Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

Vera and Charles sat in a windowless room about as big as a sleeping berth in a railcar, stood on its end (for the ceiling was very high); what little space there was to move around in was taken up by filing cabinets and boxes, from which paper spilled like water. If you bumped into something, paper sloshed about you. A stack of newspapers had risen perilously close to the gas lamp on the wall. Charles guessed it was mildew that he smelled. The man on the other side of the tiny desk — on which he had cleared something like a tunnel through which he might address them — was a representative of the Nonpartisan League, an organization founded in North Dakota, where they’d had spectacular success, winning control of the state legislature, but were now running afoul of businessmen seizing the opportunity of the war to assert “preparedness” and holler “sedition.” He was outlining their grievances, which Vera jotted down on an IWW notepad.

Charles brought her wherever he went as a supervisor for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, claiming she was his secretary, for no other reason than he wanted to see what would happen if anybody someday happened to identify her as the Vera Kolessina who had been implicated in the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco and other assorted murders. He was ready to say he had “turned” her, that she was no longer “an anarchist” and wanted only to help the state save the lives of innocent people. She was in fact “known,” by persons such as this man from the NPL, to be representing the Chicago Wobblies, and this made some interviewees uneasy: he, for instance, had been dealing with Detroit Wobblies, but Detroit Wobblies, Vera assured him, had sticks up their asses. “They say you Chicago people are grandstanders,” said the NPL man. “The Detroit people say that,” said Vera, “precisely because they have those sticks up their asses. If you want to play chess, go to Detroit. If you want to get out of the mess you’re in, talk to me.”

The man looked nervously at Charles. He was there, they told him — and “believed it” themselves as well — as a secret agent. He wasn’t really there. He was really and truly working for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety and the Chicago IWW, who really and truly had no quarrel with each other, at least while the war was on. He would be inside, privy to any plans regarding the NPL — which was just more evidence that Chicago wasn’t fooling around while Detroit was complaining that their coffee was always served lukewarm. He was an extraordinarily influential person, despite his youth. There was a town named after him in North Dakota, and he knew Teddy Roosevelt. He might someday be president of the United States! Crazier things had happened. And his sympathies were with working people. He was doing real work, field work, because it was believed it was time, just as it had been time for Henry V, to be awakened and despise his former dreams. There was hope in certain quarters that the United States might be presided over by — he mock-stumbled here, over how to characterize his sham self — by someone like, like, say, Marcus Aurelius.

The NPL man sat back in his chair and blew his cheeks out. He looked back and forth at Vera and Charles for a while — not with incredulity or suspicion or irritation, but as if it were all just then becoming too much to bear. Then he seemed to give up, or to come to terms with it.

“Why is it,” he asked, drawing his great thick eyebrows together, “that a single company can control line elevators, terminal elevators, commission houses and mills, have tidy arrangements with the railroads and tell a farmer how much he will get for his produce?”

He was the kind of salesman who seemed to want answers to rhetorical questions, so Charles said he didn’t know, at least in specific terms, and neither did Vera, who nodded.

“Tell me,” he continued, “where else a consumer tells a producer what the price of the product will be! Tell me why a farmer can’t tell the railroads how much he’ll pay to get his wheat to Minneapolis. Tell me why there are no terminal elevators in the entire state of North Dakota. Tell me why it is—” he waved off Charles’s reply, “—why it is that of all the farms in North Dakota in the year 1890—” he consulted his figures, “—6.9 percent of them were operated by tenant farmers, in 1900 8.5 percent, and in 1910 nearly double that. Tell me why every newspaper in the country will run stories with huge headlines of how ‘European’ orders for two million bushels of wheat have suddenly and mysteriously been cancelled, driving the market into a crash, and not a one of them will run the story that states unequivocally that the first story was a goddamn hoax! Tell me why the price of a bushel of wheat always drops at harvest time and rises once the millers own it. Tell me why we are supposed to believe that ‘our leading citizens’ would never ‘stoop so low as to use false weights’ at their elevators, while farmers will lie, slander, cheat, steal — even murder, I suppose! — to continue their profligate lifestyles, anything to continue to live like the corrupt prairie barons they are denounced as. Can you? Tell me?”

“Darkness,” said Charles, “is on the face of the waters.”

The NPL agent narrowed his eyes.

“I’m not sure that the farmer you idealize is anything but another kind of businessman,” suggested Charles.

The NPL man said, “Let us talk for a moment about wheat grades.”

“All right,” said Vera, licking the point of her pencil. “The less talk of murder the better, you ask me.”

Again the man gave her the same dark look he’d just given Charles. He was confused, and angry because he didn’t think he was there to be confused. “There’s #1 Hard, #1 Northern, #2, #3, and #4. There’s also No Grade and Rejected. Have you got that? It’s pretty confusing. You’ve got to have a good hand with grain, a good eye, and a telephone number of another fellow with similar attributes and a like mind who will back you up when you are accused of downgrading at the elevator, he can confirm your grade instead of upgrading like he would normally. Everybody in the NPL has had that happen to them: you sell and it’s #2 or #3, but when it gets to Minneapolis, the train ride has miraculously transformed it into #1. Well, that’s just what a broker does, that’s what they tell me anyway, and we ought to keep our heads down and our mouths closed and let the man do his fucking job, but first tell me how it is we get docked for ‘impurities, dirt, and other seed’ in our wheat, have to pay the freight on this exceedingly heavy pile of impurity, only to learn later that these impurities have been screened out and sold as stock feed for twenty dollars a ton by the very folks who said it was worthless, and an inconvenience to them for which we should have to pay?”

Vera and Charles smiled and shook their heads.

“‘Darkness on the face of the waters’?” The man’s eyes were small and black beneath shaggy graying brows. “Kinda crack is that?”

“Means the same thing as a smile and a nod,” Charles said evenly. “Don’t get your underwear in a bundle. It’s a good story and you tell it well, but it’s not like I haven’t heard it before. VERA HERE GREW UP IN A BUTTON FACTORY, YOU GODDAMN BONEHEAD!”

The man merely glowered and sunk deeper in his chair. Vera apologized for Charles’s rude behavior. She felt sorry for the man, in truth, because it was believed he was playing fast and loose with NPL funds, and things were only getting faster and looser; he was an ideal target for Justice agents, easily turned when things finally got out of hand, and Vera had been asked to establish a relationship with him of simple goodwill and trust in the hope that he would not turn when the opportunity to do so came around. Some of the men she knew thought it was women’s work, and some thought it was shit work, but Vera liked it, and everybody recognized it was something she did naturally well. She said, somewhat deprecatingly, that she thought it “suited her personality,” and it reminded her of her duties at the Passaic Weekly, the job she’d found when they left Lawrence after the fiasco of the Children’s Crusade, and moved down to the even bigger strike in Paterson in 1912. That paper’s editor was now doing time in prison, and Vera believed she might lend some kind of attenuated moral support by practicing reportorial skills, talking to people, and taking notes on a little pad.