The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 5

Danny a pond monkey in an Oregon timber camp until he side-spiked a rain-slick log boom, lost his balance, and drowned in a river of trees. Then there was their father-who-aren’t-in-heaven, that cursed old mine muck Dan Senior, so long to the dirt that the brothers could barely conjure his face, though they could recall his sadder songs and every inch of the back of his hand.

Their ma was the last to go, from TB. The only kid still at home, Rye helped her to Mass and picked up enough work for a pasty-and-turnip dinner. He wetted scarves for her to breathe through and whispered a thousand lies to the woman, promised to write her sister in Galway and said Da was waiting in heaven with Lace and Danny, and, oh yeah, Gregory was on his way home with a sweet Catholic girl—so many lies Rye told in that room he was surprised Christ Himself didn’t appear to smite his bony back. Ma died feverish, unable to afford a hospital, coughing knots of blood, bruises rising from nothing but the idea of them, joints swollen with tumor, moaning and yelling and praying and wailing, and, alone at fifteen, Rye thought the devil had come into her until the parish priest came to last-rite the poor woman and said, “That’s just dying, Ryan.” Christ forgive him, Rye felt delivered when she finally stopped gurgling and left her wretched banty body, the undertaker carting her off like rubbish. A day later, Rye pawned his parents’ wedding rings and, dirt still wet above his mother’s moldering corpse, he became the last Dolan to walk out of Whitehall, Montana—off to find his long-lost brother, Gregory.

And find him Rye did, two weeks later, sacked in a crib this side of Spokane with a hard piece of trouble. He stepped into that room with its dusky-whiskey-smoky smells and said, “Gig, our ma’s dead,” his big brother staring as if he didn’t recognize this long-armed kid. Then Gig made a noise like the air was pressed out of him, and turned and wept into his girl’s rashy bosom. This made Rye cry, too, the only tears he shed during the matter, standing in a dank flop watching his big brother sob on this girl’s chest. Next day Gig sent the girl back to the house of trouble where he’d found her, and the brothers lit out—

For a year they moved, barely pausing for breath. They walked twenty miles some days, and ran down freight on the slow edges of towns, hopped boxcars and crouched on the blinds between mail cars. Gig showed Rye his favorite way to travel—in the open, on flat cars and lumber racks: “flying,” he called it, wind in his face, sun on his arms. They flew and floated this way, job to job, week to week, farm to farm, Washington to Oregon to Idaho, until they landed a gyppo logging crew on the St. Joe River, Gig talking his way onto one end of a two-man misery whip, Rye ladling water and pounding wedges in the kerfs to keep the saws from binding. But they got run from that job, too, replaced by the foreman’s nephews. They followed rumors to interior farms and staggered harvests, bushed wheat and picked huckleberries. The Panic of ’07 had run the banks, and it was rare to find a boxcar or a barn without a vagrant in it. Most days they’d wait hours in line at the job sharks’ only to be told there was nothing for them. They huddled under burlap on boxcars, drank from streams, and ate squirrel meat over jungle cook fires, boiled up their clothes and slept beneath stars, ducked train gangs and rail bulls, and if it wasn’t an easy life, Rye would be lying if he didn’t admit some adventure in it.

Spokane was base for five thousand floating workers, and the brothers put on their best shirts and queued at some of the thirty employment agencies lining Stevens Street, beneath bunk signs promising work for GOOD MEN! $1! JOBS FOR ALL! INQUIRE WITHIN!

A hard season for men, but lying was having a banner year.

Rye acted older, Gig sober, and they forked a dollar for the pleasure of a twelve-hour workday, knowing full well the shark was likely to split their buck with the straw boss and pull the job after two weeks for another crew (at a dollar-a-man), churning them like water in a paddle wheel, so no man could get a foothold. The Bunker Hill Mine rotated three thousand hungry muckers through fifty jobs that summer—three grand in fees split with the bosses, the sharks bleeding them other ways, too, subtracting two bits for doctoring, for stale bread, for a straw mattress. Then, harvest over, they recast the migrants as worthless bums and had security men knock their heads and drive them from town.

This was the call of the IWW, the Wobblies, whose nickname came from a Chinese rail hump asking for the “Eye-Wobble-Wobble.” The whole operation had started in Chicago in 1905, and it landed hard in Spokane, where seven freight and passenger lines converged in the busiest terminal west of Chicago, a kind of Tramp Central Station. A thousand signed up in Spokane for IWW red cards, one of them Gregory Dolan, who dragged Rye downtown to hear Walsh call for nonviolent action, to peaceably gather in the streets to protest the sharks. And if the cops wanted to arrest them for speaking out, fine: they’d pack the jails, clog the courts. The union action cooled that spring of ’09, when the floaters went back to work, and Gig and Rye caught on at an apple orchard, made enough to sock-bank twelve bucks each to give to the widow Mrs. Ricci, so they might winter at her house in Little Italy.

It was Gig’s favorite place on earth, Spokane, “theater capital of the west,” he always said, by which he meant “actress capital,” since every brothel and crib girl