A Moment in the Sun (17 page)

“You start to wonder if there’s a God in Heaven,” he sighs as Hod helps Smokey lug the casket aboard, “and then He sends you a night like this.”

KINDLING

In the drawing there are a half-dozen young men standing aimlessly, many with their hands in their pockets, as if in line for a free lunch. They are placed, however, on a ramp leading into the maw of a huge iron pot atop a roaring fire.

The pot is labeled
CUBA
.

A leather-aproned Hephaestus-as-blacksmith grins down into the brew, steam curling around his large, boyish face—unmistakably a caricature of the Chief—as he pumps a large hand-bellows to excite the flames. A chute extends from the base of the pot, and marching out on it is a neat row of identical, uniformed soldiers with rifles on their shoulders.

THE CRUCIBLE OF
WAR

—reads the caption, and the Cartoonist is hard-pressed to say whether the whole effect is critical or laudatory. The soldiers look manly and forthright, a vast improvement over the loafers they had once been, and the Chief might seem either demonic or merely industrious. Since an equal number of men are seen leaving as are seen entering the crucible, there is no indication that any have been lost within it. The word is that the Chief pinned this one on the wall of his office and called the
Herald
to compliment them on the likeness.

The other drawing portrays him as an old geezer, bent double with age and supporting himself on a crutch labeled
WAR WITH SPAIN
. A Latin-looking nurse wields an oversized hypodermic, injecting
JINGO JUICE
into his buttocks while Joe Pulitzer, hands on hips, observes disapprovingly.

GOOD FOR THE CIRCULATION

If anything will improve circulation it is the nurse, one of Templeton’s specialties, her dress much more form-fitting than would be allowed on a white woman. Pulitzer’s
World
has always been merciless to the Chief, of course, accusing him of having manufactured the Evangelina Cisneros affair and of scuttling any hope of diplomatic solution in Cuba. But Old Jewseph has jumped on the war wagon so wholeheartedly himself that this can only be viewed as a purely personal attack.

So once again the Cartoonist is drawing the Eagle.

He has a knack for birds, better than any of the big salary boys, and the Chief knows it. The trick is to make them express themselves with their feathers. The Chief wants not only to rebuke the Spanish and his competitors, but to remind the readers that we need a good scrap, that this won’t be American against American, no—if certain people would just get out of the way we could step out and take our place among the Great Powers.

The Eagle, spear and arrows clutched in its talons, strains its wings as it attempts to soar skyward despite the chain around one leg, with Pulitzer and Senator Hanna and a couple of the other naysayers hauling back on it, heels dragging the ground as the mighty raptor threatens to lift them all away. His Pulitzer needs some work, a decent enough likeness but not sufficiently craven. The Eagle’s feathers, if you had to put it into words, are proud but angry. Uncle is there already, speaking to his companion yet to be drawn, President McKinley.

SHE
’
LL FLY IF YOU LET HER

—Sam is saying. The Chief wants the President to be uncertain but dignified. He also wants to try a small boy, an onlooker, off to one side and very much upset by the spectacle, labeled
OUR FUTURE WARRIOR
or something similar. The terrible effect of peace-mongering on tender minds. The Eagle is looking with furious concentration at a trio of distant islands, Cuba, Porto Rico, and Guam, each with a palm tree and a Spanish flag sticking up from them. Adding China, though in tune with the ambition of the picture, might be confusing.

And maybe Sam should have a rifle.

SALVATION

Hod rides the
Utopia
back to Seattle with the other beaten men. They are a sorry-looking collection, frostbit sourdoughs with empty eyes and greenhorns fleeced before they even got to the fields, a few who probably made a small pile and blew it in town and can’t face another winter freezing their lungs and hacking the ground. The fog, constant up on deck, is a relief. Men appear in it, flick a glance at the state of Hod’s face, then turn away without meeting his eye. There is no brotherhood on this ship, each defeated stampeder minding his own troubles.

Hod has been down before, but never this alone. He misses the Army.

It started in Butte with hungry men. First the Gold Trust had their way and repealed the Sherman Act, then Amalgamated tossed Hod and hundreds more like him out of their pits.

“There’s a man named Coxey,” went the word in Finntown and Dublin Gulch, “gonna make it right. He’s got a plan.”

FREE SILVER
! said the banners at the Union Hall.
GOLD AT A PREMIUM, LABOR PAUPERIZED
!

“May Day in Washington,” said the laborers with gleaming eyes. “Every damn American needs a job gonna tromp on Grover Cleveland’s flower bed. That don’t wake this government up nothing will.”

The plan was that the Government, which was the railroads and the mining outfits and the Rothschild bankers who had lured them out West to build their fortunes then dumped them like a gaggle of Chinamen, that Government, would pay them, the Workers, a decent wage to build roads, to dig canals to water the dry Western states and territories, and everybody would come out the better for it. Hod was younger then, just barely off the farm, but even he knew it was a desperate dream. But it was big, big as the Depression that had one man out of four walking the streets and feeling like shit on a bootheel.

“Coxey plans to leave on Easter,” said Bill Hogan, little Bill Hogan who’d never led anything bigger than a mule team but was as straight as they came and when voted General of the Butte Contingent said “Thanks, fellas, I’ll try to live up to it.” There were a bunch of them there who’d been in the same stope with Hod at the Orphan Girl—Hack Tuttle, Orrin Wheatley, Curly Armstrong—all shouting out and stamping their feet when the resolution to march was passed.

Of course marching to Washington was easy for Coxey and his troops, back east in Massillon almost to the Pennsylvania border. The Butte men could walk Coxey’s route twice over and never leave the state. The Northern Pacific said they wouldn’t haul a mob of tramps on their road even if every one of them paid full fare. Which neither Hod nor any of the other jobless men in Local Number One possessed.

And so it was that one night in the middle of April a dozen or so of the troops who’d been railroad hands snuck into the yard and convinced the watchman it was only patriotic that they liberate an NP locomotive and six open coal cars, plus a boxcar for supplies, and that he not inform his masters until the sun came over the Hill. The train stopped a quarter mile out of the yard and Hod was one of three hundred Commonweal soldiers to scale the coal-car sides and drop down into the grimy interior. Their cheers echoed off the insides of the car while they gathered steam and began to highball east.

Wild train coming your way
, said the telegraph message sent ahead.
Stay clear of our tracks
.

It was cold, without a roof and with the train barreling across the scrublands, but with fifty men crammed together and the thrill of defiance running in their veins the night sped by.

The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

Down with the bosses, up with the stars!

—they sang—

Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again

Shouting the battle cry of Silver!

It had been the banks and their tight money that drove his old man off the farm, town people putting an arm around his shoulders and cooing into his ear till he took the loan and then there they were out in the yard with Sheriff White behind them, saying how it was just business and you had to be prudent with your finances. His own father, Esam Brackenridge, working for wages at the granary till it killed him with shame.

My country tis of thee

—they sang—

Once land of liberty

Of thee I sing

Land of the Millionaire

Farmers with pockets bare

Gypped by that cursed snare

The Money Ring

He’d never quite understood how they worked it, no matter how many speeches he heard and meetings he sat through. That was part of the con, of course, making it impossible for a simple toiler to follow, wrapping it in a gauze of words and laws and proclamations and economic ciphers, but somehow he knew somebody was getting rich without lifting a finger, and here they were, honest hardworking American men, without a pot to piss in or a window to toss it from.

We are—joining—Coxey’s Army—

—they sang, miners and teamsters and railroad men, tillers of wheat and builders of bridges, Northerners and Southerners and men born, like Hod, in the far West—

We are—marching—on to glory

We will—camp in—Cleveland’s backyard

On the first of May!

There must be some good men there, they thought, that flag they sang about must stand for something and if only they could bring the truth to Washington, truth in the flesh of a hundred thousand working men from every corner of the land, it would put the greenback boys on the run and there would be work and bread and pride enough to go around. Hod wasn’t sure of their names, but there had to be good men in the East, wizards of finance, who could do
something
.

Wild train coming.

They made Bozeman by daybreak and in the rail yard of the cow town there were a hundred people waiting, cheering as the Commonwealers stood on each other’s shoulders and climbed stiff-legged over the sides of the coal cars and cheered back, throats raw from singing, and there they commandeered a fresh engine and loaded up with coal from the NP stockpile and coupled ten beautiful spacious boxcars behind it.

“There’s law coming,” the telegraph operator told them. “Marshal McDer-mott just left Butte with an engine and two cabooses. Got him some eighty deputies.”

There were jeers from the Commonweal soldiers and from the crowd and much speculation as to the character of anyone who would throw in with the Czars of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

“Must not be a pimp left in Venus Alley,” said Jim Harmon as he jumped behind the throttle. “Who wants to go to Washington?”

The boxcars were rolling palaces after the open coal-haulers, and the folks in Bozeman had thrown meat and bread and cheese and even a few pies in with them as the wild train resumed its journey.

“This is still hot,” said Curly Armstrong, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Some lady woke up before the sun and baked us a damn pie.”

They had barely settled in, filling themselves with the donated food and bragging about what they would do if the Marshal and his deputies should have the misfortune of catching up with them, when the train stopped in the middle of the Bozeman Tunnel.

The men piled out and walked in the dark along the other boxcars and the coughing, dripping engine to find half of Bozeman Hill slid down over the track ahead of them.

“The NP done this,” decided Hack Tuttle, though the station agent had said there’d been a hard rain the day before and to watch out. “They called their agents out ahead of us.”

“It doesn’t matter how it happened,” said General Hogan. “We have to clear the track or give up.”

It was Hod who found the tools, half-hidden on the downside of the slope, the section gang who abandoned them probably still within shouting distance. There were fifteen shovels and they worked in relays, digging furiously till their arms gave out and then handing it over to the next man. Nobody was singing now, with that deputy train running up behind, and just when the track looked ready to roll on there was another cave-in.

“Damn if I aint doin the railroad’s work for free,” said one of the men, and that led to joking about the bill for services rendered they should hand over and finally Jim Harmon said the hell with it, jumped up behind the throttle again and got up a little steam and plowed right through the whole mess and out the other side of the tunnel. There were cheers and they loaded up with the shovels in hand in case there were more accidents or company mischief up ahead and Hod had the sudden thrilling idea—
This is ours now.

Hod’s old man always said it was the railroad advertising lured him out West, too many years of making scratch in Kentucky and those handbills looked awfully good. It was the railroad brought him out cheap when he signed on to settle and the railroad dumped him off in Topeka with some hints about where any smart fella ought to stake his claim. The old man listened and went in with a crowd who guessed on the area around old Fort Zarah, which they got a charter for and called Zarah City and commenced to build while the old man bought a quarter section between there and Pawnee Rock and put a crop of sod corn in and waited for the railroad to make his town land worth something.

But that was the year the hoppers flew down and ate everything so he went hunting buffalo along with all the other busted farmers, and when he managed to bring a stinking, tick-infested roll of them in without getting scalped the agents were paying less than a dollar a hide. On account, they said, of the railroad charging so much to ship them back east.

The next season it was hailstorms did the crop, and then somebody paid somebody more than somebody else did so Great Falls got the railhead instead of Zarah City and the town dried up when the drought came in and settled, more or less permanent, for the next ten years. Hod, third of eight, would run to find the old man wherever he was whenever the sky broke, eager-eyed, but the old man would barely look up and say “Hope it don’t rot the beans.” Then the year him and everybody else around went over to the winter wheat that the Mennonites brought to the country he made forty bushels an acre, but the price dropped out when the railroad upped its rates.