Gilded Mountain, page 26
“We’d not have jobs at all, without Padgett hires us,” Mrs. Quirk said.
“While you build his castles and slave for pennies, he feasts on your blood.”
“This is a fine boardinghouse,” Mrs. Quirk said. “The men have no complaints.”
“They ought to! They are whipped curs too beat for complaint.”
“Complaint is the seed of misery,” I said softly. “My mother believes.”
“Your mother has it backward,” said Mrs. Jones. “Misery is the seed, grows complaint, and that brings justice if you’ll only speak up.”
In this way she tutored us in the Art of Troublemaking and proceeded to charm herself indoors for tea. We sat over steaming mugs. “Rest is as much your entitlement, Mrs. Quirk, as it is Mrs. Astor’s,” said the old woman, and passed a plate of crackers, “Madame, voulay-voo?” mimicking a society dame, finger crooked, nose in the air. “Some of these butterflies wake up with five dollars’ worth of paint on their cheeks. Why, Mrs. Padgett has a toothbrush for her dogs! And yet you hear them say, ‘Oh, them dirty miners.’ ‘Oh, that Mother Jones, that horrible old woman.’ Well, I am horrible! I admit. But I must be, to these bloodsucking pirates.”
Mrs. Quirk looked over her shoulder for spies. I stayed quiet, thrilled to hear Mrs. Jones bashing royalty. K.T. must’ve told her about the schipperke’s toothbrush.
“Buckle on your armor,” Mother Jones said. “A day of reckoning’s upon us.”
“They will throw us off the mountain,” warned Mrs. Quirk.
“And for what would you stay?” cried Mrs. Jones. “It’s time for a great uprising.”
* * *
I left them to their tea and proceeded down the Quarrytown lane, putting the words RALLY and UNION under cabin doors where the wind had blown frigid drifts all winter. This new notice blew another kind of wind under the door. I hoped for it: a great uprising. Among the cabins, the ghost of my father was hanging off a laundry line in the shape of a pair of overalls, a pair of boots on a doorstep. He was dead five months, but if I closed my eyes, I could see him plain, heaving a shovel of snow over his shoulder, heading down this very road, whistling.
I had a girl and she was good…
Cabin Six stood weathered, no sign that Pelletiers ever lived there. A stranger came outside, a kerchief around her head. Sockless toes protruded from her shoe.
“Hello. Here’s this for you.” I handed her a notice.
“Sorry, sorry, no English.”
Eva Setkowski emerged from just behind her. “Syl-veee!” She launched herself at me, throwing her arms around my waist. “You’re back?”
“Can you read this notice for the lady?”
“She is my auntie. She lives in your house now.”
“Read it to her, please.”
“You read it,” Eva said. “I’ll say the Polish.”
I read aloud. Union. Meeting. Tonight. When Eva translated, the woman spoke in Polish, then went back inside our house, shut the door.
“She says she’ll tell my uncle,” Eva said. “And I’ll tell my brother. Oskar says you gonna marry him.”
Her words followed me like a threat. Eva followed too, skipping along while I delivered the notice. “A meeting!” Eva cried. “Come to a meeting!” She was a natural-born carnival barker, luring the women outside. They exclaimed over me like a long-lost relative.
“Seven o’clock!” Eva held up seven fingers. “Tonight! Seven!”
“Musika?” Mrs. Tchachenko played accordion keys in the air. “To bring?”
“Yes!” Eva said. “And tell Mr. Bruner: Bring the trumpet.”
“It’s not a party,” I said.
“So what?” Eva shrugged and twirled. “Music is for any reason.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON I found Mrs. Jones at Jenkins’s stables with George Lonahan. They sat out on the back of a wagon, drinking coffee. “Sylvie!” she said, raising her tiny fist. “Are you ready to raise some hell?”
“I’ll take notes,” I said. “We’ll write it for the paper, if that helps?”
“It does!” Lonahan said. “But beware. Mother Jones has caused folks to faint with the force of her talk. She’s a fierce terrier at the trouser seat of the oligarchs.”
Mrs. Jones looked pleased at the description and more pleased to see I was already writing in my notebook. Terrier. Oligarch. It was plain that her words would raise extra hell if the Record printed them. I hoped so. What would she say? She adjusted the black ribbon at her neck, tapping her impatient foot. The shift whistle blew.
“Here we go,” said Mother.
The sky streaked magenta and tangerine, the mountains black against the garish sunset. I attempted to draw a fierce terrier nipping the trouser seat of a top-hatted man. George angled next to me and looked over my shoulder and laughed at my efforts, so it seemed true that we were comrades. I felt an importance, sitting with them, as if I were indeed an inside agitator. Hawky Jenkins lit torches so the air smudged with black smoke.
Nobody showed.
“Spies must’ve got to them,” George said. “Tarbusch.”
Then, in the dusk, Dan Kerrigan came from the boardinghouse. Another man approached from the track. Christe Boleson. Two more skirted the shadows along the lane. The Mercanditti brothers. Quarrymen finishing the shift came toward the stables, watching wary as dogs approaching a nest of snakes. Oskar Setkowski came along with Eva. “Hiya, Sylvie!” Her brother gave me his slanting smile. More men arrived, smoking and skeptical.
Mrs. Jones climbed onto the bed of the wagon. “Come nearer, comrades. Don’t be afraid, boys, I don’t bite.”
Now most of the population of Quarrytown herded into the stable yard. Off to the side, Juno Tarbusch parked on a boulder, legs drawn up, necktie dangling. It would serve as a noose to strangle him. Whether he was criminally negligent or had ordered the Snail fired up deliberately to kill my father, no one would ever know, but I needed to blame an enemy, and he was mine.
“That’s the quarry boss,” I warned Mrs. Jones. She gave him a jaunty salute.
George Lonahan stepped up onto the wagon bed, dashing in his tall boots, his hair too long, thumbs hooked in his braces. “Gentlemen!” he cried. The crowd settled. “Some of you know me. You’ve heard me talk about the great work of the United Mine Workers, and I’m here again to tell you what a union will do for you. In Cripple Creek, the unions won the men three dollars for an eight-hour shift.” (Applause.) “Plus overtime!” (Applause.) “Together we’ll do the same here.” Lonahan had their attention: Three dollars a day was downright lordly.
“With us,” George cried, “you’ll have your rights. The bosses can’t delay the payroll. Can’t starve and freeze you all winter. We’re here to sign you for the union.”
Lonahan went on, listing the advantages of joining up, and I wrote them down. As he spoke, he held his hands forth, offering us the whole sky. He opened his arms as if he might gather all of us listeners into his embrace for safekeeping. His voice was young and full of hope and possibility and some magnetism of belief that drew me like a spell. The way he raked his hair and paced the platform made me forget for a moment to write down his words. He clapped his hands once sharply, to make a point, and the sound echoed against the mountain like a shot. I jumped.
“No more dead work,” he cried. “An eight-hour day. Money in your pocket.”
He joked and rallied the men till at last he came to a fiery point, like a ringmaster: “Now!” he cried. “I present! Mother Mary Harris Jones!”
Applause.
Mrs. Jones stepped forward on the wagon bed and began. “Has anyone ever told you, my children, about the lives you are living, so that you may understand how it is you pass your days on earth? Might you imagine a brighter day and bring it to pass? I will do it for you now. I want you to see yourselves as you are. I am one of you. I know what it is to suffer from the schemes of a soulless enterprise.”
I copied her words as she said them, her voice ringing out over the rocks.
“You pity yourselves,” she said. “But you don’t pity your brothers, or you would stand together to help one another. You hard-rock miners have stood for abuse like mules. So have your brothers in Padgett’s coal veins, and in the copper mines of Wyoming, and in Rockefeller’s oil fields. You have starved your children. Starved yourselves. You have lived in chicken coops and dog kennels. They wouldn’t build one for their beagles as bad as yours here. You have permitted the businessmen to rob you, of safety, of the comforts of home. You have given up your leisure. You pay the Padgett Company more than it pays you. You shop in their pluck-me stores and you pay them in blood scrip.”
The men prospected the dirt with their boots. Sheepishness grew in the air.
“You are to blame and no one else,” Mrs. Jones cried. “You have stood for it. You’re afraid! You say you can’t join the union because you’d lose your job. Poor wretch! You never owned a job. Those fellas who own the machinery own the job. You have to get their permission to earn your bread and butter. You’re laboring under a delusion: that you have no power. But if you were organized, you wouldn’t have these conditions.”
“She’s right,” somebody called out. Kerrigan.
“They make you shovel track in the dead of winter for nothing. They call it dead work, and do you know why? Because it’s killing you. Men have died here. Of a negligence same as murder. Your friend Jack Pelletier.”
My skin went cold.
“The gruesome death of a good man,” she said. “A beloved man. You knew him, and know his good hardworking wife and children, thrown to the jackals. The Company replaced him cheaper than a mule. One of you moved right into his house, and the rest of you watched. You watch, yes, while the Pinkerton goons throw wee babies and friendless widows out of their homes as if they were garbage. What’s to stop the bosses from throwing you out too? You’re next”—she pointed—“or you.”
“Organize us, Mother,” Kerrigan called out, waving his hat.
Mrs. Jones pointed to Tarbusch on his rock. “See the boss over there? I’m not afraid of a boss. He’s just a man like you. And he can act like a man instead of a lapdog. He has a beating heart in his chest. His mother raised him to do right. Didn’t she?”
Her daring! It thrilled me. The men vibrated with attention. Tarbusch sat on his rock in a smirk. He had a pocket notebook out, writing in it, same as I was writing.
“Sylvie, lass, come here and stand beside me,” Mrs. Jones said. I startled. “You men all know Sylvie Pelletier. Jack’s daughter.” She beckoned. Lonahan gave me a little push, “Go on, sweetheart,” and handed me up next to Mrs. Jones. I stood like a wooden doll, cheeks scarlet.
“Our young lady’s father was killed by these criminals,” Mrs. Jones cried, her hand around my waist, possessing me. “Killed same as those boys in Ruby roasted alive in Padgett’s coal mine. Let’s call it what it is. Murder. A human being is killed, and they haul his body up in the cage, and the men go back to work. That man Pelletier was good as slain. And his replacements—maybe your own selves—will die too, if you boys don’t stand with the union.”
“Will you stand up, men?” Lonahan called out. “Will we take the vote today?”
Something shifted then, a wind blowing through. The smell of kerosene filled the stable yard, as combustible as the men seething in the crowd. They began to cheer.
“Sylvie, lass!” Mrs. Jones called. “You tell them.”
Tell them what? My throat filled with liquid fear.
“Speak from the heart, honey,” George Lonahan said. The men waited in the fragile quiet. Words were piled on a cornice of my thoughts, and now they would spill to bury me. Who was I to speak?
“Remember your papa,” said George. “What would he say right now?”
“Go on, love,” Mrs. Jones whispered.
These two agitators pulled words out of my mouth like stitches unraveled, undoing all I knew about silence. That it was golden. Sink or swim, I thought, and swam.
“You knew my father,” I heard myself say. “His fiddle. His songs.”
“Frenchy!” Kerrigan shouted. “Speak louder, sweetheart!”
I fumbled on, my voice growing stronger. “The Company claims the payroll’s on the way, but it never comes. They swear the hospital will get built—and then take a dollar off your wage for it. But we don’t see a hospital, do we? The only payout is credit at the Company store, nothing to get ahead.” Words piled on words, among them Easter Grady’s. I blurted them: “Don’t trust what a Padgett says. It’s what they do.”
My voice cracked and shook. “They won’t do anything for us. My father, he was for us to help ourselves. He was for the union. He talked about it and sang the songs. He wanted all of you to join. I’m here to ask you to do it. Vote for the union.”
Mr. Tarbusch stood up. He stared at me and wrote something in his book.
Murderer. The thought spiked my blood. If I’d had a flaming arrow, I’d’ve shot it through his glaring eyeball. I gathered myself out of the red poison of the sun sinking behind the dark peaks. “You knew my father,” I cried. “You heard him ask for wages when we froze ourselves to shovel the track. You heard the Colonel refuse to pay. They claimed they owed nothing. You were with my father that day he was killed. You know what happened. The inquest said it was no accident.”
“Because it wasn’t.” Dan Kerrigan again.
“Every week the newspaper prints reports of men hurt, crushed under stones, fallen off ladders. Fingers sliced off. Legs amputated. They die frozen in slides. My father can’t ask you,” I said, “so I will. Sign up for the union. That’s all.”
I turned away from them with a burning face.
The men began to clap. The applause was not for me, I thought, but for pity. For Papa in his grave, the respect they had for him. I stood blotched and confused about how much I liked it, their approval like medicine. The hand of God would come out of the sky and pluck out my liver as punishment.
Instead, George Lonahan took my hand and held it high. “Hip-hip!”
“Hooray,” the crowd answered.
Mrs. Jones took my other hand in her bony fingers. “If the men don’t fight, the women will!” she cried. “Your mountain women are fighters! And you men are fighters, are you not? Say you are, boys.”
Was I a fighter? I wanted to be, but stepped behind the wagon and was sick in a pile of stone. After that, it was as if shame—for our poverty, for the blasphemy of having spoken out—began to leach from my system. I took up my notebook again and wrote it all down. That habit, to take notes, the impulse to tell what happened, is with me to this day. Writing is a step removed from danger, but speechifying puts a woman right in the middle of it. Even now I have a well-founded fear of speaking in public.
Mother Jones had no such fear and started to wind up the crowd again. “March over here, men! A union will make things right. I’ll organize you this very night!”
Tarbusch shouted, “You can’t organize them, madam. They have to pay fifteen dollars for a charter.”
“Lonahan here from headquarters will give them the cost of the charter,” she said. “Raise your hands, all of you, and I will swear you the obligation.”
“Union! Union!” the men chanted, fists in the air, and Tarbusch slunk away. To use the pump-house telephone, no doubt, to call out the Company beef.
Mrs. Jones rallied on. “These parasites couldn’t live on this earth without us to do the work. Forty-five years ago, slavery was outlawed in this land, and yet most of you have hardly touched a paycheck since last summer. Are you slaves? They give you living quarters same as on the old southern plantations. It’s only a few degrees of difference here. Your corporate masters wish they did not have to pay you at all.”
Her words settled on me like drops of water and soaked in as if I’d been a wilted stalk of celery but now was crisp and stringy with new leaves. Never had I heard such talk, never heard us held up as miserable and living like animals, or seen the truth about why. And neither had I ever opened my mouth to find out what was in it. The men had clapped for me, and I was altered, charged with a new recklessness, to say what I thought, record what I witnessed.
The pen shook in my hand. I wrote everything. The men swarming to greet Mrs. Jones. George Lonahan taking down names. Lev Tchachenko began to play the accordion. Gustav Bruner joined in on trumpet. It was a party now. Oskar Setkowski made wolf eyes at me and raised his flask in a toast. I inched closer to George Lonahan, hoping Oskar would give up. George was politicking but sent encouraging glances in my direction, the air quickening between us. Was it? Mrs. Quirk watched from a corner of the yard, thumping the flat of her chest, coughing, to get air in her tubercular lungs.
* * *
Stars pricked the sky, each one a wish. That I’d stay brave enough to tell some truth, fierce as Mrs. Jones. The air smelled of tobacco and horses. Men conspired outside Jenkins’s barn, drinking. Lonahan smiled at me. The terrible musicians fumbled along playing “Stick to the Union, Jack” and “Hold the Fort.” Without Papa, the band had no fiddle. Nobody played spoons without Henry. Somebody ran to the boardinghouse for a guitar, and Kerrigan produced a tin whistle. Eva Setkowski jigged and twirled.
In the horse barn, I sat at the feet of Mrs. Jones, who rested on a throne of hay. She and Lonahan talked with Dan Kerrigan, now named head of the new local union shop. They toasted, drinking. Lonahan offered me the bottle and I took a long drink. Mrs. Jones in turn raised it in my direction.
“Your father would be proud.”
“I hope so.” I drank more and sang along in the barn. “ ‘Would you have mansions of gold in the sky and sleep in a shack in the back.’ ” Intoxicating words. Warm looks from George. Mrs. Jones laughing like a girl. In their ragtag company, I was not lonely, not strange or apart, but at home, one of them. A comrade.
