“Boys,” he was saying, “Don Chafin’s got four thousand men on top of Blair Mountain in concrete bunkers. He’s got lots of machine guns. He’s been waiting for something like this and he is prepared.”
“We already know that, Keeney!” I yelled. “We got ten thousand men. Hit’s a goddamn army, son!”
Our eyes met. His were soft with apology, pleading. “I’m sorry, boys, but it’s no good. President Harding has sent a telegram to the governor. He’s sending in the U.S. Army. He’s calling this an armed rebellion.”
“Damn straight it is!” Talcott hollered.
“I just talked to a U.S. Army general,” Keeney shouted, “and I’ll tell you his exact words. He says there are several million unemployed in this country and they’re afraid this might assume proportions that they couldn’t handle. Those are his words, not mine. It’s the U.S. Army, boys. They’re bringing in airplanes with bombs, the 88th Air Squadron. They intend to drop those bombs. You start questioning who runs this country and the big foot comes down.”
Men had been pushing all around me, talking among themselves so it was hard to hear Keeney, but now they grew quiet.
“We cant go agin the federal government,” someone called out. “We cant lick nothing that big.”
“I got me a newspaper,” a colored miner answered, “quotes a coal operator. Says we got a bunch of niggers turned loose with high-powered rifles. This here nigger aint setting down this rifle without a fight.”
There was scattered applause, but most of the men were wavering, I could tell.
“Hit’s a trick!” Talcott yelled. “The U.S. government dont give a damn what goes on down here. When has the government ever cared about this place? They dont even know we’re here.”
“Hell they dont,” Keeney answered. “They knew where the Philippines was and where Cuba was. We’re right in their backyard. You can be damn sure they know what’s going on here. They know it all. And boys, they’ll call it treason.”
“So what?” I cried. “Hit’s a lousy bunch of Republicans is all it is. Hit’s a rich man’s government and hit’s a coal operators’ government. We dont have to take nothing offn it. Aint yall never heard of the Declaration of Independence? Hit’s our god-given right.”
An Italian in the bleachers began to sing in his language and others joined in, clapping their hands. Keeney pushed his way through to me, took my shirt in his two hands.
“I want this as bad as anybody,” he said. “But they want it too. Rondal, we heard things. We think one of the boys that talked this thing up is a company agent. They want us to attack because they know they’ll win and they’ll call it treason and they’ll have an excuse to break us all over this state.”
“They got to win first,” I said. “Back off and you’re done broke.”
“I want to say go on, but I can’t. What I said has to be the official position.”
We stayed on that ball field and argued for over an hour. Some men drifted off, like they were reluctant to leave but had lost sight of the craziness that had brought them there. Others stood with their arms folded, ready to march if only Keeney said go. The Italians sang for a while, then lapsed into a sun-beaten silence. One Italian who wore a uniform I’d never seen before came over to where I stood arguing with Keeney. He shook my hand.
“You say good things,” he declared. “My papa, he come to this country for the freedom. He can’t find the land to buy. Then he get crushed in the roof fall, poom!” He clapped his hands. “Now, where I go to find the freedom, huh? Alaska? Pah! I tell my wife, I have to keep look here, you know?” He turned on Keeney, jabbering in Italian, and flicked his fingers beneath his chin the way the Tallies do to show they’re disgusted.
“What the hell kind of uniform is that?” Keeney asked.
The man drew himself up to his full height. “Italian army,” he said proudly. “My papa’s uniform.”
“Shit,” Keeney said. He shoved back his hat, looked at me cockeyed, shook his head and smiled. “Before I took over this district, the leadership was so careful they looked ten ways before they pissed.”
“I know it. I aint thinking hard of you, Frank. But me and my brother left folks in tents at home. We aim to go back there.”
In the end it was out of both our hands. Talcott and I were ready to order our train back to Blair when men came running from the ball field, calling at us to wait for them. Two men had arrived on a railroad handcar, calling that the state police had crossed Blair Mountain and shot up the mining camp at Sharples. Scores were dead, they claimed, including women who were kidnapped and forced to march as a shield in front of the policemen. I spied Frank Keeney on the station platform just before we pulled out.
“Send the boys back that have started home!” I yelled.
He waved his hand and let it drop as though he hardly had the strength to lift it. A dark wet patch spread under the arm of his light suit jacket.
“Come on with us!”
“I got to go home and pack,” he replied. “I reckon I’ll be in prison for a spell.”
Carrie and I spent the night in a barn on Hewitt Creek that belonged to a Holiness preacher who’d joined our fight. They are tough old birds, the Holiness, not scared of a thing. This one had been in the sun so long and worked so hard he looked to be made out of rope. We told him we were married and he offered us his bed but we said no, we’d not put him out. In fact, we wanted to be alone. But although no one else was in the barn, I touched her self-consciously. I was aware of the men camped around us, ready to climb the mountain in the face of the machine guns. I heard them breathe, felt their hands supporting me as I rolled atop her. Afterward I waited, quiet, for her to speak, to fret aloud over the danger I was in and beg me to be careful.
Instead she asked, “What’s your idea of heaven?”
It was a typical Carrie question, and just the sort of thing I didn’t want to think on right then.
“Never considered it before,” I said grumpily. Then I relented, remembered the thrill of fear when it occurred to me on the train that she might be one of the women endangered by the police and the gun thugs.
“What do you think about heaven?” I asked, not really wanting to know.
“Heaven is where everyone you love is all in one place.” She said it quickly, like she’d thought about it before.
“Sounds like a damn cemetery,” I said.
She nipped my ear lobe with her teeth and I yelped.
“Ifn you’re so smart-alecky, how come you’re scairt to answer my question?”
“I might die tomorry,” I said. “I dont like to think on it.”
She pressed her face against my shoulder. “I know it.”
A tenderness filled me. I kissed her hair and it clung to my dry lips, tickled.
“Hit’s this here,” I said. “Heaven is this here. Hit’s all these men together, and you, and knowing this here is the way we was meant to do. But it only lasts a minute. Then hit’s gone.”
She kissed me. “I love you,” she said.
The response leaped to my lips and died there. I turned my head away, shamed.
Her thin arms around my chest never loosened their hold. “You dont have to say. I know as much as I need to.”
She never did beg me not to go. It was then I knew what I had in her. She’d throw out no snares to trip me and slow me, to keep me from giving everything up to what was coming. It takes a hell of a woman to be like that.
Twenty-two
CARRIE BISHOP
THE HOTEL AT CLOTHIER WAS QUIET UNTIL WORD OF THE SHOOTINGS at Sharples. I was stretched out on my bed reading Bleak House, the black-trimmed window frame wide open to the Sunday morning sunshine. I heard men yelling from the direction of the train depot, then loud voices in the lobby below. When I went downstairs I saw a crowd outside listening to a short, curly haired man who stopped talking often to catch his breath in great sobs.
“Hit were the state police and Chafin’s thugs! They shot up our hou
ses with the younguns still yet inside. They caught the women and held them out front so’s we couldnt git off a shot. They’s three good men laying dead up there.” His hands went to his face. “They hit my baby in the arm. Doc Lewis had to cut it—”
No one cried out in anger. They listened in silence now, and when one of the man’s friends led him away they shouldered their rifles and began walking toward Logan. I went over to Doctor Booker.
“They’ll all be coming back,” I said.
Blair Mountain was one of the most powerful mountains I’d ever seen. It sprawled the length of Hewitt Creek and thrust out its arms to push away the punier hills. Shadows rolled across the folded slopes to mark the time of day, and sometimes the folds opened into a cove, seductive, that promised a way across. But there were no passes through.
“How will you go over?” I asked Rondal before he set out with the Point Lick men.
“We aint sure,” he admitted. “Some will try over to Sharples, but we hear the road’s guarded pretty good. And the blackberry and mountain laurel is growed up too thick to pass over the ridge in places. We’ll have to hunt and peck for a place to cross.”
“You should have waited for the cold before you marched,” I said.
“But they’s cover for us when the leaves is on the trees. Besides, you got to go when your time comes.”
He buttoned me into my wrinkled white uniform and walked me up the creek to a one-room schoolhouse that would serve as our field hospital. Then he left me without a word, with only the most casual wave of a hand. I went cold with fear. There was something about the back of him as he walked toward the creek with his slight limp, something that said even if he crossed Blair Mountain he would keep on going to God knew where, but it would be out of my life.
I ran into the schoolhouse in a panic. Dr. Booker was already there, opening boxes of supplies.
“I got to do something! I wont never see him again!”
He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed tight. “They’s plenty to do right here. And that’s all you can do, child.”
“But I’m going to have his baby,” I blurted out.
He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“You aint told him?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Good. You’re strong that way, you’ll be just fine. Now help me with this here place before the shooting starts.”
We carried the students’ desks outside and set them beneath an elm tree. I poured water from the creek into a jar, dropped in a metal ball filled with English tea I’d bought in Charleston, and set it in the sun. Light brown currents swirled through the water like liquid marble. Inside the school we pushed a table next to the teacher’s desk to make an operating table, emptied the bookcase and set out medicines, scrubbed the floor and the window sills, pumped water and built a fire.
At dinnertime we ate ham sandwiches and sipped tea cooled in the creek. A Dr. Mason joined us. Dr. Booker met him the day before at Clothier. Dr. Mason claimed no politics but said he was once an army doctor and knew how to dig a bullet out of a man. He said it with such relish that I shuddered. His white hair was greasy and he smelt of alcohol, but we let him stay.
“I was over in Logan two days ago,” Dr. Mason said. “The place was crawling with armed men.”
“Who are they?” I asked. “Where do they come from?”
“Well, lots of Baldwin-Felts guards, of course. Sheriff Chafin’s deputies. Townspeople from Logan and Justice, Welch, Bluefield. Bankers, lawyers, doctors. A few American Legion Posts. Saw their flags. And college boys down from Morgantown on their summer vacations. Boys who were too young to fight in the big war, I suppose.”
“I reckon they think they missed something,” Dr. Booker said.
“They’re all armed to the teeth. In fact, one of them already got drunk and shot his own man accidentally. But they’ve got plenty of machine guns. And they’re building bombs.”
“What?”
“That’s right. Got a regular factory in an old warehouse over there.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what these miners think they’re going to do. Even if they make it to Logan and Justice, do they think they can run things? Of course, they probably wouldn’t do any worse than the rest of these hillbillies.” He laughed heartily.
I stood up so fast I spilled my tea, and turned my back on him. Just as I did there came a loud tearing sound from the ridge that spread the length of the holler, as though the jagged edge of the mountain top had caught on the sky and ripped it open.
We froze, our eyes turned upward. The gunfire continued without ceasing.
“I served in the war with Spain,” Dr. Mason said slowly, “and this gunfire’s as heavy as anything I heard there. How many of these medical stations do the miners have?”
“Three,” Dr. Booker said.
“They’ll need them,” said Dr. Mason.
A company of about eighty miners passed by in their blue overalls and red bandanas. They bore the bright blue banner of their local union hall, embroidered by their wives, emblazoned with two American flags and a golden eagle, hands clasped in solidarity, and the slogan, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” Unlike the men on the first day out of Charleston, they did not joke or call out, but trudged silently, their faces set. We had watched companies just like them pass by all day.
Within half an hour, a dead miner, a Negro shot through the head, was carried down to us. Shortly after, the first wounded men arrived.
Twenty-three
RONDAL LLOYD
THREE DAYS ON THE MOUNTAIN, AND I KNEW WE COULD BREAK through at Crooked Creek gap. Three days since, frightened and already weary from days on the march, we walked up the mountain in the quiet of the morning, no sound except our breathing and the snapping of twigs, no sound until we could see the blue sky above the ridge and the machine guns opened up on us. Three days back and forth, I scarcely slept and scarcely ate, and the briars ripped my clothes to shreds. I was everywhere, on Spruce Fork and Beech Creek and Hewitt.
Blair had the worst of it. The gun thugs waited in force at Blair, where the main road crossed. We soon decided it would be impossible to breach the defenses, and kept up a steady fire only to occupy the defenders. At Sharples I met a company of men just arrived from Pennsylvania. I sent them to the head of Hewitt, where Talcott was in charge.
Talcott and his men had taken over an abandoned mining works down holler from Crooked Creek gap. Besides his own Point Lick men, he had a company of Negroes all the way from Northfork in McDowell County. I joined him on the evening of the second day. We talked about Blair.
“The damn machine guns never stop,” I said. “The men git up the nerve to make a charge but they just git pinned down. Cant charge straight up the hill no how because of the goddamn bushes.”
Talcott spat. “Here too. Hit’s like the trenches only upside-down. Hit’s like climbing a damn wall, except they aint no place to git a toe hold.”
Above us the gunfire was more sporadic.
“They’re gitting tired,” said the man beside Talcott.
“Want to try again?” said Talcott. He waved his arm. “Come on, boys!”
We poured out of the rusting tin sheds, climbed over rotting timbers, reached a slippery pile of slate. Immediately the bullets kicked up the top of the slate pile. The man beside me fell wounded. Flying slate cut my face. The others ran back to the sheds. I followed, dragging the wounded man by the leg.
Inside, I leaned against the wall in the semi-darkness, breathing hard. Talcott handed me a canteen.
“Hit will be dark soon,” he observed.
“How do we go up?” I said.
“Damned if I know.”
“You were in the goddamn army.”
“Hell, you think I’m General Pershing?” He leaned closer. “You know what hit would take to breach that there hill? Ever man we got, going up in the face of them machine guns, knowing full well that half of them will git kilt in the charge. Then hand-to-hand combat at
the top. And the only thing that will make a man do such a durned-fool thing is ifn he knows for sure they’s a firing squad waiting ifn he disobeys. That there is how they drug us outen them trenches and that is the only way.”
“Then what can we do?”
He shrugged. “I’m thinking on it.”
The firing continued heavy that night, for the defenders feared we might use the darkness to cover an attack. The mountainside was alive with explosions of orange sparks. We took shifts, some spreading out along the hillside to return the fire, others sleeping under cover. I slept two hours. Then I woke, and the air in the sheds was too close to fall back to sleep. I went outside, crouched behind a tipped-over railroad sidecar and sucked on a cigarette. I stayed there watching the moon float behind the clouds and wondered briefly about Carrie. She was busy, likely, and wore out, but safe. The defenders could pass by us no more than we could break their line. Again I studied the flashing lights on the mountainside.
“Beech Creek,” I said aloud, then shook my head. The shooting was heavier there. I threw down my cigarette butt in disgust.
“Big brother,” Talcott called from the shed, “come on in here. I got someone I want you to meet.”
A skinny man with thin blond hair cowered in the corner while the Negroes who had been on patrol trained their rifles on him. He wore a dirty white armband, the badge of Don Chafin’s volunteers.
“Dont k-kill me,” he whined, his words so slurred as to be barely understandable. “Oh, lordy, dont sh-sh-oot. I’m just a poor ole miner like you.”
“You’re a scab,” Talcott said.
“No! I work over to Ethel camp. They wont let us join no union there. I would ifn I could. You know how it is, boys.”
One of the Negroes poked him with his boot, easy, but the man jumped liked he’d been hurt.
“Aint got no union in McDowell,” said the Negro, “but we’re fightin on this here side.”
“You’re fighting for them,” Talcott said.
“Oh, no!” The man wept, his mouth wet and bent like it was made of rubber. “They made me. They come pulled us outen the mine. Said we had to plug up Crooked Creek Gap. Said they was short of men there.”
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