MOTHER JONES AWOKE IN bed, the glow of dawn in the room. Shadowy figures hovered at her bedside, murmuring. She couldn’t decipher their words. Voices like a purling stream, a language of water and stone. She didn’t know where she was, if this bed were in Heaven or Hell or Washington, D.C.
She’d been doing what the church might call good works for the large part of her life, but she’d raised a lot of hell, too. She’d spoken against sky pilots—priests in the pockets of King Coal and Big Steel—and she’d harbored a secret belief that God was a woman. Creation something born, not erected. Surely the sky pilots would consign her to Hell for that.
She just breathed, floating like an airship amid the white clouds of cotton bedding. Didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes more than a nick. It almost seemed she could stay here, just like this, in this thin slice of another world. No ghosts touched her here, no body pains. No hard wrenching of the heart, as if someone were adjusting the meat of her with a knife.
But she’d never been one for rest, stasis. For years, she’d had little home but the kindness of friends and comrades, miners’ shacks and haylofts and her own shoes. She wasn’t going to spend the Hereafter in bed, if that’s where she was. The Long Home. No, if this were Heaven, she had questions for the Almighty, she did. And if this were Hell or Washington, she had tails to twist.
Slowly the voices began to take shape, the words becoming discernible, shifting into a language she knew. She could hear Emma and Terence Powderly—her friends and hosts. And a learned man, too. A physician. Discussing her health.
Eyes still slit, Mother sniffed loudly. “Am I dying, Doc?”
The bedside figures jumped, throwing their hands to their chests. Emma leaned down and touched her head. “Mother, you’re awake!”
“Just resting my eyes, darling. So, Doctor?”
The doctor was tall and long-jawed, dressed in a dark suit and tie, a stethoscope looped around his neck. “It seems you’ve had a nervous episode, Mrs. Jones. No evidence of stroke or heart attack. I’ve been talking to Mr. and Mrs. Powderly here, and I believe it may be a symptom of nervous exhaustion, neurasthenia. What some are calling ‘Americanitis.’ An increasingly common condition.”
“Americanitis?”
“Think of your body as a machine, Mrs. Jones. It has a finite amount of nervous energy, which it replenishes through rest, recreation, and fellowship. Working too hard, for too long, in too stressful of an environment overtaxes the body’s nervous system. Body pain, dyspepsia, morbid fears, and fatigue can result, as well as acute episodes which resemble heart attack or stroke, but are not dangerous. Nerve attacks.”
The doctor turned to Emma and Terence, as if they were her parents. “I’ve seen the affliction in one in thirty of my patients. We believe rapid modernization is exacerbating the condition here in America. Our bodies are simply not designed for such overstimulation. It’s plaguing men and women of station and standing. Generals, surgeons, executive officers. Overworked. For a woman like Mrs. Jones, it’s incredible it took so long to develop.”
Mother twitched her nose. “You should go down to West Virginia, Doctor. I’d like to see what the company bosses thought about an outbreak of Americanitis in miners working seventy hours a week in the hole. I’d like to make a world where the bosses would give one ounce of a good Goddamn.”
“I understand, Mrs. Jones, but you need to rest if you want to keep fighting for that world.” He touched her shoulder. “Or you won’t live to see it.”
“I ain’t in it for my health, Doctor. But I know you’re probably right.” Mother laid her hand on the doctor’s arm. “I’ll rest for a spell, it’s about time, and what else do I need, Doctor. Perhaps company?” She patted the man’s bony hand. Cold as bone. No wedding band.
He removed it. “Rest is most important.”
“Bedrest,” said Mother.
The doctor glanced toward the door. “Yes, yes. Any rest.” He looked at the Powderlys. “I’ll have a full prescription delivered this afternoon.” He looked at his watch. “I had better be on my way. Appointments.”
He packed up his medicine bag and stood by the door, looking back over his shoulder. “I’ll come by tomorrow to check on you, Mrs. Jones.”
Terence walked the man out and Emma turned in her collared dress and set her elbows on the bed, her chin in her hands. “You are bad, Mother.”
Mother winked at her friend and set her hand on her arm. “I’m just getting started, Emma. I need to send a telegram.”
HIS NAME WAS BOYDEN Sparkes, traveling correspondent for the New York Tribune. He came dashing down the steps of his office, his travel satchel and typewriter strapped across his chest like a set of crossed bandoliers. He paid the newsboy on the corner a half-dollar to borrow his bicycle. Soon he was mashing through the early streets of Cincinnati, crouched on the squeaking springs of the seat, ringing the brass handlebar bell to alert shuffling pedestrians and street sweepers of the clanging steel skeleton beneath him, outfitted with wicker basket and carbide headlamp and wide gullwing handlebars.
He was headed for the nearest rail station, where he had to catch a train already rumbling out of town on the B&O tracks.
Sparkes had made his name as a correspondent during the Great War, following the American Expeditionary Force across the Western Front. He’d served as an eyewitness to the ravages of trench warfare, where the modern age of tanks and planes and artillery guns met tactics little evolved from medieval times, and there were more dead men than poppies in France. Since then, he’d been covering politics, baseball, and other topics for the large Eastern papers.
In his pocket was an express telegram delivered by courier that morning:
TROOPS DEPLOYED TO WV STOP COULD BE SECOND CIVIL WAR STOP YOU SHOULD BE THERE STOP CATCH FIRST TRAIN YOU CAN STOP TELL IT LIKE IT IS STOP MOTHER JONES
Sparkes knew the 19th Infantry Regiment out of Camp Sherman, just east, would be the first unit to reach the battle zone, and he had to be aboard their train.
The dawn sun was shining directly in his face, filling the streets with light as he weaved in and out of crosswalk traffic and clattering motorcars, the great chains and sprockets and wood-hooped wheels of the bicycle squeaking and clunking beneath him.
His breath was spuming from his mouth, his luggage banging at his hips. He felt like one of those French or Belgian cyclists from the 1919 Tour de France, men just out of the trenches who’d pedaled the battle-shredded roads, dodging bomb craters and unexploded artillery shells, drinking brandy from their bidons and dripping liquid cocaine into their eyes for speed.
The low roof of the station came into view, silhouetted against the rising sun. The long iron slug of the train was already rolling, heading out of town. He cranked harder on the pedals, his vision narrowing down to a tunnel. He leapt off the bike at the edge of the tracks and handed it off to another newsboy, and then he was running for the tail end of the train, the red caboose gaining speed, moving away from him. He was running in his ankle boots and flopping bags, feeling the gravel of tobacco smoke in his lungs.
A grizzled trainman stood on the rear platform, holding a cob pipe against the chest of his coveralls. He squinted an eye down at the frantic creature beneath him, the knees pistoning beneath the corduroy trousers, the black necktie flying behind him like an airman’s scarf. The trainman leaned an elbow on the rail, casual, like they might discuss Babe Ruth or the weather report. “Who are ye, son?”
Sparkes roared between breaths. “Boyden Sparkes! New York Tribune!”
The trainman narrowed his eyes like an old sea captain, stepped lower on the platform, and clasped Sparkes’s hand, hauling him up onto the caboose. Sparkes collapsed in a pile of tweed, sweat, and baggage straps, blowing like a death-driven horse.
The trainman toked on his pipe. “You’re that famous war correspondent, ain’t you?”
“Don’t know about famous.”
The man reached into an inside pocket of his coveralls and handed Sparkes a battered brass trench flask. “You best tell the truth what’s happening down there in West Virginia. I don’t want to wish I given you the boot stead of a nip of my special apple brandy.”
Sparkes unscrewed the cap and lifted the flask to the trainman. “The truth,” he said, taking quite a large slug for seven o’clock in the morning.