On November 11, 1919, at the age of 28, Wesley Everest’s teeth were reportedly caved in with the butt of a rifle. He was beaten, possibly castrated, and hung from the Mellon Street Bridge in Centralia, Washington, 45 miles from my hometown.
Everest was an anarchist, a member of the IWW, a global union that included women who fought, sometimes violently, for equity. Everest was accused of murder, although the union called it self-defense.
In the morning, Everest was cut down from the bridge and left in the river. By evening, he was laid out in a jail cell with the hanging rope still tied around his neck. Neither coroner in town would take his body. In fact, one of the coroners was possibly the person who castrated Everest the night before. His jailed friends were forced at gunpoint to dig the hole where he was buried.
Writing about the bloody history of the logging industry in Washington State felt like fighting a mob on a crowded street, throwing punches with tears in my eyes. Composing stories about teens growing up during the fallout of a timber bust felt much the same way.
My family logged on the Olympic Peninsula for a long time, but not forever. They logged until the big trees were gone, and the cities rose, shining.
The logging industry was different in Washington than surrounding states because Puget Sound offered deep water ports that supported large timber operations. Despite existing native American communities, large tracts of land were divided between wealthy timber barons and logged by prisoners and young, poorly-paid, mostly British and Scandinavian workers. From the beginning of European settlement, the state suffered severe economic and social stratification.
Writing about the bloody history of the logging industry in Washington State felt like fighting a mob on a crowded street, throwing punches with tears in my eyes.In Vera Violet I wrote about the ways lumber barons kept control of the mostly powerless workers. Another critique the IWW made was that timber workers in Washington made so little money, and the work was so unstable, they could not settle down and have families. The harsh conditions were likely what made young timber workers attracted to radical unions like the IWW.
During my late teens and early 20s, I spent nights researching Wesley Everest, the IWW, and the history of the timber industry in Washington State. I scribbled in notebooks while my roommates slept. I saved chapters on brightly colored floppy disks, printed pages at public libraries, and edited chapters in coffee shops. These efforts slowly added to a messy pile of papers that I initially titled, Some of Always because I considered the story a small part of something bigger that would always exist.
The ways that this story repeated itself throughout history, throughout the world, haunted my nights.
When I graduated high school, I didn’t go to college. Instead, I packed my Nissan Stanza haph-hazardly with essential items and left. I wasn’t sure what I was running from. I didn’t know what I hoped to find.
But I carried the pile of notebooks and paper with me in a backpack from western Washington State, to Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and finally back home. For years, I worked and lived in neighborhoods not typically featured on tourism websites, towns most people don’t visit. Places like where I grew up.
In those years, I made mistakes and experienced losses that led me, again and again, back to my solitary world of words. Back to the ghosts in the rain. The logging town streets and my tiny studio apartment 2 blocks from the tidewater mill. I kept returning to the story and the characters who grew increasingly more real to me. And through the distractions of manual labor, addiction, violence, aching bones, and divorce I carried this story in my mind.
And the people who believed in me carried my soul.
At some point, I knew that my life had to change, and the change would be different from what the American myth tells us is possible. Less like pulling myself up by my bootstraps. More like a suicide mission.
When I started college, a friend gave me a laptop and somewhere between work and night classes, the pile of papers and notebooks meshed themselves into an actual novel. This process required discipline, but also practice, and more importantly friends. I started reading at open mic nights and as a featured writer in public libraries, indie bookstores, and coffee shops. At these places, I found a community of readers and writers who never stopped helping me. People who took time out of their lives because they believed in something bigger. People who kept telling me, “you can do this, you have to.”
In 2014, I received even more help from Jonathan Evison who accepted an ugly self-printed version of Vera Violet after I arrived hours late to his workshop. I struggled to explain that I’d been working out of town, and had driven from another state and made it just in time for everything to be over. Jonathan, out of kindness, not only accepted the book, but actually read it. He championed the story and gave it to Harry Kirchner who found it a home with Counterpoint.
In 2017, I moved back to my hometown for good. This time, I carried my one-year-old son Walter, and a master’s degree from the University of Montana.
Inside Vera Violet, there is a question hanging, and it’s taken me 20 years to answer:
Why am I so angry?
And beyond that, why are so many people, in so many economically abandoned places, losing hope?
Two weeks later, shortly before my book tour, I took Walter to Seaside, Oregon to visit his grandmother. After the visit, I left Astoria and crossed the mouth of the Columbia River on highway 101 heading north, heading home. Over the water, I listened to the song, “Don’t look back,” on the new Hangmen album.
“I’ve been beat down.
I’ve been bloodied,
I’ve been kicked around, and muddied.”
I thought of the quote I had repeated at so many readings, “Why are you wasting so much time hanging around this old town?…You gotta put down on paper all those pictures in your head…You gotta do all those things you was gonna do! If you don’t, all of this is for nothing!”
On the bridge, Brian Small sang:
But there’s a light at the end of the tracks, don’t look back
When Wesley Everest finally died hanging from the Mellon Street bridge, the crowd shot his body repeatedly. On the steep incline of the truss bridge, I felt like I was at the end of a pendulum that would never stop swinging. I looked out over the water. The sky was peach.
“Do you see any whales?” I asked Walter.
From his carseat, he carefully surveyed the waves and answered solemnly, “No. Just water.”
The song was ending, and Bryan Small sang:
“But now I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.”
As we reached the end of the bridge, it started to rain.
In the shadows of my dark ceiling, I traced the path of greed until it was bloody and led to broken teeth, smoking rifles, bodies hanging.At our house later, I brushed Walter’s teeth and dressed him in his pajamas. I let him curl up beside me in my bed. He asked for a story.
I tried to talk, but the words came out scattered. He put his hand on my cheek and said, “Tell the right story.”
I took a deep breath and started over.
When he fell asleep, I kissed the top of his head and whispered, “I love you.”
I stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed. American myths floated through my mind. Like the idea that crime, anger, and poverty happen in a vacuum. That it’s people, and not policies, that need to change, that are broken.
In the shadows of my dark ceiling, I traced the path of greed until it was bloody and led to broken teeth, smoking rifles, bodies hanging. From inside my small house, I felt the shiny city pushing outward.
I struggled with a crime America couldn’t admit to, a crime based in economics.
Power swung wildly. Anger and beauty. Peace, justice, and murder. I knew I was in the way.
The crime, it wouldn’t let me sleep.
