Dry Rot

by S. L. Stoner

  Leo’s words calmed the men. They said nothing more, standing silent, as the scabs lined up on the porch in front of the clerk, who made a show of writing their names down, carefully licking his pencil tip as each new man approached. Sage fought an almost overwhelming urge to stride onto the porch and smack the clerk across the back of his head. Leo, however, pointedly ignored the scene and headed up the road. The rest of the strikers followed.

  As he sloughed up the muddy road with the strikers to pay collective respects to the widow, Sage discovered that O’Reilly was walking beside him. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, Sage said, “I understand you are down from Idaho. You worked as a miner there?”

  “Aye, that’s for sure that I did,” said O’Reilly, his words laced with a hint of the old country’s brogue. Mingled scents of tobacco and whiskey wafted toward Sage.“Hmm,” Sage thought,“that might explain the fella’s fervor. O’Reilly wasn’t the first man to waltz with stupidity after draining a bottle dry.”

  O’Reilly interrupted this rumination. “So, you’re the son of Leo’s brother I hear.”

  “No, his sister is my mother,” Sage answered. At that moment, a passing man asked O’Reilly a question and the pair moved off, leaving Sage wondering whether O’Reilly’s question was a mistake or a test. Leo had no brothers—just the one sister.

  EIGHT

  In the darkest hour, wind gusts slammed sheet rain against the window glass, jolting Sage awake. He lay staring up at the ceiling for as long as it took the rain to settle down into a steady patter. Its rhythm made him drowsy enough that he rolled over, snugged deeper into his warm blankets and returned to sleep.

  s s s

  A mile away, the watery deluge fell on the Mackey Construction shack. Inside, fire crept up a wall at one end of the shack, gaining in size, until it flowed across the exposed rafters and began charring the underside of the cedar roof shingles. Breaking through to the outside the furious flames met drenching water and shrank back, their yellow heat doused, leaving only wispy gray smoke to twist upward through the rain.

  s s s

  Sage opened the kitchen door and paused on the threshold, taken aback by the scene confronting his eyes. For the third time, in less than a week, he was looking at Herman Eich. This time, the ragpicker was inside Mozart’s, seated at the kitchen table. A skeletal man, all thin sharp angles, sat across from him. The man’s short black hair grew in a rounded peak above a face bent so low over the table that Sage saw only the ridge of his dark eyebrows and the side of his clean-shaven face. Eich pointedly cleared his throat and the stranger glanced up, causing Sage to take an involuntary step back. The man’s eyes shone like smoldering coals deep in the dark hollows made by sleepless nights. He said nothing, merely nodded before returning his eyes to the table’s surface. For a fraction of an instant, the man seemed somehow familiar. Sage immediately dismissed that idea. He was certain that he’d never seen him before. Definitely a stranger.

  Sage’s mother entered the kitchen and crossed to the stove. She pulled two plates from the warming oven and piled them high with food from the pots that simmered on the stove. Ignoring Sage, she set the two plates before the men at the table, poured two cups of steaming coffee, set those before them and urged them to “fill yourselves up. There’s plenty more where that came from.” Turning toward Sage, she ordered him into the adjoining dining room with a sideways snick of her eyes.

  “I know, I know,” she said before Sage said anything.“Having the city ragpicker and a homeless man in Mozart’s kitchen is not exactly the image we hope to project to our exclusive clientele. What else could I do? Mr. Eich showed up this morning with Daniel in tow. He’s the poor man whose wife and baby just died in that fire. Apparently he’s been wandering the streets in a daze ever since. Finally, this morning, Mr. Eich was able to corral him and herd him into the public baths for a scrub. Afterwards, he said he brought Daniel here to eat because that’s the best idea he had. He says Daniel’s still too agitated to go anywhere public or to be by himself. Sage, I couldn’t turn them away.” Compassion warmed her dark blue eyes.

  He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “No, I don’t think you had any choice about that,” Sage said, earning a grateful smile.

  Ida, Mozart’s cook, poked her head out the swinging doors, a worried crease beween her eyebrows. “Mr. Adair. There’s a young boy at the alley door. He says he needs to speak with you. He says it’s real important. He looks scared out of his wits.”

  Sage exchanged worried looks with his mother. On his way to the back porch, through the kitchen, he saw the two men still eating breakfast in companionable silence.

  Outside, a young boy of no more than eleven years of age stood at the bottom of the porch steps. Although he wore the cap and half-pants common among the city’s lower class, the presence of the father’s square jaw and agate brown eyes in the young face made the boy instantly recognizable as Leo Lockwood’s eldest son, Bobby. Once, while strolling the downtown streets in his uptown John Adair clothes, Sage came face to face with Leo and his son and noticed how the boy admired his father.

  Today, fright widened the boy’s eyes and knotted his jaw. “Bobby, is something the matter with your father?” Sage asked, his mind leaping ahead to injury by assault or accident.

  Relief at Sage’s recognition swept across the boy’s face as he snatched off his cap. “Yes, sir. My pa said to come here to the kitchen door and ask for Mr. Adair, ah, you sir, if there be any serious trouble.”

  “Serious trouble. What’s happened, son? What serious trouble?”

  “Trouble at the strike, sir. The police arrested my pa.” At this, the boy’s chin wobbled and he blinked rapidly to hold tears in check.

  “Arrested him, whatever for?” Sage asked, though he figured O’Reilly’s rabble-rousing finally triggered a fight and, consequently, Leo’s arrest. Sage’s thoughts raced through the mechanics of bailing the union leader out of jail.

  Tears flooded the agate brown eyes in earnest, spilling onto the boy’s cheeks. “They say he killed the boss man.”

  “Killed the boss man—you mean Abner Mackey?” The boy nodded. Sage’s mind flashed over half a dozen potential scenarios where Leo might raise his hand against the elder Mackey. Each one of them involved self-defense, not murder. Leo was a peaceful man. More important, he was also a smart man. Without a doubt, Leo knew that strike violence would only strengthen Earl Mackey’s hand.

  “What are you talking about,‘killed’ him? What happened?” When the boy only dumbly shook his head, Sage patted his shoulder and told him to return home and tell his mother not to worry—Sage was going to hire a lawyer. He watched the boy turn the corner into the street before returning to the kitchen where the two men were digging into their food with suspicious gusto. In his haste, he’d left the door ajar. Likely they’d listened to the exchange. Sage shook loose of that thought, setting it aside for later consideration. Right now, it was time for him to transform into Sam, Leo’s nephew, and get down to the strike line. Someone there would know why Leo was under arrest for

  killing Mackey.

  s s s

  Chester stood with a few glum strikers at the top of the road leading into the cul de sac. When Sage looked beyond them to where the construction office stood, he noticed something amiss with the building. Half of it looked normal. From the other half, however, a sinew of gray smoke curled upward to mingle with the morning mist. Jagged black holes punctured that burnt half’s roof, while sooty tendrils trailed up the outside walls from around glassless window openings.

  “Good Lord, what happened down there?” Sage asked Chester.

  “Last night, someone set the place on fire. The night watchman discovered the fire, called the brigade and with the help of the rain, they doused it before the whole thing burnt down. When they broke inside, they found Abner Mackey, dead. Someone had tied him to a chair. Least that’s what I overheard one of the coppers saying.”

  Sage’s mind raced. Was it possi
ble one of the hotheaded strikers decided to take matters into his own hands? What with O’Reilly stirring the pot, the scabs, and Rufus dying—maybe one of them liquored-up and took action.

  Still, it made no sense. Luring Mackey to the shack, tying him to a chair and setting fire to the building, that indicated a deliberately cruel attack, one that did not fit the character of anyone he’d come to know on the strike line. It would take a snoot full of liquor before they’d go that extra step of even starting a fistfight with Earl Mackey. The cruelty needed to tie old Abner Mackey up and burn him to death wasn’t in any of the men he’d come to know and respect. Besides, the son was, by far, the more obnoxious Mackey. If it was revenge someone wanted, Earl was the one hated by the strikers—not the old man. They spoke fondly of Abner, most thinking him a puppet of his son. “Where’s Leo?” Sage asked Chester even though he already knew the answer.

  “Leo came here this morning with the rest of us and found the police waiting for him. They arrested him on the spot,” Chester answered.“They kept mum about why. We figure it’s because of old man Mackey being murdered. I sent a man around to Leo’s house to let Mrs. Lockwood know.” The man’s voice was thick with despair as he asked, “What in God’s name are we going to do now? This damn strike keeps going from bad to worse.” Sage took a deep breath before saying in a deliberately reassuring voice, “Try not to worry about it, Chester. Leo’s always known that, because he’s our leader, they might arrest him. So we planned for it. Your vice president, Homer, knows what to do. He’ll keep things on track here. Since you let Leo’s wife know about the arrest, I am sure that everything that needs doing is being done.” Thanks to Fong, he was certain Leo was already in the very capable hands of the lawyer, Philander Gray. Although sometimes irascible, lawyer Gray displayed unsurpassable zeal and skill when it came to defending his clients. He was probably already blistering the ears of whatever police sergeant had the unfortunate luck to pull jail duty this day.

  Chester wandered off, leaving Sage quietly considering the gloomy men milling around him. Just yesterday these same men felt somber yet still hopeful. Abner Mackey’s murder was a terrible blow. Certainly the public wouldn’t scrutinize any case the police made against Leo, no matter what the strikers said in Leo’s defense. Over the years, The Gazette was eternally unrelenting in its effort to gin up public antipathy against unions and union men. Newspapers, The Journal excepted, seemed the same everywhere. The labor movement incessantly struggled against the twin foes of public indifference and hostility created by lopsided newspaper reporting. The sad truth was that too many people swallowed newspaper sloganeering whole rather than thinking for themselves.

  Sage anticipated Earl Mackey using his father’s death to strengthen his war against the union. Mackey the younger inherited all of his father’s stubbornness, in addition to possessing a streak of meanness all his own—or maybe that came from his mother. From what Sage observed as a rich mine owner’s foster child, there seemed to be two different outcomes from inherited wealth. Either the new generation struggled to renounce the self-serving amoral values of the old or it strove to outdo them in the callous greed department. Earl Mackey fell squarely into the latter category. He was greedy, arrogant and seemed without a lick of compassion.

  Sage gave a mental shrug and tried to focus on what was important. For example, these men needed Leo back on his wooden soap box leading them, with his name cleared. That required Lawyer Gray quickly straightening out the situation. Otherwise, this strike was lost. As if to underscore that grim prognosis, fat, cold, raindrops began streaming down onto saturated ground, creating puddles for the unwary to splash through. Sage scurried, alongside the others, to find shelter beneath the wide eaves of the dilapidated warehouse at the head of the road.

  For a while, Sage simply listened as the men’s quiet talk ranged from bewilderment over Mackey’s death, to worry over Leo’s arrest, to despair about the eventual outcome of the strike. Beneath the thrum of rain hitting overhead, Sage started wondering whether Abner Mackey’s murder was a death blow to the strike.

  Sage shifted his feet, only to feel water squish up into his socks. Pulling his coat collar tight, he signaled for Chester to step out into the rain, away from the other men. Sage didn’t consider himself a patient man. For him, doing something, anything, was always better than doing nothing. He and Chester might as well continue with the bridge inspection plan although there was no guarantee there’d be an opportunity to use the information. He spoke quietly into the foreman’s ear,“Chester, did Leo talk to you yesterday about maybe helping me out today?”

  “Yah, he said he wanted me and you to survey some other trestle bridges and elevated roadways. He didn’t give me no names of particular bridges to inspect though.”

  “That’s all right. I know the trestles we need to inspect,” Sage said, patting a sheet of folded paper in his breast pocket. The list was waiting for him, propped against the coffee pot, when he woke up that morning. For a man of words, Johnston didn’t waste them. The note simply said, “Here are the locations of most of the city’s recent bridge repair contracts. They’ll give you a place to start.” The names of ten cross-street locations followed this missive.

  Chester looked at the list, “Yah, I know where these trestles are. Closest one to us is on Front Street, between Porter and Gibbs. What about Leo, though?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about Leo. A good lawyer is already taking care of the situation. Believe me, if Leo stood right here, he’d tell us to go on ahead with these inspections. He’s really given his heart to this strike and just maybe, our inspection will be helpful. You know, Leo wouldn’t want us to stand around and mope over something we can do nothing about.”

  The crease between Chester’s eyebrows said he felt dubious about inspecting bridges while his strike leader sat in jail. Apparently Sage’s blood ties to Leo prevailed, because Chester finally sighed, shrugged and said, “I guess you’d know him best.” He shoved the list into a side pocket, buttoned his collar tight and led the way toward the first bridge.

  Preoccupied with bracing against the downpour, their mission and gloomy thoughts, neither man noticed when another man stepped away from the group to trail them. He kept well back, ducking into alley openings and shop doors whenever he thought they might look back. Such precaution was unnecessary. Intent on reaching the first bridge, neither man thought to check whether anyone followed.

  s s s

  Six hours later, Sage ached everywhere. His filthy, sopping woolens felt icy cold where they hadn’t rubbed his skin raw. Scrambling up and down the muddy slopes of ravines and wading in muck was hard work. He gulped more hot coffee and pushed aside his discomfort in order to write down every discovery before he forgot it. His pen raced across the paper, even as he snuffled with the beginning of what he feared was an attack catarrh or something worse.

  Alder Street bridge near Chapman, sidewalk, roadway planking and stringers in dangerous condition due to decay.

  East Alder near East 3rd, punk riddles all the substructure, especially the pilings. Water pushing against pilings, making the bridge shake.

  Belmont at East 9th, underlying decking missing in places, leaving small sections of roadway suspended in midair without support.

  “Mister Sage,” Fong’s soft voice made Sage jump. “Mr. Philander Gray is downstairs in the restaurant dining room. He said to tell you he is here.”

  “He just walk in the door?” Sage asked. When Fong nodded in the affirmative, Sage asked the determining question, “Is he staying to eat supper, Mr. Fong?” Fong’s answer would tell him how long it would be before he needed to go downstairs. Philander Gray was a tall, string-bean of a man who remained thin despite packing in more food than a cookhouse full of loggers. Equally misleading was his long, doleful face which concealed a lively, aggressive mind. More than once, Sage saw the lawyer use this visual misdirection to his advantage in the courtroom.

  Fong, understanding the import of the ques
tion, smiled. “Yes, of that I am certain.”

  Sage nodded and continued writing no faster than before. If Gray intended to eat, plenty of time remained to complete his

  notes and to change his clothes. Fong returned to the restaurant. Alone again, Sage continued writing:

  East 8th near Washington Street dumping of dirt and debris off bridge has pushed the piling substructure from underneath the caps . . . Structure unsteady

  The clang of mental alarm bells mounted steadily as Sage listed the structural problems their quick inspection uncovered. The ten bridge trestles they inspected represented just a few of the ones recently repaired by the Mackey company. Yet, more than five were clearly in dangerous condition. How many bridges and elevated roadways existed in the city anyway? Everywhere you looked, water poured downhill. That meant gullies, ravines and swamps that people needed to cross, by horseback, buggy, wagon, carriage, as well as on foot. This early winter’s ceaseless rain made the situation dire as it swelled trickles into raging streams and small ponds into large lakes. How many more days of rain until another bridge collapsed? Would a man, woman or child be crossing it when the road bed shuddered, dipped and fell? How many more might die?