Castle Garden

by Bill Albert

  The cabin was a lean-to built up against the side of a mountain at the top of a small, heavily wooded no-name gulch. We were stuck there hiding out from the patrols, waiting for the swelling in my ankle to go down.

  And Abraham talked. He talked about his father and mother, his grandfathers and grandmothers, who had been sold on the auction block like fat cattle. He talked about the South which in one story would be the Garden of Eden, a paradise he was a damn fool to have left, and in the next story it was the hell he wondered why he hadn’t left quicker than he did. He talked about having to escape from a plantation where he’d been caught up in debt and cotton picking. He talked about his travels North, following the old route of the slave’s underground railroad to New York. He talked about the Army and all the places he had been and all the people he had killed. Mostly he talked about being a man, a colored man, an Afro-American man, which for him seemed to be three different men trying to fit into one skin.

  “How do y’all be a man?” he asked, scratching at his head where the hair was starting to grow out.

  “An American and a man? Y’all ask them Bohunks, I-talians, Jews like ya is, them Polacks and Cousin Jacks, them Irish and Greeks and Litvaks, them herrin-chokin Swedes and Finlanders, all of them down there locked up in that stockade. Y’all ask them how ya be an American man. ‘Piece of paper,’ they says. Piece of paper! And my family bein here a hundred years, more, and me wearin the uniform and none of it counts for nothin. Piece of damn paper! They only sees this,” he said pointing to his arm. “This damn blackness is all they sees and no uniform gonna change that and make me an American man like I thought when I joined the Army.”

  Then he started singing in a hard, bitter voice:

  Run nigger run, the pateroller ketch you.

  Run nigger run, it’s almost day.

  Dis nigger run, dis nigger flew.

  Dis nigger tore his shirt in two.

  “Lord almighty but ain’t it still the same and ain’t I still just that poor-assed runnin nigger. How much now is worth all that Freedom over me?”

  The more he talked, the more he reminded me of Charlie Pinto Face, only Charlie had seen his time and was sad with it, whereas Abraham had expected more and I suppose that made him angry.

  We stayed there for almost three weeks; the Army never did come looking for us. No one did. Abraham figured that the miner who had led us there had been arrested or had maybe to run for it himself. We’d been forgotten.

  The day after we’d eaten the last of the bacon Abraham decided I would have to take a chance and go to Mullan.

  “This here black face? No, child, it’s you has gotta go for the both of us. Y’all keeps yer head down and walk likes ya belongs. A couple of them miners that was sprung had kin stoppin there in Mullan. Might be they is still there. Dunn was one of ‘em, other was Sparks. Find out where they lives at, wait until it’s got dark and then see what y’all sees. Tell ‘em to get word to yer Aunt May. She’ll get ya back on the straight. But y’all watch yerself, child. Y’all watch yerself good.”

  I was to send word back with someone who could guide him over the mountains into Montana. From there he was going to beat his way East on the freights to Chicago.

  “Heard tell there is plenty of work in Chicago, plenty of colored people to get me lost in. Be just another nigger to them white folks and right about now I reckon that’ll suit me just fine. Might be I’ll even find me that Sweet Home of Freedom in Chicago.”

  I heard Abraham Lincoln Baker got safely over to Butte. After that he disappeared from my knowing.

  29

  “Oh, my dear Lord! May Hutton’s boy, ain’t ya?” the woman said in alarm, half opening the door and waving me quickly inside.

  It had taken three hours of hard walking to get to Mullan. It took me another hour of asking to find someone who knew the cabin where Spark’s wife lived out on the edge of the town. She was a skinny woman with lank hair and a bad squint. The house smelled of damp and cabbage and something burnt.

  “I guess ya’ll be wantin somethin to eat, won’t ya? Come on if ya comin. Seems you always gets visitors when you makes a pie. Reckon they must smell it. Sit down there.”

  She slipped the cloth off the top of the pitcher, poured a glass of milk, half of which slopped over onto the table, and then cut into the pie. It was burnt, lopsided and, of course, made with huckleberries.

  “They’ve been searching high and low for ya and that nigger soldier and them others too. Maybe a dozen times they been here with those deputies and those soldiers, but my Jim and most of the other men, they’re long gone over to Montana, some reached as far as Colorado by now. Had word of him today from the Federation people. Somethin the matter with that pie?

  “Thought ya’d be long gone too by now. Why you still hangin around here? Where’s that nigger at?”

  She went over to the window and peered out through the side of the curtains into the night.

  “Anybody see ya come here?”

  She gave me paper and a pencil. I wrote that I had asked after her in Mullan. That got her completely crazy.

  “Ya did that? Oh, my dear Lord in Heaven! What did ya want to go and do that for?”

  She snatched the plate with the unfinished piece of pie, held it up against her chest and kept repeating “Oh, my dear Lord in Heaven. Probably on their way here right this very minute. What’s gonna become of me now?”

  She went to the window, still clutching the plate.

  “All over they are. Don’t ya know better than to ask? Eyes watchin. Re-wards. Oh, my dear Lord in Heaven!”

  What with her moaning and carrying on so I was more scared of her than what might be waiting for me outside. I got up and started for the door. She grabbed at me, dropping the plate.

  “Ya wait up now!”

  I thought she had had a sudden change of heart, but she only wanted to blow out the lamp before I opened the front door.

  “Big woodshed up that way,” she whispered and slammed the door closed behind me.

  There was nobody outside, just the crickets singing. Behind them, rising and falling on the night breeze, was a thin thread of human-made music coming from a saloon down in the town. None of those joyous sounds lifted me from where I was feeling right then. If they were watching Mrs. Sparks so close how was I ever going to get in touch with Aunt May?

  Paddy Dunn found me behind the shed at first light the next morning. He was a soft-spoken man for a miner.

  “Hyman?” he asked, then gently turned my head to one side. “Sure it is. You all right, son? Damn that Cockeyed Jane! Sending a mere boy away alone into the night. Scared of her own shadow is that poor benighted woman. Even before the troubles she was no different. Too many years being a miner’s wife does that to some. Come on, get up and let’s be moving. We have an appointment.”

  He took me to the back room of a saloon in Mullan, where half a dozen men sat hunched around a table. As we came in one of them stood up and walked over to us.

  “So, this is him?” he said. “May Hutton’s boy?”

  A tall, heavy-shouldered man with a broad face, square jaw and a dead eye. One thing that caught me was that for such a big man he had surprisingly small hands, one of which was badly scarred.

  “That’s him right enough, Bill,” said Paddy Dunn. “In the actual flesh so to speak.”

  “Hear you’re on the dodge, boy? Pinkertons and the Army after you? So much big trouble for such a little fella. Well then,” he said, “we’ll just have to see about getting you safe out of here, won’t we?”

  30

  They’re not pleased with my performance. I don’t have to look very hard to see that. I’ve given them the Dynamite Express with miners howling and guns blazing and I’ve given them Harry Orchard, put him right there in Wardner on the end of the fuse. But now they’ve got him they don’t seem interested either in
him or the Dynamite Express. They want their own dastardly worked-out, dime-novel plot, want it rolling on clear and straight ahead from the Coeur d’Alenes to Caldwell. They want Big Bill.

  “You’re waltzing us all over the floor, Abraham,” McParland says. “It’s getting late and I’m too old for the dancing.”

  He puts a finger in his hairy ear and digs around. Then he inspects his fingernail. He’s been doing that quite a lot in the last hour or so. Every time he does I feel the pressure on me ease just a tad. You’ve gotta watch for stuff like that at the tables. Sometimes it can give you an edge.

  “You write here,” says Charlie reading, “’I first met Bill Haywood in Mullan, Idaho.’ What was he doing in Mullan?”

  “What were you doing in Mullan?” asks McParland, wiping his finger on the underside of the table and thinking I didn’t notice.

  All of that begins and ends, like I knew from the start with Big Bill Haywood. But to put him in the story they want puts me in the same story and no matter what they promise I reckon the fine people of Idaho are not going to be happy to see me, the self-confessed killer of their ex-Governor, walking free through those gates. Still, there’s a lot more rope to play out before I may have to drop the noose around Big Bill’s neck or my own.

  I went to Mullan on an errand for Al, taking a message to Bert Fry who was laid up sick in bed with a fever. It happened that Bill Haywood was in town on Federation business. Because I had been at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan he asked to see me. Paddy Dunn was there and Jack Simpkins and some others I didn’t recognize.

  “What were they saying about Governor Steunenberg?”

  Not much. They called him names, of course.

  “Names? What names?” asks McParland.

  Snake in the grass, traitor, tyrant, dictator, those kind of things.

  “That’s all, called him names?”

  More or less.

  Of course, it wasn’t only names. They complained that they had trusted Steunenberg, thrown the Labor vote behind him, and now at the first whiff of trouble he had sold them out to the mine owners. There was a lot of talk about Bartlett Sinclair too, especially about his permit system and the new Industrial Union he was forcing the miners to join. They blamed the Governor for that as well. All in all they were pretty upset and desperate about what was happening to the Federation in Shoshone County. Their union was being exterminated, raised and then leveled flat just like the Bunker Hill and Sullivan concentrator.

  Big Bill explained it to me while we waited for the train that would take me to Missoula. Unlike Al, Bill told a story that never left you, either when he was telling it or later on when you thought back.

  “Like a living history lesson all this is,” he said, staring with his good eye across the double tracks to the scarred hills which surrounded Mullan. “Not one I like to see, but maybe one to learn something from, which is what history lessons are for. The Western Federation of Miners, conceived right here in the Coeur d’Alenes, nurtured in the womb of the Ada County Jail and born kicking and screaming into the world over there in the copper city of Butte, Montana. And now they’re trying to kill her stone dead.”

  “They must’ve been burning angry,” offers Charlie.

  They were, too. More than I’ll let on. Jack Simpkins, who’d taken a bayonet through the side for arguing with a bullpen guard, was talking about more giant powder. He wanted to tunnel under the Army camp and set a few boxes. Big Bill said the Federation didn’t want any more games like that, things were plenty stirred up already, although he’d sure like to see Steunenberg given the push. And that’s the point at which I stop the story. When Paddy Dunn asked where to, Bill smiled broadly and said anywhere deep, dark, and stony.

  “What did he mean by ‘giving Steunenberg the push’?” asks McParland.

  Pushed out of office, I write.

  I heard Bill say that too, more than once.

  “Humph,” humphs McParland. “Pushed off a cliff is more likely with that vicious one-eyed bastard.”

  Which only means McParland knows the Bill Haywood he wants to know. Mind you, I’d not try to say Bill was a Quaker. No, he was a miner, with everything that goes with it.

  “I got mine, Hyman,” he said, pointing to his dead right eye, “when I was about your age. Cutting myself a slingshot. Knife jerked. Still, I get by and so will you. Things like we’ve got are not a weakness unless we let them be. Can even be a strength. Being different means you gotta be stronger than the next fella. Hurts like we got to carry with us, why that can make you draw yourself out full and proud if you let it. Make people take you like you are, don’t back up, don’t apologize. People ask, ‘Bill, why you don’t wear a patch.’ Now why’d I want to do that? No reason to hide myself. Proud, Hyman. You remember that.”

  I did. The first time I saw a photograph of him posing, with his left side to the camera and his small hands hidden in his pockets, I remembered what he had said and felt badly let down. But maybe that was my fault for assuming too much, and besides, Bill Haywood never let me or anyone else down when it really mattered. Like in Mullan when I was scared, alone and on the run. What’s a little vanity against that kind of friendship?

  “Gotta get you fast out of Idaho, Hyman. I’d take you with me, but I’m going the other way, back to family in Silver City.”

  What he did was get Steamdrill Irene Copeland, one of my former clients, to come up from Wallace. No paint and a plain dress made her look near enough to the fussy mother she was play-acting.

  I had come into the Coeur d’Alenes on a slow freight, a fugitive full of hopes and overfilled with my dime-novel expectations. I was leaving as a fugitive twice over, three times if you count in the Jews of Spokane. I had a crib girl for a mother, no destination except fast out of Idaho and P. K. D. Swibble’s terrible prophesy of blood and destruction reverberating through my mind louder than the iron wheels of the train that was carrying me.

  PART IV

  1

  McParland stretches his arms out over his head and yawns. “Stop now, boy,” he says, reaching over to take the pages in front of me. “Had enough for one day, I reckon.”

  I write asking them please not to send me back to the cells or solitary and even more, please not back to Montana Jim. I promise them I can do much better tomorrow if I get a good night’s sleep.

  “Sure,” McParland says, pushing aside my note. “You’ll do better tomorrow, Abraham. Because if you don’t, well then, we haven’t much more time to be wasting on you, do we?”

  He goes over to Charlie, bends down and whispers. Charlie listens, all the while looking at me and nodding his head.

  “OK, Abraham, my boy,” McParland says. “You sit tight for a couple of minutes and we’ll be arranging something extra special for you.”

  McParland limps slowly out of the room.

  Charlie drops his feet to the floor. Sitting upright now, he nails me on the end of a smoky stare.

  “Sure are a dam strange little Jewboy, ain’t you Abe?”

  There’s no way to deal with that question.

  “Don’t entirely figure somehow, a gentle-educated boy like you tied up with a murdering Anarchist like Bill Haywood or a low down bomb-throwing back-shooter like Harry Orchard, or those others either, those revolutionists like Hagerty, Debs, DeLeon, Mother Jones, Parsons.”

  He’s watching for a reaction. I try to look puzzled. The story they’re after is spreading out like syrup on a hot griddle. What the hell do they want with Chicago?

  “But then,” he continues, “I’ve found over the years that things are never put together like you figure maybe they should be. You start in to thinking like that, you’ll never get anywheres in the detective business.”

  I’ve heard Big Bill say that you could put the hearts and souls of forty thousand detectives in a hollowed-out piece of hair and they would still rattle. Texas Charlie
and McParland are giving me a better idea of exactly what Bill meant.

  He comes over, walking a bowlegged gait, hikes up his pants leg and sits next to me perched on the edge of the table. Sticking out from under the bottom of his gray city pants are a pair of fancy-scrolled cowboy boots.

  “Check for dents like these on either side of the heel,” Buffalo Bill said. “Usually shows you the real cowboys from the others who’re just wearing them to walk around tall in.”

  Charlie has the spur dents, worn in shiny.

  “I know all about those Anarchists, don’t you think for two seconds that I don’t neither. Who was it murdered our president if it wasn’t an Anarchist? And I know all about what goes on back in Chicago and not just last year either. You see, I was there in ‘86. You heard of the Haymarket?”

  He pauses.

  “No? Thought everyone had heard of it.”

  Of course I know. Haven’t I heard it dozens of times? Wasn’t I born the year the Haymarket Martyrs were executed? Didn’t my own life change after I was told the story by that Russian lady at Henry Street? Was that not the day I ran away from being a Liebermann? How could I not know the story?

  “My first step to understanding about the repression of the workers,” Big Bill said. “When I read about those men being hanged for nothing more than believing in the workers, well it opened a door for me that’s never closed. ‘There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you’re strangling today.’ Couldn’t get that out of my head. Still can’t.”