Read Online Power by Howard Fast - Free Book Online Page B

firing on our side was suspended to give us a better chance.
    I approached the roadblock slowly in an old Ford draped with white rags, and then for fifteen minutes I talked as I never had talked before. I told them that Laura was dying, something I believed at the time, and that I would hold them responsible for her death. I pleaded, cajoled, and threatened, and finally they let us through.
    There is little to tell after that. I drove to Charleston, put Laura in the hospital, found a room for her mother, filed two stories I wrote while waiting at the hospital for some news of Laura’s condition, and then slept the clock around when I heard that she was out of danger and would recover.
    I remained in Charleston for the next three weeks, the time Laura was in the hospital. During those three weeks, Ben Holt’s forces swelled to six thousand men, an army that was ready to break the siege on Fenwick Crag and move in to occupy Clinton.
    But the United States Army moved in first, occupying the town and the surrounding area. The miners were disarmed. Ben Holt and his IMU organizers got over the mountains to where a car was waiting for them, and then out of the state. The charges against them were eventually dropped. Jim Flecker and his deputies met violent deaths during the next twelve months, but who their killers were was never established.
    Almost fifteen years were to pass before the West Virginia miners had a coal union.

PART II
    1
    October 14, 1958
    M Y DEAR A LVIN:
    Back here in Ringman, in Father’s house, it is hard to believe that time has had its way with all of us. These are the good autumn days, the trees gold and red and brown, and from Father’s study window, the great hump at Mt. Babcock is such a pile of beauty that it quite takes one’s breath away. At first, the big old house was rather somber and musty, but Norah and her three children spent the summer here, and there is nothing like three high-spirited grandchildren to drive the smell of death and decay out of a place. Ben, Jr., was with us for two weeks, and I think his children were quite happy during that time, but his Susan and I are not as compatible as we might be. I always said that I would never be a typical mother-in-law, but that, I am afraid, is a pit no one truly avoids.
    Now I am alone, but not lonely, if you understand, and I think you do. In any other place, it would be different, but I feel that I belong here in Ringman and certainly I am quite content.
    Father’s death was not such a blow, even coming as it did only a few weeks after Ben passed away. Father was a very old man—I am myself going to have a sixty-first birthday, in case you have forgotten—and the years were better to him than to most. I felt the pangs of his passing, but not real grief; and perhaps after watching me, dry-eyed at Ben’s funeral, you will think me coldhearted. I wish it had been otherwise, Alvin; love and closeness are worth all the pain of the ultimate sorrow, and nothing death brings to those who survive is as bitter as to stand by the grave and know that the man who lies there is almost a stranger. No, not a stranger. You will know what I mean—I think you remember it all only too well—and the three weeks I then spent in the house in Washington were my own punishment. Father’s death rescued me, not from grief, but from the loneliness and and the hopelessness that I remained with there in Washington. I had to go to Ringman; there were things to be taken care of, not the least of them, the house. I decided not to sell it, but to live here—and I think you will understand when I tell you that during the months since then, living here, I have been closer to Ben than during most of the twenty-five years before his death.
    How strange, now, that you should want me to tell you about myself and Ben in the beginning! That was so long ago—another time and another world, and I wonder who will care now or be