Gilded Mountain, page 36
One evening, December already, I lowered the shade and had settled down by the stove when somebody rapped on the door.
“Knock-knock.”
“Who is it?”
“Joe King.”
“Who?”
“Joking around to get a laugh outta you.” It was George Lonahan, whistling out there in the weather. “Unlock the door, Sylvie Pelletier.”
“Not funny,” I said.
“Then why are you smiling?” He came in with a blast of snow, kissed my cheek, hung up his hat like he was home, and dropped his pack. “It’s Dr. Lonahan with a cure for the sours.”
“I’m not sour,” I said.
“Rumor says you are. I saw Redmond in Denver, and she hinted.” He produced a large bottle of whiskey. “Here’s medicine.”
“George, you’ll cause a scandal—”
“The shades are lowered,” he said. “The storm is fierce. Are you going to throw me to the wolves? The arctic winds? I am an honorable fellow. Also cold as a frosted frog. And I have good news for you to print, so lemme just thaw here awhile and tell it. Kerrigan’s gone to Dogtooth to tell the boys.”
I handed him a glass, obviously pleased to see him. Quite pleased with himself, he poured whiskey and toasted. “The Colorado Labor Commission has fined our infernal Company for infractions and breach of promise. Bowles and the bosses have pledged a wage hike and an eight-hour day. I just came from their offices where we made a handshake deal. All that remains is for those rat bastards to add a signature, and we have a contract.”
“It’s thanks to you,” I said.
George flashed a smile of triumph. “Not only! It was your father who started things a year ago. And it’s thanks to those brave boys freezing their onions, holding camp up on the flats. But I’ll take any thanks. Even only one thank.”
“Thank,” I said. That joke again, I was not tired of it. We smiled at our own cleverness. By the stove, George turned his hands over to warm them. He threw more coal into the fire pan, and left the doors open to stare into the embers, and sighed. “Soon as these boys sign, sorry to say, Primrose, I’m off again.” He watched me to see what I thought of it.
“So soon?” I said. “You just got back here.”
“Job’s done, pretty much, now we have an agreement.”
“Will they really sign, George? I don’t trust that Colonel. I’m afraid they’ll just pay another measly fine and carry on as usual.”
“This time I’m hopeful. Either way, there’s nothing left for me to do now. District boss is sending me to the southern mines. There’s a coal strike in Trinidad.”
“To the Rockefeller camp there? It’s dangerous. The Governor sent in troops. They have machine guns.”
“They do, the bastards.” He cocked his eye at me. “If I were machine-gunned, would you feel a pang?”
“Don’t talk like that. They wouldn’t shoot you.”
“I’m exactly who they’d shoot. And I indulge the idea, not infrequently, that you might shed a tear for me if I died for the cause. That you’d be sad.”
“Of course I’d be sad. What are you talking about?” I could not look at him.
“Je t’aime,” he said.
“Pardon?” I’d misheard him.
“I went to the Denver Library and looked it up in the French department. Learned three things: J’ai faim. J’ai soif. Je t’aime.”
In his endearing thick accent, George had said: I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I love you. To deflect him, and to ignore the last bit, I corrected him like a schoolteacher. “Non, Georges, you pronounce it J’ai faim, j’ai soif, je t’aime.”
“You do?” he crowed, and thumped his chest. “You love me!”
“I didn’t say that!” I cried. “No, I said—”
“J’ai soif,” he said. “J’ai faim.”
He was hungry. He was thirsty. And the third thing. I pretended not to hear it, tried to act as if I did not return the feeling, dug deeper now in trouble. I said nothing in French or English about myself as Mrs. Padgett. I laughed. “If you’re hungry, here’s a sandwich!” I escaped to the cupboard and buttered bread. He ate it while I helped him to drink the rest of the liquor in his bottle. I should’ve confessed then. But the heart wants. I was in the grip of loneliness. Je t’aime, he’d said, and I was hungry myself, for such words in any language. I should’ve sent him on his way. Instead, I plied him with questions about the union, the Wobblies, his hobo life on the road, stumping for the UMW. While he talked, I pretended not to see the burn of his eye, the smiles in my direction, how he plucked his long fingers at the crease in his trousers, raked his dark head of hair, parted like crow’s wings. He tucked it behind his ears and caught me noticing. “I do need a haircut,” he said.
“Your hairs cut,” I said, tipsy. “Like my mother would say. She used to cut my father’s hair.”
“There’s an idea! Fetch the scissors!”
“Scissors!” I said.
“Shears!” He plucked them off the desk and we laughed ourselves stupid, the pluralia tantum like a code for what was singular between us. With George, I did not feel myself to be less, not poor or Papist or foreign. We were cut from the same cloth. I took the scissors from the composing table. George took off his tie. I put an apron around his neck and snipped the air behind him with theatrical menace.
“Yikes,” he said. “I’m having qualms. A qualm.”
“One yike or two?” Roaring again, both of us cracking up.
“Stop,” he said. “Do you have a mirror?”
“You won’t want to look after I’m done with you. Hold still.”
I worked around his head with a comb, leaving tracks in the dark hair. Now we did not talk. George closed his eyes, so I was free to study the arch of his eyebrows, that scar tracking across the blue shadow of whiskers. The noise of scissors cut the quiet. Snips of hair fell to the floor. I folded down the cartilage of his ear, trimmed around the crest of it, above the frayed collar, along the back of the neck. His eyes stayed shut. Some concentration of feeling came over his face, his breathing. The air thickened and turned strange. I grew afraid, not of the scissors working close to the arteries of his neck, but of the heat off his scalp, the whiskey in us, the rise and fall of his chest. I leaned over the long bones of his legs to trim the wings of his curls, my knees brushing his knees. My fingers forked along the scalp, lifted a lock of hair. George opened his eyes and saw the workings of my throat. I nearly fainted at the plain raw intention on his face.
“Sylvie,” he said, a husk in his voice.
I was weak beside him, the scissors dropped. He pulled me to his lap and kissed me, and I kissed him, abandoned in adulterous betrayal, wondering was it only kissing that I liked so desperately, or was it George himself or both at once? Was the window shade open? Could the whole town see? Did my lawful wedded husband, Jace, know somehow and would he smell infidelity on me and would the world and God now know me for a traitor to my sacred word? George was not the Devil, I was. I kissed him till I sprang up for breath, wiping at my bruised mouth with a sleeve.
“You’ll be lopsided if I don’t finish,” I said, drunk on kissing.
“Lopsided is a new fashion,” he said, pulling me back, his hands along my rib cage, down my one leg and up the other. I did not stop him, only craved to fall away to the floor. I confess it, now that it does not matter. How the chair tipped and lurched. My clothes in a dishevelment. He moved my hands where he wanted them, his own at my buttons.
“Stop,” I said. “Stop.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. We were shaking, both of us rattled. “Forgive me, Sylvie. For a long time I thought of—kissing you. And did you ever think—?”
“Yes.” It was the truth. “George,” I said, verging on tears. “George, please, I have to confess that I am—I must tell you—”
He grew cold, watching me stammer, as if a door had been left open in January. Gusts of winter blew in. Gales.
“I’m sorry, I—” A sob escaped me. “I have to tell you.”
“There’s someone else,” he said, hard as a hammer.
I nodded.
He stood up from the chair, his hair half cut. “You’re a bad person.” He looked stricken then sad then angry. He put his coat on fast and made for the door.
“Your hair—”
“Delilah,” he said, and was gone.
* * *
George did not return. Jace did not write. The strike did not settle. As I’d feared, the sanction and fine had done nothing to convince the bastards of management to sign the contract. A decoy agreement was drawn up by Bowles only to stall and frustrate. His handshake was as worthless as his word. The women in the camp boiled soup bones to feed their children, and the Pinks were itching—had been for six weeks—to raid the ragged camp, only thirty stalwarts left there. The scabs scabbed in the mill. George was gone, so there was no union rep to hold management feet to the fire or put their testicles in a vise. I blamed myself for driving him away. It was almost Christmas, the season of giving. As penance, I spent forty of Jace’s dollars on cornmeal to donate to the freezing strikers, and hauled supplies to the camp in the snow. I visited a little girl quarantined with measles and brought her a box of crayons. At the schoolhouse, I tutored a Slovakian boy who spoke no English. I helped Dottie Weeks to paint the walls of the bakery and got spills of her sunny yellow paint on my father’s old overalls, “like the blood of daffodils,” I told her.
“Aren’t you very strange,” she said. “Daffodils do not bleed.”
I sent Maman one of my three Knoxes for Christmas. “I’ve saved my salary, and send it to you. Joyeux Noël, Ta fille, Sylvie.”
“Grâce à Dieu,” she wrote back. “A hundred dollars! Your brothers have new boots and coats for the winter. I have tithed to the church. We pray for you to be home soon.” Home was nowhere but my closet. I longed for my family. But when I thought about Rutland, Vermont, the very name of the town matched my despair, land of ruts, not roots. I mailed Maman copies of the Record so that she would know the state of things, as K.T. wrote them upon her return from Denver.
STRIKE STILL ON
An eastern stockholder, on a visit to Moonstone, would think it false if he were told the marble workers’ strike continues. Company managers assure stockholders—poor victims—that the strike did not amount to a row of pins because the owner and the visible employees scoff at the truth: The strike is ongoing. They claim the union is finished. But meander over a ridge of Dogtooth Mountain and there you will find a tent colony inhabited by a stalwart group of walker-outers. These are the true employees, none of whom will budge until Kunnel Bowles signs a fair deal. Meanwhile, an inferior quality of marble is shipped, as the replacement crews would not know a fine picarillo chisel from a sledgehammer.
December hurtled onward. The wind raved in the creaking pines and sent branches crashing down, narrowly missing the heads of sledding children. Gale forces ate shingles off rooftops, and snow fell to muffle the creatures digging under it, human and animal. The board shacks crusted over; the tents up on Dogtooth Flats sagged in depressions of snow.
It was two months since my elopement. Nothing but silence from Jace Padgett. Pas un mot from George Lonahan. He had left the day after his lopsided haircut, “for urgent business with Mrs. Jones,” K.T. said. “Or perhaps he was disappointed?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You would,” she said, “if your big fat head were screwed on straight.”
I took my ears in my hands and straightened the head on my neck. “There.”
“Devil,” she said. “Take the paper up to the camp. Dottie has bread for you to bring. And blankets.” She handed me an old coat of hers. “Somebody’ll want it.”
“Load me up, sure. I’m the underdonkey.”
“We’re all underdonkeys now. I’ll hire you out to that old mule skinner Jenkins if you don’t bring me back a story.”
“It’s the same story up there,” I said. “Nothing new. They still expect a settlement. Same as last week. And the week before.”
“Eventually, something’s gotta give,” she said. “Don’t miss it.”
* * *
Dottie and I loaded the sled. Newspapers. Potatoes, blankets, three cast-off coats, bread. I strapped on webs, strapped my skis to the top of the load. The temperature was twenty-nine degrees, the sky blue, snow glittering in all its hostile glory. The cold braced me for the climb, hauling that sled up the track, an underdonkey in snowshoes. With every step, my ankle ligaments burned like the punishment I deserved. Les chevilles enflent.
Threads of smoke rose from the camp. Somebody there was singing. “Hello ma baby, hello ma honey, hello ma ragtime girl.” That was Dan Kerrigan. “Hello, Sylvie Pelletier!” he said when he saw me. “Did you bring us bread and roses?”
“Bread,” I said. “Slightly stale.”
“Roses in your cheeks,” he said. “Take the bread to Bruner’s. The baby is sick.”
In their tent, I found Frau Bruner ragged with worry. The shivering children were piled under blankets. The little year-old boy, Albert, had a barking cough and red chapped cheeks. His arms and legs startled up with each bark, his eyes wide with the effort of gasping. “Oh, Sylvie, thanks God.” Frau Bruner took the bread and I took the baby. The poor child coughed, exhausted, on my shoulder. I sang to him softly, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” His mother put a pot on the stove and boiled snow. When it was steaming, we held him over it to breathe the mist and loosen his chest. All day we took turns, walking him, trying to get him to eat a little. But he refused the spoon pried between his new teeth. Toward afternoon, he finally slept.
“I’ll stay the night,” I told his mother. “I can ski him to the clinic in the morning.”
“Please Gott,” she said.
I bedded down by the stove and fell asleep to the sound of Gustav Bruner snoring, the fitful wheeze of Albert in his mother’s arms. And that’s how it was that I came to be in the camp at dawn that violent day, December 14, 1908.
* * *
We woke to the clang of a spoon on a skillet. Shouts. A dog barking.
“Alarm!” Herr Bruner pulled on his boots and ran out of the tent. Frantic, Mrs. Bruner lifted a section of flooring. Underneath was a cellar. A rocky hole like a grave.
“Fast, fast.” She began to throw bedding down, cans and clothes, and descended the ladder, holding her arms out for little Clara and the coughing baby. I handed them down. “Komm, Sylvie.” Her white face looked up at me from the pit like a swimmer’s underwater. “Please hide!” she cried. “Der shooting.”
I threw her boots in the hole and ran out.
All hell. Shouts and Pinkerton curses. “Out! Go! Get out!” Up the slope in surprise attack, a pack of thirty agents came raiding over the mountain, two of them sliding on toboggans like demon schoolboys. War whoops echoed off the rocks. Strikers ran out of the tents, yanking up their pants. Children panicking. Mama, Papa. Somebody shot off a gun. One of the tents was burning.
Fire! The people woke and scattered and fled. Get out! Everything wild. A Pinkerton agent had a broom in his hand and held it to the flaming tent. The broomstraw caught fire as another bandit took up a tin of kerosene and poured it. His friend lit the fuel with his torch of a broom. Something exploded. A camp stove or a charge of dynamite. Debris scattered down, metal bits, bedding, and a shoe. Pops, shots. Bullets. Impossible to tell who was shooting, where. I ran, dodging like a rabbit.
“Get the hell outta here! All of you!” the Pinks hollered, and brandished their shooters. “Time’s up! Strike’s over!” The cowards toppled tent poles. Canvas crumpled to the snow, mounded over women and their scraps. The Bruners’ tent was collapsed but not yet burning. Beside their wilted heap, I found Clara, crying, her dolly buried in the cellar with baby Albert and her hysterical mother. I crawled under, pushing at canvas. “Frau Bruner!” She was down in the hole, struggling to climb the ladder with Albert in one arm. I gripped him by the scruff. We fought our way under fallen canvas into the snow, where Clara was wild for her lost dolly. “Meine Inge.”
The raid at the flats was over in a snap. Like a pack of jackals, the hired marauders left behind a wreckage of tents and people, bleeding and stunned. Tony Mercanditti had a bullet in his shoulder. Mrs. Tchachenko walked the ruins with her hand over her mouth. Some other men were rope-tied in a line, Gustav Bruner and Dan Kerrigan among them, prodded down the trail by Pinks.
The strike was broken. And then everything was.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE RECORD PUBLISHED EVERY SCRAP of news about the raid, the fire, the breaking of the strike. I delivered that copy to the seventy-one subscribers left in town, rolled and mailed it out to the list of faraway readers.
If you only read the Booster, you’d never know it happened. That paper would have you think you lived on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, with its lemonade springs, bluebirds of happiness, a place where raids and fires, strikes and unfairness, were merely inventions of malicious lying traitors to the Company. Booster Editor Goodell reported only that the Christmas pageant at the Moonstone schoolhouse would feature a manger with two live sheep. Caroling would take place in the square on Christmas Eve. Their headline story was about a prizefight coming up on December 26, Boxing Day, when black boxer Jack Johnson would be pitted against the white Canadian Tommy Burns in the first-ever heavyweight championship fight featuring a Negro.
The Booster wrote:
It is expected there will be lynchings if the Negro wins.
I stood reading in the cold outside the bakery, hoping the Gradys had escaped that threat for good. Jace would have a lot to say about it, I thought, and a picture of his earnest face appeared in my mind like an apparition.
