Read Online Power by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

your faction. I told Mr. Holt otherwise. I am not here under any false pretenses.”
    â€œYou certainly are not!”
    â€œYet I wrote what I saw.”
    â€œDid you? Is it only alleged that our people were murdered by the detectives? Who else murdered them? Did we, Mr. Cutter? And do you really think that the operators have the right to evict us from our homes when the mood takes them, simply because we have no leases?”
    â€œThe legal right, yes.”
    â€œAnd who gave them this legal right, Mr. Cutter? Aren’t there any moral rights?”
    â€œYou’re putting me in a position that’s unfair. I can’t judge this thing. I can’t judge its background. I’m not equipped to.”
    â€œNo. Not even to approve of starvation—or to disapprove.”
    â€œThat’s not fair, Miss McGrady.”
    â€œI am not trying to be fair, Mr. Cutter, any more than you tried to be fair.”
    She would have it that way, and there was no moving her. If she did not convince me that it was necessary to change my story, I did at least decide to put off filing it until the following day. During the rest of the afternoon, I wandered around the farm, observing the preparations being made as the small army came into existence.
    I spoke with Ben Holt once more, after the supper meal, which was as thin and unsatisfying as lunch had been. He acknowledged that Laura had told him about my story.
    â€œDo you want to read it?” I asked him.
    â€œNo—no, Cutter. I don’t want to read it. Write what you see, if that’s the way you feel about it. I hear you feel that raising my wages from three to five thousand dollars is ambitious.”
    â€œI remarked on it. It’s a news item. Am I wrong in thinking that no coal miner ever makes five thousand a year?”
    â€œI’m not a coal miner now, Cutter. I’m president of the union. If I live like a coal miner and act like a coal miner, I’m no damn good to them, am I?”
    â€œI don’t know, Mr. Holt. From what I’ve seen of their lives, I’d break my back not to be a miner.”
    â€œOh? Then maybe we should both thank God they don’t feel that way. This country lives on coal or dies without it, Cutter—don’t ever forget that. It eats coal the way we eat this stew, but it’s nourished better. Someday, you’ll understand that. Someday, I am going to take you into a coal mine. You’ll open your eyes.”
    â€œI didn’t tell you, Mr. Holt,” I said slowly, “but there was some talk back in Clinton about arresting you and charging you with the deaths of those Fairlawn operatives. A man called Fulton Oswick was pushing for it. Do you know him?”
    â€œI know him,” Holt smiled.
    â€œAnd here in West Virginia—ultimately, I mean—will you win, Mr. Holt?”
    â€œWe’ll win,” he said.

    Â 
    15
    So I have set down, relying on yellowed clippings, old notebooks, and a memory far less dependable, the beginnings of my friendship with Benjamin R. Holt—a friendship that was to continue for the next eighteen years, when it was at least in part dissolved by certain events. I call it a friendship; others might call it something else. There were times when we needed each other, which makes for friendship of a sort, but there were more times when he needed me. Yet if I left him, I returned to him, so it may be that my need was the larger one.
    I look at him through my memory somewhat differently than I regarded him then, thirty-nine years ago. His tolerance was calculated, which I did not know. He despised me, but he wanted a newsman to see things from his side, and I was the only reporter available. Yet to this day, I know no more about his real feeling for the miners than I knew then; and it is possible that he never knew much more than I did about that particular subject. What he felt about them then, at that moment, up on Fenwick Crag,