Castle Garden

by Bill Albert

  “Can I ask you somethin real personal? Say, I don’t rightly know your name.”

  I wrote it down on a card.

  “Hyman? Listen, Hyman. I wants to ask you . . . I mean some of the girls here say, well what they say is as how Jews have different, you know different ah . . . ah, dodas, different ones that is from ordinary folk. Course, I reckon how they must be funnin me, ya know, me being sort of new to the Row and all, but bein as how you is here and all, I thought I’d just sort of ask . . .”

  I could feel my ears burning like fury and I was shaking pretty good too. She came over and dropped a delicate hand on my knee. I thought sure she was about to do a Buffalo Bill on me but I was too frightened to move away.

  “Oh, say, honey, don’t take on so. It ain’t important. I just thought . . . you know. I didn’t mean nothin by it.”

  She laughed all tinkley and ruffled my hair.

  She was so damn pretty. Soft and fresh. She even smelled sweet. I guess I was in love. It was the first time. It was the worst time, being so staggering hopeless as it was. Going on just a touch from twelve years old and in love with a whore! In love with an O’Malley!

  20

  My first romance was a dark secret and all going out in one direction, which was probably for the best. I didn’t see what she did for a living or hear her rough tongue. I could only see Maggie O’Malley’s sweet face smiling at me like it was stuck in the middle of a fluffy cloud.

  It’s because of Maggie that I got started on what was to become my livelihood for the next seven years.

  I wasn’t a complete novice at letter writing, but my apprenticeship with Buffalo Bill had been writing out exactly what he said. There hadn’t been any call to improve or to improvise. Buffalo Bill knew exactly how best to be Buffalo Bill.

  I know that letter writing isn’t so special, you can find a letter writer hanging around any saloon with his leather box, ink pot, and little square sign hanging down on a string. I started out different. I was the Almost-Official Letter Writer for the whores of Wallace. I was a letter writer who could never betray a confidence, never get you mocked on the Row or in a saloon. I was a letter writer that wrote more than a letter, I tailored stories to order, like Samuel Smith tailored suits.

  “Sure, Hyman. Ya sit yerself right here. Ready? OK, now you write somethin like, ‘My dearest Jim.’ How’s that sound? Maybe ‘My darlin Jim?’ Now, ah . . . ‘I sure am missin ya awful bad and wishing ya was back here instead of out there in California like you is.’ How’s that sound, honey? Say, you just fix it up like you think best.”

  It was painful, every word a knife into the wound that was my opened heart. But I wrote it out anyway. Without realizing it I was learning to be a professional.

  “Ya tell him how things are just fine here. Of course, things ain’t fine at all, is they! No, now you tell how the army’s made a right damn mess of things, and add how they arrested our dad too. Ain’t that about the dumbest damn thing ya ever heard tell of? Jesus Christ! Couldn’t blow the top off a dandelion, drunk the way he is all the time! Business’s been real slow too. What you lookin like that for? What? Jim? Sure he knows. Where you think he got that money to run out to California on? Anyway, Hyman honey, ya put it all down proper and in that there sweet joined up writin how you does so nice.”

  I got five cents a page, which would have been real good money if I hadn’t had to give four cents of it to the push.

  “It’s a rough, disorderly neighborhood,” explained Tom. “Ya can see that, can’t you, Bud. Person so little like you needs hisself some protection.”

  I did, but there was no one to protect me from the O’Malleys, so I paid my four cents.

  “Hyman. There is a young lady out the back who wants a word with you,” Miss April said in her most nose-up-disapproving voice. “Stick in those pockets, for goodness sake, you do look a sight!”

  Waiting for me was a slight girl wearing a modest cotton dress and a bonnet which hid most of her face.

  “I hear you does writin,” she blurted out before I even cleared the door. “I need a letter writ. I’ll pay.”

  News traveled quickly on the Row. Helen Bancroft—Harmony Banks—was my second client.

  The letter was to her mother back in some place outside of Twin Falls. It was the usual stuff. She had a good job in a laundry and was doing real well. The folks around Wallace were real friendly and she was being courted by a real swell mining engineer with real excellent prospects. She hoped they were all getting on and that the crops would come in real fine that year. She missed them all real bad and to kiss little Bobby Joe for her, who she knew probably wasn’t so little anymore.

  After that they came looking for me nearly every day. Young ones, old ones, pretty ones, ugly ones, first from the cribs and not long after from the parlor houses too. Whores wanting to tell the kind of stories about themselves they figured someone else wanted to hear.

  In the West it’s the gamblers, gunfighters, and whores who draw the most extravagant, extra-ordinary stories, but the thing that was most extravagantly extra-ordinary about the stories the whores in Wallace wanted me to write was that they were so damned ordinary. The more ordinary I wrote them the better they liked it.

  It wasn’t that all those women were illiterate either. It was the “Proper words” they wanted, fancy-stitched personally for them in my fine copperplate hand.

  “We aren’t saying it’s wrong what you’re doing, Hyman,” Miss April told me after a few days of visits. “I suppose these girls have their feelings too.”

  “Christian of you,” Miss Jan added. “Right Christian it is.”

  I was right glad to hear that.

  “Yes, of course,” agreed her sister. “But, we have a business to run here. Can’t support all this coming and going at the back, Christian or not.”

  “And you’re supposed to be working for the Grand,” Miss Jan said with her always-gentle smile.

  I couldn’t very well give up my job at the Grand because of Aunt May, and the push wasn’t going to let me stop writing letters.

  “Why not, Mouse? She’s so damn busy with all her own stupid letter writin, she ain’t going to find out nothin. She found out about them ad-vertisments and such? No, ‘course she ain’t found out. An hour or two is all. Maggie got it all fixed with Miss Prescott, you know the one who rents out the cribs. You got the one belonged to Chinese Mary before she skipped. Rent? Sure. You do free letters for her boarders we don’t pay no rent, at least while the army stays around and the crib sits empty like it is.”

  So, after school or work at the Grand I made my way down to the Row. The women called me Jewish Mary. They didn’t mean anything bad by it. The name, the Mary part, was there on the door, that’s all.

  21

  While I was falling in love and plying my new trade on the Row, Aunt May continued fighting all out against what she called the Military Occupation. I wrote letters for the Wallace whores, she wrote letters to the Spokane newspapers.

  I didn’t believe it was possible for anyone to get hotter, more crazy mad than Aunt May. Then they arrested her beloved Al.

  He’d already been up before a coroner’s jury a couple of weeks before. They tore him off a stripe for not doing anything to stop the train getting to Wardner but they couldn’t get past the fact that he’d had a Winchester stuck in his ribs the whole time. That wasn’t good enough for Bartlett Sinclair though.

  Exactly one month after Al drove the Dynamite Express down to Wardner the soldiers and special deputies came for him. Luckily for them, Aunt May wasn’t there.

  It was a Monday morning and I was on my way down to school when I saw five or six Negro soldiers together with four white men, three in civilian clothes, moving up the stairs at a run. I turned and dashed back to the cabin.

  Al was pouring himself a cup of coffee as I burst in.

  “Hey up, Li
ttle Hy! What’s the all-fire hurry? Slow down now. Come off the track at that speed, ya will.”

  Before I had time to write out anything the men were at the door. Straight in they came. The soldiers leveled their rifles at us and two of the civilians waved revolvers. A tall, clean-shaven, severe-looking man, the only one of them who was unarmed, stepped forward.

  “Levi W. Hutton?” he asked in a deep rumble.

  Al put his cup down carefully on the table.

  “You know who I am, Mr. Sinclair.”

  “Hutton, I’ve come to take you down to Kellogg.”

  “Come to take me down where?”

  “Kellogg, to the new stockade.”

  “What for? Ya heard what I had to say to that jury, didn’t ya?”

  “I heard it. Doesn’t mean I believed it.”

  “It were the truth,” Al said indignantly. “Jury believed it were too.”

  “So what if they did?” Sinclair laughed, a real dastardly villain’s laugh it was too, and swept his arm taking in the men behind him. “We’ve got martial law here, Hutton, not the civil law. Your miner friends, your fellow conspirators saw to that.”

  “My fellow whats?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Conspirators is it? Maybe ya reckon how I should have let them shoot me dead? Is that how ya sees it, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “I see it like it was, that’s all. Listen now, I don’t have all day to stand here arguing with you, Button. The only thing I need to know is whether you’re coming peacefully or not?”

  Al stuck his pipe in the corner of his mouth and sucked on it while he looked slowly from one expectant face to the next.

  “Peaceful it is,” he said with a shrug.

  The Negro soldiers, the guns, the deputies, and especially Bartlett Sinclair frightened me into a fever, but what had me frightened more was what Aunt May would do when she found out they’d arrested Al.

  “Just take your time, Little Hy. Write it all out for me. I want everything that man said, word for damn word.”

  I had expected her to take the roof off the cabin, but Aunt May was calm as a snowdrift when I told her. It just shows how careful you’ve got to be with those easy expectations about people.

  “It figures,” is all she said when I had finished.

  “They’ve arrested all those other poor boys who never did anything, why not Al? I expect that miserable bastard Sinclair doesn’t care much for what I’ve been writing either. He can’t shut down the newspapers in Spokane like he done here; maybe he figures to shut me up by sticking Al in that damn bullpen. Ha! I’ll be damned if he or any of those other bastards can do that, Little Hy. I ain’t even got me fully started yet!”

  “Ain’t”? One surprise was piling straight on top of the one in front of it.

  “Where the Devil is that Benjamin Shorter got to? He gone already?”

  He’d never come home the night before. He was doing that more frequently, sneaking out after they’d gone to sleep and then telling Aunt May he was working in the Grand before school. She was too taken up with her letter writing to notice that he was almost never at the cabin.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm. “What’s that? School? Not today, Little Hy. Bigger fish to fry than school.”

  It wasn’t not going to school that had me worried but not being Jewish Mary. The girls expected it and so did the push. That last expectation was one it was downright dangerous not to meet. But Aunt May was a larger, more insistent, more immediately dangerous danger.

  First we called in at the Northern Pacific railway office in Wallace.

  “What the hell do you mean, you can’t do nothing!” she bellowed at the agent.

  The weight of Aunt May’s anger was eating away at her scrupulously constructed language. It was terrible to see, worse to hear.

  “I’m just saying, Mrs. Hutton, that the Company can’t take no part here,” he shook his head. “Government business is what it is, can’t take no part.”

  “Al Hutton’s worked for this damn railroad for most of ten years and you can’t bestir yourselves to take his part in this business?”

  The agent, thin, bony hands twitching not far below a pair of yellow elasticated arm bands, blinked wearily across the top of his half glasses at Aunt May who was filling up his doorway and cutting off the light.

  “Of course, Mrs. Hutton, if it was down to me, Ivor Llewellyn Jones, well, of course, you know I’d be the first to go to bat for Al, as well as for old Bert Fry, who they picked up this morning right after they got Al, but it ain’t me sitting here, it’s the Company, and the Company says I gotta say nothing, Mrs. Hutton. I sure am sorry about that. I sure . . .”

  “I can sure as hell see that!” Aunt May said hotly, as she turned and lumbered out into the street.

  We took the train to Kellogg.

  “There she is,” Aunt May said, pointing as we came into the depot.

  The first thing that caught me was the white tents, about ten round ones and then a line of a couple of dozen smaller ordinary ones. On the other side of the tents was the bullpen—four big, new-built sheds surrounded by a pole stockade strung with barbed wire. The large sprawl of the camp easily swamped the town of Kellogg, which was little more than a short main street with a dozen wooden buildings.

  A month before to that very day a thousand determined, angry miners had passed through there on their way to Wardner and the mill of Bunker Hill and Sullivan. A month before a thousand happy, crazy miners had passed through on their way back from Wardner and the smoking wreck of the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mill. Now, some of them were back again not passing through to anywhere. They were guests of the U.S. Army and the State of Idaho.

  Aunt May set her jaw and marched off from the depot. I had to half run to keep up. Even then I was eating her dust.

  At the front gate of the bullpen three Negro soldiers with fixed-bayonet rifles barred her way. They told her she couldn’t go any farther and that if she wanted to visit a prisoner she’d have to get permission from their commander and come back on Wednesday.

  I readied myself for an explosion. None came.

  “Not going to waste my breath on the likes of them,” she huffed.

  The commander of the bullpen was Captain Lavalle. He was from Georgia.

  “I am terribly sorry, Ma’am, but those are the rules. I don’t make them. I’m just here doing my duty.”

  “That include incarcerating innocent men without charging them?”

  “Please, Ma’am. I can see that you are distressed. Would you care to sit down? Can I perhaps have one of the men fetch you something cool to drink?”

  Aunt May didn’t sit. What she did was heave her bosom up and spot the Captain straight in the eye.

  “I am certainly not distressed, young man. Maybe back in Old Dixie your women may get distressed and need to sit down with a fan and a lemonade so as not to have a spell, but out here when we’re crossed we get angry, we get riled, we get stirred up, we get all kinds, but one thing we don’t do, one thing we don’t got the damn time for doing is getting ourselves distressed!”

  Captain Lavalle’s head snapped back away from Aunt May’s vitriol.

  “Yes, Ma’am. Yes, Ma’am. Sorry. Now I want you to understand that I, well I don’t actually arrest anybody.”

  “Just lock ‘em up? Is that it? Keep them from their families and loved ones?”

  “Hold them until they are processed by the proper authorities. That’s all.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I beg your pardon!” he said, alarm and indignation fighting across his face.

  She took a step forward and pointed at Captain Lavalle.

  “You listen to me real good, Captain Slicky Dixie,” she said in a low menacing voice. “I’m going to make you, and your damn General Merryman, and Mr. Bartlett Sinclair
, and that damn turncoat of a governor, I’m going to make you all sorry you ever heard the name Al Hutton. Damned sorry!”

  And she did too.

  22

  The American Bastille is what the men in the bullpen called it. A banner made from sheets hung from the roof proclaimed that name and their defiance.

  On Wednesdays and Sundays a couple of hundred miners’ wives and their children from Mullan and the Canyon dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meetings and filled the train to Kellogg. Only fifty men at a time were allowed to the wire for their visit. A few guards stood directly behind to make sure the women didn’t pass them anything. Of course, they managed anyway. If they couldn’t sneak something through there and then, the guards could be bribed to smuggle in food and letters. I heard that bribing was so easy because the miners had cleaned out the soldiers at poker.

  Two days after Al’s arrest Aunt May was there alongside the other women at the wire.

  “Fine, May, just fine.”

  “Wadda you mean, ‘just fine,’ Al Hutton? You’re in a damn military prison! Don’t stand there and tell me ‘just fine!’ It ain’t at all ‘JUST FINE’!”

  Other prisoners and their wives were staring. Al ducked his head.

  “Now, May, now May don’t go making such a . . .”

  “Don’t you ‘Now, May’ me, Al Hutton.”

  I pulled at her sleeve.

  “What? Oh, yeah. Let ‘em look.”

  Aunt May passed Al a tin of tobacco. A Negro guard saw her and came running over.

  “Ain’t allowed,” he said trying to grab the tin from Al.

  “Ain’t allowed!” shouted Aunt May, snatching the tin back. “What the hell do you mean? Ain’t . . . I’ll have you know . . .”

  “It’s all right, May,” Al said nervously.

  While the guard’s attention was with May’s tobacco and her loud spectacle I saw women nearby hurriedly push all manner of things through the wire.

  “Damn it to hell, Al, I wished you’d . . .”