The Anarchist (37 page)

“YOU know what they’re going to do?” Feeney whispered.

Norris could see through a gap in the boards into the next stall. Feeney was lying on his side on a bed of straw. He was facing the stall gate and his bound hands were tied to the post.

“We’re waiting—waiting for something, but I don’t know what.”

Feeney tried to look over his shoulder toward Norris, but he could only manage to stare straight up. Straw clung to his clothes, his hair. “That crate he sits on, all that dynamite, he’s going to set it off.”

“They left the barge because it was no longer safe,” Norris said. “Where are we?”

“Well east of Buffalo. I figure we could be on any farm between Rochester and Syracuse. I don’t understand why we don’t keep moving.”

“Me neither.”

“Gimmel must be planning to blow something up.”

“But what’s out here, cows and crops?”

“It’s gonna happened soon.” Feeney’s voice was adamant and tight with fear. “I can feel it. And we’re going up with it.”

In the evening the wife and daughter brought a pot of soup and bread out to the barn. Norris and Feeney were untied and allowed to sit at the makeshift table to eat, and then they were put back in their stalls but not immediately tied to a post. A bucket had been placed in each stall, and while Feeney used his, he whispered,
“I got me something, something sharp. A piece of a file they use on hooves.”

“Wait till they start drinking.”

After dark Gimmel, Bruener, and Tuck, as always, got into the whiskey. The light from their lantern cast long shadows up into the rafters. They spoke mostly in German, getting louder as the evening wore on. Horses stirred in their stalls. Norris could hear Feeney slowly sawing away at the rope that bound his wrists. Then there came another sound, somewhere from behind the barn. At first Norris thought it was an animal rubbing itself against a post, but then he heard a suppressed sigh.

Feeney paused in his sawing and whispered, “What’s that?”

“It’s that girl and Josef,” Norris said. She was about seventeen, a few years younger that Josef. “You could see her making eyes at him while she ladled out the soup. Get it while she’s still got all her teeth.”

At the front of the barn Tuck began playing a mouth harp, and Bruener slapped his thighs in time. Feeney started working again.

“How you doing?”

“Nearly there.”

Straw crackled beneath Feeney as he sawed the rope, and then he suddenly stopped. He crawled over to the wall that separated their stalls and he slid the file through a gap in the boards.

Norris’s hands were bound tight to the gatepost. “I can’t reach it.”

He could see through the gap in the wall as Feeney got to his knees and lifted the latch. Slowly he opened the gate just wide enough for him to slip out on his hands and knees. He crawled to the outside of Norris’s gate. “I could cut it from this side.” He looked toward the front of the barn, and then began sawing at the rope that bound Norris to the gatepost. The lantern at the front of the barn cast flickering shadows, and intermittently Norris could see the rusty file and Feeney’s hands, which were covered in blood. From behind the barn Josef and the girl were both gasping
as though they were running. They grunted and whimpered, louder and faster. The animals in nearby stalls were becoming agitated, their hooves knocking on the hard dirt floor. A mule brayed. The girl cried out as though in agonizing pain. Bruener, dancing a jig, sang in German—something about a fräulein. Feeney kept working at the rope, until it suddenly broke away from the gatepost. Norris quickly freed his wrists, which were raw with rope burns.

He opened the gate and crawled out of the stall, following Feeney toward the back of the barn. When they reached the open door they lay still on the ground, looking out on a cow pasture under a starry sky. The air was cool and rich with the smell of manure. Josef and the girl were quiet now. As Norris’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw them leaning up against the side of a shed. The girl’s skirts were raised, revealing a long pale leg that entwined Josef’s haunch. She turned her head toward the barn, and then she screamed.

Norris and Feeney got to their feet. Turning to their right, away from the shed, they began to run, but then stopped when they saw what had startled the girl: Gimmel stood at the corner of the barn, holding a pistol at his side. He took aim, and Norris and Feeney stopped and raised their hands. There were running footsteps in the barn, and Bruener and Tuck came outside, the lantern swinging. Cows in the pasture were frightened and they lumbered away into the safety of the dark.

Norris looked at Gimmel. “You were watching them,” he said, curious. “Just like when he was in the shed by the canal with Clementine.”

Bruener went up to Feeney and took hold of one of his bloody hands, forcing him to drop the rusty file. Bruener pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt and quickly drew the blade across Feeney’s throat. Feeney gasped as he fell to his knees. For a long moment he seemed to be confused as blood flowed down his throat and soaked the front of his shirt. A burbling sound issued from his mouth, his nose, and then he fell forward in the dirt.

Bruener went over to Norris, raising his knife, but Gimmel said, “No.”

So Bruener wiped the bloody blade on the thigh of his pants and slid it back in its sheath as he walked over to the shed, where Josef now stood next to the girl. Bruener slapped the boy’s face hard, and then shoved him toward the barn. The girl fainted, her back sliding down the shed wall until she was squatting on the ground, her skirt hiked up over her white shins, her bony knees.

MONDAY morning Czolgosz was handcuffed to Geary and Solomon as they took him through the Tunnel of Tears to city hall. On the second floor they were confronted by an angry crowd—larger than the day of his arraignment. The police had formed a cordon and Czolgosz was hustled into the courtroom and then the doors were slammed shut. Inside, several hundred people shifted about for a better view of him as he was brought to one of two long tables in front of the judge’s bench. His handcuffs were removed, this time without difficulty, and he sat between Solomon and Geary. His lawyers, Titus and Lewis, were seated at the far end of the table; neither looked in his direction. District Attorney Penney and several other men were gathered at the other table—some of them were the alienists who had examined Czolgosz, but he only remembered the name of one, Dr. MacDonald. To one side of the judge’s bench, there was a group of about fifty men seated in rows that allowed them a clear view of the proceedings. Most of them were scribbling in notebooks, which created a scratching sound that reminded Czolgosz of mice trapped in a wall.

When Judge Truman White entered the room from a door behind the bench, everyone stood up. After the judge took his seat, they all sat down, and he said, “Mr. District Attorney, have you any business for the court?”

Penney stood up and said, “I desire to arraign the prisoner Leon F. Czolgosz, Your Honor. Mr. Czolgosz, you have been indicted on the charge of murder in the first degree, committed on the sixth day of September of this year, in that you unlawfully killed one William McKinley, contrary to law. How do you plead?”

Judge White looked at Czolgosz for the first time. He appeared curious, and Czolgosz suddenly felt the urge to speak to him. He leaned forward slightly, but his attorney Lewis got to his feet and said, “If the court please, we desire—”

The judge said, “I think the prisoner was about to speak. Czolgosz, did you understand what the district attorney said to you?”

“I didn’t hear it,” Czolgosz said.

Penney seemed agitated. He said loudly, “You are indicted and charged with having committed the
crime
of murder in the first
degree
. It is
alleged
that you on the sixth day of September of this year unlawfully
shot
and
killed
William McKinley, contrary to
law
. How do you
plead?”

Czolgosz said, “Guilty.”

Angry voices echoed through the courtroom and Judge White pounded his gavel until there was order again. Then he said, “That plea cannot be accepted in this court. The clerk will enter a plea of ‘not guilty’ and we will proceed with the trial.”

Czolgosz leaned back in his chair.

They proceeded to select a jury. The first man questioned was a sixty-year-old plumber. There were also farmers, a man who sold butter and eggs, a blacksmith. All of them were asked questions about their opinion of the case, about their employment and family life, about their views of insanity, and about capital punishment. Some people were accepted by both sets of attorneys, while others were not, and the process of selection was tedious, yet conducted with efficiency.

Czolgosz paid little attention. He stared at the floor. He watched the newspaper reporters as they diligently took notes. He studied the judge’s hands. They were pale, the fingers thin. There were no nicks, cuts, bruises, or calluses. They were the hands of an old man who did no manual labor. When the judge realized that Czolgosz was staring at his hands, he pulled them inside the loose sleeves of his robe.

Czolgosz had admitted his guilt. There was no reason for all these people to be in this courtroom. They were accomplishing nothing. Yet the lawyers droned on, and he was reminded of sermons given by priests during mass. As a boy he would drift off as soon as the priest stepped up to the pulpit. In those days he had pleasant reveries involving hunting and fishing, but now he couldn’t conjure such images, so he merely stared at the floor and concentrated on the sound of the rain against the windows.

Occasionally he heard people behind him whispering, and he realized that they were surprised by how tranquil he was—and when they said this, there was disappointment in their voices. They wanted a madman, a raging lunatic, disrupting the proceedings and spewing anarchist slogans. But he wasn’t like that at all, and this had a sobering effect on the audience in the courtroom. One voice—a woman’s—whispered, “He’s so quiet and detached, and his face is so youthful. Perhaps they have the wrong man?”

After lunch recess the jury selection was concluded and the prosecution began its case. A series of witnesses established the facts of the shooting. A large sketch and several photographs of the floor plan of the Temple of Music were used to establish the location of the crime. Most of the time Czolgosz stared at the floor until a Dr. Mann was called to testify. The doctor was small, tidy, and arrogant. His responses were abrupt, as though the questions put to him were an impertinence he shouldn’t have to suffer. There was a great deal of discussion about gangrene, which he claimed was caused by germs and pancreatic fluid. At one point,
the doctor said, “The president probably was not in very good physical condition. He was somewhat weakened by hard work, want of exercise, and conditions of that kind.”

He and District Attorney Penney discussed whether the bullet had actually struck the pancreas. Mann didn’t think it had, but serious damage had been caused by concussion to the organ as the bullet passed through the stomach. During this point in the testimony, Czolgosz realized he was sweating and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. He did this quickly, not wanting to give the impression that he was disturbed by the graphic details of the president’s wounds. And then he realized that since being arrested he had not once really thought about the actual shooting; it was as though it had been erased from his mind—he knew he did it, he knew why he was being held, but the event itself seemed to have disappeared from his memory. But now he saw it all again, particularly the first shot, the hole in the president’s starched white shirtfront. That bullet, Czolgosz realized now, was not the one that had done any damage; it was the second bullet—striking the president lower in his enormous stomach—that killed him. Czolgosz felt like he had somehow drifted out of his own body, if only momentarily, and he could see himself standing before William McKinley, his arm extended and the .32-caliber Iver Johnson wrapped in a handkerchief. It was not a big pistol—it fit easily into his hand—and he wondered if such a small weapon was sufficient to kill such a large man. Too, he saw the president’s eyes: during that brief moment between the first and second shot, McKinley’s eyes became startled and alert. He didn’t seem to be in pain so much as surprised. And again, Czolgosz knew—he was absolutely certain now—that there was a moment when something in the president’s expression was sincere, even grateful.

Penney and this Dr. Mann talked about the second bullet at great length, and never once could the doctor state the obvious: it had killed the president. Czolgosz wanted to stand up then. He wanted to get to his feet and shout at them, tell them all how
absurd this was—he had shot the president, the second bullet entered his stomach, and a week later the man died. What more did these people want?