Gilded Mountain, page 42
* * *
One recent afternoon about six months ago, on a spring day in Denver, 1934, I was on the way to a meeting at the Union Auxiliary, riding the trolley, when I noticed a man climb the steps and pay his fare. It was the dark patch tied over his eye that made me glance twice and recognize him.
“Cal?” I said, “Mr. Caleb Grady?”
He turned, wary, and did not appear to know me. The other passengers stared.
“It’s me, Sylvie.”
“Why, Miss Sylvie—Mrs. Padg—” he said.
“Mrs. Lonahan. I’m Mrs. Sylvie Lonahan. How are you, Cal?”
“I’m keeping well.”
“And your mother?” I asked. “How’s your family?”
The trolley started up. Cal shrugged an apology, then went toward a seat at the back. Overcome with questions, I followed. He leapt from his seat. “You don’t want to be sitting back here, ma’am,” he said with some alarm.
He knew, as I did, that Denver Mayor Stapleton was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Colorado Governor Morley too, probably, and half the statehouse. They dressed in their ghost hoods and were photographed grinning at the racetrack. They railed against Catholics and Communists and talked against Jews on their campaign stumps. They made sure that black people did not move into the white neighborhoods or swim in the public pools. And those men did worse things we whites didn’t hear about, or maybe didn’t want to know, because then we would have to act against appalling injustice or change somehow. And if we didn’t, weren’t we ourselves only one rung up from the white-sheeted goons on Satan’s ladder to hell?
Caleb tipped his hat to me and jumped off the trolley as if I were a threat, because I was. But still, I didn’t think of that in the moment. I had questions.
“Cal!” I jumped off after him, with my forty-three-year-old legs complaining.
He turned around then, looking—I must say—so startlingly like his half brother, Jace Padgett, that I nearly wept. The round eyeglasses, the skewed necktie, the cup-handle ears. We stood on the corner and traded news. He was a chef at the Albany Hotel, he told me.
“Do you make your famous elk-heart stew?”
“No elks to hunt down here.” He laughed. “Unless you mean the Fraternal Order of Elks. We cater their meetings.” A fraction of a smile on his face. I returned his smile as if he were a long-lost comrade, though he was not. He made that clear in his reluctance to talk with me.
“Cal,” I said, “tell me, how’s your family?”
For an answer, he drew two photographs from his wallet, one of his wife, Ellen, “she’s a piano teacher and choirmistress at the church.” The other picture showed their three daughters in front of a diner: Sunshine Café. “The girls at my mother’s place out in Weld County,” Cal said. “My dad runs the gasoline station there at Dearfield.”
“The town. You really did it,” I said, impressed. “You must be happy. And wasn’t there a college? Did you start it? Du Bois University, as I recall.”
Cal appeared pained by the question. “It’s finished in Dearfield. Marcus and his family live here with us.” He explained that Dearfield had prospered for a decade on crops of sugar beets and melon. But then, instead of the railroad, it was a drought that came through, all over the Colorado grasslands, same as it came to Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas. The West was a dust bowl of shriveled fields, abandoned homesteads.
“Old people, like my folks, the only ones left there now,” Caleb said, something hard in his eyes that stoppered me with sadness.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“We’re starting over here in Denver,” he said. “Du Bois College. Thirty-two students already enrolled, night classes.”
“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “Can you tell me, is that—is the stone still there? That Jace took—the marble?”
“It is.” His expression told me that the stone remained uncarved, a monument only to folly.
“He believed he was doing right,” I said.
“For whom was he doing it?” Caleb asked with his hard smile. “Not for me.”
“I never understood—”
“I don’t expect you to, Mrs. Lonahan,” Caleb said in polite irritation. “J.C. was always talking my ear off about my rightful inheritance. I suspect you know the reason. He said he talked to you about it.”
“He did.”
“And so, in the end, what was your inheritance?” Cal asked. “What was mine?”
“Did you not receive…?” It was a guilty question, as I already knew the answer.
“Mrs. Lonahan.” Caleb straightened his gaze, aimed it at me. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead. And not about J.C. He always talked about the future, how he’d set me up. I believe he meant to do it, but the old man cut him off. Jace was killed. And you can guess the rest.”
I guessed, slumped at the thought of it.
“My mother always warned me,” he said. “Watch what a Padgett does—not what he says.”
“Easter told me that too.”
“We Gradys tried to get ourselves away, on our own—and here you are, Mrs. Lonahan, running me down to bring it all back. And so I’m just gonna say it now, what I didn’t say that night: Your union boys was the ones that beat the dickens out of me. Cost me my right eye. Them Turks from the marble mill, beating on scabs. I heard that name Monahan or Lonahan. Never did tell it. Would only bring more trouble on myself.”
My mouth dropped open. I covered it. Cal kept on. “To this day, the union won’t let a colored man in their clubs. I went to get work at the ironworks on Larimer and the hiring hall told me stay away or they’d lose me my other eye.”
“Wait—” I was foundering. The pricking thorn was not a suspicion now but a painful truth to pluck from my conscience. “My husband George—he would never—” sputtering, my defenses up so high I did not ask questions but only batted away his words with grievances of my own (as so many of us do, when confronted with painful truth). “I have—my own father was—my husband was killed—”
Caleb Grady looked off toward the spiky mountains in the distance while I flailed in a pond of guilty denial and a realization that the money I stole—reclaimed!—from the Padgetts was dispensed to exact my own brand of justice, for my father and our cause. Had Caleb Grady got that money he would’ve had his own fight, to make things right for his mother, for the advancement of his own people. It’s shame and willful ignorance, such as mine in that moment, which blinds us to unfairness.
Caleb seemed eager to get away from me.
“Cal—Mr. Grady—wait. I apologize if my husband—if he—I didn’t know.”
“All right,” he said. He saw my squirming.
“And I never did thank you,” I said. “For what you did for Jace. How you took care of him—when he— he did like his whisky too much.”
“That he did,” Cal laughed. “Good to see you again, Miss— Mrs. Lonahan.”
With his hands in his pockets, Caleb Grady turned and strode down the street, whistling. You might say it was a carefree tune. But I could swear that what he whistled was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” That Temperance anthem. Marching as to war. With all the crowns and thorns and the kingdoms falling, as they do, in that hymn.
* * *
That evening, alone at home on Quebec Street, I climbed the pull-down steps to our attic and found my old trunk. There, under brittle yellow copies of the Moonstone Booster and the Moonstone City Record, were my notebooks and letters, the ledger of Finances, holding secrets. I sat reading under the eaves, awash in nostalgia and tender sentiment for my unknowing girlhood and the first husband I lost. He was only a boy, really.
In a shoebox were years of postcards and letters, mostly from George, writing his travels. I sat remembering the pluralia of his affections, his jokes, and how he cared for me. I don’t want to believe he’d have hurt Caleb Grady, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t.
Next morning I went to the bank and emptied out and closed the account of Angela Sylvestri by writing a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars. It was enough for a few years’ rent. A car. Perhaps a down payment on Du Bois College. A grand sum, to my way of thinking. I sent it to Mr. Caleb Grady, Chef, The Albany Hotel, Denver.
It was the last act of La Princesse des Voleurs.
Dear Mr. Grady,
Please accept this money from the estate of Jasper Padgett, now deceased. He spoke often of you and your rightful inheritance. I know he’d want you and your family to prosper. If he were with us still, he’d have made sure of it. Please send my regards to all the Gradys, and tell Easter that I still cook all her recipes (her chess pie is a favorite), and thank her to this day for her wisdom, and all she taught me, about sauces and pastry and also about history. About right and wrong.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Sylvie P. Lonahan
And I did it why? For Jace? Did I send funds to Caleb to salve my own conscience? To do one right thing. Was there a fair price for the lost eye of a man beaten by thugs? A woman violated? These were not equations of equivalents. An eye for an eye. A two-hundred-dollar fine for my father’s life exploded by a rusty canister of malice. A summary judgment of $10,500 for a smashed newspaper. Such sums were rounding errors. The real money was in the markets, the vault, the three homes big as castles, six cars, servants, a pair of dancing slippers costing the same as a college term, parties that cost more than the yearly salaries of three men.
What I sent Caleb Grady was guilt money. Mailed off as if I could purchase absolution and make myself superior to the Duke or the Colonel. I justified myself, thinking, Some people would send nothing. Some would offer a block of stone.
A week later, the check was cashed, Caleb Grady’s signature endorsing the back of it, so I knew the money was in his hand. Of course, as the only surviving son of Jerome “Duke” Padgett, Caleb should have inherited a vast fortune, enough to start ten colleges. The amount I sent him was crumbs off a cake, not a fair share of the spoils left behind in the vaults of Elkhorne or gathering interest at Morgan Guaranty Trust.
* * *
I am not here to say I am Saint Sylvie. I don’t care to be any kind of angel.
The truth is, I kept back five hundred dollars for myself, as payback for the death of Jacques Pelletier. I was now twice a widow and had mounting expenses that a UMW pension could barely cover, a surgery for female trouble, repairs for a leaking roof. Five hundred dollars of stolen spoils still remained in my own nest-egg account to gather up interest. If it were unspent at my death, it would be left to divide among my surprised survivors. A legacy from their Pelletier grandfather’s grave. Frenchy, he was called. Mon père, who was killed in a marble quarry in Moonstone, Colorado.
* * *
These days I find the old fury plaguing me again, violent visions, the urge to strangle. I see the bread lines downtown and read about the suicidal bankers and the caravans of skeleton people crossing the dusty plains wanting only to work, to rest, to eat a square meal, and that impulse to do something burns in me still. But what to do? What?
I cannot be a thief. From whom would I steal?
On a train, several months ago, I read my newspaper full of news about the proposed Wagner Act, an attempt by a goodhearted politician to help the struggling classes. The bankers were denouncing it from their marbled offices. Out the window I glimpsed a mule by the side of the tracks, a man lashing the animal with a switch. The sight of him put me in mind of the skinner Jenkins, and that long-ago essay contest. Three paragraphs about abused mules had set my life on its course. In the lurch of the train car, I got out a scrap of paper, and wrote, K.T.’s question in my mind, Did you know the Liberty Bell is cracked?
December 1934
A LETTER to MILLIONAIRES
Dear Messieurs Rockefeller, Mellon, Morgan, Dupont, et al,
In your boardrooms, labor people are branded as “violent,” “shirkers,” “anarchists.” We are called Socialists as if it means Satanist, when we only wish for a fair deal. Here in Colorado, the Governor calls in the National Guard if there’s even a whiff of protest, doing the bidding of bosses and men of vast fortune, like yourselves.
This year, more than a million US workers have gone on strike: longshoremen, autoworkers and steelworkers fighting for a fair deal. Their protests are peaceful, but the police and private guards respond with bloody violence. In Minneapolis, police shot 67 striking Teamsters, and killed two men, as my own husband was killed alongside strikers in Montana. Like him, these workers were only demanding a living wage, and the right to join a union.
Now in Congress, the proposed Wagner Act will set up a Labor Board to enforce fairness: it outlaws yellow-dog unions, bully tactics, and requires employers to negotiate in good faith. But the bankers and your money class oppose it; Mr. Mellon at Treasury thinks more charity is a solution. In this long Depression, alms are not the answer.
You gentlemen give away your money to opera houses or college buildings that bear your names, but your charity is a fraction of your vast wealth. Will it solve problems of the unhoused world? It is only for yourselves that you are philanthropists. Why not pay workers what they deserve? Workers do not want charity. Charity is not a system of law. It is not justice that lasts.
The Wagner Act will bring fairness. The Congress must pass this law or face a great uprising. Americans will demand that millionaires be held to rights, and pay a fair wage to the good hardworking people who build our country,
Sincerely, S. P. Lonahan Denver
Like throwing a feather dart, I sent that screed to The Sun in New York City where the millionaires lived, and asked for a job as a stringer covering labor news in Colorado. To my surprise, the editor sent me a check for five dollars—published the letter, and offered me the job. I got no response from Mr. Rockefeller, et al., but the byline emboldened me to fill these notebooks, pouring out words on troubled pages, trying to make sense of these uncertain days, these perilous times.
* * *
“Who is Mother Jones again?” my girl Joanie asked me the day she read that Mary Harris Jones had died, one hundred years old, November 30, 1930. This was when George was still with us. Hearing the sad news, he wept. The newspaper showed her portrait and photographs of her funeral, attended by grateful thousands, her grave at the Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. A granite monument to the great woman stands there today.
“We knew her once upon a time,” I said. “Your father and I. And Auntie Trina.”
“You did? How? When?” Joanie was briefly impressed but lost interest as I began to tell her. “Oh, that tiresome union talk,” she said. “All Dad’s strike stories are the same, picket this, picket that.” She was off to put her hair in rollers, slide silk stockings up over her darling young ankles.
And just in a snap like that, I saw how history is lost. Kept from the children out of exhaustion or our own shame at how the feet suffered in broken boots, leaking in the snow, unbearable to live it over again. Your grandfather was killed and the Pinks threw your grandmother out onto the gravel and I didn’t see my brothers again for fifteen years. You tell about it, and the children say, Huh. They yawn, impatient.
For you, the past is alive in yourself as breath. To them, the young, it’s a story, no more real to life than a painting. They’re in their own story.
“Hallelujah, I’m a bum,” my son, Jackie, sang as a boy, like Nipper did long ago. But our Jack had little idea where the tune came from, what the words were about or how the sunlight cast shadows like bars when Henry rode off through the trees, with our little brother singing on his shoulders, to catch fish in the Diamond River. Jack and his sisters have their own music, new on the radio. They have their own song for the times. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
What I have are memories, these old newspapers, and—this longing, still, to keep. To have—not things. Not maraschino cherries or a pearl choker or elephant-hide wallpaper. Just a yearning for something like the snowflake melted in the heat of my hand, my mother’s breath. What I want is to save it, a crystal only of beauty, the sharpness of the mountains, that pure cold in the lungs to quicken a body from inside out. Outside in. Here under the attic eaves, that urge grips me, to set it down, the way a painter wants to clutch the sunset, the purpling bruise of light on the underbelly of a cloud. The heart wants. To kiss in the moonlight. To hear Jacques Pelletier’s fiddle again in the evening, to catch his eyes crinkled above his beard, and taste the soupe aux pois my mother stirs, singing so as not to forget, longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublirai. To save it preserved, a flowering snowdrop in amber.
Perhaps this wish is the same as one that builds a monument in marble or casts a statue in bronze, carves initials in a rock. But that’s not what I’m after. Not the stone glory of important or self-important men. Only to tell how it was: The wind groaned in the eaves. The cold froze the very marrow. The lights of the village winkled in the dark, the towers of Elkhorne spired above the pines. The sound of the rack-rib donkeys split the morning, and woodsmoke filled the wind. Ancient urges stirred the blood by the river, love and fear. A mountain lion snarled. The magpie laughed. Deep in the mountain, a white cave hummed with the sounds of men and machinery, bone crack and groan. Chisel and drill. The glory of the sun stole the breath and released it to the blue sky. The snows gathered on the cornice to thunder down, melted to flood the rivers. The curse of the Ute people lay upon the land, and white drifts built up around the walls of the cabin so that we were in our own little pocket, like animals in a burrow, all together there.
THE END
Author’s Note
GILDED MOUNTAIN IS A work of fiction, drawn partly from histories of Redstone, Marble, and Dearfield, Colorado, in the years between 1900 and 1915. While real historical figures like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and King Leopold of Belgium appear in the novel, their scenes are invented, as are the other characters. People whose lives inspired this book include one of my great-grandfathers, J. F. Manning, who served as president and general manager of Colorado Yule Marble during the years that company supplied the stone for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; Oliver Toussaint Jackson, founder of Dearfield, Colorado; Sylvia Smith, newspaper editor; and John Cleveland Osgood, founder of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company; and his wife, Alma Regina Shelgrem Osgood. For purposes of this story, I have appropriated some newspaper articles, events, and certain biographical details, but have reconfigured these, and altered dates and circumstances, when it suited the narrative.
