Chapter 26, Hill toppers vs. Valley folks

The shop floor of the plant was packed full of people and every available chair from the office had been carried down the stairs and still there were people standing. There were grim and worried faces in the crowd and the topic of discussion was what to do to regain control of the situation on the hill. Facing an armed mob with another armed mob had been suggested as the only way to face force with force. Though not a man wouldn't hesitate to protect his property or his family, the thought of all of them heading back up the hill armed with rifles and shotguns just seemed to be inviting more trouble. It was a game of flinch and whoever flinched when the other side started firing would be the dead man for sure.

George, in his position as plant manager and the mover and shaker for all those gathered there tried to keep the meeting on track.There was not much that anyone could come up with that would diffuse the tensions and all agreed that giving in to the mob was out of the question. The county Marshall's office had yet to respond to George's request for someone to come down and arbitrate between the village law and the fate of Benton for shooting Tate.

Benton felt odd about it all. It was his fault for the rash action though he knew that what was happening had little to do with what he'd done but was just an excuse to intimidate the hill toppers. Still, he had shot a deputy and was having to hide. Giving himself up wasn't allowed, not at least while George and the group were in agreement that he would be harmed for sure if Tate ever got his hands on him, especailly after George related what he had seen at the jail that evening. There were a few suggestions about laying siege or torching a valley farmstead in retaliation for Steven Hubener's murder, but most just wanted to get back to thier homes and live in peace.

Theresa and Billie were both there and she was seated with Billie in her lap. Benton stood beside her chair though he wished he was further away than that. He could't push out of his mind the creepiness of Tate's boast. Had she willingly given herself to him? Even if not willingly, had she only once and why hadn't she intimated anything about it? Was the shame of it that great? Perhaps it was and what she needed right now was his understanding and love, but the shooting and his forced excile in the plant had driven a wedge, a greater wedge than what had existed priro to the incident. It was strained even before Billie's birth and in hindsight he realized that she had acted strangely after Billie's birth, almost to the point of grudging acceptance of the little tyke. He himself could not look at Billie's face without a pang of disgust if Ed's revelations were true.

But she was his wife and Billie, for all intents and purposes or revelations to the side, was his daughter. But even Theresa had only made pretense to love and care for Billie, preferring that upon Maggie as the sitter to take care of her while Theresa worked the front desk at the hotel. Benton realized he had himself not doted much time with Billie and it was on this night that he noticed Billie seemed to favor her left side as she reclined in Theresa's lap. She was eight months old and still little, but he could not remember now if he had ever seen her outside of her crib or not being held by some adult. He had assumed she was normal, assumed that is until today.

"We all know who's behind all of this. The Tate's ought to be the ones we concentrate on and force them out of the valley," Micheal strood said.

"How?" asked Hubie's widow asked. "If we didn't have to prove that our law enforcement was crooked first we wouldn't be meeting here instead of arresting Steve's murderer."

"Look, let the law take care of the law, that's why I called the marshall. If the Tate's are behind it all, it'll come out. One look at our sheriff and his deputies should tell any law man that they are crooked. No, we need to do something to protect our assets and our families on the hill from them. We need to go a step further than our neighborhood watch group some of us formed last year. We need a more united front against this mob." George said as he looked about the room.

"What if we can't trust the county?"

"Do we have a choice," asked Micheal Strood.

"No, not really," George stated.

"Then how are we ever to get any justice?" one of the men who worked on this very floor asked from the back of the crowd.

"The charter has an election of Sheriff in five months and all of the village offices, I know we can throw out the whole lot of them in one feld swoop, we just need to figure out what to do in the mean time. The Tate's are using the law to get what they want, we need to do the same," George answered.

"We outnumber them, let's just band together and oppose them to thier faces," the voice of Estell White said. Estell ran the diner where many of the plant wives found themselves gathering to gossip and visit over a cup of tea or coffee. The Whites had been one of the early ones to establish a buisness up on the hill. Fred, her husband helped with the cooking and was always behind the gridldle, so much so that it was easy to forget that Estell was even married as one rarely saw the man. Estell had seen for the past year the depredations of the valley families upon the hill toppers from the diner's large front windows. Fred just sat next to his wife and looked bewildered at her.

"People have arleady died today, we want more of this?" asked Charlie Pence the shop floor supervisor. He stood behind his wife Helen and thier three children squirmed on the floor at thier feet, obviously bored by the proceedings.

"Listen, a direct confrontation will just make things worse," George retorted for the fifth time this evening. "Band together, yes. We need a solid front against them. Arm ourselves and oppose them directly, no. With a few of them, someone would get killed for sure."

Benton knew that in the end accounting, they were going to be the losers, for no one was really willing to directly stop the mob of valley men from doing whatever they pleased.

"We can't just let 'em run rough-shod over us, how're we gonna stop 'em?" asked Clarence Applewood, owner of the first wrecker and auto shop to go in on the hill.

"Like we did this evening, we stare them down at our doors," George replied. "We stop selling to them, we stop dealing with them on a professional level, we stop bowing to them."

"An' what good is that gonna do us? They already don't shop at our shops 'er come up the hill that often, what good's that gonna do?" said Applewood.

"Yeah, they'll only understand force for force, not some pansy boycott," said Estell.

"Too bad Benton didn'a hurt that animal Ed Jr.," Estell added as an afterthought.

"Speaking of," George said. "I'm not going to let them take Benton either, not like they took Hubie."

Benton blushed at the sudden attention. These people where all that stood in the way of him being handed over to the likes of Ed Jr." He owed them a debt but wished it had not been so. This was the sort of attention he would sooner not have. The schemes of George to become something in the enterprise he had started had drug Benton into the limelight. It wasn't wholly uncomfortable there, but it had been something he had gotten used to. But it would always be George whom the people would look to for leadership and he would always be in the background. This was one moment he wished he was still in the background. It had alwasy been George whom even the valley people loathed and as if in addendum it would be his name mentioned. That one small act of anger had catapulted Benton to the top of the hit list as far as the valley people were concerned, or so it seemed.

Vat four had settled down and the danger was over of it breaking its seals and bursting. The venting had stopped hours ago and the danger for anything around the plant would seem to have subsided as even the odor that had been given off during the venting had dissipated. Yet, it was he, Benton Shields, who had been in charge of the vat and the test and the safety and had failed at each point. The plant knew this and it was another form of attention that he wished could be redone. It was still a mystery as to why the pipe had burst. No explanation could be hatched as to why. A weak spot in the piping couldn't handle the pressure? Sabotage? Freak happenstance? The knowledge that someone had died possibly as a result of the venting also weighed heavily upon him despite Jim Hilcock's assertions to him earlier. It had killed livestock all around the valley, another small fact that was not lost upon his mind.

And it was all avoidable, possibly. His testing of the scrubber pads revlealed the presence of amonia, something that could only have been present with the introduction of air to the mix. The chemicals had to be controled and pressureized, kept from each other until the right conditions where introduced. To keep the pressure right in both Vat four and the outside tank, inert gas was used to backfill the space vacated by the liquid chemical, the more space was emptied through the pipe that lead to the shop floor the more gas was introduced to the tank. The vat also had to be emptied of gas as it was filled with the chemical. Everything had to be precise or another failure and loss of time was to be realized. Benton had scrambled to make sure the scrubbers were readied for the venting by calculating what would neutralize the resultant buildup of gas and what that gas would be given the variables he knew about. He missed the hole in the pipe and the introduction of the air into the vat until they shut off the control valve.

It was enough amonia mixed with the other gaseous products through the ionized water that produced an irritant, amonia dioxide via the scrubbers and prolonged exposure producing the allergy like reactions from those nearest the plant and spreading out from there with the symptoms lessoning the furthest one traveled from the plant as the crow flies. He had been careless and things had happend as a result, bad things. Everything that had happened today was his fault, at least that's how it seemed and Benton wondered if anyone else blamed him for the incidents on the hill. He hadn't nor couldn't help the pipe rupture, but he could have helped the result.

"We can't hide Benton around here forever, they'll come down here eventually," Micheal Strood said. "Maybe Benton should go to Charleston and turn himself in there, that way we get the right law on our side from the start."

"I'd hoped the county marshall would have gotten here by now, but maybe we do need to do that. Something needs to happen to shed some light on what's going on around here," George replied.

There were nods of agreement and mumbled "uh huh" acknowledgements from the gathering. Benton swallowed hard. Some small part of him hoped that nothing at all would need to be done and he could just go back to being Benton Shields, lead engineer and leave Benton Shields the fugitive far behind him. Benton looked over at Theresa and she avoided his glance to look down at Billie in her lap.

"Well, so's what we gonna do? We've been here fer an hour or so and nothin's come of it," stated Estell.

"We pose a united front is what we do, come to each others aid when the valley folks start menacing anyone from the hill, and we go about our buisness. That's all we can do without inviting more reaction or adding to a volitile situation," replied George.

"And what about my husband? What about your friend? What are we going to do about that? We can't just let that monster Tate Jr. walk about like he owns us and the place. He needs to be dealt with or none of us are safe," Martha Hubener wailed.

"What, that one of us go out there and kill him? Is that what you want? Will that settle Hubie's memory?" George was visibly taken aback by the suggestion.

"Martha's right, if the law aint going to do nothing about him, someone has got to," Micheal Strood conceeded. "We knew when we was watching him that he was trouble."

"You've seen how they react to Benton just grazing him, how do you think they'd react if someone killed Tate Jr.?"

"Well, we can't let him walk about freely any more, we've got to stop him," Martha Hubener insisted. "That monster has already harmed my baby! Now he's taken my Steven from me, you people should have done something long ago," she sobbed.

"If someone here wants to attempt it, then you're on your own. We've got to handle this the right way. Ed Jr. killed Steven and Willie Banks and who knows what else he's done around here. We can prove it if we find the evidence and make sure the county folks get that evidence. That's the only way to deal with this. Killing Tate will just make it harder for us to get justice." George looked about the room once more to make sure each person understood he was serious.

As much as Benton had been loath to even carry a gun while the group watched Tate, he couldn't deny that something much sooner should have been done about the Tates. It was too late for the should have's.

George was answered with murmers of both agreement and disagreement but no one else spoke up in rebuttal from those disagreeing.

"If we support one another, band together, we can collectively ignore the law here until we can get some of these people taken care of. The sheriff and his deputies are all in the pocket of the Tates, don't do anything they say unless you're alone. Arm yourselves and be ready to respond if anyone else is confronted by any of this mob. They won't act if we collectively stand up to them. Agreed?" George paused, waiting for responses from the room.

"Agreed," said Clarance Applewood.

"Agreed," said Estell White.

"Where were you people when they came to haul my Steven away?" sobbed Martha Hubener as she leaned on the shoulder of Sally her daughter and the reason the four of them, George, Benton, Charlie, and Clarence had banded together to watch Tate Jr. in the first place.

"I'm sorry, Martha, that we couldn't get up the hill faster to help Steven stop those bastards. I'm truly sorry," replied George.

"Well, let's organize really quick and get out of here, who knows what's going on out there right now," George said as he motioned to a few of the men to gather around him. "Benton, you and Theresa ought to get out of here now, we'll take care of things with the locals, you just plan to go up to Charleston and turn yourself in to the state police, if you're already gone, they've got no recourse but to swallow it."

Benton's heart leapt. There it was, the finality of the corporate decision and wether he liked it or not, he had to agree that it was better for everyone if he was scarce and gone for a time right now. The earlier attempts to search the houses had surprised even George. There was no place that anyone was going to be safe.

"Honey, why don't you take Billie up to the house and gather some things and meet me back here, we'll leave as soon as you get back," Benton said to Theresa.

"Benton, we're just going to run? I've wanted out of this place for years, but not like this!"

"Honey," Benton half pleaded and half insisted, "I don't want to go either, but don't you see if I stay I'm endangering everyone else here? They've already attempted to search other houses for me, we just need to leave for a little while."

"You don't get it, do you. You're still beholden to George and this whole place. You should have shot Tate better, the one thing you've done your whole life to stand up for yourself and you scewed it up as well! Tate is the father of Billie, Benton!"

Benton turned white, or at least figured he had as Theresa's voice carried above the din of the murmuring of the men gathered around George and the other wives and children visiting around them until there was almost a total silence.

"Shhh!" Benton hissed.

"Just like Sally, Tate forced himself on me one night, but if I'da thought you would do anything about it I wouldn't have kept it to myself, but you're still more concerned for yourself than for me or Billie or anyone else around here, Benton! You should have shot him better!"

Of all the times and places to hear this form his wife, Benton thought, this was not the time or the place. The murmuring had resumed but more out of emberrassment for Benton and for Theresa than out of a lack of interest in thier loud conversation.

"When you going to stand up for yourself and stop following his lead?" Theresa added and pointed at George.

"Just go get some things so we can get out of here!" Benton said. She was right, he should have shot better, perhaps they all would be in a better situation had he killed Tate Jr.

Theresa stood and bundled Billie on her shoulder and headed out the back door that lead to the parking lot. Benton watched her go and felt a pang of guilt.