MOTHER JONES MARCHED THROUGH the staggering D.C. heat, heading toward the State, War, and Navy Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. She was wearing one of her black dresses, frilly and hand-sewn, her hair knotted snow-white beneath her black bonnet. Her handbag was pinned hard beneath her elbow, her heavy ankles grinding beneath the wide girdle of her hips.
She’d spent two days bedridden, sick as she’d ever been. The rheumatism. A severe attack. Pain pulsing through every inch of her, sheets soaked, cheeks scarlet, forehead shining with sweat. Never had she felt so old, so helpless. The fever stoked memories from dark corners of her past, raising them up like ghosts. The forgotten faces of gun thugs and corrupt lawmen who snatched at her sleeves and skirts and hair, cursing her with bared teeth. Children who held up their mutilations before her, gear-smashed fingers and wheel-cut limbs and hoof-kicked faces, wishing she’d done more for them, and the woman from Cabin Creek holding the bloodied wreck of her husband’s head in her lap, shrieking like something not quite human.
She tried to hide beneath the covers, but the visions were still there.
She saw her boys in the deep folds of the hills, marching along the creeks and ridges, breaking like a red tide at the foot of the mountain. Mother swelled her lungs and yelled to them, but her voice carried no sound. It was just smoke. She screamed and screamed and it was all just smoke.
The morning the fever broke, she ignored the warm compresses and pineapple juice on her breakfast tray and began dictating telegrams, rifling off messages to governors and tycoons, bureaucrats and senators, shooting long-range missives onto the desks of friends and enemies. Offers of help, pleas for assistance, requests for meetings. She’d bring her spirit to bear on those who’d watch the battle from afar, men in clean suits and high offices who’d influence the outcome as sure as pieces on a chessboard.
Now the heat rose fuming from the blacktopped streets, as if they’d been sloshed with buckets of kerosene. As if she could light a match and turn this whole white city into a mile-high cathedral of fire, the smoke curling thousands of feet heavenward, seen for hundreds of miles in the surrounding country. Seen from the top of Blair Mountain, perhaps, bearing away the ashes of every double-talking, two-faced politician in the whole damned city.
Sometimes she wished she could.
Now she stood before the ornate facade of the State, War, and Navy Building, a 566-room behemoth Mark Twain had famously called “the ugliest building in America.” She chuckled at that. Every square inch of the place was crowded with ornamental cornices, porticoes, colonnades, pediments, and other architectural extravagances. It looked more like the palace of some inbred French emperor with powdered cheeks and a three-pound miniature poodle than the rightful home of the war offices of the United States of America.
She cocked her head beneath her bonnet, eyeing the sun. High and hot, rising toward its noon zenith. The President’s deadline was noon tomorrow—a line drawn in the sand and thrown out of hired aeroplanes, peppering the hills. An ultimatum.
The sun hung boiling over the building, making ants of sweat crawl down her skin, and Mother couldn’t help but think of Smilin’ Sid standing before the stone facade of that West Virginia courthouse one month ago. She wondered if he’d sensed his death was near, the men waiting in the shadows of the courthouse, crouched like gargoyles in the alcoves. He could stand toe-to-toe with any thug, but what was flesh against stone? Against these buildings of white granite, like chiseled mountaintops or carved icebergs, big enough to tear ragged the steel ribs of the Titanic or call down whole heavens of fire, reducing nations to heaps of rubble.
In the Old Country, people had whispered of the wee folk of the woods—aes sídhe—fairies who lived in stone rings and underground forts, little hills and hollow hawthorn trees, their power ranging just beyond the sight of humankind, carried through winds and music, wreaking havoc if they were not appeased.
These stone buildings did something similar, she thought—connected as they were through a vast network of letters and telegrams and telephone wires, all part of a common bedrock. As if they were but the visible outcroppings, finely tooled and faceted, of an invisible power that ranged beneath the land. State and law, money and influence. Empires of men who took their certainties from boardrooms and telephone lines, campaign donors and typewritten reports. Men who rarely saw the inside of a factory or mill or mine. Who’d never worked their hands bloody or lungs black, yet could wield incredible power over those who did.
Someone had to bring that world to them, make them know it existed.
Someone had to raise Hell on them.
Mother hitched her handbag higher against her side. Her breath was short, her joints still pained, but it was her heart that hurt her most. Broken. That was the thing, the crux of her condition. It felt like someone had stuck her hand flat on a table, palm down, and hit it with a hammer as hard as they could, three or four times, wrecking the insides for good, smashing the bones and knuckles so they’d never heal right, then stuck that broken thing in her chest and called it her heart.
Strange thing about broken hearts, though—they kept working. She’d keep fighting for her boys, no matter how many disowned her. Her love, like any good mother’s, was not conditional.
Mother, wearing her old black battle-bonnet and frilled dress, squinted a last time at the noon sun, then hiked her skirts and stepped beneath the vast shadow of the granite edifice, climbing the stone steps to face the Secretary of War.