The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Through it all, I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t Early Reston.

  One day in 1911, I was working at the machine shop when Willard came in. He wasn’t dressed in his usual suit but in a sweater and light jacket. He said he couldn’t believe how much older I looked. “Like your brother,” he said.

  I stepped outside to talk to him. He said he was no longer working for Mr. Brand.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He is—” Willard cleared his throat. “Unwell. He’s been under some pressure from the city and divested his holdings here, sold out to various partners. He’s going to move east, spend his retirement with his family.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to British Columbia,” he said. “I have a sister up there.” He looked around and then leaned in. “Ryan, I was wondering. The money. From that day. I hate to ask, but, well, I’m in kind of a spot and—”

  The money. Right. For a year, five thousand dollars had sat in an envelope under my mattress. I hadn’t spent a dime of it. Most days I forgot it was there.

  “Of course,” I said. “You can have it all.”

  “No!” he said, and his face flushed. “One or two hundred would be fine. Just enough to get me staked up there.”

  “I don’t want it, Willard,” I said. “Where that money came from, what happened—I don’t want it.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, “it’s just money. It’s as good or as bad as what you do with it. And whatever you do, Rye, it’ll be better than Brand having it.”

  That night he met me at Mrs. Ricci’s house, and after much convincing, he agreed to take five hundred-dollar bills. I took them out of the envelope and handed them over. He folded them, his hands shaking, and put them in his pocket. “You have to promise me you’ll do something with the rest of it,” he said.

  I promised.

  He shifted his weight on the porch. “I said that Brand was unwell. He’s actually in a sanitarium, babbling like a lunatic. He’s convinced Early Reston is still out there and coming for him.”

  My mouth went dry, and I told him that when Sullivan was killed, I’d had the same thought.

  “No,” Willard said, “come on. You saw that wreck. Nobody could’ve survived that.” But Willard wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I could see even he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  It was thirteen years later, in 1924, that the police announced they’d finally solved John Sullivan’s murder. I was married by then, with three little kids at home. It had been years since I’d even thought of the big police chief.

  I gasped when I saw the story in the paper. A woman in Alabama had killed her husband in self-defense, and when the police arrested her, she said that he had been a drifter and outlaw who’d worked out west in the mines and had fallen in with anarchists. He’d told her that he’d killed dozens of people out there, including a police officer somewhere in the west, Spokane or Seattle, she thought.

  The man’s name was Victor Claude Miller. I stared at his picture. It didn’t look like Early Reston. But how could I be sure? By that time, Early wasn’t so much a man anyway, but a shadow in my worst dreams.

  Not long after Willard left, I sent Mrs. Ricci’s son Marco a letter, offering him five hundred dollars for his father’s old orchard.

  He drove up two days later and we sat at the kitchen table. “You don’t have that kind of money,” he said.

  “I inherited it,” I said.

  “From who?”

  “My uncle Willard.” I reached in my pocket and set the five hundred dollars on the table.

  He stared at the money. “We’ll need a lawyer to draw up papers.”

  “Oh!” It dawned on me. “I have a lawyer.”

  Marco looked as shocked by this as he had been by the five hundred dollars.

  Two days later, Joe gave me the afternoon off, and I took the streetcar downtown to Mr. Moore’s office. He was happy to see me and said he couldn’t believe how much older I had gotten in just the year since Gurley’s trial.

  “How is Elizabeth?” I asked.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “Living in New York with her parents and her sisters, organizing garment workers there, of course.”

  “And her husband?”

  “She told him she wasn’t cut out to be a miner’s wife.” He smiled. “He tried to talk her out of it, but she went back to New York after the trial, filed for divorce, and is raising the baby herself.

  “It was a rather bittersweet victory,” he said. “She missed seeing the results of it—the anti-speaking ordinance overturned, the police chief fired, the IWW prisoners released, nineteen of the worst employment agencies shut down.” He shook his head. “She did all of that. And she wasn’t here to see it.” But the success in Spokane had inspired other free speech actions, he said, in Fresno and in Los Angeles. He was leaving in two days to consult with the IWW in California.

  “And the baby?”

  For a moment, Mr. Moore seemed confused. “Oh, yes. A boy. Fred,” he added shyly. “She named him Fred.” He laughed, and then he wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. It was Gurley Flynn’s address.

  “I don’t have the first idea what I’d write,” I said.

  “She told me you were the one who got her story out,” Mr. Moore said, “that you took it to the Agitator in Seattle. I know she was quite moved by that, Ryan. She always believed, as I did, that you were a pawn in the other side’s treachery.”

  I could think of nothing to do but nod.

  “How’s your brother?” he asked.

  My breath left, as it always did when someone asked about Gig. “He’s great,” I said. “Riding the rails, seeing the world.”

  Mr. Moore was staring at me. “That’s who you look like,” he said. “I just realized it. You look like him.”

  I smiled and cleared my throat. “I don’t know if you’re still my lawyer,” I said, “but I need a couple of things. And I can pay.”

  I explained about drawing up the paperwork for buying Mrs. Ricci’s orchard. Then I put $505 on his desk. “Take your fees out of the five hundred and donate the rest to the IWW’s legal fund,” I said. “The other five dollars is for my dues. I never paid them.”

  Mr. Moore just stared at the money. “Where—”

  “Inherited it,” I said.

  My next stop was the Phoenix Hotel. I hadn’t seen Ursula since the night I tried to find Gig, and I thought she should at least know what happened to him. A young man at the desk called the hotel manager, Edith, who excused herself to call Ursula. I sat in the lobby waiting.

  After a moment, Edith came back. “One thing,” she said. “She doesn’t go by Ursula anymore. She performs under her real name, Margaret Burns.”

  “Oh,” I said. “She’s not doing the cougar show anymore?”

  And that’s when she came in, as big and lovely as ever, in a blue bustled dress with a feathered hat. “They shut down the variety shows,” Ursula said. “Thank God.”

  “Margaret’s doing real theater now,” said Edith, “a touring production of George Cohan’s Forty-five Minutes from Broadway.”

  “It’s a small part,” Ursula said.

  “It’s a star turn!” Edith said.

  “Don’t listen to her. The producers are merely filling some of the lesser parts with local actors, and I got one of the singing roles.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Edith. “She steals the show.”

  Ursula put a hand on the other woman’s arm. “Edith, can Ryan and I have a moment alone?”

  I followed Ursula to Edith’s office, and once the door was closed, she gave me the warmest hug, and the smell of her, the press of her bosom, it all made me think of my brother, how much Gig had liked her, and my own boyish fantasies that she and Gig would raise me someday. I fought against crying.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to Gig,” she said, and before I could ask how she knew, she added, “Willard told me. I was very fond of your brother. I ho
pe you know that. When I heard, I felt responsible. For getting you tangled up with Lem that way. My intentions—” She didn’t finish the thought but leaned in, confiding. “I sent an anonymous letter to the police. Nothing came of it, but I had to do something.”

  I reached in my pocket. I put five hundred dollars on the office desk.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Inheritance,” I said.

  She looked as if I couldn’t be serious.

  “Gig would want you to have it,” I said.

  “Oh, God, no,” she said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Absolutely not.” She said that she owned the hotel free and clear now and was doing quite well for herself. I tried several times, but in the end, she was the only one who wouldn’t take the money.

  She walked me out of the hotel and, on the street, ran a hand across my face, as if memorizing it. She looked at me from both sides. “You look older,” she said.

  “Like him?”

  “Oh, God, no.”

  I only saw her once more, eight years later, in December 1919. Spokane had become a quiet and conservative place by then. The rushes had ended, timber and mining were in decline. The population had flattened, and temperance and religious forces had succeeded in shutting down the vice in Spokane.

  Elena and I had come downtown to see the Christmas windows at the Crescent. Gregory was almost three, Daniel just a baby. Bets and Calvin hadn’t been born yet. This was just weeks before Prohibition went into effect, but Spokane had already banned alcohol. I parked in front of Jimmy Durkin’s old place, got out, and was reaching in the backseat for little Gregory when I felt a hand touch my shoulder.

  It was her, walking with a poodle and a well-dressed older gentleman. “Well, hello there,” she said. “It’s Margaret Burns.”

  Before I could say anything, she gestured up at the old Durkin’s. It was a dry pool hall and cardhouse now. A sign advertised free coffee and ginger ale.

  “Well,” she said, “at least Gig didn’t live to see that.” Then she took the dog and the gentleman and strolled off.

  “Who was that?” asked Elena.

  “That”—I watched her walk down the sidewalk on the gentleman’s arm, a fur stole flapping over her shoulder—“was Ursula the Great.”

  I must’ve started ten letters to Gurley. But in the end, I never wrote to her. I had only known her a few months, after all, and the more time passed, the less I felt it would make sense, getting a letter from me. Meeting her was like being swept up in a typhoon, then dumped back on the ground. But the storm had long ago passed. My old friend Tolstoy said the closer a man gets to history, the less he seems to have his own free will, the more his life is commanded by the gravity of big events.

  I imagine Calvin would’ve agreed with that as seawater swirled around him. And Gurley, too.

  Gurley. How many times as a young man did I roll that name across my tongue. I had never told Elena this, but at one time I believed that I loved her, although that’s a strange word for someone like Gurley—love. She seemed too tough for it. Back then, I knew cops and killers, detectives and anarchists, and not one of them had her strength, could have done what she did.

  I watch the TV news now and I see the Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King Jr., people protesting at lunch counters and on buses. She would be right alongside them, alone and pregnant, nineteen, and not a doubt in her mind that goodness would eventually prevail.

  I wish I could be so sure.

  There was always a part of me that felt she was too bold, asking too much, going too far. I was a strong union man my whole life, but I could never go that fast, like she did, like Gig did. I sometimes felt guilty, living my quiet life, paying my union dues and getting small rewards, while true believers like Gurley fought with their lives.

  The labor wars continued throughout the teens. In 1916 three hundred Wobblies boarded steamers in Seattle to go support a strike in Everett, but when they got there, two hundred armed men were waiting, and for ten minutes they unloaded on the steamers, 175 bullets tearing into the pilothouse alone. Most of the men on board were unarmed, but a few returned fire, including a private detective who had been planted as a spy inside the union. One steamer nearly capsized from the men running from gunfire, and when it was over, five Wobblies were dead on the ship, and more in the water, their bodies never recovered. Almost thirty were wounded. Two deputized citizens were killed, although it was determined later that they’d been shot in the back by vigilantes on their own side. Twenty citizens were wounded, including the sheriff.

  The next year, Gig’s old friend Frank Little was organizing for the IWW near Butte when six men broke into his boardinghouse, beat him, tied him to a car, and pulled him down the street, over granite blocks that tore off his kneecaps. They bashed in his head and hung him from a railroad bridge at the end of town. Pinned to his torn pants was a note that read, “First and last warning,” with the initials of other union leaders.

  What do you make of such times? I feel a similar sense of despair now, watching those southern sheriffs turn firehoses and dogs loose on civil rights protestors. I find myself looking up from the newspaper and saying to Elena, “The world is tearing itself apart.”

  My wife has her mother’s quiet wisdom, her grandfather’s great laugh. “Always,” she says to me.

  By 1917, the IWW had been run completely out of Spokane, and when the union objected to the U.S. entering World War I, the government cracked down, raiding union offices, charging leaders with sedition, and deporting thousands. In those years, I could no more admit being an old Wobbly than I could admit being a German spy.

  So I never talked to my kids about the IWW, about the riots, about jail, about any of it. I didn’t think it would make sense to them. It would have been like talking about the gold rush or the Civil War.

  My oldest son, Greg, is a partner in his father-in-law’s car dealership. He tells me he’s going to vote for Barry Goldwater for president. He gave me Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, for Christmas. Last year, he gave me Atlas Shrugged. He likes to lecture me about the dangers of unions and the spread of communism.

  Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world.

  Now, as I sit with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s obituary in my lap, I think I’ll tell him all about my past, about his anarchist uncle, about how his father once fancied a girl who grew up to be president of the Communist Party. I don’t have any hope of changing Greg’s opinion. I just want to see the look on his face. It’s another mystery of parenting: how you can love your kids without always liking them.

  Maybe it’s being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside—to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren—and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I’ve acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity.

  But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience.

  And Bet on the last horse to piss.

  I remember something Gurley told me, the night we sat up in the Missoula train station. We had been robbed and nearly killed in Taft. We were as beaten as people could be. And here she was, gearing up to start the fight all over once we got back to Spokane.

  “How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?”

  She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right?

  “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?”

  That day in 1911, after I went to see Fred Moore and Ursula, I decided to keep another five hundred dollars for myself, to us
e on the house I was going to build. That still left almost three thousand dollars of Lem Brand’s money.

  I thought about walking into Bradley & Graham’s, slapping it on the counter, and saying, “Dress me, Chester!” The thought of it made me laugh.

  Instead, I went to a shop that made headstones and memorials. I asked whether a person could get one if there was no body, no grave.

  “Of course,” the man said. So I picked the simplest one, granite, flush with the earth. It cost forty dollars engraved. Later, I put it in a corner of the orchard in Little Italy. It read: “Gregory T. Dolan, 1886–1910, loving brother and member in good standing of the IWW.”

  After I picked out the headstone, I walked through the east end of downtown. There were a few floaters out, a man begging, a handful of people outside the Salvation Army, where the regular brass band was playing in the street, including an old toothless man blowing a French horn that looked like it had been in a hailstorm. The army used volunteers for its band, but every once in a while, they’d employ a tramp with musical ability, and that’s what the toothless French horn player looked like.

  We always made fun of it, called it the Starvation Army. But I thought of how many meals, how many pairs of shoes and shirts, I had gotten there, and it felt right, walking up and sliding almost three thousand dollars into the bucket next to the French horn player’s dirty shoe.

  He took his lips from the mouthpiece. “God bless.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  Acknowledgments

  As Albert Camus once said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And as Jessamyn West said, “Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures.” And as my kids said, “Dad, that sounds made up.”

  Kids, this is made up. The Cold Millions is fiction.

  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some obscured truths in here, a few relevant philosophical questions rattling around these pages, as well as some “real” historical figures—among them the great labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Spokane police officer Alfred Waterbury, the police chief John Sullivan, IWW organizers John Walsh and Frank Little, the labor lawyer Fred Moore, and others.