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Nilson touched the desk here and there with his fingertips. “Even the people you’re trying to help will hate you most of the time. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why do you want to join, then?”
Jim’s grey eyes half closed in perplexity. At last he said, “In the jail there were some Party men. They talked to me. Everything’s been a mess, all my life. Their lives weren’t messes. They were working toward something. I want to work toward something. I feel dead. I thought I might get alive again.”
Jim jumped up and stood in front of the bench and whipped the leaf skeleton across his palm. “I’m getting to this: In that cell were five men all raised in about the same condition. Some of them worse, even. And while there was anger in them, it wasn’t the same kind of anger. They didn’t hate a boss or a butcher. They hated the whole system of bosses, but that was a different thing. It wasn’t the same kind of anger. And there was something else, Mac. The hopelessness wasn’t in them. They were quiet, and they were working; but in the back of every mind there was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated. I tell you, there was a kind of peacefulness about those men.”
Lean-face burst out angrily. “Know what they’re payin’, fella? Fifteen cents, fifteen lousy cents!"
“Well, what do you want?” Mac demanded. “Jesus Christ, man! You ain’t got the nerve to say you want to eat? You can eat an apple while you’re workin’. All them nice apples!” His tone grew hard. “S’pose we don’t pick them apples?”
Lean-face cried, “We got to pick ’em. Spent every Goddamn cent gettin’ here.”
Mac repeated softly, “All them nice apples. If we don’t pick ’em, they’ll rot.”
“If we don’t pick ’em, somebody else will.”
“S’pose we didn’t let nobody else pick?” Mac said.
The men about the fire grew tense. “You mean—strike?” Lean-face asked.
Mac laughed. “I don’t mean nothin’.”
“Sure they liked it. Men always like to work together. There’s a hunger in men to work together. Do you know that ten men can lift nearly twelve times as big a load as one man can? It only takes a little spark to get them going. Most of the time they’re suspicious, because every time someone gets ’em working in a group the profit of their work is taken away from them; but wait till they get working for themselves. Tonight the work concerned them, it was their job; and see how well they did it.”
Jim said, “You didn’t need all that cloth. Why did you tell London to burn it?”
“Look, Jim. Don’t you see? Every man who gave part of his clothes felt that the work was his own. They all feel responsible for that baby. It’s theirs, because something from them went to it. To give back the cloth would cut them out. There’s no better way to make men part of a movement than to have them give something to it. I bet they all feel fine right now.”
A truck went by, carrying off the filled boxes. The old man continued, “I was in the north woods when the Wobblies was raising hell. I’m a top-faller, a damn good one. Maybe you noticed how I take to a tree at my age. Well, I had hopes then. ’Course the Wobblies done some good, used to be there was no crappers but a hole in the ground, and no place to take a bath. The meat used to spoil. Well, them Wobblies made ’em put in toilets and showers; but, hell, it all went to pieces.” His hand went up automatically for more apples. “I joined unions,” he said. “We’d elect a president and first thing we knowed, he’d be kissing the ass of the superintendent, and then he’d sell us out. We’d pay dues, and the treasurer’d run out on us. I don’ know. Maybe you young squirts can figure something out. We done what we could.”
Dan’s big hand found Jim’s arm just above the elbow, and crushed it until it hurt. “I got things out of it while I was at it,” he said. “I’d go up a pole, and I’d know that the boss and the owner of the timber and the president of the company didn’t have the guts to do what I was doing. It was me. I’d look down on ever’thing from up there. And ever’thing looked small, and the men were little, but I was up there. I was my own size. I got things out of it, all right.”
“They took all the profits from your work,” Jim said. “They got rich, an’ when you couldn’t go up any more, they kicked you out.”
“Yes,” said Dan, “they did that, all right. I guess I must be gettin’ pretty old, kid. I don’t give a damn if they did—I just don’t give a damn.”
“And who are your neighbors?” Mac asked quickly. “I’ll tell you who they are: Hunter, Gillray, Martin. Who holds your paper? Torgas Finance Company. Who owns Torgas Finance Company? Hunter, Gillray, Martin. Have they been squeezing you? You know God damn well they have. How long you going to last? Maybe one year; and then Torgas Finance takes your place. Is that straight? Now suppose you got a crop out with no labor charges; suppose you sold it on a rising market? Could you clear out your paper?”
Dr. Burton threw back his head and looked at the sky. “Mac,” he said. “Look at the physiological injustice, the injustice of tetanus, the injustice of syphilis, the gangster methods of amoebic dysentery—that’s my field.
“Revolution and communism will cure social injustice.”
“Yes, and disinfection and prophylaxis will prevent the others.”
“It’s different, though; men are doing one, and germs are doing the other.”
They were nearing the Anderson place. Jim asked, “What do we do now, Mac?”
“Well, we hold the funeral, and we start picketing. It’ll settle down now. They’ll run in scabs with trucks.”
“You still think we’ll get beat, Mac?”
“I don’t know. They got this valley organized. God, how they’ve got it organized. It’s not so hard to do when a few men control everything, land, courts, banks. They can cut off loans, and they can railroad a man to jail, and they can always bribe plenty.”
Mac edged him slowly away, for the men were beginning to move in, toward the shrill voice. “What you blaming us for?” he said. “We didn’t do it. It was those nice neighbors of yours.”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t of happened if we didn’t get mixed up with you.”
Mac turned angrily on him. “Listen, mister, we know you got a sock in the teeth; little guys like you and me get it all the time. We’re tryin’ to make it so guys like you won’t get it.”
“That wagon cost eighteen hundred dollars. Why, man, I can’t go in town without the kids throw rocks at me. You ruined us, that’s what you did.”
Mac asked, “How’s Al feel about it?”
“I think Al’s red as hell himself. Only people he’s sore at are the men that did it.”
heh