The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  He asked her if she would forgive him for their argument, and both relieved that he was back and struck with fear that he would be leaving again for the war, Lily had quickly done so.

  Now Lily studies Daniel’s uniform. The morning after that fight, he’d told her that once he returned he’d never have anything to do with Vogel again—a promise he hadn’t kept.

  She tucks the ribbon and ticket into the pocket on Daniel’s shirt. Then she puts the boxing gloves back in the footlocker next to the packet of letters. She carefully picks up the letters, her heart thrumming, as if just by touching them she’ll turn them to dust. Then she feels a thick booklet that’s been slid at the bottom of the packet underneath the letters. She pulls it out—a Kinship Trust Savings & Loan passbook.

  Lily sets aside the letters while she studies it. The cover is stiff; the passbook has rarely been opened. There are a few entries after the first one, dated December 1, 1919. Just after Daniel’s first election as Bronwyn County Sheriff. It’s for $40.00. The next entry, January 3, 1920, is for $42.00. After a few more monthly entries for similar amounts, the pages are blank.

  She has to smile, just for a moment—that was Daniel. Good intentions of precise note-taking, then falling aside. But quickly her smile fades. The sheriff’s monthly salary is now $165 a month. Back in 1920, it was $150. Lily tracks every bit she spends on the household, food, clothing, and such. She’s certain Daniel couldn’t save more than 25 percent of his monthly income. Where had this money, in this separate account, come from?

  Lily flips back to the front of the passbook, looking for any notations. This time she sees the careful note in Daniel’s handwriting in the inside front cover of the passbook: “Payable in full upon my death to Lily Ross,” followed by the account number. Lily tucks the passbook in her pocket. Why had he never told about this account?

  Lily places Daniel’s uniform over his old boxing gloves in the footlocker. She shuts the lid, secures the latch. She picks up the packet of letters. Eventually, she’ll reread them all, but not this night. Tonight, reliving the memory of the ribbon is enough.

  She takes the letters, the passbook, the ticket and ribbon, and her wedding suit back down to their bedroom. She drapes her suit over a side chair and then puts the smaller items in Daniel’s drawer, alongside the chocolate box she’d found in the drawer in the jailhouse. She regards the items for a moment, her magpie collection of newly discovered bits from Daniel’s life. They’re crowding the familiar remnants, his shave kit and brush.

  She picks up the brush, breathes in its fading menthol scent, puts it back, shuts the drawer. Suddenly she is too hot. She goes to the window and opens it just a bit, enough for a cool, thin night breeze to ease her of the desire to claw at her suddenly hot skin.

  Then she picks up her notebook and fountain pen from the top of the wardrobe. She sits on the edge of the bed, staring down at what she’d written on the notebook’s cover—her name and “—Sheriff.”

  Mama would say, Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched!

  For a moment, Lily stares at the curtain lifting and falling on the breeze.

  Then she sets to work, writing out a timeline of the morning of Daniel’s death, notes about Harvey Grayson, Rusty Murphy, Marvena Whitcomb. And a list for after she’s sworn in: go to bank before it closes to inquire about the surprising, separate account.

  Then, most important, find Marvena.

  CHAPTER 10

  MARVENA

  At nearly midnight, Rossville miners nearly fill Cobbler’s Rock. Marvena calculates: there are nearly twice as many as their last meeting, in February, during the brief warm spell.

  Now Marvena sits on a small rock on top of a flat, large boulder—makeshift chair on makeshift stage—as Jurgis speaks to the men gathered before him. He’s warming the group, preparing them for her, talking about John Rutherford’s work, about how Marvena as his widow—in fact if not by law—has taken on the mantle of his call for the past six months.

  Marvena knows she should focus on Jurgis, but she’s distracted by Frankie, sitting and humming near a small fire. Frankie’s near on old enough to be left at home alone and Marvena had almost done so tonight, but a sign of foreboding—that damned owl, still crying near her cabin—made Marvena bring her along. Frankie had put on her new shoes, the hand-me-downs from Jolene, preening. But at least her foot had healed enough that she could walk all the way.

  Suddenly tears prick Marvena’s eyes. She looks away from the men—she cannot let them see her cry; she cannot let herself cry, lest she crumble. She turns her gaze back to the small fire. It throws large shadows on the cave walls, and to Marvena the shadows seem not to be of those gathered but of those lost.

  Damn this sentimentality, hitting her just as she is supposed to rise and speak! Marvena tries to refocus her thoughts, stares at the petroglyphs on the wall curving to her left, stark images of people, animals, and symbols that bore no understanding now, and she wonders what ancient needful rites drove those people to this cave as she and her people are now driven.

  The petroglyphs give her strength. And so when Jurgis calls her name, Marvena stands, strides to the edge of the flat rock.

  She takes in the smudged and careworn faces of men whose families immigrated not so long ago from Wales and Scotland, Germany and Liechtenstein, Italy and Poland and Lithuania, some of them already miners, some new to the work. Some had been rescued last September, thanks to John’s and other volunteers’ efforts. Still, seven dead in all, including John and Caleb McArthur, Lily’s father. The toll would have been higher without John leading the nonsanctioned rescue. Luther had been willing to authorize only a token rescue.

  “Look at us,” Marvena says, starting so softly that the men lean forward to hear the low strum of her voice, “here, under the earth, again. We meet in darkness. Why? Because we cannot meet in light. We speak in hushed tones. Why? Because we cannot speak out clear and free. What happens if we say loudly in the bright of day that we have rights? We have mouths to feed and feet to shod? Children to care for?” She stops. Looks at the men. She finds the angriest-looking man in the front row. She stares at him. She knows what he’s lost.

  Marvena drops her voice as she speaks directly to him. “What happens?”

  His words, a strangled cry: “They turn you from your house, and your baby—”

  Marvena nods. “That’s right. You dared mention unionization to another man, the wrong man, a Pinkerton plant, and next thing you know, you’re turned out—not of your house, Ross housing! So you move to the tent city. And then what happened to your baby? Tell us!”

  The man speaks so softly that Marvena doesn’t hear his words but she says as if she has and is repeating them, “Your baby catches whooping cough, and the drunken company doctor says it’s nothing, just croup, and your baby dies.” She pauses. Her words echo off the cave walls, through the silence of the men. When the echo fades, she goes on. “You were promised decent wages for decent work, and now you’re held to company house, company store, company doctor.” She gives each utterance of “company” a loathsome twist. “And if you dare say but we have mouths to feed, feet to shod, families to care for, you’re taken even from that but not from your work. Your work only doubles. So what would you do? Other mines are organized. There are organizers who can come in, help us demand unionization, get some guarantees—”

  Someone from the back cries out, “You all forget already the strike in Hayden last fall? Folks there were turned out of our company homes, set up camp in tents, and one night—”

  He doesn’t have to say what happened next at the coal-mining town just north of here, one of ten small mining towns, all separately run, scattered throughout the northern and eastern portions of Bronwyn County, more than fifty throughout southwestern Ohio. Some are unionized, some even peaceably integrated with Negro workers, Mingo being the best example. But here, in Bronwyn County, Rossville is the biggest mining town.

  All here know what happened
next in Hayden, in the strike for worker safety spurred in part by the Widowmaker explosion. Late one night last November, Pinks drove through, shooting tommy guns into the tent camp. Two women and three children were killed.

  “New Straitsville still burns, and nary a thing’s changed!” someone else hollers. They mean the mines in that town, when strikers decided to destroy the mines to get back at unrelenting bosses, setting a coal seam afire in 1884. The fire yet burns underground.

  “Yeah, an’ ’94 was a waste,” someone else adds. After the Panic of 1893, wages were so slashed in depressive times that miners across the country—in bands of hundreds and even thousands—struck. For a time, it seemed they’d gain the desired wages and safety provisions, but bosses brought in strikebreakers—scabs—and hired gunmen such as the Pinks and sympathetic sheriffs deputized many; in the end the militia-like standoffs, hunger, and desperation turned the struggle against the miners, and United Mine Workers was nearly destroyed.

  “An’ don’t forget Blair Mountain!”

  The gathering quiets. For most of these men, 1884 and 1894 and many conflicts between and since are already tales of yore, passed on by fathers and uncles, mothers and aunts.

  But the Battle for Blair Mountain, fought just four years before, is fresh to many.

  John, Marvena’s husband, was a survivor of the battle. Into his unionization talks John had woven the story of how he’d left behind his elderly parents to support strikers at Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia, when it turned into the largest armed uprising since the Civil War, lasting five days with weeks of skirmishes after that.

  Even now, Marvena can hear John’s voice, low and steady, sharing the facts: In the peak of battle, ten thousand armed coal miners faced a third that many lawmen and strikebreakers. But the benefit of numbers was undone by Sheriff Chafin’s men holding the greater advantage of higher ground, better weapons, and coal management–funded private aviators who dropped homemade bombs—and even some government bombs left over from the Great War—on the strikers.

  Near on a hundred strikers died, John would say, just thirty on the other side. The battle ended when, by order of President Harding, the army intervened. The striking miners scattered, but nearly a thousand were caught and held on murder and conspiracy charges. The battle nearly broke the back of unionization, again plummeting United Mine Worker membership.

  Now the men’s voices rise, some for unionization at any cost, some still unsure. Jurgis comes to Marvena’s side, touches her elbow. She looks at him, smiles. She knows how long to wait, how to hear when the timbre of the voices turns too sharp, a warning that blows will be struck. It’s a skill she learned from her parents’ fights, knowing just when to scream as loudly as her six-year-old self could to distract them from each other and focus their wrath on her. That seemed better than letting them kill each other.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Marvena sees that Frankie has stopped playing with her rocks and is anxiously staring at her mother. Jurgis goes to the child, wraps an arm protectively around her little shoulders.

  Marvena looks back at the miners, waits calmly, and then finally barks one word: “Men!”

  They settle somewhat, and Marvena says, “Do you not know you must all join together? Helping your brother is helping yourself! Why do you think the Pinks knew they could get away with shooting and killing innocent women and children in the Hayden tent city? Because of fear. Fear! You think you stink of coal, a stink you seek to wash away with company store pumice, but you know what? You really stink of fear and cowardice!”

  The men fall into seething silence. Careful. Push a little more … but not too hard.

  Marvena chooses her next words thoughtfully, speaks them softly: “Yet you are not cowards. You go down in the mines every day. You hunt when you can, to add food to your family’s table. The men who send you into the mines would crumble if they had to do half of what you have to. Can you see Luther Ross going into the mines he owns?”

  A few laugh. Everyone here can agree on one thing: hating Luther Ross.

  She waits for the next wave of silence, then goes on. “How many miners are in this region? Thousands! How many boss men? A fraction of that.” The men look at one another, a bit of hope sparking. “And all of you are armed. You have shotguns and rifles. Why, the companies themselves have armed you, with dynamite and axes and picks! If you march together, more than the unionization of Ross Mining is at stake. It’s better treatment for all. It’s said each man must work for his fortune, for bread for his family. But what good is individual work if the system is set against you and for only a few at the top? Now, now is the time to strike, to band together, an army of men fighting for themselves.”

  Some of the men look at one another, startled. They’d come to hear about the possibility of the United Mine Workers helping Ross Mining unionize, not to be told to become an army.

  “You all know Sheriff Daniel T. Ross. You know he was shot dead.”

  There are murmurings, nods. The men mostly liked him, even though he was Luther’s half brother. As far as they knew, Daniel had not committed to being either for or against the cause of unionization. But all in all, he was known as a fair man, and all could agree that it was a shame—and shameful—that he’d been murdered.

  “I met with his widow, Lily Ross. And she told me a Pinkerton sent him to Rossville. And you know what I know, that she didn’t? I know that Daniel had had enough of our ill treatment! He was planning to go public in his support of our cause. He was going to get help for us! He was planning to report safety violations to a friend, an official, at the Bureau of Mines.”

  As gasps rise from the men, Marvena thinks back to the fight he and Tom had gotten into. What if that had made Daniel change his mind about looking into Eula? About reporting to this friend, whom he’d never named? Or what if he’d gone to Luther, threatened him with going to the Bureau of Mines unless Luther addressed safety issues?

  A terrible notion rises in her mind: What if Luther had opted to stop Daniel forever?

  The accusation blurts out before she can think better of it. “I believe Luther found out, and I believe he set up Daniel to be killed before he could help us!”

  The men stare at her, dumbfounded at this allegation. She pauses, shocked by her own words, yet thinking it could be true. Still, her stomach curdles at using Daniel’s death in this way. At the realization that she’s pushing the men past the unionization efforts that Daniel would have sanctioned and toward all-out rebellion.

  A man calls out, “Come on now. We all know your own brother Tom was the prisoner the sheriff came to fetch! How do we know you’re not just covering for him?”

  She blinks hard, keeps her voice even. “Yes, Tom is missing. But I have no need to defend Tom. He is no murderer. Would any here put it past Luther to use Tom as a scapegoat?”

  The men mumble agreement with this possibility.

  “No matter what’s happened to Tom, this fact remains: without Daniel around to temper Luther’s cruelty, he’ll grind the men of Rossville down even harder. That will encourage other managers, even in unionized mines, to come down harder, too. Maybe even bust up the unions.”

  The men’s muttering grows, and Marvena’s voice rises along with the men’s wrath: “Who, then, will take up arms and join together for the good of all, when the time comes?”

  * * *

  Later, Marvena eases Frankie down on the straw bed, covers her gently with the quilt so as not to awaken the sleeping child. Frankie mutters, then rolls to her side.

  Marvena finds her way by habit to the table, lights a coal-oil lamp. She pours herself a dose of her shine, settles into a chair. The men are galvanized. They’d all agreed: two weeks to grow their numbers. Also: sneak out dynamite and bring it to their women. Marvena will collect it along with rag rugs, then walk out of Rossville with it rolled up in the rugs, and she’ll take it to her hiding spots. When they’re ready, the men will stop work. Protect themselves from Pinks wit
h their knives and coal picks and axes and hunting rifles. And, if Luther Ross won’t listen to them, blow up the train track and the loading yard. A few miners will be hurt or even killed. But this will happen anyway if they stay on the job. At least they’ll be fighting for their rights.

  Marvena sighs, takes another sip of shine. Her mind whirls. She can’t relax. A chill comes over her: something is wrong. And then it strikes her: Usually Shep comes from under the porch, where he sleeps of a night, to greet them. But this night he hadn’t, and she was so exhausted that she hadn’t realized it until now.

  Marvena grabs her shotgun and lamp, steps out the front door. No sign of Shep. Did a black bear get him? A wolf? Her heart tremors with a surprising rush of sorrow.

  Then she hears Shep whimpering under the porch.

  Marvena hunkers so she can see under the porch. In the lamplight, she sees that one of Shep’s ears has been lanced, nearly off, lashes cross his back, and his front right leg twists back in a sickening, unnatural angle. Broken.

  No bear or wolf had done this to Shep. The predator was far more dangerous: human.

  “Shep,” Marvena says softly, reaching under the porch for him. If she can just get him to wiggle forward a little, she can pull him by the scruff out the rest of the way. Fix him up. Save him. He looks at her, eyes wide with pain, and moans. “Come on, boy. Let me help you.”

  Dammit. She’s not going to lose anyone else. Not even a fool coonhound.

  CHAPTER 11