The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  The men all looked at Rye. “He’s a boy,” one of them said.

  “He is a boy who was beaten and jailed for seeking honest work. I guarantee everyone who hears this Irish orphan’s story will imagine their own son.”

  That word again—orphan.

  “And by your own description, Mr. Cawley,” she went on, “I would say that as the only white male American-born, English-speaking member of our union currently not in jail, he’s ideal.”

  Rye went almost as red as Cawley. Not because he didn’t like Gurley calling him ideal but because he wasn’t actually a dues-paying member of the IWW.

  And no way could he imagine getting up and jawsmithing like his brother.

  “Mr. Dolan,” Gurley said, taking his hand again. “Please. Tell these men about the treatment you endured.”

  Rye wished Mr. Moore were still there to give all the proper habeas ipsos, but the lawyer had slipped out. The rest of the men were staring at him.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Dolan,” she said, “tell them what happened.”

  “Well,” Rye said, “we woke on a ball field.”

  He hardly remembered what he said after that—he just talked, about his brother and Jules and the slate-haired cop and Gig telling him to stay at Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse but him sneaking off to watch the free speech riot and Walsh and the Italian singer and seeing Gig get arrested and stepping on the soapbox himself and being locked up in the sweatbox and then the school and the Salvation Army discovering he was only sixteen and the judge releasing him that very day.

  “And now . . .” Rye looked over at Gurley. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get my brother out, too.”

  The union men took turns shaking his hand on their way out, and clapping his shoulder, and then they left. When it was just Filigno, Gurley, and Rye in the office, Elizabeth turned and said, “You did well, Ryan.”

  Then Fred Moore came back in the room with a stack of clothes. On top was a bowler hat. “As promised,” said Fred.

  The pants were fine, gray, with a matching jacket, braces, and a white stiff-collared shirt. Rye immediately put the gray bowler on his head.

  “Looks good,” Gurley said.

  Fred Moore pulled some notes from his jacket. “I also got the charging documents for your brother, Ryan,” he said. “He’s being held with the union leaders, charged with conspiracy. They’re seeking six months.”

  “Six months?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll fight it,” Fred Moore said. “Your brother is not an elected union official, and since he was only on the free speech committee, we can use his overcharging to challenge the anti-gathering law.”

  Rye was about to ask what that all meant when Fred Moore flipped to another page in his file. “The other name, your friend Jules?” he said. “A Jules Plante was released to family two days ago.”

  Of all the things that had happened that day, this seemed, in some ways, the most unlikely to Rye. He took the hat off. “Wait,” he said. “Jules has a family?”

  Gemma

  I HEARD no breathing from the other room. I touched my husband’s broad back. “Dom?”

  He rolled over. “I’ll go see.” He pulled on his pants and walked across the floor. I heard his footsteps out in the hall, and then it was quiet again. The steps moved into the kitchen, and the cookstove door opened, Dom stoking embers, a log going in. A minute later, he got back in bed. “He’s alive, Gemma.”

  It was decent of him, but my husband was nothing if not decent. Especially about Uncle Jules. The very first time he’d shown up, dirty from the road, Dom had invited him to stay. “He’s family,” Dom had said. I was humbled. Not every man would let an old Indian shirttail relation of his wife’s come sleep at the house each year.

  Jules had Spokane and Palus parents, and a Scottish trader on one side. He was born on the river before the city existed, then sent to live with an old ferryman who ran the crossing between here and Idaho. In his thirties, he married my mother’s sister, Agnella. As I told Dom that first year, Jules was the only family I had. Mother and Aunt Agnella were both dead from flu and my father long since run off.

  Dom liked Uncle Jules. When he showed up after harvest, he and Dom would work together wintering the house, cutting firewood, making repairs. I knew Dom gave him money, too, even though I said a winter bed was payment enough. Jules brought presents for the girls—corn dolls and wagon-wheel rugs. He’d stay two or three weeks in November and then drag a train south to hunt work in California. Fourteen years Dom and I had been married, and Jules came for eight of them, no warning, just him walking up our road with his pack and long duster.

  He always looked so big walking up that road.

  But the man the jailers brought in the wagon was half that size. They said Jules got caught up in the labor trouble from the newspaper. When he became sick, Jules gave them my name and they released him to the closest thing to family, his niece by marriage.

  Dom didn’t hesitate when that coach arrived. He cleared a place in the living room, put blankets on the davenport, and tried to make Jules comfortable.

  Jules’s gaze flickered in and out, then fell on me. “Uncle Jules,” I said. The girls stood in the doorway. Elena was thirteen, Maria nine. Maria had been studying Indians in school and used to pepper Jules with questions and even asked him to teach her Salish. But Jules, wary of teaching the old language, had told her French words instead. He’d held up a knife. “Couteau,” he’d said.

  But Maria was too smart for that. “Not French, I want to learn Indian.”

  “That language doesn’t work anymore,” he’d said. “C’est disparu.”

  And now he was on the davenport in our living room, drawing what sounded like his final breaths.

  “Is Uncle Jules gonna be okay?” Maria asked that first night.

  Elena was the quiet one. She and I heated wet rags for his chest. We kept the fire hot and tried to break his fever and that awful rattle in his chest. Dom always said Jules could lift as much as a man half his age, extra strength coiled in that body, even with his hard life. Now he was just a weak old man. Still, he survived the first night and seemed to be improving in the morning, but on the second night he took a turn. Short, uneven breaths, and he couldn’t open his eyes. Dom looked over at me. We’d both buried parents. We had the girls say goodbye before they went to bed.

  “Is there anything he would want us to do?” Dom asked in bed. “People we should contact? Preparations to make?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Are there leggings or something?”

  “Leggings?”

  “Funeral leggings? Or buckskins or something? I think I’ve heard that.”

  “How would I know?”

  “He’s your uncle,” Dom said. “Did he ever say anything about his wishes?”

  I told him that Jules didn’t talk like that. He told stories. He liked to make himself laugh. The only thing I ever recalled him saying was how, when he was a boy, his people sometimes put the dead on platforms in trees. This terrified him. He thought that if he walked beneath one of these trees, someone would reach down and pull him up into it. Once, he and the ferryman’s son climbed a tree to see if there were bones up there, but there was nothing. They debated whether animals had made off with the remains, or if the spirit had gone on to the afterlife. When loggers took down trees, Jules would say to himself, Goodbye, Uncle, goodbye, Grandmother.

  Dom listened intently. “You don’t think he’d want us to put him in a tree.”

  “No, I don’t think that was the point,” I said. It was hard to explain someone like Uncle Jules to a man as direct as Dom.

  “What was he like then?” Dom asked.

  “Jules? The same. The big booming laugh. He didn’t have the trouble with liquor then. Not until Agnella died.”

  My mother and her sister died within a month of each other, in the 1890 Russian flu outbreak. Agitta and Agnella were only a year apart, dragged west by their miner father, Giacomo, and his
wife, Gemma, after whom I was named. Grandma Gemma died not long after they arrived, and Grandpa Gio died in a cave-in when his daughters were sixteen and seventeen. Neither girl was what you’d call a looker, unless you meant to look away from, and even in a mining town, neither was beset with suitors. Mother married late, a union that lasted just long enough to produce me. She would volunteer, without being asked, that my shiftless father “flew off with a soiled dove.” Then there was Jules, who met Aunt Agnella while digging fence posts near the family house in Mullan. After that, Jules was in and out of our lives, catching work on ranches and orchards most of the year, during which time it would be just Mother, Aunt Agnella, and me in the little Mullan house.

  All spring and summer Jules worked farm jobs from Canada to California, but he’d come winter with Agnella and Agitta and me, cut firewood, and catch up on repairs to our little house. Once the snow came, Jules would hibernate, barely leave his chair in front of the fire, drink tea, smoke his pipe, and tell stories. I never shared much of this with Dom’s family, for fear they would judge me sordid, coming from the kind of women who took up with Indians and gamblers who ran off with whores.

  I sat up in bed. “There was one story he used to tell, about an outlaw who stole their ferry boat.” In the story, Jules was twelve or thirteen, working on Plante’s cable ferry. One day two outlaws stole the ferry, cut the ropes and escaped downstream. Jules tracked the men from the shore on horseback as the raft rode the current down to the falls. One fell off and Jules kept expecting the other to swim for shore. Instead the man simply rode the boat over the falls.

  “Maybe he couldn’t swim,” Dom said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But Jules said the man didn’t look scared, not the way someone would if they couldn’t swim. He seemed almost eager, and right before he went over the falls, he sat up and called out, ‘Watch!’ ”

  “Watch?” Dom said.

  “Watch. Jules yelled from the riverbank, ‘Swim, you idiot!’ But the young outlaw just waved and went over the falls.”

  Dom waited for more, but there was no more. “And . . . he died?”

  “Well of course he died,” I said.

  Dom just stared ahead, as if trying to picture it. “Huh,” he said.

  “Jules said if the kid jumped off the boat and swam to shore, he’d have been arrested and hanged. But as long as he stayed on the boat, his fate was his own. I think that’s why Jules liked the story. And why he rode the rails instead of moving onto a reservation. I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life.”

  In bed, Dom sat with this a moment. Finally, he opened his mouth to speak.

  Oh, how I loved my sweet, simple husband. I put my hand on his thick, hairy arm. “No, darlin’,” I said gently. “I don’t think Uncle Jules would want us to put him on a raft and send him over the falls.”

  I woke. The sun was up. After spending all night listening for Jules’s breathing, I’d overslept. It was after seven and Dom must have gone to work. I put on my robe and went out to the living room. The fire was out. Jules lay still on the davenport. The grimace was gone from his mouth. I was equally heartbroken and relieved. With Mother there had been gasps, jerks, and shudders. I didn’t want that for Jules. I put my hand above his mouth. I touched his head, pushed the hair away.

  Before the girls woke, I walked down the road to ask the Carvers if their boy could ride downtown to notify the county coroner that my uncle had passed.

  “Your uncle?” asked Mona Carver. “I didn’t know you had relations around here.”

  “Yes,” I said, “my uncle.” I walked home, snow crunching under my boots, built the kitchen fire, and lit it again. Then I went into the girls’ room. I sat on the edge of their bed. Elena sat up without me saying anything.

  Maria was just waking. “Uncle Jules?”

  I nodded.

  She crawled into my lap and wept into my chest. “I want to see him.”

  “He’s gone, Maria.”

  “In heaven?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The same heaven we go to?”

  I did not know what to say. Most of Jules’s people had gone to the reservation and got Christianity from the missionaries a generation ago. But Jules hated the missionaries and said cruelty and hope should never be served together. He’d gone to the Billy Sunday tent revivals when the old ballplayer came through town—but more for Billy’s good humor and free food than the preaching.

  He talked sometimes about elders who practiced the old ways. Washani. Dreamer Cult. But he rarely shared details except a single prophecy that he told like it was just another story: that after the shimmering people destroyed the world, knocked down the mountains, drained the rivers, and ate all the animals—the true people would be resurrected and have the land to themselves.

  But did Jules believe this? I had no idea.

  I suspected he did not. I didn’t think Jules practiced the old ways any more than he practiced Catholicism. If Jules had a religion, I would call it the Church of the Big Laugh.

  “Mama,” Maria said. “Can Indians go to heaven?”

  “If anyone can,” I said.

  I covered Jules with a bedsheet and sat with my girls in the kitchen, next to the fire. I could not get warm. I made tea and bread with raspberry jam. Elena ate quietly. Every few minutes, Maria would sniff.

  The coroner’s assistant arrived at noon with a man from the funeral parlor. Both men seemed surprised to see an old Indian in our house. I asked the funeral man if there were special considerations for Indian deaths, but he did not know. He said he could carve a feather on the headstone. “Did he have a name like Two Clouds or Bear Paw?” the man asked.

  I did not know his Indian name—but I was fairly sure it wasn’t Two Clouds. I suspected it bore some relation to the name the French ferryman had given him, but I didn’t even know that. “Jules Plante will be fine,” I said.

  They were about to load the body when two young men came walking up our drive. These were not funeral men, but a boy in tramp clothes and a new bowler hat, and a young man in a fine suit who introduced himself as the young tramp’s lawyer. The boy in the bowler said he was a friend of Jules.

  The lawyer said he had inquired with the jail about Jules’s condition and had been told that he was released and brought to the house of his niece. Was I her?

  Yes, I said.

  Might they see him?

  “No,” I said. “He died this morning.”

  The boy’s legs buckled and he reached for his lawyer’s arm. “We’re too late.”

  The lawyer explained that he was working on this union fight—perhaps I had read about it in the newspaper—I nodded—and that he was concerned that Jules’s treatment in jail might have contributed to his death.

  “He had pneumonia,” I said.

  The lawyer said his condition had come about from being confined eight men to a two-man cell, and that he would be happy to represent me in an inquest into the circumstances of Jules’s death.

  As the lawyer spoke, the boy kept rubbing his face and looking at different spots on the ground. Sorrow was written on his pocked, thin face.

  “What’s your name, son?” I asked.

  “Ryan Dolan,” he said. And as if he’d been reminded by his mother, he thought to remove his hat, revealing a rat’s nest of brown hair underneath. “I worked with your uncle up near Rockford. Went to the tent revivals with him.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  Grief can be a stingy emotion. I was in no mood to share it with a rabble-rousing lawyer and a young drifter. A horrible stain, a mixture of sweat and blood, trailed the front of the young man’s shirt, and he absentmindedly turned the hat in his hands. Still, he was Jules’s friend, so I invited the boy inside to pay his respects.

  “He looks so small,” Ryan said.

  My girls peeked in from the kitchen and I pointed at them to go back. I kn
ew they’d want to say goodbye, but I did not want them to see the old man’s lifeless face, and I did not want to deal with Maria’s nightmares.

  Outside, the lawyer started in again. “There’s a woman named Gurley Flynn who would like to write about Jules’s death for the labor newspaper,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Tursi,” the lawyer said, “your uncle is a casualty in the battle for free speech, and his death should not go unnoticed, nor those responsible go unpunished—”

  “No,” I said again. “To all of it. No.”

  He looked confused. “You’ll at least let us proceed with an inquest. You could have a claim against the county, pay for his burial and maybe more—”

  “My husband and I will pay for my uncle’s burial,” I said. “I want no part of this. It’s not my concern, and it shouldn’t have been any of his.”

  The younger one put a hand on his lawyer’s arm to quiet him. “We’re sorry for what happened, ma’am.” Then he pulled at his dumbstruck lawyer, and they turned and walked away.

  A light snow had begun to fall.

  I watched them walk to the corner of our fenced field. We lived on the outskirts of town, and it was a quarter mile to the nearest streetcar stop. I wished Dom were home with the buggy to offer them a ride. Maybe he would listen to what they had to say about this free speech fight. Dom was a machinist, a member of that union, and his sympathies might be keener than mine.

  After they rounded the Carvers’ corner, I went back in the house. The coroner and the funeral man had set Jules on a litter and were ready to move him.

  I pulled the blanket aside so that one of Jules’s hands was exposed. “Girls,” I said, and I let them come hold his hand and say goodbye. “Oh, Uncle,” Maria said. Elena said nothing, just squeezed his hand. Then I sent them back to the kitchen.

  “May I have a minute?” I asked the coroner and the funeral man.

  “Of course,” they said, and stepped outside.

  The room was quiet. I took Jules’s cold hand. Such heaviness in my arms—sorrow for Jules, dead on a litter in my living room. My living room. My house. My daughters. Oh, how proud he was of the life I had made, of the woman I had become. It meant everything to him, having me safe and settled, as my girls’ health and happiness will mean everything to me.