A Million Tears (34 page)

‘How is he?’ Evan asked quietly.

‘He’s still unconscious, but he seems a little better. The doctor thinks he’ll live. But,’ her voice faltered, ‘he can’t be sure if there won’t be brain damage of some kind.’ Her tears were drying up and she wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘God, it seems an eternity you were gone. What happened? Oh, hullo Sonny. Let’s go down and I’ll make some coffee.’

‘I just came to see if Sion was all right, Mrs Griffiths. I’d better get on back now, but thanks all the same.’

‘Nonsense. Come and have some coffee with us. I know I could use some and I’m sure you can as well,’ said Evan gruffly. ‘I’ll just go in and see if . . . see he’s okay.’

I followed him. Sion was deathly white, his head swathed in bandages. He was not moving and scarcely breathing. I sat by his bedside and took hold of his hand. It was icy cold. Gently I tucked it under the blankets and sat back in the chair. Evan touched my shoulder. ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Later. I’ll just sit here for a wee while.’ I sat there I don’t know how long but well past sunrise. If I could have changed places with that little boy I would have done so gladly. I loved him just a little bit more than the rest of the family. He was . . . special. I thought about the kite flying we’d done and his ideas for a bigger kite. How excited he had been only the evening before about a new design he wanted to try out. He was a clever little lad, there was no getting away from it. I vowed if he died I would kill Junior, not Evan. The thought of Sion having brain damage preyed on my mind until I felt I was going mad trying to imagine how it would affect him.

None of us went to the warehouse for the next three days; I don’t think it entered our heads. We thought only of Sion; nothing else mattered.

It was five o’clock on the third morning and Evan was sitting beside him when Sion finally regained consciousness. After that his recovery was rapid. Soon, he was taking a light broth, his hours of wakefulness grew longer and his interest in what was going on increased. As far as we could tell there was no difference in Sion but it was an anxious time.

I stopped working at the warehouse and stayed at home to look after him. Meg stayed for the first couple of weeks too, but gradually the warehouse claimed more of her time. If the truth were known, I had been finding it more and more tiring going in every day and after we went after Junior I was exhausted for a week.

Sonny had coped admirably by himself during the first few days when none of us went into the warehouse and he easily took over from me. He was given the title of Warehouse Manager and Frank, one of our more able staff, was made up into Sonny’s old job. Evan gave everybody on the payroll a ten percent pay rise, in appreciation for all they had done.

Evan wrote to John Buchanan telling him what had happened and John sent Sion a fisherman’s knife from Scotland, which became his pride and joy second only possibly to Thunderbolt.

Not being able to ride his horse was Sion’s hardest cross to bear and he was forever nagging me to let him have a ride.

Evan and Meg also began a lively correspondence with the folks back in Wales. I use the term lively in a jocular sense because it took anything up to two months to send a letter and another two to receive a reply. Although Meg wrote to her mother regularly she never received a reply, not once, something that upset her a lot.

Evan constructed a small safe in the floor of the study and we took to keeping the takings there instead of in the bank. He used what remained in the bank account to buy more merchandise but after that kept only a token amount with the bank. It was just as well.

That year, in 1893, Grover Cleveland was returned to the White House as President for his second term in office. No sooner had he taken the oath when a major panic burst across the country. Even before that things had been tough. The Populist revolt that had been sweeping the country had taken hold like a religious revival. The party embraced all the Alliances that had grown up between the various farming groups and the many other minority groups such as the remnants of the Knights of Labour, of the Greenback and Union parties, advocates of woman suffrage, Socialists, single-taxers, silverites and professional reformers. They all came together to help the common people, the small businessmen and farmers. One of their most popular speakers was a woman, Mary Ellen Lease who came to St. Louis one day in Spring.

I remembered some of her impassioned speech which was quoted at length in the newspapers. She said: ‘Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall street. Our laws are the output of a system that clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.’

Her speech had a profound effect on Evan and he began to take a more active interest in local politics. That does not mean to say he did anything more than read and keep abreast of the situation across the country. Business houses crashed, banks closed their doors, railroads went into the hands of the receivers, factories shut down, trade languished and creditors foreclosed their mortgages. In the cities, long lines of unemployed men waited outside soup kitchens, and in the country thousands joined the army of tramps. It was all as Evan had expected, though he often said, expecting it and seeing it were monstrously different. Before things got really bad we built up a large stock of non-perishable food, and reduced our stocks of the other, non-food, items. People would always have to eat, said Evan. I agreed with him, except, as I pointed out, when they couldn’t afford to. By the autumn an awful lot couldn’t.

Only three good things happened that year. Sion made a complete recovery by the late Spring. Junior Roybal was convicted and sentenced to the state penitentiary for fifteen years, lucky not to have been hanged. And we built up a library in the study. While the boys bought and read such books as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Meg took to reading The Portrait of a Lady, The American, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of a Dove by Henry James. Evan stayed with law and economics. We all read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and I then started on all Twain’s books like Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. These were the first complete books I had ever read, and I took great pleasure from them.

Business, of course, dropped right off but did not stop altogether. There were plenty of wealthy people in the area who found the depression no more than a hindrance. Because of Evan’s foresight and John Buchanan’s advice we possessed the best stocked warehouse in the area. At the worst period of the depression we were still making enough on our turnover to pay the bills and wages. We also never had to sack anybody or reduce their wages as so many other employers did. The only change was that the work altered slightly. There was not enough to do for all of them to be kept even moderately busy during the day so we started a system of having two men on guard during the night. It was a wise precaution because in the next year alone there were sixteen attempted burglaries, all of which failed. Evan occasionally did a spell of guard duty, though not as often as he would have liked because of the pressure of his own work.

In the house it was easy to forget there was a depression. It was only in town that the real meaning of it came home. More and more men were out of work and more and more businesses failed. The papers were filled with gloomy prophecies and slated the President for not doing something about the situation. I noticed there were few suggestions as to what he should do. Unfortunately, the President was convinced the whole thing would blow over and his prevalent philosophy became what the papers called laissez faire. I agreed with them when Meg explained what it meant.

From time to time Evan and Meg went to New York to buy more merchandise, and each time they came back with the most fearful tales of riots, strikes, fighting in the streets between workers and soldiers, the huge soup queues which, luckily, we didn’t see in St Louis. And of course prices rocketed. Bank after bank closed and the depression got worse and worse as time went on.

25

The next few years saw a backlash against the government and the moneyed few who were held to be responsible. There was the Homestead strike, resulting in a pitched battle and the great Pullman strike of ’94 which tied up the railroads of half the nation and became known as the strike that best exemplified the situation in America. When the representatives of the workers had appealed to Pullman to talk about their wage problem they were summarily dismissed. The workers promptly went on strike and the newly organised American Railway Union sided with the Pullman workers and directed its men not to handle Pullman cars. With that, war broke out between the railroads and workers and it covered half the nation. The North and West became paralysed. One newspaper called it a war against the government and society. An employers’ organisation, called the General Managers Association, demanded the Federal Government intervene to maintain the railway service.

An injunction was brought against the workers and suddenly all hell broke loose. The Governor of Illinois was ready to act with his state militia, but before he could, Cleveland sent in Federal troops to Chicago. The injunction broke the strike and the troops almost broke the labour movement. The Governor protested that the Constitution had been violated with the sending in of the troops but for his pains all he received was a rebuke from the President and a repudiation by the courts. The bosses had won all along the line and it seemed to me that they always won. We had come from Wales to escape this sort of tyranny but here we found it as great as ever. It was true to say we were making money and had a way of life far better than we’d had in the old country but that was not everything. Evan used to burn with the injustice of it, screwing the newspaper up in disgust when he read what was happening.

Just after the Pullman strike was over, I was making one of my rare appearances at the warehouse. I sat across the desk from Evan, drinking coffee.

‘How long do you think all this will go on for?’ I asked him.

Evan shrugged. ‘I honestly don’t know Uncle James and I have no ideas. It’s the same all over. There’s no work and the queues for soup are lengthening. It’ll end, of that I have no doubt, but God knows when.’ He paused and sipped his coffee. ‘One thing I’m glad of, though, and that’s John came to see us a couple of Christmases back. I never told you this but, though I’d had the feeling things were going to go sour I couldn’t admit them to myself. Know what I mean?’

‘Seemed too far-fetched, did it?’

‘Yes. But it was more than that. Hell, I didn’t really know much about economics and the like, and still don’t really, in spite of all I’ve read. I just couldn’t believe I was right. After all, nobody else seemed to think the way I did. If John hadn’t come and confirmed what I was thinking I wouldn’t have made the arrangements I did. In fact we could well have gone bust, like some of the others. Oh well, we’ll get a bigger place one day but not until things improve.’

‘Hmmm. Let’s hope they do – soon. When are you planning on another trip to New York? I see the stock is getting low.’

Evan nodded gloomily. ‘I didn’t want to risk going in case the strike had escalated. But now the railroads are nearly back to normal I’d better go next week. I’ll talk to Meg about it and see what she says. Mind you, haven’t the boys got something on at their school next week; the parents go along for a visit or something?’

I nodded. Come hell, high water or business, the family was first with Evan and always would be. I was about to reply when Hans Reisenbach appeared at the door. I had not seen him for months and though Evan had told me how worn and tired he looked I was still unprepared for the defeated looking man before us.

Hans shook his head and I had the impression he was trying not to cry. He cleared his throat. ‘It is all over, my friend. I have come to say goodbye to Evan and I had hoped Meg too, but I see she is not here.’

‘It is quite simple Evan. I am pulling out. Me and the family and one or two others are going. Ve are finished,’ he shrugged helplessly.

‘I don’t understand. How can you be finished? And where are you going to? Hell, I’ve seen your place. It’s a thriving farm,’ said Evan.

‘Evan, Evan, Evan,’ Hans spoke with all the weariness in the world. ‘You know I have a mortgage on my property. There are very few farms in the territory that don’t. Ve have made a good living, eaten well, vorked hard and enjoyed ourselves. But to stay in the farming business ve have had to keep investing in new equipment, borrow to get us over bad times, like the drought three years back.’ He gave a helpless gesture with his hand. ‘You know farm prices have steadily dropped during the last . . . God Almighty . . . twenty years and look at them now. I’ve always managed to get enough cash to pay the interest on my loan but not the capital. Now the bank has foreclosed. In twenty minutes,’ he looked at the wall clock, ‘twenty-two to be precise, I vill no longer own my farm. After all these years . . .’

Hurriedly he took a sip of coffee, half choking on it. ‘Ach, I must go. Ingrid is vaiting for me to help her pack. I believe they give us a veek to get out of our own home. So, goodbye my friend,’ he leaned across the desk, his hand outstretched.

Evan ignored it.

‘Sit down Hans. Why the hell – Good God . . . I seem to be saying that every other sentence nowadays. Why didn’t you come to me sooner and tell me? Do you think so little of me as a friend you couldn’t have asked me to lend you some money? And what about the others? Have Wilhelm and Erwin the same problem? What about Heinz?’ Evan was angry.