Out of This Furnace

by Thomas Bell

GEORGE KRACHA came to America in the fall of 1881, by way of Budapest and Bremen.

Slovak peasant in Franz Josef's empire.

trusting immigrants robbed and beaten their first day in America, about others who stepped off the ship and were never seen again, about husbands found in alleys with their throats cut from ear to ear while their brides of a month vanished forever into houses of prostitution.

Why did Kracha steer clear of strangers in America?

He had first noticed Zuska on the pier at Bremen.

zajda, his bundle of clothes and things,

1st s Bohom,” Mihula said. “Go with God.

By showing his paper to every policeman he encountered, he reached the ferry house without mishap.

After that he asked his way by showing his paper. Most people were kindly. Sometimes he got a lift on a wagon, but he walked ten miles for every one he rode. He avoided towns when he could. He let his beard grow, and washed his socks and feet every day but did not change his clothes. When his bread and sausage gave out he knocked on the back doors of farmhouses and begged food by gestures, an open mouth, bunched fingers.

One week to the day after leaving New York, toward midafternoon,

Joe Dubik, a Rusnak, a Greek Catholic Slovak, from Tvarosc in Sarisa.

“My money was stolen in New York and I had to get here on foot.”

“That was to have paid for your railroad ticket here.”

same age, twenty-one, but

Djuro,

died of a fever.

goiter among both men and women was common Elena's throat had always been too plump for the rest of her.

decide. He had left her a lively, healthy girl, cheerful as the day was long; now she seldom smiled and went about her housework listlessly.

to such attentions she responded satisfactorily yet never with enough impetus to carry over into bed.

never forgive you.” She named the baby Mary. The snow had stopped

His wages were ten cents an hour, and when bad times came and the company cut wages, nine. It was an excellent month when he made as much as twenty-five dollars.

from White Haven to Bear Creek—where Kracha's second daughter, Alice, was born—

from Harvey's Lake to Plymouth, where Elena presented him with yet a third daughter, Anna. They did the same work, lived in the same ramshackle shanties, wherever they went.

last.

The wage rates in the mills were only a penny or two higher than on the railroad but a man worked more hours per day and more days in the

failed; in April Dubik and Dorta and the boy set off for Braddock, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh.

Some time later he wrote that he had a job in the blast furnaces and was working seven days a week. In that letter and all those that followed he kept urging Kracha to join him.

tolerance. It wasn't all Elena's fault, he would say. She had to work hard, cooking, washing, scrubbing; and what pleasure did she ever get? Women had a hard time of it, Dubik said. Put yourself in her place. How would you like to live her life, eh?

Did Dorta live any better, have it any easier? Yet she was always lively and good-humored. Nor had Kracha ever heard Dubik complain about her behavior in bed.

Dorta, her husband

replied, had her...

All true; and it was, as Kracha saw it, likewise true that Elena was a skinny, unpretty creature whose mere lack of energy was enough to drive a man to drink. “What the devil's the matter with you?” Kracha exclaimed once, exasperated beyond e...

He stared at her and hated her, less for what she was than because desire drove him to her and she, unbeautiful, unresponsive, whining, made it a bitter taste in his mouth.

And he pushed rather than struck her so heavily that she fell against the trunk. As she began to cry he rolled over into bed.

As time passed it became evident that Carnegie and his manager, Captain Jones, did not intend to reopen the mill until the men

accepted a wage cut and a return to the twelve-hour day, changes which Carnegie insisted were made necessary

by the competition of unorgan...

The outcome was predictable. In May, after being idle for five months, the men capitulated, and that was the end of the union and of the eight-hour day in Braddock.

In October a train full of Irish Catholics returning from some church festival in Hazleton crashed into a similar train at Mud Run. Kracha and the rest were routed out of bed at two in the morning and spent the rest of the night extricating the living and dead from the wreckage; when Kracha got home his clothes were stiff with blood and

In November President Cleveland was defeated for re-election. A bearded man named Harrison won and work was neither better nor worse because of it that winter.

In February Kracha heard that Crown Prince Rudolf, Franz Josef's son, had been found dead beside his mistress ...

the end of May came news of the disastrous Johnstown flood. Half the city had been destroyed, thousands of people lost, but after Kracha learned that Johnstown was not near Braddock or Homestead he thought no more about it. Then, in July, one of the men asked

him if he had a brother-in-law in Homestead and when Kracha said he had the man told him the Homestead mills were out on strike.

“Ah,” Kracha said knowingly, “Andrej must be making good money.” “He is making fourteen cents an hour,” Francka said shortly, “which is what you can expect when you get a job.”

“What rent does he want?” “Three dollars a month.” Kracha nodded. “Well, it will do to start. We can always move later.”

Andrej spoke to his pusher, a sort of sub-foreman, that night, and the following

“Were you around when this Captain Jones was killed?”

“They were tapping the furnace and the iron burst out and splashed over him. Last Thursday night. He died yesterday.”

“If the railroad paid as well as the mill I would go back tomorrow. But no man with a family can live on what they pay. Even here it is not so easy.”

“But it's so hard to find a house. And not everyone will rent to our people.”

“There's the kind of husband I should have,” Dorta said, looking at Dubik accusingly. He spread his hands. “I give her my whole pay, I drink only on paydays, I beat her no oftener than twice a week and still she complains.”