Gilded Mountain, page 35
“Ingeborg Princess,” Clara said. She chattered away until she fell asleep in my lap. I did not want to move from under her warm weight and thought of my small faraway Nipper. For him, I was only a story by now. For Maman, I was a prayer and a worry. For Henry, a shrug. I suffered with homesickness, missing a home I didn’t have.
It grew late. The wind came up, battering the canvas walls. The night was moonless, too dangerous for me to go back to town. Frau Bruner gave me a blanket. I settled myself on the floor as if I belonged there. The feather mattress of the Ruby Arms and the arms of a husband were remnants of a preposterous fever dream. Somebody started a tune on a harmonica. An accordion joined, and a graveled voice began to sing, “As I walk along the Bois Boolong, with an independent air…” The singer was heckled, “Shut up, ya maggot,” but he kept on singing, “You can hear the girls declare, there goes a millionaire…” The men jeered him, scoffing at the absurdity of millionaires, while scraps of millionaire money festered in the pillow of my rucksack. I fell asleep on it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
LONAHAN’S MISSION TO CALL OFF a raid was successful. The good news traveled through the camp: Negotiations had resumed. I was quick to leave before George returned. The rest of the morning was uneventful, without violence.
But in the ensuing week, as a response to acts of vandalism, “that debris blocking train tracks,” the Company increased the ranks of Pinkertons. Swaggering Sheriff Smiley deported two more strikers, but his goons did not attack. Not yet.
“Their intent is to deport them one by one,” K.T. said. “And let the camp fold when the snows arrive. Won’t say I told ya so.”
* * *
In the early days of October, my routine resumed as if I’d never married. The fact of the wedding seemed vague as a mountaintop is in fog. The weather grew as cold as my recollection of the courthouse vows, the night in the arms of mon mari, the down of clear hair on his wrist, blue veins there carrying his very blood around to his heart, which he said was mine, as mine was his. It was an obsessing mystery, how I could have been his heart when, only weeks before, the Lemon Drop had him riding around bewitched. He’d promised till death us do part, but I had no proof, no sign, no photograph. Only this inward shift, as if a magnesium flash had burned through my flesh and left a pulling ache. Dread gathered like the clouds that lowered onto the surface of Marvelous Lake. In the mornings now, the bowl of it held a cold white soup of fog, winter cooking like trouble. No word from Jace. I grew angry at him again, worse than before. I wish now I’d confessed, alerted someone about his mission. I wish I had.
* * *
The town was crawling with Pinkerton agents. They bullied around the streets, accosting people on any excuse. They chased and beat a boy for jeering, “Pinks are finks!” waggling his fingers in his ears. The guards’ camp was by the river, next to the mill. A hundred scabs were penned there too, in a new stockade nailed up “for protection” against “violent anarchists.” Talk of a raid hung in the air, spiked the days with threats. Everybody on edge. The strikers kept to the flats and hauled meager supplies over the difficult trails from Rabbit Town on mules. There was a shortage of blankets. A rationing of coal. I worked and sent my wages to Maman. K. T. Redmond published an editorial demand:
RECALL THE ILLEGAL PRIVATE MILITIA.
The Booster responded:
STRIKE HOLDOUTS SAME AS BLOODSUCKING LEECHES.
Somebody left a scrawled note under our door: “You beter leave this part of the mountins, as you are to free with your mouth.”
* * *
Mid-October, when I was twelve days a bride, somebody threw a brick through the window of the Record in the middle of the night. “Firebombs are next,” K.T. said. We nailed boards over the broken pane. The next night, somebody threw a hunk of marble at the front window of the Company offices. It shattered in the shape of a web.
“Serves ’em right, those spiders” was K.T.’s verdict.
“Was it you?”
“We don’t throw bricks,” she said. “We throw words and reason.”
I threw myself into the work of the newspaper in order not to throw myself into the river, holding a handful of reasons, like stones, why Jace would never return. He is false, a drunk, deranged. I tried to picture his eyes, lit blue as the center of a flame, with what? Revolution? Alcohol? Delusions?
My own delusions were too painful to examine, so I studied Dr. Du Bois’s book of Souls, parsing it for insights, trying to understand my husband’s mad mission, to be ready when he returned. If. What if he didn’t? I decided to go to Chicago, where a woman could disappear in a crowd. In K.T.’s unsorted mail, I found two copies of the Chicago Defender. To my surprise, it was a newspaper published and written by Negroes. It contained articles about the plague of lynchings, heinous acts in the southern states, written by Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, fearless in her reporting, sickening to read:
The lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips the flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the leaders of the mob are so minded, oil is poured over the body and the victim is roasted to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman, Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death.
The Defender reports had me again in shock. In his tortured confessions, Jace once told me his father had brought him and the Grady boys to see a man hanged, as a lesson. My own lessons continued with the articles in the Defender’s pages that called on black people to move west, to migrate for their own safety. I began to further understand the forces at work on the Gradys, what they were escaping. A town all our own. Easter had not wanted Jasper to follow, yet he was following, dragging that stone. I couldn’t imagine she would be happy to see him or it. A stone inheritance.
* * *
Two weeks, he’d said. But it was more than two already. I looked at the post office for a letter or a telegram to summon me. Jumped at the ring of the party-line phone, in case Jace might be calling. Listened like a spy for talk of Padgetts and scandal, a robbery of money and diamonds from the vaults at Elkhorne, valuable marble missing. An assault by union thugs of a chef. But nothing was rumored or reported. K.T. would get wind of it, some detail would expose me. As Jasper’s accomplice? His wife? A dupe? And then what?
A summons. On the morning of October 16, a Company messenger delivered a note on official letterhead addressed to me. I was to appear at the office for an “interview” the next morning. The request came from the owner and president and mayor, Frederick “Colonel” Bowles.
Here it comes. Was the interview some kind of a trap? I scrambled for reasons to refuse. Something contagious. Smallpox? Measles? But at the same time, I was hoping Bowles had news of Jace, so I went.
The Colonel greeted me, all smiles and welcome. You would never peg him for a snake, this jovial man. “Well, good morning! And how’s the anarchy business?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
He held a chair for me and sat at his desk. “Doc Butler tells me you were working at Elkhorne a few weeks back. The same night some union criminals thrashed a Negro, the Padgetts’ cook.” Bowles did not say Negro but uttered the common epithet. “Doc says he saw you when he went to tend the fellow, about nine o’clock.”
I affected the blinking of a slow-witted child. Silence is a woman’s best garment was advice often handed to me, and I wore it now as a disguise.
“Mrs. Padgett”—he paused and I startled at the name—“suggested you might know the whereabouts of young Jasper. She is worried about him. No one’s heard from him since that evening. His father is concerned. Any idea where he might be?”
I shook my head.
“He left with the injured man,” the Colonel said. “We searched up at the lodge. We interviewed the train conductors. He was rumored to have gone to Ruby, but there’s no word of where he went after that. Miss DuLac has gone abroad, and we thought he might’ve followed, but he did not. We’ve contacted his classmates and friends. No luck.”
“I wish I could help,” I said, glad the Lemon Drop had thrown them off the trail.
Bowles swiveled his chair. “Miss Pelletier,” he said, “young Jasper is not—you must realize—he has foolish ideas. He is prone to rash actions. He goes off half-cocked.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, with big eyes blinking.
“Mrs. Padgett mentioned that you and Jasper are friends. Or more than friends?” His eyebrows lifted with insinuation. “Inge thought perhaps he’d had some little… dalliance and might’ve confided in you?”
I blinked again, like a mooncalf.
Colonel Bowles lit a cigarette and conducted the air with smoke. “Duke Padgett has asked me to find his son. He and Mrs. Padgett are traveling in Europe. The family is no longer connected to the marble operations here, but out of a sense of loyalty and friendship to his father, I’m left to untangle the mess the boy made.”
“The mess, sir?”
“The boy made a fatal mistake. He allowed the union in. We’ve lost time and revenue. Shipments are missing. We’ve got to get these agitators out of town. Resume normal business. You and that Redmond woman are not helping.”
“Sir?”
“Her articles claim our Company is nothing but a stock swindle. Do you know anything about investments? Stocks?”
“Nossir, I don’t.”
“Darn right you don’t. And your lady editor is equally ignorant.”
“She studies the markets.”
“Phh. In places where we expected investment, that miserable sheet—the so-called Record—has been waved in our faces and timidity encountered.”
Timidity. I knew it well and clung to it yet, for a strategy.
“Investors will not put their money in.” Bowles looked me over. “You always did seem like a nice girl. A good, quiet girl.”
“Thank you, sir.” My mother would’ve been proud in that moment at how I bit my lip appeasingly and looked at my shoes.
“You’re a friend of the Padgetts, are you not? Mrs. Padgett gave you a great opportunity. Despite the unfortunate accident in the quarry, they’ve treated you well.”
Killing my father. Evicting us. The hackles rose at the back of my neck, and I imagined leaping with wolf fangs at the wattles of his throat. Le loup-garou.
“Please understand,” he said, “if you were not yourself a friend of the Padgetts, if your editor had been a man, you both would’ve been ridden out of town a long time ago.”
“I am just an office girl.”
Perhaps the Colonel heard the gnashing of my teeth, for now he warned: “Do not bite the hand that feeds you. Do us the courtesy of convincing Trina Redmond to cease her attacks. Tell her we mean business. If she doesn’t quit, we’ll shut her down.”
“Like I said, sir, I’m just an office girl.” I attempted a little shrug in the style of the Countess. “But I don’t expect she’ll ever stop printing the paper.”
“Shiftless and uneducated workers here are susceptible to her anarchist lies,” the Colonel explained.
At the word shiftless, I lost my restraint. “Sir,” I heard myself say, “the men are worked to the bone. They were forced out on strike because no one had a paycheck since last fall. They only want to go back to work and feed their families. Can the Company not settle and pay back wages—”
“We made our offer!” The Colonel hit the desk. “These boys only listen to outsiders like this fellow Houlihan—”
“Lonahan. He negotiates—”
“Lonahan, Houlihan, hooligan, you know who I mean. You gals will never understand this business. The sheer difficulty and danger. Perilous transportation. The constant snowslides. The fickle investors. We are trying to make a go of it in impossible conditions. Ten thousand feet above sea level. For crying out loud!”
“Trouble is a pebble, sir,” I suggested. “My mother always says.”
The Colonel snorted. “Trouble is where you’re headed if you keep on associating with low types of people. I’d hoped you’d be reasonable. I’d hoped you knew where to find Jasper. His father is distraught. If you hear any word, I’d appreciate your telling me.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
NO WORD. THE MERCURY FELL. The nights were freezing now, snow in the wind. On several excuses in those darkening weeks of late October, George Lonahan dropped by the Record after his attempts to negotiate with management. His habit was to blast through the door, the bell jangling, gusts blowing ice flakes and paper, rattling the nerves and the conscience of this dissembling woman, me, Sylvie P., guarding her secret.
“Halloo, ladies of truth and justice!” George stamped snow off his boots.
“Wipe your feet, savage,” K.T. said.
Lonahan scraped each one with exaggerated care and never failed to exclaim over the weather and his enemy, Colonel Bowles, in the same breath.
“Goddamn cold as Bowles’s left onion.”
“Goddamn cold as Bowles’s amphibian heart.”
“Goddamn wet out there as the fish-slime soul of Colonel Bowles.”
We had the same enemy. I loved how he named Bowles as a sonuvabitch and a dog-faced boor, a mealworm, a blue-blooded city boy making bargains in bad faith. “Today Bowles made the union an offer of air and threw in daylight as a bonus.”
Between outbursts, he checked to see was I laughing (I was). “You’re sweet on Colonel Bowles,” he said, to bait me. “You think he’s swell.”
“No! He’s—”
“Bootlicking. Say bootlicking. You can manage it. Say boot… lick.”
“You’re vulgar.”
“You’re laughing. Come out with me now, Sylvie, for a ginger beer.”
“George, please,” I deflected. “I’m trying to get this printed.”
“Let me at that type tray. I will spell ‘b-e-a-u-t-y.’ I’ll spell ‘What does Sylvie want for Christmas?’ ”
“Get away, you, Lonahan! I have to set the page.” I swatted at him and escaped as a hairball of lies gathered in my throat. The longer my bizarre elopement stayed undisclosed, the more it seemed invented out of fairy books. The longer there was no word from Jasper Padgett, the more I looked forward to George’s distractions. My work at the press suffered from mistakes. The air was wiry with tension, leaps of guilt in the blood. I was at all times aware of Lonahan’s location in the office. The bell that announced his entry jangled my nerves until he went out again. I followed news of his negotiations, his meetings at Dogtooth Camp. George stayed up there, and the Pinks left him alone for now because he was an official from UMW headquarters.
K.T. the instigator encouraged his visits. Invited him for whiskey, coffee, and cards. It was comfortable, the three of us talking about events both local and global, such that I developed an addiction to the newswires that has lasted all my life. George hung about smoking, drying his wet socks by our stove. One night he borrowed my scissors and cut shapes out of paper, a bird, a daisy, a fish. Another night he fashioned a straggly palm tree out of rolled newsprint and planted it in an empty whiskey bottle. “Now we are in the tropics!” He joked and composed sentences on the jobsticks, messages and doggerel for me to read backward:
Sugar is sweet and so are you.
He persisted in teasing me. I feigned ignorance. A head cold. He hid type so I’d have to hunt for it, finding the S on the windowsill, the G balanced on a tea tin.
“Darn you, George, where’s the Q?”
“Just before the R,” he said. “After the P.”
“Darn you.”
He called me “Primrose” or “Rosie” to mock me for my refusal to curse. “Repeat after me: Shitcan the bosses.”
“Profanity is just an excuse for a poor vocabulary,” I said, then spilled ink and cursed. “Dammit! Look what you made me do.”
“Attagirl, Rosie, now you’ve got the hang of it.”
Thus he corrupted me with his jokes and swigs from his flask. “We’ve got their testicles in a vise!” he announced one day, so I refused to speak to him till he apologized for talking that way to a lady (who was laughing anyway). “Sorry, Primrose. Where’s the soap? I’ll wash my mouth out.”
I missed his distractions when he went with Kerrigan to Denver for a meeting with the Labor Commission. But it was a relief that he wasn’t around. I was weak and he was bold. He lingered too close at the printing press, a comradely arm around my shoulder. He was a pirate with the hands of a pianist, long thin fingers, flat blunt fingernails, very clean. The white path of that scar led across the cheek to his mouth.
“How did you get it?” I finally asked him.
“Rescued a kitten from a sawmill,” he said, winking. “Or was it the time I fell upon the switchblade of a bandit in the Pine Barrens? Possibly it was that fight with a broken window.” Half his stories were true and seventy-five percent of them were not. I could hardly admit to myself how much I liked him. I was married. A married woman. Was I?
* * *
The days of October dwindled, and then it was November. Something was terribly wrong. Jace had not written. The mail service was no excuse: I received regular letters from my family. Why had I trusted JCP? Naive idiot Sylvie. Layers of reproach and anger built in me like snow on a scarp. He’d found solace in a bawdy house in a railroad town, or returned to Virginia and the arms of a debutante. Such ficklery had happened before, but I hadn’t learned my lesson. My skull was a cauldron of hurt. Jace was free. He could do what he wanted. He was a man. Armed with money. What was my weapon?
* * *
Just before Thanksgiving, K. T. Redmond packed her bag and went to Denver again to visit her sister, Daisy, a widow now. “It’s a three-week vacation from this cussed burg.” She left me in charge of the office, with instructions not to print any news till she returned—only invitations, posters, or handbills. I was to feed Bill the cat and shovel the sidewalk. She left me to celebrate Thanksgiving with Dottie Weeks and her husband, then wallow in self-pity and a copy of Pride and Prejudice.
