Castle Garden
Page 33
I’ve heard the same from others, but Charlie seems to have learned a completely different lesson from the Haymarket.
“We were boarding on Harrison Street, my wife and I,” he says. “Heard the bomb go off and then the shooting. Sixty policemen were maimed by those foreign bomb-throwing scum. Decided me right there on the very spot for being a detective. I figured then that the worst threat to this great country of ours is from those foreign agitators and their Anarchist sickness.”
His voice gets tight and taken up with itself.
“If we’re not on our guard, why it will sap the very strength of America, take away that very thing, that newness in the world, which makes us as great as we are. You know what I’m saying to you?”
He’s become almost as tent revival as McParland. He’s standing over me, his hands clenched into bony, avenging fists.
“And we’ve got to root it out whenever and wherever we find it!” he says with harsh venom, bringing a fist down hard on the table. “Root it out and destroy it until not a single solitary foreign germ remains.”
I guess you could say that one way and another the Haymarket story is just about the most powerful changing-of-life story you could ever hear.
“You listen to me real good,” he says in a hard whisper, leaning close. “I know those miners and I know the Coeur d’Alenes. That means I also know you’re holding out on us. Mr. McParland, well, he’s going too easy on you, if you ask me. Maybe it’s on account of you’re being so young and like you are with that throat and all. But don’t you count on the kid gloves lasting much past tomorrow. That would be a number one big mistake.”
He lowers his voice to a harsher menace.
“Not supposed to be telling you this. Mr. McParland, he wanted to save it for tomorrow morning. But I reckon maybe you knowing that he’s found out you were mixed up with that bunch of revolutionists in Chicago might give you something more to think on tonight.”
He’s going to say something else but the door opens. McParland and a prison guard step into the room. Charlie stands up and turns his back on me.
“You go with Mr. Corder here, Abraham,” McParland orders. “He’s got a nice soft bed fixed up for you tonight.”
I get up. I’ve been sitting for hours and my legs feel weak. I stumble, the guard grabs me under the arm.
“Easy there, sonny.”
“We’ll see you here first thing, Abraham,” McParland says. “And you know what I want to be hearing, don’t you? No more dancing around. Straight talk is all that’s left for you. The Inner Circle, Abraham. You think about that. The Inner Circle. Cripple Creek, Telluride. You think about that. Mr. William D. Haywood. You think about him. And maybe there’s more you’ll be wanting to think about. What do you figure?”
I figure to be doing a lot of thinking.
I leave the warden’s office to the same damn tune I’ve been hearing all day long.
2
“Y’all must be one mean, importantly bad hombre,” Beaver Loveman says from the other side of the door. “Don’t ya know who he is?”
The guard had walked me down the outside iron stairs, across the snow-deep yard, past the main cellblocks and the two new ones which are still empty, to a row of three small buildings with false second stories.
One is a blacksmith’s, another the commissary, and the third is where the prison trustees live. That’s where I’ve been put for the night, in a small locked room at the far end of a dormitory with metal frame beds, footlockers, and half a dozen nosy old men.
At least it’s a long step away from cell Number Thirty-seven or another freezing night of solitary. Here I’ve got a frame bed like those outside, a lumpy cotton-tick mattress, and three not-too-greasy blankets. There’s a hot pipe running along the wall near to the floor. A faded sampler on the wall announces that this is “Home Sweet Home.” Through a narrow, thick-barred window I look out onto the white calm of the prison yard, beyond to the few lights flickering from the cellblocks, and higher up to what must be a guard’s lantern swinging along the top of the prison wall.
Supervised by a guard, Beaver Loveman had brought my supper—boiled potatoes, cabbage, some kind of gray meat in gray gravy, a biscuit hacked out of stone, and watery coffee. Damn good it all was. Now he and the others are trying to make conversation with me through the locked door.
“Sure, that’s him all right,” Beaver assures me.
“Damn straight it’s him,” another voice adds.
“Jack Redlands, that is who’s now talkin at ya,” Beaver explains.
“Howdy, son,” Jack confirms.
“Dooley Mankin here.”
“Don Hartman.”
“Parsons,” another voice growls.
“Spotted him right off, I did. Boy oh boy, old dead-eye Charlie Siringo!” Jack says.
Charlie Siringo! Now that is something. Of course he knows the Coeur d’Alenes, knows it blind and running. He’s that damned Pinkerton labor spy Al told me about who caused all the trouble in Gem back in ‘92. It was Butch Cassidy, Big Foot Philips, Blackjack Thompson, Billy the Kid, but now it’s me and all those other dangerous Anarchist revolutionists he’s got in the sights of his silver-plated, pearl handle Colt .45. Like his good friend Buffalo Bill, Siringo’s another real life dime-novel Western hero. Unfortunately, he’s too real and too close for me to celebrate our getting acquainted.
“Got the whole place buzzin he does.”
“They say he’s killed twenty men in his time.”
“They say shit! More like to be thirty.”
“He put this cousin of mine in jail back there in Kansas. Cattle rustlin.”
“Put more than a few boys in here as well. What about Mad Dog Greenwald then?”
“What about him?”
“What y’all done, boy?”
“Don’t be more a fool than you is, Pop. Boy can’t talk.”
“How’s I to know that?”
“It’s Beaver Loveman here, boy. Why don’t ya give us one knock for a yes and two knocks for a no?”
I give two knocks, write that I can pass them notes under the door and slide it to them.
“Right enough,” says Beaver. “Clever is that.”
“Like all them Jews is.”
“What y’all done, boy?”
“Jesus, Pop, don’t ya never plow more than one damn furrow.”
I haven’t done anything, I write. It’s all a stupid misunderstanding.
There’s a moment’s silence and then they all start talking at once.
“Hold up! Hold up!” Beaver shouts. “Damn, now . . .”
“Ain’t got no Charlie Siringo here for nothin, boy,” Pop insists.
“Nor that other one neither. Know him I do.”
“Who’s that, Dooley?”
“Old Molly McParland, that’s who. Pinkerton like the other one. A big shot too. Over there to Denver.”
“Damn me!”
“Jesus!”
“Bet my hat it’s got somethin to do with that fracas over to Caldwell.”
“That what it is, boy?”
“Come on, boy. Ya can tell us.”
“What is it y’all done?”
There’s no point trying. Like McParland and Siringo, the trustees want to hear what they want to hear.
On the other side of the door they’re still arguing. I lay down on the bed and cover myself with the three not-too-greasy blankets.
3
Someone is howling like a wild animal caught in a trap. The noise erupts into my dream, filling out a world, working backward to create a long story that ends with the scream that started it off. I can’t remember anything about the dream but its ending. I remember that because it’s still there, funneling out from one of the cellblock windows, expanding into the empty prison yard, bouncing off the stone walls. Ang
er, pain, hurt, fear, frustration, helplessness—I hear them all.
Stopped now. Cut off in mid-scream. The air in the yard quivers with the echoes which slowly fade like tired pond ripples. The silence forces its way back.
I sit up. The sky is black, no moon, no stars. Even the snow looks black.
A dark dream that only begins with the ending, a prisoner’s howling. Is that my story? Going nowhere but to the gallows and a martyr’s grave?
I feel like I’m in the middle of that damn poem from the Reader.
Oh, why should the spirit of a mortal be proud?
Like a fast-flying meteor, a fast flying cloud,
A flash of lightning, a break of the wave,
He passes from life to rest in the grave.
Not me. Not me. Not me!
They want everything there is that ties Big Bill to Harry Orchard to Caldwell and to stringing him up alongside the Molly Maguires and those from Haymarket.
“You stand up and tell people their lives don’t have to be like they are,” Bill said. “That what they need is the Union, that what they need is Socialism and there’s plenty out there who’ll try to cut you down for saying it. Why? Because they got a big stake in the world staying just like it is with them at the top and the rest bumping along as best they can at the bottom.”
I stand up and begin to walk. The room is four paces long and one, two, almost three paces wide. I turn the switch that works the electric light. The bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling glows faintly. I reach up, take the sampler off the wall. Red and black, with roses twined around the letters. “Home Sweet Home.”
I turn the sampler over. “Praise Jesus” someone has written on the back in thick squat letters. Home Sweet Home and Praise Jesus. What could be more complete for a genuine American boy like me? Born to it, reborn, self-made, over and over again right to the end of my story.
And here I am facing a genuine American death, not knowing what name they’ll carve on my marker. Does it matter? Probably not. If you keep changing names, your past can only belong to you, which means it belongs to no one when you’re pushing up the flowers. So, what difference in the world is a marker if there’s no story to go with it? Nothing to be remembered, nothing to be told.
Abraham, Herbert, Christian, Hyman, Carl, Newborn Buffalo Calf, Meyer Liebermann—Rest in Peace.
I hear a voice. Maybe not, more like the muffled clatter of thunder a long way off. I get up and go to the window.
Nothing out there but snow and the soundless prison yard.
Wait. There it is again! Closer now. A big, giant voice. I suppose that’s what they’re like when you hear them coming out of the sky. God? Could be. I mean, God would come in handy right about now. Could be it’s McParland’s Jesus coming to me in my hour of need. Coming to tell me what I need to say to win my salvation here and in the Hereafter.
No, none of those. Not God or Jesus Christ. You see, I recognize that voice and its fierce thundery rumblings. Burning like the voice of a prophet that he was, and for all I know still is. Out there endlessly riding the side door Pullmans, telling his story, showing his scars, and trying to steer himself and others clear of those murderous rods and the murderous lying West.
“They is waitin for ya, just like they did me. Ain’t nobody escapes, nobody, and ain’t no place to run to. East or West. North or South. No place to run! When they finally comes for ya then remember old P. K. D. Swibble. Then remember old P. K. D. Swibble. Then remember . . .”
I preferred the screaming. At least that was for real.
4
McParland’s face is too close. I can smell his morning-coffee breath, count the purple lines of burst blood vessels that map his nose and cheeks. No P. K. D. Swibble ghostly nightmare. No, sir, for all his portly-small-town-banker looks he is a living P. K. D. Swibble nightmare. Real as the death, real as hanging, close enough to real as you would want to get in this life, stumbling scared on your way to the next.
And so is his companion Charlie Siringo, sitting there across the table sucking on a toothpick.
“You had your soft bed last night, didn’t you, Abraham?” McParland asks. “They treat you right? Good. Finger still hurting you? No? Then we’re all of us straightened out, aren’t we? So, let’s be getting on with it.”
He rests a hand on my shoulder and stares down into my eyes.
“I want you to know, Abraham, that even though your people killed Jesus, I’m not about to be holding that against you personally.”
Well now, that’s a big relief, that is. It means he’s only after me for the one murder.
“There are those that were born and raised Christians who deny Him. That’s a mortal sin, and a whole lot worse than being a Jew, which you can’t do much of anything about. That doesn’t mean you can’t find peace in confession though.”
“To say nothing,” Charlie throws in, “of some kind of amnesty from the state of Idaho.”
McParland pauses until he sees Charlie isn’t going to say any more.
“The Lord of Abraham and Isaac, the Lord of Moses and David, He’s the same for us all.”
Death too. He forgot about that. From the end of a rope it’s the same.
The pressure of his hand increases, his eyes track back and forth across mine.
“I want you to think on that today, Abraham. Real hard.”
He lets go of my shoulder and sits down heavily in his chair. Charlie coughs and shifts the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.
McParland takes a stack of papers out of a small leather case. He lays them on the table, smoothing them out with the heel of his hand.
“Now,” he says, looking at me. “I’m going to be helping you along some today, Abraham. Sort of put you where I know you were and when, and then start you rolling from there. OK? Going to help you save yourself from the hangman, just the same as Kelly the Bum did.
“Well, let’s start with Mr. William D. Haywood, shall we? We know you’re close to him. A fact!” he says with sudden emphasis, stabbing at the papers in front of him. “We also know Harry Orchard was close to him. Another fact! We know that Orchard and some others, including you, were hired by Haywood and the Inner Circle for bombing and killing right across this part of the country from Denver all the way over to San Francisco. Fact! Governor Steunenberg was just the end of a long line of murdering for Harry Orchard, you, and your Federation bosses. A long line which started off in Cripple Creek in 1903. Fact!
“We also know something else, Abraham. Something that will tie it all together for a jury of solid-thinking Idaho farmers with a big black ribbon.”
He pauses dramatically, his eyes widening. He picks a sheet of paper out of the pile in front of him and holds it up for me to see.
“Here it is, Abraham. We know about Brand’s Hall, son. Always been a den of Anarchist vipers. Don’t you be shaking your head at me. We know you were there on Lake Street when they were hatching their Godless Anarchist schemes. Terror, assassination, bombing, subversion, sabotage. All of that and you and Harry Orchard and Bill Haywood and Cripple Creek. We can sell that to an Idaho jury without even breaking into a trot.”
Sure I was in Chicago. Me and maybe two hundred others were there, but I never heard anyone say anything about assassination or any of those other things.
I stop writing.
Of course, some might think that if you got all those revolutionists together under one roof they would spend their time talking about the Bloody Revolution, but they didn’t. There was lots of hard-blowing fancy talk about Socialism and remaking society. Bill started it off calling for the emancipation of the working class from capitalism and slavery, but there wasn’t much of anything new about that and nothing you could call a real scheme for seeing it done. Most of the ten days was taken up with long-winded speeches and arguments that bored me until I wanted to scream with it. Bil
l kept telling me to pay close attention because we were witnessing a great historical occasion like the Mayflower or the Declaration of Independence. I did my best.
At Brand’s Hall they argued about everything they could find to argue about, the constitution, the preamble to the constitution, the manifesto, the preamble to the manifesto, committees, delegates’ credentials, badges, seating, finances, who were real workers and who weren’t. They couldn’t even agree on what to call the damn union.
I didn’t see much Mayflower or Declaration of Independence at Brand’s Hall, much less any talk of assassination and sabotage. Cigar smoke, loud voices, hot-July bad tempers, and gassy soapboxing was more like it really was.
“I wouldn’t expect you to say any different, Abraham. But we know what those Anarchists get up to, and so will a jury.
“But, let’s put all those Industrial Workers of the World to one side for a time. Let’s see what have we got right here and right now. We got Harry and we got Harry’s story,” he says, smacking the papers. “And now we got you. Soon we’re going to get Haywood and Moyer and Pettibone and Simpkins, the entire Inner Circle. The only thing you got left is to help yourself by helping us. You can see that, can’t you, Abraham?”
I write that I didn’t have anything to do with the Steunenberg bombing. I ask why if they know so much do they need me to tell them anything.
McParland laughs and passes the note to Charlie.
“Why, you should be damn glad we do want your story,” Charlie says. “If we didn’t want it you’d have nowhere to go but for that last walk through the rose garden out there.”
“That’s right enough,” McParland adds. “And let me explain something else to you, Abraham. First off, in the state of Idaho you can’t be sure to get a conviction on one man’s testimony alone, especially if he’s an accomplice to the crime. Story needs to be corroborated. Need to have other kinds of evidence, your kind. That’s one. Two is that if the truth be known we don’t really need you at all. That’s right, isn’t it, Charlie?”