“That’s not really a choice you can make,” Brand said to his back. Then: “What if I get your brother out two days from now?”
Rye turned again.
Brand was holding the envelope out. “Take this message to Early Reston, I’ll get Gregory released, and you and I are done forever. No one will ever know what you did.”
Rye stood in the hall, breathing heavily. “I don’t even know if I’ll see Early again.”
“I’m willing to bet you will.”
Rye stood staring at an envelope with five hundred dollars in it. He just needed time, to think. “I have to get back to the union hall.”
Brand turned and looked at the grandfather clock behind him. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. The raid will have already started by now.”
Gurley
LISTEN: I come for the fight. I come from rebels, from blood nationalists, Molly Maguires, fiery socialists. I come from a New York suffragist and a New England quarryman, Irish parents who saved me the humiliation and hypocrisy of Our Blessed Church so that I might see the world clearly and burn with other fires. I have sought a paradise in this life, from the window of a train traversing a starkly beautiful land where a man’s skin is still criminalized and a woman’s body enslaved, where workers are thrown away like coal slag.
Injustice burns in me like a fever. Take away the Catholicism, and a little Gaelic heart like mine still beats martyr’s blood.
From the first days of grammar school, I was haunted by an adage the nuns had us copy on our slate boards: There but for the grace of God go I. The sixteenth-century reformer John Bradford was said to have uttered those words upon seeing a criminal led to his execution. Bradford was clearly on to something, because he did go eventually, burned at the stake for a crime that is my own, stirring up a mob, although I’d propose his real offense was another of mine: first-degree aggravated empathy.
I was thinking of Bradford as I sat in the Spokane IWW office that cold winter night, an hour before I was to speak. Two loud crashing sounds came from outside, yelling in the main hall, the sound of doors being bashed in.
Charlie Filigno and I stood and looked at each other.
“Raid,” he said simply.
I thought for a moment of those five hundred already in jail in Spokane, and the millions fighting every day around the world for fairness and justice, risking limb and life, and I repeated Bradford’s words like a prayer (There but for the grace . . . ) as the yelling drew closer and an ax cleaved our office door with a great cracking sound, the wood exploding in chips and splinters.
The broken door was flung from the hinges, and I could see in the great hall that cops were smashing windows and having at our printing press, and another man was taking a splitting maul to the small piano. I put an arm out to keep Charlie from moving, from getting beaten.
And then that awful Sergeant Clegg stepped through the broken doorway into our office. He smiled. “You’re under arrest for conspiracy, you fat labor cunt.”
“I assume you’re addressing me,” I said, and smiled calmly, in my mind editing the devout Bradford with a brevity and clarity he would have had to admire as those first flames licked his feet: There—go I.
They aimed to finish us. I don’t know how else to say it. Ten stick-wielding police thugs sent to arrest a pregnant girl and glum Charlie Filigno, a handful of newsboys and an old cook making pies. They meant to shutter us forever. Less than an hour after we sent newsboys out to announce my speech and the second labor action, the police were ready with a full raid. I suppose they’d been waiting for it, having weathered our first attack, jailing five hundred, scuttling our attempts to raise funds and recruit. Now came the death blow.
After Clegg, that brute police chief, Sullivan, came inside. “Afternoon, sister.” He held up a newspaper with a story of a speech I had given to the Women’s Club of Spokane. “You’re under arrest for furthering a conspiracy inside the city limits.”
“Speaking is an act of conspiracy?”
“Calling for violence against the city is.”
“I have called only for peaceful protest. You’re the ones beating men and breaking down doors, Acting Chief Sullivan.”
He had two cops drag us outside in the swirling dry snow. We stood on the sidewalk, Charlie, me, and our old cook, Alan. Across the street, they were arresting newsboys, three twelve-year-olds led by an older boy named Lidle, the cops treating them like a gang of criminals.
A crowd was gathering on the street. “Are you seeing this?” I yelled as the cops broke windows and threw pie pans in the street. “These are your police! Arresting children!” Two cops dragged our printing press out into the street, where they resumed beating it to scrap. They carried out chairs and pots and pans, coffee cups and plates, and smashed them on the sidewalk. They confiscated posters, newspapers, and threw everything into a smoking burn barrel.
Fred Moore had arrived and was pacing in the snow, cease-and-desisting, but the cops weren’t paying him any attention until Clegg pointed with his stick and said that if he didn’t shut up, he’d be charged, too, with resisting arrest.
“Am I under arrest?” Fred asked.
“Not yet,” Clegg said.
“Then how can I be resisting?”
The riddle was too much for Clegg, who turned back to the newsboys.
Finally, to keep me from jawing on the street, Sullivan had a cop load me in the back of a wagon, onto a hard bloodstained bench. I put my head in my hands. There were rings for shackling hands, and the wagon smelled of horse and sweat and piss. I
