The Trench Angel
Page 22
“Sit.”
Seamus tugged at his gun lifting it as far as his hip before I squeezed the revolver twice and it jumped in my hand and Seamus fell, crashing into the radio and collapsing into a heap of train schedules.
I stopped above him. The old man’s gray eyes were dry, and blood poured from his chest and his throat and made a sound like a whistle. He still clutched his gun, but he was dead.
I looked down and saw my boots were steeped in blood and snow. Dizzy, I bent over and dropped my gun and felt tired. I loosened my tie and yanked my collar and pulled up my sleeves and wanted to get out of my clothes until Jacob stopped beside me and picked up the gun, and then offered me his flask.
I waved him away.
He went to the radio, putting the receiver to his ear. He changed the frequency.
“New Sligo Police,” he said.
I crouched beside Seamus and touched the old man’s face. I’d done this and I mourned him, but the ten minutes were nearly up and it was for some kind of good. I took the old man’s hand and said I was sorry for how his life turned out and I was because I wished events hadn’t built up like they had so that it made sense for me to shoot him.
“Yeah, it’s Detective Bailey. Mr. Rahill’s dead. Up at the train station,” he said. “Yes. Shot.”
I met Jacob’s gaze.
“Jesse Stephens,” Jacob said. “Jesse shot him. Get the militia to set roadblocks out toward the south. Stole a car and headed toward Denver. Yeah, I saw him.”
After a while, I found myself on the platform. I looked over at the war cripples and sighed and I made my way to the tracks and watched the snow melt on the rails. The station was silent, but I knew trucks full of kids with rifles were on their way, and those kids had ideas about the world that led to the sort of disasters that repeated themselves every generation or so. Yet, for that moment, on that platform, everything seemed silent.
Beyond the station, across town, smoke plumed from the museum. It burned to the ground that night, the columns, arches, and art turning to rubble and ash. They never replaced it. Instead, they turned the lot into a shrine for my uncle, erecting a statue of his likeness, and, on its pedestal, they placed a placard chronicling his heroic life and his tragic death at the hand of my father. It’s still there today, but not much else remains of that time: Rahill Coal & Electric was long sold to a Pittsburgh interest, who had their own strikes, their own version of Rahillville.
On that platform, I was the last of the Rahills, our power disappearing overnight. I can’t say what was lost because of Seamus’ death, perhaps just a sense of historical proportion, a connection to our founding, but I know, no matter how much I deny it, his life and death live within me. Him and Jesse Stephens.
Jacob approached, his coat glazed in snow. He stood beside me like he would for a long time after that day, after we fled New Sligo.
“When’s the next train?” Jacob asked.
“Six thirty-five to Kansas City.”
“Good,” he said.
“There are some things I’ve got to take care of out there,” I told him. “I’ve got to make sure she’s dead.”
“Alright.”
“I think she is, but I want to be sure.”
“And if she’s not?”
I didn’t have an answer, then. I’d have to go searching for it and I did and of course I never found her and that’s a pain that has stayed with me long after the pictures yellowed and the letters crumbled. I still mourn her. Yet, in the end, searching for her gave me a purpose. It led me back into the world, to the places I saw, to the photographs I took.
But that doesn’t absolve me.
Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep and I’ve run out of prayers to make or pictures to develop, I imagine Lorraine alive, not as she once was, not as young and vital and beautiful, but instead the woman she would have become if she’d made it out of that nearly-forgotten war. I imagine her growing old and growing gray, living in a big house somewhere in Lisbon, children and grandchildren at her feet, and I like to think that she occasionally sees a man with a camera and remembers me, remembers Paris, and even if she’s cursing me under her breath, I hope she remembers our stories.
As I waited on the militia, I went down to the track and my boots sunk into the snow and I laid my hand on the rail, feeling the warmth of the steel and its possibilities. From there, I looked west toward the mountains, toward California, toward the end of the white horizon, as the snow made invisible the tracks laid by the anarchist.
A Selective Bibliography
I’m particularly indebted to the works of Patricia Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster, along with the archivists at the Colorado Historical Society who walked me through the myriad of old letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that made this book possible.
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Thomas G. Andrews. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2010.
First World War Photographers. Jane Carmichael. Routledge, New York, 1990.
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. William Cronon. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992.
A Cloud of Witnesses. Anna De Koven. E.P. Dutton, New York, 1920.
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. John D’ Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Modris Eksteins. Mariner, Boston, 2000.
The Great War and Modern Memory. Paul Fussell. Oxford University Press, New York, 1975.
An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. Horace Greeley. C.M. Saxton, Barker & Co., San Francisco, 1860.
The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Stephen Kern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. 2003.
No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. T.J. Jackson Lears. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994.
The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Patricia Limerick. W.W. Norton, New York, 1987.
The Eye that Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Frank Morn. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982.
The French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World Wars. Charles Rearick. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997.
Low Life. Luc Sante. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2003.
Colorado Mining: A Photgraphic History. Duane A. Smith. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1977.
The First World War. Hew Strachan. Penguin Books, New York, 2005
The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Elliot West. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 1998.
“It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Richard White. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1993.
The Experience of World War I. J.M. Winter. Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.
Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Donald Worster. Oxford University Press, New York, 1992.
Acknowledgments
After eight years of working on this beast, there are far more people to thank than I could possibly list. But here goes. . . .
At Leapfrog, thank you Lisa Graziano for believing in this project, Ann Weinstock for the badass cover, and Laura Hess and Rebeca Schwab for your advice.
Thank you Eleanor Jackson for your counsel and dedication.
Thank you to the University of New Hampshire’s MFA program for supporting me, educating me. There are too many folks in snowy Durham who heard me out and offered me rides home and told me when a specific line was off-key to properly recognize, but particular gratitude goes out to the critical eyes of Ann Williams, Elise Juska, MRB Chelko, Kate Megear, Dylan Walsh, Tim Horvath, Nate Graziano, Clark
Knowles, Amy VanHaren, Sara Erdmann, Sue Hertz, and Leah Williams. Thank you Nicola Imbrascio and Abby Knoblauch for being my confidants.
Thanks to the librarians at the Colorado Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the University of New Hampshire. You’re truly doing God’s work.
At the University of Massachusetts, Heather Cox-Richardson, Noel Hudson, and Shane Brennan encouraged me and gave me confidence. At the University of Miami, Andrew Green and Gina Maranto welcomed me and taught me how to survive Florida. In Houston, Willie and Mabel were my inspiration. At the University of North Carolina, Melissa Geil has been my friend and work wife.
Thank you to my mother Julie Gutierrez and my sister Laura Lee Harlan. No man could ask for a better pair of women to raise and nurture him. Eileen Ulrich gave me my first books and set me on this course. The Iselins have provided me love, support, and a second family.
Joe Lewis, despite our wives and your children, you’ll always be my life partner.
Brian Wilkins, you’ve taken my calls during both coffee and bourbon hours, kept up my swagger, and read far more of these pages than I had the right to ask of you. This book is as much you as me.
Alex Parsons, you’re the mentor all young writers dream of. You gave me the talk during my second draft that pushed me to my tenth. I’d have quit long ago without you. Someday, for you, I’ll learn how to pronounce my last name correctly.
Finally, Jessica, darling, I love you. Anytime you and the Sue want to get in the car and drive off for parts unknown, just know I’ll be right beside you, always.
The Author
Courtesy of Rebecca Ames
Michael Keenan Gutierrez earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire. His work has been published in Scarab, The Pisgah Review, Untoward, The Boiler, Crossborder, and LA Weekly. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival and he has received fellowships from The University of Houston and the New York Public Library. He lives with his wife in Chapel Hill, where he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina.