Rebel Voices

by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel

  But this here moribund condition of mine had justification for bein’. The very night before, I had got stood against a wall by Keefe and his Red Squad while they vacuum-cleaned me, looking for the red card. It is true, they didn’t get anything on me because when I hit these malevolent sections I leave the little due book up where the chambermaid can see if I am paid up or not. The job, I maintains, is the place to carry the card at.

  I turned the corner goin’ down towards Archie’s slave market when who should I bump into but Pearlie MacCann. Now, Pearlie is just the right sort of antidote for any dark-brown morning that comes along. He just radiates joy. In fact, just to think about that fellow worker is to raise up a glow that is more intoxicating than a shot and a half of Dehorn.

  You don’t know Pearlie MacCann? Say! Pearlie is the most all-there he-man that ever hit the sticks. He savvies how to get out the round stuff, too, but better than that he knows all the methods for gettin’ conditions improved in some of the insect laboratories that are to be found even yet on parts of the Coast.

  As a scizzorbill evangelist he sure gets the goods. Why, he went single-handed into the cook shack up at hostile Clallan Bay and pulled out the camp, cook house crew and all, till the Super came thru with the grub that the cook wanted, and then decided that it was better to put up that dry-house than to take a chance on losing his job.

  MacCann shipped into the outfit as a pearl-diver, and that is how he got the name of Pearlie. This was early in 1918, too, when to be a Wob was about as tough as it is now, only more so.

  When Pearlie saw me he grinned a welcome like a shark. “Hello, there, Tightline!” he said warmly as he hooked me with that grip of his. “Where have you been all these days since old Paulson reclaimed the bunk space we was usin’?”

  I give him a list of my late ambulations and he returned with his. Then he sprung a job on me.

  “Say, Tightline, you still nosin’ ‘round the grease pots?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you take a rest from this fog bustin’ and do a little real work? Come on and load for me for a few months or so.”

  I was startled. “What do you mean,—months? Have you got a pull with old Weyerhauser lately? The longest I ever saw you keep one master was six weeks.”

  “Well, anyway, you could come out and give a fellow a start,” he said. “You see, I got a recommend from Archie as bein’ an A-One hooker if I ain’t crossed, and one of these gunny-sack parasites decided to hire me and let me pick my own loader. There’s a donkey puncher already on the job, or I would put you next to the graft. But as I always said, a man is a chump that will scald himself in good summer weather alongside a yard hog. Come on out and load for me.”

  I knew right then that I was goin’ to go to work, but for appearances’ sake I stalled a bit. “What kind of a show you got?” I asks.

  “Fine!” says Pearlie. “Couldn’t be better. There’s two settin’s where the logs is four deep and not a stump in the ground!”

  “Thasso?” says I. “And I suppose the riggin’ is all ginney line with whistle wire for a haul back. I’m your man. If you run me out on a work-house job I’ll make you buy an organization stamp for every drop of sweat that leaks out of me. Say! Where is this young heaven?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, I haven’t exactly given the lay-out the once-over quite, but the proud owner was tellin’ me that the hooker he had was loadin’ three cars, and that the men was all kickin’ on account of hard work. I says to myself: “Here’s where I make a reputation.”

  Next afternoon Pearlie and me hitches our suitcases onto a Redmond stage and climbs in for Camp Three. The chauffeur let us off at a little trail and we started along, as directed, towards the camp. ‘Twas about a mile, he told us.

  I’ve picked up books with yards of stuff in ’em tellin’ about leafy bowers, twittering birds and the like. I never could see no sense in puttin’ such stuff down into books when there it is, right in front of a feller in real life, if he only goes out and looks at it. These here writin’ fellers ought to write more about conditions and organization and things that are more important, and let people that are interested in nature-lovin’ go out and get their nature first hand. I think the reason a lot of ink is spilled on this nature proposition is that the spillers are afraid to get off the cement for fear they might get lost, or bit, or something.

  Anyhow, it was late spring, and everything had that tang to it that peps a fellow up and puts some sass into him. There is a different sort of feeling in the air than there is in the fall, say in November. November is a sort of dreary, reactionary month when everything sort of goes backwards. It ain’t for nothin’ that November was the month when they hung the victims of the Haymarket riots. I bet the weather had a lot to do with the Everett Massacre, with killing Joe Hill and with the Centralia Conspiracy. But here I am a-gettin’ clear off.

  At the end of the trail we came out into a little clearing in which was as pretty a picture of a haunted house as you ever see. An old clap-boarded farmhouse gone to seed. There was two or three pig and hen houses scattered around, but I didn’t see nothin’ that looked like a camp.

  We piked up to the door of the fenceless and unprotected house, and met the bull-cook goin’ after water. Pearlie tells him he was the new hook-tender, and the bull-cook he shows us over to the nearest pig-house, which is fixed up with three bunks.

  We dumps down our suit-cases and squints about to see the lay-out. No sign of stickers on the walls, no literature on the table, not even a capitalist rag. The shack was one to delight a fresh-air fiend, except that the dust and cobwebs might have caused a sneeze or two. The bunks were of ordinary steel, such as our bosses, prompted by a rush of emotions to their heads, installed at the time of the big Job Strike.

  I ain’t never been interested much in this architecture stuff, but I sure didn’t have no taste for the mixture that was in that shack. It seemed to have been built in three installments, each installment put on like a patch on a pair of overalls. There was a cedar puncheon-and-shake foundation with an overcoat of fir lumber and shingles, and then to give the modern touch of orneriness there was some tin and paper stuck around to fill up the holes.

  Under such conditions there is generally a flock of double-deck bunks and crummy sougans to sleep under, with the boss a-proddin’ all the time to get the new men to bring their own blankets. Here, however, there was only the three half bunks, and while the sougans were not new, yet they wasn’t clammy with the rubbin’s from pants and shoes,—not so far.

  So we surmised to ourselves that this must be the parlor where only the brains was allowed to sleep.

  Pearlie pokes his thumb over at the third bunk and asks the bull-cook who sleeps there.

  The bull-cook looks mysterious and says in a tone that was meant to sound like he was goin’ to give the devil his due even if it went against the grain: “That’s Hal Whicombe’s. He is slingin’ the riggin’ as a rule, but is tendin’ hook till you get here. He is a pretty good, steady worker.” He takes a long pause to think over the next, then he springs this: “If I were you I would be careful what I said to him, ‘cause he is liable to let it out.”

  “Huh,” thinks I, “a stool pigeon!”

  Pearlie and me looks at each other. Then Pearlie turns to the bull-cook. “How long has this Whicombe been here?” he asks casual like.

  “Well, let’s see, I been here eighteen months now and he come about a month after I started. Yeah,—he’s been here seventeen months.”

  Pearlie stops monkeyin’ with his clothes and sits down on the bed. The bull-cook remembers his water bucket and goes out. Pearlie goes to the door to see if he is really gone, and then comes back and says to me: “There is something phoney here. This bull-cook spills some slave ideas and then brands this riggin’ slinger as a stool, after advertisin’ that he himself is a bill from backwater. Here he says he’s been on the job for eighteen months and then tells us strangers that this stool come since he did. Som
ething dungy some place.”

  “All I got to say, Pearlie, is that if this guy is a stool, you and me will sure lead him a cheerful life between us, on the job and off. Anyway, we better wait till we run into him before we lay plans to put the skids under him. It may be a grudge this bull-cook has or somethin’.”

  So Pearlie and I kept on unpackin’. Neither of us unloaded any of the books and literature we had. We wanted to size up this said stool first.

  I mopes around the camp to find the drinkin’ water and Pearlie goes over to the cook shack. After gettin’ a drink I takes a squint at a couple of shacks that were built about like the one we had camped in, and finds only one with bunks in. There was four bunks. I was puzzled. What kind of a phoney outfit was this, anyway? I wouldn’t have put it beyond Pearlie to go out to a seven-man loggin’ camp, but I couldn’t savvy no such camp bein’ run. I made up my mind that there was another camp some place around—perhaps up on the railroad track.

  I goes back to the shack and pulls out a book I had brought along from Andy’s Library, and lays down to read. By and by Pearlie blows in. He gives a grunt and lays down, too. His grunt wasn’t a sociable one, so I let him alone.

  We could hear the donkey whistling signals as the men logged, away off towards the timber. By and by they blow for quits and in half an hour or so the third roomer in our flat showed up.

  He says “Hello,” and wants to know if one of us is the new hooker. Pearlie says, “Yes.”

  This third party is very chatty and twaddles along about the weather and the water and the soap and nothin’ at all while he is gettin’ off his boots and socks and puttin’ on his change.

  Then he grabs a rag from the wall that does for a towel and goes out to the wash-bench by the creek. By and by he comes back as confidin’ as ever and starts to talk about the work. He gets a lot of slave ideas off his chest in one way and another, about how many they yarded on this day and how much they would have got on that day if they hadn’t had bad luck with the haul back, etc., etc. Finally I asks him how many there was in the crew. He starts countin’ ’em up by name and finally gets about thirty-five. Then he starts tellin’ about them: “This feller isn’t much good,” and “That feller is a jim dandy,” and, “This other guy is a piker.”

  Finally Pearlie asks him what kind of a guy this here bull-cook is. Pearlie casts no remarks about the bull-cook, just a plain question, but the riggin’ slinger seems glad of a chance to get something off his chest. “Wah,” he says, “That guy ain’t to be trusted. Say there ain’t hardly any of the boys here that like him. O’ course, those that are his kind like him all right, but I ain’t got no use for that bunch.”

  “How’s that?” asks Pearlie. “What’s the trouble with him?”

  “Ah! He’s liable to tell everything you let him find out about you.”

  I nearly fainted. Here was two stools whose chief occupation seemed to be stoolin’ on each other. I was commencin’ to get real curious to see what the rest of this famous crew was like. The chow bell rang and we went over to the cook-shack and climbed up the dilapidated steps, entered the squee-geed doorway and found ourselves in the table room. The bull-cook had graduated into the flunky now and was standin’ ready to show us the place we should sit in. The Super was there and they put Pearlie alongside of him while I got a seat down at the other end.

  I’ll say this for the grub, I’ve eat worse, but also can say that I’ve had a lot better. There was eight men at the table. I was wonderin’ where the rest of the crew was at. It wasn’t Saturday, so that they’d all be gone to town. This here strangeness was gettin’ on my nerves. Nothin’ was run the way it ought to be. Instead of thirty or two hundred men shovelin’ in the chuck, here was eight. Then here was all this loose talk about stools the first thing a fellow hits camp, and nobody seemed to have a good idea what there was to stool about. Then because of the rummy actions that had already come to notice, every other move on the part of the crew seemed rumdum.

  There was a woman cook that we could hear talkin’ in the kitchen. The pie was dished up in a saucer and one piece was supposed to satisfy. The crew was all talkin’ loud at the table, which sure ain’t no proper way for a crew to act. Everything made me think that I had gone to some country where loggin’ was unknown.

  Pearlie didn’t show up after supper, so I supposed that he was still listenin’ to the Super. I moped over to the other bunk-house and was stared at for a while by the inmates. I never felt quite so ornery. These freaks were sure the strangest bunch of loggers I ever seen. I got up and left when I couldn’t get no talk or sense out of them and walked up to the spring for a drink. There I met the fourth character just comin’ back.

  He says right away like a real human, “Well, what do you think of this lay-out?” I told him that I didn’t hardly know yet and was so pleased at his slow grin that I could have hugged him.

  “Did you bring any papers?” he says, just as tho out of a dream, to me.

  “Well, I got a P. I.,” I come back.

  “Huh,” he scoffs, “I see too much of the P. I. to suit me.”

  “All right, fellow worker,” I says, “come over to the bunk-house and see if there is anything I can give you that will suit.”

  “Have you got any stamps?” he asks.

  “Do you want some?” I counters.

  “Yeah,” he says thotfully, “I think I’m behind. I’ll go over and get my book. I’ll be right over to your shack.”

  I went into my old valise and dug up my supplies. Then I spread the latest working class papers out on the bed and the stranger soon appeared with his little old red card.

  He was an old-time dirt-mover and so I transferred him into 120. While I was busy with his card he looks over the papers and literature and picks out all the late copies. He sticks the papers in his pocket and sits down for a talk.

  Before he had a chance to commence I asks him what was the matter with this outfit. I says, “Here is supposed to be a loggin’ camp. Loggin’ camps generally have a few loggers around and there is nobody here. Then, the first thing we hit camp there is two fellows accuse each other of bein’ stools and I commence to believe both of ’em. Everything has a phoney air and rumdum look. What is the answer? Is it the Dehorn or moonshine, or what? Is it real or just company manners? If I don’t find out what’s the matter with this layout I am goin’ to be as batty as the rest.”

  The dirt-mover laughs. “Didn’t you ever see a bunch of stump ranchers before?” he inquires.

  “Sure I seen stump ranchers!”

  “Well, these is the real homespun short-horn variety.”

  “I seen all kinds of stump ranchers,” say I. “But what is the idea of brandin’ each other as stools?”

  “That’s all over the cook. You see, this cook hasn’t lived here quite as long as the rest of the old hens in the neighborhood, and then she gets the job of mixin’ the mulligan and gets all the rest of the old dames sore. Then there is church jealousies tangled up in it, too. Maybe she don’t dip in the same duckin’ pond as the rest. Anyway, there is two factions in camp. One faction favors the cook and the other faction’s against the cook. They have a string of talk that would make you weep. It runs like this: ‘Sally come over to the house the other day and says so and so. My old woman got right back at her and tells her so and so.’ This is repeated every day by the bushel, yard or scraper full.”

  “And the class struggle?” asks I, “where does that come in?”

  “The class struggle is like the Irishman’s flea—it bites, but it ain’t there.”

  Then the oldtimer starts to askin’ for information about the organization. Him and me had played different parts of the country, but I give him what late news I had and he soon gets up and goes to read the papers. “I haven’t been able to jar a single idea loose in this whole camp,” he says. “These hoosiers just stare at you and don’t get a single point. Maybe with the three of us we can do more, but I won’t be much help to you because I am on the
grade and will only get to you at night. Well, so long!”

  In a few minutes Pearlie come in and his eyes was ashine with excitement. “Tightline,” he whoops, “we’ve struck a virgin field. Every which-away you look you see a scizzorinhus. I been out scoutin’ around and I seen whole droves of chin-whiskered blocks as innocent of intelligence as a dehorned sailor. Just think,” he rambles on, “of yellin’ at a whistle punk with the whiskers of Karl Marx and cursin’ at a donkey puncher that is a deacon in the church. I bet there ain’t a man in camp that knows that the Czar of Russia has even had a chill.”

  “You’re wrong again, Pearlie,” says I, folding up my report sheet. “I have already sold four papers and an Ebert Pamphlet, and stamped one man up.”

  Then I told Pearlie about the dirt driver and what he had said about the camp. Pearlie was enthusiastic. He was already thinkin’ up ways to get under the hides of stump herders. “To-morrow,” says he, “I’m to be Queen of the May.”

  To-morrow came with the bang and the clang of the bull-cook’s hammer on the old circular saw that hung outside the kitchen door. We stirred from our bunks and washed the wrinkles out of our eyes at the wash-bench. Then we filed into the cook-shack with the bang of the second bell.

  It was just getting daylight and the shivers still ran over us as we gulped down the breakfast and left for the shack to get the rest of our loggin’ clothes on. Still shivery, we climbed on the loggin’ truck that a wheezy, dirty loggin’ dinky locomotive shoved up the track from the mill to the landing where the loggin’ was done.

  Over the uneven track we jolted and turned around curve after curve. Nearly all the crew was piled on the truck and they were carryin’ on a gabblin’ about this and that. One had come by a calf during the night. Another was still grumbling because his wife was too sick to get his breakfast. Spud plantin’ and plowin’ was discussed in detail. They were a sodden crew, and the misty morning air was no pep instiller.