Harvest of Fury

by Jeanne Williams

On this day in early June, up Tombstone Canyon, she had shown them how cacti grew under nurse plants which protected them while they were small, though the cacti might later grow up through the tree’s limbs and even flourish after it was dead. There’d been a pack rat’s nest under a vast clump of prickly pear, and Chris had told the wide-eyed youngsters how he was an ornery old bachelor who lived alone except when mating. Females were solitary also, except when rearing young.

  “You’re sol’tary, too, Miss Revier,” blurted Sulev, one of the Slovak children. “You ever goin’ to rear any young?”

  She laughed in spite of a pang and tousled his yellow hair. “You take all my energy! And I guess I am about as cantankerous as the grouchiest old pack rat.”

  He squeezed her hand shyly, letting it go before any of the other children could notice. “You’re not real grouchy, Miss Revier. And on Saturdays you’re not like a grown up at all.”

  Most of the foreign-born miners were Mexican or Slav, but Chris taught Cornish, Irish, Swedish, Austrian, and Italian youngsters, too. The mixture made for colorful holidays. Last month the Cinco de Mayo dance had been held in the Pythian Castle just two days after the Day of the Holy Cross when Mexicans marched up Brewery Gulch to a cross on the hill. Serb and Polish members of the Greek Orthodox Church celebrated January 7 as Christmas and St. Savo’s birthday on January 27. In spite of this mingled population, no Chinese were allowed in town. The local laundries wanted no competition and that was the business Chinese often went into. Chris had spoken against this to the mayor and various other leading citizens, who either looked blank or reminded her that such emotionalism was the reason why women had still not been given the vote.

  Near Castle Rock they stopped to watch leaf-cutter ants stripping a small tree and carrying the severed bits to their hill where the stored leaves would mold and provide food. Thousands of workers streamed in and out of the hill that might be sixteen to eighteen feet deep. Chris found their industry depressing, though marvelous. No time for play or meandering or friendship, just a round of mechanical labor to ensure the continuance of the colony.

  “Remind you of something, lady?”

  Startled, for she’d heard no steps, she looked up into a face paler than most one saw in this sunny region.

  Rebellious chestnut hair curled close to the young man’s skull, looking as if it had been hewed off with a knife. His mouth turned down like a wing, bittersweet, and deep gray eyes watched her as a wild thing peers out from its stronghold. He wore work shoes, faded Levi’s, and a blue shirt, and his flesh hadn’t caught up to his height yet, so that his bony wrists and frame gave an impression of immaturity belied by mouth and eyes. He had a guitar slung over his shoulder.

  “I—I was wondering if that’s how people look to God.”

  His mouth quirked. “I’m not God, but that’s how the main lot of people look to me. Except they don’t always even get their food and a place to shelter. They store up riches for their bosses while they get just enough to keep them going. When they can’t go anymore, they’re kicked out.”

  Was he one of the IWW organizers who’d brought on the strike at Jerome late in May? The United Verde workers had been granted the Miami scale of wages, $5.25 a day for underground work, and had voted to go back to work, though the closed shop still demanded by the Industrial Workers of the World and the Western Federation of Miners had been denied. Several men had been killed, but the violence at Jerome seemed mostly over. Was it moving here?

  “Phelps-Dodge pays good wages,” she told the young man.

  He laughed sardonically. “Is that what you teach these kids?”

  “Of course not! I teach them arithmetic, grammar, spelling, science, history—”

  “Ah, history!” Rocking back on his heels, he eyed her mockingly. “What do you give the poor little devils? Magna Carta and George Washington? That Arizona became a state in 1912 on Valentine’s Day? I bet you don’t say what happened to the Indians!”

  “You’d bet wrong!” Turning to Sulev, Chris said, “Please tell this man about Cochise and Mangus Coloradas.”

  Sulev did, adding that Geronimo, of coyote power, who could make the dark last while he stole upon his enemies, had died in Oklahoma, but that in 1913 the Chiricahua prisoners of war were allowed to either take up land in Oklahoma or move to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. “They could have had their old lands around Warm Springs,” the boy added, “but when the leaders traveled back to look at them, the grass was gone and it wasn’t the good place they remembered.”

  Chris glanced challengingly at the stranger, who had stopped grinning and was watching her with surprise. “How can you get away with that in this part of the country?”

  “It’s history.” Chris knew that her family’s prestige tempered the criticism she got. “Some of these children’s parents went to the first school in a miner’s shack above Castle Rock. When the whistle blew for a possible Indian attack, they followed their teacher into the mine tunnel to hide. My students hear plenty of that.”

  He watched her, still with that disbelief that somehow pleaded to be convinced. Half under his breath, he said, “Have they heard about Joe Hill?”

  She shrank from the name. Who hadn’t heard of Joe Hill, Joel Hagglund, and four bullets fired into his heart by the State of Utah, in November 1915? He had been executed over the pleas of President Woodrow Wilson, the Swedish minister, Helen Keller, and many who felt he was being killed for his ardent support of the Wobblies, the IWW, rather than for a double murder of a shopkeeper and his son for which there was only the flimsiest circumstantial evidence.

  Too cruel, too close, too bloody. She couldn’t teach it yet, though she could now tell the older students about Cananea and weep only in her heart.

  The stranger shook his head. “You haven’t told them.” He unslung his guitar, leaned up against a rock, tuned the instrument, and began to sing, smiling at the children in a way that drew them close, as if he were about to share a secret.

  “‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe,

  They shot you, Joe,’ says I.

  ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’

  Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’

  Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’

  “And standing there as big as life

  And smiling with his eyes,

  Joe says, ‘What they forgot to kill

  Went on to organize,

  Went on to organize.’”

  He finished the song in a clear, haunting voice that brought tears prickling back of Chris’s eyes, threw back his head, pulled a mock long face, and began a song she knew, a parody written by Hill.

  “Long-haired preachers come out every night,

  Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;

  But when asked how ’bout something to eat

  They will answer with voices so sweet:

  You will eat, bye and bye,

  In that glorious land above the sky;

  Work and pray, live on hay,

  You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

  By the time he finished that song, the children were singing the chorus with him. Then he glanced at Chris for just a second before he half closed his eyes, lashes fringing his cheeks in a way that gave him a boyish, vulnerable look.

  “Who’s goin’ to be your man tonight,

  Who’s goin’ to be your man?

  You walk the streets in a yaller gown,

  Sayin’, ‘Who’s goin’ to be my man?’”

  Chris wore a yellow dress. She couldn’t take her eyes from his fingers, long, skillful, bringing such music. A slow, warm trembling ran through her.

  Play me—touch me, oh, tune me, the way you do the strings. It was years since she’d wanted a man. The sudden violence of her desire terrified her.

  “We have to go, children,” she said. “Good day to you, sir. You play very well.”

  He rose with a last caress of his guitar and bowed. “May I see you home?”

&nbs
p; “There’s no need.”

  “My need.” His look was disarming, and his tone laughingly burlesqued. “I’m hungry, pretty lady. Won’t you give a poor wanderer something to eat?”

  Her heart seemed to stop. She was feverish and icy at once. “I’ll find something for you.”

  By ones and twos, the children left them. They passed the Warner Hotel, the YMCA, and moved up Opera Drive past the school to the small house where Chris lived alone, except for Nicodemus, her handsome, green-eyed black cat.

  At the door, she turned in sudden fear. What was she doing? She knew nothing about this man, except that he was surely IWW, a man of trouble. His eyes met hers steadily. The slight smile vanished, replaced by a bleak hunger, a loneliness and desolation so strong she experienced it physically.

  “Pretty lady.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked desperately. As if it might be a magic, a means to conjure him away, break free of this …

  “Johnny Chance.”

  He was younger than she, but taller. His thin body blocked the sun. She opened the door. He stepped in behind her and took her in his arms.

  XXIV

  She did give him food, but much later. He helped set the table and slice the bread while she scrambled eggs with green chilies and cheese.

  “You’re a good cook, too,” he said, filling her coffee cup as naturally as if they’d been sitting in her small kitchen like this for years.

  She flushed. “Did you—did you think—?”

  He shrugged and grinned, eating with gusto. “I certainly hoped!”

  Should she stammer and blush and say she’d never done such a thing before? Explain she had been taken by his boy’s face, his voice, his hands on the guitar? It had probably been true of other women before her. Yet the way he’d loved her, bringing her to joy, using his lean, finely jointed, body for her pleasure before he had his own—surely that had been different with her?

  “Are you staying in town?” she asked.

  “Start work tonight.” At her surprised look he added mischievously, “Yes, I get meals at my boardinghouse, but I figured I’d much rather have whatever you’d give me.”

  So he hadn’t been starving, though he’d looked that way. Was the other hunger also pretense? She straightened and gave him a level look. Whatever his appetite, hers had been real. And he had fulfilled her as Fayte had never done. What was it with the boy? A fragility, something that completely disarmed her?

  “Johnny Chance,” she said slowly. “Is that a real name?”

  “Joe Hill gave it to me. Before that, on the San Pedro waterfront where he found me, they just called me ‘Kid’ or ‘Hey, you!’ or whatever they could twist their tongues to. I was lucky to get work. After the big business panic in 1908, a third of all workers were out of jobs.”

  “But you must have had a name.”

  “I never knew it. Or my folks. The orphanage called me Henry. Ran off as much because of that as the grub and beatings.”

  So that was it. The lonely, unwanted child still looked out of his eyes, shaped that wistful, cynical smile. “So you knew Hill in California?”

  “Sure. He worked at the wharfs like me. Came in 1910 when the IWW local was formed and was secretary for a couple of years.”

  She vaguely remembered that in 1911 the Mexican Liberal Party, bent on overthrowing Díaz, had headquartered in Los Angeles and from there had tried to take Baja California with the aid of IWW members and others. “Did you go to Mexico with Hill?”

  He nodded. “We took Mexicali in January, and another little town, but in June the Porfiristas ran us out. That winter we went to Hawaii and worked as longshoremen, loading raw sugar. Next year we got beat up in Oceanside when we were headed for a free-speech fight in San Diego—”

  “What’s a free-speech fight?”

  “Lots of cities forbid speaking in the street. IWWs would come in strong and all get up on soapboxes, urging the workers to join and stand up for their rights. The speakers would get hauled off to jail, but there’d be so many they’d overcrowd the jails and bog down the courts, be such an expense that usually the city fathers repealed the law against street speeches and organizing and let the jailed lot go. But we didn’t always get it all our way. I’ve been stripped, beaten and left for dead, pistol-whipped a couple of times, and run out of more towns than I expect you’ve even seen, pretty lady.” Softly, remembering, he went on. “Joe and I left California the summer of 1913, heading for Chicago. We got as far as Salt Lake City. Later Joe did get to Chicago. He was buried there, after Utah killed him.”

  “And he had one funeral in Salt Lake City and another in Chicago, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Over five thousand came to the one in Chicago. We sang his songs on the way out to Grace-land Cemetery, and late into the night, after words were said over him in Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, German, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Lithuanian—languages of the workers he’d spent his life trying to help.”

  “But wasn’t he cremated? There was something about lots of envelopes …”

  “The funeral was on Thanksgiving and he was cremated next day, November 26, 1915. Some ashes were sent to locals in every state except Utah, and to Asia, South America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. On May 1, the workers’ international holiday, he wanted his ashes to be scattered, and they were. All over the world.”

  “And you’ve come here.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think the Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers will like that.”

  “Too bad.”

  “If you find poor conditions, you could talk to the management.”

  “I will.”

  She stared at him, thought of a man she’d never known jerking in a Utah prison yard as bullets ripped his heart. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Johnny, don’t!”

  He came to lay his head in her lap, arms embracing her about the hips. His breath warmed her thighs. She stroked the hair that tried to curl, winced at scars revealed by her touch. She bent to kiss his cheek, but he raised up to meet her lips with his mouth.

  He came to her almost every night before he went to work. Through the day she’d think of all the reasons she shouldn’t let herself care about him, even reciting them aloud to a bored Nicodemus who would bat her face with his paws till she paid attention to him. At night, as soon as Johnny smiled at her or touched her with his hands, she wanted only to comfort and be comforted by his body, give all she could to this one who could love with such sweet wildness though there seemed to be little enough love in his past.

  Often he brought his guitar and played for her, sometimes leaving it at her house. Mostly, he sang folk songs, but always he sang something of Hill’s. The hours with him were when she felt alive. The rest of the time, even with the children, seemed unreal.

  Of course, that late spring and early summer had been past belief. War had been declared April 6 against Germany, and on May 19 Gen. John J. Pershing and 30,000 troops had been ordered to France. Chinese refugees who’d followed Pershing out of Mexico after almost a year’s fruitless pursuit of Pancho Villa, had gone to San Antonio, where they were enlisted in the quartermaster’s department.

  Villa, once a conscientious mule packer for Sonora mines, had become one of the most famous revolutionary generals and in March of 1916 had led fifteen hundred guerrillas into Columbus, New Mexico, where they killed seventeen Americans. Pursuing U.S. troops had killed over a hundred of the raiders, and Pershing had been sent south of the border to try to capture Villa. He met with the same success that earlier commanders had when sent after Apaches.

  The strike at Cananea was now sometimes called the start of the Mexican Revolution. Several of the strike leaders who’d been condemned to the awful prison of San Juan de Ulúa were now generals, and the dead huelguistas were considered martyrs. It had been 1911 before the rebels actually took over Cananea. Colonel Greene had barely lived to see it. The 1907–08 panic all but ruined him with the sharp, sudden
drop in copper prices, but he’d salvaged what he could. On August 5, 1911, he lost the reins of the horses pulling his buggy and was thrown from it, smashing bones and puncturing a lung. He died of the pneumonia that set in.

  Fayte, so far as Chris knew, was operating a mine south of Cananea, one owned, independently of Greene. Her young girl’s admiring adoration for him was dead, crushed by the bullet he’d sent into Cruz, though that wasn’t all of it. She could never have lived as an ornament in his house, a rare trophy, guarded, protected, but a thing.

  It must be precarious for a gringo in Mexico; it was dangerous for anyone. Carranza was now president, following the murder of Francisco Madero, the idealistic reformer who had been the first president after Porfirio Díaz was overthrown in 1910. Victoriano Huerta, who had conspired to kill Madero, had succeeded him, but Carranza, Villa, Obregon, Zapata, and other revolutionary chiefs refused to accept him and kept fighting the federales. Some U.S. Marines, landing at Tampico in 1914 for supplies, were arrested and held for an hour and a half. They were released with apologies, but Huerta refused to salute the American flag in reparation, and President Wilson had ordered a fleet to Tampico Bay. It seized the customs-house at Vera Cruz in April of 1914 and sent a detachment to Huerta, demanding an apology for the arrest of some Navy men. Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the U.S., but more serious, trouble was warded off by the offer of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina to arbitrate the dispute. The advancing revolutionary armies forced Huerta’s resignation in July. He sailed for Spain. During the ensuing chaos, Venustiano Carranza emerged as president, but it would be a long time before the volcano that was the revolution stopped erupting.

  To Chris, there was strangeness in finding accounts in the Bisbee Daily Review of aerial battles over Europe fought at 6,000 to 19,000 feet, while across the border in Agua Prieta, Villistas were being shot against the wall.

  Congress had passed a Selective Service bill May 18, and when a government agent had entered the Navajo reservation to register men for the draft, he’d been run off. In Phoenix thirty-seven Russian conscientious objectors had gone to prison. In a raid over London German planes killed ninety-seven people and wounded more than four hundred. On June 20, 1917, England finally gave women the vote. The next day in Washington, a mob tore down suffragette flags.