It was cold and raining that May day in Matewan in 1920 as Jack watched the Baldwin-Felts detectives let themselves down one at a time from the train. They had just finished the evictions of the miners at Mine #2, three miles south of town. They were big men, used to sitting a lot and eating well. But they were all crack shots, whether it was with a revolver or a rifle; no one in Matewan who knew anything about the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency would dispute that. Through the steam rolling out from the boiler and stack, Jack could not make out how many of them there were. Rumor had it they were sending the whole dozen of the Baldwin-Felts men stationed in Bluefield to evict the miners from their company-owned homes at several area mines.
Union organizing had stepped up in southern West Virginia after the nationwide coal strike that winter, but the southern coalfields were still not organized. Those being evicted by the detectives hired by the mine operators had signed union cards. Evicting the mine families from their camp homes and from mine company property in Matewan was something that Sid Hatfield, the police chief of Matewan, had refused to do. Those were his friends and relatives. Nobody was going to put them out in the mud streets of the camps in his jurisdiction, at least that is what he had been telling everyone for the last week. The people in Matewan who knew what the Baldwin-Felts men were capable of, especially this bunch from Bluefield, were sure of one thing—there would be mine families on the street. The only way to stop the detectives would be to kill them.
From where Jack lay in the loft of the old livery just off the uptown area, he could now see six big men whose trench coats obscured the Colts they would for sure be wearing. They moved onto the cinders along the tracks, and stood conferring, checking the area around them visually.
They reminded Jack of the hawks that sat out in plain sight up the holler, surveying all around them, and then swooping down to grab some critter that never saw them coming. They were in no hurry as they ambled toward Jack’s position. Then he saw the seventh. Jack drew a bead on him at the fifty yard distance and started shaking, the Winchester Model 94 wavering back and forth across the target. The boy hadn’t counted on buck fever, had in the past pulled off a few twenty-two caliber rounds at mine company detectives outside the camp where his uncle lived, and never had a problem. He had never hit one of them to his knowledge, and if he had, he probably wouldn’t have killed him. But he was shooting a forty-five today, and knew that if he hit a man he would likely kill him.
Then the detectives walked across the tracks toward the dry goods store. Jack saw Sid Hatfield come out of the barber shop. He was wearing both guns all right. Town folk had said that would be the tip-off that Hatfield would settle the matter on the street—if he had both Colts on his hips when the Baldwin-Felts men got there. Not many men could shoot with Sid Hatfield. For sport, he shot coins out of the air with a forty-five. He was the best anywhere in these parts and maybe all of West Virginia.
In a few minutes, Jack heard a man shouting. Then he heard Hatfield answer. Then it was quiet. A couple more minutes passed, and Jack rested the barrel of the heavy gun on the wood slat of the loft vent. Then he heard a boom, and all hell broke loose, the shooting so intense it hurt his ears. He aimed where he thought one of the detectives would have to pass, between the tracks and the hardware store. It would be his only shot. Then his target was there, not thirty yards away, and Jack squeezed off the shot. He watched as the man’s head exploded and he fell over backwards from the force of the bullet. Jack levered another round, and waited in his hiding place, his heart pounding wildly. When he was sure the shooting was over, he climbed down from the loft, leaving the rifle behind.
The street was full of armed men—both from the mine camps and the town itself. Hatfield’s revolvers were holstered as he walked among the corpses, checking each man. Several of the detectives had been shot in the forehead. When he got to the detective Jack had killed, Hatfield glanced down at the man and then back up the street, trying to trace the path of the bullet. Whoever shot this one had saved his life.
Jack, Crazy Jack, as he was now known in his role of skilled trades committeeman at the stamping plant, made his way into the machine shop, stopping along the way to answer questions or give greetings. He knew what the call was about—it was Ernie Davis again on the small machines wanting to make the longhairs go away, to make his son come back from Vietnam alive instead of dead. He saw Hank Schmidt on one of the engine lathes, but didn’t see Ernie.
At the union meeting last week, Hank Schmidt had been recognized under new business. “I want to make a motion,” he had said.
“What have you got, Hank?” the president had asked.
“We got some longhairs in our new apprenticeship class. I want them fired.” All the men knew that Hank’s best friend, Ernie Davis, had lost his boy in Vietnam six months ago. They worked the small machines together, and anybody who passed by couldn’t help notice Ernie, who, ever since the funeral, had spent everyday cutting air on his engine lathe, staring blankly down the aisle in the tool room machine shop, with a clear view to the main entrance up the long aisle to the offices, like he was watching for the military to come back and tell him it was all a mistake, that Ernie Jr. wasn’t really blown all to hell in a fucking rice paddy not fifty feet from a village full of Vietnamese people, the folks he was sent over there to save from the Communists. His boy was killed by a land mine in a place called Phu Phong, and Hank could often hear Ernie muttering to himself, “Phu Phong, sounds like fucking Chinese food…fucking Chinese food.”
And when the longhair apprentices rotated through the machine shop, or were on the die floor across the way, Hank would catch Ernie staring at them for hours, shaking his head and muttering to himself about “the longhair bastards. Got no right to be here…no right.” Once Hank had stopped Ernie with his ball peen hammer in his coveralls pocket, the big, twenty ouncer, the one they used on the heavy stuff, his eyes glassy and fixed on the longhair grinding on the die across the way. Hank had put his arm around his big, hurt friend and guided him back to the bench by his lathe.
At the union meeting, the president had grimaced. He knew what it was about. Everybody knew what it was about. While guys working the lines were getting drafted and disappearing to the country of Vietnam, and kids like Ernie’s were coming home in body bags, the apprentices were draft exempt, just like the pansy-ass, draft-dodger college boys. They were selected through a testing process and were damn bright kids, as bright as any that ever went to college, and this had always been a good thing.
The union had fought hard in the early sixties to force this stamping plant to put the apprentice program in place. One hundred and fifty young guys at any given time were paving the future of the plant, ensuring the presence of skilled tradesmen for decades down the road.
Hard as it was to get the older guys to accept the apprentices as “draft deferred” while their own boys could be sent to Nam, it was nearly impossible to get them to accept the longhaired young guys showing up in the last couple of apprentice classes as legitimate. They were fair game outside the plant, but the company was pretty proud of its apprentices, assuming ownership of the program after the union had negotiated it into being, and there was little tolerance for harassment under the plant roof. Hell, some of the top management pulled strings to get their kids into the program, as did the union board and shop committee.
“Not going to happen, Hank,” the president had told him.
“I want to make the motion, and we’ll vote on it.”
The president stared down at the table and then over at Milt Jeffers, who really was the one who should speak on this issue. Jeffers controlled the bargaining issues and the president ran the meetings. But it really couldn’t go to a vote. It couldn’t go that far, because there was no form of valid motion to fire fellow union members because they had long hair. And if it couldn’t be a legitimate motion, then it sure as hell could not be put to a vote.
“We’re going to fucking vot
e on it,” Hank had said. He was getting agitated, and that was not good. Lately, the union meetings had become incendiary, and at the last, a fist fight had broken out over the apprenticeship program—it was hard to test into the program for the guys in the plant already, and one view was that too many “outsiders,” the longhairs and college kids, were taking slots that belonged to the guys who had put their time in on the press lines. But the contract specified a quota to be hired from within the union ranks, and the quota was strictly observed.