The Long November

by James Benson Nablo

  “Freddie’s late tonight, isn’t he, Joe?”

  I said she might as well go to bed and I’d sit up for a while because I wanted to read. I could hear her getting undressed and then I heard the light snap off. I waited a while, then went to my own room. I was just going to sleep when Fern came in and crawled into my arms again. She was sobbing that dry, catching sob, and I held her tightly. I was awakened some time later by Fern crawling all over me and pressing herself against me, still sobbing, but now her sobs were hysterical. She’d torn her nightgown off and lay on top of me, wildly kissing me and half-crazily calling me “Freddie.” Her body was hot. She pressed herself to me furiously for a time, then suddenly stiffened and stopped. Then she went limp and fell into a deep sleep lying on top of me.

  I’d be a damned liar, Freddie, if I said those nights, especially the one before we found you, didn’t bother me and plenty. But I sweated it out until Fern was all right. I know it would have been okay with you if I’d gone ahead, if it would’ve helped Fern, but it wouldn’t have, Freddie, not one damned bit.

  We got Freddie the next morning. He’d been caught by his own drilling machine and it dragged him to the bottom of the sump, his hand still through the trigger guard. When the lowering water showed the outline of his body, they dropped me in a sling and I hauled him up. In the mine hospital I identified that oily, battered thing as Freddie Miller for the coroner, and then went home to tell Fern.

  Fern changed overnight. In the morning her mind had accepted the fact of Freddie’s death at last, and she started eating and sleeping properly. We had a funeral service with a sealed coffin, and Fern didn’t insist on seeing Freddie. When I started back to my regular shift I found the boys had been punching my time card in and out so I lost no time for the layoff. You wouldn’t have liked that, would you, Moreland? But then, you probably never learned of incidents as trivial as Freddie Miller’s death down in that fishy island. It would have only cluttered up the monthly balance sheet anyway.

  It took Fern several weeks to decide what to do and to straighten out her affairs. She would have about five or six thousand dollars when everything was fixed up, and the idea of going back to school struck her.

  “I think I’ll try to learn about some of the things Freddie was interested in...maybe I could be of some help somewhere if I knew. There must be a place for women in this thing, too, and Freddie would like to have me do that. What are you going to do, Joe?”

  “Stay here, I guess. I don’t know where else I’d get a job.”

  “Why don’t you keep the house and the furniture, Joe, and write for your Steffie?”

  I smiled at her. “Steffie is just a dream, Fern, maybe that’s all she ever was...and when you aren’t here, I won’t even want to walk by this place.”

  She cried a little, quietly, and came over to curl up in my lap again; she hadn’t done that since we’d found Freddie. She buried her head on my shoulder and said: “Joe, I guess I was pretty bad for a while, wasn’t I? And I’ll never forget how wonderful you were...it was just that you and I are all that’s left...you understand, don’t you, Joe?”

  “Of course, honey.”

  An idea was kicking around in my head and I didn’t know just how to put it, but Fern spoke again.

  “Freddie would have liked you to have the house, Joe...”

  “No, Fern...that is, unless...look, Fern, this is a hell of a time, but why do you have to go? Oh, hell, honey, we’ve been together so long now...why don’t you marry me, Fern? Please, Fern?”

  She said nothing and I went on, “You don’t have to say anything now, Fern...take a rain check on it...go home to London for a while and think it over. I could ‘bach’ it here...think about it, honey.”

  Fern was crying again and I felt like a stumblebum. “I’m sorry, Fern, I didn’t mean to. .

  She sat up and looked at me, and smiled, then she reached up and kissed me.

  “Oh, Joe, Joe, you’re just too damned swell....”

  “I meant that, Fern, you know how I feel about you.”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Joe. I’ll think about it tonight.”

  Just before I went to sleep Fern came into the room and tucked the covers around me, kissed me, and said, “Good night, Joe-boy.”

  Millicent was there the next afternoon when I came home, and I went downtown in the early part of the evening because they seemed to want to talk. I stalled two or three hours in the poolroom and finally went back about nine-thirty. Millicent had left and Fern came over and curled up in my lap. She fitted there so damned beautifully. I waited for her to start and after a while she said:

  “Don’t stop me, Joe, till I say all this. Thanks, Joe, thanks so very much for asking me to marry you, and if it’s got to be someone else but Freddie...you’re the only person I want. But, Joe, I’m going to say ‘no’ and it isn’t because of Freddie. He’s gone and I’ve got to make a new life...it’s because of your Steffie, Joe. No, please let me finish...you can’t love a girl as long as you’ve loved her and forget about her just because you feel sorry for me. But Joe, I’m only twenty and there’ll be other men...there’ll have to be, and I want you to be the first.”

  I couldn’t say anything for a long time—there didn’t seem to be anything to say—but finally I said, “You’re not exactly right, Fern, it’s not a question of you or Steffie. It’s really more that we know each other so well and you fit so damned well into my life...like you fit in my lap.”

  “Joe...let’s not talk about it...I might weaken and I know I’m right. Just do what I ask, Joe.”

  She was right, Steffie, I loved her and she knew it, but not the way I loved you. I held her that night for Joe Mack, not for Freddie Miller, but I knew and so did she that I could never love her the way Freddie had, nor could I love her the way I love you. But if she had said yes, Steffie, I could have been a pretty happy guy and maybe I wouldn’t be lying in this stinking hole today.

  Fern started packing the next day. I was to sell the house and furniture and send her the money. Once her mind was made up she hurried like the devil to get out of Moreland Lake. On Monday she was ready and I laid off for the day to see her to the station. It was an end to a hell of a big part of my life, even though it was compressed into one year. She stood on the bottom step of the entrance to her car and kissed me for a long time, then she said:

  “Good-by, my Joe, I’ll never forget you.”

  The air was clean and green and cold as I walked back toward the doll-bungalow. They were gone, Fern and Freddie, gone as if they’d never been there at all, and the full, drab horror of that bastard town closed in on me. Yes, the air seemed clean and green and cold, but it wasn’t. A kid spoke to me on the street.

  “What time is it, mister?”

  “It’s November, bud.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The house was dead and in its lifelessness many little mean features stood out. I guess it wasn’t much of a house, but Fern and Freddie had made it a home. I wandered through as though looking for something; some silly damned thing that would bring them back. In the bathroom there were faint traces of powder Fern had used, and on a clothesline in the woodshed were two tiny pairs of pink panties she’d forgotten. They looked so little and so lonely, I couldn’t leave them, so I packed them with my things. I sat for a while in the big armchair and tried to imagine what it had been like holding Fern, but it was no use. I knew I had to leave the dollhouse; had to start from scratch, somewhere, again. The cubicle at Mother Machree’s Boarding House was going to be a poor substitute, but there would be life there. I left the dollhouse and was never inside it again.

  And yet, Joe, you’ve never really left it. Whenever a dream of home starts forming, it shapes and colors in the pastel blue of those tiny press-board rooms. You can’t leave people like Fern and Freddie, any more than you can forget Jake and Sarah—those people who’ve taken you in, those people made only of heart and dreams. Yes, Joe, you’ve a lot to thank those people for. It’s
a debt, but not one you can pay back. Could you pay Jake Levinsky for taking you from the Sally Ann? All Jake would say is, “Nuts, Joe, give it to some guy that’s down...pass it along.” You knew that then, eh, Joe? Yes, by God, I didn’t know much but I knew that. I knew I had to square things somehow with Freddie and Jake. And I resolved to make Moreland Consolidated pay a million times for the life net that wasn’t under Freddie Miller. I didn’t, I know I didn’t....I didn’t even help very much when the time came. But they’ll pay, they’ll pay a million times, and more. Moreland himself got off pretty damned easily. Just a slug on the noggin and a grave no one will remember.

  I’ve never seen those smelly little islands with scenery like a fruit-store calendar; I’ve never seen the place I’d exile myself to so I wouldn’t have to pay taxes. But you’ve never had two hundred million dollars, Joe. What the hell difference does that make? If you’ll do it then, you’ll do it five times as fast for a sawbuck. It isn’t the amount of dough that’s important, it’s how much you love it that counts, and Moreland sure must have loved it. The hunkies loved it, too...what they saw of it. Those hunkies who worked like hell so their kids wouldn’t grow up to be hunkies, but maybe even Canadian. Finns, Hungarians, Polacks, Ukrainians, Greeks and God knows what else; crawling on their bellies through damp tunnels. Working, slugging, dreaming, and dying. And paying their taxes on the piddling wages they earned. Yes, by God, they did. They paid their taxes!

  I wonder what it was like, don’t you, Moreland? And everyone wonders who did it. Just a few sharp raps with a heavy stick, and your skull cracked like the sapless attachment it was. It doesn’t take long, does it, Moreland? It didn’t take Freddie Miller long either. And afterward the harpies sit around and start cutting up the bones. Two hundred million dollars worth of bones! Do you ever wonder who did it, Moreland? Have you ever thought maybe it was God?

  To hell with Moreland, Joe, what about the next year? Well, it was a stinker! From November ‘37 to November ‘38. From the day Fern left to the day Curly Durant died in the cold shack on the trail. From Joe Mack, underground machine man, to Joe Mack, prospector and would-be mine financier, who sneaked out of town on a cold freight train with a bag of channel samples, a few clothes, and two tiny pairs of panties. It was the year Moreland Lake found its permanence, its grave. It died that year, but it went in a burst of white-hot glory and what is left is slowly sinking back to the green earth and rock. Mines haven’t a long life at best and the towns live only as long as the mines. Moreland Lake looked impermanent and it was. As the earth shifts and closes the silly openings rudely digging into its skin, it also provides enough atmospheric changes to rot and tumble the ridiculous structures man places on its surface. And one day nothing will be left, nothing will mark where it was, any more than anything marks where Curly lies asleep with his golden women. Anyway, Joe, what the hell is permanent? It isn’t a scrubby mining town, and it isn’t a coral reef in the Caribbean, and God knows, it isn’t gold. No, it isn’t gold, for of all the things we chase, gold moves the fastest.

  You were right, Curly, Gold is the whore. But she’s only working one side of the street; her older sister, Death, is working the other side. And the street narrows and comes together at the end of vision, so they walk side by side. One carries the beginning and the other carries the end. Gold is the syphilis and the chancre, and Death the consuming maggot. And Gold will proposition you, Curly. She’ll ask, in the age-old fashion, “Out for a good time, boy?” and she’ll give it to you. When she’s done, when all passion and life is gone, and you’re twisted and spent and tired, then she’ll turn you over to her cackling sister for the payoff. And the payoff is a grave. A fine old pair, eh, Curly? And they never quit ‘cause their hearts are in their work, and like you said, Curly, when you find a whore who puts her heart in her work, you’ve really got something. It was the fall of ‘38 when the sisters gave the payoff to Moreland Lake; gave the town its grave.

  Remember the shack on the north side of town, Joe? The musty smell and the broken bunk? Remember sitting in the last warm sun in the doorway and trying to add up the life of Joe Mack? And spread before you in the valley was a dying town. And you wondered if, for all practical purposes, Joe Mack had died too? That was two months after the strike and you still hadn’t moved on. You still wondered why you stayed. No, I knew why I stayed; I knew Fern and Freddie had punched too deep and I had to stay to the end, even if I were the last man to leave. I had to square it somehow with the Ferns and Sarahs, the Jakes and Freddies. And it wasn’t until the day in November when I topped the last rise before town and saw what had been making the sky so bright that I knew I could leave. I knew Jerry Koro had settled it for me and for the handful still left.

  A town doesn’t die like a man. You can’t pull back an eyelid and flick an eyeball to see if life still reacts, nor can you place a mirror under the nostrils to see if traces of breath remain. But it dies just as dead as any stiff you’ll ever see. It’s an odd sight, too. One day it’s bustling and elbowing its way along, and the next day it’s standing still. Once the crowds aren’t on the streets any longer, you can see little shabbinesses, places where the paint has peeled off buildings, and worn spots in steps. But rigor mortis takes longer with a town. I guess the kids are where you notice it first. Their faces are serious and they walk along differently, just as their dogs walk quietly behind them instead of bouncing along at their sides. As though the dogs had been cut in on the trouble at home, too. And the pregnant women are gone, but they must still have been there somewhere because miners’ wives are almost always “hung up.”

  It was a mess of a strike. All spring and early summer we talked of it, but the thing that kicked it off was a rock burst on the 2000 foot level when two guys were killed. The union demanded the immediate appointment of a safety engineer, and O’Sullivan just laughed his big, fat face off. We struck two weeks later, demanding a twenty per cent general increase, a closed shop, and the safety engineer. The mine has never reopened. For the first few weeks, when the government mediators were there, we expected daily to hear of a compromise deal or a settlement. Finally the mine shut down completely, and O’Sullivan alibied it by the old reliable “unfavorable labor conditions,” but the fact was “excess profits” taxation. It was more than a failure as a-strike to me; it was a major failure for Joe.

  Yes, Freddie, I muffed it. I don’t know, even now, what I might have done to help, but what I did do was about as much use as a tit on a spinster. I just stood there with my bare face hanging out, and the strike happened and a town died, and before our nimble-brained Joe did a damned thing, it was beyond saving. I guess my trouble is in timing...even if I knew how to punch, I’d do it at the wrong time or in the wrong place. It’s always been like that, Freddie, but I knew then and I know now that if the time ever comes for our Joe to punch at the right time, in the right place, and with the right punch, I’ll really get it in there. I’m sorry, Freddie, sorry as hell, because I haven’t ever built that monument, and maybe I won’t live long enough to get the chance again. But it bothered me plenty. Not only that I failed you and the strike, but that I didn’t know what our Joe amounted to. I knew I had a hell of a feeling of despair, and I couldn’t seem to shake it. Twenty-four years old and living like a jungle-bum, in a shack on the edge of a dead town. Cuffing meals at Nick’s lunch, and cuffing smokes at a drugstore. Remember me, Freddie? I was the guy who was going to make them pay a million times.

  The strike was called in August, and I went broke in September and moved to the shack, and like Buddha contemplated my navel. But I knew some things, even then, that I hadn’t known before. I learned, or thought I had, how you treat the other people you must share this world with. I’d known great guys like Jake and Freddie, and I’d been exposed to little men, too....I was beginning to know the difference. I knew a look in Fern Millers eyes, and I knew that, for all his size, Joe Mack was still a lightweight, still playing the bush leagues, still batting around two hundred instead of fo
ur hundred. Somewhere in the sunlight of the doorway of the shack, I found it isn’t whether you win or not that counts, but whether you fight, and I hadn’t fought. But there were many things I’d learned; there were many things I couldn’t do to other men, many things I wouldn’t do. What should the kids do, Moreland, when they can no longer feed their dogs? They should shoot them, eh? And should the fathers shoot the kids, Moreland? And who’ll shoot the fathers? It’s taken some years to find the answer to the last question and I’ve had to come all the way to Italy; but you can have the fathers shot over here for free.

  They are scattered now. They’re all over the world. They used to be miners, but they’re sailors, soldiers, and airmen now. They can still die, though. And, by God, they can die like honest men, or live like honest men. Some will come back, and they’ll muck your stopes, and work your factories, like they’ll fight your wars. No, they aren’t stupid, they’re honest. It’s changed a little, Mr. Tennyson...oh, yes, theirs is but to do and die, but look out, bub, they’re starting to reason why. There’re a million armed killers here, and in the same million men you couldn’t have found ten killers in ‘39. If you teach your dog to bite strangers, don’t be surprised when he takes the ass out of Uncle Charlie’s pants—Uncle Charlie looked like any other stranger to him. Yes, Joe, they’re starting to reason...but they aren’t too good at it yet, and in their confusion they might reach for a rifle or a box of dynamite, like Jerry Koro reached for a can of gasoline and a box of matches. They’re scattered now, they’re all over the world. Some are here in Italy, some are in France, and some are in Germany. Some are even in Burma. And they look so much alike, so much that if they’re stripped by a good shell blast, you can’t tell whether they’re Canadians, Americans, Frenchmen or Englishmen. Any more than you can tell whether they’re Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. It hurts them all in the same place, and in the same way, and it hurts like hell.