The Lawless

by John Jakes

  Gideon had heard the railroad lobby was deeply mired in a truly spectacular scandal involving the Credit Mobilier, the company which had financed and constructed the Union Pacific section of the transcontinental railroad. He’d unearthed no facts; no one had. But sources he trusted, sources such as Theo Payne, kept telling him Washington would explode like a bomb if the truth about gifts of Credit Mobilier stock ever came to light.

  Gideon’s editorial had suggested the need for a railroad worker’s lobby to offset Henry Cooke and his associates. It had only alluded to potential scandal. Still, the editorial had produced those twelve letters, some quite hateful, and a brief, exuberant feeling that someone read his little paper.

  “I’ll be fine, Sime,” he said. “No one’s going to show up here.”

  Strelnik looked dubious but finally shrugged. He lit one more cigarette, blew out the match and asked, “Still planning the trip to Chicago?”

  “Yes, the workers on the Wisconsin and Prairie want me to attend their organizational meeting, and I think I should.”

  “Is Mrs. Kent still against it?”

  Gideon nodded. “She hates every trip I take. In fact I think she hates all of this. She’s told me several times it was too dangerous.”

  Well, it wasn’t exactly tame. He’d been set on by ruffians three times in other cities, and shot at once. But General Jeb Stuart had taught him how to fight; he held his own. To deal with unwelcome visitors, he kept a loaded Confederate cavalry revolver in the drawer of his desk.”

  “I heard it’s been hot as a furnace out in the middle west, Gideon.”

  The younger man smiled. “Sime, you needn’t hang around to nursemaid me. I’ll be out of here in half an hour. Now go home! Tomorrow we’ll carry the rest of the issue to the typesetter.”

  Strelnik cast one more glance at the pile of angry mail, pulled his cap out of his coat pocket and reluctantly left.

  iii

  Gideon inked his pen, found several sheets of foolscap and printed in capitals at the top of the first one THE TRAGEDY OF PARIS.

  He chewed the end of the pen. He knew what he wanted to write but he had to phrase it properly. The Versailles government could never be condoned for what it had done in the third week of May; Bloody Week, it had come to be called. In an orgy of fire and shooting that had left much of Paris a corpse-littered ruin, the government had overturned the Commune and executed as many as twenty thousand of its supporters.

  In spite of the May bloodshed, public sympathy seemed to remain with established authority. It was the Commune itself, not its overthrow, that struck fear into most Americans. And an obvious but irrelevant connection was still being made between the Commune and American labor. The bosses played up the fact that Marxian Socialists had led the Paris revolt and would, if permitted, lead similar revolts in the United States. There were constant references to the horrors of an earlier French Revolution. The Commune had raised a specter not easily banished, and one that would harm American labor for a long time to come.

  Slowly, Gideon began to write:

  The American workingman was ill-served by the late and unlamented Paris Commune. From the outset it must be made clear that although American labor does include within its ranks a few who support the International, and who would see all private enterprises dismantled and given piecemeal into the workers’ hands, such men are in the minority.

  The bosses have foolishly tried to make it seem as though American labor is entirely composed of such radicals. That is a lie deliberately fabricated to set back the just cause of workingmen’s rights. Most native workers are not Communards in fact or even by disposition. They have no conflict with legitimate enterprise, and no antagonism to capital, but only desire to receive a full and proper share of the capital which their toil creates.

  Although certain bosses would wish it, we must not assume that what was wanted in Paris is wanted in the streets of American cities and—

  Abruptly, he glanced up. Absorbed in trying to get the editorial to flow smoothly, he’d paid no attention to his surroundings. Hadn’t there been a sound a moment ago?

  A sound out on the landing?

  He laid the pen down. His palms grew damp. Through the grimy windows he saw that it was nearly dark.

  Voices murmured beyond the door. Two, perhaps three men. His heartbeat picked up as the door handle rattled. He’d forgotten to throw the bolt after Strelnik left.

  As he leaped to his feet, the door crashed back. Three ragged, scowling men crowded inside.

  “Yessir, here’s the one,” said the biggest of them, hefting a short length of lumber in his right hand. “Eye patch, ain’t that right?”

  “Right, James,” said the second, a wiry fellow with a slingshot in his fist.

  Gideon’s heart almost broke; for a moment he was too sad to be frightened. Here was a perfect example of Gould’s statement that he could use the working class itself to destroy anyone who fought to improve the plight of the class. These three men were no criminals but poor, ragged city dwellers whom all the craft unions barred from apprentice programs, and thus from decent job opportunities.

  Men with families, he supposed. Desperate men as yet unacceptable to the rest of the labor movement. All three of the men were black.

  Sorrowful, he still reminded himself they’d do what they had been hired to do. He eyed the desk drawer where he kept the cavalry revolver. The burly man in charge drew a folded Beacon from his sagging trousers. Waved it under Gideon’s nose and delivered a message Gideon was sure had been rehearsed.

  “Certain gentlemen don’t like you printing things about Mr. Henry Cooke down in Washington.”

  Quietly, Gideon said, “Who paid you? Why are you doing this? You’re workingmen, aren’t you? I’m on your side.”

  When they heard his accent, the wiry one sneered. “On our side? Lord God. You hear him, James? He’s a Southron an’ he says he’s on our side! No, Mr. Southron, we ain’t workingmen, much as we’d like to be, ’cause this old city don’t seem to have many jobs for those who ain’t got white skin. You come up here after the war just like we did, Mr. Southron? You come here ’cause they wouldn’t let you keep niggers as property no more?”

  “If it makes any difference, my family never owned a single slave in Vir—”

  “No, it don’t make no difference,” the wiry man interrupted, and lunged.

  He swung the shot-loaded sock. Gideon ducked but it grazed his forehead. He grabbed the drawer handle as they surged around him.

  He stabbed his hand inside the drawer. Closed his fingers on the butt of the revolver. The leader spotted the gun and kicked the drawer shut. Gideon cried out when the drawer caught his wrist.

  “No more stuff about Mr. Cooke, hear?” James said, and slammed the length of wood against Gideon’s right temple.

  His good eye blurred. He punched the black’s belly, but underneath the old shirt the man’s gut was rock solid. While the third one held him, the wiry one hit him again. They beat him for three or four minutes and left him gasping and floundering on the floor.

  Then they tore up books and papers and, just before they ran off down the stairs, they smashed the office windows. By then Gideon had collapsed, unconscious.

  Chapter II

  Breakage

  i

  AFTER LEAVING THE precinct house, he had to run to catch the last car of the evening on the Third Avenue Railroad. Every step hurt, and set his head to throbbing. His secondhand frock coat was torn, and because there was no running water in the Beacon office, he’d had to clean up with a rag and some bourbon whiskey he kept on hand. So he smelled and looked like a ruffian when he jumped aboard the car. He didn’t recognize the conductor.

  The man was new on the run, and might have denied him passage except for the peremptory way Gideon slapped the fare into his hand. Gideon sank down on one of the wickerwork seats and stared at the passing street. The conductor clanged the bell. The horse walked a little faster.

  It wa
s a long trip north through the country on the eastern side of the island to the growing village of Yorkville, and home. He had ample time to think about the evening’s events. He was less concerned about the physical damage to the office, most of which could be repaired, than he was about the prospect of arriving home so late, covered with cuts and bruises. He knew it would cause trouble. And there’d been too much of that in his household of late.

  Perhaps he should head off the trouble by telling Margaret he was suspending publication of Labor’s Beacon. For a few moments he felt like doing just that.

  Then he thought of his friend Daphnis Miller.

  He closed his eyes. Inevitably, his mind turned back to that winter night in the Erie yards when Daphnis had died, crushed between two freight cars they’d been coupling. Daphnis had slipped on ice while a fierce storm raged. He’d never forget the sound of his friend’s scream as the car bumpers snapped his ribs and broke his back. He could still see the sleet spattering Daphnis’ wide, lifeless eyes as he lay beside the track like a broken doll.

  The memory of that night hounded Gideon like some infernal animal, chasing at his heels and forever making him run faster. He had dreams about Daphnis dying; the sound of his friend’s scream or the sight of his dead eyes slipped into Gideon’s thoughts when he least expected it. Daphnis had been a decent, nonviolent man of limited learning; he wouldn’t even have understood the word Communard. It insulted his memory to say that any effort to take care of his family after his death was a radical conspiracy.

  The Daphnis Millers of the world had precious few to speak and fight for them. Gideon would not—could not—diminish the already thin ranks by stepping out. Margaret had taught him to understand what justice was, and to care about it. If it no longer mattered to her, it did to him. Labor’s Beacon would continue its work.

  And damn the consequences.

  ii

  Dressed in a plain cotton nightgown, Eleanor Kent sang to herself and danced on the worn carpet of the parlor in Yorkville.

  She held the hem of the nightgown up around her calves, trying to remember the step one of her school friends had shown her.

  She was nine years old. A slim, well-formed girl who already showed signs of growing up to be a beauty. Large brown eyes dominated an oval face. A large mouth revealed dazzling white teeth when she smiled.

  Upstairs she heard her mother’s voice, raised loudly because Eleanor’s baby brother, two-year-old Will, had cried out with a bellyache that had been troubling him since noon. Mama was in a terrible mood tonight.

  Of course, Eleanor thought, missing a step and then stopping altogether, that wasn’t unusual lately. More often than not, her mother and father seemed out of sorts. They were always arguing, too, about things which puzzled Eleanor.

  Papa’s safety. Or his traveling too much. Or Mama wanting some particular article for the house and not being able to buy it out of the allowance he gave her. Or Mama simply saying she didn’t have everything most wives had.

  Eleanor glanced around the parlor. The room was jammed with furniture and potted plants, as current custom dictated. Nearly every inch of space on the papered walls was crowded with knickknacks, ornamental plates and framed pictures. On the tables there were more plants in smaller pots and a Rogers group—one of those highly realistic little sculptures reproduced by the thousands in gray or brown plaster finish. Every well-furnished American home had at least one John Rogers piece: his famous slave auction, or President Lincoln reading a proclamation, or some farmers playing checkers.

  They had a lot of things, Eleanor thought. Yet Mama wasn’t satisfied. And lately she’d been acting very peculiar. Sometimes she vanished for an hour, and Eleanor would hear rattling in the cellar. A bottle or a jar, she didn’t know which. Then she’d hear crying. Finally Mama would reappear, her eyes slightly red and her breath smelling in a strange way. She didn’t walk steadily, either.

  Once Margaret had lectured her daughter on the evils of drink. She’d used as her example a town idler who could frequently be seen weaving up and down the streets of Yorkville. This evening, quite without warning, it struck Eleanor that her mother’s lurching walk was just like the town drunk’s. Her cheeks burned, and she felt ashamed of thinking that, but she couldn’t help it.

  She stared at the parlor mantel. On the wall above it hung an old sword and an equally old musket. Below them stood a green bottle filled with some dry tea, and a glass display case with wooden ends. The case contained a medallion and a piece of tarred rope.

  All were things that Eleanor’s father said were important to the Kent family—just like the picture in Papa’s study showing that ferocious ancestor of hers, Philip Kent.

  Tonight Eleanor paid no attention to any of the mementoes. She glanced at the clock. Papa was very late coming home. And Mama had been in a stormy mood ever since the afternoon post brought a letter and a photograph from the Territory of Wyoming.

  Mama had examined the photograph with tears in her eyes. She’d angrily refused to answer Eleanor’s questions about it, except to say that it had been sent by Uncle Michael’s wife. Eleanor knew very little about Uncle Michael and Aunt Hannah except that their last name was Boyle, not Kent, and that Papa didn’t like them and said so.

  Hoisting the hem of her nightgown again, she began to sing softly.

  Listen to the mockingbird, listen to the mockingbird,

  Oh the mockingbird is singing all the day—

  Her feet moved in rhythm. At last she had the step. She kept dancing and singing. She delighted in both.

  Papa had taught her to love to sing, and she’d watched street dancers in the city. She loved performing for people, but her practicing was not well tolerated by her mother, who disapprovingly called her a little show-off. In theaters—places she’d only heard about—people were actually paid to sing and dance and show off!

  Papa had offered to take her to a theater, but Mama disapproved of that, too, even though she had once enjoyed attending plays when she was a young girl in Richmond. Some things about Mama had certainly changed, Eleanor thought. She didn’t know why, but she was very sorry about it.

  Papa had a fine voice. Sometimes he sang with his daughter—another cause of arguments with Mama. Lately Eleanor had concluded that she didn’t want to fall in love and get married if what she saw and heard around her every day was the result. Even though she was taught that girls were supposed to become wives and mothers when they grew up, that wasn’t for her if so much quarreling and bad temper went along with it!

  She finished the song and turned her head toward the table which bore their one Rogers group, the rustics seated over a checkerboard. Next to it lay the wrapped photograph which had caused so much distress. With a hesitant glance at the darkened hall outside the parlor and an ear cocked to the sound of Mama berating Will upstairs, Eleanor drew in a long breath. She reached for the picture.

  Heavy boots on the veranda startled her. Her hand jerked and hit the piece of statuary. As the front door opened, the Rogers group fell off the table. She tried to catch it.

  She wasn’t fast enough. The plaster shattered.

  Horrified, she covered her mouth. There was no possession her mother prized more. She’d nagged Papa for weeks before he finally brought it home as a Christmas gift.

  Yet the moment Eleanor turned and saw Gideon, she forgot the damage and the certain punishment that would be hers. “Papa!” She hurled herself against him. He was dirty, his coat was torn, and his face was covered by cuts and two huge, purpling bruises. “Papa, what happened to you?”

  He managed to grin as he hugged her. “Never mind that, young lady. Why are you still up?”

  “’Cause Will’s got the bellyache and he’s making so much noise, I can’t sleep. Papa, please, please tell me who hurt you!”

  He ruffled the lustrous dark hair that hung loose around her shoulders and shimmered in the lamplight. He walked to a chair and collapsed in it, his blue eye looking a trifle glassy. His shoulder
s slumped as he said, “The same kind of men I’ve run into before, sweet. Only this time they really took me by surprise.”

  He sat forward, wincing. Eleanor stood in front of the pieces of the Rogers group so he wouldn’t notice. He probed his side with his fingertips. Oh, how she loved him! He was so handsome and tall, still as dashing as any soldier. She wished he and Mama could be happy together.

  He sighed and sat back. “Don’t think anything’s broken.”

  Rapid footsteps came down the stairs. Eleanor turned toward the hall, still shielding the plaster bits by standing directly over them and tugging her nightgown down as far as it would go. The hem was an inch above the carpet.

  Her mother rushed in, stricken first by the sight of Gideon slumped in the chair, bruised and dirty, and then by Eleanor’s bare toes poking out from under the gown. Margaret Marble Kent was her husband’s age, twenty-eight, with brown hair and eyes and a pretty though snub-nosed face. Her bosom and waist had thickened and now had a matronly look.

  Flour whitened Margaret’s gingham skirt and bodice. Strands of loose hair flew around her shoulders. She let her anger win out over her concern as she turned on her daughter.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” She grabbed Eleanor’s earlobe, hurting it. Eleanor stumbled, pulled off balance. “I ordered you to your room an hour ag—”

  She saw the fragments of the sculpture. Her dark eyes filled with tears. “Oh, no. Oh, no!”

  She pushed Eleanor aside, knelt and tried to fit two sections of the statue together. Gideon stared at her, a stunned expression on his face. Then color rose in his cheeks. Anger animated his shoulders and arms with a quivering tension.

  Suddenly Margaret exclaimed, “You did this, young lady! You broke the only Rogers group we own!” She slapped her daughter’s face, and not lightly.

  Eleanor reeled back. She was more shocked than hurt. All she could think was, Mama smells funny again—what’s wrong with her?