Blood on the Forge

by William Attaway

  Clear to the river front he went, repeating his word. He was looking for the sheriff. There was to be a raid on the union headquarters, and Big Mat had to be among the raiders. Only new violence could strengthen him, restore his feeling of power. That feeling must come quickly, or the cracks that Anna had cleaved would widen until he was nothing but the pieces of a man.

  The sheriff and his band were waiting. They would not have gone without Big Mat. He was to be the key figure in the attack. They were worried until they saw him coming along the road. The sheriff poked a deputy in the side.

  “See?” he crowed, pointing toward Mat. “What I tell you?”

  A deputy said, “Yeah, he’s comin’, all right, but that don’t mean he’s goin’ to do it.”

  “He’ll do it. Jest wait and see.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t do it by myself. I wouldn’t.”

  “Me neither,” said another man. “Them union guys is desperate now.”

  One of the troopers grinned.

  “I might do it but I’d want more than my horse with me.”

  The sheriff hailed Big Mat.

  “Hallo! Thought you wasn’t comin’ back. What held you up?”

  Big Mat made a gesture with his hands.

  “Okay,” said the sheriff. “All ready to go?” He did not wait for an answer. “Now here’s the plan. We got to have some guy go in there and start trouble first. You catch it, jest the old stuff—knock a few guys down; kinda start a riot. Then before anything can happen we bust in and cart off the whole shebang for disturbin’ the peace.”

  “You’re goin’ to go in first.” The trooper laughed.

  The sheriff gave the trooper a hard look, then turned to Big Mat.

  “Well, that’s it,” he confessed. “Think you can handle it?”

  Big Mat turned toward the center of town. The sheriff mistook the gesture.

  “Wait!” he said. “You can’t go back on your oath like this. You’re a sworn deputy. Ain’t no yellow bellies in my outfit.”

  “I was jest gittin’ started,” said Big Mat.

  He strode back down the moonlit road.

  The sheriff called:

  “Jest walk in like you was goin’ to sign up. We won’t be far behind.”

  “Damn, he’s game!” said the trooper.

  “Seem like he’s kinda anxious to go,” marveled the sheriff. Then he became businesslike. “Well, C’mon, you guys, let’s git started. But don’t crowd him too close.”

  Big Mat walked alone in the center of the road. The houses on every side were dark but they were full of hidden life. The deputies patrolling their beats came to look but they knew him and turned away. The dogs scrapping over the garbage in the road stopped their snarling at the menace of his steady footsteps. The clank of the mills was subdued and disjointed but it was there as always. Everything that the town had known was still there, but Big Mat was utterly alone. His was a terrible concentration as he walked along dragging the red belt through the dust.

  Peon . . . peon . . . that was what she had called him. He knew the term. The Mexicans around here used it. It was for slaves bound on the soil—slaves bound on the job. There were no white peons. It was a term like “nigger.” He could not understand just why he had been called by that name, but the contempt behind it was real. His new-found power had had no strength against that contempt. Maybe in the South he had been just a peon. There had been a riding boss to count the drops of sweat from his body. But here there was no riding boss. He had to keep saying it to himself: there was no riding boss . . . there was no riding boss. . . .

  It was bad, trying to keep from thinking all that long way to the union headquarters. The cracks in his ego were widening. He hurried his steps.

  The union headquarters were just a desk and a few chairs in a store front. Behind that desk sat a calm, square-faced man, the organizer for the district. Women occupied the chairs. Their men stood against the wall. There was no air of great activity here. There was, rather, the feeling of purposeful waiting. For these men and women knew that they were to be raided. The news had leaked out through one of the drunken deputies. A youth kept watch at the front door. He called back to the man behind the desk:

  “Ain’t nobody yet, sir.”

  “Just keep lookin’, boy. They’ll be here.”

  The boy turned his anxious eyes toward the glass.

  A couple of women started talking under their breath to a big, hairy fellow. Their words were foreign, but their fear spoke plainly. The big-bearded man shook himself. His coat rattled like paper. Everybody looked.

  The organizer cleared his throat to command attention. He spoke.

  “Say, did I ever tell you folks ’bout the time I was weldin’ in Monessen? I was nothin’ but a kid. There I was doin’ a man’s job. My old man taught all his boys the trade, you know.”

  Everybody was hanging on his words. He might have been telling them how to win the strike.

  “My old lady run a boardin’house—took in all the metal workers that ’d pay three bucks a week and took in all that couldn’t. Wasn’t always that way, but there was a fire on a trestle, and my old man got himself burned some. So I had to do the weldin’. And there had to be boarders.”

  The boy turned his strained eyes.

  “Ain’t nobody yet.”

  “Well,” the organizer said, “they wanted to know how old I was when I got the job. So of course I tried to lie a little—was pretty big for my age.”

  One of the women said:

  “Look, we know they’re comin'—we know that. Then why don’t you let our men go home? We don’t want no more trouble. We don’t want no more trouble.”

  Another woman broke in:

  “My boy’s laid up now. I don’t want my man to get hurt. Why don’t we just leave?”

  Her man said:

  “Look, you go home, Sally. You go home.”

  The organizer looked at her.

  “We ain’t breakin’ the law. This is an organization under the law. How long do you think we’d last, runnin’ and hidin’ like criminals?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Nobody yet,” droned the boy at the glass.

  “As I was sayin’,” took up the organizer, “I had to lie a little ’bout my age. Said I was nineteen. The boss called me a liar right off. He knew I couldn’t be over fifteen. But I knew my weldin’, so he hired me. ‘Of course,’ he told me, ‘on account of your age we got to give you a boy’s job instead of a man’s.’ That was all right with me, so I asked him what was the difference in hours between a man’s job and a boy’s job. ‘Ain’t no difference in hours,’ the boss told me. ‘The difference is in pay. Boys just get half as much.”'

  A woman said:

  “Why don’t they come?” She wrung her hands.

  The organizer started another story.

  “Say, did I ever tell you folks ’bout——?”

  The boy at the window broke in. His voice went into falsetto.

  “A man’s comin'! Big fella—black. . . .”

  One of the men walked to the window.

  “Yeah, that’s them, all right. Seen that big guy before. He’s a bad one.”

  The organizer motioned to the boy at the window.

  “Go on out the back way, son. You done good.”

  “I don’t mind stickin’.”

  “Naw, you go on,” the organizer said.

  The boy left.

  Big Mat stopped outside of the window and looked in. He saw a place full of calm people, a square-faced man sitting behind a desk. All of these people were intent upon themselves. They did not look up at his terrible face on the pane. He hesitated a minute before he walked in.

  Inside, he stood tensed for action. The bellows of his chest worked up and down, making loud whistling noises. But nobody spoke to him or paid him the least attention. A man moved against the wall, and Big Mat spun suddenly. But the man had only shifted, folding his arms, his coat crackling like newspaper.

/>   Big Mat became tired of his tense position. But how could he let down? How was he going to start trouble? He could not just walk up and hit people who were calmly looking at the floor. His eyes began to shift out toward the street. The sheriff would know what to do. But the sheriff and his men were out of sight. So Big Mat stood in the center of the floor, unable to fight or to leave. He was trapped by the calmness.

  The still minutes ticked by. Big Mat shifted from foot to foot. At last, in desperation, he started forward. The man behind the desk did not look up but extended his hand with a slip of paper. Big Mat took the paper and held it. He watched the people around him. If only someone would say something, look at him, help him by their fear to do the thing he had come to do.

  The man behind the desk looked up for an instant and beckoned toward a stub of a pencil. Big Mat felt his hand forced toward the desk. In another minute he might have signed a union blank, but a woman broke under the tension.

  “He’s a deputy! He’s a low-down deputy! He didn’t come here to sign.”

  That was all he had wanted. With his foot he kicked the desk over on the union organizer. Then he was beating his way through the crowd. The people stampeded out of the store front. A little gray Slav came under Big Mat’s hands. Those hands fastened around the old man’s neck. Hardly realizing that he carried a man, Big Mat broke through the doorway and into the road.

  The sheriff and his men were waiting.

  Big Mat stood out in the night, breathing in the air that intoxicated him like ether. Peon . . . peon . . . He was no peon. There was no riding boss over him now. He turned wildly and gazed at the mill. A great exhilaration almost swept him into the air. The townsfolk were down. He was exalted. A bitterness toward all things white hit him like a hot iron. Then he knew. There was a riding boss—Big Mat. Big Mat Moss from the red hills was the riding boss. For the first time in his life he laughed aloud. Laughing crazily, he held the man by the neck.

  The old Slav struggled feebly in Big Mat’s great hands. He cried out against the hands of Big Mat, the black riding boss. He had never been in the South. He was from across the sea. His village was in the Ukraine, nestling the Carpathian mountains. From that great distance he had come to be crushed by hands that had learned hate in a place that did not exist in his experience. He slid out of those hands, and his gray little body barely made a mound on the level ground.

  The mounted troopers galloped up and down the street, leaning over their horses’ necks to club the fleeing men and women. But Big Mat did not see them. He looked at the mills, a string of broken lights now. So many of the fires that had seemed eternal were now gone.

  Big Mat looked at the mills, and the big feelings were lifting him high in the air. He was big as God Almighty. The sun was down, or his head would have thrown a shadow to shade the river front. He could have spit and quenched a blast furnace. Big Mat’s eyes were big as half-moons. They stretched, and their full size showed white all around black pin points. His mind went rocketing at a crazy speed. All of his life here at the mills flashed before him for an instant. Smothers had been a liar. Steel couldn’t curse a man. Steel couldn’t hurt him. He was the riding boss. How could those dead mills touch him? With his strength he could relight their fires or he could let them lie cold. Without Black Irish they were dead.

  This was the only place for a big black man to be.

  The blow on the back of his head took him without warning. His eyes had been the measure of the whole river front. His big eyes could not have seen the young Slav and the pickax handle. He did not fall. He staggered about like his blind brother in search of the outhouse. The blows fell again and again. Still he did not fall. His hands groped for his assailant. He had been tuned to the pitch of madness, but the instinct of self-preservation forced his mind down the scale to a more normal pitch. He was blinded by that long slide.

  Like a reflection in disturbed water, the face of the young Slav came into his vision. He looked at that face from a great distance. It would only be a moment before he must crash to the ground. His eyes were objective. He had all the objectivity of a man who is closer to death than life. From that dark place he looked back at the world. This is what he saw:

  A young man, a Zanski without the handle-bar hairs underneath his nose, a young Slav frantic because he was killing a man. A good face, a little crazy and twisted with repugnance for the blows he must deal.

  He, Mat, was the riding boss, and hate would give this club hand the strength it needed.

  His vision faded. He was confused. It seemed to him that he had been through all of this once before. Only at that far time he had been the arm strong with hate. Yes, once he had beaten down a riding boss. A long time ago in the red hills he had done this thing and run away. Had that riding boss been as he was now? Big Mat went farther away and no longer could distinguish himself from these other figures. They were all one and all the same. In that confusion he sensed something true. Maybe somewhere in these mills a new Mr Johnston was creating riding bosses, making a difference where none existed.

  The young Slav danced about and used the pickax handle. Because the big black man did not fall he was filled with terror. Because the little eyes seemed to regard him so calmly he had to become frenzied to finish the job. So he danced about, and the sound of the blows was dull. It was like a Punch and Judy show, the way the black head wagged under the stick. It was funny, funny without laughter.

  The mounted troopers swept back down the street. They passed two bodies—an old Slav’s and Big Mat’s. . . .

  Later at the jail, the sheriff, in his own way, summed up the whole thing.

  “Sure is a shame that big nigger had to go and git himself killed. But I don’t reckon we can pin it on nobody. Just accidental in the line o’ duty, that’s all. He was game, all right, but crazier ’n hell. That’s the thing ’bout nigger deputies—they’re fightin’ the race war ’stead of a labor strike. Always be like that, I guess, as long as they come from the South. There’ll be somebody to take his place, an’ that there’s one reason why the union ain’t gonna win. They didn’t figure on the South when they started this here. . . .”

  Melody and Chinatown had been through much since they left Kentucky one early spring night. And now they were leaving the mills. They were at the station, waiting for the train. The months behind them stood out like years. Winter was coming. . . . That morning there was a thin film of ice in quiet places along the Monongahela. The sun came out and lanced that thin ice, leaving it pitted with black holes. The Indian summer was gone. The strike had gone with the Indian summer, destroyed by forces cold and ruthless. Now the mills had more men than they needed. Wages were down.

  But that was not why Melody was taking Chinatown away. There was a deep pain in Melody. He was never happy. He thought about the first months in the Allegheny Valley. Then he had been fearful of the greatness around him, the endless clash of big forces playing up and down the banks of long rivers. This place had been a monster, beautiful in an ugly strength that fascinated a man so that it made him sing his fear. It was a new, big world. Right now all of Melody’s world was a little, dull pain. He had left his guitar behind.

  Someday, Melody thought, he and Chinatown would go home to Kentucky. But he did not think about that very hard. He was beginning to feel the truth: they would never go home. Now they would go to Pittsburgh.

  Many Negroes had gone to Pittsburgh before them; many were castoffs of the mills. They had settled in the bottoms of that city, making a running sore at those lowest points. But a man had told Melody where to live: the Strip, a place where rent was nearly free and guys who knew how to make out would show them the ropes. That was good. Melody had a check for two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, but that did not seem like big money now. It was the little price that had been paid for Chinatown’s eyes.

  The train roared in. The sides and flickering windows of the black coaches became steady in his eye. He took Chinatown’s arm and helped him aboard. The
whistle sounded twice—highball. They were on the way.

  It was just like any other passenger train but to Melody it was special. This train was the one taking him away from the mills . . . Anna . . . Chinatown’s eyes . . . Big Mat’s grave. . . . The only things he carried of these were a homemade watch fob and an old backless Bible.

  They took seats in the smoking car. Melody did not look out of the window. He looked at the black man in the seat across from them. That man wore an old khaki uniform and a wrinkled overseas cap. Under that cap an elastic band held two black patches over the soldier’s eyes. Melody looked from the soldier to Chinatown. Two blind men facing one another, not knowing.

  “Anybody in front of me got a smoke?” asked the soldier.

  “Sure.” And Chinatown pulled out his pack of cigarettes.

  Miraculously they made the exchange.

  “You ain’t a doughboy?” asked the soldier.

  “Naw, steel worker,” said Chinatown.

  “I’m just from the soldiers’ hospital. I’m well now, so I’m goin’ on down the line to my folks.”

  “We goin’ to Pittsburgh.”

  “Used to be a steel man myself ’fore the war.”

  They talked along many of the long miles to Pittsburgh. Finally they were friendly enough for Chinatown to ask:

  “How come you quit the mills? What was the sense goin’ somewhere to git shot?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” said the soldier. “It was just one day I was standin’ outside the mill to git the cool river air, and the feelin’ come on me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The feelin’ was sorta like that river air, I guess. Ain’t no sense tellin’ it to quit blowin’. It don’t care if you want to git cool or not.”

  Chinatown laughed.

  “Yeah, but I kin go in the house an’ shut down the windows if I git tired o’ that air.”

  “There’s one thing I couldn’t shut out.”

  “What was that?”

  “Listen.”

  Chinatown cocked his head to one side. He heard only the noises of the train.

  “You hear it?” asked the soldier.