MOTHER JONES STARED OUT at the landscape passing before her window, the blunt green hills knuckled beneath the sun. She could almost sense the fury they contained, the clenched fist of their power. An emanation, like fuming nitro. In these hills, her boys were rising, gathering, grieving bloody-minded for their murdered darling, and she was going to them, journeying to their encampment.
Mother looked down at the telegram in her lap, the message she’d come to deliver to her boys. She rubbed a finger along the top of the envelope. Her hands looked like those of an old crone, knobby-knuckled with twisted fingers, red-blue veins spidering beneath the translucent film of her skin. She was tired, she was. She’d just returned from speaking to striking factory workers in Mexico, where they called her “Madre Juanita” and doused her in blue violets and red carnations—a lift to her spirits, crushed flat by news of Sid’s murder.
She shook her head, looking out the window. She’d seen so many boys cut down in these hills, losing a hand or foot or some better part of their mind. Families thrown out on the street with no compensation, sleeping along the roadsides like creatures not yet civilized. Their faces long-jawed with want, their cheeks soiled with every manner of filth. Little children among them—boys, she feared, who would bear the bitter seed of injustice into manhood, exploding with revenge in ages to come, trying to make even with the people who’d robbed their mothers and fathers of even the slightest splinter of pride or dignity.
Perhaps the first wave was now. Their darling, Smilin’ Sid, shot down like a dog in a street. Mother shook her head. That boy had made an impression on her. A lean killer, born hard, willing to stand smiling before the hired gunmen of King Coal and send them home horizontal, laid out on spare doors from the hardware store. The hero they needed, who carried their hopes in his bones. To murder him, unarmed, was to stick a knife through the ribs of ten thousand men. To kill something that lived close to their hearts. And to do it barefaced in broad daylight—that could not be brooked. Now they were coming from all over the state, marching along the roads, riding on the tops of boxcars, hanging from the engines of commandeered passenger trains.
Mother had seen them out her window. They wore their uniforms from the Great War, where they’d seen their friends blasted into treetops or machine-gunned in tangles of barbwire, their bodies strung like scarecrows across no-man’s-land; or else they wore the uniform of denim overalls and red bandannas knotted at their necks. Their faces didn’t carry the penny-bright shine of those boys who went overseas in 1917, so sure of glory and triumph. Those myths were dead, gunned down in trenches, on courthouse steps.
No, here was an army of the hollow-eyed and grave—men who’d been fighting for years, suffering under the thumb of King Coal—men who’d just seen their smiling boy killed cold-blooded in the street, and the papers mock him, and the governor ignore their pleas.
Men ready to die.
Mother realized she was holding the telegram envelope against her chest, squeezing it hard under her thumbs, like a letter from a lover. She breathed in and out, trying to corral the wild loping of her heart.
She knew she was not as dangerous as she once was. Time was at her heels. Her mind wandered sometimes and her speeches could zag strangely or ramble on too long. The rheumatism could flare like wildfire in her joints and her feet bark like dogs at night. Fear, that little snake, could skate through the pigeonholes of her heart.
Most of all, she feared they were marching toward a battle they couldn’t win.
She looked down at the telegram envelope. She prayed her boys had not lost faith in her. That they would believe the story she told. She prayed they would still listen to their mother.