Clarkton Read online

  Butler shrugged and looked from face to face.

  “One thing.”

  “Maybe I’d say that this new D.O., Mike Sawyer, drifted into town yesterday.”

  “D.O.?” Wilson asked.

  “District organizer.”

  “For the union?”

  “For the Communist Party,” Butler said quietly.

  Lowell watched Gelb, but there was no reaction, no change in his interested, considerate attitude. Listening to him speak, it was difficult to tell whether one question was more important than another.

  “You say he’s a new man?”

  “Only on the job a few weeks. Byron Rand had the job before. I hear they sent him down South.”

  “Why?”

  “It could be a lot of things,” Butler said. “But he was pretty good. It’s tough down there, so they send out their good people.”

  “They go where they’re sent?” Wilson asked.

  “Mostly, they go where they’re sent.”

  Gelb lit a cigarette and puffed on it for a while before he spoke to Butler again, “What do you know about Sawyer?”

  “He’s a quiet guy—don’t talk much, listens. He’s a veteran of this war and the Spanish War.”

  “Lincoln Battalion?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You have another one in town, haven’t you?”

  “Dr. Abbott.”

  “We’ll hold him for a while,” Gelb smiled, avoiding Lowell’s eyes, making Lowell wonder how much this well-dressed, quiet-speaking man knew, how much he had known before he came to Clarkton, how much he had learned since. Then, almost as if he had read Lowell’s thoughts, Gelb turned to him and said, with a note of sincere yet not unctuous diffidence in his voice:

  “It’s my profession, Mr. Lowell, and I’ve been at it a long time. I’m sure you’re as well informed in yours.” Lowell, for all of himself, had to smile. Curzon and Wilson exchanged glances. Gelb asked Butler:

  “When you say district organizer, do you mean the entire district?”

  “There are four states in the district. Sawyer’s territory is western Massachusetts. I guess it would be more on the ball to call him a section organizer. That’s his real title, but we call him a D.O.”

  Tightening a little, just a little, Just enough for it to be perceptible, allowing just the slightest edge of hardness to creep into his voice, Gelb asked:

  “When did you join the party here in Clarkton, Butler?”

  “A little less than six months ago.”

  “You seem well informed for such a short time.”

  “I keep my ears open,” Butler said, the note of insolence in his voice just matching the note of hardness in Gelb’s. Gelb smiled at him, and once again the voice became gentle and inviting.

  “Ever in the party before?”

  “In ’thirty-nine—in Ohio.”

  “Why?”

  “I did a job.”

  “For United?”

  “No, for the government. They pay you like a scab and treat you like a slob.”

  “I’ve found,” Gelb said sympathetically, “that they generally mess things up. Management and organization don’t mix with politics. And before that?”

  “Before that?”

  “I mean, you were in the party before that.”

  “In nineteen thirty-two,” Butler said.

  “On a job then?”

  “No,” Butler said. “I was broke and I hadn’t worked in a year, and I hadn’t eaten in three days.”

  “I see. Tell me, who is party organizer here in Clarkton?”

  “Danny Ryan.”

  “Full-time?”

  “No, he’s a dinker at the plant. There’s no full-time in Clarkton; it’s not important enough, not big enough. Also, Ryan’s vice-president of the local. He divides the party work with Abbott’s wife, Ruth, who is organizational secretary for the whole works.”

  “Who?” Lowell said.

  “Ruth Abbott,” Butler repeated—slow, looking at Lowell unhurriedly.

  “That’s a lie,” Lowell said. “That’s a damned lie.”

  Butler started to say something, but Gelb cut him off easily and expertly, telling Lowell: “It may be a lie, Mr. Lowell, and again it may be true. Suppose we wait until I’m through talking with Butler, and then you can ask him for proof of any statements you feel are open to doubt.”

  With all the edge Gelb took off it, Lowell didn’t like to be spoken to in that fashion. He wasn’t used to it, and he didn’t like the way it sat with the realization that Gelb, in Clarkton less than twenty-four hours, knew more about some things in the town than he had learned in five years. But he nodded because there wasn’t anything else to do. You stood something on its head, and at first it was unbelievable, and then almost instantaneously it all fitted into the new focus. Butler, who gave the impression of being simple, was not simple; as Lowell saw him then, he became an amoral being; he would lie because nothing in him separated the lie from the truth; there was no principle, no direction, no controlling factor, any more than there was in a beast of the fields, in a fox that had been chased the day before and would be chased again, in a small child or in a very wicked, very old man. For the first time in his life, fleetingly and fragmentarily, Lowell had a sense of the ethic rising from the situation; at the same time, the reverse image fitted into place, and he knew that in this case, Butler was not lying.

  “You want to know more about Ruth Abbott?” Butler said. “She’s a big-time operator here. She’s on the district committee too.”

  “Also Ryan?”

  “Also Ryan,” Butler said.

  “I’m afraid you don’t like the Abbotts,” Gelb smiled, the hint of deprecation and understanding directed at Lowell. “Suppose we hold him for a while. How big is the party here in Clarkton, Butler?”

  “Forty-three people.” And then he added, with what was almost a disarming smile, “Including myself.”

  Gelb had a little book out now, entering not notes but figures. The book was a tiny, expensive memo in blue leather, delicately covered with a tracery of gold, and it added to that sense of fastidiousness which Gelb managed to maintain with no loss of masculinity.

  “How are they organized?”

  “In two branches,” Butler said, reaffirming for Lowell an orderliness of mind at odds with that skinny, retiring, more or less haphazard exterior, and causing Lowell to wonder about the chance which puts one man in one place and another elsewhere; for here was the professional agent almost as an abstract, without bias, without preference, tucked away in a dingy New England milltown, and performing for the twenty or thirty dollars a week more than his pay that Wilson was willing to give him.

  “There’s a shop branch and a neighborhood branch,” Butler continued. “I’m in the shop branch—we got twenty-six members. The rest are in the neighborhood, Abbott’s branch.”

  “The shop branch people all work in the plant?”

  Butler nodded.

  “What about the neighborhood?”

  “Abbott and his wife, Joe Santana—he’s the barber—and his wife. Old Professor Revere and his son, the one who teaches up at Williams. Goldstein, the lawyer, and his wife, and Milt Cooper, who just got out of the army—”

  “Never mind cataloguing the rest,” Gelb said. And then, turning to Wilson, “You have a complete list, haven’t you?”

  Wilson nodded. “How come you know the other branch so well?” Gelb asked Butler.

  “The two branches hold joint meetings once a month. Since the strike began, they’ve been holding joint meetings almost every three days—they had two meetings already. Anything at all that comes up, Ryan brings to Ruth Abbott.”

  “He thinks highly of her?”

  “I wouldn’t say how high his thoughts are,” Butler grinned, glancing at Lowell, “but he’s sure as hell got her on his mind. I don’t know what goes on in the comrades’ beds, I can only guess—”

  “Shut up!” Lowell said.

 
“I’m asked a question, I answer it.”

  “Suppose we forget about Ruth Abbott,” Gelb intervened smoothly. “Where do the branches meet, Butler?”

  “The neighborhood branch meets at the Abbott house—or in Santana’s flat in back of his barber shop. The other branch meets around, at Ryan’s house or at somebody else’s.”

  “How does the shop branch fit into the strike?”

  “Strictly with double-talk. Don’t misunderstand me. This strike couldn’t have been pulled anyway like the way it’s been pulled without them. But they’re in it for what they can get for their god-damned party.”

  “How?” Gelb said, almost in a whisper.

  “Well, Ryan makes a big pitch to the comrades about political education, letting the workers know that a strike ain’t the end-all, teaching them that they got to learn how to take political action. We got to figure out how to bring socialism to the workers. Bring them into the party. Teach them unity. Teach them their class interest, which means that they’re going to ride into heaven on a book by Karl Marx. Mass picketing and all that crap, but Ryan don’t leave himself open. Hands off the union, he tells them. Keep hands off the union.”

  “But they don’t,” Gelb smiled.

  “What do you think? There are three of the comrades on the strike committee. They run the soup kitchens. They volunteer for picket captains, which is no sleighride because you got to show, no matter how the weather breaks. It’s their own goddam little strike—but they’re keeping hands off, all right, just running in food by the ton and pushing that rag of theirs, the Daily Worker, all over the place.”

  “Would any of them talk business?”

  Little wrinkles formed at the corners of Butler’s eyes, and he looked at Gelb for a long, cool moment before he answered, “Why don’t you try?”

  “You’re a smart cookie, Butler. You shouldn’t be too smart. I don’t like people who are too smart.”

  “I wouldn’t be in this racket if I was smart.”

  “This Danny Ryan,” Gelb said. “Is it known around that he’s a red?”

  “How do you mean, known?”

  “Does he admit that he holds a card?”

  “He don’t broadcast it. The only one in town who has enough guts to stand up and say what he is is Joe Santana. He used to have the church, and then he got the party like religion, and he keeps a stack of the Dean of Canterbury’s books right there in his shop and pushes them onto anyone who’s sucker enough to give him two bits for one.”

  “I was asking about Ryan,” Gelb said.

  “Some know about Ryan and some don’t. When they decided to take the strike vote, at the local meeting, Bill Noska, the president, laid it into Ryan for being a commie. Ryan never denied the charge, just kept asking them to look at his record and judge him by what he did, which is the line of crap they always pull, and then Joey Raye, a big nigger who talks like a Baptist preacher, got behind Ryan and swung it over to him. That Ryan is one smart mick, and he don’t take a step if he don’t know where he’s putting his foot. He’s been carrying on this push for mass picketing, but he never pushes it too hard—he never pushes anything too hard if he sees it’s running against him.”

  Later, the three of them, Lowell and Gelb and Wilson, had lunch at the plant. Inclined to make small of what had gone on in Curzon’s office, Lowell said he didn’t see that twenty-six Communists in a shop that employed almost five thousand men and women could mean a great deal, one way or another.

  “One rotten apple in a barrel isn’t much either,” Gelb said. “One little touch of cancer isn’t much, is it, Mr. Lowell?”

  “It’s still not against the law to be a Communist,” Lowell protested.

  “It will be, but the law is awful damned slow. This is a quiet town, Mr. Lowell. Your father never had any trouble here. But sure as God, you’re going to have a peck of trouble if you don’t stop it where it begins.”

  Uncertain of his ground, faced by the matter-of-fact directness of both Wilson and Gelb, Lowell sought for reason and facts to lay hands on. All the times he had been with the Abbotts came back, yet for the life of him he could not relate Abbott or his wife to the picture Gelb drew. Communists were not anything Lowell had ever particularly considered, and if he did, he was enough of a sane and worldly human being to dismiss frenetic ravings and to file them in that back-of-the-mind drawer which contained total-immersion Baptists, Technocrats, and Seventh Day Adventists. Curiously enough, the only time he had ever attempted to speak seriously of the matter was not with Abbott, but with Clark once in terms of the Red Army, when they talked a good deal on such subjects; and then he had been lured on by Clark’s fresh, open-eyed hunger for all of the world that was knowable in that flaming caldron that life had become during the war.

  “Yet the only thing you can put your finger on now,” he said, “is that they want mass picketing and that they’re bringing in food.”

  “They’re the easiest people in the world to underestimate,” Gelb said, “and that’s a mistake I try very hard not to make.” Eating his pie and coffee, talking earnestly and looking into Lowell’s eyes, he was obviously a sincere man, like that rare type of army officer who can combine discipline and intelligence with actual human qualities. “I have a reputation for success,” he went on, “and I don’t think I would have that reputation if I underestimated these people.” He spaced his words with bites; there was a literalness about him that defied opposition, a matter-of-factness that achieved better results than dramatization. “We make two mistakes, Mr. Lowell. We don’t like these people, and we don’t understand them. Costly mistakes, if you follow me. They’re a very high type of people and that is something we must recognize. They are very skillful at organization. The purpose of mass picketing is not to make you aware of the workers, but to make the workers aware of themselves. That’s a hard concept for us to grasp, because we don’t think like the workers, but they do. If you remember, in your father’s time, the company union worked smoothly—there was no trouble; then the CIO came in, and the people in the town began to think of the plant in different terms.” He apologized with, “It’s not that I know more about the situation than you do, Mr. Lowell, but I can generalize knowledge from a hundred situations that are very similar. Your father laid down a pattern of paternal care, but when the CIO came, the workers began to demand. The appetite was there all the time, but here was a means of satisfying it, and either they devour you, or you make them understand that you are capable of imposing limitations upon their appetite. Now why are the Communists the key to this? Not because they call for revolution, not because they want to overthrow the government, not because they are destroying the family, the church, and everything else—these are old wives’ tales for those who want to use them, and they only serve to confuse us—but because the Communists very cleverly make the workers aware of themselves and aware of what they can do when they get into motion. That would not be good for the Lowell Company and it would not be good for Clarkton.”

  “It’s against our traditions,” Wilson said. “It’s against everything American, everything that we cherish. It’s the sort of totalitarian concept that would turn this country into a barracks—”

  “What do you propose to do, Gelb?” Lowell interrupted, tired already, wanting to get away and be through with this.

  “There are various courses of action,” Gelb said, “but I think we ought to put something in this that will act as a catalyst and settle it. Wilson tells me that it would be vastly to your advantage to have it over with quickly—but not by retreating. I think it would be wrong to retreat just now. There are certain things we can do. For example, a number of officers in the local are reasonably anti-Communist. There’s a place for a wedge, depending upon how honest these officers are. We’ll go ahead on that. But more than that, I want to anticipate mass picketing. I don’t like mass picketing. I want to throw a monkey wrench into it. Now Wilson tells me that the plant property extends all the way from the gates to Birch
Street.”

  “That’s right,” Lowell said.

  “It’s also marked against trespassing,” Wilson said. “I spoke to Burton about that, and he says there’s a solid legal basis for Mr. Gelb’s proposal.…”

  7.About two hours before this, in other words at eleven o’clock or so, Lois began to develop a splitting headache, one of those things that begin in the morning and grow steadily until they become actually consuming in pain and completeness. This was rather unfortunate, because Lois had made up her mind that today she would speak to Fern about a certain pattern the girl had fallen into, and there was in Lois a block to abandoning an idea, a plan, indeed any course of action which she deemed necessary and upon which she decided. The more so, since this was not a particularly pressing thing, in any case no more pressing than it had been a week ago or would be a week in the future. She lay down for an hour, but that did not help much, and she thought she would drink a glass of cold milk, recalling that Elliott had prescribed it for almost any minor stomach disturbance, and also recalling something he had said about headaches beginning in the stomach. When she went into the kitchen, she found Fern sitting there, drinking milk, and eating chicken sandwiches as fast as Martha, the cook, prepared them. Lois had her milk, meanwhile asking Fern where she was going.

  “To Elliott’s,” Fern said.

  “Why?”,

  “Because I think I’m sick,” Fern said calmly, a statement Lois had no reason to believe—but which prompted her to go through with her decision; she told Fern that she would like to talk to her. “For long, Mother? I don’t want to be held up.” “For just a few minutes,” Lois said, Then they went into the library, where Fern sat with her hands in her lap, knowing her mother, sensing what to expect, and already decided to hear it patiently through. Sitting there, facing Lois, she looked very nice, a young girl in a brown suit, a yellow blouse, and low-heeled brown shoes. She had Lois’ frank, open countenance, the wide-set eyes which could be so completely disarming, and which, as Lois reflected now, took in her father again and again. But Lois did not intend to have her thoughts brushed aside now, and not knowing how to preface her remarks, plunged into what she had to say by telling Fern that this couldn’t go on.