SethRibner2

Everett, Washington, November 5, 1916.

The steamer Verona glided into sparkling Port Gardner Bay as more than two hundred strong belted out “Hold the Fort.” The Union men aboard had passed their short voyage up Puget Sound’s evergreen coast singing the anthems from the red songbook they knew by heart. With the smokestacks and warehouses of Everett in view, their voices boomed:

We meet today in freedom’s cause and raise our voices high!

We’ll join our hands in union strong, to battle or to die!

They were members of the Industrial Workers of the World. Most called them the Wobblies, though nobody could say for certain how they earned the nickname. From points as far east as Butte they had answered the summons to rush to Everett. The week before, forty-one of their brothers aiming to preach the Wobbly gospel on Everett’s street corners had been beaten and run out of town at gunpoint. That Sunday, they would have their say. The festive mood on the crisp autumn afternoon was so infectious that the Verona’s few nonunion passengers didn’t mind being crammed among the footloose harvesters, miners, and timber beasts.

Hold the fort for we are coming, union men be strong.

Side by side keep pressing onward, victory will come.

Jack St. Dennis slapped some backs then squeezed from the excursion boat’s upper cabin onto the deck.

“Hey Jacko!” Tom Tracy called above the singing, thrumming engine, and bracing wind. Tracy had the muscular build of a teamster with intelligent eyes, a high forehead, and thick black hair that ran down the sides of his face into coarse whiskers. He put out an emergency appeal for two thousand men after the previous week’s incident. If only four hundred responded, that wasn’t bad; he had no ability to cart them to Everett anyway. 

The Wobs that assembled in Seattle resolved to pool their money and chartered the Verona. So many men marched four abreast from the IWW’s skid road meeting hall to the docks that morning that the small vessel reached its maximum capacity of 250 passengers in a jiffy. The steamer company had a second boat, the Calista, in reserve. It followed behind with the overflow of Wobblies and the displaced passengers who bought advance tickets to ride the Verona. 

“Ready with your spiel?” Tracy shouted in his hearty bass.

St Dennis hitched up his cut-off overalls to the top of his caulk boots. “As I’ll ever be.”

Tracy leaned in closer so he could make himself heard without yelling. “You’ll go before Ashleigh. He’ll be our closer.”

“Is he going to make it? I haven’t seen him.”

Tracy grinned. “Old Charlie’s predicting a turnout of five thousand or more. You think he’d miss a chance to speak to that kind of crowd? He rode up by rail on the interurban. That way he didn’t take a space on the boat. Just as well. It’ll give him a chance to work the press he invited for today’s lesson in free speech.”

Everett’s mill owners had crushed a strike by the local workers who cut shingles from raw cedar. Having gone months without pay and with a cold winter coming, the humbled shingle weavers slunk back to their jobs on the bosses’ old terms. The millworkers weren’t Wobbly radicals. They were craft unionists who considered themselves a rung above the unskilled farm and industrial laborers who belonged to the IWW. The Wobblies nonetheless descended on Everett to buck up the dispirited shingle weavers and demonstrate organized labor’s unbroken resolve. St. Dennis planned that afternoon to teach his listeners a practical lesson on how to do six hours’ work in a ten-hour day. If the shingle weavers folded their arms in the right way—the smart way—the bosses would come around. They wouldn’t have a choice.

St. Dennis eyed Abe Rabinowitz standing apart from the boisterous crowd on deck. The young New Yorker, fresh from that city’s public university, had recently shown up in Seattle. He sought out St. Dennis who, though not yet thirty himself, was a veteran organizer by Wobbly standards. Rabinowitz had earned his union credentials organizing garment workers in Newark and was eager to bring the Northwest fighting spirit back home. In the few weeks St. Dennis had known him, he seemed an irrepressible optimist—as a Wobbly organizer one had to be. He stood against the rail studying the shoreline.

St. Dennis edged over to him. “See something?”

“It’s too quiet.” Rabinowitz frowned and turned up the collar of his pea coat.

A lone dockhand and three men in dark suits and fedoras waited on the City Dock. The brooding commercial buildings lining the wharf cast a shadow over the waterfront. 

St. Dennis pointed to the hill rising above the wharf. “Look past the tracks.” Beyond a railroad crossing Everett’s courthouse square teemed with workers unfurling enormous red banners. Their cheers at the Verona’s approach lilted over the bay. “That’s what counts.” The young man failed to brighten, and St. Dennis tried to reassure him. “We’re gonna do just fine.”

Rabinowitz eyed St. Dennis. “These people are capable of anything.”

St. Dennis rubbed his chin out of habit. He had shaved off his vagabond beard with a straight razor that morning for his appearance before Everett’s city dwellers. His skin felt stubbly, but he hadn’t nicked himself badly. “There’re too many of us this time, Abe.”

The captain cut the throttle. A crew member at the bow tossed a line in a lazy arc to the dockworker on the pier who slipped the rope over a bollard and drew it fast. Another deckhand wedged ahead of St. Dennis and Rabinowitz to swing the gangplank into place. The Wobblies on board whooped and broke into a marching song. Men filed up from the cabin below. They pressed together waiting to disembark like tourists impatient to start a holiday.

The shortest of the three men on the pier stepped forward. He seemed about fifty with a flabby lassitude that masked a temperament as hard as the steel jacket he wore under his suit. The man cupped his hands around his mouth to better cast his voice. “Boys, I’m Sheriff McRae. Who’s your leader?”

St. Dennis found himself staring at the sheriff from the opposite end of the gangway and bellowed the stock Wobbly retort. “We’re all leaders!”

The Wobs on the boat erupted in cheers and laughter. Without turning from the Verona, the sheriff waggled the revolver he drew from a holster on his belt. At the sheriff’s signal, over a hundred armed deputies streamed from one of the warehouses fronting the dock and fanned out along the wharf.

McRae leveled his revolver at the gangplank. “You can’t land here.”

“The hell we can’t!” St. Dennis roared as his fellow Wobblies surged behind him.

A gunshot echoed across the harbor. St. Dennis turned to see Abe Rabinowitz stagger and crumple onto the deck. Then a hailstorm of rifle fire from shore rocked the boat. Some of the terrified Wobblies dropped to the deck where their prone bodies became targets for buckshot and dum-dum bullets. Most bolted for cover on the far side of the upper cabin. The panicked rush caused the steamer to list and water poured over the lower deck. Men without a handhold skidded into the bay. Those who saw no escape jumped. Sharpshooters among the sheriff’s men fired on the figures bobbing in the icy water.

St. Dennis struggled to maintain his footing and keep his head amid the screams and bodies jostling him. Bullet holes scarred the pilot house, but the engine revved. Somebody was trying to power the Verona to open water. St. Dennis dropped to the sloping deck awash with blood and slithered to the mooring line. Stretching over the boat’s gunwale, he flicked open his switchblade. He sawed at the rope pulled taut as steel cable. A bullet whizzed by his ear. The gunman would be adjusting his sight. With single-minded focus St. Dennis threw all his bodyweight into one slash at the rope. The line snapped. The Verona, engine in full reverse, tore backward as if launched from a slingshot. St. Dennis hurtled overboard into the murky sludge at the edge of the pier.

His heart clenched as he hit the frigid mix of seawater and mill runoff. Port Gardner Bay had been dredged for deep draft freighters, so there was no seeing the bottom. St. Dennis descended below the Verona’s keel through the inky brine weighed down by his waterlogged boots, overalls, and flannel shirt and underwear. He oriented himself and willed his legs to kick hard to the surface. He broke water to the sound of gunfire, gulped air, and submerged. St. Dennis held his breath as long as he could stand then rose to the waterline once more. With all the power in his numb extremities, he paddled to the City Dock and clambered up the wooden pilings.

St. Dennis flopped onto his back gasping. The guns were still. He rolled over to see the Verona out of range and steaming for Seattle. The Calista, which had overtaken the Verona in Port Gardner Bay, was turning to beat a retreat with her sister ship. St. Dennis got to his feet unable to control his shivering. A pack of deputies charged him, and he raised his trembling hands into the air. They might have plugged him right then, but several women who came for the rally shoved past the barrier Sheriff McRae had erected at the railroad tracks. They ran straight for the deputies in their long Sunday dresses screaming, “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!”

PRE-EVENT ASSIGNMENTS

My novel has two protagonists, Jack St. Dennis an organizer for the radical Industrial Workers of the World who enlists in the Army to escape trumped up murder charges, and Sophie Weiss, a New York nurse, who joins the British military nursing service to flee an arranged marriage. Their stories intertwine once they meet in Arctic Russia.

Story Statement.

An American soldier and a young New York nurse meet in Archangel during World War I and strive to sustain their love amid the death and destruction of a brutal winter war against the Red Army.

Antagonist.

Antagonistic forces that propel the novel are: (i) the First World War and subsequent war with the Red Army; (ii) the Spanish flu epidemic; and (iii) the extreme Arctic winter.

Major Oliver Reece, the British personnel and supply officer for the North Russia mission, is a personal antagonist for Sophie Weiss. He is heir to a well-connected Wiltshire family, attended Cambridge, and became an accountant. A grasping opportunist, he enlists in the army as a means to increase his social station. His failure leading troops in battle resulted in a posting to London with the Quartermaster Corps. He joins the North Russia expedition to gain a promotion from captain to major and a second opportunity to distinguish himself in a war zone. Reece picks Sophie for the mission based upon her Russian language ability and seconds her to the beleaguered Russian Red Cross. He seeks to imprison Sophie on his accusation that she stole British medicines to treat American soldiers stricken with Spanish flu. Later, after Sophie rejects his advances, Reece threatens her with renewed arrest as a Bolshevik spy. He then refuses to authorize Sophie’s transport home once her mission in Archangel is complete.

Title

Archangel

Never Comes the Dawn 

The Desperate Road Home

Comparable Titles

The Cold Millions, Jess Walter (2020): This novel of IWW activism and labor/management confrontation in the early twentieth century Northwest addresses themes that are prominent in my story. My novel opens with an event known as the Everett Massacre and dramatizes efforts by Washington State business leaders and the federal government to destroy the radical labor movement.

When the World Fell Silent, Donna Jones Alward (2024): This World War I era story of an unwed pregnant nurse who serves on the home front at the time of a disastrous munitions explosion in Halifax Harbor is a recent entry in a line of historical novels, of which mine is a part, that depict how World War I changed societal norms through a loosening of social mores and the employment of women in grueling nursing roles.

Hook Line

An American soldier with radical sympathies and a young American nurse serving with the British military strive to sustain their love amid the isolation, death, and despair of the 1919 Anglo-American winter war in Arctic Russia against the Red Army.

Inner Conflict

Jack St. Dennis: 

Primary Internal Conflict: Jack St. Dennis must decide between his own happiness in having a future with Sophie and honoring the pledge to his dead friend and commanding officer, Lieutenant George Wynn, to bring Wynn’s lover, Katia Petrov, out of Russia.

Scene: After St. Dennis and Sophie save Katia from a Red Army advance, St. Dennis learns the US Army will only evacuate Russians from Archangel if they are war brides of American soldiers. He responds by marrying Katia which honors his duty to his friend but ruins his chance for a life with Sophie.

Secondary Internal Conflict: At first, St. Dennis is torn by his loyalty to the IWW’s ideals and his obligations as a noncommissioned officer responsible for training draftees once the United States enters World War I. In Archangel on a supposed peacekeeping mission, St. Dennis must rationalize fighting the Red Army to bring his men home safely.

Scene: An IWW operative approaches St. Dennis once the Army assigns him to a training camp outside Battle Creek, Michigan, and advises that the union wants St. Dennis to go to France and organize within the ranks. When told that some in the union’s leadership wonder where his allegiances lie, St. Dennis responds: “My job is to make sure the workers who’ve been drafted survive what’s coming. I’m on their side.”

Sophie Weiss:

Primary Internal Conflict: Making an irretrievable break with her family by fleeing the marriage her parents have arranged for her.

Scene: After rejecting a number of eligible suitors and still living at home at age twenty-three, Sophie learns that her parents have arranged a marriage for her to a much older man. She resolves to flee but has no money of her own and can’t envision living alone as a single woman in a strange city. The next morning Sophie seeks the advice of the directress of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service where she works. The directress gives her the phone number of an English doctor in New York who is clandestinely recruiting American medical personnel for Britain’s war effort.

Secondary Internal Conflict: Dealing with the pain and self-loathing brought about by her reliance on opium to relieve her loneliness and depression.

Scene: After being seconded to the American forces in North Russia from the Russian Red Cross, the British order Sophie’s return to serve aboard a hospital ship that has docked in Archangel. Sophie has managed to isolate herself from anyone who might suspect her opium addiction. In the close quarters aboard ship, Sophie fears she will be unable to keep her habit a secret. Although motivated by her addiction, she tells a half-truth to the senior American medical officer that she is afraid to go back to working for the British and that she has grown comfortable being around Americans again. Sophie hates herself for lying to this man who has protected her from the vindictive Major Reece. She accepts the medical officer’s offer of an immediate assignment to the Russian interior to work at a hospital where she will have easy access to opium compounds.

Setting

Arctic Russia: In the early twentieth century the landscapes in Arctic Russia consisted of barren tundra with few roads, several important rivers, and vast pine forests. The novel’s scenes set in North Russia take place in remote forward outposts or the two largest cities in Archangel Province. The isolation and desolation of the North Russia expedition’s advanced positions test the soldiers’ inner strength as much as the war tests their courage.

Archangel: The city of Archangel follows the crescent shape of the Divina River. During the war gray cruisers and freighters painted with camouflage compete with sailing vessels, trawlers, and freight barges for space at the crowded docks. Across the river, is the sister city of Bakharitza, sometimes referred to by American servicemen as the Brooklyn of Archangel. Once the British seize control of the city through a coup in the summer of 1918, Archangel bustles with trade. Wagons cram the alleys around wooden warehouses as supplies pour in from Britain. In summer, the temperature is hot and humid; open sewers under plank sidewalks have a foul smell, and mosquitos and greenflies swarm. An electric tram operates on the Troitsky Prospekt, Archangel’s main thoroughfare, that boasts outdoor cafes. British soldiers, a fair number missing arms or wearing eyepatches, patrol the streets and Cossacks in candy-colored uniforms stroll the city. Officers of various nations salute one another and speak in strange tongues. Black-robed Orthodox priests drift through the throng, attesting to the influence of Russian mysticism despite the city’s military trappings. In addition to Cyrillic writing, the storefronts display pictures of the wares sold inside for the benefit of a foreign clientele. The blue domes of Archangel’s cathedral loom over the city and there is an imposing stone capitol building. In winter, the Divina freezes solid and muzhiks driving pony sleighs zigzag through the streets. The American 310^th Engineers build the Gorka toboggan run which adds to the cityscape a structure like a Coney Island roller coaster. The natives of the city are known as “treskoedy” or cod eaters. Notwithstanding all the wartime activity, by the spring of 1919, a pall hangs over Archangel. While the Americans and British might evacuate in the face of an advancing Red Army, there is no escape for the treskoedy.

Shenkursk: Perched on a hilltop above the Vaga River, Shenkursk is at the time Archangel Province’s second largest city. It is half-mile square and has four thousand inhabitants. During the reign of the czars, the city was a summer resort for wealthy tourists who came for the abundant hunting and fishing and good local food. Katia Petrov, one of the main characters in the novel, escapes from Petrograd with her father when the Bolsheviks seize power, and they take refuge in the family dacha in Shenkursk. Situated in a meadow dotted with wildflowers, the rambling dacha has a view of the surrounding hills and its own bath house fed by a natural spring. The city hall and other public buildings have electric light and quaint shops and restaurants front its cobblestone streets. Shenkursk’s tidy, well-maintained houses are clad in brick or have pastel-painted siding. The domed Holy Trinity Church rises above the Vaga River. There is also a monastery with whitewashed walls and an abandoned imperial barracks. When a small American contingent first arrives in September 1918, the residents welcome them and hold a celebration with traditional Russian folk dancing conducted in the city hall. After the American detachment receives orders to press further into the Russian interior, the British military arrives in force and transforms Shenkursk into its forward base. The British import the Spanish flu epidemic to the city resulting in the deaths of many natives, the closure of the shops and restaurants, constant funeral processions, and streets lined with coffins. The Red Army advances in force on the expedition’s forward defensive positions in January 1919. The temperature at the time nears fifty degrees below zero. In Shenkursk, the retreating British and American troops assemble in the torch-lit streets for a nighttime evacuation amid the city’s frantic residents. At daybreak, the Red Army bombards the once idyllic town and reduces it to rubble.

Blockhouses: The American soldiers in the North Russia expedition occupy blockhouses at the most forward positions. Six inches of sawdust supply the insulation between the double log walls. A rectangular stove centered on the plank floor provides the heat. The sturdy blockhouses with slits to fire guns can withstand most enemy actions other than a direct hit with an explosive shell. Rings of barbed wire to ward off a flanking assault or an attack from the impenetrable snow-dusted forests surround the structures. With January temperatures that dip to forty or fifty degrees below zero, the soldiers are confined to their blockhouses. Cooking, eating, and cleaning weapons are the only breaks in the monotonous, tense days. The men start wasting away from their unvaried diet of canned food. While each blockhouse has attached outhouses, the best the men can do to stay clean is wash with snow heated on the stove. They suffer a constant itch from lice and scabies. To brighten the polar night, they rely upon the glow from the stove and smoky candle lamps which scarcely produce enough illumination for their interminable card games. The men jam together on the hard floor to sleep and, with no ventilation to speak of, the indoor air reeked. Some soldiers prefer to sleep on benches attached to the walls; they are further from the stove’s heat, but the smells are less disagreeable. The alternative is to step outdoors into air so biting that breathing feels like suffocating.