40 Patchtown

by Damian Dressick

  I step back away from everybody while Charlie draws names outta his hat. I’m watching the whole bunch of us laughing and it feels okay, but I can’t laugh too hard, cause I can’t quite shake hearing Buzzy laugh his mean old laugh and saying how we was gonna get them bastards one way or another. And looking round, I see that even though Mr. Paul done put his name in to go over Philadelphia and picket, he ain’t laughing so much neither.

  Thirteen

  It ain’t till the next morning that we finally get our tent from the union. Two scruffy fellas I ain’t never seen before heave it off the back of a horse wagon onto the scrubby patch of ground Lottie and the twins cleared out of rocks and sticks. I shout up to them if they’ll help us to get the thing set up, but they’re already jockeying the wagon back through the woods out to Patchtown Road.

  I get Lottie and Frankie to give me a hand with driving the stakes into the dirt and Mr. Paul comes over and pitches in with the poles, so it don’t take too long before we got the damn thing raised up. It’s leaning some off to the left and Esther’s saying it smells like a diaper that nobody bothered to wash, but after a night sleeping in the open, I don’t think none of us care two bits.

  Once we get all the pots and blankets and whatnot we brung from Second Street stacked inside the tent, my ma hands the twins a couple gallon buckets and shoos them out into the woods to gather up acorns. She tells Lottie and me we’re gonna have to be eating black acorn mush for a bit. She says we oughtta make out that we like it in front of the twins and Johnny, no matter what it tastes like. Lottie just groans she didn’t sleep worth a damn last night out in the damp air and she’s going in the tent to get some proper rest.

  I don’t know nothing ’bout making no black acorn mush and I ain’t too keen on learning, so I wander over to the cook fire. It’s still a little cold from last night and more than a couple folks are setting round warming theirselfs off the flames licking up out of the fire pit.

  I says “hey” to everybody and set my ass down on one of the logs put round the fire. Some folks is roasting up corn ears at the edge of the fire in the bed of red glowing coals. Cooking through them husks, that corn smells like pretty good breakfast to me and I ask them folks setting around where they got it.

  One of them Slovak girls, what used to run with Buzzy, clues me in they been picking for the farmers out in Ashtola. She says they been dragging theirselves out there every morning and them kraut farmers put ’em to work in the fields bringing in the potato crop. The farmers mostly let ’em take a half bushel of potatoes for a day of picking. Sometimes they even get a few corn ears or maybe a bit of milk or eggs to boot.

  She turns them corn cobs over in the fire and I tell her that sounds all right to me. I says to her about how we got our stuff set out by the Pinkertons and ain’t got much of nothing left to eat.

  I say that even with what happened to Buzzy, I still got two brothers and a older sister. I tell her that Lottie and me is real good workers and even though my other brothers and sister is young they can work hard too. But before I can ask her how we can get on picking with one of them farmers, she’s already starting to look off in the other direction, like she don’t wanna hear the rest of what I got to say.

  “What’s a matter?” I ask her. “Won’t them krauts hire on no pollocks?”

  “If them kraut farmers stopped hirin pollocks,” another woman says to me, “they’d have a hell of a time gettin them damn potatoes picked at all.”

  “So how come they wouldn’t want to hire me on?” I ask. “I can load coal on the B seam I can damn sure pick potatoes!”

  I got no choice but to listen to that green wood crackling away in the cook fire for a minute, cause none of them women are saying nothing. I can feel the damp rising up off the log bark and getting into the seat of my pants. I stand up and step over to where the fire’s hotter. I don’t say nothing, just stand there with my ass turned towards the flames steaming the damp outta my britches.

  Finally, one of the other women, a Slovak what used to live down First Street, says to me that all of them farmers are about done with their harvests. She says I should have been here two, three weeks back. There was plenty of work then, potatoes, apples, even pears, she says. But most all of them crops has been put up by now.

  I don’t feel there’s nothing to say to them after that, so I just set back down next to the fire and wait for the twins to come scurrying back with the acorn buckets. The girl that knowed Buzzy must feel bad seeing me all down in the dumps about the way things are shaking out, cause when I get up she gives me a half dozen corn ears and a couple potatoes to take back to our tent.

  My ma perks up a bit when she sees I brung a spot of food over. She divides all the stuff up and puts it on the dinner plates we brung from our house. When the twins get back, my ma takes the acorns they hunted up and dumps ’em into a wash tub of water to leech out the poison. Then she has us all set down on some rocks next to our tent to eat. We’re all pretty damn hungry and them corn ears go awful quick and the potatoes don’t last much longer.

  When Esther and Frankie start asking how come we got these big old plates and hardly no food, Lottie tells them to hush. But they ain’t having it, neither of them. They’re both whining and carrying on, saying how they wanna eat pierogies and halushki and have blintzes for dessert.

  “Ya kids oughtta be thankful ya got food to eat,” Lottie says to them. “There’s plenty kids round here be damn glad to have what ya got.”

  “My ass, Lottie,” Frankie says.

  I look over at Lottie cause I’m hoping she’s gonna let Frankie slide on account of all that’s going on, but no chance. She’s already up off her butt ready to whack him right cross his gob when Mr. Paul comes hoofing past our tent.

  “Charlotte,” he says to my sister. “If you got time to cook ’em, me and Pauline got some cabbages over here that we ain’t got no use for.”

  My sister tries to tell him that we’re doing okay, that we don’t need no help, but Mr. Paul won’t take no for an answer—which is good, cause if Lottie actually kept Mr. Paul from giving us them cabbages to eat, I think me and Frankie both would like to have drown her in the middle of Paint Creek.

  After Lottie lets up, Mr. Paul brings both Pauline and them cabbages over. They set down next to us on the rocks and my ma starts tearing up one of them cabbage heads. Frankie and Esther set there watching her, making sure, I guess, she don’t drop none of them leaves on the ground. Lottie uses a corner of her dress to wipe a smear of potato from round Johnny’s mouth.

  Mr. Paul says that Pauline overheard me talking to them Slovak ladies round the fire ’bout getting work on one of these here farms. She’s glaring over at her pa when I tell him that I did have a word with ’em, but they said there weren’t no work to be got this late in the year.

  “Damn liars,” Mr. Paul smiles to me. “Them women are damn liars.”

  He tells me that it’s maybe true there ain’t much work left, but there sure is some. He pokes Pauline in her ribs a little. He says to her, “Ain’t that right, Paul?” Pauline gives her pa a look that’s even meaner than her usual before she admits that, ya, maybe some farmers is still hiring.

  “Pauline and me been workin out Lasky’s in Reel’s Corner for goin on two weeks now,” Mr. Paul tells us.

  “That right?” my ma asks. Her face lights up at the chance of us getting hired on somewhere.

  Mr. Paul says they been picking potatoes out there and shucking cow corn too. He says that five miles is a far piece to go every day, but walking beats starving, so they’ll keep on going.

  My ma’s got them cabbage leafs all cleaned up and she drops them into a pot of cold water with a couple of our cut up potatoes. She tells Frankie to haul the pot over to the cook fire. Esther’s got to go with him to make sure he keeps his eye on that pot, cause my ma don’t want none of them Tent City Slovaks walking off with any of her pots.

  The next morning we’re all up before it’s even light so we can get
something into our stomachs before we hike on up to Lasky’s. My ma griddles up some kind of pancakes outta water and that acorn paste. Chewing them turpentine tasting platters apart me and Lottie learn it’s hard work to make out like they taste okay. When Mr. Paul and Pauline come by to get us, my ma offers them some poison pancakes, but they says that they had biscuits and ain’t hungry no more. Lottie and me sneak them the high sign behind my ma’s back while Esther just pretends to put her finger down her throat.

  Frankie wants to come long to Lasky’s with us, but Mr. Paul figures Lottie and me will have a better chance of getting on if there’s just the two of us to hire. So both the twins stay with my ma and Johnny at the tent camp. I tell Frankie to help fetch up water and firewood and keep his eye on Johnny, make sure none of them tent camp kids try to trick him out outta his shoes. My ma says she’s gonna try to get some kind of acorn paste bread baked up for tonight. That gets the lot of us all moving outta the tent camp and hiking up Patchtown Road at a pretty good clip.

  Since what happened to Buzzy, the curfew’s lightened up so much that the only Pinkerton we see round 40 is sprawled inside a sedan at the Scalp Pike crossroads at the top of 40 Hill. He got his feet leveled up on the dashboard. I don’t look too long, but from what I can see, he’s more concerned with reading the Johnstown newspaper than keeping his eyes peeled for union men.

  Mr. Paul keeps us hiking right quick down into Windber, past Delaney Ball Field and onto the road to Reel’s Corner. Pauline and Lottie walk a little behind us peeking in the dress shop windows, jawing ’bout what’s nice and what ain’t. It’s funny to me cause I don’t see much chance of either of them getting no store-bought dress any time soon, but I guess not admitting things to yourself is one more way to keep going when skies run dark. Mr. Paul seems a pretty quiet fella in the morning and he don’t say much to me, ’cept that I should act real respectful towards Farmer Lasky.

  “He’s an alright fella then?” I says.

  “He’s a bastard pure and simple,” Mr. Paul tells me. “But showin ’em that respect can make it easier to get along with all kinds a bastards.”

  We keep going down the road to Reel’s Corner, past corn fiels broke up by stretches of pine and stands oak and maple. I’m watching the sky lighten up from blue-red to orange. Maybe it’s just cause it’s early, but once we get past Windber we don’t see even one Cossack. I’m feeling pretty good. It’s on my mind what Mr. Paul said ’bout old Lasky though, cause Buzzy would a for sure said about him being a bastard and all, but he never would a thought to do anything other than call him a low down bastard to his face and maybe give him what for if he could and let that be the end of it.

  It’s full light by the time we hit the dirty turnoff for Lasky’s farm. Mr. Paul’s right. They’re still taking on folks for work. I follow him up onto the side porch of the farmhouse where one of the Lasky boys is finishing off his breakfast. He says most of the other miners has already been set to work in the orchard, so me and Mr. Paul can cool our heels on the back of his horse wagon. He’s gonna finish his bacon and then we’re gonna make the collection run across the potato fields. Me and Mr. Paul is to take turns walking behind the wagon stacking all the full sacks of potatoes from their fields into the wagon bed. He cracks for Pauline to show Lottie to the barn behind the house and get her started helping out with shucking the cow corn.

  Lasky’s land runs the whole way from Reel’s Corner down to the edge of Old Ashtola, so it ain’t no small job getting their potatoes brung in. First turn, Mr. Paul walks behind the wagon and heaves them potato sacks up to me so I can stack them in the back of the wagon while the Lasky boy drives from one field to the next. We see a good many folks working in the fields digging up them potatoes. They carry twenty-pound flour sacks with them, popping the potatoes in a couple at a time. Then they take their sacks over to where they got a pile of fifty-pound bags and folks dump their sacks into them bags.

  It’s right before we stop to take the lunch break that I see some of them Tent City Slovak women what told me there weren’t no work to be got. They’re bent over picking potatoes outta the ground on the North Slope above the Ashtola line. I look down at them from the bed of the wagon and I’m thinking that I oughtta say something to them ’bout how they lied to me or maybe how they’re stooped over grabbing up them potatoes in the damp. But Mr. Paul sees ’em too and he shakes his head, warning me not to say nothing.

  When we finish up with getting the potatoes collected up there, the Lasky boy drives the horse wagon back to the barn so we can get unloaded before we eat our lunch. He buzzes on into the farmhouse to eat with the rest of the Laskys, leaving me and Mr. Paul to unload all of them potato sacks ourselfs before we can hoof it over to the lunch table they got set up on the other side of the barn for the day workers.

  When Mr. Paul jumps outta the wagon. I slide the fifty-pound sacks across the wagon bed and toss them down to him and he piles them in the wheelbarrow. Then he hauls them cross the barn, and we stack them up so Mr. Lasky can drive ’em into Windber mid-winter when the prices go up.

  I’m glad Mr. Paul’s a big fella, cause if I had to take my fair share of turns catching them sacks, I’d be too tired to eat before we even got anywhere near to finished. I wait till we’re stacking up the last of the potato sacks before I ask Mr. Paul about how come he didn’t want me saying nothing to them Slovak women. I say that he knows as well as me that they tried to trick me into not looking for no work.

  Mr. Paul bites off a little piece from a plug of tobacco. Then he puts his head out the barn door to make sure that no one’s walking round out there before he sets down on the back of the horse wagon. He holds the tobacco plug out to me and I grab it and shred a bite off with my teeth.

  “Them women out in those fields ain’t got nobody to look out for ’em, Chester,” Mr. Paul says. “So, they’re doin the best they can to look out for themselfs.”

  “We all gotta look out for ourselfs,” I says.

  Mr. Paul nods and spits out some tobacco juice onto the floor of Lasky’s barn. He says that I should think about what it’d be like for my ma, if she didn’t have Lottie and me and she was trying to raise up Johnny and the twins on her own. Running the cloth of one of them empty potato sacks between my fingers, I set there thinking about how hard it was for my ma to pull herself up off the neighbor’s porch the day the Cossack give us the boot out.

  Before he jumps down off the wagon, Mr. Paul also reminds me that I just got here and starting up trouble ain’t gonna say much for keeping me on.

  He don’t wait for me to answer back to that. He just says he’s hungry as hell and we oughtta get on over to the lunch table before them damn Slovak women eat up every last thing. I follow him outside, round the barn to the back of Lasky’s house.

  Them Laskys got maybe fifteen miners and their wifes from all the tent camps round Windber set down at a long wood slab table behind their house. I see Lottie over on the corner setting next to Pauline drinking cups of coffee. Everybody looks like they’re pretty much done eating and there ain’t nothing left on the table ’cept a little mashed potatoes and a couple of thin beans. It ain’t much, but it’s still a damn sight better than any kind of acorn anything, so I grab what I can.

  I set myself down across from Lottie and say hey to her and just nod and try to steer clear of Pauline. Lottie says that we should have got here quicker cause there was a whole mess of vegetables and fried chicken too.

  I try to listen when Mr. Paul talks to the other men down the table about what he thinks is gonna happen with the strike, but a whole bunch of fellas all come stomping up from stacking apple crates in the orchard barn across the road. They’re mostly miners from down 35, but I recognize Fatty Papinchak from 40 and Goose Naylor too, who I ain’t seen since he got Blacklisted for buying mining tools on discount somewhere out around Saint Michael instead of paying for ’em high dollar at the Eureka Company Store—and sunafabitch if Grubby Koshinsky, that big mouth from the union meetin
g, ain’t there with ’em. They’re all loud and hungry and pushing their way up to the table. Grubby’s running his mouth as usual, saying for anybody what already ate to get the hell up and get back to work so they can set.

  Lottie and Pauline and most of the other folks what was shucking cow corn pop up to get back to it, but there still ain’t enough seats for everybody. Fatty, who used to be a track layer down 35, tries to take my seat off of me, but I tell him that I just got here and he better plan on putting that big butt of his somewhere else. At first I think he’s gonna start a fuss, but then one of the Lasky women comes off the porch toting a fresh plate of steaming chicken and Fatty would just as soon miss the Resurrection of the Body as a crack at one of them chicken legs.

  All the men at the table grab up that chicken fast as they can. When I reach out to get a piece for myself, Grubby takes hold of my arm. He says to me that I already ate and this here chicken is for the orchard workers.

  “I ain’t had none yet,” I says to him.

  But he don’t let go of my arm till I stick my fork into his wrist a little and then he stands up and starts making a big enough fuss that all the men at the table turn to eye up the two of us. Grubby says to everybody that he’s trying to stop me from getting extra chicken. I’m looking to Mr. Paul to give him hell, but he don’t stand or even raise up his voice, just whispers for Grubby to set back the hell down.

  “One a them Laskys come out here and sacks us cause a your fooling round Grubby, there ain’t gonna be nothing to stop me from beating the Everloving Christ right outta you,” Mr. Paul says soft, but nobody doubts he means it. “Now let that boy have a damn piece a chicken.”

  So I get my chicken, but before I even get it into my mouth I hear Grubby start kicking. He’s telling Goose that just cause Mr. Paul used to be fire boss down 35, he still thinks he can tell everybody what to do. It’s funny, cause instead of saying anything back to Grubby, Goose Naylor starts talking loud to me.