Death at Pullman

by Frances McNamara

  “But he was only speaking in haste and anger,” I insisted. “You could not help but be angered by what we saw. I’m sure he did not refer to any real plot. It was an expression.”

  “How can you be so sure, Emily? Do you know these men so well that you can vouch for them? Are you quite sure LeClerc did not tell you this to impress you, so that when an explosion happens you will know it was his act and admire him for it?”

  I felt myself redden at this accusation and replied angrily, “Admire him? Of course not. I would never condone such a thing.” But, in reality, I could not help but admire LeClerc for his vigor and action in fighting against the current circumstances. He gave me hope. Compared to us, he seemed full of color. I thought the doctor and I, and even the Hull House supporters, seemed pale and weak in comparison. I did not say it out loud, though.

  “Wouldn’t you? Are you quite sure you wouldn’t be impressed by such an act? I am afraid with the coming of Debs and the American Railway Union we will see this struggle become a contest of wills between the union leader and the industrialist. The pride of each will be on the line.”

  “But you didn’t hear him. Debs said he didn’t like strikes and they say he was able to negotiate with James Hill. He and Mr. MacGregor told the men repeatedly to stay away from the works and out of trouble. I heard them.”

  “Oh, each side will claim to be the innocent party, Emily. But how much is bluster and posing? You will find Debs and Pullman are both powerful men and, in the end, the struggle will be about power. But let me show you something.” He opened out the newspaper he carried, folded it back to an inside page, and handed it to me. On the top of the page was an article by Alden, in which he described our visit to Fulton Avenue. He kept his promise and disguised the names, but his careful telling of the circumstances of each family filled two columns.

  “This is wonderful. This will help Miss Addams and the others to raise money.” I was proud of Alden—it was so much more than I had expected of him. It was the first of a series of articles he was able to publish during the next week before the real troubles began and I do believe they helped—at least in those early days—to promote the cause of the people of Pullman.

  We spoke no more of LeClerc.

  When we reached the town, worries of bomb plots and potential violence gave way to the work of setting up the relief station. I found that Fiona, and the others in our hastily formed committee, had spent the evening drawing up a list of those in most dire need. Under the watchful eye of her father they came up with a set of criteria for eligibility that made it much easier to begin the distributions. An excerpt from one of Alden’s articles describes the system as we set it up that day:

  Relief headquarters open at eight o’clock in the morning, and from that hour until well along in the afternoon a line of men, women, and children file in at the open door, some with baskets, some too poor to afford a basket with only their hands to carry away the supplies received. A counter extends along the west side and across the south end of a room some forty feet in length. If the applicant is making his first visit to the relief headquarters he hands his union card and slip from one of the investigating committee to a man seated behind the counter near the door. A slip is filled out with his name and address and the articles required are handed to the applicant.

  He passes farther along the counter to a group of clerks, who take his slip and pass it to a young woman at a desk, who, if the slip calls for meat, writes an order on Secord & Hopkins for the small quantity allowed to a family. The applicant is handed a twenty-five pound sack of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of tea or coffee, and a bar of soap. As he passes out another clerk at the door takes up his slip and cancels it. Care is used to see that no one gets provisions who is not in urgent need. Two separate records are kept of the applicants, and the slips and the stubs of orders on Secord & Hopkins, so the committee may be able to give an account for every cent received.

  The Kensington businesses were extremely generous at that time, supplementing the supplies with fresh loaves of bread and contributions of money.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time everything was set up and running to my satisfaction. I saw Mr. Miller from the day before and made sure his application was quickly accepted. But there were others, equally destitute, I did not see. When I consulted Fiona, she told me that the residents of Fulton Avenue and the Dens who we had not visited the day before were not likely to be aware of our efforts. At her suggestion, we loaded a wagon with supplies and headed east, accompanied by Mr. LeClerc, who had volunteered his assistance. I left the two of them with half the goods at Fulton Avenue and drove on to the Dens by myself.

  As I headed south I purposely drove the cart away from dreary Fulton to Stephenson, which took me past the handsome row houses. They were small, but each had its own particular characteristics—a mansard roof here, a different doorway there. And the road took me to the Market Hall with its arches. Unlike Mr. LeClerc, I did not want to blow it all up. On the contrary, I wanted people to be able to live and work in the pretty town. Whatever reasons compelled George Pullman to build the town (and I was sure they were mercenary), I thought that Beman—the young architect he had hired to design the place—had understood only that it was to be a pleasant, wholesome place for people to live in peace. It seemed a great shame that it could not be inhabited in that spirit. I could see that it would take so very little, just a small reduction in the profit of the Pullman Company, for the people to be able to inhabit that dream.

  As the horse walked along towards the Dens, I could see the great brickyard shed, stranded alone on the dreary mud flats. When I got closer, I heard shouts coming from the O’Malleys’ shack. Gracie Foley’s voice carried across the empty landscape and I recognized the clipped tones of Detective Whitbread in the responses. I pulled up beside the policeman’s carriage and climbed down.

  “’Tis no business of yours where I work, or where I’ve been, or why I left. Your business is to find who killed my brother. You’ll not be coming here to hound me. I’ll not let you do it. The rest of them in this place may cringe and fawn, and do whatever you tell them, but I’ll not. You should go out there and find who killed Brian, I say. Go.”

  “Madam, I merely asked for an account of your actions on the day in question. Don’t you want your brother’s killer found? Have you no desire to see justice done? Or is there some more sinister reason why you refuse to answer? Do you deny there was bad blood between you and your brother and that he had forbidden you to come here?”

  Looking in the doorway of the shanty, I saw Joe O’Malley sitting at the table, whittling a piece of wood. I thought about how recently the corpse of his brother had been laid out there and wondered how he could bear to use it. But then he had little choice, for there were few pieces of furniture in the shack. In the shadows, Gracie and the detective were both stalking up and down as they argued. I heard another horse and turned to see Mr. Mooney’s shiny, black carriage pulling up. Gracie had seen it, too. She must have been expecting him, since she marched out of the cottage tying her hat under her chin with a perky bow and taking Mr. Mooney’s hand as he helped her into the carriage. Detective Whitbread followed behind her.

  “Madam, I am not finished.”

  “But I am finished. I’m quite finished. I have to return to my work, if you please . . . or even if you don’t please.”

  I noticed that Mooney stayed out of the dispute but I thought he was trying to disguise a smile as he climbed aboard and took up the reins. He must have known arguing with Gracie was a lost cause.

  “Madam, I must warn you that I can get a warrant if necessary.”

  She did not deign to give a reply but only urged Mooney on as he flicked the reins. Detective Whitbread was quite red in the face and I was afraid he would burst with indignation.

  “But, Detective, it seems very likely she does need to return to work in the city. You don’t really suspect that she killed her brother, do you?”

  “It
is not a question of suspicion, Miss Cabot, it is a question of getting the facts from everyone involved. The woman is a lunatic. She rants that the officials are in the pay of the Pullman Company and yet she will not answer a few simple questions to assist with the investigation. It is the most perverse behavior I have encountered in such a case.”

  There was a sharp squeak, and we turned to find Joe O’Malley leaning on the open door and trying the little whistle he was carving.

  “She’s ashamed is what it is.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Detective Whitbread said with a frown.

  Joe O’Malley looked gaunt in too-short trousers, held up by suspenders over an undershirt, and bare feet covered with mud, but he did not seem indignant. “You’ll have to forgive her, Detective, sir. She couldn’t bear to repeat it, you know.” He looked at me over the little carving he was still working at. “Gracie hated the works. The woman she had to report to in the laundry didn’t like Gracie and she always gave her the worst of the work and the least of the pay. But it was because of Brendan Foley that she became with child and my father threw her out. He told her he never wanted to see her again. He was hard about things like that. On everything else he was as mild as a May breeze, but about that—about her having a child with no husband—he wouldn’t stand for it and he told her she had to leave. She went to Foley in Chicago and he didn’t want to marry her, you know, but even he couldn’t stand up to her in a thing like that, where she knew she was right. So she marched him down to the local parish—downtown, where they weren’t really known—and she got the priest to marry them. I’m sure he was probably afraid of her, too, no doubt. But it turned out that he was a bad choice, was Brendan. He was all right when he could get his stomach filled at his parents and flirt with the girls around here, but his folks were just as put out and they threw him out when he took some money from his da’s pocket. He didn’t have it so comfortable in the city and it made him cantankerous, so they say. And he would take it out on Gracie. They had a room above a saloon and she wasn’t working, waiting to have the child as she was. But he should have known once that was done she’d have taken care of him. She’s always been a prodigious hard worker, Gracie has. She makes no friend of them she works for, but no one would say anything but she’s a prodigious hard worker.

  “But she wasn’t working then, and neither was Brendan most of the time, and he took to hitting her. Of course we didn’t know that because our own da had forbidden us to talk to her and we were all working our backbreaking jobs. Well, as you can imagine, Gracie fought back and one night he threw her down the stairs. She lost the baby then, but she still had Brendan Foley. He was sorry, they say, after it happened. And Gracie got herself work as a laundress. That’s the one kind of domestic work where you can live out, you know, and she could not bear to live in and be under some housekeeper’s hand all the time. She could come and go as she chose and, being a hard worker, pretty soon she was in demand and it’s on Prairie Avenue no less, for a family named Glessner and some others, that she works. She would never work for Pullman, you understand, although they live there, but she made a good job of it for the others. Then Brendan got himself killed in a barroom brawl—no one was really surprised by that—and she was on her own. She wanted to come back and bring the little ones presents, and show as how she had got on, but my da wouldn’t allow it and Brian was as straight as an arrow like our da. She couldn’t even come to Da’s funeral. Brian wouldn’t let her.”

  He lifted his head from his work to see how we were taking in this story. Detective Whitbread stood with his arms folded, listening, and I was trying to imagine how awful it must have been for poor Gracie to be left so alone.

  “She’d never have killed Bri, if that’s what you’re thinking, and she came down on an afternoon train. She was working in Prairie Avenue all the morning, so she only got here right before Brian was found.” He sighed and blew shavings from his work.

  “What about your brother, Mr. O’Malley? Do you have any knowledge that he was spying for the company?” Whitbread asked.

  “Brian was no spy and any that say he was are lying.” Joe dropped his hands to his sides. There was a deep frown on his face, which was lined much more deeply than it should have been as he must have been less than twenty-five. “Brian was just like our da. He was too hard-headed sometimes, he was too much on the straight and narrow. But he would never, never, never betray MacGregor and the rest by spying for the company. It’s a lie and no one that knew him will believe it.”

  I watched Detective Whitbread, who gave no indication of what he thought on the matter. It was true that as far as I had heard, people who knew the dead man did not believe he would have spied. Besides Jennings, the only one who seemed to think it possible was Dr. Chapman and I could not understand why he thought that.

  “When was the last time you saw your brother, Mr. O’Malley, and do you know anything that could lead us to the person who hung your brother in the brickyard shed?”

  I noticed he did not mention the fact that Brian O’Malley had been dead before he was hung. Joe looked down at the ground.

  “I saw him only at breakfast that morning. He went over to the hall in Kensington to hear the speeches. But I was tired of the speeches—they do them morning and night and it’s just to give the men somewhere to go, it’s not that they say anything. I stayed to look after the little ones and to play my pipe. And I expected Gracie, for I was the one who got a message to her asking for her to bring food for the little ones, and I wanted to get to her before my brother saw her. So I was here.”

  “You did not see anyone in the vicinity of the shed?”

  He looked across the mud flats, squinting. “I did not look that way and if I had, I would not have noticed. I was playing the pipes, you see. Then Gracie came and we were talking when we heard the screams and we went with everyone else to see. Gracie never expected such a thing. She was all geared up to see Brian in the flesh and to have a knock-down, drag- out fight, verbally, if you know what I mean.” He turned to the detective. “She won’t tell you the story because she is ashamed. She’s ashamed for what happened with Brendan Foley and our da throwing her out. But it’s them that should be ashamed—him and Brian—for treating her like that. But she found Mooney. Brian would have been mad to know he’s not Catholic, but she’s happy for once. He’s a good man. I don’t suppose she loves him, like, not really. But she loved Brendan Foley and see what that got her. I’ll be glad to see her marry Mooney and I cannot see that it matters which church or office it’s done in. But Brian would have forbidden it. As if he had any right to tell her what to do after all that.” He shook his head at the sorry story of his near relations.

  “Mr. O’Malley, where are the children?” I asked. Detective Whitbread had done his questioning and I still had my task to complete, but the silence of the Dens seemed ominous.

  “Most of the men have gone round the lake to try to catch some fish. The company says they cannot do it from the shore here. We sent the children with them as there’s nothing for them here and they whine about their empty stomachs. Gracie will bring more food when she returns, but she must work to be able to do so.”

  “I’ve brought stores from the relief station. Can you help me distribute them?”

  His face lit up when he saw the contents of the wagon. To my surprise, Detective Whitbread took off his jacket and, in his shirtsleeves with his bowler hat still firmly on his head, he helped us take the sacks around the Dens. I had not expected them all to be in need but, with the help of the men, we did some repacking to stretch what I had brought. We were able to leave something with each of the sixteen shacks. I was alarmed by what I saw. Hollow-eyed, exhausted women, some of them ill, several pregnant, were pitifully grateful for the supplies. With Joe to help me, I filled out the applications for each family, but by the end I was extremely worried. What I had brought, after we divided it again, would only last a few days. How would we ever manage to replenish the stores often enough w
hen the numbers of needy kept increasing?

  “Perhaps Mr. MacGregor is right and they will all be back to work next week and no longer need the help,” I said, as I climbed into the cart to head back. Detective Whitbread was putting his coat back on and preparing to leave. He had been unnaturally quiet during the food distribution.

  Joe O’Malley looked at me with large, sorrowful, brown eyes as he handed me the reins. “If this were a fairy tale, perhaps, Miss Cabot, but I’m afraid this is a dark tale, full of curses and spirits and foul deeds. And it will be a time longer before it comes to whatever end the fates have prepared for us.”

  He slapped the horse to get him started and I headed back to the town, followed by Detective Whitbread in his rented carriage. We traveled some minutes until we had almost reached the streets of the town again when I pulled up and waited for him to stop beside me.

  “Detective Whitbread, you don’t really believe Gracie Foley killed her brother, do you? From what Joe said she had only just arrived when he was found.”

  He tipped up his hat and wiped a handkerchief across his forehead. It was another hot day. “With the information from her brother it should be possible to verify the claim that she was working in town that morning. Why the woman could not have just said so is beyond understanding.”

  “Detective, you see the terrible straits the people are in here. At least the O’Malleys have Gracie to help them. You won’t arrest her, will you? I am very worried about how much longer the relief supplies can last. Someone must do something to end this strike.”

  “I will arrest whoever is shown to be guilty by the evidence, Miss Cabot. I would remind you that it was you, and Miss Addams, and Mr. Safer who petitioned the mayor to have me assigned to this case. As for Mrs. Foley, I will consult the Glessners. And, as for the strike, I am afraid that is far beyond my authority. It would seem that some of the striking workers are enjoying the holiday.” He nodded in the direction of the town and I saw a young couple walking hand-in-hand towards us. She looked up at him with a smile on her face and he walked along with his cap pushed to the back of his head and his jacket swinging from a finger over his back.