The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 8
It seemed to Rye that his brother usually had a famous saying at the ready, and as they moved down the trail, he went with an old favorite: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
Early Reston squinted as they walked, the same grin on his face. “Well, go on, you well-read son of a bitch, don’t stop there.”
“For if you gaze long enough into an abyss—”
“The abyss gazes back,” Early said. “And that’s me, friend. The abyss smiling back.”
Rye had never seen anyone compete with Gig in the quoting of famous men. This Early Reston was like Gig meeting his match and his best friend at the same time, and they went back and forth about this fella Nitchee, or that one Marks, or some guy Russo, who Early said believed that “liberty with danger is preferable to peace with slavery.”
“Tommy Russo?” Rye tossed in from behind, thinking of a young Italian they’d picked apples alongside.
“Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” said Gig over his shoulder, less to educate Rye than to show off for his new friend. “His Discourse on Inequality is basically the Wobbly pitch after a bath and a glass of port.”
This caused even Jules to laugh, and Rye felt left out, as he often did when Gig broke out the union talk. He’d been listening to this Wobbly pitch for almost a year, but he’d never been entirely sold. Carpenter, millwright, machinist—plenty of unions Rye could see them joining for steady work and a slice of the pie, but the IWW seemed more tramp church than true labor outfit to him. Gig said this was “small thinking” on Rye’s part. “This is about more than you and me making enough to buy some vacant lot, Rye-boy. It’s about equality. It’s about the worker owning the means of production.”
That seemed awfully unlikely to Rye—like a beggar hungry for bread getting the whole bakery. And the idea that you could make men equal just by saying it? Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.
On the trail in front, Early Reston was making a similar point. “To my way of thinking, your one big union goes against human nature and human history.”
“But it is history,” said Gig, “the coming revolution of the working class.”
Early turned back and winked at Jules and Rye. “I think you and I had different history books.”
Then Gig smiled back at his little brother, too, as if to say, Ain’t this grand? And it was grand, thought Rye. He imagined everyone had a picture in mind of the word America—flags or eagles or George Washington’s wig—but from that moment on, he thought he’d imagine waking on a ball field with his brother, fighting off a mob, then marching into town in a moving debate of economics and justice.
“What do you think, Jules?” Rye asked.
They had fallen back a few steps, the old man glancing over the hillside at the mouth of a stream. Hangman Creek ran through the farm near Rockford where they’d worked together, and Jules had told Rye how it came to be named fifty years earlier, when the valley was filled with nothing but Indian villages. During the Coeur d’Alene War, a Cavalry colonel named George Wright rode along the Spokane River, destroying every village and food cache he found. He also captured eight hundred horses, the full measure of the tribes’ wealth. Twelve miles upriver, Wright ordered them shot. At first, they led each animal out separately and put a bullet in its head, but realizing this could take days, Wright had the soldiers fire directly into the herd, ponies falling in heaps, eight hundred wailing horses shot dead while the Spokanes watched from the foothills. After that, missionaries guaranteed the safety of any chief who would talk peace with Wright, but each time one rode into camp he was arrested. And when a Yakama brave named Qualchan came to plea for his father’s release, he and his party were immediately hanged.
In Rockford, Jules told Rye the story of these two places, the Horse Slaughter Camp on the east end of town and Hangman Creek to the southwest. He called them Père Blanc et Mère Blanche, and even though it was French, Rye didn’t need a translation: In a city named for the people driven from it, everything called civilization was born of those two parents.
“Jules?” Rye said again. “You got thoughts on this union business?”
Jules looked up from the stream as they climbed the hill. “When I was a boy,” he said, “before any of this, I worked upriver for the old French ferryman, Plante, at the only crossing for a hundred miles. This was after Wright raided our village, and my mother begged Plante to take me on so she’d have one less child to feed. I had a trapper grandfather on my father’s side, so Plante agreed. He taught me French and English and was the one called me Jules. I slept in a shed behind his cabin and cleaned horseshit off the ferry decks and cleared brush from the shore. I worked for Plante from my sixth year until my fifteenth and was never paid a dime, but I was fed and given a place to sleep.”
Just ahead of them, Gig and Early turned a switchback.
“One day,” Jules said, “two men rode up on the far shore. I roped the barge over and loaded the men and their horses. But they were outlaws, and when we got halfway across the river, they threw me off,