The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 27
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