John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sinclair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organization called The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He still had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn’t blow it in on a bust. He’d heard that there was a miners’ strike in Goldfield and he thought he’d go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. “Godalmighty, man, you’re just the kind o’ stuff we need out there. We’re goin’ to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada.”

That night Mac went round to the local and filled out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of selling out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.

The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was still in his head, and the sour smell of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smell of the hall of the house he’d been in with a couple of the fellows, the smell of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smell of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he’d had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they’d drunk and the cooing mechanical voice, “Goodnight, dearie, come round soon.”

“God, I’m a swine,” he said to himself.

For once it was a clear morning, all the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whoring round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hell was he going to tell her he was throwing up his job?

She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sailorblue dress and picture hat. They didn’t have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trolleycar and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They’d never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him all the way to the top. At the observatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wall out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her all over her face, all over her face and neck.

Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian… Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”

He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.

“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.

After a couple of hours they stopped to rest. They left the path and found a patch of grass in the middle of a big thicket of cistus. The mist was all around but it was bright overhead and they could feel the warmth of the sun through it. “Ouch, I’ve got blisters,” she said and made a funny face that made him laugh. “It can’t be so awful far now,” he said; “honest, Maisie.” He wanted to explain to her about the strike and the wobblies and why he was going to Goldfield, but he couldn’t. All he could do was kiss her. Her mouth clung to his lips and her arms were tight round his neck.

“Honest, it won’t make any difference about our gettin’ married; honest, it won’t… Maisie, I’m crazy about you… Maisie, do let me… You must let me… Honest, you don’t know how terrible it is for me, lovin’ you like this and you never lettin’ me.”

He got up and smoothed down her dress. She lay there with her eyes closed and her face white; he was afraid she had fainted. He kneeled down and kissed her gently on the cheek. She smiled ever so little and pulled his head down and ruffled his hair. “Little husband,” she said. After a while they got to their feet and walked through the redwood grove, without seeing it, to the trolleystation. Going home on the ferry they decided they’d get married inside of the week. Mac promised not to go to Nevada.

Next morning he got up feeling depressed. He was selling out. When he was shaving in the bathroom he looked at himself in the mirror and said, half aloud: “You bastard, you’re selling out to the sons of bitches.”

He went back to his room and wrote Maisie a letter.

DEAR MAISIE:

Honestly you mustn’t think for one minute I don’t love you ever so much, but I promised to go to Goldfield to help the gang run that paper and I’ve got to do it. I’ll send you my address as soon as I get there and if you really need me on account of anything, I’ll come right back, honestly I will.

A whole lot of kisses and love

FAINY

He went down to the Bulletin office and drew his pay, packed his bag and went down to the station to see when he could get a train for Goldfield, Nevada.

all day the fertilizerfactories smelt something awful and at night the cabin was full of mosquitoes fit to carry you away but it was Crisfield on the Eastern Shore and if we had a gasoline boat to carry them across the bay here we could ship our tomatoes and corn and early peaches ship ’em clear to New York instead of being jipped by the commissionmerchants in Baltimore we’d run a truck farm ship early vegetables irrigate fertilize enrich the tobacco-exhausted land of the Northern Neck if we had a gasoline boat we’d run oysters in her in winter raise terrapin for the market

but up the freight siding I got talking to a young guy couldn’t have been much older ’n me was asleep in one of the boxcars asleep right there in the sun and the smell of cornstalks and the reek of rotting menhaden from the fertilizer factories he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account but he’d bummed all way from Minnesota he was going south and when I told him about Chesapeake Bay he wasn’t surprised but said I guess it’s too fur to swim it I’ll git a job in a menhaden boat

Big Bill Haywood was born in sixty nine in a boardinghouse in Salt Lake City.

He was raised in Utah, got his schooling in Ophir a mining camp with shooting scrapes, faro Saturday nights, whisky spilled on pokertables piled with new silver dollars.