by Bill Albert
“Some called them the Molly Maguires. That sound more familiar, son?”
I look up at the old man, give him a bewildered smile and shake my head.
Who hasn’t heard the story of the Mollies, especially if they lived for any time in a mining camp? It seemed everybody knew one of those who had escaped from the gallows and run out West—Mike Doyle, Bill Gavin, or Friday O’Donnell—had met them in some camp or other and heard the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. How good union men were sold out by a dirty Pinkerton spy. How nineteen of them were hanged, each going up the gallows’ steps with a red rose stuck proud in his lapel. How the last one, Jack Kehoe, had swung for five minutes before he choked to death with his tongue bit half off. Sure, I’d heard about the Molly Maguires but, like with old King David, I figure it’s better to admit nothing, let the old man play out his hand and take me for a baby-faced greenhorn.
“Kelly was one of the worst. But bad as he was, guilty as he was, because he saw the Light, decided to follow our Lord Jesus Christ, went with the State and named the others, he got off. Even got himself a reward.”
He gives me a meaningful stare. I’m studying the snow flakes.
“The Inner Circle, boy. The Inner Circle. That’s what we want. Haywood and Moyer and those others in the Federation central office over in Denver. Pettibone, he’s another. You give them to me, tell me how they put you and Orchard up to the murdering and maybe we can do something for you. You don’t want to swing for them, do you? Harry Orchard sure doesn’t. No sir. Already told us enough to convict you, he has. How you helped him put the bomb near to the gate. How you . . .”
I grab my pencil and begin to write how I never did anything wrong, that Harry Orchard’s probably the biggest damn liar this side of the Rockies and the other side if the truth were known, that I’m only a poor dumb . . . The old man lays his moist hand on mine and shakes his head.
“You see those buildings out there, son?” he says, pointing to the two high sandstone-faced cellblocks outside. “They’re full of men who ‘never.’ Never did this and never did that. Never did anything wrong. None of them. It’s always the same story, son, always the same. The cells are full to the brim with innocent men, just like you.”
Who is this damned old Irishman anyway? Some kind of detective for sure. A Pinkerton? A Baldwin-Felts? At least now I know the precise story he wants to hear. Do I tell it for him? Tell it the way he wants it told? Cheap as dirt stories are, I know that, but if I tell this one it’s going to come hurtfully expensive. Expensive for me, expensive for Big Bill and expensive for the others as well.
2
The Irishman told me to think about King David and Kelly the Bum and Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer and about my everlasting soul. I was to contemplate my fate and pray to my Saviour for redemption. Think of Jesus, he said. He would visit with me tomorrow, he said. After that a guard came and led me down the outside stairs and back across the yard to the cellblock. It was muffled quiet outside and our footprints were the first ones to be cut into the new snow.
Now I wait outside the tall iron-bar gate into the cellblock while my guard talks to the turnkey. It’s freezing and the prison clothes are stiff, rough against my skin. I suppose I should be thankful they didn’t shave my head like they do to real convicts. I rub my hands together and stomp my feet. The handcuffs are pinching at my wrists. The guards look over at me then turn away and talk some more. That’s fine. I can wait to see Montana Jim.
Coming into the cellblock out of the clean snow is a shock. So much iron and everything painted copper green. Gates, the cell doors, stairs, handrails, even the high wall facing the three tiers of cells—all copper green. Why should I care about the color when I’ve just been told I might be hanged? Necktied, topped, stretched. I saw it once, in Leadville. They said this Swedish boy had attacked a little girl and almost killed her. He never made it to the jail. Bouncing at the end of the rope, feet twitching, smelling of shit, piss running out the legs of his pants, head all collapsed to one side. Is that me? And for what? Knowing Harry Orchard? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The gallery echoes with loud voices, coughing, boots banging on the iron stairs and catwalks. More than a hundred men stacked up on top of each other, two to a cell. But it’s not the noise that rushes at me so much as the heavy stench of all those shit buckets. Even after we take them down in the morning and empty the contents into the sluice, the stink doesn’t go away. It’s seeped into the walls, our clothes and, along with hundreds of bedbugs, into the bedding. I thought I’d got myself used to every kind of bad smell there was. Just goes to show how easy it is to be wrong about the true fullness of your own experience.
The guards have finished talking. One of them motions me to follow him though the gate. It clangs closed behind us.
“Hands,” he says harshly.
It’s the first thing he’s said to me since we left the warden’s office. My open-faced listener’s charm doesn’t beguile everyone.
I hold out my hands and he unlocks the handcuffs. They’ve left red welts around my wrists. He pushes me up the stairs ahead of him.
The fronts of the cells are made of flat pieces of iron woven into a tight lattice of four-inch squares all but shutting out the light. You can’t see the faces from the catwalk, only fingers pushed through bars and the occasional eye pressed up close for a better look. There are no prisoners here. Just iron cages stuffed to busting with eyeballs and fingers.
We arrive at cell number Thirty-seven. The guard unlocks the door and slides it open. I hesitate.
“In,” he barks.
I go in and the door is closed behind me. The cell feels smaller, but it smells about the same. Montana Jim is lying on the top bunk staring at the ceiling and popping bedbugs between his fingers.
“Ugh” is all I get as a welcome.
He doesn’t have a lot of small talk to be working on. I can live with that. Anyway he has already told me his story. A predictably disjointed tale of an unfair partner and an unfaithful woman, predictably resolved with an axe. The one thing I do remember clearly is his insistence that, contrary to what they said at his trial, the axe was sharp. Razor sharp, he kept saying. Montana Jim obviously feels that being accused of keeping a blunt axe is an affront to him as a real man.
Suddenly I have to pee something fierce. I turn sideways and shuffle past the bunk to get at the bucket in the far corner. I lift off the tin lid, unbutton and don’t look too close at what’s in there as I start to relieve myself. I’m in midstream when Montana Jim bellows from above me.
“I’ll be tied! A damned Christ killer!”
Sweet Mother! I grab myself, choke off the flow and try to get everything back into my pants, but it’s too late. The curse of Abraham descending on me again. Oh God! I’m in for it now. Montana Jim’s probably never seen a Jew this close before and I reckon he’s about to get himself that one true religion.
Ever since I discovered to my disgust that all men are not circumcised, I’ve done my best to shield myself from unfriendly Gentile eyes. I mean, that’s about the only thing about me that is too obviously Jewish. Otherwise I look kind of ordinary—a tad dark-skinned and my nose is more impressive than the rest of my face, but my hair is brown and straight and I’ve got muddy-green eyes—like the bottom of a pond, my mother used to say. A Jew, sure, but not so as you’d notice with my pants on and my name changed. Anyway, it didn’t take me long to figure out that in the West Jews are not real popular, at least with the farmers, the ranchers, the miners, or the storekeepers. That doesn’t leave a lot of other folks to be popular with. You see, some say Jews are big Eastern bankers sucking the lifeblood of the working man, like they took the blood of Christ. If you’re like me, clearly not rich or a banker, well then, you’re probably a foreign Socialist agitator or just a simple Christ killer, a murderer of children who uses their virgin blood to make the Passover m
atzos. That’s good enough for most people to be getting on with. Like the song I heard once about the Jew’s daughter.
She pinned a napkin round his neck
She pinned it with a pin
And then she called for a tin basin
To catch his life blood in
I wonder if Montana Jim has heard that song. Maybe so. He is off his bunk now, towering over me, his big hands opening and closing on the axe he’d love to have in his hand.
I back away from him, but one step and I’m up against the hard bricks. I reach for my pencil. His big paw slams it away. No more pictures for Montana Jim.
“Christ killer,” he says again, savoring the words. “In here with ol’ Jim. A pox-ridden Christ killer at that. Might as well have put in a Chink or even a Nigger. Know what we do to Christ killers? Huh? Do ya?”
Whatever the details, he looks as if he’s about to save me the trouble of telling the Irishman his story and the state of Idaho the expense of a hanging. He lunges and I duck, throwing myself forward through his legs. I grab hold of the cell door and start moaning and squeaking for all I’m worth. All the time Jim is yelling and shouting about how he’s going to kill him a Christ killer.
“Just smile and enjoy it!” a sympathetic soul yells from a nearby cell.
“Give him one for me, Jim,” another prisoner shouts.
They think he’s giving me a prairie wedding!
I feel his hand on my ankle, pulling at me. I hang on to the bars. The tin cups start their clattering roar once again. A hand on the other ankle. He’s tugging and I’m holding. My arms are going to pop out of their sockets.
“Jew bastard!” he screams. “Teach you . . .”
Shit! Something smashes hard against my fingers and I let go. Montana Jim shoots backwards and I land on top of him. I hear the bucket go over, clanking on the floor and then warm liquid is soaking into my pants legs. The cell door slides open with a crash.
“What have we got us here?”
I look up. It’s one of the guards holding a long wooden club.
“Ya boys sure are makin a heck of a lot of noise, ain’t ya? Can’t have that in a respectable place like this, can we now? Ya’ll be disturbin the other guests. I’m surprised at ya, Jim, nice, well-mannered gent how ya are.”
Two more guards arrive. They’ve also got clubs.
I think one of my fingers is broken. At least it’s on my left hand.
I manage to find my pencil under Jim’s bunk. Irishman, I write on a piece of my paper and push it to one of the guards.
The old man can have the story he wants, any way he wants it.
3
It’s like when you’re working down a mine. If there’s a fistfight no one asks who started it. Both men get their walking tickets and that’s that. Here, unfortunately, it’s not walking tickets. Here solitary is what you get.
Montana Jim spat and cursed when the guards clubbed him and dragged him down the metal stairs. Called me a damned Christ killer again and again. Leading such a sheltered life, he probably hasn’t heard of a Sheeny or a Hebe or even a Yid. Said he’d tear me into little pieces. By then he was at the bottom of the stairs and I couldn’t hear the rest, especially as the other prisoners were banging their cups and shouting to beat the band.
I’m delighted to be where I am. So it’s a little dark. Well, to be honest it’s pitch black and also more than cold and I’ve got to lie on the cement floor with only a thin blanket. But at least here I’ll be safe from Montana Jim’s unnatural lusts and his Jew hate.
All the way over here I kept pointing at the paper with Irishman written on it. I moaned and showed the guard my finger. He didn’t seem impressed. He told me I wasn’t in no position to tell him what he had or hadn’t to do. Then just to make it nailed-down clear he told me to shut my whining Jew mouth or I’d have more than a busted finger to worry about. I guess being a prison guard is not a particularly uplifting job, in the spiritual sense that is. He shoved me hard in the back and told me to keep moving.
We walked out of the cellblock. It was dark and windy and the snow had frosted hard and crunched under foot. The sound of voices from the cellblock drifted off in the gusts of cold air. I was taken over to an old one-story building close to the prison wall. The wall is made out of the same light-colored stone as the cellblock and is about twenty feet high. On each corner there is a fancy round turret like you’d find on one of those old-time castles in Europe. Iron walkways run along the top of the wall. There weren’t any guards walking there. Probably inside the turrets out of the wind, figuring it was too damn cold for anyone to want to escape.
The solitary block has a riveted iron door and no windows. Inside we passed through a barred cage entry and then into a narrow corridor with heavy wooden doors along each side. The guard unlocked one and pushed me inside.
“No talkin now, boy,” he laughed, “’lessen you want a bucket of water tipped up over ya.”
The door closed, a key turned and I was left in the dark.
I felt around the cell until my foot hit a bucket. It was empty. A small blessing. The cell is about five by six and I can’t reach the ceiling. It smells like piss, it’s damp and ass-biting cold. The blanket is no help at all.
Should I bang on the door and demand the guard get the Irishman? My middle finger is throbbing and hurts like sin, but if I make a fuss I reckon I’ll just get myself wet. I’ll have to wait until morning, that’s all there is to it. I can last out one night. The Irishman said he’d be back for my story. What’s he going to do when he finds out I’m not only a killer, but a Christ killer?
I pull the blanket up under my chin and try to find a comfortable spot against the hard wall.
So I tell the Irishman what he wants to hear, and then if they don’t hang me, which they might do no matter what the Irishman says, I’ve got the rest of my life in here with the likes of Montana Jim kicking the tar out of my hide for nailing up the gentle Jesus. It would be better to let them hang me and get it over with, because there’s no way I’m going to last out in this prison.
It’s all down to a story, one I’ve got to tell but can’t afford to.
I’ve learned that if you keep at it high and hard you can generally story yourself into the clear with most people after a time. Not with this Irishman though. There are other stories I could tell him, but even if I did manage to find a whole wagonload more out there, ones that might even string him along and keep me warm, after a while I’d simply run out of them. Stands to reason, that does. Even for me. Even in America.
4
It’s unnaturally quiet in the solitary block, like someone was holding their breath waiting to scream. Every half hour or so there are footsteps in the corridor, the spy hole is flipped back and I see a small circle of light.
I can’t remember ever being this shivering cold. My feet and hands, my broken finger, my ears and nose, all numb as the stone. Heard this tale once about a mountain man who was stuck somewheres up in the Rockies in the dead of winter. Well, it got so damn cold and his teeth got to chattering so hard that he bit the end of his tongue clean off. Half-Tongue McWaters they called him. That’s a true story, at least that’s what I’ve been told. So, I’m biting down on the edge of the blanket to stop my teeth chattering. Even if my tongue doesn’t do a lot for me but wet my lips and taste my food, I don’t want be known as Half-Tongue Something-or-Other.
Damn stories are the story of my life. How I got myself locked up in a cell in the Idaho State Penitentiary charged with murdering an ex-governor, someone I never even laid eyes on, is one damn story I would dearly like to understand. I mean, how do you get close to the end of your own story from where you started out? For me this is a specially difficult question because I started out a long way from Idaho and even farther from a life in which I could ever imagine being on such intimate terms with Montana Jim Naylor.
Li
ke I said, I came into this world at Castle Garden, an enormous circular building put up many years before my arrival to protect New York Harbor from the British. Then it was called the Southwest Battery, later on it became Fort Clinton and later still, when they turned it into a concert hall, it finally became Castle Garden. It’s had its name changed almost as many times as I have. Some years on, the concert hall was transformed into the Office of the Commissioner of Immigration. Then it could protect the entire country from something far worse than the British—immigrants. It’s still there, at the edge of Battery Park. Now it’s the Aquarium, a home for yet other strange fish.
I was born at Castle Garden in 1887, a few months after President Cleveland unveiled the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island and a few months before they hanged the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago. Of course, I didn’t know about that particular unveiling or that particular hanging at the time. In fact, I didn’t know about the circumstances of my birth until eleven years later. It was at that time, in 1898, when all the assumptions, expectations, and the careful plans for my young life got pushed aside. It’s also when I found out about the Haymarket Martyrs.
Until then I was Meyer Liebermann, “a gifted child” with a wonderful future—”If only he would apply himself with more diligence.” “If only Meyer would be more careful with his work.” “If only he would pay more attention in class.” That’s what my teachers said about me at the Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys. Fifty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue is where it was and, for all I know, where it still is. A school full of gifted children with well-paid-for futures.
So what about the assumptions, the expectations, the plans? There was an endless succession of them. The most fundamental was that since I was a Liebermann, I would succeed. How could it be otherwise? My father decreed it. My mother announced it. My relatives applauded it. I would graduate from Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys and then attend Sachs Collegiate Institute. There, with more rigorous tutoring in Greek and Latin, in Mathematics and Science, I would be made ready for Harvard or some other appropriate university. After that I would have a profession. My father had decided it would be the law. Lawyers, he said, always made a good living no matter what the state of trade. Could an American life be mapped out more clearly?