He looked at her, puzzled, then said, “I believe you do actually care, Elsa… a little.”
“Of course I care,” she cried drunkenly. “How can you be so cruel,” but she didn’t move to go to him.
He went to her chair and looked down into her lovely face. “There’s nothing to fear,” he reassured her. “Brand is a sensible man, even if he is leading the strikers against us. He’s not a hot-blooded Communist like some of the other labor agitators we’ve had here and in Harlan. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t talk with him at one o’clock in the morning.”
“Maybe not.” She sank back wearily. “I’ll have a little drink and wait up for you. You’re so brave and kind, Charles.”
Charles reached for her hands and drew her up from the chair, close to him. The smell of liquor on her breath repelled him. He kissed her swiftly, put her aside, and went out the door to his car.
2
Charles turned on the headlights and released the emergency brake. His car rolled forward, and he kept his foot on the brake to ease it down the slope. The beams from the lights tunnelled through the green tangle of foliage in a sweeping arc that carried him past the big house below. He noted that the open double garage was empty as he glided past.
That wasn’t strange. The house was usually dark, the garage empty, at this time of night. Jimmy lived alone in the big house, now that John Roche was dead, with only a couple of Negro servants who occupied rooms in the rear and retired early. Jimmy seldom came home before daylight. He was either drunk in the village, or he might be drunk at the Cornell woman’s house.
There wasn’t anything to be done about Jimmy. Charles knew, for he had tried to reason with him. He was five years younger, a slender bundle of bitter frustration and angry nerves; an alcoholic who declared there was nothing to do in Centerville but fool around with females or fish, and the fishing didn’t interest him. He was determined to go to hell in his own way. He scorned the mining village because he was bound to it by the terms of John Roche’s will, and he despised the mines which provided the money he threw around so carelessly.
When Charles thought of Jimmy he had an uncomfortable sense of inadequacy. At first he had felt guilty, but after three years of trying to reason with him he no longer censured himself for his younger brother’s predicament, but he still groped for some solution. He knew Jimmy hated him. Knew that he had taught himself to blame his elder brother for the terms of the will which required them both to stay in the Kentucky mountains near the mines where men slaved and sweltered and risked their lives every day beneath the earth’s surface. Even in death, John Roche’s unreasoning pride and unrelenting drive held them here. It was natural that their father had selected him, Charles, to be groomed to take his place as head of the Roche Mining Industries. He was much stronger physically, more serious-minded and more capable of succeeding his father.
Mist was gathering in the valley, and as his car rolled slowly downward, Charles’ mouth tightened into a grim line.
He reached an intersecting road leading east and west and turned east along the hillside contour toward the airport. He switched on the ignition and slipped the car into high gear. The motor took hold when he let the clutch out and he stepped on the accelerator. He was now travelling parallel to the strungout mining village, approximately half a mile above it, measured along the slope, and perhaps four hundred feet measured vertically. Lights of the village showed through the treetops, and were gradually left behind. Directly below were the shacks of the miners, clinging precariously to both sides of the gorge, rising on high stilts in front and sitting flat on the mountainside in the rear.
The airport was a mile and a half farther on, where the gorge widened out into a flat meadow.
The crackle of gunfire sounded below and slightly behind Charles’ car. He jerked as though the bullets were aimed at him and had found their mark.
Braking the car and switching off the lights simultaneously, he leaned out the window and looked down anxiously. For a moment he could see nothing through the light mist. There had been only one burst of shots. Some of Chief Elwood’s imported deputies, he thought angrily. Tanked up and shooting at the moon because thus far they had been restrained from firing at more exciting targets.
Then, there was a loud explosion, a sheet of flame rushing high into the air. It came from the far side of the gulch, from the string of shacks nearest the village which housed Roche miners. The ancient frame-and-tarpaper shack went up in a solid mass of flame that spoke eloquently of plenty of gasoline cunningly applied.
Charles trembled violently as he drew himself straight behind the steering wheel. He could still vividly see the sheet of flame, though he looked only into the clean mistiness of the night. Sweat streamed from his face and he pounded his doubled fist futilely on the steering wheel.
Why? In the name of God, why? There were other ways to settle such things. Better ways. But not in Kentucky, he thought savagely. Not in the bloody Harlan district. This was the pattern that had been laid down long ago… by his father, and by other rugged individualists like him. An inflexible, tyrannical pattern of force. He couldn’t make them see that times had changed. That the pattern was outmoded. Another striker’s home dynamited. Another sharp wedge driven between those who sought to reconcile viewpoints that had been unreconcilable for decades.
The thought made him physically ill. He must see Brand now. But he had to go to the airport first. The letter in his hip pocket pressed against his sensitized flesh as though it had suddenly taken on measureable thickness. With that in the mail, he would feel better. Then he could go to Brand and try to explain.
There were lights at the small airport, but no one was there. Charles was glad that no one saw him mail the envelope. It seemed better that way. It would be so much safer if no one knew.
He drove away from the airport, down to the main east and west highway running through the bottom of the gulch, then west toward Centerville. The gaunt outlines of dark miners’ shacks on either side of the road were strangely distorted caricatures of misshapen animals crouching there sullenly to spring upon anyone unwary enough to pass them. They did not spring, but sat solidly upon the mountainside, as though they feared the flimsy stilts might break if they moved. They had the strength, Charles thought bitterly, if they but knew it. It would be so simple.
When Charles reached the spot, the flames from the burning house had died down. There was only a mass of glowing embers on the hillside, nothing more. No curious crowds, no sign of any fire-fighting equipment.
He drove on toward the village, a village patrolled by armed men, where miners skulked behind flimsy walls. The roadway was deserted, and the uniform rows of shacks gave way to a pleasing residential section where the road widened into a street with concrete curbs and gutters. These houses were dark, too, except for street lights shining dimly upon their painted exteriors. Here lived the shopkeepers and the policemen, the gamblers and the Rotarians, the pimps and the politicians, the ministers of the gospel and their flocks… all those who prospered and grew fat on the fruits of the miners’ toil, and many of whom were pleased with things as they were.
Not all of them, Charles knew. He had witnessed the hauling into court of honest men and women who had refused to pay off when the strong arm of the law demanded it. He had seen weeping women shoved up the stairs to the filthy ward by fat cops to be locked in a dark and stinking room with nothing between their tender flesh and an iron cot upon which they had to sleep. He had seen men defy the authorities of Centerville, and beaten into unrecognizable pulps before being dragged up the same stairs to lie on a concrete floor until such time as they admitted guilt and were released, more dead than alive in body, and all hope gone from their minds and hearts.