Lawless (23 page)

Michael was Cheyenne’s volunteer fire warden and a member of a club called the Men’s Literary Association. He was astute, industrious—the perfect paradigm of a prosperous townsman. Jephtha knew Gideon resented Michael because he wasn’t a Kent, and perhaps because he was so successful, too. The gulf between the younger men was another disappointment to which Jephtha had resigned himself.

Presently a slight pain returned. He began to have difficulty drawing deep breaths. To keep his mind off the implications of that, he opened the Bible he always carried in the pocket of his fusty black coat and immersed himself in the search for a text for next Sunday’s sermon. Almost unconsciously, he began with the prophets. It was indicative of his feelings that he settled on the seventh verse of the second chapter of Jeremiah:

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

An overstatement of the immorality beginning to pervade the nation? He didn’t think so.

He knew he mustn’t blind himself to positive aspects. In many ways, he and all Americans were living in an undisputed age of miracles.

The transcontinental railroad, the wonder of the century, had been finished at Promontory, Utah, in ’69 with the driving of four commemorative spikes—two of gold, one of silver, and a fourth made of gold, silver and iron—into a special tie of polished laurel. Another spike, ordinary iron but wired into the national telegraph system, was hit with a maul to tell the world the oceans had been joined. Now the line from Omaha to Sacramento was carrying passengers and freight on a regular basis.

Petroleum oil to light and heat homes was surging from the ground in Pennsylvania. Bonanzas of silver were being torn from the earth in the far west, and bumper crops were ripening on prosperous farms all across the great midcontinent. Manufactories were churning out marvels of technical ingenuity. Out in Chicago, a city whose tenfold growth in recent years showed the steady ascendancy of the middle west. McCormick’s reaper factory could barely keep pace with orders. A meatpacker named Gustavus Swift was reportedly developing a refrigerated rail car that would make long-distance shipment of dressed beef and produce feasible at last. And only two weeks ago, Molly had told him about one more Chicago chap who’d patented a suction cleaning device he claimed would revolutionize the mundane chores of housekeeping. A “vacuum cleaner,” the fellow called it.

The miracles were numerous and by no means confined to his native land. The great canal of Suez was now open, materially shortening the passage to India. Cyrus Field’s Atlantic cable was in operation, carrying telegraph messages beneath the sea all the way to Europe. Such developments had forced Jephtha to conclude that America could not forever isolate herself from world problems.

And there were problems. Pestilence still ravaged Asia. Political butchery still reddened the cobbled streets of the Continent. The worst excesses of recent years had taken place in Paris this very spring. After the fall of the city, the Prussian conquerors had imposed humiliating peace terms before withdrawing. When the Prussians were gone, the radical elements in Paris reacted—violently. They screamed of incompetence on the part of their own officials, and of betrayal to the enemy. They overthrew the recently formed Republic and proclaimed a new city government called the Commune.

The Commune had controlled Paris for about sixty days. In May the established political machine headed by Adolphe Thiers and operating out of Versailles had sent French troops against French citizens. The Paris Commune had been overthrown with such savagery—so many mass executions—that the country might bear the scars for a century, just as the United States would probably bear the scars of its own civil war.

And certainly the labor radicals would never forget the inspiration of that brief time when the flags of the Commune had flown over the Hôtel de Ville. Nor, despite their own bloody excesses, would they forgive the ruthless extermination of the men and women who had helped raise the solid red banners.

The old men—Jephtha’s generation—had consistently blundered. In the United States, they’d racked the land with a war of unbelievable ferocity, and botched the peacemaking afterward. They had carried out a holy crusade to end black bondage and preserve the Union, and had sunk into the squalor of profiteering from the very first day. To make black men and women full citizens, they had passed postwar laws and damned and vilified one another as they did it. They had made pirates like Pierpont Morgan respected members of the best clubs, and tried to hound a well-meaning if sometimes misguided President out of office. They had smashed the machine of democracy and rebuilt it without one of its worst flaws—the inhuman slave system—and in the process they had somehow lost their own souls.

The nation, and the world, needed the leadership of a new generation of strong, moral young men. What was the prospect for the future if America’s best political mind belonged to a Grant, and its most successful entrepreneur was a John Rockefeller? Out in Cleveland, the young Baptist businessman, nicknamed the Deacon, was building an oil-refining monopoly. The son of a quack who peddled bogus cancer cures, Deacon Rockefeller apparently saw no conflict whatever between the teachings of Christ, which he studied diligently at an adult Sunday School each week, and driving competitors to the wall with every dishonest economic trick at his disposal. No one seemed especially concerned, or even conscious of the doctrinal paradox.

Sometimes Jephtha thought he was the one who was out of step—or crazy.

The times cried out for new young leaders brave enough to light lanterns of truth in the darkness rapidly covering the land. In that darkness, Jephtha heard certain dominant sounds.

The cynical laughter of lawless men who manipulated or ruined others.

The rustle of currency and stock certificates.

The clink of gold.

Why couldn’t Gideon see the darkness falling? Why couldn’t he realize he could help roll it back? Would he be forever content to publish a shabby little sheet dealing with just one small segment of the problem? Pondering those questions ruined Jephtha’s concentration and put him in an utterly bleak mood by the time he reached the city via a ferry boat which crossed the North River and docked at the foot of Murray Street.

Just before the boat bumped against the pier, he remembered something from Scripture. Filled with a sudden and soaring excitement, he located the passage. He bracketed it with his pencil. Then he wrote on a slip of paper and tucked it in to mark the page.

What he’d recalled was a particular verse from the sixth chapter of Judges. A verse that pertained to the role he thought his son could and should take in the world. Better than anything in Jephtha’s own words, it conveyed his vision of his son’s potential, and it clarified in precise language the responsibility that went with being a Kent.

It was a responsibility for leadership. Somehow, he must begin to make Gideon understand that.

Using the verse as his guide, he needed to have some long talks with his son. And he needed to do it soon. The prospect was exhilarating.

He drew a deep breath without difficulty and joined the passengers leaving the pier. In just a few moments he’d been filled with a renewed sense of purpose and a heightened, almost heady confidence. That was God’s spirit moving, he thought in an awed way. A smile spread over his face as he walked.

He’d taken nine or ten steps along Murray Street when he dropped the Bible, clawed at his coat, gasped for air and fell dead.

Presently Jephtha was identified. Through Molly, his son was summoned to take charge of the body. Gideon broke down and wept when he saw his father’s corpse lying on a mahogany bar under the gaslights of a Tenth Avenue saloon, just around the corner from the ferry pier.

He sent a boy off into the summer night to fetch an undertaker’s wagon. The barkeep said, “’Twas the owner, Mr. Callahan, who reached him first. We felt we should move him inside.”

“I’m obliged to you.”

The barkeep handed over Jephtha’s effects wrapped in a handkerchief. “You might be wanting to keep these safe.” He gave Gideon the Bible. “This too. It’s plain he was a God-fearing man.”

“He was a preacher.”

“Oh. Protestant, then—”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s all the same in the Lord’s sight, I suppose,” the barkeep said with a shy smile of condolence. He went off to wait on his subdued customers.

Gideon noticed a slip of paper protruding from a page in the Old Testament. He opened the Bible and pulled out the paper. There was something written on it, in his father’s hand:

Speak to G.

He saw a verse marked in pencil. He read it once, then again:

And the Lord said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, and thou shall smite the Midianites as one man.

An eerie feeling pierced his grief. Why had his father wanted to speak to him? Hoping to find a hint, he scanned the page preceding the marked verse. He drew in a loud, sharp breath. The sixth chapter of Judges dealt with a farmer named Gideon who had been threshing wheat by his winepress when the Lord commanded him to lead Israel against its oppressors.

What in the world was his father getting at? What had he meant by bracketing that particular verse in which God encouraged the biblical Gideon?

The eerie sensation continued there in the badly lit saloon whose customers remained quiet in the presence of death. Gideon was certain his father had wanted to speak to him about some symbolism he saw in the verse from Judges. But the essence of the message eluded him. He gazed at the still, suntanned face. Suddenly he exclaimed in frustration, “What is it?”

Heads turned. He paid no attention. Gideon felt that, in his ignorance, he’d failed his father.

“What did you mean to say to me?
What did you mean?”

S
OMETIMES IT ASTONISHED
Gideon Kent that a transplanted Reb could love New York with such fervor. But he had come to love it—the squalor along with the splendor.

He loved the racket of streets such as lower Third Avenue, where he and Sime Strelnik were walking now, just at twilight on a sultry evening in September 1871. The sidewalks were packed with pedestrians chattering in English, Gaelic, German, Italian, Yiddish, and several dialects he couldn’t even begin to recognize. The avenue was filled with drays and private vehicles of the sort that made Manhattan one huge traffic jam six days a week. At intersections, telegraph lines leading uptown and crosstown laid black grids against the reddening sky.

Gideon loved New York’s raucous energy and the way the city somehow conveyed a feeling that here, indeed, was the place where the nation conducted most of its important business. He loved the beauty of the city’s splendidly dressed women and the knock-you-down brashness of its young men on the rise. His affection even included acceptance, or at least tolerance, of certain unsavory aspects: air that reeked of garbage and sewage; hogs that ran squealing on some of the main thoroughfares; sad, sullen slums filled with thousands of men and women too illiterate or too thwarted and weary to rise in the world. That kind of blight needed to be excised. Yet sometimes it seemed almost inseparable from the great mural that was New York.

Gideon loved the city’s enthusiasm for innovation, typified by the three-year-old West Side Elevated Railroad which connected Battery Place to Thirtieth Street via Ninth Avenue, and by the great bridge whose first granite piers had been sunk the preceding year. When the bridge was finally completed—fifteen years was the shortest estimate of the time that would be required—it would span the East River from Park Row to Brooklyn. The idea itself was impressive. But even more than engineer John Roebling’s concept, Gideon liked the execution of that concept. Roebling intended to keep the span clean and functional, free of the ornamentation which disfigured so many public projects. There was much in New York City that was cheap and meretricious, but Roebling’s bridge to Brooklyn was lasting proof that—on occasion—imagination and excellence could carry the day. Gideon had become enough of a New Yorker to believe that no other city in the United States could begin to appreciate—or build—such a marvel.

One recent innovation he didn’t care for was the paper tube filled with tobacco that dangled from the lips of his companion. Sime Strelnik had all but given up cigars in favor of the cigarettes that were just catching on in America. Gideon knuckled his blue right eye, coughed and pointed at the cigarette.

“I’m a believer in foreign commerce, Sime. But by God that’s one European import we can do without.”

At twenty-eight, Gideon still had the soft accents of Virginia. He walked with the unconscious swagger of a cavalryman. A leather patch covered his blind left eye. He’d lost the eye while locked up in a Yank prison during the war.

Although Gideon was Strelnik’s employer, the little Russian was seldom intimidated by him. “My boy, don’t be provincial. The whole country will be puffing these before long.” But he did switch the cigarette to the opposite side of his mouth. “Besides, you’re changing the subject.”

At Timilty’s Twelfth Street Saloon, they’d eaten a cheap supper of oysters and beer before starting back to the office. They’d been arguing about the basic thrust of the labor movement. Strelnik was a disciple of Marx and carried a card in the International. Those credentials plus his experiences in Europe tended to make him pontificate.

“Reformism is failing all over the world. Correction. It has already failed. Can you deny that?”

Gideon shook his head. In America, the three major reform movements of the 1840s and ’50s had lost their vigor and most of their spokesmen as well. The cooperators were gone; they had tried to create small industrial plants owned by those who did the work. The associationists—ideological disciples of the Frenchman Fourier—were largely gone along with their plan for creating a sense of mutual need between workers and employers. And the foremost proponent of agrarianism, George Henry Evans, was dead. His scheme to divide all the free land in the West among the working class had never been realized, although his Congressional lobbying had led directly to the 1862 Homestead Act giving 160 acres to any man who would occupy and cultivate it.