________________________________________________
_ Uncle Charlie Wheeler stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor's
bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania
and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood
before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a
wink at the Reverend Minot Weeks who stood by the door leading to the
street, he tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.
"It has," he said, waving attention to the boy, who was making a mess
of the effort to arrange Uncle Charlie's loaf into a neat package, "a
pretty name. They call it Norman--Norman McGregor." Uncle Charlie
laughed heartily and again stamped upon the floor. Putting his finger
to his forehead to suggest deep thought, he turned to the minister. "I
am going to change all that," he said.
"Norman indeed! I shall give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too
soft, too soft and delicate for Coal Creek, eh? It shall be
rechristened. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden naming
things. We will call it Beaut--Our Beautiful One--Beaut McGregor."
The Reverend Minot Weeks also laughed. He thrust four ringers of each
hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie
along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like
two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and
jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing
as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door
ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go
along the street from store to store telling the tale of the
christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details
of the story.
It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one
of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks
and in the gutters of Main Street--black snow, sordid with the
gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the
bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling
along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they
carried dinner pails.
The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great
hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie,
Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and
looked after him as with the loaf of bread under his arm he hurried
along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still
enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his
nearness to life in the mining town. "Did not Christ himself laugh,
eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, as he waddled
through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the
two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-
shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was
the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole
between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand
forth among his fellows.
In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it
is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast
disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in
route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent
of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of
them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or
Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of
the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of
our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of
our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing
step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own
individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly
mass in at the door of a Chicago factory morning after morning and
year after year with never an epigram from the lips of one of them.
In Coal Creek when men got drunk they staggered in silence through the
street. Did one of them, in a moment of stupid animal sportiveness,
execute a clumsy dance upon the barroom floor, his fellow--labourers
looked at him dumbly, or turning away left him to finish without
witnesses his clumsy hilarity.
Standing in the doorway and looking up and down the bleak village
street, some dim realisation of the disorganised ineffectiveness of
life as he knew it came into the mind of the McGregor boy. It seemed
to him right and natural that he should hate men. With a sneer on his
lips, he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist, who was
forever talking of a day coming when men would march shoulder to
shoulder and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, should cease being
aimless and become definite and full of meaning.
"They will never do that and who wants them to," mused the McGregor
boy. A blast of wind bearing snow beat upon him and he turned into the
shop and slammed the door behind him. Another thought stirred in his
head and brought a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the
silence of the empty shop shaking with emotion. "If I could form the
men of this place into an army I would lead them to the mouth of the
old Shumway cut and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist
toward the door. "I would stand aside and see the whole town struggle
and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."
* * * * *
The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the
street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the
loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being,
the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had
made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance,
galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men
looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and
nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the snow from
before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he
called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beaut is the name
for you! Oh you Beaut!"
The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend Minot
Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his hat
and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about
it. It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been
plain John or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed
through him. "She might have used more sense," he muttered.
And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the
name. That checked his flight toward universal hatred and he began
pushing the cart forward again, a more genial current of thought
running through his mind. The tall boy loved the memory of his father,
"Cracked McGregor." "They called him 'Cracked' until that became his
name," he thought. "Now they are at me." The thought renewed a feeling
of fellowship between himself and his dead father--it softened him.
When he reached the first of the bleak miners' houses a smile played
about the corners of his huge mouth.
In his day Cracked McGregor had not borne a good reputation in Coal
Creek. He was a tall silent man with something morose and dangerous
about him. He inspired fear born of hatred. In the mines he worked
silently and with fiery energy, hating his fellow miners among whom he
was thought to be "a bit off his head." They it was who named him
"Cracked" McGregor and they avoided him while subscribing to the
common opinion that he was the best miner in the district. Like his
fellow workers he occasionally got drunk. When he went into the saloon
where other men stood in groups buying drinks for each other he bought
only for himself. Once a stranger, a fat man who sold liquor for a
wholesale house, approached and slapped him on the back. "Come, cheer
up and have a drink with me," he said. Cracked McGregor turned and
knocked the stranger to the floor. When the fat man was down he kicked
him and glared at the crowd in the room. Then he walked slowly out at
the door staring around and hoping some one would interfere.
In his house also Cracked McGregor was silent. When he spoke at all he
spoke kindly and looked into the eyes of his wife with an eager
expectant air. To his red-haired son he seemed to be forever pouring
forth a kind of dumb affection. Taking the boy in his arms he sat for
hours rocking back and forth and saying nothing. When the boy was ill
or troubled by strange dreams at night the feel of his father's arms
about him quieted him. In his arms the boy went to sleep happily. In
the mind of the father there was a single recurring thought, "We have
but the one bairn, we'll not put him into the hole in the ground," he
said, looking eagerly to the mother for approval.
Twice had Cracked McGregor walked with his son on a Sunday afternoon.
Taking the lad by the hand the miner went up the face of the hill,
past the last of the miners' houses, through the grove of pine trees
at the summit and on over the hill into sight of a wide valley on the
farther side. When he walked he twisted his head far to one side like
one listening. A falling timber in the mines had given him a deformed
shoulder and left a great scar on his face, partly covered by a red
beard filled with coal dust. The blow that had deformed his shoulder
had clouded his mind. He muttered as he walked along the road and
talked to himself like an old man.
The red-haired boy ran beside his father happily. He did not see the
smiles on the faces of the miners, who came down the hill and stopped
to look at the odd pair. The miners went on down the road to sit in
front of the stores on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory
of the hurrying McGregors. They had a remark they tossed about. "Nance
McGregor should not have looked at her man when she conceived," they
said.
Up the face of the hill climbed the McGregors. In the mind of the boy
a thousand questions wanted answering. Looking at the silent gloomy
face of his father, he choked back the questions rising in his throat,
saving them for the quiet hour with his mother when Cracked McGregor
was gone to the mine. He wanted to know of the boyhood of his father,
of the life in the mine, of the birds that flew overhead and why they
wheeled and flew in great ovals in the sky. He looked at the fallen
trees in the woods and wondered what made them fall and whether the
others would presently fall in their turn.
Over the hill went the silent pair and through the pinewood to an
eminence half way down the farther side. When the boy saw the valley
lying so green and broad and fruitful at their feet he thought it the
most wonderful sight in the world. He was not surprised that his
father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground he opened and
closed his eyes, his soul stirred by the beauty of the scene that lay
before them.
On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
droning song.
On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of
Eden, told him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother went
over the hill and down toward the valley but that his father, wearing
a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood
upon the hillside swinging a long sword blazing with fire and drove
them back.
When the boy went again over the hill it was October and a cold wind
blew down the hill into his face. In the woods golden brown leaves ran
about like frightened little animals and golden-brown were the leaves
on the trees about the farmhouses and golden-brown the corn standing
shocked in the fields. The scene saddened the boy. A lump came into
his throat and he wanted back the green shining beauty of the spring.
He wished to hear the birds singing in the air and in the grass on the
hillside.
Cracked McGregor was in another mood. He seemed more satisfied than on
the first visit and ran up and down on the little eminence rubbing his
hands together and on the legs of his trousers. Through the long
afternoon he sat on the log muttering and smiling.
On the road home through the darkened woods the restless hurrying
leaves frightened the boy so that, with his weariness from walking
against the wind, his hunger from being all day without food, and with
the cold nipping at his body, he began to cry. The father took the boy
in his arms and holding him across his breast like a babe went down
the hill to their home.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Cracked McGregor died. His death
fixed itself as something fine in the mind of the boy and the scene
and the circumstance stayed with him through life, filling him with
secret pride like a knowledge of good blood. "It means something that
I am the son of such a man," he thought.
It was past ten in the morning when the cry of "Fire in the mine" ran
up the hill to the houses of the miners. A panic seized the women. In
their minds they saw the men hurrying down old cuts, crouching in
hidden corridors, pursued by death. Cracked McGregor, one of the night
shift, slept in his house. The boy's mother, threw a shawl about her
head, took his hand and ran down the hill to the mouth of the mine.
Cold winds spitting snow blew in their faces. They ran along the
tracks of the railroad, stumbling over the ties, and stood on the
railroad embankment that overlooked the runway to the mine.
About the runway and along the embankment stood the silent miners,
their hands in their trousers pockets, staring stolidly at the closed
door of the mine. Among them was no impulse toward concerted action.
Like animals at the door of a slaughter-house they stood as though
waiting their turn to be driven in at the door. An old crone with bent
back and a huge stick in her hand went from one to another of the
miners gesticulating and talking. "Get my boy--my Steve! Get him out
of there!" she shouted, waving the stick about.
The door of the mine opened and three men came out, staggering as they
pushed before them a small car that ran upon rails. On the car lay
three other men, silent and motionless. A woman thinly clad and with
great cave-like hollows in her face climbed the embankment and sat
upon the ground below the boy and his mother. "The fire is in the old
McCrary cut," she said, her voice quivering, a dumb hopeless look in
her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My man Ike is in
there." She put down her head and sat weeping. The boy knew the woman.
She was a neighbour who lived in an unpainted house on the hillside.
In the yard in front of her house a swarm of children played among the
stones. Her husband, a great hulking fellow, got drunk and when he
came home kicked his wife. The boy had heard her screaming at night.
Suddenly in the growing crowd of miners below the embankment Beaut
McGregor saw his father moving restlessly about. On his head he had
his cap with the miner's lamp lighted. He went from group to group
among the people, his head hanging to one side. The boy looked at him
intently. He was reminded of the October day on the eminence
overlooking the fruitful valley and again he thought of his father as
a man inspired, going through a kind of ceremony. The tall miner
rubbed his hands up and down his legs, he peered into the faces of the
silent men standing about, his lips moved and his red beard danced up
and down.
As the boy looked a change came over the face of Cracked McGregor. He
ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. In his eyes was the
look of a perplexed animal. The wife bent down and began to talk to
the weeping woman on the ground, trying to comfort her. She did not
see her husband and the boy and man stood in silence looking into each
other's eyes.
Then the puzzled look went out of the father's face. He turned and
running along with his head rolling about reached the closed door of
the mine. A man, who wore a white collar and had a cigar stuck in the
corner of his mouth, put out his hand.
"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful arm
the runner pulled open the door of the mine and disappeared down the
runway.
A hubbub arose. The man in the white collar took the cigar from his
mouth and began to swear violently. The boy stood on the embankment
and saw his mother running toward the runway of the mine. A miner
gripped her by the arm and led her back up the face of the embankment.
In the crowd a woman's voice shouted, "It's Cracked McGregor gone to
close the door to the McCrary cut."
The man with the white collar glared about as he chewed the end of his
cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, again closing the door to the
mine.
Cracked McGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to
the old cut where the fire burned. With him died all but five of the
imprisoned miners. All day parties of men tried to get down into the
mine. Below in the hidden passages under their own homes the scurrying
miners died like rats in a burning barn while their wives, with shawls
over their heads, sat silently weeping on the railroad embankment. In
the evening the boy and his mother went up the hill alone. From the
houses scattered over the hill came the sound of women weeping.
* * * * *
For several years after the mine disaster the McGregors, mother and
son, lived in the house on the hillside. The woman went each morning
to the offices of the mine where she washed windows and scrubbed
floors. The position was a sort of recognition on the part of the mine
officials of the heroism of Cracked McGregor.
Nance McGregor was a small blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She wore
glasses and had the name in Coal Creek of being quick and sharp. She
did not stand by the fence to talk with the wives of other miners but
sat in her house and sewed or read aloud to her son. She subscribed
for a magazine and had bound copies of it standing upon shelves in the
room where she and the boy ate breakfast in the early morning. Before
the death of her husband she had maintained a habit of silence in her
house but after his death she expanded, and, with her red-haired son,
discussed freely every phase of their narrow lives. As he grew older
the boy began to believe that she like the miners had kept hidden
under her silence a secret fear of his father. Certain things she said
of her life encouraged the thought.
Norman McGregor grew into a tall broad-shouldered boy with strong
arms, flaming red hair and a habit of sudden and violent fits of
temper. There was something about him that held the attention. As he
grew older and was renamed by Uncle Charlie Wheeler he began going
about looking for trouble. When the boys called him "Beaut" he knocked
them down. When men shouted the name after him on the street he
followed them with black looks. It became a point of honour with him
to resent the name. He connected it with the town's unfairness to
Cracked McGregor.
In the house on the hillside the boy and his mother lived together
happily. In the early morning they went down the hill and across the
tracks to the offices of the mine. From the offices the boy went up
the hill on the farther side of the valley and sat upon the
schoolhouse steps or wandered in the streets waiting for the day in
school to begin. In the evening mother and son sat upon the steps at
the front of their home and watched the glare of the coke ovens on the
sky and the lights of the swiftly-running passenger trains, roaring
whistling and disappearing into the night.
Nance McGregor talked to her son of the big world outside the valley
and told him of the cities, the seas and the strange lands and peoples
beyond the seas. "We have dug in the ground like rats," she said, "I
and my people and your father and his people. With you it will be
different. You will get out of here to other places and other work."
She grew indignant thinking of the life in the town. "We are stuck
down here amid dirt, living in it, breathing it," she complained.
"Sixty men died in that hole in the ground and then the mine started
again with new men. We stay here year after year digging coal to burn
in engines that take other people across the seas and into the West."
When the son was a tall strong boy of fourteen Nance McGregor bought
the bakery and to buy it took the money saved by Cracked McGregor.
With it he had planned to buy a farm in the valley beyond the hill.
Dollar by dollar it had been put away by the miner who dreamed of life
in his own fields.
In the bakery the boy worked and learned to make bread. Kneading the
dough his arms and hands grew as strong as a bear's. He hated the
work, he hated Coal Creek and dreamed of life in the city and of the
part he should play there. Among the young men he began to make here
and there a friend. Like his father he attracted attention. Women
looked at him, laughed at his big frame and strong homely features and
looked again. When they spoke to him in the bakery or on the street he
spoke back fearlessly and looked them in the eyes. Young girls in the
school walked home down the hill with other boys and at night dreamed
of Beaut McGregor. When some one spoke ill of him they answered
defending and praising him. Like his father he was a marked man in the
town of Coal Creek. _
Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER II
Table of content of Marching Men
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
