The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  I had been in jail cells before, but this one made New York’s holding pen seem like the Waldorf Astoria. Heavy rock walls and an iron door—a freezing draft and a faint light through two barred windows, a stone floor beneath us, and on my cot, a single blanket, thin and scratchy as old leaves, and a pillow that was little more than rice in a sock.

  “Here, you take mine,” said the woman with the accent. And she held out her blanket to me.

  “I couldn’t,” I said, “thank you.”

  She raised her skirts and showed me what looked like men’s pants beneath them. “My barman give me these before the police come yesterday.”

  “He knew the police were coming?”

  She whispered: “My barman is behind to pay the police—” She shrugged. “He get the money, buy us back tomorrow, hope tomorrow—”

  The other one rolled half over to shush her. “Katya, shut up. You’ll get us in more trouble.” She shot me a look.

  A few minutes later, Pigeon-Toed was back and the heavy door opened. “Elizabeth Jones,” he said. He led me out, back down the dark hall, to a room with no windows.

  The prosecutor Pugh was sitting at a table, Sullivan against the wall. They sat me at the table across from Pugh. The needling prosecutor read from a thick notepad as he slowly questioned me for the next hour. Who was funding our chapter? Who sent me? Would I confess to conspiring to violate the anti-speaking law, to inciting violence, to causing a riot, to disturbing the peace? Did I know that I faced two years in prison? How many more men were coming to protest? How many had I rallied in Seattle? In Wallace? In Taft? Was it true that Vincent Saint John was planning to come to Spokane? And what about the murderer Big Bill Haywood? Was my husband, Jack, bringing mining toughs from Montana? Who was leading this conspiracy?

  My face heated up as he spoke, anger blessedly replacing my fear. “I am conspiring to exercise my right to speak freely, if that’s what you mean.” I began interrupting his questions. “Bill Haywood was framed by Pinkertons and acquitted of murder. You should read the newspapers, they are quite informative.” I laughed as he pressed me: which men were coming, which men were leading the fight, which men were pulling my strings. Even the sentence he threatened me with, two years in jail, was for conspiring to incite men to violate the law.

  “And what if I promise to incite only women?” I said.

  Mr. Pugh was unamused. “You do not seem to appreciate the severity of this situation, Mrs. Jones.”

  “Nor you, Mr. Pugh.”

  Sullivan came off the wall. “See—now this manner of yours is what I don’t understand, sister. The shrillness. Disrespect. It doesn’t have to be this way. You could be ladylike. You’re not bad-looking, not one of those dried-up milk cows like Emma Goldman or Mother Jones.”

  “They are champions of—”

  He acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “I don’t see why you’d throw your life off like this. Do you want to have your husband’s baby in jail? Raise it among fallen women when, with a little cooperation, Mr. Pugh might be convinced to contact your husband and have him come get you? Forget this whole mess?”

  “My husband is proud that I am fighting for—”

  “No, no, no. Don’t start with me. I’m not talking about that.” He bent so that he was at eye level. “I don’t see your husband as a man at all, Mrs. Jones. I don’t approve of your rabble-rousing, and I would forbid my wife from making a whore’s spectacle of herself—but if she did? If it was my wife out here? I would sure as hell not let her fight alone.”

  This cut me, as he must’ve known it would, and I felt even greater shame at the sharpness of it. He’d found the spot that stung, the romantic girl who once rode toward dragons with her prince. He had not come from Butte. Three weeks I had been here and nothing. Not so much as a letter.

  For a moment I couldn’t breathe. And then I could.

  “My husband has nothing to do with this,” I said. “Just as whatever poor girl you have enslaved back at your stove has nothing to do with your rank corruption. As for ‘whore’s spectacle,’ ask your wife what bargains she made to live in your house, Acting Chief Sullivan.”

  A storm went over his face, and then a surprising vulnerability.

  But I was not done. “And when your pretty wife answers, watch her eyes closely, because whatever she says, there will be another truth she won’t speak, for fear of breaking her acting husband’s fragile heart.”

  Sullivan straightened. “Take this trash to her cell.”

  My anger had dissipated, and with it, hope. I lay back on the cot in my jail cell. I could not sleep. The only light came from the small barred windows. The breathing of the older woman in the cell was labored, and as soon as the door closed, I began to hear the scurrying down the hall of large, industrious rats.

  There were faint voices, too, men’s laughter, the opening and closing of cell doors. I thought of Chief Sullivan and of Jack. Why hadn’t Jack come?

  The saloon girls snored beneath their thin blankets.

  And then, at some point in the night, the heavy door pushed open and a man with a gas lantern came in. It was a new jailer, one who hadn’t been on the earlier shift, a man with gray teeth and a patchy beard that covered his cheeks.

  “Who’s up?” He held his lantern over me. “This one?”

  “Not for that,” said Katya, the younger girl, with the accent. “Leave her alone.” She rose with a sigh.

  This repeated three more times, like an uneasy dream. The heavy jail door would open, and the gray-toothed jailer would come in and take one of the women away. “Sweetheart’s here,” he said to the unfriendly one. She rose without making a sound and, twenty minutes later, plopped back down on her cot.

  “Sweetheart’s here,” the man would say again, and now Katya rose with a deep sigh, left, and returned half an hour later.

  At some point, I must have slept, for at dawn I woke to find a different jailer sitting on my bed, a younger man, his hand on my cheek. “Cold, are you?”

  I sat up straight. I had two blankets on.

  “Leave her be!” said Katya, who must have put her blanket on me after I went to sleep. She rose and walked over. “I am coming.”

  It was almost an hour before the jailer brought Katya back. She carried two pieces of stale bread and two cups of coffee. I sat up and she gave me one of the measly breakfasts. The jailer brought another hunk of bread and a cup of coffee for the quiet woman in our cell, but she faced the wall, her back to him. “Hey,” he said, and when she didn’t budge, he set the coffee and bread on the ground in front of her.

  I sipped the cool, oily coffee and gnawed at the hard bread.

  “When will your baby come?” Katya asked.

  I looked down at my belly, surprised each day by how evident my condition was becoming. “April, hopefully,” I said. “I lost a baby last year, so . . . I don’t know.”

  “Lost a baby.” She looked me up and down. “Lost a baby,” she repeated in a singsong way, as if trying to place the phrase. “Lost.” Up close, she was thin, with black hair and lovely pale skin. Her eyes were dark and mirthful. “You have choose a name for baby?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “After your husband if a boy? Or your father?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “My father’s name. It is Oleksander. You know this name?”

  “Alexander,” I said. “Yes.”

  “O-leksander,” she corrected. “Is very good name. Very strong for boy.”

  “You should take this back,” I said, and I handed her the blanket.

  “No, please,” she said. “You.” And I could tell it meant something to her, that I use the blanket.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Can I ask you—last night, is it always like that?”

  She shrugged. “Is here, is there, is same, yes? Different boss but same.” She held up the bread. “Food is worse.”

  The other woman had stirred, and she cleared her throat as she rose. “I swear to G
od, if you say another word about it, Katya—”

  “Be quiet, cow,” Katya muttered.

  The other woman sat up now. “You’re gonna get us killed.” She took a drink of the coffee and stood. She shook her head. “Christ’s sake, you two.” She walked to the corner of the cell, raised her skirts, and squatted over a bucket in the corner.

  Katya patted my arm and stood to return to her own bunk. “Oleksander,” she said quietly. “Very strong name.”

  By the time of my arraignment that morning, Fred Moore had done champion lawyer work. The newsboys—after four hours of threats and questioning by the police—had been released to parents and orphanages. No charges had been filed against the old cook. “Not unless the state plans to charge him for dry pie crust,” Fred said. Only Charlie Filigno and I were being held, on conspiracy charges.

  Fred said he’d gone around town all night trying to raise the money to bail me out. He’d approached the other labor leaders—AFL, WFM, even the porters’ union, but everyone had told him no. One man had said that he would, but his wife found me indecent. Instead, the entire six hundred dollars—against an outrageous bond of six thousand—came from a single woman of means, the wife of a wealthy doctor in town. I recalled meeting her at a women’s club luncheon where I’d gotten such tepid applause that I’d blamed the members’ white gloves.

  “Keep the money for the fees you haven’t charged,” I said. “Leave me in here.”

  “Elizabeth, you know I can’t do that,” Fred said. “Not in your condition.”

  The small courtroom was packed with onlookers and reporters craning their necks to see me. “What do you say, Gurley?” one reporter yelled.

  “I say the time has come for the working classes of Spokane to stand up to this thievery and brutality!” The reporters bent and wrote like I was the president. Then the jailers brought in Charlie, who was bearing it quite well, in fact, even looking somewhat relieved to be on this side of things instead of doing the impossible job of running that dying union all by himself.

  The charges were read, and Mr. Pugh offered as preliminary evidence the seized copies of the Industrial Worker, quotes I had given reporters and lines from earlier speeches I’d made, and my plans for the second free speech action. All listed as parts of the conspiracy to break the law against speaking on the street.

  “An illegal law,” I said, and Fred put his hand on my arm to quiet me.

  Then Fred entered the pleas for Charlie and me—not guilty—and began arguing against the legality of the raid, “the unprecedented violation of not only the rights of these defendants but the rights of an entire community, Your Honor—”

  “Enough, Mr. Moore,” the judge said, and rapped his gavel, “you’ll have plenty of time to bore this court later.”

  When Fred explained that I planned to pay the bail, the prosecutor, Pugh, asked the judge to stipulate that my release be conditioned on my not speaking publicly or in any way further antagonizing police or city officials.

  “If your plan is to shut me up, you’d better keep me in jail,” I said.

  There was laughter, and again the gavel rapped. “Mrs. Jones, you will refrain from making speeches, and you will address this court with respect.”

  “I will respect this court when it respects my rights.”

  The judge pointed the gavel. “Mr. Moore.”

  Fred’s hand landed on my arm again, and I went quiet for him. Then the judge remanded Charlie over to custody and said, “Against my better judgment, and with strict regulations on her behavior, Mrs. Jones is released until her trial date.”

  “You should have left me in there,” I said to Fred.

  “I can’t do that,” he said again.

  There was a copy of the Chronicle on our defense table and I read the headline: OFFICERS SEIZE IWW LEADERS IN DARING RAID: ARRESTED INCLUDES WOMAN.

  “Daring raid,” I said to Fred. “Includes woman? Who do they think was running the show?”

  But if our goal had been to get back in the newspapers, it worked. The Chronicle, Press, Spokesman-Review—IWW stories were all over the front pages: FEMALE AGITATOR ARRESTED WITH OTHER WOBBLIES, and OFFICIALS RAID UNION HALL, and even a story about the newsboys being arrested: YOUTHFUL PRISONERS KEPT CROWDED IN A DELINQUENT ROOM ALL NIGHT.

  “They’ve gone too far,” I said to Fred Moore. After a month of the cops painting us as foreign agitators, it didn’t look good for them to go after a bunch of poor Spokane newsboys and a pregnant red-cheeked Irish-American girl. “It’s too much.”

  Outside the courthouse, a handful of reporters had gathered. I allowed Fred to help me from the building, thrust forward my pregnant belly, and made sure to shiver in the cold as Fred led me through a cluster of men with notebooks. He had warned me that I was not to comment to these reporters outside the courthouse, not to say anything that might aggravate the police and prosecutors.

  “You do understand that I came to aggravate police and prosecutors,” I reminded him.

  “She has no comment to make,” Fred said, helping me into a waiting coach.

  I covered my mouth. I went weak-kneed. I did everything but pass out from the vapors. “Mr. Moore is correct, I will not speak about my case, out of respect for the judge’s orders,” I said, “but I cannot be silent about the plight of this city, and those poor newsboys, held and sweated all night in a crowded delinquent cell! Are the people of Spokane going to stand by while the police arrest children now?” I touched my belly as if to remind them another child lay here.

  Fred eased me into the coach and climbed in with me. And like some prison Cinderella, I was spirited away. I asked Fred to take me to the union hall, but there was nothing left of it, boarded up and empty. In fact, said Fred, the city council had passed an ordinance banning the IWW from operating within city limits.

  “Can they do that?”

  He laughed bitterly. “We’re beyond the point of asking what they can do. It’s a question now of what they won’t do.”

  Something else was bothering me. “Have you heard from Ryan?”

  “No,” he said. “He wasn’t arrested. Why?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. But I kept picturing him leaving the union hall, in a hurry, just an hour before the raid. I did not like what I was thinking. I sat back in the coach and looked out the window at the reporters, at men in suits moving in and out of that fairy-tale courthouse. At the bustle of this burgeoning city. Cars and horses and streetcars, apartment buildings going up, a scurry of construction and destruction. Layers and layers. This place was a termites’ nest.

  “What do you think of the name Oleksander?” I asked Fred.

  He looked up. “Alexander? I think it’s nice.” He gave the driver the address of the boardinghouse where I was staying. “I’m taking you home to rest now,” he said.

  “I don’t care where you take me,” I said, “as long as it has a typewriter.”

  27

  The night of the raid, Willard motored Rye back to Mrs. Ricci’s house. They drove past the union hall so Rye could see for himself, Willard craning his neck, too: doors and windows broken, glass and wooden splinters all over the sidewalk, an ashcan smoldering on the corner. Two men were boarding up doors. No sign of Gurley or anyone else.

  “Can we stop?” Rye asked, but Willard kept driving. He crossed the river, drove through Little Italy, and parked on the street down the block from Mrs. Ricci’s house. He sighed—and something about the sound, almost an animal grunt, felt sympathetic to Rye.

  Willard reached in his coat and handed Rye the envelope with Early Reston’s five hundred dollars in it. “You got a safe place for this?” he asked.

  “No,” Rye said.

  “Right,” Willard said. Then he handed him the box with Gig’s gloves in it.

  Inside the sleeping porch, Rye looked around for a hiding place before finally sliding the envelope and the gloves under his cot. He barely slept. He heard noises, sensed shadows across the yard. He dreamed that Early was
behind him on a train.

  In the morning, he heard voices from the kitchen and sat up in bed just as Mrs. Ricci’s older son, Marco, was stepping onto the enclosed sleeping porch.

  Marco was short and square, wearing a big wool coat, with curly hair below his hat, around his ears. “Cold out here,” he said. Any heat came from two vents cut in the kitchen wall. “Anyways, Ma says you could use a job.”

  Marco said he had a friend named Joseph Orlando who ran a machine shop on Garland Street, on the North End. The day before, his stock boy had whacked off a couple of fingers with a table saw, and they needed someone to fill in. “Joe said the kid’s a real goob,” Marco said, “but if the goob comes back to work tomorrow with eight fingers, you’re probably out a job.”

  “That’s fair,” Rye said.

  Rye got cleaned up and dressed, and Marco chuddered him up the Division Street hill in an old Model N.

  Marco kept glancing over. “Hey, where’d you get the gloves?” he finally asked, probably thinking they looked stolen.

  Rye looked down at the gloves and the band of white fur hinting at the luxury inside. He was like a tramp in a tiara. “Murgittroyd’s,” he said finally.

  “Fancy gloves for Murgy’s,” said Marco.

  “They’re weasel,” Rye said.

  Marco parked the auto on Garland Street, in front of a business called North Hill Fittings and Machine Shop.

  “One other thing,” Marco said. “Ma said she agreed to sell our orchard to you and your brother. You know that won’t happen, right?”

  Rye said nothing.

  “How much you pay her so far?”

  “Not much,” Rye said, “six dollars, maybe.”

  “I’ll have her apply it to your boarding costs.” He shrugged. “Anyways, that’s all I can do. But there’s no way we’re selling that land to . . . well, to you.”

  Rye thanked Marco, got out, and went into North Hill Fittings and Machine. Joseph Orlando was a short, wiry man who toured Rye around the store with great pride. He seemed to be under the impression that Rye was Mrs. Ricci’s nephew, and Rye didn’t correct him. The first building was a storeroom where Rye would get the bolts and bushings and other parts that customers needed while Joseph took their orders and their money at the front desk. Joseph explained which parts the shop manufactured, which they ordered, and how many were needed to die-and-cast. He showed Rye where to find invoices, order sheets, and inventory forms. Rye could barely keep track of the pads, flanges, washers, and pins, let alone the paperwork, Joseph spending five minutes alone on bolts—rim bolts, hub bolts, spindle bolts—and he was about to confess that he might not be smart enough for this job when Joe said, “But a broom and a mop are the only tools you’ll need to master today.”