The Anarchist (6 page)

CZOLGOSZ did love trains. He rode them often, but rarely with a clear destination in mind. Within hours he’d be in Chicago—or Detroit or Akron or Cincinnati. No one in his family would know where he was for weeks at a time. He liked the power of a locomotive engine, the immediacy of travel, and he was content to sit in a Pullman car forever, staring out at farmland where neat rows of corn flickered by with such uniformity and speed that it created the optical illusion that the earth was spinning while the train wasn’t moving at all.

Though he was born in Detroit, Czolgosz was conceived in Europe. He imagined that it happened the night before his father left for America. Nearly eight months later, his wife and three children followed him across the Atlantic. A month after they arrived in Detroit, Leon was born. The year was 1873, though no one in the family could remember the exact date of birth. His family moved about Michigan frequently, but his father only managed to find laborer’s work up north: Rogers City, Alpena, and Posen, isolated lumber towns that attracted many Poles. Month to month it was a struggle to pay the rent and keep the family fed.

When Leon was ten his mother died while giving birth to her eighth child, Victoria. His mother was forty years old. Less than two years later, his father married Katren Metzfaltr. She was hard on all the children and cruel to Leon. He was quiet and withdrawn, and she distrusted how he would be idle for long periods of time. She accused him of stealing food from his brothers’ and sisters’ plates. He attended school less than six years, but had learned to speak and read English so well—better than any of his siblings—that it intimidated her.

His father couldn’t keep in steady work in northern Michigan, so when Leon was in his teens the family lived for a couple of years in Pennsylvania, and then finally settled in Cleveland, where they ran a grocery. When all the children were old enough to work, their father collected money from each of them to buy a fifty-five-acre farm in Warrensville. They kept the house and store in Cleveland, but the farm was their father’s dream: to own land in America.

When he was twenty-five, Czolgosz suddenly quit his job at a wire plant in Cleveland. He was skilled at repairing machines, as well as operating them, but he didn’t look for another job. For the next three years he spent most of his time at the farm, tending to the animals, hunting, and fishing. At dinner he usually piled his plate with food—he was a voracious eater—and ate alone in his room. He could spend an entire day in bed, sleeping and reading; he read newspapers constantly, in English and Polish. Often he demanded money from his family and there were frequent arguments. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, and mostly left him alone.

After leaving Big Maud’s, Czolgosz boarded the Lakeshore Line express for Chicago, with the hope of seeing Emma Goldman. He knew she also traveled by train a great deal, giving speeches around the country and selling stationery products to stores, but
she had spent the past few months at the home of Abraham Isaak, the editor of
Free Society
. Czolgosz couldn’t stop thinking about her. He didn’t feel well—he seldom did. His catarrh caused severe sinus pain and shortness of breath; he constantly took elixirs and lozenges, but eventually they made him lethargic, dazed, and nauseous. As the train traveled west across northern Ohio, he was lulled into a stupor, his head lolling against the window glass. He saw Goldman’s round face, her intelligent eyes behind her rimless glasses. He had spent a great deal of the summer of 1901 in Buffalo because he believed she wanted him to go to the Pan-American Exposition. That year thousands of people were traveling to and from Buffalo, the city of electric light, the city with the bright future. Even President McKinley had been expected to visit the exposition when it first opened in the spring, but his wife had taken ill and their trip was canceled.

Czolgosz didn’t know exactly when he decided to shoot the president, but the idea had first gripped him the night before he left his family’s farm earlier in the summer. He was in the barn, cleaning rabbits. His sister Victoria came across the yard from the house, followed by his older brother Waldeck. Czolgosz could tell by his sister’s long stride that she was angry, and though Waldeck was taller he was having difficulty keeping up with her. She worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Cleveland and she was still wearing her black uniform with the white lace collar. Her face was so pretty, her waist so small, her breasts full and round.

“Waldeck says you’re going away again,” she said. “Why, Leon?”

“Maybe I like trains?”

No one spoke as he peeled the skin down the rabbit’s back. His brother and sister, repulsed by the smell, kept their distance from the workbench.

Then, wearily, Victoria raised her arms to her head, removed the pins, and let her long hair down.
“Leon, gdzie idziesz tym razem?”

“This time? Where am I going
this
time? Chicago?” he said. “Or maybe Buffalo?”

“Again?”
Waldeck said. “How many times you been to Buffalo this summer? You spend weeks there. You ignore the company of decent women, but I think you go to whorehouses.”

He looked up at Waldeck. “Tell me you never have.”

Embarrassed, his brother lowered his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

“You just ain’t been to one in Chicago or Buffalo.” He laughed, but it made him cough again, and he had to inhale slowly until his breathing calmed.

“What you
should
do is go to a good doctor,” Victoria said. “That catarrh is getting worse. Your lungs sound like they’re drowning in fluid. All the medicine you take doesn’t do a thing. Except make you sleep a lot. You haven’t really worked for, what, three years? You lay about reading all hours of the day.”

“Maybe I like to sleep? Maybe I like to read?” he said. “And besides, I shot my dinner. I provide for myself. We should all quit our jobs and hunt for our food.” The first rabbit was done and he held it out to them, soft and pink in his greasy hands. “Smooth as a girl’s thigh.” He put the rabbit aside on the bench and took the second one out of his pouch.

“Well I just think you’re crazy,” Victoria said.

“That’s because you work for those rich people. You put on that uniform and tuck your hair up under your little cap, and you wait on them, clean their house, polish their silver.”

“At least I have a
job.”

“And the sad thing, Victoria, is you believe in it,” he said. “You believe it’s right, it’s good that there are some people who can live like that. But it demeans you, that uniform.” With one swift motion, he cut open the second rabbit. “At least Waldeck understands what I’m talking about. He knows what’s happening to the working people in this country. We’ve only sought the truth. Remember when we sent away for that Bible in Polish? We read the whole thing. Everything the priests had
told us as boys was a lie—they said expect nothing but pain and sorrow in this life and you shall be rewarded in the next. Catholicism, like capitalism, is just another means of oppressing working people.”

“Attending socialist meetings isn’t the answer to anything.” Victoria sat on a barrel as though she no longer had the strength to stand.

“I agree,” Czolgosz said. “I go to the meetings, but socialism isn’t the solution. It’s another system, a yoke designed to harness working men and women.” He began removing the organs. “Anarchists believe in a beautiful absolute: all political systems, all religions, all leaders, all laws enslave people. We need to live free, without restraint. Anarchists ask the hard question: When will we be capable of lifting ourselves up to the point where laws and rules and leaders are no longer necessary?”

“Leon, they
kill
people,” Victoria said.

“The right people,” he said. “Like the president of the United States.”

“They shoot them, stab them, blow them up,” she said.

“Not you, not me,” he said. “Only the kind of people you work for.”

“It’s still murder,” Waldeck said. “They’re criminals, they’re murderers.”

“No,” he said. “They’re doing their duty. It’s all any of us can do.”

Disgusted, Victoria got up off the barrel and left the barn.

“Waldeck, I need money.”

“You always need money, Leon. You take it from me, from Victoria, and then you go away, and when you come back you need more.” When Waldeck struck out like that, it was a sign that he was weakening, and after a moment’s hesitation he reached into the pocket of his trousers and put some folded bills down next to the first rabbit. “What
are
you going to do?” he asked.

“Maybe I’ll shoot the president.”

Waldeck stared at him, incredulous. “You’re always making these … these claims.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“They’re outrageous.”

“It’d be easy—easy as shooting a rabbit. It would make history. That’s what I should do: make history.” He picked up the bills—eight dollars—and then continued to clean the second rabbit. “And this money will smell of rabbit in Buffalo.”

“And then you’ll be back for more. The way you borrow money and never return it, maybe you should become a capitalist.”

He watched Waldeck leave the barn, and in the distance there was sound of cow piss driving into the mud.

Cows rarely looked up from their grazing to watch the train pass by, and Czolgosz often envied their sense of purpose. They were only concerned with eating; locomotives meant nothing to them.

Turning from the window he saw the conductor working his way down the aisle of the Pullman car, punching tickets as he went, speaking briefly to each passenger. His box cap had a blunt shiny bill, and his dark blue uniform gave him an air of authority. Czolgosz had seen him on the train before, but he knew the conductor would never remember him, which he found comforting. As the conductor approached the two elderly women sitting several rows in front of Czolgosz, something changed in their posture; they squared their shoulders and sat up straight, as though presenting themselves for inspection. The conductor punched their tickets with his silver clipper, and as he returned the slips he said something in an Irish brogue that made both women nod their heads. When he moved down the aisle, their shoulders sagged with relief.

Though he was a stout man in his fifties, the conductor swayed easily with the train’s sideways movement, and his feet shifted in graceful little dance steps as he maintained his balance.

“Ticket,” he said.

Czolgosz stared down at his hands, resting in his lap. He just wanted to close his eyes and go back to sleep.

“Ticket,”
the conductor said impatiently.

Slowly, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the ticket, which the conductor snatched from his hand.

“Chicago?” It sounded like an accusation. “Can’t talk, boyo?”

He glanced up at the man, who had muttonchops and a mustache, black with gray, waxed at the corners. Czolgosz had worn a mustache until recently, and regretted shaving it off. Now he looked younger than twenty-eight, but what he missed was the sense of concealment those whiskers provided. Without the protection of a mustache, his mouth, his face, even his thoughts seemed more exposed.

The conductor held the ticket as though it were a ransom. “Can’t talk English?”

Czolgosz looked the conductor in the eyes, and the man’s thick eyebrows tilted inward as the hardness of his expression dissolved into fear, or perhaps awe. Since he was a boy, Czolgosz had known that his light blue eyes could have this power over people. As the train started around a curve, there came a screeching of metal from below the car. The conductor rocked back on his heels, though this time he lost his balance momentarily and his other hand reached out instinctively for the back of the empty bench in front of Czolgosz—and in doing so he dropped his ticket punch into Czolgosz’s lap.

Czolgosz picked up the nickel-plated tool, studied it a moment, and then extended his arm toward the conductor; he might have been holding a gun the way the conductor leaned away.

“I speak English,” Czolgosz said. “Better than you.”

The conductor pulled himself upright as the train came out of the bend. He took the clipper, and as he punched the ticket there was a precise metallic click. He returned the ticket and moved down the aisle to the next passenger.

Czolgosz laid his forehead against the cool window glass and closed his eyes, and at that moment he realized what his duty was: he was supposed to shoot the president. He had thought about this before, many times, but now there was an absolute certainty to it—as though Emma Goldman had whispered in his ear.

AS Norris walked down Market Street, he saw Hyde standing at the head of the alley next to the Three Brothers Café, looking impatient and worried. Norris decided against going inside the café, and they walked toward the back of the clapboard building. He listened to Hyde and finally stopped him when they reached a cabbage patch. Throughout Buffalo there were such fields between buildings, where people grew vegetables.

“What did I tell you?” Norris said.

“I know.”

“But you went and lost him.” Norris stared across the cabbage field; on the horizon he could see a series of tall stacks rising above Lake Erie, thick smoke angling into the blue sky. He was so disgusted he didn’t want to look at Hyde. “And where does he get the money for all this traveling?”