The Long November

by James Benson Nablo

  Fern would say, “Yes, Freddie...” and walk over to him and kiss him. The kiss usually got Freddie off being an executive. But when he got wound up on the Union, nothing could stop him.

  Freddie loved hearing about Chicago, and how Gimbel’s ran their business, how strong Gimbel’s union was, and anything he figured was connected with the great scrap between Capital and Labor. Big Business and the Working Man was Freddie’s theme, and he sang it at all opportunities, but he was so damned sincere that you had to respect him even if the theme worked a little thin now and then.

  How about that theme, Joe-boy? A lot of guys wasted a whole bloody year of their lives on it, scrapping, yelling, kicking, biting, and even double-crossing, to swing it. Yes, it was quite a theme, and it marked our Joe and put him on a cold freight to North Bay that night. What is this theme, Joe-boy, that you and Freddie sang in divided chorus. Yes, tell me, Joe, tell me now, can you? I can’t, I don’t know, but I know it applied to Moreland Consolidated and to Freddie Miller and to two thousand other guys. It applied to caved-in stopes, crushed bodies, and long falls; long feet that lead to oily sumps. It’s connected with a tiny girl with big eyes, with a hundred widows and a flock of hunky kids, with something God put there, or nature, or as Freddie would say, “The processes of geology.” The theme is all tied up with half-a-hundred damned things. Like guys giving their lives for $4.85 a day so some bloated son-of-a-bitch can die worth two hundred million; only that isn’t all of it. This is only 1944 and all of it isn’t known.

  God, how I came to hate Moreland Consolidated and to hate Peter Moreland whom I’d never seen, to hate the whole setup from the top of the spidery framework of the shaft-head to the darkest corner of the lowest stope, and it wasn’t because I loved the Working Man so damned much or that I hated Big Business so much; I came to hate it for a look in the eyes of a tiny girl when I put her on a train headed south and said good-by. I wanted to build a monument to a great little guy who tried to be an executive so he could prove his theory about the relationship of capital and labor, and I butted my head like many a smarter lad before me. I learned labor can wash away many a wall it can’t blast. But I still hate Moreland Consolidated, and when that jerk was acquitted on the murder rap, I cheered. Whoever did knock Peter Moreland off should be given a vote of thanks from a grateful populace, for Moreland ripped two hundred million dollars from the guts of Canada and got out so he couldn’t even be taxed on it.

  It’s hard to think of Moreland Lake before I lived with Fern and Freddie. The time Vince McConnell told me about it and the dime novel version of Moreland’s success that went with it, he didn’t add about the shacks people lived in or the 40 below temperature for unending months or anything about the black flies. But Vince just worked in a service station in Cataract City, and the north country to him was one big mass of gold bullion where everyone got to be a millionaire like Peter Moreland. Even Vince dreamed of going north and returning with great gobs of gold for Betty and little Joe Mack McConnell. He didn’t, though, thank God. He didn’t know about the little prospector who stumbled half frozen on an outcropping of a gold-bearing vein, and stayed to prove a gold mine lay under it. Vince didn’t know about the prospector selling his interest for ten grand and then having a whore take him for that. Vince didn’t know about Moreland sitting in his tinhorn office on Bay Street peddling crap investments and treating the new mining issue the same way, until it started to look like a mine; nor did very many people ever know about how fast Peter Moreland ran to those investors and bought back the shares at a small profit on the strength of information they should have had as fast as he. No, Vince, stay with your Horatio Alger dreams and pump your gas and total your books and go home to Betty. Keep your heroes, Vince, because it’s hell when they start to stink; they stink so much more than if they hadn’t been heroes.

  Fern packed our lunches, washed our laundry, cooked our meals and kept the house like a breath of clean air. After Freddie got me on as his helper, Fern worked the same shift at home that we worked at the mine, so she would be awake with the two of us and asleep with her Freddie. It took them hours to get to sleep and I’d hear them as I dozed off, through the pressboard walls, giggling like school kids over some nonsense or very seriously making love. It seemed a shame that Freddie ever had to go to work because they enjoyed each other so. It was a break for me to start as Freddie’s helper on the drilling machine, for Freddie knew his work like he knew his hand. He didn’t weigh more than 135 but he threw that 185-pound machine around like a pillow. I learned a lot about many things from Fern and Freddie, but mostly I’ll remember them as they were, cool, green, and damned clean, and our Joe needed a little cleanliness about then.

  Yes, Freddie-lad, you were a great little man, and I know it must have been damned rough to shove off at twenty-four. Rough to go and leave a girl, just a tiny girl, like Fern, and Christ-awfully rough because your life was starting even in those years to amount to something. I guess it was the night after your fall that I really wished I’d taken it instead of you, Freddie...the night Fern stood crazily in my room in just her nightie and said she’d been talking to you in the sump, and you said you were all right except that it was cold. She stood there trembling and I couldn’t get out of bed to lead her back to her room because I didn’t have anything on. Then I realized she didn’t see me but just you in the sump, so I slipped on a robe and took her back to her own room. I did wish all that night as I held her, sobbing her heart out, that I’d taken the fall instead of you, Freddie...I wished anything that would stop that kid’s heart breaking and straighten out the look in her eyes.

  Freddie wanted me to join the union right away but I hesitated. The Moreland Consolidated knew each name that was added to the union strength and a new man like our Joe might be dropped from the M-C payroll where an older hand at the mine would not be. Other than this, joining the union or not joining made no difference to me; I’d have done it, though, and I finally did, just to make Freddie happy. I needed the job pretty badly and each pay day Freddie would work on me.

  “It’s not a question of you or me as individual guys, Joe, we got to have strength, we got fifteen per cent of the payroll now and by spring we’ll have fifty per cent. Once we tip over the fifty mark the rest’ll come running. The union only wants a fair break, Joe, and we should have it. M-C is a dangerous mine and we should earn a higher scale than other mines pay...the insurance companies won’t gamble, no sir-ee, they know, and my insurance rate is twenty per cent higher than if I worked at any other mine in the north. You see, Joe-boy, we lost fifteen guys at M-C last year...Christ! It seemed like every day somebody got it.”

  Fern’s little girl face would grow serious and suddenly older.

  Summer came and brought the black flies. Big bastards that flew in clouds from the bush. Where they spend the winter in that freezing hole I’ll never know, but they’re plenty alive in the spring. Spring? There’s no spring there, Joe-boy; just like it was in ‘37...in the middle of April it’s 20 below and in the middle of May it’s 70 above. Just cold and hot, and hotter, then colder. And those flies don’t bite a guy like any other damned insect. They take a chunk out of your arm and go sit in a tree and eat it. I’ve sprinted the half mile home from the drys just to keep from feeding those black, hungry bastards.

  We had fun that summer, though. On week ends we’d throw the tent, some blankets, and fishing tackle into the old Essex and limp the seventy odd miles to Temagami. Cool beer and fishing, and back to the fire to clean and cook speckled beauties. Fern always came along and we’d sleep on a bed of pine boughs, three of us, rolled up in a knot in the tent. Or on the summer evenings when we worked the day shift, we’d go to the ball games, and it never occurred to us that Fern wouldn’t come along.

  Fern was bothered a little with the same damned trouble every married woman has when she sees an unattached male. For the first few months she tried to get me married off to one of her girl friends, then gave up. She asked me once.

/>   “Joe, you’re such a nice fellow and you don’t seem to be interested in getting a girl...”

  “You’re my gal, Fern...”

  “I mean seriously, Joe, you take Millicent.”

  “Nix, honey...YOU take Millicent. I know what you mean, Fern, I guess I should, but there is a girl back home, you know...”

  “I thought those letters were from your sister?”

  “They are, Fern. I haven’t heard from this girl in years...”

  “It’s a fine thing! Why don’t you write her, Joe?”

  “I will when I get a little better off...”

  “What’s she like, Joe?”

  “Lovely, like you, Fern...only she’s a little bigger and she’s blond.”

  “And you don’t ever even hear from her?”

  “I hear through my sister; Steffie writes to her...”

  It bothered Fern, and that evening when we were all flopped on the floor playing a three-cornered game of Chinese Checkers, she looked up suddenly and said:

  “Joe, would you like me to write her and ask her up?”

  “No, thanks, Fern, not yet anyway. Maybe before it gets cold...”

  Yes, Steffie, you never got very far away. But I couldn’t ask you to come up to see a helper on a machine in a hole in the ground. A guy who still had to pay a hundred and fifty bucks to a hotel in Toronto before he even had enough clothes to take a girl like you out. I knew better later on, Steffie, but like everything else, I had to slug out those lonely months the hard way. And in the next room I could hear two people making love, and I didn’t know you’d ask nothing more than to share that tiny room of mine. You were still Steffie Gibson of the Gibson mansion and nothing less would I offer you. Oh, Christ, Steffie...the years I’ve wasted.

  In the middle of September the shift foreman figured I knew enough to handle the drilling machine myself and he made me a machine man. This meant I got a helper and Freddie had to start a new man in. My helper was a Finnish kid who knew just two words of English, and they were “Shut up,” and he answered everything that way, with a wide, well-golded smile. Freddie’s helper was an open-mouthed silly boy, but Freddie could get along with anybody.

  Freddie kept trying to get into the accounting department and one night he came home all hopped up over it.

  “Jeez, Joe, it scared hell outa me...just a notice to see O’Sullivan. Me, Freddie Miller, to see the ‘GM’, but when I got in an’ actually talked to him I cooled right out. ‘Well,’ the ‘GM’ says to me, ‘So you want to work in the office, eh Miller?’ ‘Yessir, I says.’ Then he tells me about the union angle...yuh don’t think that’s why they’d give me a job in the office, just ‘cause I might get elected as secretary of the local next month...yuh don’t think that’s it do yuh, Joe?”

  I glanced past Freddie and saw the look in Fern’s eyes. She wanted Freddie to take the job on the surface so badly she was almost crying.

  “Of course not, Freddie, they know you’re a good man anywhere...”

  “I hate to quit the local but O’Sullivan says I’d have to become more interested in the company’s side of it...I think I can help both sides more in the office...don’t you, Joe?”

  Freddie just wanted to be told he wasn’t walking out on the boys and so I told him. He was the happiest guy in the world that night, and Fern dabbed a little at her eyes later on in the evening.

  “The punk and I have gotta finish the sampling on number three shaft and then I go to the office. Jeez, Joe, about the first of November I’ll be a white collar man...”

  Crawl up the stopes and drifts, scrape, pick, drill, blast, muck and haul it out to the shaft. Drag it up to the surface and process it. Rush it like hell to another hole in the ground in Kentucky—out of one hole and into another—and somewhere along the line Freddie Miller dies. Yes, you bastards, and all your neatly tagged bricks couldn’t take that look out of Fern Miller’s eyes.

  Do you remember that afternoon in mid-October, Joe? Do you remember how Fern stood and waved good-by to Freddie and you, and how she was still standing there watching you when you turned the corner? How Freddie noticed the cold in the air and said something about winter? How when you were in the drys putting on your underground clothes, Freddie kidded about how soon he’d be “strictly-a-dayman”...”Just call me White-Collar Miller” he’d said. Do you remember when he got off the cage at the 800-foot level he turned and touched your shoulder and said, “See you later, kid”...and in an hour he was dead.

  We never knew just what happened. Only two of them were there, Freddie and the silly-looking boy, and they both took that long fall. Too bad the silly-faced kid didn’t live long enough to die in Italy; he’d have been a natural for it. You never really knew what happened in those cases; two men on a plank scaffold with a sheer drop of dark shaft for 3200 feet below them. A rotted board snaps and they’re gone. But one little twenty-dollar life net would have saved their lives. Maybe he was just a funny little guy with whacky ideas about being an executive, so he could help solve the Great Fight between Capital and Labor, and maybe he was a Great Little Man who might one day have solved the Great Fight. But because a cheap bastard wouldn’t provide life nets, we’ll never know what he might have been after the age of twenty-four, because that’s as far as Freddie Miller goes.

  I had to go home to tell Fern.

  The house looked the same as it had two hours before, when we left. The door was locked and I could hear the bathtub running as I let myself in. I stamped my feet and I heard the water stop in the tub. Fern came out in a robe.

  “Why Joe...I thought I heard someone...”

  I guess my face wore the whole story pretty clearly. She looked at me with those huge eyes, and then she screamed, “JOE?” and started to fold. I grabbed her, and she clung to me, struggling to keep on her feet...after a moment she steadied and asked in a quiet, dead voice:

  “What happened, Joe?”

  I told her. She broke then and sobbed like a terrified child, holding fast to my jacket with her tiny hands, as if in their clutch she held to a world that was trying to slip away. I lifted her up and held her tightly in my arms and she buried her head on my shoulder, and that swell kid’s heart broke, piece by piece. I held her curled in my lap for most of the night, and when she’d cried herself to sleep I carried her to the sofa and put a blanket over her.

  Yes, Freddie-lad, I wish I’d been on the scaffold with the silly-faced boy instead of you. I wish you had stood by the pumps for those weeks waiting for me, watching the oily swill lower inch by inch. But nothing as sensible as that happens in this world, Freddie. You, who should live, die when you’re only twenty-four, and our Joe is lying in a dark room in Italy; and I can’t answer it, by Jesus, I just don’t know why...and somewhere Fern is as lonely as hell.

  The next day was rotten, too, as was every day till we got Freddie’s body. Toward morning, I made coffee and sat there and drank it until Fern awakened. Once or twice she sobbed in her sleep and called “Freddie.” When she opened her eyes, she smiled at me and her color seemed better.

  “Hello, Joe....Where’s Freddie?...What am I doing out here?”

  I tried to answer, “Fern honey...remember last night?...Freddie isn’t coming back...”

  “It’s all right, Joe, I’m still asleep and I’ve had a dreadful dream. D you know, I’ve dreamed about Freddie falling down that shaft...

  Then her color fled and horror came into those huge eyes; she screamed and ran across the room to me. I carried her to her bed and then phoned the doctor. Fern seemed to alternate between the belief that it was all a lousy dream, and the cold, dry sobbing when the truth would force its way through. We never, Millicent nor I, left her alone, and the sobbing was easier to take than the crazy light in her eyes when she pretended Freddie was coming home.

  The nights were hell for Fern; she could see Freddie lying in the sump, and the second night when I led her back to her room, the light died in her eyes and she clung to me and said:

&nbs
p; “Don’t leave me here alone, Joe...”

  There are only three of us who know about this, Fred-die-lad—you, and Fern, and I. No one else knows Fern could only sleep when she clung to me and sobbed herself to sleep. No one but one of us would believe a guy like me could hold Fern through those moments when she thought I was you...and nothing happened. Sometimes she’d press her body against me and kiss me and say, “My Freddie...” and go on sleeping. It was like this every night for three weeks, Freddie-lad, those long damned weeks till we got you from the sump.

  During the day when Millicent came in, I went to the mine and worked with the maintenance crew while they tried to pump out the bottom of Number 3. The pumps broke down in the first week when we had the water down a hundred feet, and the sump rapidly filled again. The refilling brought the silly-faced boy back with it. He was pretty badly smashed. Freddie must have been caught on a submerged timber or he’d have come then, too. The second week we tried dynamite, but he didn’t show, and we knew then it was the long pull until the sump could be emptied enough to uncover Freddie. I had to get back to the house to let Millicent go, and I knew what to expect. During the day Fern would be all right because she knew surely this day would find Freddie. When I’d have to go home and say “No,” the crazy light would come back, and as the days passed she grew worse instead of better.

  Millicent said, “If they don’t get him soon, it’ll be too late.”

  I guess the worst night was the night before we did get him. God knows what might have happened if it had gone a day longer. Fern’s mind was snapping. Millicent would make her eat something each day and would get dinner for me before she left. I’d sit and hold Fern in my lap until eight or nine o’clock, and then make her take some of the pills the doctor said would put her to sleep. On that night, though, the pills had no more effect than water on a duck, and I was afraid to give her more. She just sat there and trembled. Then suddenly she could fight no more and she looked at me and smiled and said: