Blood on the Forge Read online

  “What the blue blazes!” he cried. “Git back on that stuff!”

  “Too hot for a pick.”

  “You wasn’t hired to work in no ice house,” yelled the pit boss.

  Some of the other men on the gang dropped their tools and backed away from the hot mass. O’Casey looked around desperately for a minute. Then he walked up to the biggest man on the floor of the pit —Big Mat. His head not as high as Big Mat’s tobacco pocket, he had to lean backward to look the big man in the eye.

  “You big dumb hulk of a bastard,” cried the pit boss, “where’s your brains?”

  Big Mat dropped his shovel and glared down at the pit boss.

  “Ain’t you got brains enough to know what to do when the stuff is too hot?” cried the little man.

  Big Mat opened his mouth to speak, but the words did not come out. His eyes glazed. He stood like a stupid child taking deserved punishment.

  “Git the hell over there and find a hose!” commanded O’Casey.

  Big Mat trotted away. O’Casey turned to the rest of the gang. His glance flashed over them with new confidence.

  “Stand back and wait for that hose! Then hop to it! This furnace’s due to pour in a halfa hour.”

  The men stood back. O’Casey walked to the other side of the pit and expelled his breath in a long sigh.

  A couple of the Slavs were too close when Big Mat turned the hose on the hot mass. There was a great hiss, and steam reached out and enveloped the two men. Cursing in their own tongues, they danced a crazy pattern. If Big Mat had not been so big he would have had a fight on his hands.

  While the men were grumbling there came a long “Look o-o-o-out below!” Nobody had to tell the green men what to do. They scrambled under one of the furnaces. Maybe a crane had broken, and its ladle of hot metal would come pounding down to destroy the pit. But the danger was not overhead. It was only a spout flowing on number seven. The mud had burned out of the tap hole, and the fast steel was pitting the ground in a bright flood. They had to put on dark glasses to watch it. It was over in a few minutes. The furnace was tilted back so that the flow stopped.

  The men who had been grumbling forgot all about Big Mat.

  “This is an unlucky day,” one of them sadly remarked.

  “Don’ no sonabitch know how fix spout round here?” screamed the young Slovac to everybody within listening distance.

  “My feets is burnin’ up,” Chinatown said to Melody.

  “Mine is hot too,” Melody told him.

  “Yeah, but if we got to clean up that there steel my feets goin’ to git mad an’ take me on out of here.” He half grinned.

  Melody grinned with him. The foreman was sending another crew to clean up the new mess.

  They pried up the last of the slag with crowbars. And then there was time to take on a fresh jaw of cut plug. Big Mat went to watch the crew tap number two. Chinatown and Melody went to sit between the furnaces. It was cooler there. Melody took out his sack of tobacco and rolled a smoke. Chinatown got his chew soft and spat a long brown stream against a wheelbarrow. He stretched his arms over his head.

  “Guy don’t git no chance to sleep round here,” he complained.

  Later he would know the truth of his words through experience. It would always be time to start back to work before he was completely rested from the previous shift. Then if he went with the other fellows to raise a little hell before turning in he wouldn’t get any rest at all.

  “Think I knock off a few winks right now.” Chinatown yawned.

  “Sure, boy. I keep a lookout,” promised Melody.

  The thanks died on Chinatown’s lips. His eyes closed, and he snored easily. Melody did not mind keeping watch. Chinatown was doing well to keep any kind of job. Melody thought about himself and Chinatown dozing in the sun back in Kentucky. The heat of the pit was like the sun at midday. Maybe they were in Kentucky. Maybe Maw was alive and in the back-door garden. Maybe Hattie would come in the doorway and say, “Wake up, you two lazy scapers. Vittles is done.” He could not rouse himself, and Hattie was yanking at his shoulder.

  It was Big Mat shaking him. Slowly he came to himself. He couldn’t remember just when he had fallen asleep.

  “Wazza matter?”

  “’Nother cleanup job,” said Big Mat. “Pit boss been raisin’ hell.”

  Melody sprang to his feet.

  “Pit boss jump on me ’cause you guys ain’t around,” said Big Mat.

  “I think O’Casey got it in for you.”

  They got Chinatown on his feet. When they joined the rest of the gang O’Casey cursed Big Mat for taking so much time. Then they were hitting the hot slag again. The green men were not in the rhythm of the crew. Their pace was uneven. They grew very weary. There was nothing like working on hot slag for tiring a man, they thought. You worked a little while, and then the needles started all over your back, and you just had to lean on your shovel for a spell. They couldn’t understand it. The slag was very light. Maybe it was the heat.

  When the foreman told them to go to lunch most of the green men could hardly drag away to the mill yard. Big Mat was untouched by the toil, but Chinatown and Melody staggered as they walked. Chinatown did not want any food. He was too tired for eating. His muscles ached. Tears rolled down his face. Melody thought that all his life he would be seeing curtains of fire flowing down through slag holes. And when he thought about the long day ahead he got sick in his belly.

  Three weeks Chinatown and Melody staggered back to the bunkhouse, asleep before their heads touched the bunks. At the end of the fourth week they were able to stay awake and carouse with their fellow workers.

  Melody lay on his back, guitar across his chest. Every now and then his hands started idly over the strings but they did not find much music. He didn’t try any slicking. That was for back home and the distances in the hills. Here at the mills it felt right to find quick chords with the fingers—a strange kind of playing for him, but it was right for that new place. Later he would take his guitar with him to the Mexican section of the town. Yesterday he had promised a woman a song. She would want to hear a ballad to make laughter—“The Midget and the Knock-kneed Gal” perhaps. She would not care about this new music he was trying to find. His fingers searched, and he watched the game going on in the cleared space near the door.

  Among the kneeling men was Chinatown, holding the dice high, praying for his point.

  “Ho dice, ho dice,” he chanted, “send that yella money to join his folks. Ha!” The dice clicked for silence and rolled for Chinatown.

  Melody saw Chinatown make his point. He put the guitar to one side and took a bottle from under the mattress of his bunk. A big drunken Irishman, standing by the door, saw the bottle and weaved toward the bunk. Melody held out the corn whisky.

  “You kin take the spider off.”

  The Irishman took a little gulp and passed the white corn back. Melody drank deeply. The Irishman took his long drink, and the bottle was corked. With the corn burning down in his guts, Melody took up the guitar and found a little more of the new music. It was nothing like the blues that spread fanwise from the banks of the Mississippi. It was here somewhere in the whirling lights and in the hearts of great red ingots.

  But the big Irishman was reaching for the bottle again.

  “G’wan, boy, knock out a tune. G’wan . . .”

  Melody turned his head away from the red face, and there were Big Mat and Smothers sitting in a corner. Smothers’ voice rang above the noises of the dice game, making him forget the drunken slobbering in his ear. He listened to Smothers’ words:

  “Lawd ain’t cuss you like steel cuss you. A guy make money—sure—but it jest fade away. Come Monday, ever’ dollar he sweat gone away.”

  “Send a little to Hattie ever’ week,” grunted Big Mat. “Put aside a little o’ the rest. I got to git a house. I got to send for Hattie.”

  The big Irishman was leaning closer. Melody could almost taste the tobacco-and-whisky breath.
r />   “Hit somethin’ hot on the Goddamn box, boy. G’wan . . .”

  In a corner of the room an argument was going on. One of the old hands, Dusty-butt Jones, he was called, waved his bottle and shouted.

  “Us niggers was brung here jest ’fore the war,” he was shouting. “Iffen they hadn’t been fightin’ we still be down South makin’ crop ’stead o’ steel.”

  “The dumb niggers like you maybe. I’d ’a’ left anyhow,” shouted back one of the men.

  The argument became more and more heated. After a while they had to hold Dusty-butt. He got his name because of his shortness. Men said that the seat of his pants dusted the ground. Yet they had to hold him, or he would have jumped a man twice his size.

  Chinatown had his golden grin turned to the roof.

  “Hep me, hep me! Come seven! Ha!” There was more yellow money between his knees than he had known was in the world. But he rolled the dice as if it were no more than pitching new coppers of a Sunday.

  Smothers had upped his voice to a shrill falsetto. “All these here fellas say jest like you sayin’ when they first come round here. They ain’t know the cuss o’ steel. They all got folks back where they come from.”

  “Gotta send for Hattie,” said Big Mat.

  “You never see her again,” shrilled Smothers.

  Dusty-butt was angry because the men had held him from a fight. He looked over at Smothers and grunted.

  “Don’t leave that crazy bastard talk on you,” he told Big Mat. “How the hell he know anythin’?”

  “How I know anythin’?” cried Smothers. “How I know anythin’?”

  “Yeah, how you know anythin’?”

  “Same way I know dead men’s voices in chains and plate. Same way I hears bridges talk in the wind.”

  A spasm of laughter broke open Dusty-butt’s mouth, and nobody could hold out against the laughter. It swelled among the men.

  The Irishman was excited by the noise.

  “Hit them strings, boy!” he howled into Melody’s ear, and began to shuffle.

  The laughter still swelled. The drunk was disgusted with Melody. He started away. Then, to point up his disgust, he flung back over his shoulder: “Sure, You’re a hell of a nigger.”

  The boards under the Irishman’s feet made loud cries in the suddenly quiet room.

  Chinatown held the dice motionless above his head. He was kneeling stiffly over his money. The black men in the room looked out of the corners of their eyes. A couple of whites, standing by the door, kept their heads down. Everybody was waiting for something to happen. Melody was waiting for something to happen. He was supposed to do something but he couldn’t think what to do. A couple of slow seconds passed. Then Big Mat got up and moved to the side of the bunk.

  The Irishman swelled. He swelled his neck and moved nervously over the creaking boards.

  “Wot, the hell! Wot the hell!” he muttered under his breath.

  Big Mat did not seem to know what to do.

  “Leave him be,” he said.

  “Wot the hell! Wot the hell!” chanted the drunken Irishman. He looked all mixed up. Perhaps he didn’t even remember calling the name that had lifted every black face in the room. Perhaps he did not know that at the mills “nigger” passed only between black men. He was backing out fast. He was running from the pressure of eyes.

  “Wot the hell!”

  And he was gone.

  Big Mat looked around. With one hand he made a little sign at Melody.

  “He don’t play so good,” he grunted. “Jest make the music what in him.”

  The dice began to click in Chinatown’s raised hand. The clicking lost itself in the noises of men talking and laughing.

  Big Mat stood there by the bunk for a long time. Melody would have spoken to him if he could have thought of something to say. By the look on Big Mat’s face, the bunkhouse had disappeared, and his thoughts were sunk deep in his head.

  It was not long before Chinatown made the throw that put him out of the game. A thousand dollars had passed through his hands. Now he was broke. Lighthearted, he came over to Melody’s bunk.

  “Let’s git out and have some fun,” he cried.

  “Whyn’t you quit when you had all that yeller under you?”

  “One frogskin just like the other when you gamblin’.”

  “Yeah, now it’s have some fun on my money.”

  He laughed and pulled Melody off the bunk by his legs.

  “Somewhere there’s gals and a moon strong enough to throw a shadow, and you talkin’ ’bout whose money belong to who.”

  While Melody was getting on his shoes Chinatown went over to talk with Big Mat.

  “Melody and me goin’ out to git some bitches.”

  It took a while for Mat to answer through a nod of his head.

  “We git some more whisky too,” said Chinatown.

  “Yeah,” he grunted.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Chinatown.

  “Nothin’ the matter.”

  “Seem like you been polled in the head with a ax handle.”

  “Jest makin’ out to think.”

  “What about?”

  “Got to send for Hattie. This here a good place to be at.”

  Smothers broke in. “All my talk wasted. I think I got somebody who listen when I tell the truth. Steel fool you and kill you.”

  “Shut up!” Chinatown laughed. “That there’s gobbler talk.”

  Smothers drew himself up, and Chinatown had to stop laughing.

  “I been round here a long time. The mill take my legs.” He took up his crutches and hobbled out.

  Chinatown looked as sheepish as a grown man could look. He kept his eyes on Smothers’ stiff back until the little man passed through the bunkhouse door.

  “Sonofabitch, he git touchy of a sudden.”

  A lot of the men had been drifting out of the bunkhouse. The corn whisky was giving out. All of them stayed full of the stuff from the time they got off until they were checked in at the mills again. Of course the hot-metal workers had to keep liquored up. There was always a craving in them that wasn’t to be satisfied. Even when they had all they could drink their insides still felt parched.

  “C’mon, China,” called Melody. “The whisky be all gone, and the gals be all taken ’fore we git there.”

  “Jest tryin’ to see if Big Mat go along with us.”

  “Mat never go anywhere—you know that,” Melody told him.

  “C’mon, Mat, have a little fun,” coaxed Chinatown.

  “Savin’ my money to send for Hattie.”

  “What do a few dollars matter?” asked Chinatown. “You drive yourself crazy sittin’ round here all the time.”

  “Hattie there waitin’.”

  “Man, you don’t know what a woman like till you see them gals at the cat house.”

  “My woman waitin’.”

  “Everythin’ go here,” said Chinatown. “The gals come down from Pittsburgh for the week end. Anything you pick——”

  “Naw.”

  “C’mon, China,” called Melody.

  “Hattie ain’t gonna like it around here nohow,” said Chinatown.

  “Gotta send for her,” droned Mat.

  “She ain’t gonna like wearin’ shoes.”

  “She’s gonna learn.”

  “She ain’t gonna like cookin’ on no stove.”

  “She learn.”

  “Aw hell!” said Chinatown. “If you wants to drive yourself crazy, sittin’ round all the time, well, that’s you.”

  Melody tucked his guitar under his arm, and they left Big Mat.

  They were already full of liquor but they went to the line of one-room shanties where the Mexicans sold themselves for a dollar if the buyer would take some green corn whisky.

  There were dogs everywhere. Stray curs came smelling at their heels. They did not kick at them. The whores of Mex Town had more love for animals than men. One steel worker who had killed a dog had been found on an ash
pile. A knife had let his blood soak the ashes.

  After one visit Chinatown and Melody had known just about every woman in this part of town. They were liked because they brought laughter. That meant a lot in a place where big red and black men made steel twelve hours in every twenty-four.

  Only a couple of lamps were burning in this part of town. They went into the first lit-up shack. Two women were seated on the bed. One was heavy hipped and fat breasted, stringy black hair falling in lines over her khaki face. They knew her. She was called “Sugar Mama.” They had never seen the other woman before. She was something to look at. Her face was broad as a spade but good to see. The eyes were big and set even with her brows. Her hair started almost at her brows and was like a live bush. She looked good because she was young. Most of the women around here were washed out and hard used. Else, why should they have to wrestle with mill hands?

  “Ah, my friends!” yelled Sugar Mama.

  “Mama, you ol’ ’gator!” yelled back Chinatown.

  “It is good you are here.” She turned to Melody. “And you have bring the guitar like you promise.”

  “Can’t play yet,” he told her. “First I got to get drunk.”

  “Sí, sí, everything go better when men get drunk.” Sugar Mama laughed. She reached underneath the bed and pulled out a bottle of something. Melody drank deep and passed the bottle to Chinatown.

  “Where everybody around here?” asked Chinatown between gulps.

  “They come back soon enough,” said Sugar Mama. “Everybody is go to see the dogs fight.”

  “Lawd, I clean forgit they was pittin’ the dogs tonight!” said Chinatown.

  Melody had forgotten too. He was looking at the broad spade-flat face.

  “We still got time to make it, Melody,” said Chinatown. He set the bottle on the floor.

  “Naw.”

  “C’mon, we take Mama and the other one with us.”

  “I could not go,” said Sugar Mama with a sigh. “I must stay here with this sick one.”

  “Oh, she sick,” said Chinatown.

  “Yes, she is a new one. I send for her. I pay railroad here. I think she bring many men in the house. Now she sick, and it is Friday.”

  “Who is she?” Melody wanted to know.