The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Brazier spread news between songs—“You’ve heard this all before, it’s off to the chain gang to hammer rocks some more”—every day new hobos railing in to sing and to give speeches, one man arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence in front of city hall, another for asking a street cop if the free speech protests were still happening.

  Sullivan countered their moves with his own, and after the spectacle at the rock pile, he put the prisoners on bread and water rations, and the next morning they were taken to the courtyard and “bathed” with a fire hose. The union leaders responded with a hunger strike to demand humane treatment for people they said were political prisoners. Fine, said Chief Sullivan, if three hundred singing bums wanted to starve themselves, less trouble for him. “Man don’t work,” Sullivan said, “he don’t deserve to eat.”

  That particular line was read to them by a jailer who stood outside their cell each day reading from the establishment newspapers, the Chronicle and the Spokesman-Review, to show how public support was against them: “ ‘The petty acts of the men in jail, such as throwing their food upon the floor, breaking the dishes, screaming out silly songs and pouring torrents of abuse upon the law and police department are what sane and orderly minds look for from incorrigible children and men in insane asylums.’ ”

  Rye would have shaken his head if he’d had room to do it: crammed into a double-barred cell beneath an open steam vent, beaten with sticks and sprayed with fire hoses—and the prisoners were the ones “pouring abuse” on their captors? Then, on the fifth morning, with the three hundredth protestor arrested, the jail full and the courts backlogged, Rye discovered the latest torture they had devised for him.

  He was being sent to school.

  There was a vacant boarded-up building on Front Street, the old Franklin School, which had been replaced by a high school on the South Hill, and the city was using it as a temporary jail to house the slop-over prisoners until this crisis ended.

  It had been three years since Rye stepped foot inside a school. He’d always felt trapped there, saddled and reined, writing numbers on a slate board or reading Bible verses and hearing what an idiot he was for getting both wrong.

  At dawn, Rye and the hardier of the men from the sweatbox were marched along with twenty others down Front Street, the first flakes of snow swirling in the gray sky. They trudged to a dark and imposing three-story brick building, a clock tower rising from the center, the hands stuck at midnight. On the steps, four civilians held rifles, paper stars marking them as deputized emergency jailors.

  As the prisoners were led through two heavy wood doors, Rye looked down at the words etched in stone at his feet.

  “Sapienta et veritas,” said a tall man with a heavy accent, as if reading Rye’s mind. “Wisdom and truth.”

  “Whiskey and trout,” said another, and a laugh went through the line of men.

  “Wine and tomatoes,” said another, and more laughter.

  “Women and trouble,” said another, and even the guards chuckled at this one.

  “Water and turnips if you bums are lucky,” said a good-natured emergency jailer, who turned out to be a barber and held his rifle by the barrel like a walking stick.

  The school was dark and cold, no furniture, no heat or light, only a single blanket for each prisoner on a hard wood floor—but at least it wasn’t a dungeon sweatbox. Rye got the best night’s sleep he’d had since being arrested. Brazier said they shouldn’t work at the school, either, so when they refused to cut their own firewood, Sullivan said fine, let them freeze, and he cut their rations in half. One cold night, they gave in and burned window sashes and doorframes to keep from freezing. They took the doors off cabinets and closets, and in one, they found a box of old books. They burned the box but not the books, and Rye leafed through them—Pearson’s Latin Prose Composition, the National Compendium for Penmanship, and Epochs in American History, from 1896. He ran his hands over the raised letters on the covers and felt, for the first time in his life, cheated by his lack of schooling. That night he used the thick history book as a pillow and, in the morning, read about the American Revolution in slanting sunlight through a school window.

  The number of IWW men left to arrest was dwindling, but there still seemed to be four or five new men every day—the prosecutor slowly holding arraignments in front of a drunk judge named Mann who told the newspapers his job was to “rid the city of this filth.” The trials always went the same, charges read, objections overruled, Wobbly convicted of disorderly conduct and given thirty days. The leaders were held on disorderly charges but also conspiracy to incite a riot, six months in prison if convicted. The women suffragists and socialists were turned loose with citations, as were the progressive civilians who got caught up, and a few people too old or infirm to do jail time. Some days the drunk judge would feel compassion, and if a union man agreed to leave town, the charges would be dismissed. Most of those rode out on rails, but when one man climbed right back on a soapbox, Judge Mann stopped offering such leniency.

  On Rye’s fourth day in the school, the Salvation Army came through to assess the prisoners’ treatment, and the guards lined Rye up with a dozen of the healthier-looking men in the school’s old gymnasium. What we called the Starvation Army grandees came in uniforms like a real army, and a man with a red birthmark on his face walked past Rye, then turned back, looking him up and down. “How old are you, son?”

  Rye didn’t hear the full question, and he said, “Fine, sir.”

  But the other prisoners all stepped forward in line to look back at Rye. The jailers, too. And the Salvation Army man got red-faced and turned back to the head jailer. “How old is this boy?”

  It was quiet a moment, and then the quick-witted barber with the rifle walking stick said, “Rye, if you jump a train in Butte going forty miles an hour toward Spokane—” and he didn’t even finish the joke before the room was laughing.

  “How old is this boy!” the flushed Salvation Army man asked again.

  “That is, uh . . .” A jailer had the original booking list and he looked for Rye’s name on it. “Dolan, Ryan J. Sixty-one.”

  The laughter was pealing now, and the Salvation Army man turned to Rye and asked more gently, “How old are you, son?”

  Again Rye hesitated. “What is today?” he asked.

  The man told him it was November tenth.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, in a week, I will be seventeen.”

  10

  Rye was put in the back of a wagon with five other shackled prisoners and taken across the river to the new fairy-tale courthouse, light stone walls, high turrets at every corner, and a huge central tower with flags on top. The prisoners were unloaded, unshackled, and climbed an ornate staircase to a dark-wood courtroom, where Rye found out the most remarkable fact of his life to that point.

  He had a lawyer.

  Ryan J. Dolan of Nothing, Nowhere, having neither house nor bed, nothing a person might call a possession, somehow had a lawyer. Rye wondered if that, more than waking on a ball field or eagles or George Washington’s hair, was what it really meant to be an American.

  His lawyer’s name was Fred Moore, and the first words out of his mouth confused Rye: “This is a travesty, Mr. Dolan, an obvious violation of habeas corpus.”

  “Oh,” Rye said, hoping he meant the case against him.

  The IWW’s strategy had been to ask for separate trials, to clog the courts, and to reject lawyers, since representation might give credence to what they saw as an unconstitutional anti-speech law. But then the city began charging the protestors with disorderly conduct instead of the underlying gathering-and-speaking law, and so Fred Moore volunteered to represent the union for free. He seemed only a few years older than Rye and, except for his glasses and tweed, was nothing like Rye would have expected a lawyer to look, but like a boy who had borrowed his father’s suit.

  But he was aces in the courtroom, habeas corpusing again—an actual writ this time—and railing against the city
having held in custody “this mere child” for more than a week, “not even putting him in the incorrigible-youth facility but beating and torturing him in a sweatbox full of adult men!”

  Judge Mann was sober enough to ask the prosecutor, Pugh, “What of this?” and Pugh, a balding, confident man who did look like a lawyer, said Rye “gave false information during his booking and ought to be charged with that as well. His arrest was a coordinated ploy meant to embarrass the city and further disrupt the judicial system. And I would ask the court, what harm is there in temporarily incarcerating a despicable and shiftless wastrel, likely in better circumstances than his wayward and immoral life on the outside.”

  Rye sat still through all of this, hoping his own lawyer could match Pugh in spewing mouthfuls. And then, like one more pull from the tap, the prosecutor looked right at Rye and said, “And finally, as Mr. Dolan has lived an adult life of criminal vagrancy and broken adult laws willfully, the state recommends that he be tried and treated as an adult by this court.”

  The prosecutor sat, and the judge said, “Mr. Moore?” and Rye turned to his lawyer, who stared at the floor a moment, Rye worried he might be stumped.

  Then Mr. Moore said simply, “Sixty-one.” And he took a deep breath. “Mr. Dolan was recorded in the booking sheet as being sixty-one years old, Your Honor. The state would have you believe that a conniving sixteen-year-old looked at his jailers and thought them too stupid to tell the difference between sixteen and sixty-one. While we are prepared to stipulate to the stupidity of Mr. Dolan’s jailers, the idea that Mr. Dolan tried to pass himself off as an old man to embarrass the city is ludicrous on its face, Your Honor.”

  This brought a murmur of laughter and then Mr. Moore was on his feet and every bit Mr. Pugh’s match, railing at the “bastardization of decency and law,” saying that the city would “attempt to retroactively remedy an egregious mistake by blaming an abused child for his own abuse, a poor indigent born under fortune’s darkest cloud, an orphan boy with no home, no parents, nothing of comfort in this hard world.”

  As his lawyer spoke, Rye felt an odd mix of emotions—pride that someone so eloquent was working on his behalf, but embarrassment, too, a painful self-awareness that he was the hobo waif Mr. Moore was describing, and shame at the way he must look and smell, he and the other scraggly shit-souls shackled behind him awaiting their own trials. He looked around the courtroom at the men in fine suits. And he thought of Gig back in jail, every bit this lawyer’s match in intellect but born, as Mr. Moore said, under fortune’s darkest cloud, with no chance at fine suits and fancy courtroom Latin.

  Rye slumped in his chair as Fred Moore finished speaking. Mistaking Rye’s shame for worry, Mr. Moore patted his arm and said, “It’s going to be okay, Ryan.”

  Judge Mann sighed, then flipped through some papers. Finally, he looked down at the prosecutor. “What do you say you toss this fish back?”

  Then Mr. Pugh smiled as if even he hadn’t believed his own argument, and he turned and winked at Rye as the judge rapped his gavel and said, “Charges dismissed. Mr. Dolan, you are free to go, but I had better not see you back in this courtroom, because I will not be so generous next time.”

  The words stung Rye: shiftless wastrel and poor indigent, beaten and jailed for eight days and then tossed back? All so the union could make a point, the judge joking about who got the best of it—like some kind of game?

  He was moved to the backbench and watched his five teammates take the field. He felt bad for Mr. Moore, who didn’t have a sixteen-year-old waif and stupid jailers for these cases and tried arguing the illegality of the law against union men gathering on the street, Judge Mann saying he wasn’t prepared to rule on the merits of that—“Only the lawless behavior of anarchist rascals”—and despite Mr. Moore’s energetic ipsos and factos, one by one the other five struck out, were found guilty of disorderly conduct and given their thirty days back at Franklin School.

  Two jailers came in to shackle the five men—while the other team gathered at the bench in their bow-tied uniforms—and Rye felt again the horror of this game.

  “Hold the line,” Rye said as his teammates were led out.

  “Happy birthday,” one of them said back.

  Jules, 1909

  THREE YEARS before she died, my mother sent me to live with the French ferryman and said I should not speak anymore. I could talk English or French, since she did not consider them speaking. What she meant was I should leave our language behind. She said it did not belong in the world anymore and would only get me hurt. It was losing your mother and your tongue at once.

  She gave me another warning. Stay out of it.

  Out of what? I asked.

  Everything. Listen. Walk to the side. Keep yourself. Go the other way.

  And then she warned me about my laugh. I had a great whelping laugh like my father’s, and she said that if I laughed at the wrong people, it would get me killed, as sure as it had got my father killed, as sure as if he’d pulled a knife.

  He did pull a knife, I said.

  But that was after he enraged a man by laughing at him, she said. So, if you must laugh, do it with your mouth closed. Through your nose.

  After I went to live with the ferryman, I tried to stay quiet. I listened, and walked to the side. My mother died and I spoke French and English and no Salish or Sahaptin, although I still sometimes muttered words to myself.

  But I could no more laugh through my nose than I could see through my ears.

  She was right, it did get me in trouble, my laugh, that morning on the river with the Dolan boys and Early Reston, the man who beat the cop. I laughed with them boys and a couple of old hands I’d ranched with, and I followed them all to the union hall, even though I knew better, and we laughed and we ate and listened to speeches and I sang and laughed with the union boys for two days, sang and laughed myself right into the city jail.

  After the riot, I was put in a crowded cell with seven others, we were cold and hungry, but we still laughed and sang. Then, on my fourth night in jail, a cop pulled me out alone and brought me to the empty courtyard. It was a nothing sky, gray and starless. The cop made me wait. When I was a boy, Plante used to make me wait for his anger to set, and so I hated waiting, shifting foot to foot, wondering when the blow would come. I have always found the waiting worse than the beating. Death comes for everything, but only spiders and men make you wait for it.

  Eventually, that cop Clegg came out. Our first morning in jail he had come in to ask the Dolan brothers and me what happened that day at the river.

  Now I’m here to talk to you alone, Chief, said Clegg. You got no reason to protect them Montana boys. Or the man who hit my sergeant that day. So why don’t you just give me the man’s name and I’ll see to it you’re let go.

  I stayed quiet.

  This ain’t your fight.

  Stay out. Don’t speak. Keep yourself. Eyes down, walk the sides. But no laughter? When the world is etrange et ridicule?

  He whispered: Come on, Chief. Give me a name. Who was it?

  I wished I could make a joke like the older Dolan saying John Rockefeller, but the cop wouldn’t take that from me. Still, just thinking it made me laugh.

  At least no more waiting. Clegg hit me in the stomach and then in the chest with his baton. On the third swing I felt something give, a rib. And I caved in. There was no breath anywhere in that yard.

  A jailer dragged me back to the cell and dropped me like an empty shirt. I slept all night on the stone floor.

  In my sleep, I imagined my mother would come, call me by name, and be angry: What did I tell you? Once, when I was a boy, we saw an old French-Canadian skinner fighting with crows over a dead raccoon. You see? my mother said. But I never saw. And remembering her now wasn’t the same as seeing her in my sleep. Maybe old men didn’t get to dream about their mothers anymore.

  I woke up wheezing in the dark cell. Eight of us taking turns on two hard cots. I’d done vagrant time in the stone blockhouse,
but not packed like this. Nothing in our guts but stale bread and dank water. After the beating, and the wheeze in my ribs, I worried this might finally put me in a grave box. We took shifts on the cots. One of them said, Why’s the old Indian get a turn, but the others ignored him and I took to that cot like a sweet wife. They were all decent men in the cell except that one. Not a bad number, one idiot in eight. I had a cousin once who told me kindness lives in the lips, and when I got a good look at the one who questioned my right to the cot, he had only a line where he took in food and put out merde. He was lucky I was not in good health or I’d have put him on the stone floor myself.

  After my beating, I saw Rye once at the rock pile but I was too sick to speak. I’m sorry, he said, but how could I blame him for my own laughter. He was a good kid and I hoped they would not beat the good entirely from him. One night I heard they moved him and some others from the sweatbox to an old school building and I was glad.

  There was a Finnish sawyer in my cell, a man named Halla, and one night I must’ve muttered in French, because after that, he made jokes in the language whenever they brought us hunks of bread and dirty water. Merci, garçon! he’d chirp, and then stick his lip out in a frown and wave his handkerchief like a fancy tablecloth. Bon appétit! This Halla would sniff the stale bread as if it was the finest cheese and say to the jailer, Mais mon vin, garçon? Deux Côtes du Rhone? I would laugh every time at this, and Halla would wink at me. Once I joined in and said to the guard, Deux steaks du boeuf s’il vous plaît, and Halla clapped my back and said good on me, though my French was chien de champagne. Country-dog French. I laughed at that, too. Laughed and coughed and could not stop. Blood on my hands.