Blood on the Forge Read online

  “Maybe we ought to be at Masonville Junction tonight.”

  “You talkin’ crazy,” cried Hattie. “Big Mat ain’t just going to pick up and walk off the land.”

  “There a snake under the door sill somewhere,” said Chinatown. “Man have to kill himself workin’ to make the kind of money he was talkin’ about.”

  “But if he was speakin’ facts,” said Melody, “us makin’ a year crop money in one month——”

  “Well, supposin’ so . . .”

  “Think what we have in a season.”

  “Supposin’ so . . .”

  “We have all the money in a year.”

  “Supposin’ so . . .”

  “In two years we got enough to fill a corn crib.”

  “Supposin’ so . . .”

  Melody got heated up.

  “What you mean by that ‘Supposin’ so’? Why, China, in two years you wouldn’t have to do no work.”

  “I don’t do no work now.” He laughed. Then he rolled like a pony in the dust, tickled over how he had tricked Melody.

  “When Big Mat come we go into town and buy up some stuff,” said Hattie.

  “Gonna drink red pop till I falls out,” sang Chinatown.

  “A big can of snuff,” said Hattie.

  “Red pop, fried fish, a big box of candy all tied up in red ribbon.”

  “Maybe I git some calico,” said Hattie, looking down at her torn gray dress.

  “Hold on, woman!” cried Chinatown. “This money ain’t for wastin’.”

  “What you hanker for most, Melody?” asked Hattie.

  “Reckon I wants a new E string for my box,” he told her.

  Away off in the hills beyond Vagermound came a deep “Hallo.” The hills played catch-ball with the echo, throwing it around until it was thrown away somewhere in the bottoms.

  “Sound like Big Mat!” she cried.

  They all sprang to their feet.

  “China, you and Melody go hide in the corn crib. That white man jest might be with him—ain’t no tellin’.”

  “Tell him us run off for good and ain’t no use in lookin’ for us,” called Chinatown as they ran for the crib.

  Crouched inside the crib, they sat tensed, bodies and faces slatted by the sunlight hitting through the planks. Just to be hiding filled them with mad-dog terror. Hiding in the red-clay hills was something always in the backs of their heads. It was something to be thought of along with bloodhound dogs and lynching. Chinatown was ducking his head up and down trying to peep out across the yard. The sun and shadow played across his rolling eyes.

  Melody had to talk or get out and run away.

  “Maybe we hadn’t ought to taken that white man’s money.”

  “He give it to me hisself. He give it to me. You seen him, Melody.”

  “Yes, I seen him.”

  There was a sound of hoofs in the yard.

  “I ain’t asked him for nothin’. He give it to me. All by hisself he give it to me.”

  “I seen him.”

  Hattie’s voice came around the house. “China, Melody, c’mon out. Ain’t nobody but Mat.”

  Chinatown let out his breath. The gold in his mouth laughed.

  “Shucks, Melody, if that was that jackleg come back he couldn’t handle us.”

  “If he do come back we make tracks for the hills and then double back to the crib. Be sleepin’ while he out lookin’.”

  They saw Big Mat coming into the yard, leading a big-boned mule by a rawhide. They ran toward him, Chinatown waving the big-money bill.

  Hiding his cheek under one big hand, Mat listened to them tell about the crazy jackleg. Not one muscle in his body moved, though Chinatown was waving the bill under his nose. Hattie was the first to notice his strange calm.

  “What on your mind, Mat?”

  He took his hand away from his face. A long purple welt blossomed on his cheek.

  “Misery! Misery!” wailed Hattie.

  Chinatown and Melody pressed in on him with questions. Hattie kept up her cry: “Misery! Misery!”

  “Git the stuff packed,” Big Mat said. “We goin’ to be at Masonville Junction ’fore midnight.”

  He pushed them aside and started up the big hill that topped the fields.

  “I knowed somethin’ had to happen,” said Chinatown. “When the coot come afore the duck——”

  “Lord, what become of us?” wailed Hattie.

  Mat stood looking at the fields. He stood a long time. Late evening. The sun was low at his back. His shadow went out from his feet to lie across the land. He felt in his bones that this was his last look at the checkered hills. Never again would the ground be something to work. It was a solemn feeling. He talked it out of himself in what was a prayer.

  “Ain’t nothin’ make me leave the land if it good land. The hills bigger ’n any white man, I reckon. Take more ’n jest trouble to run me off the hills. I been in trouble. I been born into trouble. Share-worked these hills from the bad land clean to the mines at Madison. The old folks make crop here afore we was born. Now the land done got tired. All the land got tired, ’ceptin’ the muck in the bottoms. It do somethin’ to a man when the corn come up like tired old gents.

  “Somehow it seem like I know why the land git tired. And it jest seem like it come time to git off. The land has jest give up, and I guess it’s good for things to come out like this. Now us got to give up too.”

  At dark they left, and Hattie, barefoot, was in the doorway.

  PART TWO

  SQUATTED on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for market, riding in the dark for what might have been years, knowing time only as dippers of warm water gulped whenever they were awake, helpless and drooping because they were headed into the unknown and there was no sun, they forgot even that they had eyes in their heads and crawled around in the boxcar, as though it were a solid thing of blackness.

  There were so many men in the car that for a long time Big Mat was lost from his brothers. Somebody had started to crawl around in the dark. Soon everyone was moving about. Big Mat had ended in a corner. He crouched there, body shaking with the car. Now and then his head struck against the wall with a noise that was lost in greater noises. His big muscles cried out for movement. Warm urine began to flow into the corner where he sat. He did not move. He was in misery, but his misery was a part of everything else. The air, fetid with man smell and nervous sweat, the pounding of the wheels shaking the car and its prisoners like a gourd full of peas, the piercing scream of the wheels fighting the rails on a curve, the uniform dark—those things were common to all. The misery that stemmed from them was a mass experience. Big Mat could not defend his identity against the pack.

  The rattle and jar of the wheels kept Melody from singing, although he was feeling bad and had his box with him. The wheels seemed to be saying crazy things, laughing crazy laughs, trying to draw him into the present, trying to make him crazy like they were. Whatever came into his head was copied by the wheels.

  Once he called out: “Big Mat, where you?”

  The wheels swallowed up the cry and clicked it out, louder and louder, faster and faster. It made his head spin to try and keep up with the fast-talking wheels. He had to shift to another word in order to keep sane. Soon the wheels had him racing along with the new word. Melody was a sounding board for all rhythms. If it had not been for Chinatown and what he said, everything might have become mixed up with those crazy wheels.

  Chinatown was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Melody. His grinning jaws ached with the effort of holding his teeth clamped tight. Every time he dozed off the jar of the car would begin to bang his teeth together. Painfully he dozed and started awake. After a while the fear of dozing began to work in his head. He was the first one in the car to crack up. Melody forgot himself, in trying to comfort his brother. The noise of the car was deafening, but they put their cheeks together, and each yelled in the other’s ear.

  “Ascared to sleep—ascared to sle
ep! Car shake so it liable to knock the gold tooth right outen my head. Can’t lose that tooth—can’t ’ford to lose that tooth. Now I go to sleep, and maybe it gits knocked out. . . . Ascared to sleep, and I tired. . . . I tired . . .”

  “Whoa now, whoa, boy!” Melody calmed him like he would an excited mule. “We be outen here ’fore long.”

  “I tired and can’t sleep. All my life I think ’bout a gold tooth, then I gits one. Now maybe I go to sleep, and it gits knocked out. Somebody steal it sure if it gits knocked out.”

  “Sure, boy—whoa, boy!”

  “It gittin’ loose now. You kin feel it. Feel it.”

  Melody put a shaking hand on the tooth.

  “It feel all right, China.”

  “You ain’t foolin’?”

  “Naw, boy.”

  “It ain’t even loose?”

  “Naw, boy.”

  “You a good kid, Melody,” said Chinatown, greatly eased. “Reckon this damn rattlin’ an’ all drivin’ me off my nut.”

  “That’s it, boy—that’s all to it.”

  “You know me, Melody, since I a little rhiney fella. Little Chinatown then. Now it’s Big Chinatown. Never was nothin'—still ain’t nothin’. But nobody treat a nigger like he got to git tired sometime.”

  Melody tried to quiet him again. “Sure, boy, I know how it is.”

  “Yeah, but you got your box to sit with. Everybody call me no-good nigger. Boss man walk by when he ain’t got nothin’ for to work. When there a job he kicks me if I slows and calls me a no-good nigger. All that make a man feel like he ain’t nothin’, and a man got to have somethin’ he kin grin a little to hisself about.”

  “Sure is so, boy.”

  “When I jest Little Chinatown I seen the way things is an’ I know I got to have somethin’ to make me feel like I somebody. So all the time I dream ’bout a gold tooth, shinin’ an’ makin’ everybody look when Chinatown smile.”

  “Sure do shine, China.”

  “Reckon it do. Work for that tooth when all I wants to do is laze in the sun. But that’s all right—I gits the tooth. And I jest got to have that tooth. Without it I ain’t nobody. Now everybody turn and see who it is when Chinatown smile.”

  “Sure do, China. Sure do, boy.”

  The train gave a lurch. They were pounded against the wall.

  “Watch out for me, Melody. I do something for you sometime. Keep talkin’, so’s I won’t go to sleep. Sure as I do I git to boundin’ and knock out this here tooth. I tired—tired. . . . But you and me keep talkin’, Melody—keep talkin’. . . .”

  Riding away from the hills they were born and raised on wasn’t easy. Riding with the rattle of wheels in their ears when they were in the dark, not knowing where they were headed, wasn’t easy. It was enough to make them all brittle. Melody knew that. He knew that later on Chinatown would not want to think about the crazy secret things he was saying then. . . . But the shiny tooth did not drop out, and Melody was glad. His brother’s voice was the only sound, outside of the wheels, that was real.

  When the car finally stopped for a long time and some men unsealed and slid back the big door they were blinded by the light of a cloudy day. In all their heads the train wheels still clicked. Their ears still heard the scream of steel on the curves. Their bodies were motionless, but inside they still jerked to the movement of a bouncing freight car.

  A brakeman had to rouse them. “C’mon, stretch your legs on West Virginia ground, boys. Tomorrow You’ll be in Allegheny County.”

  PART THREE

  THEY HUNCHED against one another, whispering and wondering, and big drops of rain, grayed with slag and soot, rolled on the long wooden bunkhouse. Passing the makings back and forth, they burned cigarettes until their tongues felt like flannel in their jaws. There was a crap game going on in the bunk-house, but the newcomers didn’t have any money to put on the wood. There was nothing for them to do that first day, except smoke and keep walking the rows of bunks. Windows stretched in the long wooden walls around them. And outside they could see the things that they would see for a long time to come.

  A giant might have planted his foot on the heel of a great shovel and split the bare hills. Half buried in the earth where the great shovel had trenched were the mills. The mills were as big as creation when the new men had ridden by on the freight. From the bunkhouse they were just so much scrap iron, scattered carelessly, smoking lazily. In back of them ran a dirty-as-a-catfish-hole river with a beautiful name: the Monongahela. Its banks were lined with mountains of red ore, yellow limestone and black coke. None of this was good to the eyes of men accustomed to the pattern of fields.

  Most of the crap shooters had been in the valley a long time. Some of them took time from the game to come back and talk with the green men.

  “See them towers? That’s where I works. The iron blast. Don’t take the blast if you kin help it. It ain’t the work—it’s the head blower. Goddamn tough mick. Why, I seen the time when the keeper on my furnace mess up the blast, and the furnace freeze before you know it. That head blower don’t stop to find who the fault go to. Naw, he run up and right quick lays out three men with a sow. One of the hunkies yanks a knife on him, but that hunky gits laid out too. I reckon somebody woulda got that mick ’fore this. Only a man ain’t much fer a fight when he’s makin’ four hundred tons of fast iron from one sun to the other.”

  The men from the hills were not listening. They were not talking. Their attitude spoke. Like a refrain:

  We have been tricked away from our poor, good-as-bad-ground-and-bad-white-men-will-let-’em-be hills. What men in their right minds would leave off tending green growing things to tend iron monsters?

  “Lots of green guys git knocked out by the heat—’specially hunkies. They don’t talk nothin’ but gobbler talk. Don’t understand nothin’ else neither. Foreman tell one old feller who was workin’ right next to me to put leather over his chest. Foreman might jest as well been whistlin’, ’cause when the heat come down there that hunky lays with a chest like a scrambled egg.”

  Yes, them red-clay hills was what we call stripped ground, but there was growing things everywhere and crab-apple trees bunched—stunted but beautiful in the sun.

  “Them old fellers hadn’t oughta be put on a furnace. Course, a green man got to expect to git pitted up some. Lots o’ young’uns got lead in their pants, and they gits tagged when the flame come jumpin’ for their shovel. There always burns, too, when the furnace gits tapped and the slag spills over into the pit. But the quicker a man learn to move around on his feet the longer he stays livin’.”

  A man don’t git to know what the place where he’s born looks like until he goes someplace else. Then he begins to see with his mind things that his eyes had never been able to see. To us niggers who are seeing the red-clay hills with our minds this Allegheny County is an ugly, smoking hell out of a backwoods preacher’s sermon.

  “Mebbe they start you new boys out on the skull buster. That’s a good way to git broke in. But jest keep minded that you got to be keerful o’ that old devil, skull buster. Kill many a green man. How? Well, magnet lift the steel ball thirty feet up and drop her. Steel ball weigh nigh eight tons. That eight tons bust the hell out of old scrap metal. Got to be keerful not to git some of it in your skull. Yessir, many a green man long gone ’cause he couldn’t keep old skull buster from aimin’ at his head.”

  What’s the good in strainin’ our eyes out these windows? We can’t see where nothin’ grows around here but rusty iron towers and brick stacks, walled up like somebody’s liable to try and steal them. Where are the trees? They so far away on the tops of the low mountains that they look like the fringe on a black wear-me-to-a-wake dress held upside down against the sky.

  “Skull buster don’t git as many as whores git. Roll mill help the gals out. Feller sees all that hot steel shooting along the runout tables, all them red-and-white tongues licking ’twixt them rollers. Feller go hog wild fer any gal what ’ll take his money. She do
n’t have to work him up none—he’s hot from that bakin’ steel.”

  The sun on the red hillsides baked a man, but it was only a short walk to the bottoms and the mud that oozed up between his toes like a cool drink to hot black feet, steppin’ easy, mindful of the cotton-mouth.

  “On the floor, under the Bessemers, you ain’t got time to think what a gal’s got ’tween her legs. . . .”

  Melody and Chinatown went out into the wet. The door closed behind them. The rain had lessened to a drizzle. They could hear the clank of the mills over the steady swish of the rain. Melody led the way. He turned away from the river and walked toward the town.

  “Boy, this here North don’t seem like nothin’ to me,” complained Chinatown. “All this smoke and stuff in the air! How a man gonna breathe?”

  The drizzle stopped. Thin clouds rolled. Melody looked up. “Sun liable to break through soon.”

  “Won’t make no difference to us if the sun don’t shine.”

  “How come?”

  “There won’t be no crop to make or take out.”

  “Sun make you feel better,” said Melody.

  “Couldn’t shine through the smoke, nohow. Long time ago a fella told me a nigger need sun so’s he kin keep black.”

  Melody kicked Chinatown with his knee. Chinatown kicked back. Soon they were kicking and dodging around the ash piles. They were laughing when they came to the weedy field at the edge of town. Both men stopped. The laughter died.

  Quivering above the high weeds were the freckled white legs of a girl. She struggled with a small form— a little boy who wanted to be turned loose. Other children were peeping through the wet grass. They began to chant, “Shame, shame! Mary and her brother—shame!”

  Chinatown and Melody wheeled and hurried away. They had no need to speak to each other. In both of them was the fear brought from Kentucky: that girl might scream. Back in the hills young Charley had been lynched because a girl screamed.

  Breathing hard, they followed the path until it became a dirt street. In front of them was a long line of women waiting in front of a pump shed. A few boys crouched underneath one corner of the shelter, held by a game with a jackknife.