Lawless (25 page)

Labor’s Beacon
could attract no advertisers. Hence every issue lost money. But Gideon’s fortune was invested and managed by experts at the Rothman Bank in Boston. Using investment income alone, he was able to keep the paper going and at the same time provide a decent home for Margaret and the children in a good suburb. More ostentatiously than that, he would not live. To have done so would have created suspicions and doubt among the laboring men for whom he traveled, spoke and wrote.

Molly nominally operated both the newspaper and the book company on behalf of all four owners, though in truth each firm was run by professional managers. Gideon had a standing offer from his stepmother to move into management of the
Union,
but he’d never even considered it. That upset Margaret, as did a certain inevitable danger in his work.

Her displeasure had been making their household very tense lately. The mention of Leah Strelnik reminded him that he and Margaret hadn’t made love in five or six weeks. The thought of it produced a stir in his groin, then an unexpected and slightly embarrassing image in his mind.

Julia Sedgwick. The late Louis Kent’s former wife.

Louis, Amanda Kent’s only son, had gotten involved with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in the ’68 Erie stock war. About that time, Gideon had confronted Gould and demanded postmortem benefits in the form of payments for the families of Daphnis Miller and another Erie worker. He’d managed to bluff the financier into making the payments secretly—just about the only occasion anyone had gotten the best of Jay Gould, Jephtha said later. Gould had needed someone to blame. Apparently he’d chosen Gideon’s relative, though there was never any proof of his being connected with what had happened next.

On a street in a dingy section of New York, Louis had been stabbed by an unknown assailant. The attack had left him paralyzed below the waist. He’d slipped into a coma and died during the summer. Gideon had met Julia when she’d come to the funeral with her son Carter; she had gotten custody of the boy when she’d divorced Louis during the war.

Julia lived in Chicago, was wealthy in her own right, and used her money to finance her work as a lecturer for the American Woman Suffrage Association—a cause nearly as unpopular as his. He recalled how impressed he’d been at their first meeting. He’d been taken with her poise, her intelligence, and most especially with her interest in public questions. It was an attitude in sharp contrast with Margaret’s. Once Gideon’s wife had been much like Julia, but now she was retreating from the world, seeming to want nothing so much as the security of a comfortable life with a husband who was in a prosperous and respectable business.

Yes, Julia had impressed him. And not merely on an intellectual level. She was physically attractive. In a guilty way, he realized the attraction hadn’t lessened since that first meeting.

“I say, Gideon—” Strelnik had spoken loudly. “The proofs are marked.”

“Good, good,” he answered, coming out of the reverie. “Go on home.”

“Don’t you think I should stay till you’re finished?” There was concern in the little man’s voice. Despite his arguments with his employer, Strelnik liked Gideon. The feeling was reciprocated.

Gideon shook his head, trying to clear it of pictures of Julia Sedgwick even as his hands cleared a working space on the littered desk. Strelnik objected to the dismissal.

“Listen, it’s safer with the two of us here. We got four more in today’s mail, don’t forget.”

With exaggerated significance, he pointed to a small stack of letters on the desk. They totaled twelve now. Only three were signed, and the rest contained threats ranging from mild to maniacal. All the letters had come in response to an editorial Gideon had written in the last issue. He’d criticized the Washington railroad lobby directed by Henry Cooke, brother of Jay Cooke, who headed the huge New York investment banking firm bearing his name.

More and more, it was becoming apparent that the railroad lobby was buying favors and preferential treatment from state legislators and jurists.
Labor’s Beacon
printed news of all trades. But the railroads were emerging as the country’s most important industry and thus received the most coverage.

Gideon had heard the railroad lobby was deeply mired in a truly spectacular scandal involving the Credit Mobilier, the company which had financed and constructed the Union Pacific section of the transcontinental railroad. He’d unearthed no facts; no one had. But sources he trusted, sources such as Theo Payne, kept telling him Washington would explode like a bomb if the truth about gifts of Credit Mobilier stock ever came to light.

Gideon’s editorial had suggested the need for a railroad worker’s lobby to offset Henry Cooke and his associates. It had only alluded to potential scandal. Still, the editorial had produced those twelve letters, some quite hateful, and a brief, exuberant feeling that
someone
read his little paper.

“I’ll be fine, Sime,” he said. “No one’s going to show up here.”

Strelnik looked dubious but finally shrugged. He lit one more cigarette, blew out the match and asked, “Still planning the trip to Chicago?”

“Yes, the workers on the Wisconsin and Prairie want me to attend their organizational meeting, and I think I should.”

“Is Mrs. Kent still against it?”

Gideon nodded. “She hates every trip I take. In fact I think she hates all of this. She’s told me several times it was too dangerous.”

Well, it wasn’t exactly tame. He’d been set on by ruffians three times in other cities, and shot at once. But General Jeb Stuart had taught him how to fight; he held his own. To deal with unwelcome visitors, he kept a loaded Confederate cavalry revolver in the drawer of his desk.”

“I heard it’s been hot as a furnace out in the middle west, Gideon.”

The younger man smiled. “Sime, you needn’t hang around to nursemaid me. I’ll be out of here in half an hour. Now go home! Tomorrow we’ll carry the rest of the issue to the typesetter.”

Strelnik cast one more glance at the pile of angry mail, pulled his cap out of his coat pocket and reluctantly left.

Gideon inked his pen, found several sheets of foolscap and printed in capitals at the top of the first one
THE TRAGEDY OF PARIS.

He chewed the end of the pen. He knew what he wanted to write but he had to phrase it properly. The Versailles government could never be condoned for what it had done in the third week of May; Bloody Week, it had come to be called. In an orgy of fire and shooting that had left much of Paris a corpse-littered ruin, the government had overturned the Commune and executed as many as twenty thousand of its supporters.

In spite of the May bloodshed, public sympathy seemed to remain with established authority. It was the Commune itself, not its overthrow, that struck fear into most Americans. And an obvious but irrelevant connection was still being made between the Commune and American labor. The bosses played up the fact that Marxian Socialists had led the Paris revolt and would, if permitted, lead similar revolts in the United States. There were constant references to the horrors of an earlier French Revolution. The Commune had raised a specter not easily banished, and one that would harm American labor for a long time to come.

Slowly, Gideon began to write:

The American workingman was ill-served by the late and unlamented Paris Commune. From the outset it must be made clear that although American labor does include within its ranks a few who support the International, and who would see all private enterprises dismantled and given piecemeal into the workers’ hands, such men are in the minority.

The bosses have foolishly tried to make it seem as though American labor is entirely composed of such radicals. That is a lie deliberately fabricated to set back the just cause of workingmen’s rights. Most native workers are not Communards in fact or even by disposition. They have no conflict with legitimate enterprise, and no antagonism to capital, but only desire to receive a full and proper share of the capital which their toil creates.

Although certain bosses would wish it, we must not assume that what was wanted in Paris is wanted in the streets of American cities and—

Abruptly, he glanced up. Absorbed in trying to get the editorial to flow smoothly, he’d paid no attention to his surroundings. Hadn’t there been a sound a moment ago?

A sound out on the landing?

He laid the pen down. His palms grew damp. Through the grimy windows he saw that it was nearly dark.

Voices murmured beyond the door. Two, perhaps three men. His heartbeat picked up as the door handle rattled. He’d forgotten to throw the bolt after Strelnik left.

As he leaped to his feet, the door crashed back. Three ragged, scowling men crowded inside.

“Yessir, here’s the one,” said the biggest of them, hefting a short length of lumber in his right hand. “Eye patch, ain’t that right?”

“Right, James,” said the second, a wiry fellow with a slingshot in his fist.

Gideon’s heart almost broke; for a moment he was too sad to be frightened. Here was a perfect example of Gould’s statement that he could use the working class itself to destroy anyone who fought to improve the plight of the class. These three men were no criminals but poor, ragged city dwellers whom all the craft unions barred from apprentice programs, and thus from decent job opportunities.

Men with families, he supposed. Desperate men as yet unacceptable to the rest of the labor movement. All three of the men were black.

Sorrowful, he still reminded himself they’d do what they had been hired to do. He eyed the desk drawer where he kept the cavalry revolver. The burly man in charge drew a folded
Beacon
from his sagging trousers. Waved it under Gideon’s nose and delivered a message Gideon was sure had been rehearsed.

“Certain gentlemen don’t like you printing things about Mr. Henry Cooke down in Washington.”

Quietly, Gideon said, “Who paid you? Why are you doing this? You’re workingmen, aren’t you? I’m on your side.”

When they heard his accent, the wiry one sneered. “On our side? Lord God. You hear him, James? He’s a Southron an’ he says he’s on our side! No, Mr. Southron, we ain’t
workingmen,
much as we’d like to be, ’cause this old city don’t seem to have many jobs for those who ain’t got white skin. You come up here after the war just like we did, Mr. Southron? You come here ’cause they wouldn’t let you keep niggers as property no more?”

“If it makes any difference, my family never owned a single slave in Vir—”

“No, it don’t make no difference,” the wiry man interrupted, and lunged.

He swung the shot-loaded sock. Gideon ducked but it grazed his forehead. He grabbed the drawer handle as they surged around him.

He stabbed his hand inside the drawer. Closed his fingers on the butt of the revolver. The leader spotted the gun and kicked the drawer shut. Gideon cried out when the drawer caught his wrist.

“No more stuff about Mr. Cooke, hear?” James said, and slammed the length of wood against Gideon’s right temple.

His good eye blurred. He punched the black’s belly, but underneath the old shirt the man’s gut was rock solid. While the third one held him, the wiry one hit him again. They beat him for three or four minutes and left him gasping and floundering on the floor.

Then they tore up books and papers and, just before they ran off down the stairs, they smashed the office windows. By then Gideon had collapsed, unconscious.

A
FTER LEAVING THE
precinct house, he had to run to catch the last car of the evening on the Third Avenue Railroad. Every step hurt, and set his head to throbbing. His secondhand frock coat was torn, and because there was no running water in the
Beacon
office, he’d had to clean up with a rag and some bourbon whiskey he kept on hand. So he smelled and looked like a ruffian when he jumped aboard the car. He didn’t recognize the conductor.

The man was new on the run, and might have denied him passage except for the peremptory way Gideon slapped the fare into his hand. Gideon sank down on one of the wickerwork seats and stared at the passing street. The conductor clanged the bell. The horse walked a little faster.

It was a long trip north through the country on the eastern side of the island to the growing village of Yorkville, and home. He had ample time to think about the evening’s events. He was less concerned about the physical damage to the office, most of which could be repaired, than he was about the prospect of arriving home so late, covered with cuts and bruises. He knew it would cause trouble. And there’d been too much of that in his household of late.

Perhaps he should head off the trouble by telling Margaret he was suspending publication of
Labor’s Beacon.
For a few moments he felt like doing just that.

Then he thought of his friend Daphnis Miller.

He closed his eyes. Inevitably, his mind turned back to that winter night in the Erie yards when Daphnis had died, crushed between two freight cars they’d been coupling. Daphnis had slipped on ice while a fierce storm raged. He’d never forget the sound of his friend’s scream as the car bumpers snapped his ribs and broke his back. He could still see the sleet spattering Daphnis’ wide, lifeless eyes as he lay beside the track like a broken doll.

The memory of that night hounded Gideon like some infernal animal, chasing at his heels and forever making him run faster. He had dreams about Daphnis dying; the sound of his friend’s scream or the sight of his dead eyes slipped into Gideon’s thoughts when he least expected it. Daphnis had been a decent, nonviolent man of limited learning; he wouldn’t even have understood the word Communard. It insulted his memory to say that any effort to take care of his family after his death was a radical conspiracy.

The Daphnis Millers of the world had precious few to speak and fight for them. Gideon would not—could not—diminish the already thin ranks by stepping out. Margaret had taught him to understand what justice was, and to care about it. If it no longer mattered to her, it did to him.
Labor’s Beacon
would continue its work.