The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  Sol climbs up onto the back of the truck, knees aching from the effort. For a long moment, he merely looks stupidly out over the crowd. He sees the anger, the rage simmering in their bellies, and then sends his gaze down to the twenty-one miners’ helmets which line the truck bed, pausing at the one he knows belonged to his son. It’s the old, bashed-up spare, a hand-me-down from Sol himself. Owen’s own helmet is buried with him, somewhere down the Penn, melted maybe, buried under the tons of rock that came down when the timbers burned. One day some unlucky mucker would find his boy, perhaps, or maybe his body will just stay down there, if the seams of ore lead elsewhere. Eventually, when it finally plays out, the mine will be allowed to flood and whatever is left of Owen by then will remain forever underwater. It’s rare that they aren’t able to get a body out, but that’s most likely to be his boy’s fate, left interred inside the mine that took him. This whole town his headstone.

  Sol looks up again, feeling heavy and tired inside. Whatever is going to happen here is going to happen. It doesn’t matter what he has to say, so there’s no point trying to use words to stop anything. Frank asked him to talk about the fire, about the men who had died because the Company found safety to be an embarrassment to the sanctity of the profit line. Sol will tell these men, then, about the miners that died. He’ll tell them about his boy and, if they want to bust heads with scabs and the police, let them. Owen and the others deserve at least to be heard, even if it all turns to shit by the end.

  Sol straightens up, takes a deep breath. As he does, he catches the eye of Sean Harrity, who nods back, and then, shrugging, reaches inside his jacket.

  The raven atop the timbers stretches, extending his wings.

  4.

  Billy comes half-awake to the sound of tapping at the window, a dry rap like a fingernail against the glass of their cabin’s one, grimy little pane. He’d been dreaming of some kind of fight, masses of men pushing and striking at one another, gunfire and screams and the dry, metal smells of snow and bloody dirt. A raven, flapping atop a stack of timbers. The dream had been a confusing, inchoate collection of ideas, only loosely wrapped together in the kind of tortured logic that dissolved upon waking, the way such things often are. Now, his heart is racing, the bedding wrapped and twisted around him so that he feels trapped. He has the sense that he’s shouted himself awake, but then he hears the tapping again and realizes that there’s something outside the window.

  A bird, something about a bird, in the dream. Something about his uncle and a bird, before all the rest but, when he tries to come closer to the thought, it scuttles away.

  Sagiistoo! he hears, although he knows he hadn’t, not really, and tries to shake himself the rest of the way to consciousness. For once, sleep isn’t easily dropping him free of its grasp, until it finally does and the voice and the dream fall away.

  Sol is snoring in his own bed across the room, a ratcheting buzz that’s amplified by what must be amazingly capacious sinus cavities, punctuated by irregular gasps for air like a drowning man. Billy had long ago learned to ignore it, even given his own tendencies towards light and fitful sleep. With a quiet groan, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and blearily sits up, feeling half-drunk still from the boozy celebrations that broke out after turning the scabs away at the strike; he has a stabbing pain in his head and feels as if all the water has been leached out of his body, leaving him shaky and as dry as gristle. He’s never been much of a drinker, for reasons both temperamental and constitutional and, now, he remembers why.

  The tapping at the window continues, soft and sharp. Moving slowly, Billy reaches under his pillow for the large knife he’d started keeping there a few days ago, for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand. The damn thing is big enough that he can feel it pressing painfully on his skull through his flat, tired pillow when he tries to sleep. But, somehow, he doesn’t feel quite right lately if it’s not there. It’s an uncomfortable comfort, he thinks, holding the knife in his hand now, feeling the cold, hard weight of it. Listening to the quiet rapping at the glass, which is still loud enough in Billy’s dried-out, ill-used skull to hurt. Go away, whoever you are. Let me fucking sleep.

  For a while that afternoon, it had looked like what had begun as a memorial would end in bloodshed, riot. More death, more miners to mourn. The work stoppage had done nothing but send already keyed-up, angry men that much more out of sorts. Working men will say that they want their leisure and, to a point, that’s true. But what men want even more is the safety of routine. It felt wrong, somehow, to be outside in the cold February sunshine on a working day, no matter what the justification. No work means no pay which means no food for your family. No end-of-shift Sean O’Farrell and the companionship of friends equally worn out from twelve hours down the hole. No work means restlessness, unease; combine that with the memory of brothers killed by Company negligence and combine that with a passel of strikebreakers come to take your pay and you have a bad, bad combination.

  Trust Frank, Sol had said. Man knows what he’s doing. Trust Rob. From the beginning, though, the idea of the strike, combined with the memorial, had seemed like a bad idea to Billy. But what did he know? He wasn’t even particularly attentive to the Labor movement. Just a man who did his job, paid his union dues, maybe listened to the occasional speech down at the Hall. He’s no dummy though, he knows, and shit and damn, today had been a close one.

  No wonder he let himself get so fucking drunk afterward.

  Frank said his piece about unity and focus and a fair wage for a fair job and all that, ideas that smell sweet but lack real taste when chewed, Billy’s always thought, and he’d damn near lost the crowd before he was done. But then Sol stands up and, although Billy shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing him as he does, knowing Sol has a touch of the poetic in him, at times, he is: the old man speaks calmly, elegantly even, with feeling. Brings the crowd back in, quiets the restless and angry with just a few simple, heartfelt words about the son he’d lost, the friends he’d feared for, down the burning Penn a year ago.

  Sol hadn’t been much of a father to Owen; it was Dr Rideout and his wife who had raised the boy. Maybe, had things with Elizabeth not happened as they had, Sol would have done better. He’d damn near raised Billy, after all, rest of the way up, anyway, after Billy had left that school and Bad Bird had gotten too dangerous to be around. Maybe it was a flavor of guilt at his failure with Owen that’d made Sol take Billy in, those years ago, and maybe he could have started over with Owen, picked up some of those pieces, had the fire not happened. Maybes were worth jack shit, though, Billy knows, no more than that. Sol can be a pain in the ass, that’s a truth; but, under the bullshit, is the man that Billy still, these years later, shares a shitty little room with, by his own damn choice. He wouldn’t have called it in so many words, but he loves Sol Parker, plain and simple. He knows that Owen loved him, too. Or would have, if he’d had the chance to know him.

  So, when Sol starts speaking about the fire, about getting his boys out, except for the one person that, in a perfect world, would have been first to the mine collar, Billy can’t help but feel his eyes burning. Something in Sol’s words, or maybe just his tone, communicates itself to the unraveling mass of angry men who are looking to take out their frustrations on the easy target of the scabs coming up. Cowards, thieves, escorted by the police in the pay of the ACM, to take their work, steal food from their babies’ mouths.

  Billy sees Sean Harrity, smoking a cigar he’s drawn from a pocket inside his jacket, eyeing Sol from within the cloud of smoke he’s making, puffing away like a freight train. Just a cigar, nothing more than that, and never mind the look in his eyes. Above his head, squatting on a stack of timbers, a big raven frets and mutters.

  The crowd is ominously silent when the scabs start to hop out of the back of the trucks, looking at the ground for the most part, not willing to meet the eyes of the men they are betraying. Their police escorts grip their batons so tightly that, even from here, Billy can see whi
tening knuckles. On the other side of the picket, mine guards are shifting nervously, rifles pressed to chests. Between them all, the working men are packing closer together, trying to fill the space with as much human mass as possible, to build a wall of muscle between the collar of the Neversweat and the scabs that have come to go down her.

  One burly, red-faced police sergeant steps forward, close to the protesters. The man raises his baton, points to the headframe of the mine, widens his legs. He sucks in a deep breath of air in preparation for whatever he’s going to say.

  “Not today, brother!” From the bed of the pickup, Sol bellows the words, shaking his head, arms crossed over his chest.

  The shout is immediately picked up by the strikers, individually at first and then with greater cohesion, a staccato beat from hundreds of hoarse throats.

  – “Not today, brother.”

  – “Not today, brother!”

  – “NOT TODAY, BROTHER!”

  The sergeant can’t help but take a step back. He raises his own voice, but the words are drowned out by the chanting miners. The scabs still stare at the ground, shrinking into themselves even more.

  – “NOT TODAY, BROTHER!”

  – “NOT TODAY, BROTHER!”

  After a while, Frank pushes his way through the miners, flanked by a wary Rob Quinn. He takes the sergeant aside. They huddle together, Frank pressing his case, from time to time gesturing back to the mass of yelling men packed between the putative workers and the mine collar. The sergeant’s face gets yet redder and he stabs a finger into Frank Little’s breastbone, making his displeasure known, waving vaguely towards town where the ACM offices are. Even from a distance, without sound, it’s clear what the conversation entails.

  And then, just like that, it’s all over.

  The sergeant shouts towards his men and then washes a last baleful glare over the strikers, no doubt memorizing faces as best he can. With a sneer towards Frank and Quinn, he turns his back, directing the scabs into the trucks with a minimal amount of curt, disgusted gestures. The trucks cough back to life and, a few minutes later, the miners are left to themselves, wedged between the Company and that day’s profits, still shouting.

  – “NOT TODAY, BROTHER!”

  – “NOT TODAY, BROTHER!”

  Later, of course, the festive, comradely spirit devolves into pure, drunken celebration, the miners of Butte reveling in one brief, surprising victory over the forces of Capital, washing the dust out of their tired, sore throats with round after round of drinks. There are songs and bar bets and, likely, another generation of miners planted into the bellies of willing women that night. There are fistfights, of course, mostly good-natured except when they aren’t. The whores are walking bowlegged by night’s end, picking up the slack for those miners lacking a wife or a steady.

  Tomorrow will be another day but, tonight, Labor is king.

  Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Billy sits on his bed now, listens to whatever drunken fool is tapping at his window, and vows to never drink again. Never, ever again. Eventually, with a determined, unsteady movement, he flings himself upright, weaving for a moment. Knife held behind his back, he yanks aside the tatty lace curtain, heaving up the sash.

  No one’s there.

  Whichever asshole had stumbled up to rob Billy of his sleep and introduce him to this hangover must have finally moved on. Cursing liquor and all who consume it, himself most certainly included, Billy staggers back to his bed. He drops into it, searching again for slumber.

  5.

  Uninvited, Marked Face sits down across the table from his nephew Sagiistoo, next to his pet white man, Solomon Parker. It’s early, the sun just up, and each man is staring bleary eyed into a steaming mug of coffee. Searching those depths for relief from the white sickness. Marked Face himself is an old man, who needs little sleep, for whom drink has largely lost its savor; he relishes the feeling of health that a man has when sober and in the presence of suffering drunkards. It’s a small pleasure.

  Here, again, he is come to do the work of the Above Ones. That which must pass is moving ever onwards, creeping inexorably to the end. Marked Face thinks, as he has many times before, how strange it is that such massive things like the shape of a world can be determined by such tiny actions. Again, the thin searching root that splits the boulder, the pebble that starts the slide that destroys the mountain. Bones, clattering on a table. Such tiny actions, all of them, to do so much. But, then again, to the Above Ones, men are all tiny. They are as ants to those people.

  He feels the bones warming in his chest. Best to get on with things, then.

  “You look unwell, Nephew,” he says, in the true tongue, over-loudly, not bothering to hide his smile as the drunkards wince. “Perhaps you indulged in too much of the white man’s medicine, hey? Did my crazy brother Bad Bird ever tell you the story of the Old Ones and the sacred ear mountain? I will tell it to you now. Listen. You see, one day, the daughter of Siinatssi’s brother, Maatakssi, came to the old man and said…”

  This old man needs to pipe the fuck down, Sol thinks. Billy must have the same thought, as he says, “Shut up, Uncle,” holding his head on one palm as he has been since they got to the diner. It’s all Sol can do to keep from reaching across the table and throttling the old Indian. If he felt better, himself, he might have done so. There’s nothing worse for a hungover man than the presence of the loudly sober. Whatever the old fucker is saying in Indian is most likely not complimentary, anyway; his very presence seems to stir up unpleasant half-memories, although Sol himself has never met the man, so far as he knows. Some relation of Billy’s, apparently. He seems familiar, maybe, but Sol feels too wretched to study on it.

  Sol had dreamt of Owen last night, no doubt due to the feelings cracked loose at the memorial, from the cage in his chest where he keeps them. He almost never speaks about Owen to anyone; Billy maybe, once or twice, but not even to the other boys in his crew. His surrogate little family, Owen’s briefly adopted brothers. Certainly Sol’s never before stood up in front of a mass of men, mostly strangers, and talked about the boy. Doing so has broken a poorly mortared dam inside him, and the thought of Owen has crawled its way into his head, infected his dreams.

  “Coffee,” he croaks out, remembering his manners. He waves a waitress over, points at his cup, nods at the old Indian.

  When it’s brought to him, the old man stares at his cup of coffee. He picks it up, briefly blowing on it before taking a long, loud, slurping sip. In English, he says, “I heard that you white miners won a great victory yesterday, against your masters. Congratulations.” He tries another taste of the coffee but then makes an unpleasant face and blows a long breath across the mug. He sets it down and pushes it away.

  If Sol hadn’t been so hungover and out of sorts to question his own senses, he would wonder just how that cup of coffee the old Indian pushed away, after blowing on it, has frozen solid into a black mass.

  “Yes, a great victory, Uncle,” Billy says. “No one got their heads cracked, for once, just for standing in a road. The fuck are you here, anyway, old man? Shouldn’t you be on the reservation?” He just wants to be left alone, left alone to nurse his aching head and grumbling guts with a cup of coffee and the greasiest eggs and potatoes a Butte diner can provide, some salty, meaty corned-beef hash, something to help him wait out the hours until he can return to being merely sick instead of both sick and hungover.

  “Why am I here? That’s my own counsel, boy. Maybe I just wanted to see my beloved nephew, Sagiistoo. Are you sure you are well, Nephew? You look pale, even for a white man.”

  Billy manages as much of a glare as he can, trying to keep the contents of his stomach where they belong. He will never drink again, he vows. Never. His uncle sits there, across from him, smiling wide enough that Billy wants to do nothing more than slap it off him. From time to time the old man looks around the room, nodding amiably whenever anyone catches his eye. This cheerfulness is more disconcerting than Marked Face’s general surly anger,
and Billy is uneasy that it’s the mad smile that prefaces the fist, as it often had been when he, Billy, was small. Both his father and uncle have dangerous, unpredictable natures, as shared scars attest.

  Their food arrives and they tuck in, Marked Face refusing to order with a smiling shake of the head. The hash and eggs are oily and hot, thick with salt; the taste is a small shine of heaven. Billy knows that he’ll shit himself inside out later but, now, he can feel the food sucking some of the whiskey from his innards, steering him on a course towards human again.

  Marked Face has taken something out from a pouch inside his shirt and is shaking it in his cupped hands, as if praying. When he lets them go, Billy sees that they’re his old bone dice, and he feels a twist of unease in his belly, and not simply because he can see the look on Sol’s face, the familiar gleam coming to his eye, the gleam that he gets when he’s about to lose something. That same gleam that put him in this current mess with Sean Harrity. There’s something more to this, but he doesn’t know what. He doesn’t know why Marked Face is here and the unease is deepening now. Billy glances outside the window without knowing what he’s looking for.

  “Do you gamble, white man?”

  When Billy turns back, his uncle is smiling wider.

  “Let’s go, Sol,” Billy says, pushing his empty plate forward. He tosses some money on the table. “Let’s get out of here.”