Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
Alexander meant to say in his prayer that afternoon that God should protect the working people from leaders like Colin Jarvis, who had encouraged them to bring such misery and heartbreak on themselves.
“Amen,” he said to himself.
• • •
And the people came as promised. They came on foot. In order to discourage them, the city fathers had canceled all streetcar service in that part of the city that day.
There were many children among them, and even infants in arms. One infant would be shot to death and inspire the poem by Henry Niles Whistler, later put to music and still sung today, “Bonnie Failey.”
Where were the soldiers? They had been standing in front of the factory fence since eight o’clock, with bayonets already fixed, with full packs on their backs. Those packs weighed fifty pounds and more. They were Colonel Redfield’s idea of how to make his men more fearsome. They were in a single rank, which stretched the width of the plaza. The battle plan was this: If the crowd would not disperse when told to, the soldiers were to level their bayonets and to clear the plaza slowly but irresistibly, glacially—maintaining a perfectly straight rank that bristled with cold steel, and advancing, always on command, one step, then two, then three, then four …
Only the soldiers had been outside the fence since eight. The snow had kept on falling. So when the first members of the crowd appeared at the far end of the plaza, they gazed at the factory over an expanse of virgin snow. The only footprints were those they themselves had just made.
And many more people came than had spiritual business to conduct specifically with Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron. The strikers themselves were mystified as to who all these other ragged strangers might be—who also, often, had brought their families along. These outsiders, too, wished to demonstrate to simply anybody their misery and heartbreak at Christmastide. Young Alexander, peering through his binoculars, read a sign a man was carrying that said, “Erie Coal and Iron unfair to workers.” Erie Coal and Iron wasn’t even an Ohio firm. It was in Buffalo, New York.
So it was against considerable odds that Bonnie Failey, the infant killed in the Massacre, was actually the child of a striker against Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, that Henry Niles Whistler was able to say in the refrain of his poem about her:
Damn you, damn you, Dan McCone,
With a soul of pig iron and a heart of stone …
Young Alexander read the sign about Erie Goal and Iron while standing at a second-story window in an office wing abutting the north wall of the bell tower. He was in a long gallery, also of Venetian inspiration, which had a window every ten feet and a mirror at its far end. The mirror made its length appear to be infinite. The windows looked out over the plaza. It was in this gallery that the four sharpshooters supplied by Pinkerton set up their places of business. Each installed a table at his chosen window and set a comfortable chair behind that. There was a rifle rest on each table.
The sharpshooter nearest Alexander had put a sandbag on his table and had hammered a groove into it with the edge of his hairy hand. There his rifle would rest, with its butt tucked into his shoulder, as he squinted down his sights at this face or that face in the crowd from his easy chair. The sharpshooter farther down the corridor was a machinist by trade, and had built a squat tripod with a swiveling oarlock on top. This squatted on his table. It was into this oarlock that he would slip his rifle if trouble came.
“Patent applied for,” he had told Alexander of his tripod, and he had patted the thing.
Each man had his ammunition and his cleaning rod and his cleaning patches and his oil laid out on the table, as though they might be for sale.
All the windows were still closed now. At some of the others were far angrier and less orderly men. These were regular company guards, who had been up most of the night. Several had been drinking, so they said “… to stay awake.” They had been stationed at the windows with