U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [368]
"He's a kike, hit him again for me." "Say, you ain't a wob-bly." Somebody whacked a riflebarrel against his shins and he fel forward. "Run for it," they were yel ing. Blows with clubs and riflebutts were splitting his ears.
He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped on a rail and fel , cutting his arm on something sharp. There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn't see. A heavy boot was kicking him again and again in the side. He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Some-body was holding him up under the arms and was drag-ging him free of the cattleguard on the track. Another fel-low began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief. He
-437-heard Bram's voice way off somewhere, "We're over the county line, boys." What with losing his glasses and the rain and the night and the shooting pain al up and down his back Ben couldn't see anything. He heard shots behind them and yel s from where other guys were running the gauntlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of wobblies making their way down the railroad track. "Fel-low workers," Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, "we must never forget this night." At the interurban trol ey station they took up a col ec-tion among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk the thirty miles back to Seattle.
Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so dopey he barely knew what was happening when they
brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Ever-ett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At Gen-eral Delivery he found a letter from Gladys enclosing fifty dol ars and saying his father wanted him to come home. The Defense Committee told him to go ahead; he was
just the man to raise funds for them in the east. An enor-mous amount of money would be needed for the defense of the seventyfour wobblies held in the Everett jail charged with murder. Ben hung around Seattle for a couple of weeks doing odd jobs for the Defense Committee, trying to figure out a way to get home. A sympathizer who
worked in a shipping office final y got him a berth as super-cargo on a freighter that was going to New York through the Panama canal. The sea trip and the detailed clerical work helped him to pul himself together. Stil there wasn't a night he didn't wake up with a nightmare scream in his
-438-throat sitting up in his bunk dreaming the deputies were coming to get him to make him run the gauntlet. When he got to sleep again he'd dream he was caught in the cattleguard and the teeth were tearing his arms and heavy boots were kicking him in the back. It got so it took al his nerve to lie down in his bunk to go to sleep. The men on the ship thought he was a hophead and steered clear of him. It was a great day when he saw the tal buildings of New York shining in the brown morning haze.
. . . when in the course of development class distinc- tions have disappeared and all production has been concen- trated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. . . . Ben lived at home that winter because it was cheaper. When he told Pop he was going to study law in the office of a radical lawyer named Morris Stein whom he'd met in connection with raising money for the Everett boys, the old man was delighted. "A clever lawyer can protect the workers and the poor Jews and make money too," he said, rubbing his hands. "Benny, I always knew you were a good boy." Momma nodded and smiled. "Because in this country it's not like over there under the warlords, even a lazy bum's got constitootional rights, that's why they wrote the constitootion for." It made Ben feel sick talking to them about it. He worked as a clerk in Stein's office on lower Broad-way and in the evenings addressed