Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/103

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 90 "Hennacy, fellows like you remind me of Arnold Winkelreid 600 years ago when, 'in arms the Austrian phalanx stood; a living wall, a human wood... he ran with arms extended wide as if a dearest friend to embrace' and by his brave death made an opening for his followers to rout the tyrants who sought to enslave the Swiss. The only difference today is that your sacrifice is almost useless for you have no followers and Winkelreid had enough to break the Austrian line."

Thus spoke the Old Pioneer, Lin Orme, one of my employers, as I was on my knees in the hot Arizona sun sawing a tree which had fallen in the driveway. He knew that I had quit a good job for this "Life at Hard Labor" that I had sentenced myself to when I chose to work at day jobs. I replied that my work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow the seeds. If people preferred death and payment of taxes for their own destruction that was their lookout.

Mr. Orme had been head of the Parole Board of the State for 14 years and was now President of the huge Water Users Association which furnished water and power to Central Arizona outside the big cities. In 1916 he was a member of the Rotary Club in Phoenix when the I.W.W.'s were driven out of Bisbee. He resigned from the Club in protest over their approval of this outrage, saying, "If they can drive I.W.W.'s out of Bisbee they can drive Ormes out of Phoenix." I had worked for him off and on and now he invited me to live in a three room cottage to the left of his house. It was back from the road and quiet. Only an oil lamp, but there was running water. I got the rent free in order that I would give him first chance on my employment, such as mowing his lawn, chopping wood, cutting weeds, etc. He was not a Catholic, but was a nominal Episcopalean who did not go to church. He was also head of the Old Pioneer Association and appreciated the ideas of Jefferson and his life on the land. His 160 acre farm was rented out to the big company I had first worked for. He knew of my radical ideas and read the CW.

"The bourgeois get the cream for a thousand years. The time will come when there will be a change," spoke my Yugo-Slav fellow worker, quoting his grandfather in Yugoslavia, as we hewed the jungle of offshoots around the date trees.

"And now Tito has given the peasants the land," he continued. "In my home town when the Nazis came to kill the Partisans the village priest pointed in the opposite direction from which they had gone, but the big priests stood always with the land owners and bourgeois."

"Leo, you talk like a Communist," I remarked.

"Maybe in Yugoslavia I be a Communist," he replied, "but not in this country. I hear Bob Minor speak in Phoenix and he gave good talk and I raise my hand and give a ten dollar bill in the collection, and also a ten dollar bill for my friend who has no money with him. But I find the Communists in this country are chickenhearted. I have a friend who talks communism and one day another