Blood on the Forge Page 6

  “Look—more hunkies!” breathed Chinatown.

  “Keep shut,” warned Melody.

  The pump at the edge of town watered about fifty families. Every Saturday the women were here in line. This day they carried bathing water home. The rain had soaked into their shawl head coverings. They stood patiently.

  Then one of the boys spied the three strangers. He was on his feet in a second.

  “Ya-a-a . . .”

  A rock whizzed between Melody and Chinatown. The two men halted, confused. In the eyes of all the Slavs was a hatred and contempt different from anything they had ever experienced in Kentucky. Another rock went past. Chinatown started to back away.

  “We ain’t done nothin’,” cried Melody. He took a step toward the pump shed. The women covered their faces with their shawls.

  “We ain’t done nothin’,” he cried again.

  His words were lost in the shrill child voices: “Ya-a-a . . . ya-a-a . . . ya-a-a . . .”

  Melody backed after his half brother. A little distance away they turned and trotted riverward.

  “So this how the North different from the South,” panted Chinatown.

  “Musta mistook us for somebody,” said Melody.

  “When white folks git mad all niggers look alike,” said Chinatown.

  “Musta mistook us,” insisted Melody.

  It should have been easy for them to find the bunkhouse. The river was a sure landmark. But, in turning in among a series of knolls, they lost direction and found themselves back at the town. Before them a dirt road ran between rows of frame shacks. A large pile of garbage blocked the far end of the road.

  “Oughta be somebody we kin ask where the bunkhouse,” said Chinatown.

  “Well, I ain’t knockin’ on nobody’s door to ask nothing.”

  “All we got to do is start back to the river.”

  “Which way the river?” puzzled Melody, craning his neck around.

  The light rain had started again. A mist had arisen through the rain. The low mountains were no longer visible. The mills along the water were blotted out. Their sound seemed to come from all directions.

  “Maybe if I climbs that garbage . . .”

  Chinatown started at a run down the road. At the top of the garbage pile he got his bearings. To the west the gray was tinged with faint streaks of orange.

  “Over yonder apiece,” he yelled, pointing westward.

  At the cry, white faces appeared in the doorway opposite him. Nothing was said. Little faces grimaced between the overalled legs of the bearded father. With a movement of her hands beneath an apron, the mother fanned the breadth of her hips at him. An old Slav bent like a burned weed out of the window. Great handle-bar mustaches dripped below his chin. With eyes a snow-washed blue, he looked contempt at Chinatown. Then he wrinkled his nose and spat.

  Chinatown slid down the pile of wet garbage. Hardly daring to hurry, he walked the middle of the road to the place where Melody waited.

  “These here folks ain’t mistook nobody.”

  They made quick tracks in the mud to the west.

  At the river they did not stop to rest or look around. They wanted the shelter of the bunkhouse. This new place was full of hatreds that they did not understand. Melody led the way down-river. They had been going ten minutes when he stopped. There was no sign of the bunkhouse. Nothing but the river looked familiar.

  “You reckon we been goin’ wrong?” asked Chinatown.

  “Got to be one way or the other,” said Melody. He turned and looked behind him.

  A fat-cheeked black girl moved along the riverfront road. Bright red lipstick had turned to purple on her lips. A man’s hat was pulled down over her ears. She wore an old overall coat over a stained satin dress.

  Melody stared at her. She drew the coat tight around her hips and began to swagger. He was drawn by her eyes. They were cold pieces of wet glass.

  “Wish I knowed what the way to Kentucky,” Chinatown was moaning. He turned and saw the woman. “Man! Man! Kentucky kin wait.”

  The girl passed them. Her swimming eyes invited. They caught a heavy scent of perfume. Under the perfume was a rot stink. The stink sickened them. They were unnerved.

  “Howdy, boys. Green, huh?”

  They whirled and faced a small, dark man. He shifted from one foot to the other. His movements were like a squirrel’s.

  “Howdy,” said Chinatown.

  “How come you know we green?” asked Melody.

  “They give all green niggers the same clothes,” said the man.

  “Oh . . .” Melody’s gaze followed the woman.

  “Beside, only a green man stop to look at that there gal.”

  They questioned him with their eyes.

  “Her left breast ’bout rotted off.” The man laughed. “You kin smell it a mile away.”

  “What you know!” Chinatown laughed.

  Melody was stunned. He could not get the wet eyes out of his mind. All he could think to say was, “We lost from the bunkhouse.”

  “You been goin’ wrong,” said the man. “Back the other way a piece.”

  “Obliged,” said Melody.

  “I got to pass by there. Point it out.”

  “Obliged.”

  They walked along together.

  “You work around here?” Chinatown asked.

  “Blast. Boss of stove gang,” said the man.

  “Oh,” said Chinatown. He looked at the old overalls.

  “Sparks,” explained the little man. “They’ll git you too.”

  “Oh.”

  A group of Slav workmen came out of a gate in front of one of the mills. They moved with a slow stiffness, hardly shaking their drooping mustaches. There was dignity in the way they walked.

  “Uh-uh,” groaned Chinatown.

  The workmen paused at the gate. One of them turned and waved at the little black man.

  “Hallo, Bo.”

  The little man waved back. That greeting was the easy familiarity of men who had known each other over a period of years.

  Chinatown voiced what was in his mind: “That there’s the first white guy we seen don’t hate niggers.”

  Bo asked, “You been havin’ trouble?”

  “Everybody treat us like poison,” said Chinatown.

  “Everythin’ be smooth in a coupla weeks,” said Bo. “Always hate new niggers round here.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, company bring them in when there strike talk. Keep the old men in line.”

  “Oh . . .” said Chinatown. They walked a little. “There strike talk now?”

  Bo looked him in the eye. “Looka here, boy. I don’t know nothin’ but my job.”

  “Yessir,” said Chinatown.

  “Don’t mean nothin’ by talkin’ short,” said Bo, “only it ain’t a good thing for a feller to go spoutin’ off.”

  “That’s like Kentucky,” said Chinatown.

  Within sight of the bunkhouse, Bo stopped in the open to let water.

  “Good idea,” he said. “The outhouse always full of flies. Smells because nobody sprinkle ashes like they supposed to.” He laughed. “Sometime a lizard use your behind for a bridge when you on the hole.”

  The men from the hills had always let water in the open. It made a feller feel free—space around him and the warm water running in the weeds. Nothing overhead but what God first put there. This touch of the past relaxed them. Their recent experiences became the unreality. This was the reality. They felt for a minute like Bo was an old friend.

  “Well, so long,” said Bo. “Be keerful. They puts green men on the hot jobs afore they know enough to keep alive.”

  They stood and watched him cut across the weedy ground to the cinder path leading to the lunch car.

  Back in the bunkhouse. Big Mat, Chinatown, Melody—the Moss boys—walking around in a place so strange that one of them might have been dreaming it for the other two. In the bare boards underneath one of the windows there was a knothole. It had
a swirl like the top of an onion gone to seed. To the Moss boys that knothole was bigger than all the steel mills.

  Later they were in their bunks but far from sleep. They could hear the noises of the dice game, still going strong. One of the men had told them that the game had been going on for years, the night shift taking over when the day shift was at work.

  The Irish foreman broke the noises of the game, assigning the shifts. Most of the new men would work in the yards. A few would stoke the “mules,” small engines that hauled steel along the river front.

  That word “mule”—it sounded like home.

  A shift was anywhere from ten to fourteen hours in the heat. Everybody averaged around twelve hours a day. Knowing that, they should have slept but they listened to the high, whining voice of a crippled Negro called Smothers. One of the men whispered that Smothers was off his nut. Yet they listened and heard a different sort of tale:

  “It’s wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground don’t like it. It’s the hell-and-devil kind of work. Guy ain’t satisfied with usin’ the stuff that was put here for him to use—stuff of top of the earth. Now he got to git busy and melt up the ground itself. Ground don’t like it, I tells you. Now they’ll be folks laugh when I say the ground got feelin’. But I knows what it is I’m talkin’ about. All the time I listen real hard and git scared when the iron blast holler to git loose, an’ them big redhead blooms screamin’ like the very heart o’ the earth caught between them rollers. It jest ain’t right.

  “So what happen? There a ginny falls when they pourin'—and the preacher got to say service over a hundred tons o’ steel. For no reason there’s somethin’ freeze in the blast furnace. Then it slip, and hot coke and metal rain down through the roof on the fellers round the bosh. Any time you foolin’ round fast metal it liable to blow up. It always blow for no reason at all, ’ceptin’ it want to. . . .

  “Listen close now, an’ I’m goin’ to talk to you so you know something. Steel want to git you. Onliest thing—it ain’t gittin’ you fast enough. So there trouble in the mills. Guys wants to fight each other— callin’ folks scabs and wants to knock somebody in the head. Don’t nobody know why. I knows why. It’s ’cause steel got to git more men than it been gittin’. . . .

  “Can’t blame the ground none. It give warnin’. Yessir, they was warnin’ give a long time ago. Folks say one night there’s somethin’ fall right outen the sky, blazin’ down, lightin’ up this ol’ river in the black o’ night. Guys ain’t stop meltin’ long enough to see what it is but next morning they finds it. A solid hunk o’ iron it be, big around as a house, fused together like it been worked by a puddler with a arm size of a hundred-foot crane. Where it come from? Where this furnace in the sky? You don’t know. I don’t know. But it were a warning to quit meltin’ up the ground.”

  Smothers pulled himself to his feet by taking hold of the bunk above him. His eyes held all the green men until he got his crutches underneath his armpits. Then he shook his head in a last warning and hobbled out like a parched-up hoppergrass.

  “It ain’t quite daylight, but it’s four o’clock, So wake up, niggers, an’ piss on the rock. . . .”

  One of the boys woke the green men with that cry. He had done time on a Georgia chain gang. Outside, the light had not pierced the morning smoke cloud. Through the windows the men saw the red ball on the horizon. It was a strange waking to a muted sunrise. It was hard to realize the morning.

  Some of the old hands kidded, “You ain’t never goin’ to work in daylight. Now it too early. Next week you work the night shift, and it too late.”

  The new men had heard how they changed to the night shift. One crew would have to work twenty-four hours in the heat. That did not mean anything to them now. Now they did not like the taste of the sooty air. They missed the sun.

  “Got to blow the chimneys ever’ night,” they were told.

  “When the air gits good guys is hungry,” they were told.

  Everything was too strange for the green men to comprehend. In a daze they were herded to the mill gates and checked in. The night shift was getting off. They mingled for a few minutes at the mill gates. All of them were gray in the dirty river mists, but the men who had finished a turn were easy to pick out. Their shoulders sagged as though the weights of their coats were too much. The green men carried overall coats over their arms. They had been told to put something on after a turn, that even on a hot day a guy chills, coming away from the heat. They had on long underwear also. That would be good to take the sweat off when the heat really came down. The men from the hills hated the heavy shoes cramping toes used to gripping the dust.

  The Moss boys waited in line with the rest. They were given numbers and keys to lockers. Their eyes were open, but they were not seeing the mills yet. They did not know how they arrived at the locker room. All around them men were changing into working clothes. The green men were given cold stares. Nobody spoke to them. They sat on a bench at one side.

  An open-hearth worker had the locker next to the Moss boys. He was an Italian. Everybody called him Mike. Mike had a good heart. He showed them how to tie handkerchiefs around their necks. He made sure they had smoked glasses and heavy gloves. He warned them to wear two pairs of pants if they were put on a hot job—hot-job men always had a lot of holes burned in their clothes. Mike told them what had happened to him on the hearth.

  “So there I, workin’ Goddamn number eight. Pete throw switch, and furnace go over.” He showed them how far the furnace had tilted, slanting his hands. “Goddamn slag run over at door. Some go in buggy car in pit. Some miss Goddamn slag hole. So sp-t-t-t-t-t-t—I think I Goddamn lucky not get burn bad. One, two, three hour later I standing up between Goddamn furnace catch little sleep. I wake up Goddamn cold. Fellas laugh like hell, ’cause spark burn right round pants top, an’ Goddamn pants drop off my behind. Maybe I lucky not get burned, huh?”

  The men laughed. Laughing, they broke up in little groups, headed for the places where strong backs were needed to do work too small for the great machines. The Moss boys waited until the call came for the yard and pit men. They slouched along in the gray morning. Big Mat was ahead of his brothers. They had always thought of him as big and powerful as a swamp tree. Now, in their eyes, he was getting smaller and smaller. Like spiral worms, all their egos had curled under pressure from the giants around them. Sooner or later it came to all the green men:

  What do we count for against machines that lift tons easy as a guy takes a spoonful of gravy to his mouth? The magnets, traveling cranes and steam shovels that do the loading and unloading—in a week they handle piles of stuff that would keep a crew of a thousand guys busy for months. That charger, for an instance—it fills eight furnaces quicker than it takes the crews to make back or front wall. Them hoppers moving up the side of the blast—they fill it before a guy can get the sweat off his forehead. What does that make a man?

  The foreman was telling the green men about the old way of filling the blast furnace by hand. “Guys up on top of the blast didn’t have a chance when things went wrong. . . .” he was telling them.

  Melody was not listening. Smothers had said that men were making steel. Well, it looked to him more like the machines were making the steel and men just hanging around. One thing he knew that Smothers was right about: everywhere the metal was fighting to get loose. The shaping mills were far down the river, but he could hear the awful screams when the saws bit into the hot metal. The blast was a million bees in a drum. The open hearth was full of agony. The daylight was orange yellow with the droning flames of the Bessemers.

  Melody whispered to Chinatown, “Wouldn’t surprise me none if the Judgment turn out to be jest a steel mill. . . .” He was not joking.

  “Sound like circus animals tryin’ to git loose,” whispered Chinatown.

  To get to the pit they had to pass underneath the hearth furnaces. The foreman led the way under number four. All of the men but Chinatown and Melody got through w
ithout difficulty. When they ducked to follow the crew a curtain of fire appeared in front of them. Slag was dripping down through a hole to the floor of the pit, and there was no buggy in place to catch it. A couple of thin branches of liquid fire followed the slag. The branches grew large as a man’s arm and flowed into one another. That liquid fire was “fast” steel. It hit on top of the slag and spattered. Chinatown yelled. His clothes began to smoke in a dozen places. They lost no time in getting out of there.

  They came through under number five. O’Casey, the little pit boss, was there to give them hell.

  “What in blue blazes you guys think this is?” he shouted. “You bastards ought to be docked half pay for takin’ your own Goddamn time gettin’ here.”

  “We couldn’t git under—” began Melody.

  O’Casey left him in the middle of the words. The red face glowered up at the rest of the crew.

  “What the blue blazes you guys waitin’ for? Hop it! Clean up that mess front of number four!”

  Half of the cleanup gang was made up of Slavs. They took their time getting to work. They knew that all pit bosses raised hell. It was the thing for a pit boss to do. Big Mat grabbed a pick and was at the slag before they could spit enough to slick their hands. They looked their disfavor. Big Mat would outwork everybody. He would spoil the rhythm of the crew. That would give the pit boss something else to raise hell about. Chinatown and Melody worked with a young Slovac. He wielded the pick; Chinatown shoveled, and Melody handled the wheelbarrow. The pile of stuff they were working on was red hot; its core was still molten. Their feet heated and blistered.

  Chinatown said, “When I think how we usta throw wiggle worms in hot ashes jest for fun I feels like crying.”

  Melody laughed.

  “What you find to laugh for? asked the Slovac. “This three-, four-hour work.”

  “Sonabitch let furnace go to hell,” grumbled another of the men.

  “You guys talk too much,” yelled O’Casey from across the pit. “Get to diggin’.”

  “Stuff too hot for pick,” yelled the Slovac. He dropped his pick. O’Casey came on the run.