The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 24
Halla patted my arm. Rest now, Jules. But I was dreaming and fevered and feared I was going over.
I was too sick to work the rock pile, but Clegg told the jailers I was holding out on him and they took me to the pile and handed me a pick. I always liked to work, but standing in sleet, watching shackled men not hit rocks, was torture. Twice I fell, and the second time I could not get up. Halla and another man carried me back to our cell. Ne t’an fais pas, Jules, said Halla.
Je ne suis pas inquiet, I said. I wasn’t worried. I wanted to tell Halla about the boy who stole my ferry, but it was so many words, and I wasn’t sure what it would mean this time. People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.
I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t awake. I missed my shift on the floor and I sat up on one of the cots to see Halla had given up his turn for me. In the morning, my legs felt a mile away. My face burned. Even my cough had no breath behind it.
Winter fever, said a jailer.
Another listened to my chest. Ague, he said.
Sleep. Sunlight in dreams I did not want to leave. I looked for my mother to put her face against my fevered cheek, to use my name, to chide me, anything, but still she did not come.
Halla told me I was talking in my sleep in a language he couldn’t understand. He tried to repeat what I’d said but I told him that it sounded like he was speaking horse. I said, Come closer. Halla bent down so his ear was near my mouth: I was ordering us two steaks.
Halla laughed and patted my chest. Très bien, Jules. After a time, he said, Do you have people, Jules?
I had a wife, I told him.
I should have stopped there. But I could not.
My wife’s sister had a daughter. My niece.
I should not have given the name. But I was afraid and so I gave Halla the name of my niece and her husband in Spokane.
It’s okay, he said again. Sleep now, Jules.
Heat. Breath catching. Slip down a ladder. Pass into dreams, bales of hay and garden rows and a thicket of blackberries and a dog with white eyes and still no mother but an old aunt who didn’t recognize me. And in my dream I could not remember enough of the language to ask for her. I could not even name all that I had lost.
Men were talking over me.
Hands on my shoulders and legs.
Halla’s face. You’re getting out, Jules.
Deux vin, I said.
Goodbye, Jules, he said.
I see you, I said, but in what language?
Repose-toi, maintenent, Halla said. Mon ami.
Night. The sky was clear. Cold clean air. I gulped it like water. Was this freedom? I was being carried on a litter, ice crunching beneath the feet of the men carrying my body.
They put me in the back of a wagon and I drifted again. Cold air. Horses crying, rustled, clopping, pulling the wagon. Ruts. Blankets. Wagon. Heat.
Then we were outside her house. Dom came out, with his big arms and his kind eyes. He spoke to the jailers. Muffled words. Yes, he said, Jules Plante is my wife’s uncle. Of course.
The litter rose up the steps with me on it. And I was delivered into the warmth of Gemma’s house. And then her face filled the world above me.
Hello, Uncle.
Gemma, I’m—no breath.
It’s okay. Stay quiet, Uncle, it’s okay.
It’s what my mother would have said, too, stay quiet, Jules.
Heat from the fire. O Gemma. Lovely girl. Jewels and gems.
Sleep now, Uncle. You’re home.
Her husband left the room, and she bent and whispered in my ear.
And the rest of life was dreams.
Part II
I fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class.
—Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
11
She was the daughter of an Irish firebrand named Thomas Flynn and a lace-curtain suffragist named Ann Gurley, raised on the speeches of Emma Goldman and Mother Jones. At ten, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was railing against inequity at Harlem social clubs and calling for the women’s vote at her grammar school. She drew hundreds when she spoke on the street and, by the time of her first arrest, at fifteen, was locally famous, dubbed by progressive newspapers the “East Side Joan of Arc, an Irish beauty with blue eyes, filmy black hair and a fiery manner of speaking.” The establishment New York Times took a harder tack, calling her a “she-dog of anarchy.” At seventeen, Gurley Flynn joined the IWW as an organizer, rallying workers and leading strikes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, working her way west, speaking in mining camps and earning the nickname Rebel Girl. She married a Montana labor man named Jones and, having just run a successful protest in Missoula, was sent to Spokane to help organize its free speech battle—at nineteen, already a grizzled veteran of dozens of union actions.
Rye’s lawyer, Fred Moore, was explaining all of this as they left the courthouse after his release, but Rye was having trouble concentrating. A jailer had brought his clothes to him, and though they’d been laundered, a bloodstain still covered his shirt like a bib. As they walked down the courthouse steps, people kept staring, and Rye self-consciously pulled his coat tight around his neck.
In Spokane, the seasons could turn like a switch, autumn light one day, winter dark the next. A wall of courthouse maples burst with color the day Rye went to jail. Nine days later, the trees were frosted and skeletal.
Rye shared their mood: What was he supposed to do now? How would he explain his absence to Mrs. Ricci? Would she charge