“You can’t help at all. Joe, take Miss Caulden out of here.”
“Caulden?” Joe gasped and looked at Amanda as if she were the devil himself. “Come on, let’s go.”
Amanda moved away from Joe and put her hands on Dr. Montgomery’s desk. “I thought you needed help. I thought you believed in equality and fairness, but I guess you have to be poor to deserve fairness. One set of laws for the rich and another for the poor. Pardon me, I didn’t understand.” She straightened. “I wish you luck, Dr. Montgomery, in whatever you’re trying to do.” She began to make her way through the crowd to the door.
Hank watched her go and he was torn between wanting someone to help him translate and never wanting to see Amanda again. He’d thought of nothing but her since he’d left her house. He could see her, feel her, smell her.
“You’re right, Doc, we don’t need no Caulden working for us,” Joe said. “She’d probably give away all our secrets to her old man.”
“What secrets?” Hank muttered and then he was running after her. He caught up with her before she left the hotel, grabbed her arm and pulled her into the first door he saw, which happened to be a tiny, smelly broom closet with one bare, weak light bulb overhead.
“Dr. Montgomery,” Amanda said, rubbing her arm, “I would have known your grip anywhere.”
“What do you want, Amanda?” Hank demanded.
“A job. I saw your ad in the paper and I do have some knowledge of languages. I’ve always been rather good at languages. Of course I probably should have spent my life learning the latest dances instead of wasting it learning what’s inside books, but now I seem to be cursed with knowledge, so I thought I might put it to use.”
“And help me start a union? Do you realize that I’m trying to get the people to join the ULW? I want them to join together to demand better working conditions. The enemy is people like your father.”
“Is that what you tell them? To personally hate anyone who owns land? They wouldn’t have jobs if it weren’t for my father.”
Hank hated her attitude. She didn’t have any idea what poverty was. Except for self-imposed hunger, she didn’t know what it meant to go without a meal. “Did Taylor give you permission to apply?”
“I didn’t ask him,” Amanda answered truthfully. “Dr. Montgomery, do I have the job or not? If not, I’d like to go home.”
“You won’t last a day,” Hank said.
“And what sort of wager do you want to make that I will last, and that I’ll do a good job?”
“Amanda, you make it through today and you can have anything of me you want.”
“Oh?” she said, one eyebrow raised. “I’ll take you up on that, but you should worry that what I want will involve guns and knives and incendiary bombs.”
He opened the door to the broom closet. “I’ll chance it,” he said softly. “But you won’t last past noon.”
He was almost right. Many times during the day Amanda wanted to go home. She was given fifty jobs at once. She was to write translations and do oral translations at the same time. Every hour more people arrived on trains into Kingman, and Dr. Montgomery had hired people to meet the trains and tell them to come to him so he could explain what a union was.
At eleven A.M. they moved out of the Kingman Arms and into a house that Joe had rented. There were big signs in front saying that this was the union headquarters.
All day long Amanda told people that they had rights, that if they bonded together they could peacefully make changes. Peace was the key word, she began to realize. Taylor and her father had said that the unionists wanted to burn and kill, but nowhere did she hear mention of violence.
By three o’clock she was very tired and she wanted a bath and a cool drink, but she kept going. Twice she looked at Dr. Montgomery and he looked more tired than she did.
The people were making her feel awful. Their eyes were hungry and tired. One woman’s baby cried from hunger, and Amanda opened her purse and gave the woman the little bit of pocket money she had. She gave another woman the enameled comb in her hair. At four o’clock she sent Joe to get her chauffeur, then sent James to the diner to order three hundred sandwiches and distribute them—and to send the bill to her father.
Repeatedly, she felt Dr. Montgomery’s eyes on her but she looked away.
The children were what upset her the most. How could toddlers be expected to pick in the fields? How could she bear to see them hungry? The children wanted to touch her because she was so clean and pretty, and several times Amanda held a baby in her arms while she explained to a father what a union was. Two babies wet on her, one threw up on her shoulder.
By eight P.M. the house began to clear out. The workers were beginning to find campsites along the roadsides or wherever they could.
Amanda just sat in her chair behind the little table that was littered with papers and pencils and stared dully around her. She didn’t seem to have any thoughts at all. Today she had been through hell and back—or maybe she wasn’t fully back.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she heard Reva say to Dr. Montgomery.
Dully, without
conscious thought, Amanda stood. Home, she thought, home to a hot bath and a hot meal.