Chapter Two Your Local Wobbly Gorden's Grocery in Lafayette keeps a truck idling on the curb for deliveries on the half-hour. Two street musicians are leaning forward on the truck, their hands pressed against the warm engine. Cold October nights turn a guitar player's hands in to gnarled meat hooks, so the engine keeps them ready until a paying customer walks by. The day shift has ended, and the mines of the coal field have blown their whistles. Most miners at the Columbine, like John Ortega, live in the camp's company housing, though a great many come home to the neighboring cities of Lafayette, Louisville, and Erie. In Lafayette, miners had a shot at owning their own homes. Most of the miners have made their way up Simpson Street already, stopping at the stores for last-minute supplies. Wives purchased groceries on a daily basis. Father up Simpson, a pack of farmhands from the east side of town are hitching their horses at the Jewel Theatre to catch the late movie. Children kick up dirt from the unpaved road, diving behind telephone poles and firing make- believe guns in games of Cowboys and Indians that their fathers and grandfathers had played for real. Tiny cottages, bookending the business district, are alight with soft scarlet and orange as the evening fires die down. Inside the mercantile store, the clerk reads a copy of the *Lafayette Leader* with his feet on the counter. His eyes scan over the weekly Christian Science column, offering the latest research on which prayers will cure which diseases. As the crowds thin out and the children return home, the hum of electric streetlights, and nickering horses, fills the quiet spaces of the street, and the two musicians spot a trio of prospects coming up the road. The trio come closer to the musicians, stopping under the streetlights at Michigan Avenue, groaning, shuffling in a kind of askew crab-walk. This crab-walk is the universal identifier of a coal miner, acquired from picking and shoveling on their backs for hour upon hour. From the Michigan intersection, Simpson Street begins its slow incline to meet Public Road to the east. The feeblest horse in the nearby livery stable could handle that hill, but it stops Jacques, Eastenes, and Spanudakhis dead in their tracks. Jacques looks up at Spanudakhis. "You know something, Greek?" "What's that, Jay-coo?" replies the Greek. "It's terrifying to see your life flash before your eyes," says Jacques, "but the seventh or eighth time, it gets a little old." Eastenes nods, and wheezes out, "I'd like to ask God to show me someone else's life next time." They hear a bell ring on the door of the RMFC company store. It's Jerry Davis, carrying a bad of raw pinto. "Whaddaya know, who let these brutes out?" "Whaddaya know?" asks Jacques. For a moment, Simpson Street bounces with that standard miner's greeting of "Whaddaya know," applicable in any and all situations a coal-digger might find themselves in. "Working the night shift, Jerry?" asks Eastenes. David nods. "Anything I should know about tonight?" Spanudakhis grunts. "What shouldn't you know? That's a shorter list." Eastenes hears tiny footfalls behind him, and knows who it is. He just wanted a few more minutes to prepare himself, before he sprang his day onto his family. "Daddy!" yells Dorothy. Dorothy grew every time he saw her, thinks Eastenes. Eastenes picks his daughter up and swings her around. He sees his wife Bertha walking up, too. She knows, with that ESP some spouses share, that something went wrong at the mine today. Eastenes hates laying his worries on Bertha; her days are just as hard. "And just what are you doing out of bed?" Eastenes asks Dorothy. "You didn't give us your pie yet!" she says. *The pie*, thinks Eastenes... Every coal miner in American carries a lunch bucket. The lower half is a pail for water (more often filled with beer), and the top part carries a sandwich and a slice of pie. No matter if the miner had three children or ten, half the pie was divided among the children. Even if the coal companies made him work a twenty- hour shift, Eastenes was sure he would come home to find his children's eyes peeking at him through the shutters, waiting for that pie. "A pie like this is a special occasion," says Eastenes: "table settings, cinnamon sprinkles, and milk! How about you run home and get it ready?" Dorothy runs back home without a word, sure to relay the message to her five brothers and sisters. As soon as Dorothy is out of earshot, Eastenes turns to Spanudakhis. He asks, "Do you have any credits? I need to get another slice of pie." "Now hold on," says Bertha. "You only eat the whole pie when you get nervous. What happened this time?" "His room's support beam rotted," blurts the Greek, "the whole damn roof collapsed. Bertha readies a cry of exasperation, but she doesn't have it in her tonight. She'll never know the mad scramble out of a coal room as the falling rock crushed everything left behind to splinters. Still, she knows the sound of three blasts from the mine whistle, meaning something terrible had happened. She knows the dread of wondering if death had come for her family this time. Bertha grabs her husband, hugging him close. "To beat hell, not again!" she says. "If they'd just pay you to put up a new beam!" Bertha hurries back up the street. "Try not to break your neck on the way home!" she calls back to Eastenes. "If you get hurt, I'll kill you!" "Nice to see you too, dear," says Eastenes. He turns back to the other miners and says, "Almost broke my leg getting out of that room when it caved in." "Ah, that rotted beam's been on its way out for weeks," says Davis. "Why didn't you replace it, East?" "It would have been deducted from my pay" says Eastenes. "We need that money for heating. Dorothy got pneumonia last year; I'm not risking that again." Jacques smirks and says "Or maybe the heating money fell down a beer bottle." *Far from it*, thinks Eastenes, *for a Louisville Frenchman to suggest that*. Over in the Frenchtown district, miners were known for their homemade wine, sold by the barrel in the speakeasies of Front Street. "Believe me, *mon-sewer* Jay-coo," says Eastenes, "some days I wish it had, but in Lafayette, if you get caught with booze, they can take away your house! It's written right into the deed." He grumbles something about 'uptight Methodists', and raises a holy hand to the waning crescent moon. "So praise be, my immortal soul is unmolested by the devil's drink, *hallelujah*!" "Funny, isn't it?" says a voice from behind the men. The four miners turn to see and old, gangly man standing by the livery stable. Jacques knows him, and thinks that for a man that couldn't shut up, Adam Bell was light on his feet. Bell was older than most miners, with wise eyes guarded behind spectacles. As he steps under the streetlight, Jacques sees that Bell is carrying his ever-present book of local laws and statutes. "What's funny?" asks Eastenes. Bell smiles. "We work all day, digging coal by carbide light, dodging rocks and rotten wood beams, until we'd give our right arm for enough liquor to take the pain away. Enough drink to keep us from realizing it doesn't have to be like that." "Not you again" says Jacques. "Who, again?" asks Eastenes. The old man extends a hand to Eastenes. "Adam Bell. Your local Wobbly." "Wobbly?" asks Eastenes. "Wobbly," repeats Bell, "a member of the Industrial Workers of the World." "A *union*" whispers Jacques. "Oh..." says Eastenes, thinking. "So why do they call you a Wobbly?" Bell shrugs. "No-one knows. One day it just stuck." Jacques prods Bell's shoulder. "Hey, there's not really a strike down south, right?" "More and more people joining every day," says Bell. "*Magnifique*," says Jacques. He pulls out his pack of chewing tobacco and bites off a corner before passing it to Davis. "Just what we need, everyone out of work, right before winter." "Marooned in a frozen wasteland," says Jacques. He gnaws at the tobacco. "No-one to feed our wives and children," says Eastenes. "Not a happy thought," says Bell, "no argument there, comrade." "Well, count me out, pall," says Eastenes. "My family needs a strike like I need two left feet." "Remember the last strike? The Long Strike?" says Eastenes. "Five years we held out, five years! For nothing!" "And then... people started dying," says Jacques. The men named off the violence they had seen or heard about. The strikebreaker in Superior who died in a shootout with police at the train depot. The guards at the Hecla Mine in Louisville, who tried to stop a siege of the mine by drowning the strikers with a flooded reservoir. The nights where private detectives took pot shots at anyone crossing the street. In a low whisper, Eastenes adds one word: "Ludlow." The word hangs in the air like a cloud of smoke. Eastenes looks at Bell. "I hear the old miners talk about Ludlow. The White City. The coal company thugs killed nineteen people." The month of April hung heavy in the minds of coal miners, because April had been the month of Ludlow. After five life-draining years of strike, miners in the Southern Coal Field had built a tent colony at Ludlow, two hundred miles south of Lafayette. The state militia had made sport of firing their guns into the tents, the homes they called the White City, and so miners had dug deep trenches underneath for their families to hide in. On April 20th, 1914, the militia set fire to the tents, and as the flames spread, wives and children, crowded in those trenches, suffocated on the smoke. The miners had asks for fair pay. They asked for the mines to be safe. Since they were paid by the ton for the coal they mined, they asked for weigh machines that actually worked. For all this, the coal companies opted to wait it out, until that day in April when the White City was devoured by flame, when all watched wives, sons, and daughters die cowering in their own graves. It had been thirteen years since Ludlow, and not one coal miners could say his life had improved. April hung heavy for a miner, indeed, for it was the grief of Good Friday, without the redemption of Easter. When a miner thought of Ludlow, his blood ran as black as the coal. "We can't have another Ludlow, Mister Bell," says Eastenes. Davis and Jacques continue chewing their tobacco, eyes glazed with violent visions. Bell stares down at his scuffed shoes. "I had friends at Ludlow. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them. I guess if we don't strike, that can't ever happen again." Jacques applauds. "See, even a Wobbly can learn!" "We can expect more of the same thing, over and over," says Bell. "More rotten wood beams, because they still won't pay you to put up new ones. And then when they do pay you, it's with scrip; that way, you can never save up enough money to leave. That's what we can look forward to if we don't strike. Tell me, Mister..." Bell points to the Greek. "Spanudakhis." "Mister Spanudakhis, when was the last time you saw the sun?" "Well, let's see..." Spanudakhis counts on his fingers, mouthing out the numbers. "Last Sunday, I bet," says Bell. "You go into the mine before the sun is up, and when the cage takes you back to the surface, the sun has already set. For a coal miner, Sunday really is a *sun- day*." Davis speak up. "Say, wasn't there a song about that in Louisville?" "*Oui*, says Jacques, "it's *Nuit Charboneusse*, no?" "*Charbon*, that's *coal*, I think," says Davis. "I'd heard it as *Coal-Black Night*." Jacques yells over to the street musicians by Gorden's Grocery. "Hey! You two! Plays us that song *Nuit Charboneusee*!" The two musicians look at each other. With hardly a beat, their fingers pluck across the string, playing those twangy, high- lonesome melodies that carry through every coal town from the Book Cliffs of Utah to the grasslands of Oklahoma. Jacques had called it *Nuit Charboneusse*, and Davis called it *Coal-Black Night*, but the story of the song was the same in all tongues. On a cold winter morning, a young boy followed the wagon trails out of town to a frozen lake. Out on the far shore, the windows of the power plant cast a sunset glow over the ice. The boy saw a group of old men standing on the lake shore, playing bocce ball and taking sips of company-store whiskey. The boy asked the old men if he could join them at bocce, and one of them, annoyed, told the boy to go home. The boy did go home, and his mother asked him why he was crying. The boy said "that man" sent him home. What man, asked his mother. "The man I see on Sundays," the boy said. The mother said, *"Don't worry child I know the one; that was your father, and you're his son."* The last chord of the song hangs suspended in the air on Simpson Street. Eastenes looks up to see the first wisps of snow descend on the town. The flakes swoop low, dancing a few inches off the ground, before pooling into dark blotches in the dirt road. Winter was not far away, and in the story of the song, the men saw the future all too clear. The pain of Ludlow had resigned them to a world where men forgot their children's faces, and children never saw their fathers. The men believed they'd be paid next week, or believed they would have another drink, but that was about all they did believe. In the quiet snowfall, the years since Ludlow stretched long behind them. They knew what that road felt like. Could they survive that same road for another thirteen years? How did the song go, again? *Sold my body away for a dollar a day, now you got my spirit for free.* "Hey Nick." Spanudakhis looks over at Eastenes. "See if they have any pies left at the company store. My little girl wants some dessert with her dad." The men go their separate ways. Bell hopes the boarding house didn't lock him out again. He feels Eastenes watching him and looks back. "Mister Bell?" says Eastenes. "I hope you know what you're doing. Count us in." The snow is falling harder as the men hurry home.