Under ground, p.6
Under Ground, page 6
“Good idea, Matchka! That is an immediate solution, and we will do that, this very day. It will make you feel important for a long time. And it may improve conditions for one hour, for one child. But the next day, while we are feeling charitable, the child will be hungry again, and the world will be no better. We need to think like the prophets and the saints. We need to think like Paul and Elizabeth and Emma Goldman. We need something bigger.”
Katka gently pushed Lily away. She sat down at the desk and put her fingers on the typewriter. As she stabbed at the keys, she smiled when letters materialized magically on the page. The first word Lily wrote was REVOLUCIJA.
CHAPTER 7
Milo Blatnik remembered the first day he saw Katka. She was standing at the top of the stairwell looking bewildered, dirty, and so skinny that her dark brown eyes seemed two or three times their actual size. Her cheekbones jutted out like a skeleton. She reminded him of a starving deer. The gray dress she was wearing hung over her like a horse blanket.
Had he looked that ragged when he first arrived more than a year ago in Minnesota? Probably worse, he figured. Milo’s parents had sent him to the New World because, as Milo’s father had said, “No son of mine will become a soldier for the czar.” Two weeks after Milo left for America, the Russian army arrested his mother, a poet, and his father, a famous cellist, for political agitation. They were taken to Siberia, and as far as Milo knew, they were still there.
On Milo’s passage, a Slovenian named Leo Zalar befriended him on the ship. Leo had been offered work at the Belgrade mine in Biwabik, and he assured Milo he could get work there too. So Milo accompanied Leo, his wife, Ana, and their four-year-old son, Danko, to Biwabik. They moved into a company shanty in the Belgrade location, just outside of town, right next to the mine, offering to share their quarters with Milo for a piece of his paycheck.
The first night, as they sat down to a dinner of warmed beans and day-old bread from the company store, the ill-constructed shack of a house began to shake. The few belongings they had unpacked fell off the shelves and clattered to the ground. They heard a giant explosion, and dirt and debris fell from the ceiling. A chunk of wood that had served as a roof patch landed on a pink wood-fired plate Ana had brought from the old country. She had kept the set of plates safe throughout her long journey, thinking if she could keep the set together, she herself would remain intact.
They heard a low rumble. “Take cover!” Leo yelled, and the four of them scrambled under the flimsy pinewood table. The boy cried, and Ana held him close to her chest. The second blast was even louder than the first, but the impact was not as shattering. Nothing else fell from the ceiling. Then the rumbling stopped.
“What in the name of Mary was that?” Ana asked quietly. “An earthquake?”
“Dynamite blasting from the mine,” Leo said. “I suspect we’ll get used to it.”
“I’ll never get used to that,” Ana said gravely.
But she did. As the months progressed the blasting became as much a part of her landscape as the giant oak and pine forest that she could see from her window. She’d hear the rumble and move with her boy to the corner of the small shack next to the shelves. She had packed away what was left of her mother’s dishes and replaced them with tin cookware bought at the company store on credit. If a blast was powerful enough to knock a dish off the shelf, she’d catch it, replace it, listen intently for a possible encore, and if it didn’t come, smoothly resume her tasks. It was like a dance between two partners, one of whom could anticipate the moves her partner was about to make.
On the morning of their first day of work, Leo and Milo put on overalls, boots, and cotton hats. They grabbed their lunch boxes. Each had a band tied around his hat to hold his candle. In their pockets they carried matches. They exited the shack and fell into a steady stride, easily blending in with the other workers. When they reached the mine, Milo and the other miners headed for the cage. There were actually two cages attached by a pulley system. As one metal crate descended into the depths of the underground mine, the other ascended. The cage was aptly named; it looked more fit to carry livestock than men. The one at the Belgrade mine was standard size, perhaps four feet by three feet. Six miners could ride comfortably, but comfort was not efficient. The company required no fewer than eighteen men to ride per trip. The miners packed in like sardines, holding their lunch boxes atop their heads.
When the cage was loaded and on its way down, the darkness was all encompassing. Milo held his hand directly in front of his face. He could not see his fingers. He was disoriented and felt as if the men’s bodies pressing against his skinny frame would surely suffocate him. When he got to the thirteenth floor underground, he and Leo exited the cage with a group. A miner who looked a hundred years old was waiting with a lantern. For a moment Milo was transported to his youth. He remembered his father, who loved to read, making him memorize passages from Dante’s Inferno. The miner with the lantern was like Charon, waiting to deliver the shades of the dead to their eternal punishment. The Iron Range Charon swung his lantern to the left, and the miners shuffled in that direction. They loaded into rail cars, six men per cart. The rail cart operator yelled something in English, and the cars began to move away from the light and into the darkness until, once again, there was nothing.
Milo’s head began to spin. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. Was he disappearing? He bit the inside of his cheek and felt reassured by the pain and the taste of blood. Then he felt himself falling again. Even on the darkest moonless night, his eyes had been able to adjust. This was something altogether different, surreal.
He reached into his pocket for a match. He needed to light his candle, regain his bearings. The man sitting across from him could not see Milo, but somehow he knew what he was doing. “Don’t do it, son,” he said. Milo replied in Slovenian that he did not understand. The miner responded in kind. “They deduct every match you use from your pay. Every candle. Even your dynamite. Everything. Don’t waste your light here. Your workday doesn’t even begin until you exit this cart and pick up the shovel.”
Milo lit his candle anyway. With the light he could breathe again. Breathe the dusty, old air in this godforsaken underground tunnel. He heard the other miners laughing. He heard a few people mutter, in English, four words: “Fresh off the boat.”
When the cart stopped, an old man pointed to him. “You, Bohunk, come with me.” Milo followed. “And you, Wop.” A young Italian immigrant did the same. When they got to the end of the vein, next to a huge pile of blasted ore, the old man handed them each a shovel, talking nonstop. “Careful with your shovels now, boys. You’ll be paying for their use at the end of the month.” They took the shovels.
“Ain’t big talkers, I see. Probably can’t understand a blasted word I say. I slept with your mother. Both of yourn. At the same time.”
Milo and the Italian stared expressionless at the old man, who laughed. His voice echoed eerily throughout the tunnel, and Milo felt chills go up his back.
“Lucky for you, you don’t need no English to be a mucker. Don’t need no brains neither, which might work to your favor. This here’s how you do it.” The old man took his shovel and scooped the heavy rock into the tram cars. The “fresh-off-the-boats” did the same. “We get paid by the carload, not the hour. So, as the company men say, your workday starts now.”
“Work,” Milo said.
“Work,” the Italian said.
And work they did. Sometimes the rocks were too big to shovel. They used a pick and hammer to break down the ore. To prevent their backs from giving out, they spent part of each hour on their knees working the larger boulders. By the time the whistle blew for lunch, Milo’s knees were bloody. As he ate the pasty Ana had prepared for him, with the old man and Gino, the Italian, he felt the wounds starting to scab over. Then he went back to work for five more hours.
When the cage door opened into the breeze above ground at the end of his first day, Milo gasped for air. He felt as if he had swallowed a cat, and he coughed for a good ten minutes before locating Leo. His face and hands were grimy. His back hurt and his knees stung. Milo wanted to quit. One day in the mine was enough. But he could not quit. He owed the company store for his overalls, his hatband, the shovel, the ax, the hammer, the candles, and the matches. He owed the Zalars rent.
CHAPTER 8
So Milo went back, morning after morning. He worked six days a week for at least twelve hours a day. He went to work in the dark; he came home in the dark. He didn’t see the sun until his first day off, Sunday, which he realized was the most aptly named day of the week.
His life fell into a pattern. Before the men’s arrival home, Ana heated water on the stove and boiled strips of white cloth with eucalyptus leaves. “Can I help with your boots, Ata?” little Danko would say to his father.
“What a big boy you are!” Danko tugged at Leo’s boots, falling to the ground when they finally came loose from his leg. Then Danko helped with Milo’s boots. The two miners slipped out of their overalls and rolled their long underwear up to their thighs, revealing dark red patches of blood where their knobby knees had pressed against the sharp ore. Ana laid the warm cloths on their scabs and let the men sit with the poultices on their wounds until supper was served.
Some nights after dinner, Ana persuaded Milo to take out the guitar he had brought from the old country. He played familiar chords in unfamiliar patterns. He composed new melodies, tunes he made up at work while trying to stay mentally alive, but Ana had little patience for that. She was tired of new. “Play something from the old country,” she would say. Milo did, and Ana sang along.
Milo worked first as a mucker, then a trammer, then a trackman, until he was finally assigned to a position where he was considered a real miner. He became a driller and received a slight raise in pay, at least in theory. There were four men on his crew, and only he spoke Slovenian. He learned how to say “run,” “help,” “look out,” and “bossman coming” in Italian, Swedish, Finnish, and English. He could cuss in even more languages. The miners always knew when the bossman was about to walk through. They had worked out a simple system to communicate with each other about a slew of things. Four rhythmic shovel whacks followed by two short ones clearly told the miners on the level below that the bossman was coming down. If the miner spotted the supervisor on his own level, he moved his candle slightly off-center, to the left.
Milo learned how to do his job at just the right speed. He learned to take breaks, but not for so long that his back would stiffen. He learned to drill through only the rock the trammers and muckers would be able to load. If a crew loaded less than the quota, they received lower pay. If they loaded more, they received more pay, but then the foreman would raise their quota for the next month, and they’d have to break their backs just to receive the same pay they would have gotten for loading fewer cars the month before. He learned to drill the right amount of rock that he knew would result in an acceptable output and a fair day’s wage. This scheme, which prevented the miners from ever getting ahead, was called the contract system, and the workers despised it. When his English was better, Milo would quietly listen to other miners discuss it.
“Only way to get rid of the contract system is to strike,” he heard Gino say one day. Gino had come from Italy, where workers knew how to organize, he said.
“Who’s going to organize us?” another worker said. “A wop like you?”
“Could happen,” Gino said. “Don’t forget it was an Italian mayor who got electricity on the streets and a school built.”
“You know the mayor? What? He invite you to his parties? Let you date his daughter? Next time you sippin’ whiskey with your Italian friend, you tell him this for me.” The miner made a gesture, and the men laughed.
Milo listened to the men talk about politics. They talked about a man named Big Bill Haywood, one of the founders of a union called the Industrial Workers of the World, and another named Eugene Debs, who wanted to become the president of the United States. Milo listened intently, but every time he got lost in the English.
One night, after work, Gino asked Milo to stop off at one of the Italian taverns to grab a beer. “Can’t,” Milo said. “I saving my pay.”
“For what? A woman? They ain’t that expensive. Couple bucks will get you a decent one at Crooked Neck Pete’s.”
“Not a woman, no.”
“What then? Got family back home to support?”
“No.”
“Gambling debts?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Gino because he was afraid he’d laugh at him. But Gino was already laughing, so what did he have to lose? “Last Sunday man came to the location with big cart. Ana, she wouldn’t go to the door. Said she had no money and don’t need the devil’s temptation. So me, I go. And the man, he show me what in his truck.”
“Women?” Gino said.
Milo shook his head, smiling. “Book.”
“Bibles? You are saving your money to give to a Bible salesman? Listen, Milo, ain’t nobody less Christian than a Bible salesman. Better to spend your money on moonshine.”
“Not Bible. Cyclepedias.”
“En-cyclo-pedias?”
“That what I say.”
Milo explained to Gino how beautiful the volumes were, and that he figured by the time he got through all the volumes, he could consider himself a learned American man. Milo didn’t tell Gino about his fear: that working in the mine was dulling his brain. He wanted desperately to stay sharp. His father had studied music for a brief time in Vienna and made his living playing the cello in a small orchestra in Ljubljana and giving music lessons to the sons and daughters of rich Austrians who lived there. His father had wanted Milo to attend university and had tried to reestablish a Slovenian language university in Ljubljana, where he had promised to teach music. Every time his father and his comrades had come close to fulfilling their dream, the Austro-Hungarian government shut them down.
“Salesman said be back in two month,” Milo said to Gino. “That why I save.”
Gino listened and did not laugh. “Tell you what. I’ll buy you a beer. When you get your books, let me borrow them. I don’t want no Bohunk thinking he smarter than me. In the meantime, I’ll get you some things to read.”
The following Sunday Gino showed up at the Belgrade location. When Milo opened the door, Gino reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out some magazines. “As promised,” he said. He handed Milo three publications: the Industrial Worker, the International Socialist Review, and Solidarity. Milo spent the next month sounding out the words in the magazines and reading out loud until the sentences actually made sense.
About six months into the job, when he could understand English adequately, he turned to one of his coworkers, a Finn named Johan Koski. “If the miners, we strike,” Milo asked, “will you?”
“Tried that in 1907,” Koski said.
“And?”
Koski paused. He leaned on his shovel. “Back then there were a lot more Finlanders like me working these here mines. Brave sons of bitches. They led the strike.”
“It failed?”
“Yes. And my papa got the blacklist, which was better than some, who got killed. We were hungry. Many families, they left the Range. Those who stayed moved to the country, carved out homes in the land, tried to make a go of it there.”
“But a strike would be different now,” Milo said. “There’s a war coming.”
“We Finns are smart. I read. I go to the socialist hall and listen to the speakers. I know there’s a war. I see no sense in it. I know there is talk of strike again. I think about that too. I don’t know if I believe in a socialist takeover. I don’t know if I believe that owners don’t deserve more pay than we get. But I do know this: The poor will always stay poor if we do not get together. A rich boss is not going to give one man anything at all. You don’t like your job? Go somewhere else. But a rich man cannot tell thousands of men to go away. If he does, he won’t be rich anymore. He’ll have no one to make his money.”
“So you will support a strike?”
“Only if there is a plan,” Johan said. Just then, they heard four shovel whacks followed by two short ones come from above. The entire crew picked up their equipment. Milo started drilling. They were all working in earnest when the foreman walked through. They did not take another break until lunch.
Milo and Johan Koski sat together at lunch. Another Finnish worker pointed to Milo and, his tone hostile, said something to Koski, who swore back at him in English.
“What I do?” Milo asked.
“We Finlanders, as a general rule, don’t like your kind,” he said to Milo.
“What kind?” Milo asked. “Nice-looking kind?”
“Slavs. Croats. Montenegrins. Bohunks. None of you Austrians.”
“I never been Austrian.”
“Well, you is to us. And the rest of the world too. On your papers, when you come to this country, do it say ‘Slovenian’? No. It say, ‘Austro-Hungarian Empire.’ Am I right?”
He was right. Slovenians, or Slovenes as some called themselves, were one people with a separate language and beautiful culture. A culture that was maintained by his father, by his mother, and by the many artists whom Milo met in his youth. Although they had been under the control of Austria, they were not Austrian. Not to themselves. But here? They were all lumped together. They were called Bohunks. Eventually they called themselves Bohunks.
“As I was saying,” Johan said, “we Finns don’t usually talk to none of you Bohunks, except when we have to at work.”
“Seems like you talking to me. Must be my charisma, no?” Milo had just learned that word: charisma. In Slovenian, it was almost the same: Karizma. Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World had charisma. Eugene Debs had charisma. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had charisma. Milo read that in one of Gino’s magazines.
“I don’t know what charisma is,” Johan Koski said. “But I do know that your people broke the strike in 1907.” The whistle blew, indicating that the workers needed to return to work. “Lunch is over. But I want to warn you. Don’t talk unions or strikes at work. Don’t ask me questions. If the bossman heard us talking, he’d get some cousin jacks to roll giant boulders down the shaft and our whole damn crew’d be dead.”
