Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian… Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”
He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.
“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.
After a couple of hours they stopped to rest. They left the path and found a patch of grass in the middle of a big thicket of cistus. The mist was all around but it was bright overhead and they could feel the warmth of the sun through it. “Ouch, I’ve got blisters,” she said and made a funny face that made him laugh. “It can’t be so awful far now,” he said; “honest, Maisie.” He wanted to explain to her about the strike and the wobblies and why he was going to Goldfield, but he couldn’t. All he could do was kiss her. Her mouth clung to his lips and her arms were tight round his neck.
“Honest, it won’t make any difference about our gettin’ married; honest, it won’t… Maisie, I’m crazy about you… Maisie, do let me… You must let me… Honest, you don’t know how terrible it is for me, lovin’ you like this and you never lettin’ me.”
He got up and smoothed down her dress. She lay there with her eyes closed and her face white; he was afraid she had fainted. He kneeled down and kissed her gently on the cheek. She smiled ever so little and pulled his head down and ruffled his hair. “Little husband,” she said. After a while they got to their feet and walked through the redwood grove, without seeing it, to the trolleystation. Going home on the ferry they decided they’d get married inside of the week. Mac promised not to go to Nevada.
Next morning he got up feeling depressed. He was selling out. When he was shaving in the bathroom he looked at himself in the mirror and said, half aloud: “You bastard, you’re selling out to the sons of bitches.”
He went back to his room and wrote Maisie a letter.
DEAR MAISIE:
Honestly you mustn’t think for one minute I don’t love you ever so much, but I promised to go to Goldfield to help the gang run that paper and I’ve got to do it. I’ll send you my address as soon as I get there and if you really need me on account of anything, I’ll come right back, honestly I will.
A whole lot of kisses and love
FAINY
He went down to the Bulletin office and drew his pay, packed his bag and went down to the station to see when he could get a train for Goldfield, Nevada.
The Camera Eye (9)
all day the fertilizerfactories smelt something awful and at night the cabin was full of mosquitoes fit to carry you away but it was Crisfield on the Eastern Shore and if we had a gasoline boat to carry them across the bay here we could ship our tomatoes and corn and early peaches ship ’em clear to New York instead of being jipped by the commissionmerchants in Baltimore we’d run a truck farm ship early vegetables irrigate fertilize enrich the tobacco-exhausted land of the Northern Neck if we had a gasoline boat we’d run oysters in her in winter raise terrapin for the market
but up the freight siding I got talking to a young guy couldn’t have been much older ’n me was asleep in one of the boxcars asleep right there in the sun and the smell of cornstalks and the reek of rotting menhaden from the fertilizer factories he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account but he’d bummed all way from Minnesota he was going south and when I told him about Chesapeake Bay he wasn’t surprised but said I guess it’s too fur to swim it I’ll git a job in a menhaden boat
Big Bill
Big Bill Haywood was born in sixty nine in a boardinghouse in Salt Lake City.
He was raised in Utah, got his schooling in Ophir a mining camp with shooting scrapes, faro Saturday nights, whisky spilled on pokertables piled with new silver dollars.
When he was eleven his mother bound him out to a farmer, he ran away because the farmer lashed him with a whip. That was his first strike.
He lost an eye whittling a slingshot out of scruboak.
He worked for storekeepers, ran a fruitstand, ushered in the Salt Lake Theatre, was a messengerboy, bellhop at the Continental Hotel.
When he was fifteen
he went out to the mines in Humboldt County, Nevada,
his outfit was overalls, a jumper, a blue shirt, mining boots, two pair of blankets, a set of chessmen, boxinggloves and a big lunch of plum pudding his mother fixed for him.
When he married he went to live in Fort McDermitt built in the old days against the Indians, abandoned now that there was no more frontier;
there his wife bore their first baby without doctor or midwife. Bill cut the navelstring, Bill buried the afterbirth;
the child lived. Bill earned money as he could surveying, haying in Paradise Valley, breaking colts, riding a wide rangy country.
One night at Thompson’s Mill, he was one of five men who met by chance and stopped the night in the abandoned ranch. Each of them had lost an eye, they were the only one-eyed men in the county.
They lost the homestead, things went to pieces, his wife was sick, he had children to support. He went to work as a miner at Silver City.
At Silver City, Idaho, he joined the W.F.M., there he held his first union office; he was delegate of the Silver City miners to the convention of the Western Federation of Miners held in Salt Lake City in ’98.
From then on he was an organizer, a speaker, an exhorter, the wants of all the miners were his wants; he fought Coeur D’Alenes, Telluride, Cripple Creek,
joined the Socialist Party, wrote and spoke through Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Colorado to miners striking for an eight hour day, better living, a share of the wealth they hacked out of the hills.
In Chicago in January 1905 a conference was called that met at the same hall in Lake Street where the Chicago anarchists had addressed meetings twenty years before.
William D. Haywood was permanent chairman. It was this conference that wrote the manifesto that brought into being the I.W.W.
When he got back to Denver he was kidnapped to Idaho and tried with Moyer and Pettibone for the murder of the sheepherder Steuenberg, exgovernor of Idaho, blown up by a bomb in his own home.
When they were acquitted at Boise (Darrow was their lawyer) Big Bill Haywood was known as a workingclass leader from coast to coast.
Now the wants of all the workers were his wants, he was the spokesman of the West, of the cowboys and the lumberjacks and the harvesthands and the miners.