Chapters (38)
- Cover
- ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
- Storming Heaven
- DENISE GIARDINA
- Copyright
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Contents
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Part Two
- Nine
- Part Three
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Part Four
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- AFTERWORD
I rode the train to the head of Pond Creek and hired a farmer with a mule team to take me and my belongings to Grapevine.
Part Three
Ten
C. J. MARCUM
THE DAY AFTER THE LETTER COME FROM RONDAL, I ATTENDED the monthly meeting of the Annadel Political and Social Club.
Our club started meeting in 1912 during the miners’ strike on Paint Creek in the Kanawha coalfields. They was sixteen of us altogether, including Doc Booker, who was mayor at the time, Ermel and Isom Justice, Sam Gore the bartender, Everett Day, the entire town council and several policemen. We started by drinking together on Sunday afternoons, lounging in the gambling room of the Alhambra with our feet propped up on the tables, sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon and shots of whiskey. After a while we always talked about the strike. The Paint Creek miners and their families lived in tents for a year, even through the dead of winter. They was shot at, some was killed, and they shot back. The governor declared martial law and jailed folks for speaking their mind. We followed it all and wondered if it was coming to us one day.
When the strike was done with, we argued about who had really won.
“Course hit was a success,” Ermel declared. “They got the union recognized, didnt they?”
Doc Booker disagreed. “Union was already recognized there for years, before them operators tried to bust it. Them people starved and froze and died all winter, just to stay where they was.”
“The gun thugs smashed the press at the socialist newspaper in Huntington,” I added.
“So what?” Isom tilted his head back and tossed down a shot. His adam’s apple jumped.
“You’ll think so what when it happens here,” I said.
“Aw, I seen some of them socialists from Huntington. They wear ties and talk about nonviolence. Them kind is easy pickins.”
We didn’t always get along at our meetings. We was all so different from each other. Me and Doc was socialists. Ermel by that time was one of the big shots in the Democrat party machine, close to getting his man elected as circuit judge. Sam Gore was a Republican out of loyalty to Abe Lincoln. Isom weren’t nothing, far as I could tell, except he liked to argue and drink his daddy’s liquor. We had fights all the time and we loved it.
We took turns suggesting what we should talk about. Doc wanted to discuss the Brussels Congress of the Second Socialist International. Isom said that sounded dull, but we talked about it anyhow and he stayed perked up most of the time, especially when we wrangled over the fighting in the Balkans. Isom is real interested in the Balkans because he says they sound like West Virginia.
We talked about Woodrow Wilson, the Niagara Convention and the Ku Klux Klan. Then the coal strike in Colorado caught our eye. It was Paint Creek all over again, the strikers throwed out of their houses, the tents, the gun thugs and martial law. Then the letter come from Rondal.