Honeyville (20 page)
2) Two days later, on 20 April 1914, up at Ludlow, where the tent colony had been living out that long winter together, a day of gunfighting between striking miners, Union activists and the general’s men escalated into something so appalling and so deadly it would make newspaper headlines across the world.
The camp had been evacuated in a day-long battle, and by evening the general’s forces were running amok, setting fire to the abandoned tents.
They set fire to the encampment’s maternity tent, where two women and eleven children were still hiding, trapped by flying bullets and apparently too sick or too frightened to leave at the same time as everyone else. The following morning, cowering in a dugout cellar beneath the tent, their bodies were discovered, burned alive.
3) Oh yes. And Inez fell in love again.
April 1933
Hollywood, California
The Ludlow Massacre, 20 April 1914. In school textbooks, the event has a name: it is a piece of American history. I suppose as I sit here in the Californian sunshine almost twenty years on, it seems unimaginable that I was there, so close to the midst of such tragedy, and yet am unable to describe the horror: the sound of the screams, and the hammer of the bullets, the rising smoke and the general’s men cheering as they set their torches to the empty campsite; the smell of burnt flesh as the dead children were pulled from the dugout the following morning; the weeping of the women standing by – all of it the culmination of a winter of violence and hatred.
I can’t do it. I wasn’t there. We townsfolk had spent a winter – a lifetime – staying away from the miners’ troubles. And in truth, the tales from people who were present are so thick with hatred and so immutably partisan, it is impossible to know who to believe – or whether to believe any at all. Except, of course, for what we know. We saw with our own eyes the line of white coffins make their way down Main Street to the cemetery. At the end of it all, eleven small children were murdered.
The campsite was ten miles out of town, and in Trinidad we had become inured to its distant, brutal rattle. When the violence strayed into town, as of course it had from time to time, we kept our heads down until it strayed right back out of town again. It was not our war. We did our best to live alongside it as if it wasn’t there. But when the news came of the children’s deaths, there was no avoiding it any longer, no matter whose side we were on. Our streets became the warzone.
And so for ten days, anarchy ruled in Southern Colorado.
1914
Trinidad, Colorado
That was when Max Eastman descended. Inez’s letter to him, which I will deliver at our lunch on Friday, lies in front of me as I write this. It is painful to picture the two together: the jauntiness of Max as he was on that first day, and then this ancient, bloodstained letter, written for him only a week or so later, and which I never allowed him to see.
Max arrived in town with a reporter friend named Frank Bohn, and a loud voice, and a suitcase full of pens and papers, and a lot of well-worded outrage. The rail track ran along one edge of the tent colony, or what was left of it, and Max Eastman’s train passed by the carnage at Ludlow before it drew into town. The campsite was still smoking, and the dugouts beneath many of the tents were still being excavated. He told Inez afterwards that the smell of burning flesh had made his stomach heave, and I dare say it did. He looked as white as a ghost that first morning, the first I set eyes on him. He was lugging his New York luggage up North Commercial Street in search of a hotel, just as twenty or more strikers were marching by, and he seemed to cower at the sight of them. I did too, actually. Though such was their rage and grief, I am certain we were invisible to them.
Strikers were marching in haphazard units up and down throughout the town that day, shouting and firing their guns in the air. They dominated the streets and I dare say Max Eastman and his chum were terrified. I know I was. I hadn’t wanted to come out, but none of the other girls was willing, and one of us had to.
Until that point, I had stayed aloof from the politics – taken great care about it, too – and I intended to return to being aloof as soon as possible. But the burning of those women and children was beyond politics. The tent colony had been set aflame, and now several thousand people were without any place to go. Nobody could live alongside that kind of suffering and remain unmoved – and still consider themselves human.
Phoebe wasn’t human. But there were plenty of us at Plum Street who were. We had made a collection of food and blankets and dollar bills, and a couple of us were transporting them to the Union offices, only because (in spite of everything, it didn’t matter who started shooting at whom first, or even why) the Union had systems in place to get help to the newly homeless.
It was Jasmine and me who took Phoebe’s auto the short drive from Plum Street to the Union offices on North Commercial. Jasmine didn’t want to come into the building, and nor would Carlos, Phoebe’s man-of-all-work, so I hauled our booty to the front desk on my own.
In Cody’s place at the counter that morning there stood no one at all. I felt a pang of sorrow for his missing figure and wondered, briefly, what and whose misdeeds had led to the bullet in his head – before the poor boy had even finished growing. The office was deserted. I wasn’t sure what to do. I could leave the blankets and the food on the front desk, where there was already a large pile of donations, but I hesitated to do the same with our dollars. So I stood for a moment, dithering.
A shadow crossed the door behind me. I turned to see Lawrence looming.
‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘Has something happened?’
‘No!’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
‘Why are you here?’
It sounded hostile. ‘Same reason anyone else is.’ I indicated the mountain of donations. ‘The girls got a collection of stuff together …’
‘Oh,’ he said, his voice relaxing. ‘I thought maybe Inez … Well, thank you. Leave it on the counter there, will you? I’ll get one of the boys to sort through it.’
‘Well, that’s what I was going to do, but what about the cash? I didn’t want to leave a bunch of loose dollars without knowing someone has them safe.’
‘Cash? How much have you got there?’ He held out a hand.
‘Just more than three hundred bucks,’ I replied, passing it over. ‘Not a single cent from Phoebe …’
‘Hm. What do you know?’ He gave me a thin smile. ‘Well, thank you, Dora,’ he said, moving past me to lift the counter hatch. ‘Thank you kindly. Much appreciated.’ He stopped. ‘Inez all right then?’ he asked. ‘She heard about young Cody?’
‘She heard about him.’
‘Bad news. She took it all right, did she?’
‘She seemed to,’ I said. ‘It all came in together – what happened up at Ludlow yesterday, and then Cody just the day or so before … God knows.’ I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to say to him, because when she told us yesterday, it was almost as if she had been reporting on the weather.
‘I went to Cody’s hardware store this afternoon,’ she’d informed us. ‘Because I knew he could tell me what was going on up at Ludlow. But he wasn’t there. Mr Paulin said he got killed. Shot dead right there in the store yesterday afternoon. Can you believe it? Little Cody … I don’t know, Dora. Everyone just keeps
dying
.’ And she’d sighed. ‘It’s getting so horrid, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can stand it much longer.’
After that, we’d talked about the shooting at Ludlow. We’d argued about which side had fired what shot first, and whether it even mattered … And we didn’t mention Cody again.
Lawrence watched me, as if he might learn some added secret from my face. But I had no secrets and, after a moment, he seemed to accept the fact. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thank the girls, will you? For their generosity. And you tell Inez to take care.’
He disappeared into the depths of the office and I turned back to the street. I must have taken longer inside than I’d realized. Either that, or Jasmine and the driver had been too afraid to wait for more than a second. I was searching the street for a sight of the car, when I spotted Inez and Xavier striding purposefully towards me, waving.
There weren’t many on the streets – that is, not many who weren’t in from Ludlow, here to muster for the fight. Amid the angry male faces, hobnail boots and rugged working clothes, my two dainty friends stood out absurdly. As if to illustrate the point, there came a volley of gunshots from behind them as they drew up beside me.
‘What in hell are you doing out here?’ I asked over the noise. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘
There
you are, Dora!’ Inez shouted, ignoring my question. ‘Isn’t it
awful
?Gosh, I was so hoping to bump into you. I knew you’d be out!’
‘I only came to drop off some stuff from the girls. But I don’t want to be here. I want to get home. What are you two doing, roaming the streets? You’ll get yourselves killed.’
‘By the way,’ said Inez, ignoring my question again, ‘we can’t get back up to Main Street from here.’ She pointed in the direction I would have headed. ‘It’s too dangerous, darling. Men everywhere. Do you want to come with us?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Not at all. And you should go home, Inez. I don’t like it out here one bit.’
‘None of us likes it,’ said Inez, with shining eyes. ‘Xavier’s been trying to drag me back home this past half-hour. But this is our city, Dora! Why should we hide away?’
‘Because we don’t want to get killed?’ suggested Xavier. I glanced at him. Beneath the laconic manner he was livid. He couldn’t abandon her, and yet he knew as well as I did what madness it was to be roaming the streets. Though the rabble ignored us now, who knew for how long, or when it might turn? The air was nil with violence and hatred. Here and there came the sound of objects thrown, raised voices, and then – from somewhere or nowhere – gunshots; there were men brazenly carrying guns. Nobody was stopping them. There was nobody
to
stop them. General Chase and his men – where were they now?
‘We should go home,’ I said again.
‘I keep telling her,’ Xavier said. ‘I can’t just leave her here, can I?’
I glanced at Inez, but her attention had already skittered on down the street. She was gazing through a gap in the crowd, at a handsome man I would soon discover was Max Eastman. Tall and lean – and terrified, as I have mentioned; dressed in linen suit and cravat, he and his suitcase looked even more out of place than we did.
‘Oh my giddy aunt!’ gasped Inez. ‘Oh the blessed saints … You know who
that
is, don’t you, Xavie darling?’ Her eyes were round as saucers and her voice came out in a gust of wonder.
He turned to look.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘No idea.’
‘
Yes you do!
He wrote the article, Xavier! The one about the … For heck’s sake, the editor of
The Masses
! That’s who has come to Trinidad to write about our troubles! Max Eastman! And if Max Eastman is here, I should think the whole world will be here next. I should think we are finally going to get the attention we deserve … He looks rather lost, don’t you think?’
‘Not really,’ Xavier said.
‘Yes, he does.’
There came a roar from the direction of Main Street – what sounded like the battle cry of at least thirty miners. It was followed by the smashing of glass and then another volley of shots – from not one but several rifles. Max Eastman and his companion stopped still, looked about them: a couple of New York intellectuals in linen suits scared out of their wits, in our frontier town. If I hadn’t been so afraid myself, I might have laughed at the sight of them.
‘I’m going to help him,’ Inez said. ‘
Them
,’ she corrected herself. And in a flash she was gone, marching towards them in her pantaloon skirt and red felt hat. From where I stood, thirty yards or so behind her, I could see Max Eastman spotting her approach, and the delightful transformation that came over his stance, his face – his everything – as she drew up before him.
She held onto her hat and tipped her head. He lifted his own hat and half bowed and smiled; and put a hand on a hip, and nodded encouragingly, as she pointed this way and pointed that – and in a moment, with the odd, stray, distant bullet still firing somewhere on Main Street, they were deep in conversation.
‘Good God!’ I said to Xavier, laughing.
‘Can you believe it? In the middle of this, they are
flirting
! … She is irrepressible,’ he said. His voice was full of affection. We stood quietly, looking on in wonder, until there came yet another gunshot from the direction of Main Street, perhaps slightly closer than the last, and Xavier said, ‘Can we leave her alone out here? I don’t think we can.’
‘If she won’t come back with us, then I think we must,’ I said. ‘She’s an adult. If she wants to get caught in the fight, that’s her choice. But I’m heading home. And I think you should too … Inez can look after herself.’
As I said it, and tried to believe it, Inez’s voice rang out, shouting our names and beckoning us over. When we didn’t move immediately, she tugged at Max Eastman’s linen sleeve and brought him over to meet us.
‘Dora, Xavier,’ she babbled, ‘I told you it was him and it is! This is the genius, Max Eastman. And this is … This is Frank …’
‘Frank Bohn …’ Frank gave a half-bow as he introduced himself.
‘He’s another writer. And Max says there’s a whole bunch of reporters and writers making their way here. What do you say about
that
? They’re looking for a hotel. But
The Masses
being
The
Masses
,’ she said, rolling her beautiful eyes, ‘sadly they don’t have much cash. I suggested the Toltec but I think it’s pretty much packed out with Union men. The Corinado is better, for a budget. Don’t you think so? Not that I have the faintest idea
really
,’ she added. And blushed.
That evening, Phoebe closed the Plum Street Parlour House for the first time since she’d opened it fifteen years before. She gathered us all in the ballroom at about three in the afternoon to announce her decision. Jake Trueman, our house musician, had lost two of his brothers at Ludlow (company men, both) and therefore wasn’t working tonight, she explained. Added to which the small fat general, in a forlorn attempt to restore order, had imposed a curfew on the town. The saloons had been ordered closed and the strikers had taken possession of City Hall. Nobody in their right mind would be coming into Snatchville tonight.