XVII
An old negro, his sleep-wrinkled, shiny coat and paint-stained overalls itchy from stubble acquired in a deserted barn, idled down the switching track that ran behind the Judson lands. His scrubby gray beard was stained with blackberries; his knees were gritty and dank from kneeling beside the brook that slipped over the quartz ledges beside Billygoat Hill. In doubtful cogitation he knocked cinder and chert clusters down the steep fills, swinging his hickory stick with an air of ancient mastery.
"Lawd bless me, look at dem long houses!" as he passed the lower end of Hewintown.
A white man eyed him closely, a short man with a tarnished metal badge on his ore-stained coat.
"Got any wu'k?"
The guard relit his pipe. "Too old, nigger."
"I kin tote a powerful lot."
The guard continued to stare off at Shadow Mountain. Whistling good-naturedly, the old man continued down the track. "New houses! New fences! Things mus' be lookin' up!"
He observed the path that led to the crest just east of Hillcrest Cottage, and took instead the steep descent to the spring lot. He sniffed at the well-placed garden truck, noticed the ducks and the shiny duck house, skirted the widened concrete swimming pool, and came at last past the game house to the spring. From the tin dipper swinging on the twenty-penny nail he took a drink, first clearing out his mouth several times and spitting the warmed water into the spillway.
He looked furtively around, up toward the big estate, then along the path to the eastern crest. He took up the two buckets empty on a concrete pump base, filled them three-quarters, balanced them, and made his careful way up the latter path.
When he reached the top, he skirted the ramshackle house. At the back he paused at the two half-barrel tubs redolent with laundry soap. He stooped over it, pouring in the first big bucket.
A heavy voice rang from the kitchen above him. "Hey, nigger, what you doin'?"
He turned a puzzled face toward the window. "Ah'm—ah'm——"
A big roundish woman stepped out on the rickety porch. "Fuh Gawd's sake! Is you Tom?"
"Sho' Ah is." There was an aggrieved whine in his voice.
"You come back? Whar you been?"
He emptied the bucket, and brought the other to the bench under the back steps. "Ah been wu'kin'. Ah come back."
"We done got a letter sayin' you wuz dead."
He laughed broadly. "Ah ain't."
Tramping up the steps, he flung his wrinkled coat on its old nail above the lanterns, and sat down in a splint-bottomed chair, testing it carefully before he leaned back in it. "Got any breakfas', ole 'ooman? Ah's plumb starvin'."
She set out cold bacon, cold pone, a glass molasses pitcher with its top broken. "He'p yo'se'f, Tom. Ah's powerful glad you's home."
He spoke through a mouthful of bread and "long sweetening." "Ain't married agin, or nuthin'?"
"Ah ain't huntin' no mo' trouble."
She slid his emptied dishes into the loaded sink, and took up the two empty clothes baskets. "Come he'p me tote de clo'es back. Miss' Mary mebbe got somethin' for you to do."
At supper, the biggest kerosene lamp was lit on the middle of the table, and spread its smelly radiance over the reunited family. Ed and Jim had come in last, their cap-lamps still lit, their shirts clayey from the underground work. "Here's yo' pappy, boys, come back agin," announced Stella proudly.
Diana, her nerves on edge from another meeting with Jim Hewin, got in a side blow. "I suppose you've been with that 'Banjo' Strickland again, and couldn't get home in time for supper?"
"Aw, close yer trap," growled Ed. "Think you own the place!"
"Yer maw says you boys is wu'kin' hard."
Will, who possessed a good-natured sense of humor, chuckled appreciatively. "We sho' is! You know dat chicken-farm by de dam on Shadow Mountain, paw? We been wu'kin' powerful hard, an' dat's de Lawd's trufe!"
"We got fried chicken fo' supper, Tom," as Stella lifted the simmering pan with feigned indifference.
"An' dey ain't grow on no egg-plants, an' dat's a fack," continued Will.
"You'd a come in handy, paw, las' Sad'dy night," said Ed, who had recovered from his temporary ill-humor at Diana. "Ev'rybody's lef de place 'cep' club-foot Jake Simmons; dey lef him to watch. Me 'n' Banjo he'p'd him watch; we played poker, while de three boys poked off thuhteen hens an' a cockerel."
"And that isn't all that you all and 'Banjo' 'poke off,' either," interrupted Diana, her light brown face glowing a shade darker. "What would yo' paw say if I told him all I know?"
"What's dis? What's dis?" His explosive tones regained something of the former authority.
Stella laughed comfortably. "Nuthin' at all, Tom. Diana got a fool notion dat de boys been meddlin' wid cars at de Union Depot; dat's all."
Tom scratched his head in profound silence; the rest of the family watched him with differing emotions. At length he spoke unctuously. "De Lawd he put chicken-roos'eses an' melon-patches whar dey is easy to get at; it ain't nacheral for a nigger to let a hen suffer dis vale of tribulation, or let a melon grow ole an' useless on de vine. Cars is different. Cars is different. You boys ain't got kotched at nothin'?"
"You bet we ain't!"
"Den Ah don't know nothin', an' Diana don't know nothin'. You'd better watch out, dat's all Ah say. Calaboose never wuz no black man's frien'."
"We's careful, paw. We got regular jobs."
"Dat's all Ah say. Bring out mah Bible, Babe; Ah ain't read de Scripchers for two years."
"We done jined de union, paw," said Babe, laying the shaggy-eared family Bible in the yellow circle of lamp light. "De miners' union."
"A lot you all know about unions!" sniffed Diana.
Tom nodded reverently. "Unions is good. Ah am de resurrection an' de life, says de Lawd. De Lawd done sont unions to he'p his cullud chillun."
"An' Jim's de finansher secretary. He gits de money."
"Dat's good too. You boys is hustlers, lak yo' ole paw was."
The Cole life went on as if he had never been away.
Some weeks later, Stella Cole had just straightened up from the half-barrel tubs, to wring a soggy batch of towels before "renchin'" them in the clearer water, when she looked up with that uncanny premonition of danger which lower animals and lower races possess. The ground shivered; then a hideous noise broke over the sunned and silent trees, deafening her. The vast growl of the dynamite explosion rang shrilly in her ears; she fell on trembling knees, praying.
The crash of falling timbers behind made her look around. The unsteady ground, she said afterwards, "shook lak you wuz shakin' a counterpane." The rickety step supports crumpled, the rotted square of the back porch crashed in on the bench of water-buckets below.
There was a droning noise in the air, the sound of running steps along the road passing above the house. Toward the farther mines, beyond her house and the next hill, she saw a palpable haze, smoke-like and yet not smoke, dulling the sky.
"Mah boys!" she gasped, and started running puffily for the front gate, and the road beyond.
She stood aside to let a screeching machine throb past her. It was Mr. Pelham; the sight of his tense and collected gaze reassured her. Mr. Pelham wouldn't let anything happen to her boys.
She shrank into the outer fringe of the tear-eyed, wailing Hewintown women, trying desperately to get some news. She wandered twice into the thick air at the top of the ramp, but the acrid heaviness drove her back. The men she spoke to cursed, shoving her aside. She slumped to the ground, moaning in inarticulate misery. Lord, they were all dead!
Then she saw Ed running with an empty bucket, his head bandaged, his face grimed and ferocious. "Ed! Eddie! Whar's Babe, an' Jim, an' Will——"
He stopped, coughing, gasping. "Jim's killed, ma. Dey brung out his body. Hit's yonder under dem trees.... Babe's all right; ain't seed Will. Mebbe he's caved in." He hurried off, face set and purposeful.
"Mah Jim! Mah Jim!" She pulled her trembling body from the ground, and set off on unsteady feet toward the ominous trees.
The body was not there. "You might look in the Company stores, in Hewintown," said a sweet voiced girl, her face torn with sympathy.
"Thank 'ee, ma'am." She stumbled weakly off, her uncovered head dizzy from the excitement and the sun. Her lips repeated over and over, "Mah Will! Mah Jim!"
The sudden dark of the storeroom clouded her vision. From body to body she went. Here were the negroes. This bloodied face was like—No. She went on.
At length she found what she sought. Weak from exhaustion and shock, she crumpled up beside the limp warmness that had been her second son.
Here Diana found her, a Diana pale and frightened, her right arm bandaged to the shoulder, blood caked in dusky crimson at the height of her breast. "Mother! Is this.... Jim?"
Stella raised herself drowsily. "Yeh, dis is Jim." She looked at the girl fearfully, a vague horror channelling her face. "Is Will daid too?"
"Will's all right.... You come home with me."
Stella faced the girl when they were outside. "Will all right? Babe all right?"
Diana nodded.
"What's wrong wid yo' arm, girl?"
"Nothin'. A pane of glass scratched it. It's all right."
Jim's funeral, the Sunday following, was a notable affair. A committee of fellow-members from the union marched first. The ornately rosetted Brethren of the Morning Star, and the proud ranks of the Sons and Daughters of Ancient Galilean Fishermen, came next. Last were the comfortably filled livery carriages, furnished by the lodges as the proper foil for their flamboyant officers. Stella brought out her old black silk, in sorrow and pride. Tom's successor, Brother Adams, preached the funeral sermon. "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform," was the burden of sermon and song. There was no suggestion among the elder heads that the devil, or the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company, had had a hand in this particular wonder, this harvest of dumb death.
Tom, busied with funeral sermons for other victims, received gratefully the benefits from the two lodges. "Ain't dar nothin' f'um dat union Jim set sech store on?"
"Unions don't have benefits, paw. We gwine ter git our benefit strikin'," explained Will painfully.
"Lots of use dey are, den! Whuffur you belong to su'thin' what ain't got no benefits?"
Diana and Stella sided with the father, but the boys were determined. "Dey say de comp'ny ain't gwine pay no damages for killin' de miners. We gwine strike an' make 'em pay!" insisted Will.
"We gotter git money somehow, ain't we?" said Ed, grouchily.
"Dat's foolishness," argued Tom. "How you think you gwinter make white folks do what dey don't want to, huh? Dis union business is foolishness."
The unusual excitement of several sermons a day brought on an attack of Tom's old sickness. At Paul Judson's suggestion, he walked himself over, one boiling afternoon, to the free ward of the "horse-pittle."
Less than two weeks after his limping departure, old Peter accosted Mary Judson respectfully, as she stepped into her electric at the side door of Hillcrest. "Ole Tom Cole's done for dis time, Miss' Mary."
"Yes, Peter? Are you sure?"
"Dey cut him open in de horse-pittle, an' he's dead sho'. A nigger what wu'k dar done tol' me."
Stella was close-lipped about the matter. "Dey do say he is daid dis time, Miss' Mary. Too much preachin' ain't nacheral."
Diana saw, for the fourth time, the slouching figure in the dusk of the mountain roadway, as she returned that night from the big house. She came up to him with certainty, by now used to the mixed menace of his presence. "What are you hangin' around me for, Jim Hewin?"
"You know what I want, brown baby. Aw, don't be so damn' stingy!"
He took her familiarly by her dusky, well-rounded arm; she shook him off petulantly. "I've told you——"
He held the arm more confidently. "You ain't in no hurry. We'll walk up a piece——"
Her feet retarded, as he turned up the stubby grass-rugged path. He pulled her after him with a low chuckle of insolent arrogance.
Her tones were more docile, soberly argumentative. "Why don't you go to your white girl? You told me you were going to get married——"
"She kin wait."
They were deep in the obscurity of the oak thicket now; the path was cherty, grassless. She walked easily in front of him, then stopped in the topmost shadow, as the murky panorama of the night city opened before them. She stood wrapped in the dusky wonder of a sky stained with echoes of furnace fire, a dun horizon broken with twinkling patterns of streets and avenues. Around her waist he coiled a determined arm; in her he saw the beauty that she found in the broken mystery below.
"Let's sit down."
Gathering her skirts close, she sat on the dry grass, shrinking slightly from his touch. He let her have her fill of the shining moment; but his hand continued its gentle stroking along her arm, her shoulders, the soft curve of her neck.
A subtle riot shivered out of nowhere into her emotions, an agonizing quiver so sweet that it must be wicked. Her distressed face besought his, "Don't, don't, Jim——"
He did not answer; nor did he stop. A wild pagan stir whipped her blood, giving the blasphemous counsel that she should throw herself into his arms. It was the proximity of the male calling to his mate; it was more—it was the answering tremor of the woman of a lower, darker race, the mountain wildness dominant in her blood, when chosen by the man of the higher, lighter strain.
The stern Puritanism of her training fought against this. She must save herself whole for a man of her own color; she thought of the negro poet's magnificent lines about the black Mary, who was to bring forth the black Messiah to lead his brethren out of bondage....
"Gimme your lips, honey."
She pulled back, trembling, from the dominant triumph in his voice. His arm swept tightly around her, she was dragged against him. Her weakness melted to nothing in the presence of this mighty outer and inner strength.
Slowly she felt herself losing. Her prisoned hands struck out feebly against his face; yet even in her fighting she fancied that the man whose face was hidden in the night before her was not the repulsive, leering mine foreman, but the dim white knight of her hid dreamings.
With startling suddenness she yielded to his command. His lips fastened to hers, clung there. She felt that the whole universe became a kiss; melted, eddied together into one point of mad moist contact. Her struggles to free her lips drew her closer to him. She was conscious of his hot hand pressing against her body, burning through the thin calico waist. Then she lost consciousness of bewildering details.
With rude courtesy Jim Hewin steadied her feet as she walked down the last sharp slope to the road.
He turned to leave; an arm detained him. Her tones were low and pleadingly sweet. "A good night one, now."
Head bowed, tired blood pounding, she slipped with furtive haste toward the darkened windows of the shack that was her home.