by Bill Albert
She turned to me. There were tears in her eyes.
“I miss my calling, Herbert. So very, very much. I remember having the gift, so vividly. I remember losing it. To have not had it at all would have been easier to bear.”
I asked her to forgive me. I was sorry to have caused her such distress. She read my note and answered with a resigned smile.
“It’s me who should be asking your forgiveness, Herbert. For not having a faith strong enough for the both of us. And, now when we meet again for being both ungenerous and unkind.”
She took my hand in both of hers.
“Will you forgive me?”
I couldn’t look at her for fear it would start my gaspy crying.
“But,” she said giving my hand a strong squeeze and brightening, “now I have another calling. Working among those who have fallen by the wayside. Rescuing those poor, helpless creatures from the commerce of passion. That too is God’s work, Herbert, don’t you think? Even Jesus . . . And you know I have learned so much, Herbert. So many things from these women about life that I never understood before. Another world. Wait, I must read you something. Please, sit down here.”
She went to the chest of drawers and from the top took a thin volume. She drew up a chair opposite me. Our knees were almost touching.
“This is a wonderful poem by Daniel Defoe. You know, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe? Just listen, Herbert, to what he has to say about the danger of uncontrolled thoughts and where they can lead if not checked by our own sense of morality. It will help you understand the natural forces we are up against in this holy crusade of ours.”
She stared at me steadily as she read. It seemed to me she was singing.
Loose thoughts, at first, like subterranean Fires,
Burn inward, smoldering, with unchaste Desires.
I recognized those thoughts. Mrs. Blanchard paused. She took a deep breath.
But getting Vent, to Rage and Fury turn,
Burst in Volcanoes, and like Atna burn.
The pointed end of her tongue emerged from between her teeth and slowly moved back and forth moistening her already perfectly moist lips.
The Heat increases as the flames expire,
And turn the solid hills to liquid Fire.
By then our knees were touching. She didn’t pull back, she didn’t stop reading or looking at me. Her voice quivered ever so delicately. I was holding my breath, listening to the resonance of each word.
So, Sensual Flames, when raging in the Soul,
First vitiate all the Parts, then fire the Whole;
Burn up the Bright, the Beauteous, the Sublime,
And turn our lawful pleasures into Crime!
Daniel Defoe had left us with nowhere to go but where we went.
Mrs. Blanchard and I were still actively vitiating all our reachable parts when the hotel was shaken by a massive explosion. The floors swayed, the windows rattled, plaster dusted down from the ceiling onto her rapturously upturned face. However, far from interrupting us, the vibrations from that volcano-like eruption served only to stoke more urgently Mrs. Blanchard’s already uncontrolled fires.
Outside, in the last snows of nineteen-hundred-and-oh-five, Harry Orchard’s bomb had just dismembered ex-governor Frank Steunenberg. Inside the Saratoga Hotel its impact and Mrs. Agnes Blanchard were threatening to dismember me as well.
That afternoon in Caldwell I had wantonly realized my most shameless, unchristian dreams. Their reality was productive of multiple disasters. I had failed to deliver the vital message. Not delivering that message had led to the Governor being killed, to Bill Haywood becoming an outlaw, to the entire Western Federation of Miners being endangered, and to my own imprisonment, if not my own hanging. And poor Mrs. Blanchard. What was left for her, what calling would call to her now? Would she have to flee to hide her shame after loving so unwisely? My unlawful pleasures had most definitely turned into Crime.
I am guilty. I am guilty. I am guilty.
I am now. I always have been. Ever since I came into this world by killing my mother. My mother, who traveled so far and suffered so much, only to bleed to death in the noisy immigrant stench of Castle Garden. And all for me, the new American who was her unknown reward.
GUILTY!
There. I’ve finally done. My story is finished. McParland’s story is finished. There is nothing more I need to tell him. I lay down my pen. I look up through the high windows in the warden’s office. Appropriately enough it is snowing.
29
By the city dead-house by the gate!
As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangor!
I curious pause, for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought,
Her corpse they deposit unclaim’d, it lies on the damp brick pavement!
The divine woman, her body, I see the body . . .
I’ve been locked up in this damn place for more than two weeks. A small building isolated in a far corner of the prison yard. Only two cells. Across from me in an identical cell sits Walt Whitman. He’s small and mousy and wispy-hair bald, a vociferously crazy man named Ralph E. Bolton.
I can’t communicate with him. He doesn’t talk to anyone, doesn’t even look at anyone—he recites, head back, spittle flecking white from his lips, thin arms thrown wide as if to embrace. All the language he has to command has been spoken for and ordered. He can only repeat it. As always, I can only listen.
For hour after hour, in a deep, sonorous voice, he declaims, he booms out poems from the Leaves of Grass. The guard told me that at first they took away his book. That didn’t work. Apparently he had memorized the entire tome. His incessant and insistent recitation was driving the other prisoners into a murderous fury and caused a near-riot. After that the only course left was to quarantine him from the main cellblocks. I can fully understand that.
But why have I been quarantined? I who can say nothing, I whose language is never heard. And haven’t I told the story I was asked to tell? The Story. Word for word? Where is my promised reward? Where is my salvation?
Dead house of love—house of madness and sin, crumbled, crushed
House of life erewhile talking and laughing—
but ah poor house, dead even then!
Months, years, an echoing, garnished house—but dead! dead! dead!
Every day for the last two weeks I’ve handed the guard the same note for Warden Whitney.
I want to see Mr. McParland.
Tears! Tears! Tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears!
Jesus Christ!
The guard assures me he has passed the notes on, but I’ve heard nothing but verse. Even the lawyer promised by the Federation has not appeared. I can only wait and suffer the poetry. I suppose there is some justice in that. Was it not poetry that led me here?
There is a logic but no set pattern to Walt’s choice of poems, except for the first one in the morning. It’s always the same.
Oh Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done!
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won!
The port is near . . .
O bleeding drops of red, but I do hate that damnable poem! I’ve hated it since I was forced to memorize it at Dr. Julian Sachs and read it out for the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. But two weeks of it! Fourteen times I’ve had to listen to the Captain falling on the deck, cold and dead. That’s no way to start the day.
O who is that ghost? That form in the dark with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent crouched there on the sand?
Today is what I think of as one of Walt’s “grim poem days,” when his selection runs to themes of death. It’s as if one poem suggests the next and so he descends, spiraling down into the tomb, pulling me along behind him. I prefer, albeit a marginal preference, the “singing days,” whe
n he celebrates and sings himself or takes to the open road.
Perhaps he lost his own story in Leaves of Grass and hopes to find it. Perhaps he never had his own story.
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind
O belching and desperate!
O . . .
O shit! I know what it is. They’ve suspended hanging in Idaho and replaced it with death by poetry!
“Levinsky!”
The guard stands in front of my cell. He clangs the thick key in the lock. He swings open the door.
“Here,” he says, pushing a pile of new clothes at me.
A white shirt of good quality, linen collar and cuffs, a Windsor tie, a gray worsted suit, a beaver overcoat, boots, even a flat cap. Good news or bad news?
“Change into these. Get a move on. The warden wants to see ya right away.”
I quickly shed my prison stripes. The new shirt feels fresh against my skin.
“Say good-bye to Levinsky, Bolton. He ain’t comin back.”
Good news?
Walt looks me full in the face for the first time. After a moment he turns away.
The door closes behind me. Once again I make my way across the snow-covered prison yard. I look back.
“I hear America singing! the varied carols I hear!” bellows Walt Whitman through the thick walls.
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be
bright and strong!
The carpenter singing as . . .
His voice fades away, but it doesn’t matter, I still can hear the last line of the poem.
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
30
A strong wind coming in over the water tears at the newspaper in my hands.
HAYWOOD ACQUITTED
ROOSEVELT CONDEMNS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
I turn to take the wind on my back. The newspaper stops flapping.
UNION SUPPORTERS CHEER IN COURT ROOM
Ever since his arrest a year and a half ago, and especially for the last three months during the trial, Bill Haywood has been front-page news all over the country, as big as the earthquake in San Francisco or the murder of Stanford White on the roof of the Madison Square Garden. Big Bill has become one of the most famous people in the whole of these United States of America. A stalwart hero, a defender of the working man, a martyr in the making to some, a murderous Anarchist troublemaker to others. Socialists of all different stripes and all different arguments, the unions, many ordinary people, and even Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, who hates Big Bill and what he stands for, including most fervently he hates the IWW, have spoken out for him. Eugene Debs promised armed workers and bloody revolution if Bill were convicted. On the other hand there are those who’d like nothing better than to see him swing. President Roosevelt called him and Moyer and Pettibone “Undesirable Citizens,” and most so-called “desirable” citizens seem to agree. The trial in Boise has split the entire country right down the middle.
LONDON PAPERS VIEW WITH ALARM CLASS WAR IN
AMERICA
A few months ago when the trial started there were enormous rallies and marches. I was in Boston then. Union members, a line of fifty across, carrying flags and banners, marched behind union bands through the city to Boston Common. People in the crowd lining the streets and others hanging out of tenement windows threw coins into the collectors’ blankets. At the Common there were more people than I’d ever seen before in one place. Some say there were over one hundred thousand. Many wore buttons declaring i am an undesirable citizen. All of them had come to cheer Bill Haywood and denounce his persecutors. In New York, Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, in every big city it was the same. They sang, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and a special version of “Hold the Fort.”
When you look upon your babies ‘round your hearthstone bright,
Think of Haywood’s tear-faced daughter, think of her tonight,
Make a vow to God in heaven, to that God on high,
That these boys in Idaho by greed shall never die.
DARROW PRAISES JURY
With a newly-saved-in-Jesus Harry Orchard rock solid on the witness stand telling his story of wholesale, bloodthirsty assassination, even with Clarence Darrow coming out all the way from Chicago to defend him, most people felt Big Bill’s story would end on the gallows. But it didn’t. I reckon his story, at least the one which most people will know about, really began in the courthouse in Boise. He can thank James McParland for that.
HAYWOOD SAYS “I’M CHARITABLE TOWARDS ALL.”
Me? I can’t follow that. I’ve been running scared for too long to hold out the hand of charity. And I know better.
Bill might be doing fine just now, cheered to the echo, riding high and proud, but I can’t believe that he hasn’t met up at some time or other with P. K. D. Swibble and heard his prophecy.
“Ain’t nobody escapes ‘em, nobody. Ain’t no place to run to neither.”
Sure he’s heard it. He just doesn’t want to listen. I guess I can’t blame him for that. If the people that needed to had listened, Swibble wouldn’t have to be out there riding the freights back and forth through the American West, telling the past, telling the future.
ORCHARD CLAIMS HE’S DONE HIS DUTY
I did too. My duty to protect me. Benny December would have been right proud and so would Glove.
With the guard behind me I climbed the iron stairs to the warden’s office. It was my fourth trip. I was expecting McParland and Siringo. They were there. So was the Warden and so were two people I most surely did not expect—Buffalo Bill Cody and Arizona John. Just like in the Dimes, they’d ridden to the rescue.
“That’s the boy!” Buffalo Bill boomed, striding over to shake my hand.
He was wearing his banker’s outfit.
“Howdy, son! How-dy!”
He took me by the shoulders and slowly spun me around.
“Looks like they been treating you right! The Warden here assures me they have. Only the best for his paying guests, he says!”
I held my hand flat in front of my chest and moved it quickly to the front and to the right.
Good. Seeing you sunrise in the heart, I signed.
“I’ll be!” said the Great Scout, smiling benignly. “I’ll be!”
After my arrest, Rebecca and Mrs. Blanchard had gone with Mrs. Decker to see her brother, who was at the T. E. Ranch in Wyoming resting up from his grand European tour.
“You know how it is,” he said to me later on the carriage ride into Boise. “Can’t stand up to a posse of determined women. Fierce like she-tigers!”
They told him what had happened and insisted he do something to help me. He was finally persuaded and got in touch with his good friend, William Pinkerton in Chicago.
“Mr. Cody has vouched for you. Seems his sister and some other ladies were with you all the time in Caldwell. With you when the bomb went off. Seems by what they say there was no way you could have been helping Orchard.”
McParland was agitated but trying his best to appear matter-of-fact.
“Purity League,” Buffalo Bill said doubtfully.
HEAD OF THIEL AGENCY BLAMES PINKERTONS FOR ORCHARD’S ESCAPE FROM THE NOOSE
“The boy should have told us straight out, Mr. Cody, instead of making up the tall tale that he did. Wouldn’t have had to bother you then.”
“Bother? It’s no bother. Besides it is a pleasure to be able personally to shake you by the hand, sir. I want you to know that I’ve always been a great admirer of yours. You’ve done a damn fine job.”
McParland beamed.
“Very kind of you, Mr. Cody. And likewise, I’m sure.”
“Besides,” continued Bill, “gives me a chance to see my old friend, Charlie Siringo here. Haven’t seen him for, God, can’t say whe
n it was last.”
“’92 I think, Colonel. When I came through Denver with Tom Horn.”
“Damn, but it’s been some time!” Bill exploded. “Poor old Horn.”
“Yep,” agreed Charlie. “Poor old Horn.”
“Makes you sort of think,” the Colonel muttered to himself. “You know, Charlie . . .”
“That doesn’t mean we don’t need the boy back here to testify at the trial,” McParland cut in. “There’s Cripple Creek and there’s Denver and there’s more besides that.”
“Of course!” Bill declared. “Like I told Mr. Pinkerton, I’ll be keeping him safe with the family in Cody. Have him back as soon as you say the word, sir. Just as soon as you say! Everyone knows that Bill Cody’s word is as good as having it done!”
What could McParland do? I had become a witness, not a suspect. They’d been holding me until they’d cornered Big Bill and the others. Two days before, a train had arrived from Denver carrying Bulkeley Wells, two dozen armed Pinkertons, and the three prisoners. They were safely with Warden Whitney, three more numbers for his chalked tombstone. And I was free.
I was going to make sure I stayed free. I had come too close to the gallows and was fed right up to here with what the West had to offer me. I sat back and waited for an opportunity. It came a few days after we arrived in Denver.
“I put you on your honor, Newborn Buffalo Calf, as a Lakota brave and as a gentleman. You heard me give my word to Mr. McParland. Remember Sunset Buffalo Dreamer? Good. An honorable man. A man’s word, son, is the most important thing he has got. It’s sacred. Sacred! You think about that.”
I did and after he left the St. James so did I. I knew by then exactly what the most important thing a man could have was. Freedom.