Haymarket by Martin Duberman Page B

a lot to learn about Chicago! Who would you have reported it to? The warden of Dunning?”
    “Yes, to those in charge.”
    Lizzie shook her head with amusement. “You weren’t here a few years back when the Dunning scandal broke.”
    “What scandal?”
    “Promise you won’t start cursing and yelling, but it was discovered that the warden had appointed his seventeen-year-old daughter as head of housekeeping, and that the chief physician, under cover of night, had for years been digging up the corpses of newly deceased inmates and selling them, at twenty dollars each, to medical colleges. It was apparently a lucrative trade.”
    “What did he do with the empty coffins,” Lucy said evenly. “Use them to start the Great Fire? You see, I don’t
have
to curse and yell.”
    The very day Tom was sent away, a tight-lipped Margaret told Lucy that “my Tommy will not be long at Dunning. That much I swear.”
    “But how will you get the court to release him?” Lucy asked, misjudging Margaret’s intentions. “That costs money. Lots more money than any of us have.”
    Three days later, when Lucy went to knock on the Hennesseys’ door, she found it wide open, the apartment stripped of its few remaining items, and the Hennesseys gone. At first she thought the landlord had turned them out, but he proved as mystified as everyone else at their disappearance.
    It was only months later that they learned from an unemployed neighborhood youth named Kruger, who’d “gone tramping” but had returned briefly to Chicago to visit his parents, that he’d spotted the entire hollow-cheeked Hennessey clan, including young Tom—somehow spirited out of Dunning—on a boxcar freight traveling west from Des Moines. They were part of the growing army of vagabonds, homeless and jobless, wandering the nation. “I seen folks,” Kruger said, “sleeping under bridges, in hayricks, barns, and hen roosts. In Iowa, heard about one family of five—went to sleep in an old lime kiln and was crushed to death that night by a cave-in.”
    “How do people get food, what do they live on?” Lizzie asked, sounding dazed.
    “An occasional dole from town officials, a few days’ work as farm laborers or street sweepers or coal carriers,” Kruger said. Then he smiled slyly. “And stealin’.”
    He told the Hennesseys’ Chicago friends that in fact he’d been able to speak with the family for only a minute or two. He’d caught up with them during a brief train stop when they were frantically trying to wash up in a nearby canal. When he greeted Margaret, she looked at him blankly, then turned away. Joe Hennessey would say no more than that they were heading west, where he hoped to work once more in the mines.
    Lucy never saw the Hennesseys again. Nor heard a word about their fate.
    “That Mr. Gianni was on the street today,” Lucy told Lizzie. For companionship, the two women had taken to doing piecework together in the Parsons’s apartment.
    “Gianni?”
    “You know—the produce man who comes around sometimes with hishorsecart. His stuff’s not the freshest, but he looks so worn down I try to buy a few tomatoes at least. I asked him how his daughter was, and he almost burst into tears. ‘My Sophia,’ he said—he doesn’t know much English—‘has much too hard in factory … material bad … break needle … must pay.’ I couldn’t catch his meaning at first, but he rubbed the heavy material of his overalls between his fingers and somehow got me to understand that that was the kind of rough material his daughter sews. It often breaks the machine’s needle and sometimes even the throat plate.”
    Lizzie shook her head knowingly.
    “The foreman fines Gianni’s daughter and the others girls five cents per needle, fifty cents per plate. Sometimes they bring home no money at all at the end of a week’s work.”
    “And the breakage isn’t even their fault,” Lizzie said.
    “What
is
their fault?” Lucy scoffed, “that they were