The Land of Plenty, page 26
He paused and Johnny looked away, sickened at the picture his words called up, turning to look at Winters who continued to work on his car without seeming to hear what Dwyer was saying.
“The train went on. No way to stop it. We had to wait till it got back. Nobody wanted to go down where the kid was. The guys all stood around out of the way. Finally I went down. Both legs were practically off. But the funny thing was that the weight of them logs sort of clamped the flesh together and he wasn’t losing much blood. And he was conscious. Some goofy bastard yelled to me. Is it bad? What’ll we do?’ I was down by the kid, I wasn’t sure if he could hear me, but I said, ‘One leg is mashed, not so bad, only stop that God-damn shay!’ It was getting dark; it was raining like hell; I didn’t think he could tell. But he said [here Dwyer’s voice grew heavy with contempt] ‘You’re a God-damned liar!’ Jesus, I didn’t know what to say. I stood there. The guys were all standing back about twenty-thirty feet—it was a green crew; they couldn’t get old hands up there with a gun—and that kid yelled back at them: ‘He’s a God-damned liar. They’re both off, right at the ass’.”
Johnny drew a deep breath. Dwyer ground his cigarette into the damp ground. At the house next door the woman stepped out on the porch and shook out a tablecloth, glancing at them briefly before she went inside. “Ah,” Johnny said.
“Tough kid,” Winters said.
“Yeah,” Dwyer replied. “He was tough.”
But Johnny drew up inside, racked at the brutal picture and the hard words, trying to put them out of his mind and hoping something better happened…. “What happened?” he managed to ask.
“What?”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. He died. You think a man lives when he’s cut in two?”
In the oppressive silence his father came into the yard. He greeted them briefly and sat down on the wooden walk that led to the shed in the rear. Presently he asked Dwyer, “What’d you hear?”
“The same thing. He’s going to can you anyway.”
“The Perkins girl?”
“Yeah.”
Johnny looked up in surprise, recognizing the reference to the way they got their news and wondering that they took it for granted.
Hagen asked, “What’d she say?”
“Nothing. She just heard him beefing. He said you’d spent your last night there.” Dwyer grinned slightly. “When I think about it,” he said, “it’s a wonder to me you fellows didn’t get the can last night.”
Hagen nodded and asked Winters about his wife. “Better,” Winters said. He put down the valve grinder. “I don’t know why I go on working on this old bastard,” he said. “Sometimes I think it ain’t worth the trouble it causes me…. Did she hear him say anything about me?”
“She didn’t say.”
“I figure I might just as well be looking for a job. Ever since I popped him.”
“He don’t know you popped him.”
“Somebody’ll tell him.”
Hagen disagreed cautiously. “You can’t tell. A man don’t like to go around asking people who it was smacked him one. Besides, a lot of people are glad you popped him. More’n you’d think.”
Sorenson came into the yard. “I figured I’d find you men here,” he said. “I just had an idea. I had to take my kids down to see the parade, and when I got home the thought just came to me—it’s two to one they’ll be over at Winters’. I figured they wouldn’t be at your place,” he said to Hagen, “because of all your people being there. So that left only Dwyer and Winters, and I could see there was nobody at Frank’s place. There’s going to be trouble tomorrow,” he announced. Johnny thought he heard a slight note of satisfaction, a rubbing-it-in tone, in Sorenson’s voice. “Carl’s been all over the district. He was down at Bullett’s place by ten o’clock and as soon as he left, Bullett went and got Prent Fisher and they waited till Carl got back. Then Carl drove up on the hill to the Old Man’s house and got Morley and him and Morley went out to the plant.”
“How you know?”
“My wife seen him go into Bullett’s and Molly told Gil Ahab about going up to MacMahon’s. Old Mike seen them out in the factory.”
“Son of a bitch gets around,” Dwyer said. “I never saw a fat man get around the way he does.”
“He works hard at his job. You got to give him credit,” Sorenson said. “He never rests. Mac will run out to Chicago or go off shooting bears some place, but Belcher, he never lets up. You have to give a man like that credit.”
They sat back and waited again, hovering uncertainly before saying the questions that were in their minds, waiting for someone else to start talking. Winters continued to work on his car. They watched him as intently as if he were carrying on some unique experiment or as if he were performing a major operation and they were a group of students studying his methods.
“The way I look at it,” Sorenson announced abruptly, “There’s a good chance he’ll fire all of us.”
“I was just thinking….”
“What do you figure on doing?”
Winters put down his tools. “Figure it out,” he said. “Why do we have to take it? How many we got? How many we sure of? Sooner or later he’s going after you guys because you stuck up for Hagen. Sure as hell he’ll clean out every Goddamn one of you. Now, how many can you count on to walk out when he fires Hagen?”
“We got the whole head end of the mill,” Dwyer said.
One of the sawyers and a helper came into the yard. They saluted vaguely, lifting their arms in indifferent greetings, maintaining an air of aimlessness until it seemed they had merely been passing the house and stopped because they saw the men in the yard. Dwyer and Winters glanced at each other. The sawyer worked with Winters and was a new man, one of the men who had come in after Carl finished his first clean-up of the factory, so his presence meant more than that of the the others. He said nothing at all. He stared dully at the ground under his feet, looking dense and patient, all the expression long since driven out of his heavy worker’s features. The helper’s face too was expressionless, only his eyes alert and questioning behind the habitual protective blankness of his face.
“We been figuring what we ought to do,” Hagen explained. “We got word Belcher’s going to give some of us our time. We been going over the men we can count on. We got most of the head end. Some in the glue crew.”
“Five-six in the saw crew,” the sawyer said.
The helper nodded.
“Who?”
“Me and him,” the sawyer said. “Winters and the kid here.” He nodded toward Johnny. He named the others, hesitating over some names, trying to bring in everybody he could, while they tried to identify the men he named, testing them in their own minds and trying to decide how they would act.
“Not more than thirty-five or forty,” Dwyer said. “Even if you get all of them.”
But Winters said quickly, “Think where they are. The whole head end. The electrician and the drier crew and enough sawyers so the saws can’t run. They won’t be able to run.”
“Old Mike,” Hagen said.
“The fireman.”
“Gil Ahab.”
“Yeah.”
Waino and Vin Garl came into the yard. Waino stopped uncertainly beside the back porch while Vin Garl called cheerfully to Winters. “Waino told me you had some trouble last night,” Vin Garl explained.
“He fired me and Hagen,” Winters explained. “Frank and the Dutchman here raised such a stink they had to take us back.”
“Who was hurt?”
“The hoist man. A new man. He died this morning.”
The two Finns found places for themselves and sat down. Vin Garl looked over the men with a faint appraising air, hiding his interest by questioning them carefully about the accident and talking about the man who had been burned at the power house. Waino sat down beside Johnny, nodding to him with a faint uneasiness, unsure of Johnny’s response. But Johnny was too disturbed to notice, preoccupied with the accidents, the man killed at the factory and the man burned to death at the power house, the deaths connecting up with the story Dwyer had told him until it seemed to him that everywhere, all the time, men were being crippled and killed until death did not mean very much to anyone. And they always spoke as if the killings were deliberate and not accidents. “They killed a man in the woods yesterday,” his father would say, or “They killed another logger up by Goose Creek,” as though “they” were out with guns hunting them down…. The Finnish boy relapsed into silence, thinking Johnny did not want to talk to him, Johnny’s manner connecting up in his mind with a thousand rebuffs he had received outside the Finnish part of town, in high school, everywhere except among his own countrymen or at work, and sometimes at work too. Slowly the conversation got back to what they were going to do, but now Johnny had lost interest in it for it seemed to him they were no longer trying to work out ways of keeping his father from losing his job, but arguing back and forth and not getting anywhere. Before Vin Garl came they had been talking easily, but afterwards there were more questions and more explaining, and the Finn, cold and skeptical, seemed to think he knew more than anybody else.
At last he asked Winters what he intended to do. For some reason the question seemed to disturb Winters; he hesitated and looked at the others before he replied. “I don’t know…. We just figured we’d get fifty-sixty men signed up and we’d all walk out if they did anything.”
“Don’t do that,” Vin Garl said.
Waino backed him up. “No.”
“Why not?”
“We did that … we did it two years ago over at Saint Augustine’s Manufacturing. They were going to can the edgerman and we heard about it, so thirty-forty of us agreed to walk out if they fired one of us. But they heard of it and they didn’t fire the edgerman—not then—they waited till one guy showed up drunk one night and they canned him, and some of the guys wanted to walk out and some kicked about walking out because a guy got canned when he came to work drunk, so we started scrapping back and forth and finally about a dozen of us got canned.”
“What do you say to do?”
“Why don’t you call a strike? The whole damn shift. The day shift too. We should have struck when they gave us a cut. If we had any sense we would have struck when they first slapped it on.”
He spoke with assurance, the authority of experience behind his words, but they hesitated; he was a single man; he had not been in the factory long; the word had gone around some-how that he was a trouble-maker. But he worked on the day shift and they were surprised at anyone from the day shift hunting them out and speaking as if he thought the day shift would walk out too. They thought it over, trying to remember the things they had heard that indicated the day shift might go out with them if they walked out.
“It’d be harder,” Sorenson said at last.
“Yeah, but it would work. And this other way you’d just get ——. And besides if you tried to get the cut back everybody would walk out.”
“Yeah.”
Winters said, “I’d hate like hell to have anybody lose his job just because I was getting canned.”
“They got that export order to finish,” Hagen said. “It’s way overdue. That’s the first big export order we’ve had lately. They won’t want to have any trouble till they finish it.”
Sorenson shook his head. “It don’t make any difference to them. Don’t you know there’s a clause in these orders terminating them in case of fire, earthquake, strikes or acts of God? If there’s a strike, the company ain’t responsible for its commitments.”
“You God-damned lawyer.”
“That’s the truth!”
“You’re dumb,” Vin Garl said. “What the hell difference does that make? There ain’t a mill on the harbor that ain’t running on export orders. They’re fighting like hell for them. We get a hell of a big Australia order. How you think they got that? They got it by cutting the price. Then they made up the difference by slapping the cut off on us—made it up and a hell of a lot more. Now suppose they get half the order out and the rest of it tied up. You think them guys in Australia will give them another order, no matter what price they quote? You’re nuts if you do.”
“They’ll fill it at one of the other mills.”
“And what’ll that cost them? Besides, where will they fill it? There ain’t a door factory in the Northwest that some of us ain’t worked in. I know guys who’ve left the factory since I been working there, and they’re up in the Puget Sound outfit’s mills now or at Kitsap Bay—you think them guys would cut a scab order if they knew it?”
“Yeah,” Sorenson said.
“Would you do it?”
“No. But they don’t know what they’re working on. They get an order with a number on it or a bunch of letters like that Fishba order we had—we cut on it for a year and nobody could figure out what it was for until finally somebody saw it was Fisher Bodies. How the hell would they know?—all they’d know was it was an export order.”
“We could tell them, couldn’t we?”
“Aw,” Sorenson said. “Get back to earth.”
“I am! I am down to earth! Now listen to me a minute. What have we been running on for the past year? What? We been running on export. We had that big German order for them big ships they’re building. Then we got that big English order for that hellishing big ship they never finished. Then we got that Italian order for them big liners they’re building. They got to get out and fight like hell for them orders, they got to keep knocking down the price all the time, or them orders’ll go some place else. Last year there was a special amendment to the Sherman anti-trust law permitting corporations to make combinations for export trade. You’re such a hell of a good lawyer, you ought to know about that. Now look. All the companies here in the Northwest signed an agreement setting export prices—all except us. Digby never went into it. Why not? Because he can undersell the whole damn bunch of them and he can do it because he pays lower wages. And even if he did go into it, it wouldn’t make any difference, because if they jacked up the prices the orders would go to the Japs or Canada—them Japs are getting logs right here now and shipping them across and cutting them up and shipping the lumber back here…. You think Digby just decided all at once he’d slap a cut on us? Hell, he’s always trying to cut wages. The difference is when the orders are coming in he tries to keep wages from going up, and when they ain’t coming in he begins working harder, driving wages down…. Don’t be a damn fool,” Vin Garl said gently. “You can see that. He wouldn’t be where he is if he wasn’t always trying to beat wages down. He wouldn’t be where he is any more than a guy who thought the world was flat would be sailing one of them lumber schooners down in the harbor to Japan.”
Sorenson grinned slyly at the others, saying “Listen to this. This is good. So it’s the Japs,” he said scornfully to Vin Garl. “So the Japs are in back of it, are they?”
“No. But you said they could cancel their order if we struck. And I’m just showing you they’ll do anything to keep from canceling that order.”
The boom man came into the yard. He grinned cheerfully at Winters, “I heard you konked that little son of a bitch,” he said.
“Me?” Winters replied. “I never konked anybody.”
“You God-damn Indian. You got a lot of nerve. Hitting a poor old fat man like that.”
“I’d be afraid to konk him,” Winters explained. “I’d be afraid I’d lose my job if I did.”
“You know something?” the boom man asked. “I’d have konked him myself only I was afraid I’d lose my job if I did.”
He climbed into Winters’ car and sat down in the back seat. “Well, men,” he said. He looked at them inquiringly.
Hagen said, “We got to figure.”
Johnny looked around the yard. There were ten of them there. He understood that they had come in because his father had fought with Carl, because they knew Mildred and Gerald had moved in with them and Ruth and Bill were coming and so his father could not afford to be fired. And other men from the factory were coming in all the time. “The whole yard will be filled up pretty soon!” he said to Waino; and then felt foolish when Waino, who had been listening to the arguments, looked at him in surprise.
Vin Garl said restlessly, “You can’t do anything with a little bunch like this. The thing to do is get all the guys together you can. Go around, get fifty-sixty men. They can come here, come down to my place—it don’t make any difference. Get a bunch from the day shift. It don’t pay to go off half-cocked.”
“When?” Winters asked. “I got to go to the hospital. I probably won’t get back till about eight.”
“Seven. Eight. It don’t make any difference.”
Sorenson added, “Look at me. I told my kids I’d take ‘em on the hill and let them watch the fireworks.”
“Come afterwards,” Vin Garl said. “It don’t make any difference about you. You know all about it anyway. We want to get the guys from the day shift that haven’t heard about it.”
The boom man looked at Vin Garl with a sudden interest. “You a union man?” he asked.
“Me? What union is there for a man working where I work?”
“Wobbly?”
“I used to carry a red card during the War. I had a red card when a red card would let you ride on damn near any railroad this side of the Rockies and I had a red card when it was worth your life to get caught with one. I was in that fighting in Everett and after Centralia it got so hot for me I had to beat it to Canada…. But there’s nothing left of them now.”
