Excerpt from: THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN: A Novel of 1936

Published by: Forge Books, New York.  ISBN 0-312-86494-9.  Publication Date March, 1999.

PROLOGUE
DuBois, Pennsylvania, September 1932
 
 
 

    They came at the coldest hour of the night, waking her to a sudden splintering thud and the shriek of the door-latch screws ripping out of the wood.  Then shouting men filled her room.  They kicked over the bureau and smashed the chairs with axes.  They hurled the lamp across the room, shattering it in a burst of glass and kerosene-reek.  She huddled, cradling her head, but they yanked her covers off with a whoop and a howl, dragging her out from her warm bed into the freezing air of the unheated cabin.
     She stared up at white facelessness penetrated by two holes.
     "This the one?"  The voice was casual, but with a chill undertone.
     "Yeah, that's her," somebody else said, his voice too muffled by the hoods they wore.  "Cabin fifteen, cabin sixteen.  Two men, one woman.  One of ‘em's a smoke."
     They dragged her outside, onto the porch.  She nearly screamed as pine-splinters icepicked her bare feet.  But she clenched her teeth, locking her throat.  She wasn't going to cry, or plead.
     A cold silver mist rivered past the headlights of the automobiles parked outside the tourist cabins where she and Keim and Hendricks had moved after the relief office and strike headquarters had been burned.   The men who stood waiting wore dark suits and fedoras and heavy brogans caked with the yellow clay of the county.  They carried rifles and shotguns in the crooks of their arms.  Her eyes rose to the smoky bright flames that swayed from their torches; then lifted again, to the lofty cross that flamed high on the bluff above the hollow.
     She tried to twist free then, but the gloved hands were like iron shackles.  "Let me get dressed, please," she said.  "Let me go back for my robe."  But no one answered.  One of them was lashing her wrists behind her back.  Other hands groped up beneath her nightdress.  She stopped struggling and concentrated on trying to breathe.
     Yells and the crash of more breaking furniture came from the adjoining cabin.  Then Hendricks staggered out, face black as oil with blood in the golden firelight.  He wavered, hands stretched out like a blind man.   Then a rifle-butt swung, and he slammed to the muddy ground.
     "Look what we found under his mattress.  A thirty-eight."
     "Haw, haw.  Whoopee!  Okay, let's let these good citizens get some sleep."
     She tried to fight free again as they carried her down the steps, but they were too strong and her body was so weak.  Shaving lotion and sweat and coal-smoky night, the sweet rotten-peach smell of whiskey.
     Behind the glare purred a black touring car.  As they folded her into the rear seat she realized suddenly they were being watched.  Hollow-cheeked men, gaunt women with spindly arms folded over the bodices of their nightgowns, hawkeyed kids in ragged shifts or torn men's shirts.  They stood immobile as carvings on their shadowed porches, or on the bare earth in front of the paintless decaying houses.  Gathering her strength, she screamed, "Don't just stand there.  Get the police.  Get the sheriff!"  But they only watched, gazes motionless and resigned, even the children, looking on in the windguttering torchlight; as if they had known and foreseen forever this inevitable end to all their dreams.

                                                     #                    #                    #

     This was her third campaign.  She'd worked textiles, mostly, Carolina and farther south.  The coal strike had started in May, in the Atlasburgh-MacDonald mines, when the owners dropped the wage to twenty-six cents a ton.  By late June 42,000 miners were out in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and northern West Virginia.  The union was new and weak, and the League had mobilized every organizer to give it a fighting chance.  Hendricks had done Gastonia and Paterson, but since he was colored, the organizing council made Keim the nominal leader.
     She was appalled at what they found.  The miners' families lived in tents or shacks, thrown out of their ramshackle company houses the day they struck.  They had no food, no clothing, no soap, no newspapers, no milk, no shoes.  Their thin sickly children picked coal from slag-heaps for fuel.  But they were filled with hate, and they trusted nobody.  They were ripe for organizing, and she'd thrown herself into it with passion and resolve.  Talking, exhorting, organizing the relief, walking the line.  Serving out weak coffee and bean soup.  And always, always, pounding in again and again the one simple message they all had to carry stamped on their hearts:
     If we all stick together, we can win.

                                                     #                    #                    #

     Now she shivered in the rayon slip as the open machine rushed through the dark hills and down winding forestroofed roads.  It passed coal-tipples sparkling with tiers of electric lights.  It rushed past rail crossings, crossroads hamlets, roared across castiron bridges below which the silver mist glowed like pale radium above hidden rocktumbling creeks.  The tail-lights of another automobile bobbed and jerked ahead of them.  The tall man, he with the quiet voice, and another, squat-bodied fellow sat flanking her in their white robes in the rear seat.  They were both smoking and from time to time a spray of red sparks leapt out, ripped away by the wind.  The squat man had a rifle propped between his legs, the butt resting on the floorboard.  The tall man's hand rested lightly on her thigh, as if restraining her from leaping out.  Her eyes fastened slowly to the cuff of a white shirt.  Traveled down the long tapering fingers.  As they passed a crossroads store with a single bulb burning above the gas-pumps she made out a gold ring, a complex symbol inlaid on a red stone.
     "Are you from Pinkerton's?" she asked him.  He didn't answer.
     "I'm cold," she said.  "This rope is hurting my hands."
     "It won't hurt much longer," said the one with the rifle.
      The driver chuckled, glancing back over his shoulder.  He'd taken his mask off, but she still couldn't see his face in the rushing dark.  "That's rich," he said.  "Ain't it?  She's a sheba, ain't she?  For a Jew girl.  Hey, you. You done it with the nigger?"
     "Shut up," said the man with the ring.  He had taken out a handkerchief and was dabbing at his lips with it, the motion strangely delicate, the way a woman might correct her lipstick.
     "Are you from the Mineowner's Association?  Where are you taking us?" she asked them.      "You realize this is kidnaping.  You'll answer to the law for this."
     "The law?" the man beside her chuckled, tucking away his handkerchief.  "Don't worry about that.  We own that, too."
     And a little while later the driver began singing "Yes Sir, That's my Baby," to himself.  Just the first two lines, over and over, "Yes, sir, that's my baby; no, sir, don't mean maybe."
     At last their velocity ebbed.  The automobile passed through another sleeping hamlet, and she saw a sign that read Beech Woods.  Shortly after that the lights ahead bobbed and flickered, then suddenly vanished.  Their driver slowed even more.  They crept along for a few hundred feet, then turned lurching and creaking down off the road and out onto an open field.  The headlights traced a dark line ahead.  The automobiles sagged and swayed over the uneven soft turf.  The men with her stirred.  The cars ground their way up to the black line, headlights transforming humped shapes gradually into individual trees, going more and more slowly, till finally hand brakes ratcheted on.
     The tall man said, "You can get out here."
     She stumbled getting down from the running board, unable to use her bound hands, and he grabbed her hair as she started to fall and dragged her back upright.  The grass felt icy under her bare feet.
     The other vehicles' engines died, becoming mere blocks of blackness in the murmuring night.  Theirs left its engine idling, headlights aimed at a stand of beech.
     Someone pushed Keim and Hendricks out into the light, and she caught her breath.  Their heads rolled.  Clotting blood streaked the fronts of their nightshirts.  Then she saw that the men around them, smoking cigarettes, carried whips and coils of rope.
     Beside her the tall man raised his voice.  "Listen up, Reds!  Take a message back to your friends in New York.  We don't need you here stirring up trouble.  This is an American town.  The folks here are Americans.  They don't want your kind here, and the next time, nobody'll ever hear what happened to you."
     She started to protest but they pulled her bound arms upward till she heard something tear in her back.  They pushed her gasping after the others, toward the trees, toward a rushing murmur she thought was in her own ears before she recognized the song of one of the swift creeks that in the day roared and tumbled golden with the sulphur mine-drainage down from the deep hollows between the folded hills.
     The rope soared into the treetops, then rattled down; soared again, and dropped over a stout branch.  Keim stood with knees shaking, staring into the headlights.  "Stinkin' finks," he said.  He lisped, and she saw his front teeth were gone.
     "Haul away, there.  Get 'em up in the air."  Men bent to the ropes, and two bodies straightened, hauled upward by their extended arms till their toes left the grass.
     The horsewhips cracked and sang.   She flinched at each blow, no longer feeling the cold as cold but as part of the numb disbelieving horror that would never fully leave her after this night.  It went on until their victims' backs were a mass of blood, and they dangled  unconscious, heads sunk on their breasts.
     The squat man jerked the ropes free around her wrists.  He forced her hands around to her belly, and re-tied them so tightly she gasped.  Then pushed her toward where the others swung, turning slowly in the focused light.  They tossed a third rope up for her, and hauled her up between them.  She danced in the dark air for a moment, bare toes grazing the sharp painful grass, then was pulled aloft with a great heave.
     Swinging free of the earth, she clenched her eyes shut tight, waiting for the lash.  But the breathless silence was broken only by the creak of the rope above her, squeaking as it rubbed tree-bark.  The clatter of the motor, and the sigh of the wind through the naked trees.
     "Let her down, boys," said the casual voice at last.  "We don't want to scar up that pretty white skin, do we?"
     Instead, they dragged her to the hood of a Ford.  Gloved hands pulled her nightdress up around her waist.  Others pinioned her arms.
     Much later, it seemed to her, a locomotive whistle screamed not far away.  Gradually the engine chuffed slowly closer through the darkness, panting and hissing like a harsh hurried breath in her ear.  She lay staring up at where a few stars gleamed through scattered blacknesses of clouds.  The heavy animal snuffing came nearer, closer, and behind it the hollow musical clack and jingle of railcars.
     She couldn't walk then, couldn't move or think, so they picked her up and carried her down to the tracks.  She landed face down on cold gritty iron.  Two other bundles lay there.  It was only when one stirred that she recognized the wet mass as a human body.
     They left her there, with the crumpled, bloody men.  The lights moved around back by the cars.
     The icy iron hardness shuddered under her.  Steam hissed.  Slowly, with a clank and a squeal and a prolonged sigh, it began to move.  It clacked over the uneven line of the spur.  Then gathered speed, rocking and swaying faster and faster through the night.
     Fighting the blackness pulsing in her head, she raised herself on her elbows, to see that they were coupled into an endless snake of coal-cars.  When the train came to a curve Hendricks and Keim slid toward the edge of the open flatcar.  She threw her arms out, and her fingers sank into their slack unresisting flesh like steel claws.
     They rode westward all that night, along the winding ridges, above the black hollows, through the sleeping unknowing towns.  And in those endless clattering hours a bitter knowledge grew within her.
     When light finally came again she was still awake, but cold now, a cold rigid and unyielding as ice now sheathing and protecting her inmost heart.  She lay stretched out on the rusty jolting iron, still holding the two unmoving bodies as her unseeing eyes traveled over hillsides and hollows outlined as if new-created by the first rays of dawn; beholding with that tearless unflinching gaze a world emerging from darkness into the light of a new day, when all injustice would be smashed, everything corrupt would be cleansed, and the forms of all things would melt away in the harsh penetrating glare of a new and merciless sun.
 
 
 

CHAPTER ONE
September, 1935
 
 

     Chilly morning, W. T. Halvorsen thought, even for the high Alleghenies; kind of an early taste of winter, though he hadn't seen any snow yet.  He was pushing twenty miles an hour, coming down off the ridge into Fees Hollow in the brand-new bright-red Dodge Power Wagon, when he glimpsed the crown block of Favorite No. 14 looming above the brass and scarlet of the treetops.  He didn't want to go any faster, not with a hundred and forty quarts of nitroglycerin packed in behind him and a ravine dropping away from the rutted, muddy, rock-littered lease road.
     Halvorsen was twenty, lanky and blond.  He had on green work pants with red suspenders and a red-barred hunting jacket.  Worn black rubber bighole boots rode the clutch and brake.  The headlines of the paper on the seat beside him read: Air Attacks Spread Destruction through Ethiopia.  League Votes Sanctions against Italy.  Lewis Pledges Mine Workers for Roosevelt.  He drove with one leathergloved hand, elbow sticking out the window, the mountain air ruffling the cowlick that stuck up from behind his work cap.  Every once in a while, when the road came to a switchback, he leaned out to spit brown juice toward the hillside.
     When the derrick loomed out of the woods, seventy-two feet of bolted-together hemlock and iron, the foreman and the tool dresser were standing by the engine-house.   Halvorsen locked the brakes and skidded the last few yards, then stuck his head out and yelled, "Bryner Torpedo.  You fellas call in a shot?"
     The older man nodded.  Halvorsen wheeled the truck around so that the back, where the nitro was, was right up against the derrick walk.  He cut the engine and got down, stretched, then walked around to the rig.
     "Ike Keller," said the foreman.  "This here's Karl Grau, my tool dresser."
     "Bill Halvorsen."
     They shook hands.  Grau was big, callus-handed, and he bore down harder than he had to.     "Halvorsen.  Didn't you use to work for Evans Cresson?"
     "Uh huh.  Roustabout, then tool dresser."
     "Know a guy called Len Brinton?"
     "Sure, I know Brinton.  Big-mouth champ of the oilfield.  Potzed most of the time, to boot."   Halvorsen shook his hand loose.  He asked Keller, "She on the bottom?"
     "Oh yeah.  Karl bailed her dry, she's all ready for you."
     The derrick rose above them into a charred gray sky, massive black ironbolted timbers rising in a narrowing taper high as a man could loft a baseball.  The cold wind moaned through the upperworks, making the drilling cable clang as it swayed.  The big old Buffalo engine banged in the engine house.  Six inches of rough-cast pipe stuck up above the drilling floor.  When he bent Halvorsen heard a gurgle deep in the ground.  The air shimmered above the top of the pipe.  He smelled methane wet with natural gasoline.
     He straightened.  "Who you like for the Series?"
     "I been watching Derringer and the Reds."
     "American League?"
     "I like Detroit.  Greenberg and Gehringer in the field.  Schoolboy Rowe and Mickey Cochrane, a great battery."
     "This kind of a wild well?"
     "She's making a lot of salt water."
     A shovel leaned in the corner, coated with muck and bits of dead grass.  Halvorsen picked it up and went to the forge.  He got a bladeful of cinders, and shook them out across the drill floor, out to the derrick walk.  He searched around, found a plank, and laid it slanting down to the ground.  Jumped on it a couple of times, making sure it wouldn't shift or turn under his boots.  Then carried over another shovelful and ashed the plank too, making a gritty path all the way from the back of the truck to the wellhead.
     He asked Grau, "How about shuttin' down your engine, there, toolie?"
     But the dresser just stood there with his arms folded till the foreman said, "Karl, you heard the man.  Shake a leg."
     Halvorsen went back to the Dodge.  He took his Burley Bears off and left them on the driver's seat.  He got a sheave out of his kit and a line off the power-driven reel on the back.  He walked the line over beneath the derrick and tied the block off to the drill bit, which was set down on the drill floor, with a length of soft manila.
     "Last time they shot, they brung the wagon out with those roans," Keller said.  "Those sure were a spanking team of horses."
     Halvorsen didn't answer.  He gathered juice in his cheek and spat into the mud, thinking about the shot.
     Grau came back from the engine-house while Halvorsen was running the bobber down.  He ran it all the way and read off eighteen hundred and fifty-six feet.
     Halvorsen and Keller squatted over the samples laid out in one corner of the drill floor.  The foreman said the hole went down ten feet past the bottom of the sand.  The "sand" was the oil-bearing stratum, a narrow sandwich-filling of chocolate-colored sandstone oozing-rich with crude.  The shot would fracture it, letting the oil flow into the well.
     The dresser went back to the truck with him, standing right beside him as he measured and sawed the pipe for the anchor.  Halvorsen asked him to give him room to work, but Grau didn't move.
     "Len Brinton's a shirttail relative 'a mine."
     "Yeah, you sort of take after him."
     "How long you been shooting wells?"
     "Not that long.  Two, three months."
     "Couldn't make it doin' man's work, huh?"
     "A couple fellas blew themselves up on a gas well out near Myrtle," Halvorsen told him.  "Horses, wagon, and all, nothing left but the crater."
     "Guys get hurt out here, too," Grau said.  "Like that rig collapsed in August, pullin' pipe down in the Kinnimahot'ny.  Crippled one of the guys on the floor."
     "I didn't say they don't.  All I was sayin' was, fella sees a chance to advance himself, he better take it."
     He pushed past Grau and carried the anchor up to the derrick floor, then went back and got the shooter's hook.  He hung this on the end of his line and started making up the string.  He got an empty shell, a sheet-tin cylinder sealed at the bottom, and hung that from the hook.  He hung the anchor off that, then ran the assembly down into the well till all that showed was the open top of the shell.
     He said to Keller and Grau, "You fellas might want to give me a little room here."
     "Call us if you need anything," said the foreman.  The dresser lingered for a moment, scowling; then sauntered off after his boss.

                                             #                    #                    #

     When he opened the back of the truck there was the soup, two dozen cans of it, each nestled into its rubber boot.  He took a couple of deep breaths, then reached in and very smoothly pulled out two by their soldered tin handles, drawing both up at once, one in each hand.  Balancing them like milk-pails, he walked their weight slowly and carefully up the cindered board, along the derrick walk, and set them down gently on the rig floor on either side of the shell.
     He remembered what Pete Riddick had told him, when he was breaking him in on the shooting game.  Ain't no point being scared around nitro, Riddick had said.  Screw up and you'll never know.  So just take your time and make goddamn sure you don't never let anything slip.
     Each can was closed with two corks.  Removing an awl from a loop on his belt, he carefully pried them out and set them aside on the rig floor.  That glisten on their ends was nitroglycerin.  Step on one by mistake, you could blow your foot off.
     His bare hands were getting numb now, and he took a break, sticking them under his armpits to warm while he looked out across the valley.  Under the cold sky the long hills, all exactly the same height, walked away to the end of the world.  Hills, and the fierycolored solidity of the forest, and down in the valley, the dry ginger tan of farmers' fields.  Here and there rose the peaked roof of a farmhouse, or the skyclimbing tower of another rig.  He listened to the wind, and gradually another sound seeped into his consciousness.  A sound that was always there, in this country, so that after a while you couldn't hear it.  But now he listened, tuning in like the Magic Brain in the new Zenith.  And heard the whole wide valley, the earth itself, resounding with a slow pulse and creak: the thudding of engines, off  among the hills; the creak of rod-lines working the pumping jacks.
     They were bringing up what God or Geology had hidden deep beneath these woods, these ancient hills, worn down like an old nag's teeth.  Millions of barrels of the finest oil in the world.  Pennsylvania crude.  You smelled it everywhere, in the fields, along the creeks, seeping up from the ground itself, rich and sweet and strong as honey in Monongahela whiskey.  He'd always liked that smell, from the day he'd started working in the fields.
     With a grunt, he picked up one of the cans, and tilted it over the shell.
     The nitro came out clear but with a purple tint to it, thicker than water because it was cold.  He held it steady, gradually tilting it up, till the can dripped empty.  When it was safely set down he stretched, shaking the tension out of his shoulders.  Then reached for the second.
     When the shell was brim-full he corked the empties and carried them back to the truck.  Then he ran the shot down into the well.  He took it slow, running the winch at a creep.  From the corner of his eye he noticed the drillers had come back.  They stood a few yards away, watching the line go down.
     At five hundred feet the winch threw slack.  He cut power, then threw it into reverse.      "Somethin' wrong?" Keller called.
     "She's hung up.  You guys must of been pushing it pretty fast.  Got a crooked hole here."
     "You sayin' we don't know our jobs?" said Grau.
     "Hey, I know how it is.  The lease super's on your ass to push that tool, you run that bit too long, it gets out of gauge -- "
     "You little smartass son of a bitch.  Yeah, Len told me about you.  Only crooked hole around here's that Hunky hoor you been shagging."
     "Karl, I told you about that mouth," said the foreman.
     Halvorsen studied the wire, pale blue eyes narrowed.  From the sound and the smell it could be making fluid down there, spewing oil or conate water into the well-hole.  Old sea water, trapped for who knew how many million years.  A wild well could float the shell right back up on that and the gas-flow.  Then it was either run like hell, or try to catch it in your arms before it hit the drill floor.  He watched it for a second more, then set the winch and walked up the plank to where Grau was standing.
     His right jab snapped the toolie's head against the Samson post.  The bigger man lunged back, snarling, to find the foreman between them.  "Not now.  Break it up!  Get this shot done, then you two can go settle it in the woods."
     Halvorsen waited.  Grau rubbed his jaw, glaring down at him.  "I'm gonna fit you for a wooden kimono, you little bastard," he said.  "I'll clean you and give you car-fare home."
     Halvorsen turned away and went back down to the winch.  He gave it a little power.  He played with it, pulling the string up a few feet, then running it back down, feeling his way through the tight spot.  Finally he was through and the winch hummed again.  He breathed out, and the white smoke of his breath flew away with the chill wind that came down the hollow, cold as the close and stony sky.
     When he eased it into the bottom the Z in the hook unlatched.  He ran the line back up, leaving the shell in the hole, and went to get another.
     He did this five more times, till he had six full shells sitting on top of each other down there.  A hundred and twenty quarts.  He checked the shot card to make sure that was right, then told the foreman he could go ahead and tamp it down.
     Keller said to Grau, "Run about three barrels down in there.  And don't give this guy any more lip, or you'll be back on relief."
     While they were running drilling water down into the hole, he started on his squib.
     Rigging the detonator was an art.  You started with a piece of tin pipe, like stovepipe, a little larger in diameter than the anchor and about three feet long, with one pointed end.
     Taking two sticks of straight dynamite out of the box in the truck, he shoved one heavy waxcoated cylinder down into the cone.  He used his awl on the second one, digging a slanting hole into one end.  He trimmed the end of the Clover Brand Safety Fuse square across with his Case knife, making sure the gunpowder core showed, and inserted it gently into the cap.  He crimped it with the tool, using slow, even pressure, all the way round.  Then pushed it deep into the dynamite.
     When he had the fuse timed he dropped the second stick in on top of the first and filled the squib up with sand, making it nice and heavy.  Then bent the top over and sealed it with pliers, leaving two feet of fuse sticking out.
     The drilling crew retreated again as he carried the go-devil up the plank, down the derrick way, to the hole.  He set the tip down on the floor, a foot from where the casing came up through it, and squatted down.
     This was the tricky part, as tricky as pouring the nitro.  Nerve, that was what a shooter had to have.  That and a steady hand, even after you'd taken on a load at an all-night poker game the night before.
     Squatting over the well hole, he hoisted the squib with his left hand and slid the tip into the pipe.  Slanting the rest of it to the right, out of the upward rush of flammable gas, he pulled his new Zippo out of his jacket.
     Holding the squib tight with his left hand, he flicked flame from the lighter and held it wind-whipped but still burning against the bare stripped end of the fuse.  Suddenly it caught, sputtering, spitting fire.  Moving very deliberately, he dropped the lighter back in his pocket.
     With his right hand, he pinched the yellow waxed cotton casing.  Feeling for the hidden heat, as the fire etched its way down into it.  Then he picked the heavy tube up with both hands, and with a flourish like a man releasing a homing pigeon, dropped it down away into the hole.  A rapid muffled rattling echoed back.
     He rose slowly to his feet and strolled away, toward the woods.
     He was fifty yards off when the shock kicked the soles of his boots.  The ground began rumbling.  He kept walking, knowing it would take a while for everything to come up eighteen hundred feet through a six-inch hole.  He got to where the others were standing, and turned.
     A chocolate-dark cylinder suddenly extruded itself from the earth.  It came up from the casing-head looking solid for the first fifteen or twenty feet, though it wasn't; it was oil, water, rock, and pay sand.  Then it blew apart and up and out through the top of the derrick with a deepthroated roaring  whoosh and he saw the amber glow deep in it, the light shining through it like a dirty-golden rainbow.  Yeah, she was gonna be a producer.  He could smell the scratch from here.
     "Guess we'll get to work," Keller said when the last wavering veil of spray drifted away downwind.  "Karl, you start and wash down, I'll get her ready to clean out."
     "Give her a couple minutes," Halvorsen told them.  "Let those fumes blow away."
     "That's about how long I'll need to take you down a peg," said the tool-dresser.  He spat on Halvorsen's boots.  "Ready for a little go-around?"
     "I got another shot to do today."
     "Uh huh.  You ain't got the time, that right?"
 Halvorsen looked him over again.  The tool-dresser was bull-muscled from hammering out white-hot drill bits with a fourteen-pound sledge.  Grau looked to be four, five years older than he was, and heavier by about forty pounds.  He had a cruel-looking smile.  He moved edgy, like he was getting ready to dance.
     "Oh, I can make some time for you," Halvorsen told him.

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