The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 28

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