. “Good heavens, eighty-three years, Alvin, and I never seen such a hungry time as this. Sometimes, I just close my eyes and dream about the passenger pigeons, as if dreaming about them would bring them back.”

“Passenger pigeons?”

“You wouldn't know about them, sonny.” He licked his lips. “But them was tasty, believe me, and succulent, and no one had to go hungry. Back in the sixties and seventies, round about this time of the year, they come swarming in, maybe ten, fifteen, twenty million birds right here in the delta country. They'd be so thick you couldn't see the sky and they'd make a noise like a storm on the lakes. Then they'd settle down in the woods outside Pomax, and the miners would go out with sticks and just knock them over and fill their bags with them, and it was the kind of a slaughter you wouldn't even dream about, maybe four or five hundred birds to a man. But no one went hungry then, you can be sure. But each year there was fewer and fewer of them passenger pigeons—Lord, no one ever considered that they would run out. But run out they did. Just disappeared, every last one of them killed by the greed and hungriness of man. Well, that's the way it goes.”

“That's the way it goes, Abner,” I nodded, and I went on up to bed.

 

10

About a week later, I was sitting in my office in the Union Building at Pomax, when the door opened and Gus Empek walked in. It was years since the last time I had seen him—the time of the 1928 convention in Chicago—but he had not changed much. People built like Gus Empek don't. He had a little more girth and his hair had thinned and he looked tired, but otherwise no different; and he put out his hand without too much confidence as he said,

“Hello, Al.”

I shook hands with him. I had never learned to dislike Gus Empek. There was something direct and uncomplaining about him; his round, heavily fleshed face was without guile, and his permanent sadness pulled at you and frustrated annoyance. Also, I had no illusions about how we had used him that time in Chicago. A man shouldn't be used that way.

“I hear you've broken with the Associated bunch. What are you doing these days, Gus?”

He shrugged. “The best I can. I dig when there's work. There ain't much work, Al. You know that.”

“I know.” I pulled over a chair for him, and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted gratefully. “I smoke on my friends now,” he acknowledged. “It's a terrible feeling to feel that you're one step away from being a bum.”

My hand went into my pocket, and he said, “No—no, please, Al. I didn't come here to make a touch. How's Ben?”

“You haven't seen him?”

“No. I walked straight into your office before anyone could spot me and throw me out.”

“No one's going to throw you out, Gus. That's no way to talk. About Ben—well, Ben's Ben.”

“I know. Son of a bitch, he's still the best man we ever had in this rotten industry. Tell me something, Al—” He leaned toward me, staring at me eagerly. “Is it true, what the boys say about you and Ben?”

“What do they say?”

He crossed his stubby fingers. “That you're like this with the President! That he gave you the go-ahead signal—and that Ben's going out to organize the industry?”

“More or less. We're going out on an organizing drive—a big one. Ben's aim is the whole industry, half a million members. I think we'll do something, but whether we'll end up with that many—well, who the hell can say!”