Blood on the Forge

by William Attaway

  “Maybe I ain’t the guy.”

  “Sometimes I think I goin’ to go wild and kill off some people that ain’t done me a harm,” groaned Big Mat.

  “You ought to talk to somebody ’sides me,” insisted Melody.

  “I know you think I ain’t actin’ right ’bout Hattie,” he said, “but that ain’t all on my mind.”

  Melody wanted to know about the man Mat had tried to kill. But something made him insist.

  “It’s jest that I ain’t the guy to talk to. It ain’t jest Hattie neither.”

  “There ain’t no use in thinkin’ ’bout old things,” Mat said. “I stop studyin’ the word. It ain’t no use in thinkin’ ’bout preachin’ the word no more. But that ain’t all on my mind right now.”

  Melody looked at him with old eyes. He looked like a man who had just lost a fight. And Big Mat had never looked that way before. Many times he had been slapped and kicked around. But always before he had had a resentment in him that kept him still a man. Now he was a paper sack, full of nothing—like an empty paper sack. He looked as though he were too empty for anything ever to fill him again.

  Melody said, “Lots o’ guys round here jest starts out on a new way. It ain’t nothin’ to upset a man.” He did not know he was repeating what Bo had said.

  “It got so that little gal, Anna, mean somethin’ big to me. I reckon I must look kinda like her paw. I ain’t so young. . . .”

  “It ain’t nothin’ to upset a man.”

  “She a woman, jest the same,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “At first everythin’ go fine. At first she hold onto me like a woman hold onto her man. Now—”

  “She ain’t tried to run off?” Melody could not keep the jump out of his voice.

  “Naw, she don’t run off. Leastways, her body don’t run off. But, jest the same, she ain’t there no more. I don’t know how come, but she ain’t there no more.”

  “How you mean, Mat?”

  “I don’t know how I mean. Ever since that night she come in late. She wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t even tell me a lie. I beat her up some. Her body was around. But she jest ain’t there.”

  “What you mean, Mat? What you mean?”

  “I don’t know what. In bed she jest lay there and don’t say nothin’ and don’t do nothin’. She do what I say do, but it seem like bein’ on top a piece of ice. She a long way away all the time—jest like I doin’ somethin’ to a dead body. But I do it. And then I feels bad. So I starts in hittin’ her. And I feels badder. It make me crazy.”

  Melody felt a strange, high sensation. And he relived the hot room and Anna fighting with him for a letter. He felt filled with running feet, feet running in all directions. His eyelids beat like moth wings.

  Big Mat said harshly, “I think she lettin’ some fella creep when I gone to the mill. That got to be it. Somebody creepin’ when I’m gone.”

  Melody snapped in cold anger.

  “The bastard you tried to kill,” he stated.

  “That what Sugar Mama told me. She told me she seen Anna pass her place and Dusty-butt with her. She told me she seen him creepin’ round my back door. Sugar Mama tell me all that, so I foller him clean down the river. Woulda killed him if the law hadn’t got me. But Sugar Mama lied.”

  “Sugar Mama lied,” repeated Melody.

  “Dunno why, but she lied. He ain’t the man. He give proof he ain’t the man. But still I try to kill him.”

  “How come?”

  “Dunno how come. Jest seem like that had to be it. Seem like things was all right if he was the man.”

  Melody nodded. Now it seemed all right for Big Mat to try to kill a man who had done nothing. Maybe he was getting kind of crazy himself.

  “Maybe you kin tell me somethin’, Melody. Maybe you kin tell me.”

  There was nothing. Inside, Melody could have repeated those words for himself. He needed to tell himself what it was all about. He couldn’t talk. He could put out his hand and touch Mat.

  “Tell me somethin'!” cried Big Mat.

  He gripped the bandaged hand with a force that paralyzed Melody’s right side. Melody was whirled to face him. Looking into the lined face, Melody felt weak.

  “All right—all right—it be all right,” he stammered.

  For a hundred years Mat stared at him. Then he relaxed his grip. He had shrunk a little.

  Suddenly Melody was aware of the warning. He started up. There was great danger. Something screamed it inside him. His head rang with the fearful shrilling. He thought the mill whistles were blowing. Something was going to happen down by the river. He knew it. His whole being was gripped by that knowledge. He had no memory of anything that had gone on. Big Mat, Anna, himself as himself did not exist. Only danger was real. A steel man would understand. That warning did not tell of death. He had seen men die: furnace gas, electric shock, falls into the pit, slides of piled iron on the narrow-gauge railways—all that was expected. No warning had come from them. This warning was for something much worse. Perhaps the monster had gotten tired of an occasional victim. Perhaps he was about to break his chains. He would destroy masses of men, flesh, bones and blood, leaving only names to bury. Fear of that drove everything else out of a man.

  “Mat! Mat!” he cried.

  Big Mat raised his head and sniffed at the air. It was deep night. The river front was a lighted string. He rose to his feet and stood beside Melody. They held onto the windshield of the car. They watched the string of light.

  Then down there came a blinding flash. Straight up into the sky it went, shooting its reflection to the far shore of the Monongahela. For a moment the windshield of the car filled with light. A mushroom cloud, streaked with whirling red fire, followed the flash. Under its giant bulk the blast furnaces stood like black pop bottles. Then the sound boomed over the car in a big wind. The windshield rattled.

  They were stunned.

  It was over that quickly. Perhaps it hadn’t happened at all; perhaps their senses had played tricks. But the smoke mushroom hung in the sky and lay along the water.

  One of the black pop bottles had foamed over down there at the edge of the river.

  Melody started up the automobile, and they headed for the mills. It was slow going through the town. Every person able to walk was headed the same way. There was no rush. None of the women were hysterical. The kids kept quiet. The entire town just moved on the mills. The streets were full of swinging lanterns.

  People were held in the car lights now and again, like motion-picture slides: Slavs—women with shawls over their heads—Mexicans whose hair shot back grease glints, a couple of black girls, wearing old carpet slippers, men, big chested, with handlebar mustaches, people with sweat misting on their faces, black faces, tan faces, red faces. . . .

  The crowd was already thick in front of the mill gates. Uniformed guards were stationed there to keep anybody from slipping through. They knocked men and women back. Some of the men began to grumble.

  Big Mat and Melody wormed through to the gate and tried to get one of the guards to look at their work cards. They were knocked back with the others.

  “Just wait! Just wait!” the guards bawled.

  So there was nothing to do but stand and wait. Exactly what there was to wait for nobody knew. And yet there were no questions.

  A light rain began to fall. It was chilly. Most of them had not stopped to put on coats. With an excited clanging two ambulances drove up, their headlights parting the crown. The gates swung open, and the white automobiles slid through. And now a whisper began to pass among people.

  Melody heard it: “Number four on the blast went up. . . .”

  Melody’s gang had been at the blast furnaces. Some of them might be dead ones. Chinatown had been working in his place. He might be just a cinder now. But some of the tension went out of Melody, because he knew what had happened.

  He gave the whisper to Big Mat. And he could hear it travel to the outskirts of the crowd.

&nb
sp; A different look came over the faces. Men lit cigarettes, and the women, beginning to feel the chill, huddled closer together.

  After a while there came another whisper. “Fourteen are dead ones . . . fourteen. . . .”

  They passed that whisper along without emotion. The people grieved behind set faces.

  When the ambulances came back through the gates there was a sickening smell of burned flesh. Even the hard-faced guards had to turn away for a minute. In that minute Melody had slipped through the gate and was racing toward the blast furnaces.

  There was a shocking silence around the blast houses. Billowing steam rose slowly from the broken furnace that had been number four. A lot of men were standing around looking, doing nothing. He caught one man by the shoulder.

  “Who was the dead ones?”

  He was not answered.

  He asked everybody he saw that same question. Nobody would answer. Then he saw Bo sitting over to one side. There was a group of men around him. He was not hurt.

  “Bo! Bo!”

  For a long minute he looked with blind eyes. Then he said, “Hallo, Melody.”

  “Where’s Chinatown?”

  Bo looked back toward the furnaces.

  “Like a bottle of bad vinegar,” he said. “Foamed over jest like vinegar.”

  “Where’s China?” Melody shouted in his ear.

  One of the men answered for him.

  “Don’t ask him nothin’. He ain’t ready to talk.”

  “My brother was in his crew,” Melody said.

  “Musta been taken away,” said the man.

  PART FIVE

  FOURTEEN MEN GONE, and Smothers one of them. Fourteen men, and of Bo’s crew only himself and Chinatown alive. This was a sorrowful time. There was no need for mourners; there were plenty. The entire town mourned the death of the fourteen. It was a time of funerals throughout the town. The Italians buried their dead after feasting; the Slavs sat like rocks and watched their flesh go to the earth; the Negroes were full of loud wailing and made a three-day wake for their sacrifice.

  Smothers had spoken the truth at last. Then he died. The steel workers understood the way of the accident. A shelf of hot metal had built itself high up in the faulty furnace. When that shelf had broken the force of its fall had been explosive. The upward rush of the blast had blown off the entire top of the furnace. Tons of stock had been thrown into the air. That was why fourteen men had had to die. But steel workers also felt the truth of Smothers’ last words: steel just had to get somebody that day. There was no conflict between what Smothers had said and the facts. None of the experts who came to the scene of the accident could tell why a slip had come to number four.

  It might have been better if the list of dead had run to fifteen. Chinatown’s eyes were gone. It was as if Chinatown were gone. For the man who had had those grinning, slant eyes it was one and the same. The day that they took away the bandages even the doctors’ tempered minds were struck with horror. For Big Mat there was only a dull, dry misery, but tears rolled on Melody’s face as he looked into the dead things that were no longer eyes. They were old eggs rotting in their ragged half shells, purple and revolting.

  The doctors said that those once-eyes would die and shrivel through the years, that then they would look better. Now it would be better to hide them under black patches.

  Weeks had to pass before Chinatown knew his blindness. That long time he was a man thrown into a vacuum. He did not know where he was; he did not know where the light had gone. There was no time. In movement his body felt motionless; the floor was a thing that moved to touch his feet. This was not delirium. He had been a man who lived through outward symbols. Now those symbols were gone, and he was lost.

  Big Mat and Melody had taken a bigger house so Chinatown could be near to them in his trouble. Anna took good care of his body, but it was Melody who saved his mind. In his first groping for some familiar ground he slipped back into the past. Melody went with him.

  “Man, man!” Chinatown said. “Chitterlin’s and cabbage greens!”

  “Got to have some fat meat,” said Melody.

  “Maw out in the back-door garden gettin’ them greens.”

  “Gonna git some fat meat too,” said Melody.

  “Gonna git that tooth,” he said.

  “Which tooth, boy?”

  “Gold one.”

  “Man, it sure do shine!”

  “Got to keep that tooth.” Chinatown struggled upright. “I ain’t nothin’ if I loses it.”

  Melody remembered the boxcar and the long, dark trip.

  “Sure, boy. Whoa, boy!”

  Chinatown strained into the darkness. He leaned his body far to one side as he fought the curve.

  “Ascared to sleep . . . ascared to sleep. . . . Car shake so it liable to knock the tooth right outen my head. Now I sleep, and maybe it git knocked out. . . .”

  “I keep talkin’, boy. . . . I keep talkin’. . . .” sang Melody.

  Chinatown stopped. He whispered, “You heard what happen to young Charley?”

  “They lynch him,” said Melody.

  “Yeah, they lynch him in broad daylight,” cried Chinatown.

  “That’s a long time ago,” whispered Melody.

  “That’s a long time ago?”

  “Sure, that’s a long time ago.”

  “Gonna wrap me a smoke,” said Chinatown. His hands fumbled with the air.

  Melody rolled a cigarette in one hand and stuck it into the tragic mouth. He put a match to one end, and Chinatown drew breath. The weed burned fiercely.

  “This don’t taste like no tobacco,” cried Chinatown. He spit the cigarette. Melody picked it from the bed and crushed the fire between two fingers. The burn felt good to him.

  “Smoke spoil my feelin’ for eatin’,” cried Chinatown. “Wish I had me a smoke.”

  “Ain’t no tobacco around,” said Melody.

  “How come you don’t play somethin’ on your box?” he asked.

  “Sure, boy.” And Melody reached for his guitar.

  “Blues drive away that hungry cravin’,” said Chinatown. “I jest sit here in the warmth and listen.”

  Melody’s hand was out of the bandage, but he couldn’t make any music. The corns were gone from his picking hand. He couldn’t get tone from the strings without those corns. It was all off key. He couldn’t feel the music. Sitting with Chinatown and looking into those rotted eyes had made him feel sick. Chinatown had laughed at the woman whose left breast had died and rotted so no man would buy her for a dime. Their Maw had told them when they were little scapers in the red hills, “Never laugh at a hunchback, or You’ll carry his pack.” Chinatown’s eyes looked so rotted that they brought back to Melody the memory of the woman on the road. Always before Melody had been able to heave and then feel clean. Now he could not let his stomach turn because of his brother’s eyes. They were with Melody to stay. He would never be able to spew them away.

  Chinatown began to feel for the present.

  “Ho, Melody, what was that ’bout the mills? What was that what Smothers said? All the time my body jumpin’ like hell. I don’t like it . . . I don’t like it. . . . Mill never be my home. Who keep them circus animals down by the river? Melody . . . Melody, gimme a glass. I got to see my tooth. Only it’s too dark. What good a good tooth in the dark?”

  Melody could not stand this. He went away in an old song.

  “China,” he half sang, “you know where I wish I was at now?”

  This was the wishing game, a part of their past, forgotten up to now. Chinatown had always liked the wishing game. He hunched forward on the cot.

  “Where at?” He grinned eagerly.

  “Me—me,” pondered Melody, “me—I wish I was long gone at noontime. That’s it, long gone at noontime. . . .”

  “Where you be goin’?”

  “Be jest long gone, that’s all. Treadin’ the ground, walkin’ the whole earth wherever there good ground and somethin’ growing.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe you plant a little molasses cane?” Chinatown ventured.

  “Maybe later, but I can’t stop now. I got to cover the earth ’fore midnight—got to feel all the good muck ground with my toes.”

  “Seem like you stop jest to suck jest one little cane joint, then——”

  “That’s right,” said Melody. “I stop jest to cut one. But I suck it, treadin’ along. The muck feel good to my toes, and there always the swamp near by to blow cool on me.”

  “Maybe you step on a cottonmouth in the swamp. What you do then?”

  Melody thought a little and let his thought ride high through the endless spaces of his mind. He hit a bad chord on his music. But it was good enough to carry him on a bit.

  “I do meet up with a snake,” he cried. “A whole land full of snakes come at me. First there come a coachwhip. He grab a root in his mouth and lash at me with his tail. But he don’t last long. I stomp his head deep in the ground. And he spring up into a tall whitewood tree. Lash the air a little at the tip so the leaves ’gin to fall.”

  “You meet any more snake?”

  “I’m ridin’ high till I meets a hoop snake, rollin’ along, rollin’ along, with his tail gripped in his jaws. Boy, what a snake! solid round like a wagon wheel. He gain on me. I’m treadin’ the air, but he ridin’ the breeze. Then I curve on him till he rollin’ round and round, scarfin’ the ground, rollin’ himself down. So when I push his head in the ground there ain’t nothin’ left but a crooked wild chinaberry tree, curved in the wind and broken like a old wagon wheel.”

  “Man!” breathed Chinatown. “Tell me ’bout the rattler.”

  “Ain’t much to tell,” said Melody. “He a tree full of jack-o’-lanterns now, rattling when the wind blow.”

  “Aw, that one wasn’t nothin’,” complained Chinatown.

  “Maybe he a tree full of sunned acorns,” said Melody. “Then he rattle like dry bones at drought.”

  “Where the blue racer?”

  “He so pretty I wind him round my neck in a bow tie.”

  “Where the barn snake?”

  “He a string of red and yellow beads for the neck o’ a gal.”

  “Where the snake look like a root?”