The Warriors (64 page)

Cassidy gestured “Let someone else take ’em. I got six kids.”

Sylvis looked disappointed. So did the switchmen. They’d hoped Sylvis would recommend some quick and simple plan for securing financial assistance for Augie Kolb and his brood. Instead, he was speaking of abstract matters. Wage slavery. The union movement. A long-range strategy instead of a short-term panacea.

Gideon sat frowning, barely aware of the racket from the saloon. The objections notwithstanding, he suspected the soft-spoken Philadelphian might be right. At the First Manassas, he’d learned the value of standing together. He’d taken a few men off on his own and damn near gotten shot to death by a dying Yankee.

He wanted to help Augustus Kolb’s family. But Bill Sylvis poured bitter medicine. He was realistic about the possibility of firings if demands were made. He’d upset and disappointed the switchmen. His candor about eventual mingling of the races in the labor movement hadn’t helped either.

Gideon Kent and every other man in the storeroom needed their jobs. That was the difficulty which brought the meeting to a swift and inconclusive end.

All the way home, Gideon had been unable to get forty-year-old William Sylvis out of his thoughts. Now, at the window, the approaching snowstorm again reminded him of the chief officer of the strongest of the nation’s fledgling trade unions.

Sylvis was well known among workingmen. He’d personally built the Molders into a network of over a hundred and thirty-five locals. He’d held sometimes reluctant iron workers off their jobs and won a major settlement with the foundry owners who’d staged the famous Albany Lockout of ’66. He constantly promoted the formation of worker-owned cooperative foundries as an alternative to the existing iron and steel establishment. And he was being mentioned as a potential president of the National Labor Union, a relatively new association of workers’ assemblies, union locals, reformers, and eight-hour leagues pushing for a shorter workday.

Still, the price Bill Sylvis had paid for his achievements was quite apparent. He’d been shunted into the anonymity of a storeroom because even small businessmen considered him dangerous. His clothes were hardly better than rags. His health looked none too good, either. At the meeting he’d declined all refreshment, saying he had a persistent stomach condition. He’d worn himself out—and, Gideon had read, kept his family in poverty—for the trade union cause.

In fact Sylvis had looked fragile and almost forlorn when he left the meeting and walked into the dark day with only his thin overcoat and that burned shawl to protect him. Gideon could still see the ends of the shawl fluttering like bullet-pierced flags.

The image vanished as he chafed his hands to warm them. The cottage parlor was dingy and frigid. The ancient floral wallpaper had a sooty tinge. Wind whistled through gaps in the siding.

The old walnut clock on a rickety table chimed half-past five. Gideon couldn’t wholeheartedly admit Sylvis was right. To do so would compel a man to think of taking the next logical step. Like the others gathered at the Lager Palace, he wasn’t prepared to do it. Times were too hard, work too scarce.

From the kitchen came the sound of Margaret starting Eleanor’s bath. In the midst of the splashing, she called to him, “Gideon? Your supper’s ready.”

“I’ll be there.”

But he remained at the window, his gaze fixed on the ruts of frozen mud and the shabbily identical houses straggling toward the river. His next-door neighbor, Daphnis Miller, said the only way a man who enjoyed his beer could find his way to the right bed after imbibing was to count cottages starting at the corner.

Miller was a generous man. In less than half a year’s time, he’d also become a good friend. Last summer, after being discharged from three successive jobs because of his Southern background, Gideon had recalled meeting the trainman at Relay House. In desperation, he’d ridden the ferry to Jersey City.

He’d expected Miller to be long gone or, if he were still employed, to have forgotten him. Certainly he’d have forgotten his casual invitation for Gideon to look him up if he ever needed employment.

On all counts Gideon had been wrong.

Miller had introduced him to the superintendent who hired switchmen. Gideon’s infirmity had produced a gale of disbelieving laughter.

But the superintendent hadn’t turned him down flat. Despite depressed economic conditions and a scarcity of jobs in the industrial East, few men were hungry enough to risk themselves working for a line as disreputable as the Erie. Even so, Gideon had found it necessary to plead his case for almost fifteen minutes.

He was strong. His tall frame and wide shoulders attested to it. He’d regained most of the weight he’d lost in prison.

He was agile. He’d been a cavalryman during the war.

He’d had to argue heatedly about his eye, though. He thumped the superintendent’s desk and informed him he could march into any Army recruiting office and sign up instantly for one of the new regiments of Plains cavalry. If one-eyed men were acceptable to General Hancock or young General Custer—a soldier Gideon tried not to hate for leading the Wolverine horsemen who’d killed Beauty Stuart—then damn it, they should be acceptable to the Erie Railroad! Coupling cars couldn’t be any more perilous than facing a band of rampaging Sioux Indians.

The superintendent remarked wryly that Gideon might be surprised, but agreed to give him a try. The man’s expression said he didn’t expect Gideon to last long. That only increased Gideon’s determination to succeed.

The work
did
prove as dangerous as Miller had suggested on that afternoon at Relay House. A man was killed or injured every few weeks. Gideon constantly had to soothe Margaret’s anxiety, reminding her he’d finally found employment that would keep him out in the weather, which he liked. Except, of course, during these blasted Northern winters.

Besides the appalling toll of deaths and injuries, the other discouraging element in the young family’s situation was the move across the river in August of ’67. It was necessary if Gideon planned to work steadily. During the cold months, ice drifting in the river made ferry service undependable at best.

Moving to Jersey City sharply limited their chances to see Jephtha and Molly. But Gideon and Margaret bore the new isolation without complaint. Finding a cottage for rent adjoining the Miller place helped. Daphnis Miller became not only his friend but his mentor. He willingly showed Gideon the tricks of the switchman’s trade, and arranged for the younger man to be assigned to his own shift—dusk to dawn. Tonight, Miller would come along as usual about six-thirty, and the two would set out on their half-hour trudge to the yards.

He decided he mustn’t tell Margaret about listening to Bill Sylvis. Luckily he’d made a second stop while he was out of the house. It would explain his absence.

He didn’t want his wife to think he was flirting with a cause which might lose them what little security they enjoyed. In truth he wasn’t. After the war he’d sworn he would never again fight for any so-called lofty principle such as state’s rights. Mere survival was struggle enough. He worked a twelve-hour shift for the magnificent sum of one dollar and a half per day. Mr. Greeley’s
Tribune
estimated an average family needed $10.57 per week to meet minimum expenses. Only Margaret’s sewing enabled the family to reach that figure.

Nevertheless, Gideon and his wife repeatedly refused the gifts of food and clothing offered by Jephtha and Molly. Occasionally—and this was one of the occasions—he wondered if he’d been a lunatic to tell his father he wanted no financial help. A word to Jephtha, and he, Margaret and Eleanor could enjoy a secure life. Eat decently. Inhabit an adequately furnished home over in Manhattan.

He sighed. Independence surely had its price. Was it fair to ask Margaret to continue to pay it? Pride was fine, but it couldn’t fill stomachs, or refurbish worn-out wardrobes.

Stop,
he thought, irked with himself. He shoved a hand through his long light-colored hair and bunked his right eye to clear it of a speck. He’d made the decision. He’d stick by it, build a future with his own labor and his own wits—even though he frequently felt the latter were still pitifully inadequate.

He was doing something about that, however. Every night. Every spare moment His goal wasn’t unrealistic. Many men were self-educated, including Sylvis. The Philadelphian had told the saloon gathering that his family had hired him out for farmwork when he was eleven. He’d taught himself to read because he could afford no other teacher. Later in life he’d struggled to master extremely complex material, because a grasp of it was essential for a union organizer. Sylvis had mentioned names that meant nothing to Gideon. Adam Smith. David Ricardo. Karl Marx.

He rubbed the sleeves of his flannel shirt. Lord, it was cold! His bladder felt full. But he had no desire to tramp out to the privy in the howling wind. The threatening sky continued to remind him of Kolb.

During the last blizzard, Augustus Kolb had gone to his switchman’s job, had slipped on an ice-covered rail, and been crushed between shunting cars. Before midnight, a sawbones had removed both legs at midthigh. He would never work again.

And all Kolb’s pregnant wife and two small children had received by way of compensation was a flowery note of sympathy written by some high-living, faceless Erie nabob.

“You can do nothing unless you organize.”

“Gideon? Your food will be cold!”

“Coming.”

He trimmed the parlor’s one kerosene lamp to conserve the fuel. As always, he kept his head turned slightly to the left while using his hands. The flame spurted once, throwing a quick highlight on the black leather patch covering his left eye socket. Then darkness claimed the room.

The bedroom was cold on the parlor side, warmer near the kitchen. The iron stove radiated welcome heat. As he headed for the lighted rectangle of the doorway between the rooms, another remark made by Sylvis slipped into mind:
“Until you have a union, they’ll take advantage of you. There are only two classes in the United States. The skinners and the skinned.”

The statement reminded him of his second cousin once removed. He’d never met Louis Kent. Jephtha detested him and, though related, never saw him. But Gideon often read about Louis in the papers. He was a major stockholder of Erie. On a night like this, he certainly wouldn’t be shivering and shaking in his fine new mansion on Fifth Avenue, or his palace up the Hudson.

Again Gideon scored himself for envy. He didn’t want wealth handed to him. But he did feel men such as Louis should display some responsibility when an employee was maimed for life.

Ridiculous to expect that, though. Louis was one of the skinners. Even before he’d met Sylvis, Gideon had begun to realize gentlemen such as Mr. Louis Kent lived at the expense of others. While Kolb’s wife, heavy with child, tended him and probably cried herself to sleep because of the family’s predicament, Louis Kent occupied himself with parties, voyages to Europe, and financial manipulations Gideon didn’t begin to understand.

He’d tried, certainly. He read every available newspaper account of the current struggle for control of the Erie. None made much sense. He was still hard put to differentiate between “bulls” and “bears,” and utterly failed to comprehend what a “pool” was, or a “combination,” or a “corner”—

“Gideon Kent, what are you doing out there?”

“What? Oh—” He hadn’t realized he’d stopped four paces from the kitchen.

“Why are you standing in the dark? What are you thinking about?”

“You can do nothing unless you organize.”

“Nothing important,” he said, submerging a pang of guilt and hurrying to her.

He stepped into the warm kitchen, lifted from his pensive mood by the sight of his wife and daughter.

Five-year-old Eleanor stood fidgeting in a washtub. Kneeling beside the tub, Margaret whipped a piece of nappy toweling called a rubber around the little girl’s pink rump.

Eleanor Kent was one of the delights of Gideon’s life. She was a happy, sturdy child with her mother’s dark hair and eyes. Now, though, she was frowning.

“Papa, she’s taking the skin off me!”

Gideon chuckled as he sat down at the old table where a plate of stringy beef and boiled potatoes awaited him. “She knows best, Eleanor. That hairbrush”—he pointed to the bristly object lying beside a lump of homemade soap—“does a lot more than warm you up.”

“I’m too hot now, Papa!”

“Stop that. All the doctors say children need a good scratching after a bath. Makes the blood run properly.”

“I don’t care,” Eleanor declared. “The scratch brush hurts like the devil!”

“Please don’t use that word, Eleanor,” Margaret said, delivering a light swat through the rubber she was using to dry the child.

Margaret Marble Kent was Gideon’s age. Nearly twenty-five. She was a slender but full-bosomed young woman with pretty features marred only by a stubby nose she despised. Gideon had met her in Richmond at the start of the war. He loved her deeply and had never regretted his decision to marry her.

She was a strong-minded person and not timid about letting others know her convictions. An embroidered motto on the kitchen wall typified that characteristic.

A NEAT, CHEERFUL HOME KEEPS SONS FROM BECOMING FAST AND DAUGHTERS FROM BECOMING FRIVOLOUS

The sight of Margaret jogged Gideon’s memory about the present he’d bought after leaving the meeting. He rose, walked to the cupboard, pulled the parcel down, and hid it behind his back.

“Eleanor, kindly stop wiggling like an eel!” Margaret brushed a loose lock of hair off her forehead. She laid the rubber aside and started to drag a heavy nightgown over her daughter’s head.

From within the folds, Eleanor answered in a muffled voice, “I will if Papa sings a song.”

“Papa must eat his dinner before it turns to icicles.” She lifted the child from the tub. “The weather’s abysmal, Gideon. They should close the yard when it storms—why on earth are you looking so smug?”