CHAPTER 17

 

The next morning Sage rolled out of his bunk and slipped out of the bunkhouse while the birds still slept. He didn’t bother collecting the three dollars he’d earned. In the predawn light, the trees and sky, bushes and stumps were shades of black and gray. Bindle looped over one shoulder, Sage carried a stout stick. He was alert but not too concerned. By this time of year, the bear and cougar had trailed the grazing deer into the higher altitudes.

Dawn rolled over the snow-covered ridges and crept across the valley floor, dogging his heels as he hiked down the rutted logging road. Alongside him, gray glacial waters plunged over a rocky riverbed. Near to seven o’clock he’d reached the first farmhouse, its rough-plank boards silvered by the morning light. Sage stopped to speak to the farmer who was leading his cows out to graze among the stumps in the field. For a dime, Sage got a slab of cold meat between two pieces of thick bread. He ate as he walked, thinking about Plunkett’s camp and the men working there.

Just three days ago he’d traveled this road hoping to find a murderer; instead, he’d discovered a man he wanted to call “friend.” He liked MacKenzie’s certainty of purpose and ready laughter. He’d miss his flashing smile. Still, real friendship with a man like MacKenzie wasn’t possible. There was too much about Sage himself that had to keep secret. Real friendship required an openness he couldn’t afford to show. “Oh dammit it to hell,” he said aloud, only to jump, then hoot with laughter as a startled squirrel skittered first toward him and then away.

Noon struck the courthouse clock just as Sage jumped down from a farmer’s wagon onto the main street of Chehalis. He hunted for the post office, finding it tucked inside a dry goods store. Waiting for him was an envelope from his mother. She wrote that she’d heard from her “cousin” in Denver and was enclosing the letter. It was in Vincent St. Alban’s script and confirmed Sage’s suspicions about Otis Welker:

The man about whom you inquired acts on behalf of his employers whenever there is underhanded business to be done. His appearance does not bode well. Death seems to follow him around. His presence means something illegal or violent is involved. We’d like to know what. Be very careful. He never travels alone. There are thugs about him that people don’t see until it’s too late.

On another note, it is with deep dismay that I must inform you that a Dickensen slithered past our defenses and infiltrated our organization. Not at the top, but maybe close enough to learn the names of those in the field. If he learned your real name, Welker may have it, too. I’m sorry. I pray you are not endangered. Take care. My very best regards in solidarity, V.

 

His mother’s letter related restaurant news and told him the police had not returned. She

closed her letter with:

 

Dear Boy, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how I’ve come to love our home here. Still, I would gladly leave it all behind rather than risk losing you. Take care and don’t be concerned about me. They’re not going to bother an old housekeeper. Your always loving mother, Mae.

 

Sage’s eyes stung as he stared at those last five words. Seeing them for the first time in print made him think again about her years of loving sacrifice and wonder what she felt when she wrote them. He read both letters once again before tearing them into small pieces and setting them afire atop a stone wall. Once they’d turned to ash, he slipped off the sun-warmed wall and headed toward the telegraph office at the rail depot. The telegraph operator sent a message to Fong, care of the Union Station in Portland. The message stated Sage was heading north but expected to return in a few days. After eating his fill of meat and potatoes in the railway hotel’s dining room, Sage shouldered his bindle and began walking north along the tracks.

The sky was a low hanging steel grey and the weather had deteriorated into a drizzle that a steady wind made cold. Sage looked for a fir with low-hanging branches. After some minutes’ walk, he finally found one he could crouch under and still watch the tracks.

Two hours later he was still sitting under the tree, shivering with the cold and disgusted with the day. Was any of this nonsense helping St. Alban? He couldn’t see how. Besides, for whatever reason, somebody was watching his every move and then bashing at his head. And that thumping hadn’t been because of St. Alban. Not likely. Instead of fighting the good fight against economic oppression here he was, out in the middle of nowhere, traveling even farther from home just to save a big-eared, freckle-faced kid he didn’t even know. And, so far, he was failing in that relatively simple task.

Even without Matthew’s problem, would it really matter? Sometimes he wondered whether the whole St. Alban caper was nonsense. Did he have a need to see himself as being important or singularly wise in a world gone crazy? A need so unbalanced that it deluded him into thinking he, Sage Adair, could change the world? God knew it wasn’t like he getting paid for the chances he took. But then, he didn’t need money. He had his own–plenty of it. Still, right now, it would be deuced hard to explain to a rational listener why he chose to squat underneath a dripping tree, miles from home, waiting to jump a train so he could ride like Don Quixote into who knows what situation.

The rain dripped, his morose thoughts keeping time as they circled round and round, taking his spirits down and down. A brisk wind flew up the tracks, spinning white blossoms from the wild apple tree into the air like oversized, soggy snowflakes. A vision of two little girls slithered into his thoughts. Their fingers dead white against the snow they brushed away so they could reach the dust bin’s latch and the scraps of discarded food. Tiny faces, pinched with cold, rags wrapped around their boots to keep their feet from freezing. Beyond them, their father waited with a group of other men, as he had been waiting day after day. Like unmoving rocks of misery around which other people flowed, they’d stood before the factory gates. Closer to home was his Uncle Shaun, who’d hacked the sun awake, spotting his raggedly kerchief bloody. The mine explosion was a merciful deliverance. Sage had seen coal miners die from the two-headed devil, black lung and starvation, hacking their lives away in the shadows of the damp porches dotting the ravines outside the company towns. Death came calling on those porches, in the form of hunger and disease. And the coal companies wouldn’t pay a nickle more to ease the suffering they caused.

Sage shifted. Somehow the day had lightened even though the rain was steadily falling, as if a sky high water tap had been carelessly left open. Those memories had fanned his internal fire back to life. Too bad there was no way to purge them of their evil. Or wall them up. Like those medieval penitents in the churches who chose to live on the food kindly strangers passed to them through small holes in the stone walls. If the memories would only vanish, maybe he could turn his back on St. Alban and dank, lonely places like this one.

Sage snorted loudly, sending some creature in the nearby brush scuttling away. Forgetting would be as “likely as cows trotting milk into butter,” as Mae Clemens liked to say. It wasn’t only those memories that kept him going. It was Mae Clemens herself, what she taught him and how she had lived.

He picked a tight fir cone from those scattered about his feet. Such complex, beautiful symmetry he mused, turning it round and round in his hand, flicking the seed tails with his finger. The natural world abounded with perfection while humanity was as irregular as rocks in a pile. He sniffed the cone only to jerk back when a glob of pitch snagged his mustache hairs. That’s what he got for being fanciful. He’d be smelling fir pitch for hours to come. It’d be a devil of a time getting it out.

`A rumble rolled up the tracks. A train was coming. It would slow for the curve. Sage grabbed his bindle and stepped into the bushes so that no one on the big locomotive could see him. The long line of cars swayed past, moving at about ten miles an hour. The names of the various railroads–B & O, Great Northern, Southern Pacific, Rock Island Line–in big black letters were emblazoned on their wood-slatted sides.

A railcar with an open door was swaying toward him, its metal suspension beginning to screech as it rounded the curve. Amid the deafening noise of cars, pouring rain and whip of wind, Sage sprinted out of the bushes to the open door, leapt to grab at the floor planks and pulled himself up and into the car. Even before he gained his feet, he sensed the faces peering at him from the gloom. Sage nodded at the men before squeezing into the corner at the other end, tucking himself out the sight of any railroad bull who might look in the door.

A glance from beneath his hat brim at the other men in the car eased his mind. None looked familiar. He hadn’t seen any of them at hobo camp in Portland three nights ago. His stealthy departure would have been cause for comment around the campfire.

“Hey, what’s your moniker?” one of the men called.

“John Miner,” Sage responded and, sensing welcome, he scrambled across the vibrating floorboards to sit beside the group of five who had a deck of cards and pile of unspent matches in play.

“Where you coming from, John Miner?” asked the same man, apparently the spokesman for the group.

“Plunkett’s logging camp. Up there swamping, but I lit on out of there this morning.” Sage deliberately borrowed MacKenzie’s joke, “I decided time had come to visit some houses and drink lots,” he explained. The men laughed. For awhile, they played cards for match sticks and swapped stories about life on the road. Later, they all fell silent, staring out the open doors at the wet green countryside, rough little towns and isolated farms, each man adrift in memory or thought. Tension took over whenever the train stopped at a depot or water tank. As the brakes began squealing and the train slowed, they wordlessly gathered up their belongings and sneaked peeks out the open doors on each side, their ears straining for the sounds of danger. All were ready to shout an alert and leap out if a bull appeared at either open doorway or if boots started thudding atop the steel roof. It was the usual drill. One every experienced hobo knew whenever the train was pulling in.

Sage finally caught up on the sleep he’d lost heading out of Plunkett’s so early in the day. On the final leg into Seattle, feeling safe among his companions, Sage stuffed his bindle behind his neck and closed his eyes, letting the sway of the train and the soft murmur of their travel weary voices lull him to sleep.

 

* * *

Twilight had leached color from the day when the train began its slow slide into the Seattle rail yard. The summer rain was over, leaving the air sweet and the sky a fading blue. Sage, like the others, jumped out at the yard’s edge, while the train was still traveling at a fairly fast clip. Hobos hated to “jump and flip” but they were more afraid of getting too close to the railroad bulls in the yard who usually lay in wait for those riding the trains. A smart ‘bo never entered the yard if he could help it.

Hitting the hard ground and rolling, Sage gained his feet, snatched up his bindle then paused for a second to watch as other men and bindles flew out boxcar doors all up and down the train like fleas off a carcass. Then he scrambled down off the rail bed. Within a block he was in Seattle’s Chinatown. Supper was a warming and tasty ten-cent bowl of seasoned noodles.

Sage waited until darkness had securely descended before entering the hobo jungle. He wanted a chance to study the faces around the fire before he stepped into the light.

Like its Portland counterpart, this camp was also well organized. These were the working hobos and here he was most likely to find Meachum. Supper was over, but the men offered him bread and cheese, which he declined, and coffee, which he accepted. He reciprocated by handing around the pouch of tobacco and rolling papers he’d just bought.

The talk around the fire was about the few men hired that day to work on the docks.

“How much does a man earn in a day on the Seattle docks?” Sage asked.

“They’re paying 50-cents an hour. Ten-hour day, six-day week.” A lilting Scandinavian accent colored the words spoken by a man they all called Big Swede.

“Hey, that’s darn good,” Sage said, thinking of the dollar-fifty a day he’d been earning as a swamper at Plunkett’s.

“Ya.” Big Swede responded, “You want to get that money, though, you must join the longshoremen’s union. Only union jobs on the docks pay good. Me, I join union in Frisco. I have a union card,” he patted his breast pocket, “I can work on any union dock on the West Coast.”

“How much to join?” asked a whip-thin man who called himself “Prairie Slim.”

“Ten dollars initiation, fifty cents a month plus twenty-five cents for funeral benefits,” Big Swede responded. “But the work. It is very hard. Most longshoremen are big men, like me.”

Other men, as tall and bulky as Big Swede, nodded agreement.

“What are you doing for that fifty cents an hour?” Sage asked.

“Today we loaded fifty-pound flour sacks. I stay down there in the hold. Sacks slide down the planks, I pick up two on my shoulder and stow them in stacks against the bulkhead. Ten of us, we maybe load three to four thousand sacks all day. My shoulders are real sore,” Big Swede said, using his gnarled hand to knead his shoulder.

“You looking to work on the docks, John Miner?” Big Swede asked. He looked doubtful, like Sage’s six-foot frame was short on brawn

“Nope, I’m not cut out for that kind of work. Actually, I hoped to hitch up with a friend of mine, name of Meachum. You seen him around?” There was a stir to his left as a man rose and slipped into the surrounding dark.

“No, never heard of the man,” said Big Swede. There was murmured agreement from those hunkered down around the fire.

 

* * *

Later, once he’d spread out his bedroll, Sage headed for the trench latrine dug in a small clearing well away from the camp. He’d just buttoned his trousers when rough hands shoved him from behind, making him jump the trench to avoid falling in. He nearly didn’t make it.

Sage steadied himself in his boots before looking around to see four hulking men surrounding him. Maybe not longshoremen but big enough even so. He felt somewhat reassured because, in the faint light, there was no glint of metal. Their menacing stances told him, however, that they intended to pummel him senseless with their bare fists.

Fong’s familiar refrain flashed through his head: “When force superior, first—run away quick. Second—talk fast. Third—fight smart.”

Running away quick wasn’t possible—they had him surrounded on three sides and that malodorous trench was at his back. Maybe number two. “Hey, what’s going . . . ,” Sage began, only to have his breath escape him in an ‘umph’ as the men rushed him and knocked him to the ground before he finished the sentence. He sat in the dirt, carefully flicking the small wood bits off his palms. “Fight hard” it was then.

Sage swiftly regained his footing and settled into the bow stance, his front leg slightly bent, his rear leg straight. He raised his hands, lowered his shoulders, and told himself to relax. While he was no Fong Kam Tong, he might be able to do some damage before they brought him down.

The biggest man charged at him, his arm moving in a swinging roundhouse from the left. Sage shifted forward, clasped the man’s forearm, and rocked back, using his assailant’s momentum to send him, arms flailing, to Sage’s right. The man hit the dirt with a satisfying thud, having to scramble to avoid tumbling into the trench.

A second man rushed in from the right. “Grasp bird’s tail, single whip.” Sage told himself even as he raised his right hand, wrist hooked down, fingers touching. Turning at his waist, he swept the hooked hand toward the sky. It hit the man squarely beneath the chin, knocking him backward.

Feet rooted in the ground, Sage continued moving through various forms of the snake and crane, each one diverting his attackers’ force away from him. “White crane spreads its wings” unbalanced a two-handed clutch from the right. “Hand strums the lute” transformed a meaty fist heading for Sage’s chest into a man on his knees whimpering from a dislocated elbow. “Brush knee, twist step” protected Sage’s crotch and knocked the wind from the last man standing. Sage’s attackers crawled back, staggered to their feet and clustered together, well away from him. He heard them muttering as they tried to decide their next attack. Sage was pleased to realize that he stood no more than two feet from where he’d begun his defense. A cooling sheen of sweat coated his face. Still he wasn’t panting, even though his attackers were sucking in great gulps of air. Fong would have been pleased.

As the four turned toward him, Sage lowered his shoulders and relaxed his muscles in preparation for the charge. One of the men had picked up a heavy stick. With a yowl he rushed at Sage, who again dropped into the bow stance.

“Enough!” The sharp command cracked out from the tree line. A man stepped into the clearing. This time, something metal did glint in the faint light. Sage froze, as did the charging man who immediately lowered his stick and straightened.

“Can’t you see this man’s going to break every one of your bones if you keep at it? Leave him be, I tell you!” the man ordered Sage’s attackers.

“Meach, he’s a slippery character, but we’ll take him. We ain’t been hurt that much.”

“That’s because he’s chosen not to hurt you, not because he can’t. I’ve seen this kind of fighting before. Stand down, I tell you.”

The man stepped farther into the clearing and spoke to Sage. He still held the revolver at the ready. “Sorry about the fellas here. They’re a mite protective. That’s a most peculiar way to fight, mister. You managed to hold off the whole Squad.”

“I take it you’re Meachum,” Sage said.

“Who are you? You better give me an answer I like, or maybe I’ll have to use this here gun,” the man replied, waggling the gun barrel for emphasis. A slouch-brimmed hat shadowed the man’s face and hid the intent in his eyes.

Meachum had called Sage’s attackers “the Squad.” Taking a chance, Sage said, “It’s not who I am, it’s what I am that matters. Let’s just say I believe in marching with the Saint and all his angels.” There was a sharp intake of breath from one of his attackers and the man holding the gun lowered it to his side. He stepped closer, pushing his hat back on his head so that his face showed.

“You know St. Alban?” Meachum asked.

“I’m one of his men,” Sage replied. “So are you fellas, I suspect.”