Chapter 1
Later, when he thought about what had happened during those months, Luke would always see one big picture-Frankie and the Strike. They were locked together in his memory.
It really hadn't been that way, though. Memory is a picture on paper, without depth. What's missing are the spaces in between.
Luke was sure of one thing, it all started the day the miners were kicked out of the company houses. There was a freak September snowstorm that day.
By one-thirty, the parents began arriving to fetch the kids home form school. No one knew what those early snowstorms would do or how long they'd last. Being let out early was a blessing, though, to Luke, like a reprieve.
He and his sister, Beth, got their empty lunch buckets from the cloakroom and ran out into the snow, laughing and feeling free, like on the first day of summer vacation. Pa's Mack truck was waiting for them. It was the biggest vehicle in the school yard. The other parents were grocery and hardware-store merchants and had Model T's or were officers of CFI-Colorado Fuel and Iron-and drove sleek roadsters and touring cars. Pa's big old flatbed chuffed exhaust into the chill air, its body rocking to the motion of its mammoth engine. Empty milk cans were fitted into metal slots Pa had welded onto the bed and they were rattling like sleigh bells with the rocking motion of the truck. Pa was just coming back from the midday run to the creamery, bringing the empties back home.
Beth and Luke jumped into the cab with him, full of joy, but his face was solemn, like the one he wore during his occasional visits to church.
"They're kicking 'em out of the camps," Pa said. "On a day like this. they've got no conscience."
Luke didn't ask who they were as Pa jabbed the truck into gear and fishtailed out of the school yard onto the snow-covered road.
But he soon saw what Pa was talking about. Not two miles from their ranch, at the Walsenbury-Tabasco-Trinidad junction, a long caravan of people was treading along the road, soaked to the skin, with carts and baby buggies and wheelbarrows and all other sorts of wheeled vehicles filled to the brim with boxes and clothes and food.
The Colorado coalfields were made up mostly of company towns. "A feudal kingdom for the Rockefellers," Pa used to say. Red-painted company houses for company employees. Company stores, where the workers had to shop, that sold everything from hairpins to bread for twenty percent higher than regular stores. Company schools that taught the kids just what they'd need to know to be dutiful workers. Even company newspapers and recreation halls. And, worst of all, company spies all over the place, making sure everybody stayed in line, that nobody criticized the system.
If you left your job at CFI, you also left your home. And the miners had just come out on strike, so these homeless strikers and their families walked in silence, looking up at Beth and Luke as their flatbed passed by. Men, women, and kids. Lots of kids all over the place, but they weren't running around crazy like Luke and his friends would do if they were out of school. They just stayed in this long, dark line of people. It seemed everyone was wearing brown or black, and they stood out like fence posts against the whiteness all about.
The snow hadn't let up any, and the people's heads were piled with it. A guy would take off his cap every now and then and slap the snow off, then quick shove it down tight to keep the snow off his hair. The women all wore kerchiefs over their heads.
Pa slowed down to a crawl, giving the people plenty of room on the road. Passing one family, Beth saw a rag doll balanced precariously atop a mound of mattresses and bed linen, and just as they were level with them, the doll fell off.
"Pa!" Beth yelped. "You run over her."
Pa jammed on the brakes. "I didn't see any kid." His eyes were big and scared-looking.
Beth hopped out of the cab, peering under the wheels. "Pull ahead, Pa. You're still on it."
"A doll," Luke said.
Pa sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose like he did when he couldn't find one of the cows sat night, and he let out the clutch to ease forward. Beth had retrieved the rag doll, and a kid with the little group of people started wailing. Beth held it out to her, but the little girl just cried louder, seeing the doll all crumpled and muddy. One of the men, a big guy with flashing dark eyes and a pirate's black mustache, stepped forward and took the rag doll from Beth's hand, sweeping his wet cap off as he did so and giving her a quick, short bow with his head.
"Sorry," Beth said.
He made a sound like a mix between clearing his throat and saying "Harry's toe."
Pa leaned over Luke to the passenger-side window and nodded at the big man. "Parakalo," he said.
This seemed to make all the people a bit happier. Even the bawling kid stopped for a second.
Beth jumped back in the cab, and Pa put the truck in gear again.
"They're Greek," he said, not taking his eyes from the road. "The guy said 'Thanks' and I said 'You're welcome.'"
Beth and Luke looked at each other. A sudden pride swept over Luke that Pa should know another language.
Pa drove on real slow. Finally their turn-off came, just south of Ludlow.
Pa pulled over to the side of the road after they left the thick of the people. He didn't look back at them, just kept his hands on the steering wheel. His knuckles turned white as he gripped harder and harder, and his face took on the same pale color.
Luke craned his neck around and watched the silent, sodden procession.
"But where will they sleep?" Beth said.
Pa said nothing for a moment.
"Pa?" Luke said, beginning to feel worried for those people out there in the snow.
Pa came to himself, letting out air like a punctured bike tire.
"There're supposed to be tents coming for them. But the company boys slowed up the train. They rented land from the Hollearans just above Ludlow. Plan to set up a strikers' camp there."
"In the snow?" Luke said.
Pa made no answer, only put the truck in gear again and plowed through the thick snowfall.
Visibility was bad. They could barely pick out yellow smudges of lights from the ranch. But they couldn't see the twin Spanish Peaks to the west or Fisher's Peak to the southeast. It was just the three of them in a truck in the vast flatland of southern Colorado and the yellow glow in the distance that led them through the snow....