God's Kingdom (17 page)

“Can I ask you something?” Jim said to the Scout. “How come you don't own a car?”

“I did, oncet,” the Scout said. “One of Mr. H Ford's flivvers, spanking new off the line. Trouble is, owning a motorcar gives the enemy a hostage. First they egged her. Then they slashed the tires. Busted out the windscreen and cut the brake line. Finally they blowed her up with me at the wheel. Did you ever spend a month in the charity ward of the Wheeling Hospital, Jim? I don't recommend it.

“Oh, yes,” the Scout went on. “I have been exploded in Wheeling, shot out of Matewan, and ridden on a rail through the hilly streets of Butte, Montana, in the distinguished company of Big Bill Haywood. I was stabbed in the gizzard with a meat hook in a packing plant in Lawrence. Pelted with overripe heads of cauliflower in Bakersfield. And pummeled half to death by the burly sergeant of arms of the John Birch Society in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

“J-J-Jesum Crow, mister,” Ti said. “You m-must really b-b-believe in unions.”

“What are them stone cribs out there in the river for?” the Scout asked.

“They're to keep the spring log drives from jamming up,” Jim told him. “In the spring they float logs down out of the woods to the American Furniture mill.”

“Company own the woods, does it?”

Jim nodded.

“Tell me the story, forest to showroom, of the making of an article of furniture, Jim. Say one of those trestle eating tables they want an arm and a leg for.”

Jim did. But when he looked over at the Scout a few minutes later, A. J. Peabody's eyes were shut and his chin was resting on his collar. Jim doubted he'd heard a word.

The Scout didn't offer to pay Jim or Ti, or to reimburse the editor for gas, but at the end of the afternoon he went up to his room at the hotel and returned with a UWA cap for Ti.

Ti was overwhelmed. All he could say was, “Oh, you g-guys.”

The Scout held up his hands and ducked his head to the side as if dodging any gratitude that might come his way. “See you boys tonight at the hall,” he said. “Seven sharp.”

*   *   *

The information meeting to vote on whether to vote to join the union didn't start until close to 7:30. Men kept drifting in late, many with their hats pulled low. Some stood in the shadows in the back of the hall. Jim, Charlie, and Little Ti sat in the second row. At 7:25, the editor, who'd been elected by a voice vote to moderate the meeting, introduced A. J. Peabody.

The Scout came onto the stage like a man expecting a snake to slither out from under his feet at any moment. He pulled some notes from his jacket pocket, then put them away again. Something splattered on the stage near his polished shoes. An egg.

“None of that, now,” the editor said. “We'll have civility or I'll adjourn this meeting.”

The Scout stood still. Only when the hall was perfectly silent did he begin to speak.

“Name A. J. Peabody,” he said. “Most call me the Scout. Born in Birmingham. Shifted to Gary with my people when I was three. Shifted to Flint. Shifted to Chicago. Came up rough on the streets of Chi-town. Landed in De-troit. Landed in Toledo. Currently employed by the United Woodworkers of America out of Peoria.”

At the mention of the United Woodworkers of America, some of the factory workers clapped. Some, led by Rip Kinneson, booed. Again the Scout waited for quiet. When he resumed speaking, his voice was louder.

“Men, I'm going to tell you a story,” he said. “Here it is. A man goes out in the winter woods of Vermont. He wades around in the deep snow until he finds a tall, straight pine tree. But this man doesn't see a pine tree. What he sees is a beautiful trestle-style eating table.

“Now, that's a very valuable tree, a tree that looks like a costly eating table. So the man looks around for a clear space to fell it and then he notches the tree and drops her on down. And it ain't one safe thing about that man's job of work because quick as nobody's business that great giant pine tree could swop around on its butt and take his head clean off. Or fall partway and get hung up on another tree, that's called a widow maker, then drop the rest of the way and crush that man to pulp. Oh, it's any number of ways that pine tree can kill that woodsman dead as Judas, including a hundred and one ways that he and I and you could never dream of until they happened. But they don't. Happen. Instead, that big old tree drops into that clearing neat as pie. Why for? Because
that worker knows what he is doing
. That's why for.”

The Scout's voice had acquired a confident resonance. Everyone in the hall was listening intently as he continued to narrate how the woodsman limbed out the giant white pine and cut it into logs to be skidded to the riverbank and, come ice-out, driven down the river to the mill in the Common. He told the story that Jim had told him that afternoon, of the creation of the pine table, but when A. J. Peabody told it he made Jim shiver in the snow-filled woods and out on the icy whitewater of the Upper Kingdom, where red-shirted rivermen risked their lives on the drive. He made Jim hear the shrieking saws and planers and jointers in the mill. Jim could smell the good, clean scents of wood resin and glue and varnish, and the Scout made him see the trestle table and twelve ladder-back chairs created from a single pine tree by men who all knew what they were doing.

A. J. Peabody paused. Then in a quieter voice he said, “Who are those men?

“The loggers, the river drivers, the woodworkers? Why, they're you, boys. That's who.”

And in a still quieter voice he said, “I want to ask you a question. How many of you own one of those top-of-the-line trestle eating tables? Throw up your hand.”

Not a hand went up. The Scout nodded and said in a voice that was scarcely louder than a whisper, so that the crowd had to lean forward and strain to hear, “Jesus was a worker in wood.”

“Yes!” Little Ti shouted like a mourner at a tent meeting.

“Yes is right,” the Scout said, a little louder. Then, louder still, “Jesus of Nazareth was a woodworker. And if it had been a branch of the Woodworkers of America in old Galilee, why, they'd have saved him from his torments on the cross. The shop steward would have gone up to Pilate and said, ‘See here, Mr. Pilate. You hammer that young street preacher up on that cross, by God, every union from Jerusalem to Bethlehem will sashay out on strike for a month of Sundays. I mean the stonemasons' union. I mean the shipbuilders' union. I'm talking about the vintners' union. We'll shut down your cities, your harbors, your vineyards. What'll you render unto Caesar then? Your head, that's what. You let that boy go free or else.'”

“That sounds to me like commonism,” Rip Kinneson sang out.

“To me it seems like c-c-common sense,” Little Ti Thibideau hollered.

“If the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ Almighty himself came to town tonight, there would be no seat for him at an American white-pine eating table,” the Scout said. “That's all.”

Next, several workers spoke from the floor. About half of them were in favor of a union. Rip Kinneson rose and suggested that General Douglas MacArthur be called in to clean house with the commie organizers.

“Put the flamethrower to them, Rip!” someone shouted. “You and General Mac.”

Mr. Arthur Anderson spoke last. He said that the American Furniture factory had been the heart and soul of the village economy for more than a century. He said that the pieceworkers on the machine floor and in the cabinet room brought home hefty pay envelopes. Every employee received a turkey for Thanksgiving and a ham at New Year's. He reminded the members of the Outlaws that the factory bought their baseball uniforms and equipment.

Finally the frail old factory owner said that for several years he'd been borrowing money from himself to meet the weekly payroll at the factory. After all, God's Kingdom was his home, too. He'd been born and raised here. He didn't threaten to unbolt the machinery and ship it to South Carolina. He didn't need to.

As the union's local legal representative, Charlie handed out paper ballots for the vote on whether to vote officially for or against the union. The editor, the Scout, Charlie, and Mr. Anderson counted the ballots: 164–137 to vote. Afterward the Scout, speaking privately to Charlie and Jim, called the outcome unpromising. He predicted that half of the yes voters would come down with a case of cold feet and cast no ballots on the straight up-or-down vote to be held thirty days later. In the meantime, he had a paper mill in Massachusetts and a textile mill in Rhode Island to visit. He left the following morning on the 5:08 combination and Jim didn't see him again for a month.

*   *   *

In the days to come, Little Ti Thibideau seemed to be here, there, and everywhere, talking up the union. He wore his UWA cap that the Scout had given him at work, at baseball practice, sitting out evenings with other workers on the beehive porch. On his way to the factory finish room each morning, he was careful to avoid passing through the mill floor, where Rip or one of his cronies might grab his beloved hat and throw it up a blower pipe. At lunch by the river he ate with one hand clasped on his cap, talking, talking, talking up the union, sometimes going on in French for minutes on end. Jim couldn't tell for sure, but when Little Ti spoke French he did not seem to stutter.

July passed quickly. The Outlaws were on a tear. Jim was on a tear, hitting over .500. He hadn't made an error at short all season. He no longer looked back over his shoulder after laying down a bunt or when he stole a base. He wished the Scout would show up for one of his games, but there was no word at all from A. J. Peabody.

The week before the vote, Jim's father wrote a strong pro-union editorial in the
Monitor
. He cited the substantial profits of the American Furniture Company over the past five years. He pointed out that the company's two other plants, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan, were unionized. And reminded readers of the
Monitor
that the Anderson family owned more than twenty thousand acres of prime local woodlands. As for the old threat to move south, the editor posed a question. Where would the factory find workers, black or white, who had the skill and training to make the finest home and office furniture in the country? To train a single master machinist or cabinet-room woodworker required years.

Working pro bono, Charlie kept in close touch with the headquarters of the United Woodworkers of America in Illinois. He told Jim that the Scout would return to Kingdom Common as an observer at the polls. Charlie and the editor would be there as well.

“My father would have put your pal Peabody on the first train out of town,” Mr. Anderson told Jim on his weekly inspection tour of the mill a few days before the vote.

Rip, standing nearby, said, “Your grandfather would have had him shot, Mr. A. Them was the days.”

Mr. Anderson shook his head. “No, Herbert, I can't agree with you there. My grandfather and my father, too, to a degree, were ruthless men. Maybe they had to be. Times have changed since then, for the better.”

“We need to take and make an example of somebody, Mr. A.”

“We don't want to martyr anyone, Herbert.”

“I weren't thinking of killing nobody. Just sending a message.”

“Good day, Herbert. Good day, Jimmy. Keep up the good work. You'll get a story out of this job someday. I probably won't be around to read it, but I'd like to.”

Just before ten o'clock break that morning Rip grabbed Jim by the elbow. “Jack,” he said, steering Jim toward the stairs leading up to the finish room. “Go fetch Ti. I need him to match up some boards for me.”

Matching boards to be ripsawed was one of Ti's specialties. Several times a week Rip called the fixer down to the mill floor to match together in grain and pattern the three or four boards that would be ripped for width, then glued together to form a special-order table or desktop into a single unit. Jim loved to watch Ti arranging different combinations of lumber in order to find exactly the right match. Sometimes the men at the planer and jointer would pause to watch as well. At first the match might not be obvious. Then it would dawn on Jim that Ti had found the perfect combination. How he did this no one could say, least of all Théophile Thibideau himself, any more than he could say how, with a chisel and a dollop of wood fiber, he could transform a damaged second into a top-of-the-line showroom piece.

Ti had a habit when concentrating on his work of sticking out the tip of his tongue. Rip Kinneson waited until Ti stuck out his tongue, then sidled up behind him, reached out quickly, and snatched off his UWA cap.

“No!” Jim shouted as Rip made as if to throw it up a blower.

“Okay, Jack,” Rip said, and he tossed the cap toward the whirling ripsaw. Before Jim could stop him, Ti reached out to retrieve his cap and his unattached hand was flying through the air. It landed on the wheeled lumber truck with the table stock. There it sat oozing blood on the boards Ti had been matching.

Ti looked at his bleeding wrist. The shock was so sudden that he hadn't cried out. Bennett Carol was by his side, pulling off his own shirt to make a tourniquet. Bennett, Jim, and two other men from the mill floor laid Ti on a wide board and rushed him across the common to Doc Harrison's office. Doc said later that he might have been able to reattach a finger or thumb. Not a hand. He did stop the bleeding, and the makeshift tourniquet saved Ti's life, but his fixing days were over. As for the bloodstained boards on the lumber pallet, the only person who might have been able to reclaim them was fighting for his life in the county hospital.

“Go change the sign on the roof, Jack,” Rip said when Jim returned to the mill.

“‘Zero Days Without an Accident.'”

*   *   *

It was the morning after the official vote. Jim and A. J. Peabody were waiting on the station platform for the 6:45 southbound. The Scout looked at his watch and said, “I detest a train that won't run on time. If there are two things in the world that I detest, it's a late-running train and a bold-faced lie.”