Under Ground, page 10
The door that separated the boardinghouse from the tavern swung open, and Lily and Katka burst through. “What is going on?” Lily screamed. She saw the gaping hole in the roof. Then she saw Anton, nursing his head with a bloody rag.
“Go back in the house, Lily,” Anton said. Lily froze. “Lily. Katka,” Anton said again. “Back in the house. Lock the door. I’ll be up soon.”
The sheriff took a step toward the women. He put his gun in his holster. He bowed toward them, as if he were about to ask one of them to add his name to her dance card.
“Mrs. Kovich,” Sheriff Turner said. “You are looking powerful pretty tonight. New dress? And who is this?” He gestured to Katka. “Aren’t you a vision.”
Katka was silent. She looked at the deputies. She looked at the guns. She looked at the ceiling. She began to tremble.
“Not a thank you from the lady?”
“Leave it,” Lily said. “I loathe the sight of you, Archie Turner. You ain’t fit for swine. Never were.”
“Go in the house, Lily.” Anton said. He gestured toward Katka.
Old Joe stood up. “I’ll take them, Anton.” He shuffled toward Lily and Katka, grabbed both of them by the upper arms, and walked them into the main room of the house. Katka kept her eyes on the ground, but Lily turned her head and did not take her eyes off the sheriff.
When the door slammed shut, the sheriff turned toward Anton. “Feisty girl you got. At least the young one is quiet. Tell you what I need from you, Anton. I need a list of every man who was in this bar tonight.”
“Don’t know half the people here,” Anton said.
A single shot was fired from outside, and the men heard Toivo scream. Several miners ran through the tavern door and rushed to Toivo’s side.
“That’s what happens when you resist arrest,” the sheriff said flatly. “There’s one less name you’ll have to remember. I need that list by morning. I think Mrs. Kovich should drop it off. I so enjoy her company.”
Sheriff Turner and his remaining deputy walked out of the Slovenski Dom. Toivo muttered something before he died, but no one understood what he said. His last words were drowned out by the sound of the deputies howling as they mounted their horses and headed for Vince Torelli’s brothel and boardinghouse. Seeing Lily gave the sheriff a craving for a woman. He hoped Leppe was working.
CHAPTER 19
Before marrying Lily, Anton worked as a lumberjack. When the timber companies laid off workers, he would pick up shifts at the mine, but he hated it. He was a man of the forest and loved to be surrounded by pines and white oaks and all the creatures that lived beside or inside the trees. He had labored hard in the lumber camps and endured the cold, the lousy beds, the long hours, and the bad food. Then he met and married Lily, the daughter of a wealthy couple who despised him as much as Lily adored him. He wished he could say he’d earned his good fortune, not married into it, but that’s not how it was. He had a wife he loved, and he worked for no man. His land belonged to him, and he was making a good income leasing a small portion of it to a logging company. He went out into the woods every day. There was something peaceful about riding his horse, Bruno, through the leaf-covered paths with the sun streaming through the canopy of branches. Sometimes as he rode through the noisy forest, he would be surprised by a voice. “Mine,” the voice would say proudly. “All mine.” The voice was his own.
Anton was also known throughout the area as a superior marksman. He was precise and rarely wasted a bullet. On off days, he shot rabbits, grouse, and squirrels, which he would bring home for Lily to make into stews for the boarders. On good days, he shot moose, elk, partridge, and deer. His boardinghouse was the envy of all because the men always had meat to eat, even when there was no pig to butcher. He and Lily smoked the venison and other meats in the shack in the backyard. What they couldn’t eat, they sold to Sherek’s Butchery and Meat Market.
In late September, Lily and Katka began to incorporate more controversial articles into their journal. Lily had wanted to write about Toivo’s death and the injustices experienced at the Slovenski Dom, but they knew they couldn’t risk it. Anton had deemed the place unsafe for meetings, at least for now. So the women continued to focus on women. In the fourth installment, Lily simply wrote, “Women in Finland and New Zealand have the same voting rights as men. Why don’t we?” She had heard the news from Helen, who had heard about it from Avi Nurmi, who had just received a letter from her cousin back in Finland. Letters from the old country that did not report a death were a cause for celebration. Immigrants passed them around to all who could read. Avi Nurmi’s cousin had actually voted in the last election.
“Perhaps our mayor and city council would push for running water in the mining locations if they knew that the women who washed the clothes and prepared the food had the power to vote them out of office if they ignored women,” Katka said.
“Maybe,” Lily replied. “But then there’s always the issue of the husbands. Many husbands would not let their women vote.”
“Nonsense. They’d tell their wives who to vote for and consider themselves as getting two votes instead of one.”
In October, after reading some old copies of The New York Times that a traveling salesman had given her, Katka wrote about a woman named Margaret Sanger, who was teaching about ways to prevent pregnancies. This pamphlet created quite a stir. Copies of the article were floating around town, having been translated into Finnish, Latvian, Italian, and Serbian. The editor of the local paper, The Company Chronicle, wrote an editorial about Lily and Katka’s pamphlet.
“Oh my stars!” Lily said to Katka one morning after breakfast. They were seated at the table in the cellar. She had a copy of The Chronicle in her hand and began to read out loud. “Not only is The Iron Range Ladies Journal not a legitimate journalistic publication, it is not journalism at all. The publisher of the pamphlet obviously has no regard for the basic tenets of the newspaper trade. There were no interviews, no direct quotations from legitimate sources. The cowardly author has refused to identify himself, thereby relinquishing responsibilities for its content. The most recent article about Mrs. Margaret Sanger’s Clinic for Women failed to report the dangerous medical side effects associated with taking a tonic to prevent childbirth, not to mention the fact that the practice is abhorrent. No God-fearing man should allow his wife to read such drivel.”
Lily was just about to cheer when she was jolted out of her chair by a shrill sound, forceful enough to be readily audible even in the relative obscurity of the cellar. It was the most horrific sound in the world. “Oh God,” she said. “The accident whistle!” Lily shoved the article in her pocket, and the two women scrambled up the ladder.
When the whistle blew, all Iron Rangers within hearing distance froze, holding their breath for only as long as it took to recognize the deafening sound. Soon the church bells began to toll; their solemn chime carried fear and despair to the far reaches of town, past the mine locations to those who could not hear the whistle. The women ran to the mine, dragging small children behind them. The schoolteacher tried to keep the children inside, attempting to block the exit with her body, but she could not. The older children got through first, followed by the little ones. Finally, the teacher too walked slowly toward the mine. When she arrived, Katka and Lily were already there.
The townsfolk watched as the body of a Latvian miner was carried out and laid gingerly on the hard red ground. Next, the limp body of an Italian worker was brought up. Both were dead. Two other men, panting, muddy, and sopping wet, followed closely behind.
A murmur, like a ground vibration, flowed from the front of the crowd to the back. The names of the victims floated on the vibration. As the names were recognized, women sighed, unconsciously, with relief. “Not mine,” they thought. “My husband, my brother, my cousin, my papa—he is safe.”
The Latvian was unmarried, alone, with no family here to mourn his passing. The Italian had a brother who worked at the Sparta mine a few miles away.
The foreman appeared and glanced at the dead bodies. He addressed the two men who had surfaced alive. “Dead?” he asked.
“I told you that ceiling weren’t safe!” one of the two survivors shouted. His entire body was covered with slick mud. A woman handed him a handkerchief, and he wiped his face.
The foreman tried to calm him down. “Nobody is more sorry about this than me,” he said. “Horrible accident.” And he did look sorry, Katka thought.
The other miners were slowly coming out of the mine. Some had come up in the cage; others had crawled up the tunnels via ladders.
“Accident, it weren’t,” the Finn said calmly. “Bloody murder, it is. I tell you and I tell you, the ceiling is leaking water. I tell you yesterday, I tell you this morning.” He watched as the crowd gathered, holding a collective breath of anger and despair. The survivor began to scream. “I say, ‘not safe, not safe, not safe!’ Do he care? He don’t give a damn!”
The men and women in the crowd encouraged him. “You tell him, Elmo!” somebody yelled.
“Now two good men are dead. And Sam and me, barely alive, we are. I told you there’d be a mud run, but you don’t listen. There’s blood on your hands.”
The foreman’s face went ashen. The men began to advance toward him. As they stepped forward, the miners began to chant, “Murder, murder, murder!”
Some of the miners were clutching their pickaxes. Others bent down, grabbed some rocks, and continued walking toward the foreman. “Murder, murder...”
“Oh, God,” the schoolteacher said to Lily and Katka. “A lynching. We have to get the children out of here.”
Katka made a move to help, but Lily clutched her arm.
“Let them watch,” Lily said. “Let them see how brave their papas are.”
“There’s nothing brave about a mob! Are you mad?” The teacher tried to corral the children. She yelled for them to follow her back to the schoolhouse, but her voice was drowned out by the chanting. Many of the children had found their mothers among the crowd, and the mothers and children took up the chant. “Murder, murder, murder!”
Someone threw a rock at the foreman. It hit him hard on the forehead, and he lurched back but did not fall. “I didn’t do nothing!” he yelled. “I was just following orders!”
“Murderer!”
Another rock landed squarely on his jaw and blood seeped slowly out of his mouth.
“We should stop this,” Katka said. “That man didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly,” Lily said. “He didn’t do anything. Don’t you fathom it, Katka? They care more about the dollar than the lives of those two men. It has to change.”
A small child threw a rock and missed. Within seconds, rocks were being hurled from all directions. The miners were throwing rocks. The women. The children. The foreman fell to his knees just as rifle shots rang out.
Katka and Lily backed up. They saw eight men approaching on horseback. The man in front fired his rifle into the air. The rest galloped quickly to the foreman’s side. One of the managers dismounted and hoisted the wounded foreman onto the horse. The rest of the managers spread out, pointing their rifles at the crowd. Following closely behind was Sheriff Turner.
When Sheriff Turner arrived, Mr. Augustine Stone walked out of the company office. He was one of three owners of the Oliver Mining Company. The miners rarely saw him in the flesh, but they saw his signature on their paltry paychecks every month. Some of the men in the back of the crowd began to boo Stone.
“Hush!” Mr. Stone said. “Who started this?” The foreman pointed at Elmo.
The men started screaming at him. They swore in thirty languages.
“Sheriff,” Stone said. “Arrest this man for inciting a riot.” He pointed to Elmo.
“Yes, sir,” Sheriff Turner said. He pulled out his handcuffs.
“He ain’t the murderer!” a miner yelled.
“And as for the rest of you, I suggest you get back to work. Accidents happen. It’s unfortunate. Perhaps in the future you will exercise the safety precautions we have spelled out clearly for all of you. Safety first, that’s our motto. Now go. You are not getting paid for standing out here.”
“Murder, murder!” The crowd was more vocal now.
Stone looked up at the men on horseback and exchanged some words with the manager who was closest to him. The man took aim and fired into the chanting miners. A man fell to the ground screaming. He had been shot in the chest.
Avi Nurmi wailed and ran to her husband’s side. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
The crowd grew silent as Avi’s cries rose. Her children were there now. Lily and Katka could clearly hear her sons speaking to their father in Finnish. “Eivat die, Isa! Eivat die, Isa...”
“Anyone else?” Stone asked.
Women gathered around Avi Nurmi. “Shh, now. The doctor will come, the doctor will come.”
“He’s dying,” she said in Finnish. “Don’t die, Hans.” The Finnish women began to sing the Finnish prayer for the dead.
The men put down their rocks and took off their hats. Some of the men sang too, as if the calming rhythm of their voices could somehow make the bullet that had torn through Hans Nurmi’s chest disappear.
In the midst of the song, the doctor arrived with the undertaker in a wagon. The doctor was directed to Hans Nurmi, whose blood had formed a small lake around his body. The doctor took his pulse, ripped away his clothing to reveal the wound, and shook his head.
“I’ll do my best, ma’am,” he said, then to some men standing nearby, “Load 'em all up.”
Hans Nurmi was placed in the wagon with the two dead bodies. His wife, Avi, crawled in next to him. Her boys would have to run behind. The undertaker took the reins, while the doctor sat with Hans.
As the wagon pulled away, Mr. Stone picked up the megaphone. “Nothing to be done. Back to work.”
The wind kicked up some red dust. It was October, and the breeze was cold.
“Back to work, I said. If you want a job tomorrow, you go back to work now.”
A few miners picked up their shovels. Slowly, others followed suit. One by one, they headed for the cage. They descended from the despair of the day into the darkness of the mine.
They did as they always did after the whistle blew. They went back to work. Except, of course, for the two dead miners, who were hauled off to the coroner, and Elmo, who went to jail, and Hans Nurmi, who went to the doctor’s office where he was treated unsuccessfully for a gunshot wound.
The Oliver Mining Company would pay for the funerals of the Latvian and the Italian man. Elmo was let go. The Italian’s brother would receive a small settlement check. But Avi Nurmi and her sons were on their own. The company log recorded Hans’s death as “Suicide on company grounds.”
CHAPTER 20
From the Iron Range Ladies Journal:
The men went back to work because that is what they always do. They went back to work because they worried about losing their jobs. They went back to work because they know the extreme importance of being able to support their wives and children, whether here or in their homeland. When they went back underground, after three men had died, the killing stopped. But for how long? Will the whistle blow again tomorrow? Will it blow again next week? To keep up with the war demand, the Oliver is willing to sacrifice safety for profit. What would happen if our men were to say, “We are not willing to sacrifice our safety for your profit?” I ask you, dear reader, what would happen then?
Once again, the editor of The Chronicle mentioned The Iron Range Ladies Journal in his editorial, stating, “The pamphlet is un-American. Its articles openly incite the wives of miners to support their husbands who refuse to do their jobs as required by their contract.” The negative press from what many called “The Company Man’s Chronicle” fueled the need for more copies of The Journal. In November, they printed more than one hundred copies, and all of them sold.
The people of the Range enjoyed an Indian summer until they didn’t. Winter arrived with a fury during the second week of November. Temperatures dropped into the teens, and Lake Superior froze. Because the ore boats couldn’t get out until more icebreakers arrived at the port town of Duluth, production slowed at the mines. Men were furloughed. A few of the boarders left to work in the forests with the lumber companies. Those who remained hunted or worked odd jobs in town to make their rent until the mines took them back. Life became easier for the men and more difficult for the women.
With each week that passed, the temperature plummeted. The sky dropped white flakes as big as a newborn’s hand until all the earth was covered in white. Some days Katka stood outside surrounded by the abyss of white and felt as if she were trapped in an eggshell. But never for longer than it took to complete her chores, for the wind hit hard, like a slap against her once-soft skin. Anton had told her that the northern air chilled a man to the bone. Although Katka had never heard that expression, she now knew what it felt like. The frigid blasts grabbed hold of her bones and sank their sharp teeth into the hardest, sturdiest parts. Many days she thought the wind would break her into tiny shards. Then she would rush inside, shake the snow off her wet clothes, and huddle by the woodstove, wondering if she would ever feel the tender warmth of the sun again.
Katka’s chores intensified with the cold. She and Lily gathered more wood from the pile Anton had neatly stacked to keep the fires blazing. They had to let the wet wash freeze-dry outside so the clothing would not drip onto the floor indoors and create a skating rink. Then they would wring out the frozen fabric with their raw red hands and hang it again near the stove. When Anton emptied his traps, the women carefully sewed fur into hats and made liners for their coats and boots. They spent hours knitting warm mittens and socks for the boarders. They traipsed through several feet of snow to haul water from the pump. They milked the cows, gathered the eggs, and prepared the meals. Often exhausted, they had less time to work on the paper.
