Under Ground: part 12

Chapter 6 continues

The story so far: Katka and Lily plan a newspaper for women.

Katka's head was spinning. Lily kept lapsing from Slovenian into English and although she tried to keep pace, Katka found herself feeling more and more lost. Her aunt spoke so quickly. She had been in this town for less than twenty-four hours and knew nothing about it. Yet somehow, by the end of the conversation, Katka had agreed to become a reporter for Lily's newspaper.

In the next week, Katka slowly assimilated to life at the Kovich boarding house. She and Lily woke early, built the fires, gathered eggs and milked cows. They prepared the pasties for the miners' lunch boxes. They set the table, served breakfast, cleaned up. They kept the fires going all day so they would have hot water. At eleven, Anton came home from the forest for a light lunch. They prepared it and cleaned up. Some days the two women walked to town to buy goods from Cerkvenik's Mercantile or Gornik's General Store. They washed the men's sheets and clothing. They tended the garden, picked flowers and put them in vases. After serving the evening meal, they often sat in the dining room and darned socks and knit sweaters for the upcoming winter. Katka loved the quiet of those evenings. She loved the sound of the needles. The rhythm of the clacking would transport her from this very real and tangible world to somewhere else. She would float back to Slovenia and her parents, back to the boat, back to Paul. Paul, the only man who had ever called her beautiful. Paul. Where was he? He had sent no word to Anton. "Do you think he is dead?" she asked Lily one night.

"No, I do not," she replied. "That man's too stubborn to die. And he can talk his way out of most anything. He has a habit of disappearing and turning up."

They never discussed the women's paper at night, when Anton and the boarders were within earshot. "I'd like to write about the sporting girls," Lily said one morning while rolling out the dough for a pasty. "I know some, personally. It's not what you think. Most of them, they didn't know what they were getting into. One day, I'll take you down to the Mesabi Station, we'll watch the girls get off the train. Always there's a throng of men whose shift hasn't started yet. They watch the new girls, wondering who's going to the saloons, hoping to get a go at them. They yell and scream the crudest things. That's why Anton sent you to Duluth, instead of sending you on a train directly here. He knew there was a chance you would be making the journey alone, and he did not want that for you."

"He knew that Paul would not make it."

"Teta, is Anton worried about Paul?"

Katka shrugged. "Worry early, worry twice. We have no facts."

"Will you tell me when you acquire some?"

"The very moment. Now about the sporting girls. We have plenty of facts where they are concerned. Women like me, we should help them, right? An injury to one is an injury to all. But we don't. The men help them more than we do. Sometimes the miners fall in love with the prostitutes. They buy them from the brothel owners and marry them."

"How often does that happen?"

Katka's thoughts drifted. Why did Paul send her to this strange country? She would go back. Back to Slovenia where she would marry the baker's homely son. He was a humorless boy who used to make fun of her skinny arms. One day, when several families were berry picking on the mountain pass, he, Vladik, asked her if she would go off into the forest and let him touch her hair. She said no.

A few times each week, Katka typed while Lily talked. "This article is called: The Plight of Location Women." She rambled on. "Women in the locations. Imagine: No running water in the shacks. Typhoid. Pneumonia. Women worked to death trying to keep the shacks warm."

Katka wondered if there was cholera.

"Tell me, Katka, how can a company that made over two million dollars in profit last year not be able to put running water in the houses?"

"Do you want me to type that?"

There it was again. That word. Paul had used it on the ship.

"The worker's time is coming. Every woman on the Range is a worker. When the revolution arrives, I'm going to make sure we ladies get a piece of the pie. The accident whistle blows at least once a month and someone loses an arm, or worse, their life. When that happens, what happens to the women? How do they feed their children?"

Katka stopped typing. She longed for her mother's stories of fairies and magic. All Lily thought about was injustice. "You think a newspaper will make a difference? Maybe we should bring some rolls and jam to the locations, instead of writing about hunger."

"Good idea, Kat! That is an immediate solution, and we will do that, this very day. It will make you feel important for a long time. And it may improve conditions for one hour, for one child. But the next day, while we are feeling charitable, the child will be hungry again, and the world will be no better. We need to think like the prophets and the saints. We need something bigger."

Lily gently pushed Katka away. She sat down at the desk and put her fingers on the typewriter. As she stabbed at the keys, she smiled when letters materialized magically on the page. The first word Lily wrote was REVOLUCIJA.