Governor Coolidge held a press conference at ten. He announced that in addition to the regiments Mayor Peters had called up, he had asked Brigadier General Nelson Bryant to assume command of the state response to the crisis. General Bryant had accepted and would command the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Regiments of the State Guard as well as a machine-gun company.
Volunteers continued to converge on the Chamber of Commerce to receive their badges, uniforms, and weapons. Most, he noted, were former officers of the Massachusetts Yankee Division and had served with distinction in the Great War. He further noted that 150 Harvard undergraduates, including the entire football team, had been sworn in as members of the volunteer police department.
“We are in good hands, gentlemen.”
When asked why the State Guard had not been called out the previous evening, Governor Coolidge responded, “Yesterday I was persuaded to leave matters of public safety to city authorities. I have since regretted the wisdom of this trust.”
When a reporter asked the governor how he’d suffered the bruise under his left eye, Governor Coolidge announced that the press conference was over and left the room.
Danny stood with Nora on the rooftop of his building and looked down at the North End. During the worst of the rioting, some men had blocked off Salem Street with truck tires they’d doused in gasoline and lit afire. Danny could see one now, melted into the street and still smoking, the stench filling his nostrils. The mob had grown all evening, restless, itchy. At about ten o’clock, it had stopped roiling and begun to vent. Danny had watched from his window. Impotent.
By the time it abated about 2 A.M., the streets lay as smashed and violated as they had after the molasses flood. The voices of the victims—of assaults, of muggings, of motiveless beatings, of rape—rose from the streets and out of tenement windows and rooming houses. Moaning, keening, weeping. The cries of those chosen for random violence, bereft with the knowledge that they’d never know justice in this world.
And it was his fault.
Nora told him it wasn’t, but he could see she didn’t fully believe it. She’d changed over the course of the night; doubt had entered her eyes. About the choice he’d made, about him. When they’d finally lain down in bed last night, her lips found his cheek and they were cool and hesitant. Instead of going to sleep with one arm over his chest and one leg over his, her usual custom, she turned onto her left side. Her back touched his, so it wasn’t a complete rejection, but he felt it nonetheless.
Now, standing with their coffee on the rooftop, looking at the damage strewn below them in the gray light of an overcast morning, she placed a hand on Danny’s lower back. It was the lightest of touches and just as quickly removed. When Danny turned, she was chewing the edge of her thumb and her eyes were moist.
“You’re not going to work today,” he said.
She shook her head but said nothing.
“Nora.”
She stopped chewing her thumb and lifted her coffee cup off the parapet. She looked at him, her eyes wide and blank, unreadable.
“You’re not going to—”
“Yes, I am,” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you out on those streets.”
Her shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. “It’s my job. I’m not getting fired.”
“You won’t get fired.”
Another tiny shrug. “And if you’re wrong? How would we eat?”
“This will be over soon.”
She shook her head.
“It will. Once the city realizes we had no choice and that—”
She turned to him. “The city will hate you, Danny.” She swept her arm at the streets below. “They’ll never forgive you for this.”
“So we were wrong?” A well of isolation sprang up inside him, as desolate and hopeless as any he’d ever known.
“No,” she said. “No.” She came to him and the touch of her hands on his cheeks felt like salvation. “No, no, no.” She shook his face until he met her eyes. “You weren’t wrong. You did the only thing you could. It’s just…” She looked off the roof again.
“Just what?”
“They made it so that the only choice you had left was the one sure to doom you.” She kissed him; he tasted the salt of her tears. “I love you. I believe in what you did.”
“But you think we’re doomed.”
Her hands trailed off his face and fell to her sides. “I think…” Her face cooled as he watched her, something he was learning about her, her need to treat crisis with detachment. She raised her eyes and they were no longer moist. “I think you might be out of a job.” She gave him a sad, tight smile. “So I can’t be losing mine, can I now?”
He walked her to work.
Around them, gray ash and the endless crunch of glass. Scraps of bloodied clothing, splattered pies on the cobblestone amid chunks of brick and charred wood. Blackened storefronts. Overturned carts and overturned cars, all burnt. Two halves of one skirt in the gutter, wet and covered in soot.
It didn’t get any worse once they left the North End, it just got more repetitive and, by the time they reached Scollay Square, larger in scope and scale. He tried to pull Nora to him, but she preferred to walk alone. Every now and then she would glance the side of her hand off his and gave him a look of intimate sorrow, and once she leaned into his shoulder as they climbed Bowdoin Street, but she never spoke.
Neither did he.
There was nothing to say.
After he dropped her at work, he walked back to the North End and joined the picket line outside the Oh-One station house. Throughout the late morning and early afternoon, they walked back and forth along Hanover Street. Some passersby greeted them with calls of support and others with shouts of “for shame,” but the majority said nothing. They passed along the edge of the sidewalk with downturned eyes or stared through Danny and the other men as if they were ghosts.
Scabs arrived throughout the day. Danny had given the order that they were to be allowed entrance as long as they crossed along the outer edges of the picket line and not through it. Outside of one tense chest-bumping incident and a few catcalls, the scabs passed into the Oh-One station house without ado.
Up and down Hanover came the sound of hammers as men replaced windows with wood planks while others swept up the glass and rescued from the debris any goods the mob had overlooked. A cobbler Danny knew, Giuseppe Balari, stood for a long time staring into the wreckage of his shop. He’d stacked wood against his shop door and laid out his tools, but at the moment when he could have begun covering his storefront, he placed the hammer down on the sidewalk and just stood there, hands out by his side, palms up. He stood that way for ten minutes.
When he turned, Danny didn’t manage to drop his eyes in time and Giuseppe’s found his. He stared across the street at Danny and mouthed one word: Why?
Danny shook his head, a helpless gesture, and turned his face forward as he made another circuit in front of the station house. When he looked again, Giuseppe had placed a wood plank to the window frame and begun hammering.
Midday, several city tow trucks cleared the streets, the husks rattling and clanking over the cobblestones, the tow drivers repeatedly having to stop to retrieve pieces that had fallen off. Not long after, a Packard Single Six pulled to the curb by the picket line and Ralph Raphelson stuck his head out the back window. “A minute, Officer?”
Danny turned his sign upside down and leaned it against a lamp pole. He climbed into the backseat with Raphelson. Raphelson gave him an awkward smile and said nothing. Danny looked out the window at the men walking in circles, at the wood storefronts up and down Hanover.
Raphelson said, “The vote on a sympathy strike has been delayed.”
Danny’s first reaction was a chilled numbness. “Delayed?”
Raphelson nodded.
“For how long?”
Raphelson looked out his window. “Difficult to ascertain. We’ve had a hard time reachi
ng several of the delegates.”
“You can’t vote without them?”
He shook his head. “All delegates must be present. That’s sacrosanct.”
“How long before everyone’s rounded up?”
“Hard to tell.”
Danny turned on the seat. “How long?”
“Could be later today. Could be tomorrow.”
The numbness left Danny, replaced by an adrenal spike of fear. “But no later.”
Raphelson said nothing.
“Ralph,” Danny said. “Ralph.”
Raphelson turned his head, looked at him.
“No later than tomorrow,” Danny said. “Right?”
“I can’t guarantee anything.”
Danny sat back in his seat. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.”
In Luther’s room, he and Isaiah packed the laundry Mrs. Grouse had brought up to them. Isaiah, a veteran traveler, showed Luther how to roll his clothing instead of folding it, and they placed it in Luther’s suitcase.
“It’ll give you a lot more room,” he said, “and you’re less apt to suffer wrinkles. But you have to roll it tight now. Like this.”
Luther watched Isaiah, then brought the legs of a pair of trousers together and started rolling them from the cuffs.
“A little tighter.”
Luther unrolled the trousers and made the first curl twice as tight and clenched his hands as he continued the roll.
“You’re getting it now.”
Luther cinched the fabric hard between his fingers. “She going to be okay?”
“It’ll pass, I’m sure.” Isaiah lay a shirt on the bed and buttoned it up. He folded it and smoothed the creases and rolled it up. When he was done, he turned and placed it in the suitcase and smoothed his palm across it one last time. “It’ll pass.”
When they came down the stairs, they left the suitcase at the bottom and found Yvette in the parlor. She looked up from the afternoon edition of The Examiner, and her eyes were bright.
“They may send the State Guard to the trouble spots.”
Luther nodded.
Isaiah took his customary seat by the hearth. “I expect the rioting is near over.”
“I certainly hope so.” Yvette folded the paper and placed it on the side table. She smoothed her dress against her knees. “Luther, would you pour me a cup of tea?”
Luther crossed to the tea service on the sideboard and placed a cube of sugar and spoonful of milk in the cup before adding the tea. He put the cup in its saucer and carried it to Mrs. Giddreaux. She thanked him with a smile and a nod.
“Where were you?” she said.
“We were upstairs.”
“Not now.” She took a sip of tea. “During the grand opening. The ribbon cutting.”
Luther went back to the sideboard and poured another cup of tea. “Mr. Giddreaux?”
Isaiah held up a hand. “Thank you, but no, I’m fine, son.”
Luther nodded and added a cube of sugar and sat across from Mrs. Giddreaux. “I got hung up. I’m sorry.”
She said, “That big policeman, oh, he was mad. It was as if he knew exactly where to look. And yet, he found nothing at all.”
“Strange,” Luther said.
Mrs. Giddreaux took another sip of tea. “How lucky for us.”
“I guess that’s how it turned out.”
“And now you’re off to Tulsa.”
“It’s where my wife and son are, ma’am. You know if there was any lesser reason, I’d never be going.”
She smiled and looked down at her knees. “Maybe you’ll write.”
That damn near broke Luther, damn near brought him to his knees.
“Ma’am, you surely know that I will write. You surely must know that.”
She gathered up his soul in her beautiful eyes. “You do that, my son. You do that.”
When she looked back at her knees, Luther met Isaiah’s gaze. He nodded at the great old man. “If I may impose…”
Mrs. Giddreaux looked back up.
“I still have a bit a business to clear up with those white friends I made.”
“What sort of business?”
“A proper good-bye,” Luther said. “If I could stay one or two more nights, it sure would make things easier.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “Are you patronizing an old woman, Luther?”
“Never, ma’am.”
She pointed a finger and wagged it slowly. “Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“Might could,” Luther said. “Depends if it got some of your roast chicken attached to it, ma’am.”
“Is that the trick?”
“I believe it is.”
Mrs. Giddreaux stood and smoothed her skirt. She turned toward the kitchen. “I have potatoes need peeling and beans need washing, young man. Don’t be tarrying.”
Luther followed her out of the room. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
It was sundown when the mobs returned to the streets. In some sections—South Boston and Charlestown—it was the same random mayhem, but in other areas, particularly Roxbury and the South End, it had developed a political tenor. When Andrew Peters heard about this, he had Horace Russell drive him over to Columbus Avenue. General Cole didn’t want him to leave without a military escort, but Peters convinced him he’d be fine. He’d been doing it all last night and it was a lot easier with one car than three.
Horace Russell stopped the car at Arlington and Columbus. The mob was a block farther down, and Peters stepped out of the car and walked half a block. Along the way he passed three barrels filled with pitch, upended torches sticking out of them. The sight of them—the sense they gave of the medieval—stoked his dread.
The signs were worse. Whereas the few he’d seen last night were mostly crude variations on either FUCK THE POLICE or FUCK THE SCABS, these new ones had been carefully prepared in red lettering as bright as fresh blood. Several were in Russian, but the rest were clear enough:
REVOLUTION NOW!
END THE TYRANNY OF THE STATE!
DEATH TO CAPITALISM! DEATH TO SLAVE DRIVERS!
OVERTHROW THE CAPITALIST MONARCHY!
…and the one Mayor Andrew J. Peters liked least of all…
BURN, BOSTON, BURN!
He hurried back to the car and told Horace Russell to drive straight to General Cole.
General Cole took the news with a knowing nod. “We’ve received reports that the mob in Scollay Square is also growing political. South Boston is already bursting at the seams. I don’t think they’ll be able to hold them back with forty policemen, as they did last night. I’m sending volunteers to both areas to see if they can quell the disturbance. Barring that they’re to report back with specifics about crowd size and the depth of the Bolshevik influence.”
“‘Burn, Boston, burn,’” Peters whispered.
“It won’t come to that, Mr. Mayor, I assure you. Why, the entire Harvard football team is now armed and standing by for orders. Those are fine young men. And I’m in constant contact with Major Sullivan and the State Guard Command. They’re just around the corner, sir, standing at the ready.”
Peters nodded, taking comfort in that, however small. Four full regiments plus a machine-gun unit and the motor and ambulance corps.
“I’ll check in with Major Sullivan now,” Peters said.
“Careful out there, Mr. Mayor. Dusk is near upon us.”
Peters left the office that just yesterday had been occupied by Edwin Curtis. He walked up the hill to the State House, and his heart leapt at the sight of them—my god, an army! Under the grand archway at the back of the building, the First Cavalry Troop paraded their horses back and forth in a steady stream, the clop of the hooves sounding like muffled gunshots against the cobblestones. On the front lawns facing Beacon Street, the Twelfth and Fifteenth Regiments stood at parade rest. Across the street, at the top of the Common, the Tenth and Eleventh stood at full attention. If Peters had never wanted it to come to this, he could
nevertheless be forgiven for the swell of pride the sight of the Commonwealth’s might birthed in him. This was the antithesis of the mob. This was calculated force, beholden to the rule of law, capable of restraint and violence in equal measure. This was the fist beneath the velvet glove of democracy, and it was gorgeous.
He accepted their salutes as he passed through them and up the front steps of the State House. His body felt utterly weightless by the time he passed through the great marble hall and was directed to Major Sullivan in the back with the First Cavalry. Major Sullivan had set up his command post under the archway, and the telephones and field radios on the long table in front of him were ringing at a furious pace. Officers answered them and scribbled on paper and handed the papers to Major Sullivan, who took note of the mayor as he approached, and then went back to scanning his latest dispatch.
He saluted Andrew Peters. “Mr. Mayor, I’d say you’re just in time.”
“For?”
“The volunteer police General Cole sent to Scollay Square walked into an ambush, sir. There have been shots fired, several injuries reported.”
“Good Lord.”
Major Sullivan nodded. “They won’t last, sir. I’m not sure they’ll last five minutes in truth.”
Well then, here it was.
“Your men are ready?”
“You see them here before you, sir.”
“The cavalry?” Peters said.
“No quicker way to break up a crowd and establish dominance, Mr. Mayor.”
Peters was struck by the absurdity of it all—a nineteenth-century military action in twentieth-century America. Absurd but somehow apt.
Peters gave the order: “Save the volunteers, Major.”
“With pleasure, sir.” Major Sullivan snapped a salute and a young captain brought him his horse. Sullivan toed the stirrup without ever looking at it and swung gracefully atop his horse. The captain climbed onto the mount behind his and raised a bugle to his shoulder.
“First Cavalry Troop, on my command we will ride down into Scollay Square to the intersection of Cornhill and Sudbury. We will rescue the volunteer policemen and restore order. You are not to fire on the crowd unless you have no—I repeat, absolutely no—choice. Is that understood?”
The Given Day Page 62
