The Daredevils (35 page)

Vera felt a fiery acid pump through her veins and then she felt clean and serene again. She felt objects around her withdraw ever so slightly and hold steady, and the nearness of the human beings who were speaking so softly and articulately to her. What was it that they said the old Indians used to say?

“‘Heaven is no place for a man,'” she said, again apparently out loud. “But something else . . . something else about dying . . . .”

“It's a good day to die,” said Joe.

Vera stared at him with nearly overwhelming gratitude and love.

“Some of our new friends,” said the older man, “have been demanding that the reactionary and repressive forces running the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety open themselves up to participation by other limbs of the body politic, limbs representing citizens with just as much patriotic desire to fight the good fight against the German tyrant as the next bunch.”

“Who,” interrupted Vera, “are our friends this time around, exactly?”

“Socialists are very strong across the river in Minneapolis. The mayor is a socialist. And in Saint Paul we have some daredevils in the streetcar union leadership.”

“I interrupted you,” said Vera.

“The MCPS has scoffed at such proposals heretofore, likening our friends to traitors in waiting, collaborators, spies, and of course cowards. But as I suggested a bit ago, we made some inroads. Our friends are going to front a candidate of our choosing for a very crucial job: shadowing whomever the MCPS sends to follow you and Daisy. Shadowing in the British sense: the opposite number, not in the sense of a spy. No doubt there will be other shadows—at least one if not several, but our man will be what the MCPS will call ‘a friendly face.' Someone to prevent violence, not to foment it. Our man will make himself available to the NPL speaker and anyone else in her company—the NPL is nearly bankrupt and we expect the party to be very small—”

“You and Daisy,” said Joe.

“—as a kind of liaison, more or less a neutral observer and cooling influence if anything gets out of hand or flares up. Our man will have to be interviewed by one of the MCPS's tough guys, and he will have to be able to pass himself off as someone with Pinkerton-like capacity for deceit and violence but be something considerably more able intellectually than a thug. In the end, the idea is to keep the young ladies out not just of jail, but harm's way. Any kind of harm that might crop up. To intervene and maybe get them the hell out of Dodge. Or at the very least to see that they are treated with ordinary legal safeguards. We want the IWW to look, for lack of a better word, electable. We want to show the MCPS up as thugs, not the other way around.”
And Charles, upon hearing Vera's recapitulation of the conversation, thought:
WRETCH! Dost thou ask what thou hast done? Look back upon a dreadful misspent life, and ask thyself what thou hast not done!
It was something out of Defoe, he thought,
Robinson Crusoe
most likely. He was being given a great gift. He could not quite sort it all out, but neither could Vera. He doubted anyone could, or would even care to. The thing was to be there and to act. He would do one last brave thing. And he could do it for Vera!

“I have been on services,” said Rejean Houle, “where I have been compelled to shoot, and I am chain lightning with a pistol. I do not intend or wish to pose as a killer, sir, but I think you realize that before this mess is over—”

“What mess?” asked Charles.

“The one you're in?”

“Okay, go ahead, I'm sorry I interrupted you.”

“A fast and experienced gunman will be a valuable asset to your organization. I am, I know all too well, unprepossessing and often in need of a bath, but I have been told too many times for me to ignore it that I am unusually intelligent. You may have heard how it is, sir: if enough people tell you that you are drunk, you ought to consider lying down. I have no wish to read books or learn a profession, but I am gifted with brains. I have skill in persuading unwilling witnesses to testify in court, and for finding witnesses willing to testify in court. For mixing, generally speaking, with the lower classes, I am first-rate.”

“I like to close interviews on a note of class superiority.”

They shook hands warmly. Rejean Houle had a big black moustache and was wearing a suit and tie and a bowler hat.

“Ray-zhan Oool-uh,” said Charles. “I think we'll call you Ray John Howell, if that's all right with you.”

“Certainly it is, sir,” said Rejean. “Call me what you will.”

“By the way, Ray.”

“Yes sir.”

“Does the name Charles Minot mean anything to you?”

“No sir.”

“Ever been in San Francisco?”

“No sir. Never west of zuh Mississippi.”

“And are you, let's see, a narcotics addict yourself?”

“No sir. Never west of the Mississippi.”

“Never west,” the man muttered as he scribbled on a pad, “of zuh—” and now spelled it out in a kind children's sing-song, “
Mis . . . sis . . . si . . . pp . . . i.
That used to be so hard to spell it used to be make me cry, but since I studied spelling . . . it's . . . just . . . like . . . puuuumpkin piiieee.” He dotted the several i's with dramatic taps of the pen on the pad, looked up, and said it was terrific. He told Ray he didn't have a political bone in his entire goddamned body and hoped Ray felt the same.

“Welcome aboard, Ray, welcome aboard.”

Or rather, he thought, welcome overboard, into oozy eel slime of indistinguishable and effectively invisible plot and counterplot. Ray's job would be the simplest of all, save Charles's own, unless somebody decided to pay him more money—though such a sum was hard to imagine coming into easy being: make sure that no one killed Vera. Was there a real chance of this? On the surface, of course there was not; but just below the surface, of course there was. Charles believed he now had only a single role, an omni-part, if such a thing could be said to logically exist: to keep Vera safe and happy. That he would dash into burning buildings went without saying. He would plunge into icy rivers, as well. He would throw himself upon a suitcase bomb. He would die for her, and he would kill for her. His thinking was very clear up to that point: everything in the world could be easily and swiftly replaced—except Vera. Beyond that point it was not clear, but beyond that point he no longer had any interest.

On the first truly warm day that spring, a day objectively not all that warm but which seemed so compared to the months they had spent below zero,
the great white mountains appeared to subside in geological time, an orogeny, leaving only gentle brown hills of matted grass and streams flowing everywhere with melted snow. The skeletons of what had seemed permanently dead trees—skeleton was the wrong word: more pencil tracings of exploded and frozen nervous systems, of brains—had green buds popping out of softening, moistening gray wood. The gray of the windblown clouds was bright and rich, partaking as much of their sunlit white regions and the sweet blue of the dome as of the darkness of the gentle, warm rains they held and promised.

It was on this day as well, a Tuesday, the last in April, that Andrew Minot arrived in Saint Paul with Gus and Tony. They were on their way to New York, a first visit for the younger brothers. The next day, Amelia and Pastor Tom arrived, on their way to Washington, DC. There was a good chance they would move there.

Amelia was wearing some kind of Swiss village costume: a long red skirt tied with cloth belt embroidered with red, yellow, and blue flowers and ended with tassels, a long black velvet apron, a kind of heavy cloth breastplate with a medallion of the Appaloosa Society in the center, a dark blue ruffle around her neck, and her long hair piled up under a fez-like toque embroidered with very small flowers of every color you could quickly think of.

Given the trim gray suits, starched white collars, and quiet ties that her brothers and husband were wearing, she stood out in a way that was not simply colorful and different, but faintly alarming.

They were all staying at the Saint Paul Hotel, top floor, with a lovely view of the stark and muddy Rice Park, a view that appeared to change before their eyes, as if a pointillist were touching the scene with his smallest brush dabbed in a tender green. To the left was the great white library, to the right a pink granite castle with turrets and gables and towers and a red-tile roof, the Richardsonian Romanesque home of a fairy monster that housed the post office and courthouse; directly across the park was the Hamm Theater, a colossal structure that could hold five thousand opera-going prairie oligarchs.

Lunching in the hotel's restaurant, waiting for Charles, who was conducting some business, to join them, Amelia remarked that it was a very
pleasant little city, an ideal place for a person, like Charles, who needed a real spring and fine weather and calm business to restore a sense of rightness in the world.

“I would like to know what's wrong with the world,” said Gus.

“I,” retorted Tony, “would like to know what ‘rightness' is.”

Because the table was occupied solely by immediate members of their family—Pastor Tom was an uncle by marriage but seemed very much more like one of the older brothers—but in a public place, Gus and Tony were exploring manners. When Charles arrived, they were planning to shake his hand and say, “Good of you to come, old man,” and, “Good to see you,” and go around the table shaking everybody's hand, having received this myth of a behavior Charles had long abandoned, and perhaps never truly possessed.

“The Canaanite festivals,” began Pastor Tom, “regeneration, redemption, Jesus Christ.”

Charles could now be seen entering the restaurant with the woman from his cast.

“I don't remember her name,” said Amelia.

“Vera?” said Pastor Tom.

“Ye-e-s,” said Tony, musingly.

“Vera,” said Gus celebratorily, almost as if he were making a toast.

“I rather enjoyed being backstage,” Tony continued, still musing.

“Buddy boys,” said Andrew quietly. “I don't think we'll be wanting to talk about that, all right?”

“Right you are, Brother Andrew!” sang Gus.

“Thanks awfully for the tip, setting us straight, old chap,” drawled Tony.

“Your friends died,” said Amelia, “and you are laughing.”

The boys were not at all abashed, and in fact wished now to perform a bit for Vera.

They appeared to prepare, to in a way rehearse, as Charles and Vera drew up to the table.

“Friends come,” Gus began.

“And friends go,” finished Tony.

They stood and moved around the table, shook Charles's hand, embraced Vera, and returned to their places.

“I'm sorry we're late,” said Charles.

“He is late,” said Gus, “and he is sorry.”

“We are just so glad you're here,” said Tony.

“I think we all know each other,” said Charles, ignoring his younger brothers, “but in case you've forgotten, this is my wife, Vera.”

“That's splendid!” shouted Tony.

“We hadn't forgotten, old chap,” said Gus.

“You are not married,” said Amelia flatly, but smiling.

“We are not married,” said Vera even more flatly, as if in a sort of riposte, smiling only after she had gotten Amelia's eye.

“I think,” said Charles, “that the Obscure Jude put it best when he said—”

“Old Mr. Hardy!” cried Tony.

“Dear Tom,” sighed Gus.

“Boys,” said Amelia, “you are behaving badly. Will you stop now?”

“Certainly,” said Tony.

“We have offended?” asked Gus.

“You know you have,” said Amelia.

“That we are smiling,” said Pastor Tom, “is no indication of the depth of our disappointment.”

“We do apologize,” said Tony.

“What are your smiles indications of, if we may be so bold as to inquire?” asked Gus.

“
Of what
are your smiles indications,” corrected Tony.

“The lads,” said Andrew, “have taken to their education like ducks to water. And while I have got a word in edgewise, I'd like to say, spare us the Thomas Hardy. I want to know at what point a novel becomes so ‘good' that we can forgive it for causing us such pain.”

“Pain,” said Charles.

“If you care in the least for the characters he has created, you cannot help but feel the most lacerating, the deepest sort of pain imaginable.”

“I'm glad to hear that you give the imagined world so much credence,” said Charles. “I've taken a great deal of ridicule from this family over my advocacy of the priority of the imagined reality.”

“I would just like to say,” said Pastor Tom, “that I quite understand his—”

“‘O you most potent gods,'” said Charles. “‘Why do you make us love your goodly creatures and snatch them straight away?'”

“—his, Mr. Hardy's, so-called atheism, as expressed in his poem ‘God's Funeral.'”

“Vera,” said Charles, “is, as you all know, a godless anarchist.”

“Vera!” Andrew faked dismay and hurt. “Tell us it isn't so!”

“Only too true,” said Vera, joining his act with a sad pouting face.

“Andrew,” said Charles, “let us see the real dismay.”

“Once again,” said Amelia, “I'm not sure this is something we want to joke about.”

“Not joking,” said Charles.

“Was that Shakespeare, Charles?” asked Pastor Tom.

“Yes,” Charles admitted.

“A strong line, no surprise, but I don't quite see the connection . . .?”

“I think you do,” said Charles, “or will, shortly.”

“Something along the lines of . . .?”

“Yes, you've got it.”

“I don't think I have but thank you for the encouragement!”

“You do, Tom, I know you do.”