Power by Howard Fast Page A

thousand miners locked out of their jobs and their homes, kicked into the fields and the woods, men beaten, men tortured, women whipped and raped—all that because we tried to organize a union. Have you written about that?”
    â€œA little. I suggested some of it in the interview I wrote about you.”
    He stared at me again, as if he were trying to see through me and into me, and then he told me to follow him, leading the way around the house to the barn in back. I looked for Laura but did not see her. There were men around the barn, most of them armed, and they stood apart, not for us but to let a group of women and children come out, gaunt, prematurely aged women whose last shreds of attractiveness had been washed away in grief. They had been weeping, but it was not an act that came easily to them. We went past them and into the barn, and there on the floor, fifteen bodies were laid out. Some men at the back of the barn were sawing and nailing wooden planks for coffins. I looked at the bodies. Ten were men, miners wearing their badge of trade in the black lines etched on their hands and faces, two were boys, one was a woman, and two were little children, girls. There were more women in the barn, and they sat huddled in silent woe.
    â€œIt happened this morning,” Holt told me. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Only Jim Flecker wasn’t a miner. Jim Flecker was a murderer. This is the way they tried him and sentenced him.”
    I remained silent. There was nothing for me to say.
    â€œIs this the way death should come, Cutter?” Holt asked me. “Should it come the way it does in the mines? Do you know how many miners have died in the past ten years? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands? What are we! Jesus God, what are we? They slaughter cattle with more compunction. Are you still neutral, Cutter?”
    â€œYou showed me this. I’ll write about it.”
    â€œThat’s all?”
    â€œI’m not Lazarus. I can’t raise the dead, Mr. Holt.”
    â€œNo, you’re not Lazarus.”
    â€œHow did they pick them?”
    â€œPick them? They didn’t pick them, Cutter. They drove out of Clinton this morning, a carload of them armed to the teeth, and they killed the first miners they found—or men. Those kids weren’t miners, those two boys. The woman was Sadie Stewart, those are her kids, and that’s her husband lying next to her. Her husband ran into their shack, and those hired heroes kept firing into the shack until a roach couldn’t have remained alive in there.”
    â€œI will want their names, if it’s not too much trouble.”
    Holt glanced at me sharply, then nodded. “All right, their names and anything else you want.”

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    They let me work in one of the tents. I had no typewriter with me, so I sat on a stool and put down the story in longhand in my notebook. One of the miners brought me lunch, a tin cup of poor stew that was a thin mixture of meat and potatoes and a slice of bread. It was nothing to grow fat on, but no less than what the others got. By three o’clock, I had finished my story; and I was standing by the tent, trying to think of some way to file it without returning to Clinton, when Laura came over and said hello to me. Her tone was not unfriendly. She wore a white IMU band on her arm, and a white cross was stitched on her dress at the breast. She told me that they were organizing a corps of nurses.
    â€œThen it will be war?”
    â€œThis is our home, Mr. Cutter. This is our land.”
    â€œI know that.”
    â€œBut you don’t believe in fighting for it?”
    â€œThis is the twentieth century in the United States of America. I don’t believe in private wars—no.”
    â€œThen what should we do?” There was no mockery in her question.
    â€œUse the law.”
    â€œWhat law? This is West Virginia, Mr. Cutter. Their law is different here, what