The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 29

Before the girls woke, I walked down the road to ask the Carvers if their boy could ride downtown to notify the county coroner that my uncle had passed.

“Your uncle?” asked Mona Carver. “I didn’t know you had relations around here.”

“Yes,” I said, “my uncle.” I walked home, snow crunching under my boots, built the kitchen fire, and lit it again. Then I went into the girls’ room. I sat on the edge of their bed. Elena sat up without me saying anything.

Maria was just waking. “Uncle Jules?”

I nodded.

She crawled into my lap and wept into my chest. “I want to see him.”

“He’s gone, Maria.”

“In heaven?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The same heaven we go to?”

I did not know what to say. Most of Jules’s people had gone to the reservation and got Christianity from the missionaries a generation ago. But Jules hated the missionaries and said cruelty and hope should never be served together. He’d gone to the Billy Sunday tent revivals when the old ballplayer came through town—but more for Billy’s good humor and free food than the preaching.

He talked sometimes about elders who practiced the old ways. Washani. Dreamer Cult. But he rarely shared details except a single prophecy that he told like it was just another story: that after the shimmering people destroyed the world, knocked down the mountains, drained the rivers, and ate all the animals—the true people would be resurrected and have the land to themselves.

But did Jules believe this? I had no idea.

I suspected he did not. I didn’t think Jules practiced the old ways any more than he practiced Catholicism. If Jules had a religion, I would call it the Church of the Big Laugh.

“Mama,” Maria said. “Can Indians go to heaven?”

“If anyone can,” I said.

I covered Jules with a bedsheet and sat with my girls in the kitchen, next to the fire. I could not get warm. I made tea and bread with raspberry jam. Elena ate quietly. Every few minutes, Maria would sniff.

The coroner’s assistant arrived at noon with a man from the funeral parlor. Both men seemed surprised to see an old Indian in our house. I asked the funeral man if there were special considerations for Indian deaths, but he did not know. He said he could carve a feather on the headstone. “Did he have a name like Two Clouds or Bear Paw?” the man asked.

I did not know his Indian name—but I was fairly sure it wasn’t Two Clouds. I suspected it bore some relation to the name the French ferryman had given him, but I didn’t even know that. “Jules Plante will be fine,” I said.

They were about to load the body when two young men came walking up our drive. These were not funeral men, but a boy in tramp clothes and a new bowler hat, and a young man in a fine suit who introduced himself as the young tramp’s lawyer. The boy in the bowler said he was a friend of Jules.

The lawyer said he had inquired with the jail about Jules’s condition and had been told that he was released and brought to the house of his niece. Was I her?

Yes, I said.

Might they see him?

“No,” I said. “He died this morning.”

The boy’s legs buckled and he reached for his lawyer’s arm. “We’re too late.”

The lawyer explained that he was working on this union fight—perhaps I had read about it in the newspaper—I nodded—and that he was concerned that Jules’s treatment in jail might have contributed to his death.

“He had pneumonia,” I said.

The lawyer said his condition had come about from being confined eight men to a two-man cell, and that he would be happy to represent me in an inquest into the circumstances of Jules’s death.

As the lawyer spoke, the boy kept rubbing his face and looking at different spots on the ground. Sorrow was written on his pocked, thin face.

“What’s your name, son?” I asked.

“Ryan Dolan,” he said. And as if he’d been reminded by his mother, he thought to remove his hat, revealing a rat’s nest of brown hair underneath. “I worked with your uncle up near Rockford. Went to the tent revivals with him.”

I nodded but said nothing.

Grief can be a stingy emotion. I was in no mood to share it with a rabble-rousing lawyer and a young drifter. A horrible stain, a mixture of sweat and blood, trailed the front of the young man’s shirt, and he absentmindedly turned the hat in his hands. Still, he was Jules’s friend, so I invited the boy inside to pay his respects.

“He looks so small,” Ryan said.

My girls peeked in from the kitchen and I pointed at them to go back. I knew they’d want to say goodbye, but I did not want them to see the old man’s lifeless face, and I did not want to deal with Maria’s nightmares.

Outside, the lawyer started in again. “There’s a woman named Gurley Flynn who would like to write about Jules’s death for the labor newspaper,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Tursi,” the lawyer said, “your uncle is a casualty in the battle for free speech, and his death should not go unnoticed, nor those responsible go unpunished—”

“No,” I said again. “To all of it. No.”

He looked confused. “You’ll at least let us proceed with an inquest. You could have a claim against the county, pay for his burial and maybe more—”

“My husband and I will pay for my uncle’s burial,” I said. “I want no part of this. It’s not my concern, and it shouldn’t have been any of his.”

The younger one put a hand on his lawyer’s arm to quiet him. “We’re sorry for what happened, ma’am.” Then he pulled at his dumbstruck lawyer, and they turned and walked away.

A light snow had begun to fall.

I watched them walk to the corner of our fenced field. We lived on the outskirts of town, and it was a quarter mile to the nearest streetcar