The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “After He smote her, God spoke to her. He spoke to her for a very long time, and when she awoke, she knew the Almighty to be a fraud and a coward. A handsome young man had her in his arms and was standing up. He was whispering to her that it would be all right, she was fine and everything would be all right, she should not worry. Rosemary was not to worry. The handsome young man repeated this injunction. No stranger to the protocols of the fairy tale, she immediately trusted the young man and found herself as incapable of worry as of suspicion. His princely, heroic beauty held no trace of treachery or even vulnerability to vice—and in fact his only fault seemed to lie in an apparent double standard: he was visibly worried, stricken, it was not too much to say, with anxiety. If he was outwardly reassuring, he was also clearly gripped by a fear of what might happen if he failed to get Rosemary off the filthy floor and into a warm bed in a clean room. He carried her across, it seemed, the whole of Willimantic, me bouncing along next to them, moaning and whispering and petting Rosemary’s head, then through the door of a small house, up its main staircase, and into a room that was clean and warm but nearly empty. There was a bed in it, and he put her gently under its covers. I crawled in too, and he seemed not to think I was being presumptuous. He brought more blankets and more pillows. He brought some food, which we ate together, conversing with polite awkwardness about conditions at the mill, the weather, opera, and romantic poetry. There was evidence outside of a growing commotion, but we were able to ignore it. Rosemary was warm and happy and thoroughly amazed at the depth of the young man’s knowledge of beautiful, truthful things—as was I, even though I saw very clearly that I was not the object of his tender little attentions, but merely an object. We were as well unspeakably grateful to him—so grateful and so admiring we found it impossible to find out who he was or even where we were. After a while, in which we must have dozed, the commotion outside became so loud and strange that we could ignore it no longer. We stood at the window, the young man holding the curtain back just enough so that we could see. It was a strike. ‘They’re saying you started it,’ laughed the young man. ‘Me?’ asked Rosemary. ‘Yes.’ ‘Who is saying that?’ ‘The men who saw you take the shuttle to your head.’ ‘Oh,’ said Rosemary falteringly. ‘Is that what happened . . .?’ ‘Yes. They think you’re dead. Some of them do, anyway. It was too much for them to bear. You’re a legend in your own time.’ ‘I ought to join them.’ ‘Certainly, if you feel better. But do you in fact feel better?’ Rosemary suddenly found herself sobbing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Then,’ said the young man, ‘you must stay.’ ‘Perhaps until the morning . . .?’ Admitting her weakness made her feel even worse, and she sobbed wretchedly. ‘Certainly. But while you are resting, think about those men who know you are not dead.’ ‘There are men who believe I’m alive?’ ‘Of course there are, darling. But you’re safe here. If you expose yourself, whether you feel better or not, you will be less safe. You may in fact find yourself in terrifying danger. You might get shot. You might go to prison for the rest of your life.’ The young man stared out the window. ‘I’d lie low for a while,’ he said, not turning around. ‘You too, of course,’ he said to me, turning abruptly and putting his hand on my shoulder.”

  “Rosemary sat on the edge of the bed. Her feet were cold. It was hard to believe, but she thought she could eat some more, if more was available. The young man said he would find more if it was the last thing he did. His pose of ardency seemed even more authentic than it had been earlier, but what he actually did was give me some money and send me out. Earlier, prepossessingly resourceful, he had found a Victrola and a complete recording, forty sides, by La Voce del Padrone of La Gioconda. We listened to this long masterpiece in its entirety, and then I went out for bread and cheese. Rosemary and the young man listened to it again, in its entirety, playing over and over ‘The Dance of the Hours,’ because it took me, no surprise, quite a while to get the food. We listened to it yet again, mad for it, really, as who would not have been, given all that had happened, all that was happening? The next morning, the young man gone, we decided we were finished lying low. Rosemary was pregnant. Though of course we didn’t know it at the time, she couldn’t keep the news of the fuck to herself. The young man had disappeared. Had he fathered the presence she suddenly insisted she unmistakably felt within her? She did not know. She did not know. How was one to know? I did not know. She did not care. I cared but was helpless. Strangely, her skirt was missing too, the one—the only—in which she believed she’d sewn the family document. Since her undergarments, stockings, boots, blouse, and sweater were all still available to her, but strewn here and there about the room, the corridor, landing, and stairs, she concluded she was merely being hysterical and could not trust herself to look carefully and search thoroughly an environment in which so much had happened in so little time. ‘I could be,’ she said, ‘looking right at it.’ Wrapping herself in the bedsheet with snug ingenuity, she dressed herself and we went out into the crowded street. It was a cold day but not so cold that we shivered, and if the gray sky threatened snow, it was still dry. Rosemary liked to speak of herself, and perhaps to think of herself, as a fairy-tale innocent, but she was not naïve. She knew she hadn’t caused the strike, but she felt in an obscure way responsible, even guilty. There is no explaining such guilt: it had something to do with a frivolous lightheartedness that informed or was at least present in or witness to her darkest deeds. There was no romance in a strike, and she knew it; it could only seem so in retrospect, in, as it were, a ballad. It took place in darkness and the light it shed was explosive. But it was not a darkness of evil, and that was the difference. It was a darkness of despair and fear, and a light of pain and anger, and so it was unreasoning and unrelenting. Good was not an inherent consequence. In fact no good could come of such a force, unless reason could be brought to bear upon it, unless people around whom the water was rising and swirling could be encouraged to somehow not mind the ominous roaring in the distance, could be encouraged to think and act calmly even in the face of . . . this is where Rosemary Thorndike eventually made her single historically documentable mark . . . brutal repression. And so we clung to the steps of the house while our people raged past us. If we had heard singing from the window earlier—it was possible but we viewed the possibility with suspicion, given what had been happening—no one was singing now. The flow of the crowd was so fast and turbid that it was impossible to stay in one place for longer than a few seconds. Some people we recognized who in turn recognized us, but nothing was made of these recognitions as nothing could be made of them in such uncertain circumstances: the mill had been struck and shut down and the street was a river in flood just as surely as if a dam had been dynamited. Men, women, and children would certainly drown, it was only a question of how many; and when their bodies finally fetched up in some psychological backwater, slowly rotating in the faint current, recognition would matter even less. We heard fragments of talk, asked a question here and there when we could, and, with what we already knew from the men on the docks and rumor, slowly fashioned a narrative, which went something like this: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun to take measures that would raise the standard of living for millworkers and protect them generally from the zealotry of mill owners and other smaller-minded, meaner-spirited capitalists, but Connecticut was slow in following suit. There was a corresponding diminishment of patience for the scaling down of the sixty-hour workweek. Fifty-four was the goal, and fifty-eight would be acceptable as a first step, but both goal and step were rejected as mill owners testified to insurmountable disadvantages in the marketplace: it could simply not be done, no matter what Massachusetts may, in its folly, have set out to do. Fifty-eight was nevertheless mandated. In acceptance of the mandate, the owners reduced wages. This was seen as a more or less reasonable compromise, but the 3 percent cut was felt by the workers receiving it as salt in a wound. Rosemary felt wounded, so wounded, as I have said, that she was in a nearly perpetual state of hallucination and understood a
s well as was necessary, with a mind not at all at ease with numbers—with in fact a mind in which numbers elicited a kind of feverish loathing—that the weavers had been forced to work twelve looms at forty-nine cents a cut instead of seven looms at seventy-nine cents. This was probably why she ran upstairs when she regained consciousness on the floor before her drum. These men did in fact respond to her cry. They were ready to walk out, and when ‘the little girl’ ran screaming into their presence, it was nearly impossible not to act. Most workers, however, in other parts of the mill, stayed at their stations. It wasn’t until the next morning, when she was feeling the first uneasiness of pregnancy, that pay envelopes were opened and the wage cuts made incontrovertibly manifest, and violence broke out. After a period of nervousness and actual embarrassment—Rosemary’s word for the general sentiment that universal principles of right conduct had somehow been subverted—shouts of anger could be heard here and there, and before anyone could think of doing it, some gear works were smashed and some drive belts cut. One man, who seemed lost and who had obviously been crying—she could see the tracks in the grime on his face, and his eyes were puffy and red—told her that someone had been killed, a little girl had been shot down by soldiers. ‘Soldiers?’ she cried. ‘Where did soldiers come from so quickly?’ ‘They shot her. I saw it,’ said the man with sudden disturbing calm. ‘No,’ said Rosemary. ‘No they didn’t. There aren’t any soldiers in this town.’ ‘A little girl was shot and killed,’ insisted the man, now with a kind of indifference. ‘NO SHE WASN’T!’ shouted Rosemary. ‘THAT WAS ME! I AM THE LITTLE GIRL AND I’M NOT DEAD!’”

  “Ah,” said Charles. “I think I understand now.”

  “Don’t rush me! You don’t know! Whatever you’re thinking, it’s quite wrong!”

  “Rosemary was in fact shot by the soldiers.”

  “No.”

  “She is your martyr.”

  “She spun away and staggered back up the steps to the door of the house. I followed. When we looked back, the man was gone. Confused and alarmed, suddenly, and to the edge of panic, we went into the house and found its kitchen. There around a table were three Wobblies. We knew they were Wobblies because they were extremely dangerous looking and handsome. Despite the dashing good looks, however, Rosemary was instantly struck by their similarity to the women at the well. ‘One Big Union,’ said a big man, describing himself and his companions to her, telling her everything was going to be all right from now on. A woman told her that the young man who had saved her from her nearly fatal descent into unconsciousness was a friend of theirs. He was part of the One Big Union, but more specifically was from New Bedford. This she was told as if it meant something crucial to her understanding and well-being. ‘He’s not exactly local, but it’s not like he’s from some mining camp in Colorado!’ she laughed. ‘He grew up in a mill just like you two did. He writes songs for us. Did he play his guitar for you?’ ‘No,’ said Rosemary, as if she was confident of her place not just in the conversation but in the greater scheme of things, in life itself. ‘I’m afraid he didn’t.’ ‘You really missed a treat!’ the woman assured her with a kindly smile. They told her they would take us to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where an even bigger strike was taking place, if we wanted to go. They made it clear they wanted Rosemary to come with them, myself as well, nodding and smiling at me, and implied quite strongly that she would be considered highly valuable in a very short period of time, as the dreams of the One Big Union were beginning to be realized. So we went with them, Rosemary accepting a skirt from the woman and reconciling herself to the loss of her own, feeling a tremor of anxiety when she remembered what she was pretty sure she’d sewn into it. Someone had put the opera record back on upstairs, so that the last thing we ever heard in Willimantic, the door slamming shut on it, was ‘The Dance of the Hours.’”

  “The woman wore a tall red hat pinned to her hair, and Rosemary snuggled so close to her in the car that she could study with her diseased but powerfully concentrated imagination the whorls and folds of the little enamel rose at the head of the pin. She perceived it as a living thing. The woman seemed to know a lot about her, and Rosemary accepted this without worry or question. The woman said she understood that Rosemary had been very helpful in not just the triggering of the strike but the priming of it. The men she’d been briefed by had put it just that way, she said, narrowing her eyes and clearly implying that there was something wrong with what she’d just said. ‘You will read Bakunin,’ she said, ‘like I did, and Nechaev in the cool shadows of your delirium and in the bright fever of it, and you will believe as I did, for only an hour perhaps, or a day, but no longer, and say to yourself, honored sister, there are three classes of women. The first consists of empty-headed, senseless, and heartless women who must be exploited and made the slaves of men. The second consists of those who are eager and devoted and capable but not fully committed, who must be pushed until they do, or, more likely, perish.’ I knew instantly, Charles, fatally, that I was part of the second group.”

  “Balderdash.”

  “‘In the third class,’ the woman continued, ‘are the women who are truly ours, our jewels, whose help is indispensable. I underscore this last phrase, and urge you, honored sisters, to compare your own knowledge of what you have done and what you will do to this corrupt and poisonous passage and believe it for as short a time as you possibly can.’ ‘Who is Nechaev?’ asked Rosemary. The woman peered deeply into Rosemary’s eyes as we jolted through Worcester and said, ‘He was a murderous twerp with a lot of moxie. You will find men like him all over the place.’ She sat back and pretended to fan herself, though it was quite cold in the car. ‘Don’t get me wrong, honey,’ she said, ‘I am terribly interested in Mr. Bakunin’s cult of violence, deeply so, it gives me goose bumps, but come, pull yourself together, we could not possibly have left you in that shit hole, we’ll all go to Lawrence together, where the woolen mills are bigger than ten Willimantics or wherever we were. The strike there has shut the whole town down. Can you speak any foreign languages? It will come in handy, believe me, in Lawrence. Oh, you poor little things, you poor little women. There is another look, isn’t there, in the bloodshot eyes of men when they see the only solution is to destroy and kill and maim and burn and pant like dogs in the light of the dying flames? When they lie down with us and how does it go? Jet the stuff of a superior race?’”

  “When we got to Lawrence, we were immediately put to work: we were to mind the children, the ones who were hungry, the ones who were cold, the ones who were lost, the ones whose mothers and fathers were off rioting. Rosemary hatched a plan and insisted money be raised specifically and solely for her plan. It was a fantasy she had nursed for as long as she could remember, she told me, and then the others: to get the children out of danger. Money was found, and Rosemary’s job became one of getting the children, more than one hundred of them, on a train bound for Philadelphia, where sponsor families would care for them until the strike was over. Management spies got wind of the plan, and it was quickly publicized as one in which the children, following a pied piper, would be precipitated off cliffs. When the day of departure came, however, there was no need of a cliff. At the station, mounted policemen bore down on the children and their mothers like Cossacks, herding them at first then knocking them flat with deft little movements of their great horses. Guns were fired into the air over shrieking little heads and several policemen lost their heads: they began laying about themselves with light batons, clubbing people to the ground indiscriminately. Panic overtook the brigade and the flight of the children out of Lawrence seemed doomed. The police and their henchmen managed to create a no man’s land of the platform, charging up and down the length of the train upon their steeds, while cops on foot waded into the swarming hysterical crowd with whistles and fists. Rosemary entered the no man’s land. It was the greatest thing I have ever seen and will ever see anybody do. Three horsemen galloped toward her, fast as they could go. She was four feet tall and they were twelve
feet tall—something like that. They were going thirty miles an hour, and Rosemary was standing still. Look at this.”

  Vera handed Charles an old newspaper clipping that she kept in a frame. The headline read: LITTLE GIRL DEFIES COSSACKS. A grainy, faded yellow, and torn photograph shows a train shape on the right, crowd shape on the left, a little girl half-standing, blurry with motion, a beached whale—the fallen horseman and his horse—in front of her, and two wide-eyed horsemen, still mounted, the whites of their eyes dominating their gray shapes, staring down at them.

  “‘I felt,’ she once told me, ‘like a chicken buried up to my neck in the ground, waiting for them to come pluck my ’iddle head off. They came, I stayed, they came, I stayed. I stayed and stayed and still they came. The station was shaking with the thunder of their hooves, a ton of horses and riders bearing down on me, and still I stayed. At the last second, they reined back. One of them wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess, and he went over the top of his mount. Landed at my feet. Actually rolled into me and knocked me down. That’s when the picture was taken. Just as I was scrambling to my feet.’” “For this show of fearlessness she was broadly denounced and publicly humiliated. Not only mill owners and conservative newspaper editors, but prominent socialists and leaders of mainstream unions—even some theorists within the dreaded IWW itself—had characterized ‘the evacuation of the children’ as a sensational stunt. ‘It was a sordid piece of advertising. Parents were bullied and children all but abducted from their homes,’ a House investigative committee in Washington, DC, was told. ‘We are to the labor movement what the high diver is to the circus,’ an old white-bearded Wobbly told us, in a stern but grandfatherly way. ‘Our big mouths can bind an audience with spells of hellfire and brimstone as surely as any old wild-eyed Puritan scourge. We can foam at the mouth like mad dogs and wink at the same time, and the audience cries out for more, and more, and more, and finally gets bored with thrills and marvels and goes home and the workers remain unorganized. We are like drunkards: very amusing until we take a swing at somebody and pass out.’ Nobody formally blamed Rosemary, and certainly there were many who all but canonized her on the spot, myself included, but because she was the girl in the photograph, she endured, as proxy or figurehead, a great deal of frustrated haranguing and oblique vituperation. She was only vaguely aware of it, but was being used in some way as a pawn between Wobblies based in Chicago, who were thought of by Wobblies based in Detroit as lawless boys playing at revolution, who in turn characterized the Wobblies based in Detroit as parlor-room socialists with sticks up their asses.”