The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Halla said, We need to get you a doctor, Jules.

  But the jailer said the infirmary was full.

  At night we talked about food and women like men who had experienced neither. Halla told me about the herring his mother used to fry every night for dinner. I asked, Did you get tired of herring? He said, Never. I asked, Are the herring still in the Baltic? He looked at me like I was crazy. Of course, he said.

  I told him our river once ran thick with salmon and steelhead, and at the falls, the fish rose like flies over a pond, and you could swing a drop net and catch dejeuner pour deux. My uncle grew so fat on fish and shade-berries that he became a bear. Fur grew all over his body and his voice became a growl.

  But our fish are gone now, I said. The dams keep them away. Now our river is shit and trash and wash from the mines. On the ground, they drove all the game away with hammering and sawing, they cleared the hillsides of berries to build more houses—they killed the world and called it progress.

  Halla patted my arm. Rest now, Jules. But I was dreaming and fevered and feared I was going over.

  I was too sick to work the rock pile, but Clegg told the jailers I was holding out on him and they took me to the pile and handed me a pick. I always liked to work, but standing in sleet, watching shackled men not hit rocks, was torture. Twice I fell, and the second time I could not get up. Halla and another man carried me back to our cell. Ne t’an fais pas, Jules, said Halla.

  Je ne suis pas inquiet, I said. I wasn’t worried. I wanted to tell Halla about the boy who stole my ferry, but it was so many words, and I wasn’t sure what it would mean this time. People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.

  I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t awake. I missed my shift on the floor and I sat up on one of the cots to see Halla had given up his turn for me. In the morning, my legs felt a mile away. My face burned. Even my cough had no breath behind it.

  Winter fever, said a jailer.

  Another listened to my chest. Ague, he said.

  Sleep. Sunlight in dreams I did not want to leave. I looked for my mother to put her face against my fevered cheek, to use my name, to chide me, anything, but still she did not come.

  Halla told me I was talking in my sleep in a language he couldn’t understand. He tried to repeat what I’d said but I told him that it sounded like he was speaking horse. I said, Come closer. Halla bent down so his ear was near my mouth: I was ordering us two steaks.

  Halla laughed and patted my chest. Très bien, Jules. After a time, he said, Do you have people, Jules?

  I had a wife, I told him.

  I should have stopped there. But I could not.

  My wife’s sister had a daughter. My niece.

  I should not have given the name. But I was afraid and so I gave Halla the name of my niece and her husband in Spokane.

  It’s okay, he said again. Sleep now, Jules.

  Heat. Breath catching. Slip down a ladder. Pass into dreams, bales of hay and garden rows and a thicket of blackberries and a dog with white eyes and still no mother but an old aunt who didn’t recognize me. And in my dream I could not remember enough of the language to ask for her. I could not even name all that I had lost.

  Men were talking over me.

  Hands on my shoulders and legs.

  Halla’s face. You’re getting out, Jules.

  Deux vin, I said.

  Goodbye, Jules, he said.

  I see you, I said, but in what language?

  Repose-toi, maintenent, Halla said. Mon ami.

  Night. The sky was clear. Cold clean air. I gulped it like water. Was this freedom? I was being carried on a litter, ice crunching beneath the feet of the men carrying my body.

  They put me in the back of a wagon and I drifted again. Cold air. Horses crying, rustled, clopping, pulling the wagon. Ruts. Blankets. Wagon. Heat.

  Then we were outside her house. Dom came out, with his big arms and his kind eyes. He spoke to the jailers. Muffled words. Yes, he said, Jules Plante is my wife’s uncle. Of course.

  The litter rose up the steps with me on it. And I was delivered into the warmth of Gemma’s house. And then her face filled the world above me.

  Hello, Uncle.

  Gemma, I’m—no breath.

  It’s okay. Stay quiet, Uncle, it’s okay.

  It’s what my mother would have said, too, stay quiet, Jules.

  Heat from the fire. O Gemma. Lovely girl. Jewels and gems.

  Sleep now, Uncle. You’re home.

  Her husband left the room, and she bent and whispered in my ear.

  And the rest of life was dreams.

  Part II

  I fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class.

  —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

  11

  She was the daughter of an Irish firebrand named Thomas Flynn and a lace-curtain suffragist named Ann Gurley, raised on the speeches of Emma Goldman and Mother Jones. At ten, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was railing against inequity at Harlem social clubs and calling for the women’s vote at her grammar school. She drew hundreds when she spoke on the street and, by the time of her first arrest, at fifteen, was locally famous, dubbed by progressive newspapers the “East Side Joan of Arc, an Irish beauty with blue eyes, filmy black hair and a fiery manner of speaking.” The establishment New York Times took a harder tack, calling her a “she-dog of anarchy.” At seventeen, Gurley Flynn joined the IWW as an organizer, rallying workers and leading strikes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, working her way west, speaking in mining camps and earning the nickname Rebel Girl. She married a Montana labor man named Jones and, having just run a successful protest in Missoula, was sent to Spokane to help organize its free speech battle—at nineteen, already a grizzled veteran of dozens of union actions.

  Rye’s lawyer, Fred Moore, was explaining all of this as they left the courthouse after his release, but Rye was having trouble concentrating. A jailer had brought his clothes to him, and though they’d been laundered, a bloodstain still covered his shirt like a bib. As they walked down the courthouse steps, people kept staring, and Rye self-consciously pulled his coat tight around his neck.

  In Spokane, the seasons could turn like a switch, autumn light one day, winter dark the next. A wall of courthouse maples burst with color the day Rye went to jail. Nine days later, the trees were frosted and skeletal.

  Rye shared their mood: What was he supposed to do now? How would he explain his absence to Mrs. Ricci? Would she charge him against their wintering money for the eight days he’d been gone? And what about Gig? Who knew how long he’d be in jail or what trouble he’d face in there?

  Fred Moore stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him. “So,” he said, “if you’re amenable to it, this woman would like to speak with you this afternoon.”

  Rye looked up. “Ursula the Great?”

  “Who?” The lawyer looked dumbfounded. “No. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the woman I was just telling you about, Mrs. Jack Jones by her married name.” He put a hand on Rye’s arm. “But I should warn you. She can be—” He cleared his throat. “What I mean is, she has a certain way of . . . well, her nature is—” Then Rye’s lawyer, who seemed never at a loss for words, laughed at his own inability to find the right one. “Let’s just say she is redoubtable.”

  Rye stared.

  “Estimable?”

  Rye shifted his feet on the frosty gravel.

  “Formidable?”

  Rye liked having a lawyer, but the man could be as hard to understand as Old Jules on a French bender. He wondered how many words he’d have to hear before he recognized one, so he gave up and said, “Oh,” thinking he would figure out what formidable meant once he met the woman.

  Rye walked with Fred Moore across the river, which steamed like a bath in the cool air. They passed Stevens Street and the job agencies, guarded by men with do
wnturned rifles. Down Front Street, past cafés, hotels, service halls, laundries, and bars—the street nearly empty of tramps and day workers, so many now behind bars or run out of town. A cop standing across from the IWW building took note of Rye and his lawyer as they entered. Inside, the foyer was empty, cantina closed, the cops having seized back issues of the Industrial Worker from the newsstand and arrested the editors for conspiracy to incite a riot.

  In the meeting hall, they could hear raised voices from the back office, and that was when Fred Moore put a hand on Rye’s arm. “I’m sorry for taking you into the fray without a bath or a change of clothing. Miss Flynn—er, Mrs. Jones requested that you arrive bearing the evidence of your mistreatment.” Then Fred Moore gently reached over and opened Rye’s coat to reveal the bloodstain on his shirt. “Her idea . . .”

  Rye looked down. Seeing his own dried blood made him think of Gig. “Mr. Moore, I don’t suppose you’d see about getting my brother out, too.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I will look into it immediately.”

  “Gregory Dolan,” Rye said. “And there was another man with us, an Indian named Jules.”

  Fred Moore pulled out a pad and wrote the names down. “I’ll see what I can find out. And I’ll get you some proper clothing. You look to be about my size.” He reached for the door of the union office.

  “I don’t suppose you got a bowler hat,” Rye said. “I always thought I would look smart in a bowler.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mr. Moore said, and he opened the door and Rye got his first look at the redoubtable, estimable, formidable Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

  12

  She was just a kid, more girl than rebel, small and sprightly and not a line or seam in her open face. She seemed to change from different angles—a bit of the schoolgirl, a bit of the nun, a bit of the Irish saloon girl—long black hair loose to the waist, held thick by a black ribbon. She wore a long-sleeved black satin blouse with a high collar revealing a narrow black necktie, above a plain black bustled skirt—black on black on pure Irish pale. Her slate blue eyes were big and dipped at the corners so she seemed to be alternately pleading and sympathizing.

  Rye wondered then if redoubtable meant a thing so pretty and unexpected that it actually hurt to look at. She glanced up and saw Rye and his lawyer at the doorway, but she did not announce them, instead turning her attention back to the five men standing around her, their backs to Rye.

  The men shuffled and shifted their weight, hats in hand. Gurley Flynn was the only one sitting, perched sidesaddle on a small sofa, as if choosing between unworthy suitors.

  The only man Rye recognized in the room was the IWW secretary, nervous Charlie Filigno. He was standing nearest Mrs. Jones, trying to explain in heavily accented English that they were planning a second free speech action for November 29, exactly four weeks after the first. Word was going out for more soapbox speakers and floaters willing to clog the jails. They planned to keep up the pressure with news stories while they battled in the courts. “Elizabeth has offer to give speeches to raise money—”

  “A thousand dollars,” interrupted Gurley. “That’s how much I intend to raise. In three weeks, the great Clarence Darrow will be back in Boise delivering a lecture on the Haywood case, and I plan be there, to hire him to come to Spokane and challenge this outrageous anti-speech law once and for all.”

  Filigno cleared his throat. “Elizabeth hopes—”

  “I hope to use my notoriety to raise this money, as I did in Missoula,” she said, “until the cops there overplayed their hand by arresting me.”

  The men shifted, made wary eye contact, and a chinless man cleared his throat. “Mrs. Jones, we all admired what you done in Missoula, but you had thirty men in jail there. There’s three hundred here. And frankly, we got concerns about allowing a nineteen-year-old girl in your current condition—”

  “Allowing?” She laughed. “Mr. Davis, with all due respect, I have given speeches from Maine to Montana, and I have never once been allowed to speak.”

  Standing next to her, Charlie Filigno put his hand out to calm her just as one of the men, whom Rye couldn’t see from the doorway, grew agitated. “Mrs. Jones, you will refrain from such outbursts—”

  And that was the moment when Mrs. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Jones thought it best to see Rye. She popped off the sofa, and that was also the moment when he understood her current condition—she appeared to be some months pregnant.

  “Mr. Dolan! Mr. Moore!” she said. “Please, come in.”

  They did, Moore first, then Rye. The union men took a step back, repelled by his appearance, just as Gurley Flynn must have hoped. As for the Rebel Girl, she greeted Rye’s lawyer, then took both of Rye’s hands like he was her oldest-dearest, her white skin creamy against his rough, scarred mitts.

  She spun and presented him. “Gentlemen, I trust you know the young hero of our movement, Mr. Ryan Dolan, only this morning released from jail. Ryan, these men are union leaders with the AFL and WFM—carpenters, metal workers, and miners—our allies in this struggle.” She leaned on that word, then gestured toward Rye’s lawyer. “You know our brilliant young attorney, Mr. Moore.” She let go of Rye’s hands and had him sit on the sofa next to her. She smiled as if this were a garden party she’d organized. “These giants of labor were just explaining to me that the people of Spokane would be scandalized to find out that engaging in sexual congress with one’s husband occasionally results in pregnancy.”

  Rye felt like a firecracker had gone off in the room. One of the men gasped. Another snapped: “Mrs. Jones! We are simply asking for some decency! That you not make a spectacle of yourself and that you let others do the public speaking.”

  “Others?” she said. “What others would you suggest?”

  “Elizabeth—” Charlie Filigno said.

  But she wouldn’t even look at Charlie, her intense dark eyes sweeping the room, challenging. “My entire membership is caged, living on bread and water,” she said. “To whom should I turn for this public speaking, Mr. Bennett?”

  That’s when the oldest of the union men, a big mottled man with reddish-gray hair, stepped forward: “Enough, Mrs. Jones!” The way the other men deferred to him, Rye figured him to be the biggest labor boss. “I’m not your father, but I will speak to you like a child if you continue to act like one. You ask our union’s support and then you speak to us in such coarse language? While brashly promoting yourself as Gurley-Flynn in the newspapers?” His face kept reddening. “Maybe that’s acceptable in New York City, but here, for a married woman, it is unseemly and wrong—”

  Her face flushed as well. “Mr. Cawley—”

  But the red-faced man would not be quieted. “I worked alongside your husband in Butte, and I know for a fact Jack was against you taking this trip! And yet here you are, with child, run off from a devoted husband, sullying your reputation and that of every workingman in the west!”

  Gurley Flynn drew her lips tight. “My apologies if I offend you, Mr. Cawley, but I use my maiden name because Elizabeth Jones is unknown as a speaker, whereas Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is a name whose reputation I burnished—”

  Cawley interrupted again. “Your reputation is what we are here to protect!”

  Again she interrupted her interrupter: “—whose reputation I burnished from New York to Chicago to Missoula to Spokane—”

  Oh, but that got even further under the skin of the union man, and he took two steps toward her, his face going scarlet to the mottled line of his hair. “Enough! You ask for our support—now listen!”

  Gurley gripped Rye’s arm. She was shaking.

  The man held out a copy of the Industrial Worker. “Your first article, you call Judge Mann ‘a known bottle-tipper’ and ‘a lackey of the parasites!’ You call the Spokane police ‘hired thugs’ and ‘half-witted Hiberians.’ ”

  Gurley half-smiled. “Too alliterative, Mr. Cawley?”

  “Too far, Mrs. Jones! You go too far! You go too far confusing the cau
se of labor with that of socialism and suffrage, the Negro and Indian, and you go too far now!” He crumpled the newspaper. “My union is committed to higher wages, not a goddamn revolution! In fact, I’m not sure this outfit of yours is a union,” he continued, “and not a menagerie! Every day the Spokesman runs the names of foreign savages you trot onto soapboxes!”

  “Listen—” she said quietly.

  “No, you listen!” He took another step forward, until he was right above her. “From now on, you will use your married name! And if Jack doesn’t join you here soon, I will put you on a train back to Montana myself! While you’re in Spokane, you will stay off the soapbox, off the street, and indoors at all times—”

  She smiled. “So, I am not free to speak about free speech?”

  But Cawley was not done. “You may deliver speeches at women’s clubs, but if I hear you have been on a single street corner addressing men, or using your maiden name, I will pull my union’s support. You will travel at all times with an escort, and if you publish anything in that red rag of yours, it will be respectful, and it will be under the name Mrs. Jack Jones. Do you understand?”

  Gurley glanced around at the other men but found no allies. Even Filigno was looking at his shoes.

  Cawley finally took a step back and sighed, his anger having run its course. He ran his hand through his thin hair and put his hat back on. “Mrs. Jones, I don’t care if you get a nickel out of every Negro hoe-boy and half-breed Celestial whore in the state, but I will not ask God-fearing American unionists to line up behind a pregnant wayward wife.”

  The air was gone from the room.

  “Gentlemen, can we—” Charlie Filigno began.

  Gurley sprang up and smiled broadly. “Good point, Charlie. Let’s thank these gentlemen for their support and get back to work.” She turned to the mottled man. “Mr. Cawley, I assure you, my husband will be in Spokane soon. In the meantime, I will travel at all times with an escort. In fact—” She turned to Rye. “Mr. Dolan will accompany me and speak about his mistreatment.”