The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 103

The next year, Gig’s old friend Frank Little was organizing for the IWW near Butte when six men broke into his boardinghouse, beat him, tied him to a car, and pulled him down the street, over granite blocks that tore off his kneecaps. They bashed in his head and hung him from a railroad bridge at the end of town. Pinned to his torn pants was a note that read, “First and last warning,” with the initials of other union leaders.

What do you make of such times? I feel a similar sense of despair now, watching those southern sheriffs turn firehoses and dogs loose on civil rights protestors. I find myself looking up from the newspaper and saying to Elena, “The world is tearing itself apart.”

My wife has her mother’s quiet wisdom, her grandfather’s great laugh. “Always,” she says to me.

By 1917, the IWW had been run completely out of Spokane, and when the union objected to the U.S. entering World War I, the government cracked down, raiding union offices, charging leaders with sedition, and deporting thousands. In those years, I could no more admit being an old Wobbly than I could admit being a German spy.

So I never talked to my kids about the IWW, about the riots, about jail, about any of it. I didn’t think it would make sense to them. It would have been like talking about the gold rush or the Civil War.

My oldest son, Greg, is a partner in his father-in-law’s car dealership. He tells me he’s going to vote for Barry Goldwater for president. He gave me Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, for Christmas. Last year, he gave me Atlas Shrugged. He likes to lecture me about the dangers of unions and the spread of communism.

Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world.

Now, as I sit with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s obituary in my lap, I think I’ll tell him all about my past, about his anarchist uncle, about how his father once fancied a girl who grew up to be president of the Communist Party. I don’t have any hope of changing Greg’s opinion. I just want to see the look on his face. It’s another mystery of parenting: how you can love your kids without always liking them.

Maybe it’s being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside—to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren—and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I’ve acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity.

But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience.

And Bet on the last horse to piss.

I remember something Gurley told me, the night we sat up in the Missoula train station. We had been robbed and nearly killed in Taft. We were as beaten as people could be. And here she was, gearing up to start the fight all over once we got back to Spokane.

“How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?”

She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right?

“But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?”

That day in 1911, after I went to see Fred Moore and Ursula, I decided to keep another five hundred dollars for myself, to use on the house I was going to build. That still left almost three thousand dollars of Lem Brand’s money.

I thought about walking into Bradley & Graham’s, slapping it on the counter, and saying, “Dress me, Chester!” The thought of it made me laugh.

Instead, I went to a shop that made headstones and memorials. I asked whether a person could get one if there was no body, no grave.

“Of course,” the man said. So I picked the simplest one, granite, flush with the earth. It cost forty dollars engraved. Later, I put it in a corner of the orchard in Little Italy. It read: “Gregory T. Dolan, 1886–1910, loving brother and member in good standing of the IWW.”

After I picked out the headstone, I walked through the east end of downtown. There were a few floaters out, a man begging, a handful of people outside the Salvation Army, where the regular brass band was playing in the street, including an old toothless man blowing a French horn that looked like it had been in a hailstorm. The army used volunteers for its band, but every once in a while, they’d employ a tramp with musical ability, and that’s what the toothless French horn player looked like.

We always made fun of it, called it the Starvation Army. But I thought of how many meals, how many pairs of shoes and shirts, I had gotten there, and it felt right, walking up and sliding almost three thousand dollars into the bucket next to the French horn player’s dirty shoe.

He took his lips from the mouthpiece. “God bless.”

“You, too,” I said.