Power by Howard Fast Page A

remorselessly,
    â€œI can say at least that I am more to blame than you. Here you are, a fine young woman, very good to look at and not unintelligent, born and grown to maturity in a coal town, and without a smidgen of common sense in your head as to what it’s all about. Oh yes, you may think that this is a very small point, Dorothy, but I assure you it is not. It is directly to the core of the matter. That young man who was here this afternoon is Benjamin Renwell Holt. He is twenty-two years old, the son and grandson of coal miners. If you went to the public library here and looked at your history books, you would discover that Renwells and Holts have lived in this county since Isaac Holt led the first group of settlers here in 1771—a good half century before an Aimesley bought property here and sold it at a sound profit. That’s beside the point. But much to the point is that fact that Ben Holt is a brilliant and ambitious young man—sensitive, strong, and able. Ten years ago, his father was killed in the great disaster here. He put himself through college—and took care of his mother, and came out of it an honor student. I assure you that before he came here today, he bathed and scrubbed, but you don’t scrub away the mark of the mines in one day—or in ten days. So from here on, you will think twice before you remark on how clean or dirty a miner is. That is all. You may go.”
    This was my own father, who adored me and granted my slightest whim and had never spoken harshly to me before in all the seventeen years of my existence. I would have burst into tears, except that I was too furious to weep and too affronted to give him the satisfaction of seeing me weep. I ran upstairs to my own room, locked the door behind me, threw myself on my bed, and wept. There I waited all evening for my father to appear and beg my pardon, but evidently the matter weighed less heavily on his mind than on mine. He let me have that evening to myself, while he played Jack of Diamonds for toothpicks with my Cousin Jimmy.

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    There were three precious weeks left before I would have to leave to complete my final year at finishing school, and one of those weeks was wasted with my Cousin Jimmy, rest his soul. How I grudged him every minute of my time!—for my mind was full of fantasies of how I would use those hours spent with Jimmy to meet Ben Holt, and in my mind I held a hundred conversations with him. But when Jimmy finally left on Friday afternoon, my dreams dissolved. Between my fantasy of meeting Ben Holt again and the reality of the problems it presented, there was an almost uncrossable gulf. I don’t know, Alvin, whether you remember anything of the social structure of a Pennsylvania coal town in those years before the First World War. The class cleavage was absolute and unbridgeable. Father was not a millionaire by any means, but in comparison with a coal miner, he was a person of unthinkable wealth. My whole world was sharply separated from the world of the miners. Ringman was not one town, but two towns. You will recall that time when you spent a weekend with us here at Ringman and we picnicked on the top of Belfast Ridge, and I pointed out to you the pits and the miners’ homes to the south and the fine and well-kept homes to the north. Belfast Ridge is only seven hundred feet high, but it separates two worlds. When you were there, the mines were already working out, and today that part of Ringman is only a ghostly reminder of the past, but then in 1914, you breasted Belfast Ridge and looked down into the devil’s own estate, great black heaps of wasted earth and culm, dust and dirt, the gloomy tipples and scaffolds, the tracks and cars and the piles of coal, and beyond it, through the haze, the flat, red brick company buildings where the miners lived. It was peopled with dark men who clawed inside the earth’s belly, like trolls. In town, I had seen them so often and close,