This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

  It was late afternoon when we returned to the Flats. Gertie’s hadn’t opened yet for the evening meal, but a couple of men were sitting at a table. When we stepped inside, they turned and stared at us, as if we were trespassing.

  “Gertie’s not serving yet,” one of the men said.

  He was tall, broad-shouldered, with lanky brown hair, and the dark shadow of a beard across his lower face. His eyes were sky blue, just like Flo’s, but there wasn’t a hint of welcome in them.

  The other man was an Indian, and right away I knew it was Calvin, Forrest’s brother. He was younger than Forrest by at least a decade and wore his hair in a braid that reached just below his shoulders. His aspect was different from his companion’s, especially when his eyes, the color of hickory nuts, settled on Mose, whom he studied intently.

  It was Albert who replied for us, and he spoke defiantly: “We’re working for Gertie tonight.”

  “She didn’t say anything about you,” the broad-shouldered man shot back.

  “That’s because it’s none of your business what I do here,” Gertie said, entering from the kitchen. “What you do on your boat is your affair, Tru. What I do here is mine. And I don’t like that tone, especially with my employees.”

  The man she’d called Tru had a glass in front of him. The color of the liquid inside and the slight head of foam told me he was drinking beer. From his tone and the surly look he gave us, I figured it wasn’t his first.

  Flo came in behind Gertie and looked us up and down with approval. “Cute as bugs in a rug.” Then she pulled up a chair at the table where Calvin and the surly man sat. “No luck, Tru?”

  He took a long swallow from his beer. “Wooster Morgan says it’ll be at least a week but more like two. Claims he’s got to locate the engine parts. The Berenson tow’ll go to Cooper, that bastard. God only knows if I’ll be able to snag anything anytime soon after that.”

  “You can’t fix it?”

  “Maybe. If Morgan gave me use of his equipment.”

  “Which he’s already said will happen when hell freezes over,” Calvin offered with a calm smile.

  “Oh, Tru, I told you not to let your temper get the best of you.” She put her hand gently on his arm. “Something will come along.”

  “I hope I still have a crew when it does. Mac Cooper’s already put out the word he’ll take every hand willing to work for him.”

  “Loyalty counts for a lot,” Flo said.

  “With Hoover in the White House, money counts for more,” Tru replied.

  “Calvin, it was your brother who sent these kids here,” Flo said, then introduced us one by one.

  “How is Forrest?” the Indian asked.

  “Fine when we left him,” Albert said.

  “And where was that?”

  “Mankato.”

  “Must’ve run out of cows to punch. Give you any sense what his plans were?”

  “No, sir,” Albert said.

  Calvin sat back and said, “If we can’t get the Hellor fixed, maybe I’ll pop down to Mankato.”

  “The Hellor?” I said.

  “The name of my brother’s towboat,” Flo said.

  Brother and sister. I could see it then.

  “It’s really the Hell or High Water,” Flo said. “We just call her the Hellor for short.”

  “But not for long if I can’t get that damn engine repaired and back to shoving tows,” her brother said.

  “Going to sit there and drink until we open for business, Tru?” Gertie said, hands on hips, her eyes drilling the surly man.

  “I’d suck on a dead catfish before I’d eat your swill, Gertie.”

  “Suit yourself, but it’s Flo’s lentil soup.”

  “I’ll come back,” Tru said and finished his beer. “Let’s go, Cal. See what might be shaking down at the landing.”

  After they’d gone, Flo said, “He’s really a good man. He’s just caught between a rock and a hard place.”

  “He’s been caught there since I’ve known him,” Gertie said. She studied us, then she said, “You kids cleaned up good. Now get yourselves set. We’re going to have a busy night.”

  It was, in its way, my first official employment, and my first evening on the job turned out to be like no job I would ever have after it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  GERTIE SERVED ONLY one offering for each meal. That night it was the lentil soup and bread, take it or leave it. Which made serving pretty easy. Gertie’s was a bare-bones operation, no fluff or frills, no tablecloths, no fancy framed photos or paintings on the walls, just a place that served up good, homemade fare at a decent price. Flo dished up from the kitchen; Emmy and I delivered the food; Albert cleared the tables; Mose washed the plates, flatware, and glasses; and Gertie took the cash and kept things moving.

  Everyone knew Gertie and Gertie knew everyone. Most of her clientele were men, a lot of them clearly down on their luck. “I’m not running a charity kitchen here” was a line I heard her deliver with some frequency, but I never saw her send a man away hungry.

  Although she opened her door for business at five o’clock sharp, she didn’t have a specific closing time. Business ended for the night when the soup was gone, and it was no problem emptying those pots.

  After we’d cleaned the place up, and the bowls and flatware were put away, Flo brought out a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, cold sliced beef, tomatoes, and lettuce and made us all sandwiches. We sat at a table near the front window. It was dusk, and evening light came through the glass in a wave of gold. Outside, the street was quiet, the hustle of the foot traffic and horse carts and the few automobiles ebbed to a gentler flow.

  “You work hard,” Gertie said. “And you don’t complain. Could’ve used you a long time ago.”

  “Everybody was asking about Elmer and Jugs,” I said. “Who are Elmer and Jugs?”

  “Until two days ago, they were doing just what you all did today. Right now, they’re sitting in the county jail across the river.”

  “What happened?”

  Gertie said, “Got drunk and mixed it up with the wrong people. Fifteen days before they’re free again.” She looked each of us over carefully. “How about you taking their places? You in any hurry to get to Saint Louis?”

  Albert said, “What’ll you pay?”

  “Room and board and a dollar a day.”

  “For each of us?”

  Gertie smiled. “Don’t need you that bad. A dollar for the kit and caboodle.”

  Albert gave each of us a look and saw no objection. A dollar a day for the four us would, after fifteen days, be enough to carry us some of the distance to Saint Louis. He held out his hand to Gertie. “Deal.”

  The door opened, and Tru and Calvin returned and swung a couple of chairs up near our table.

  “Nothing left,” Gertie said.

  “Those sandwiches look good,” Tru said.

  “I’ll fix you both something.” Flo left the table and went to the kitchen.

  “So, what did you find out?” Gertie asked. Although her voice was sharp, I had the sense she was hoping to hear something good.

  “If I can get the Hellor on the river by next week, Kreske has a tow of grain that he’ll give me. Perkins was supposed to push it, but he got busted with a hold full of hooch bound for Moline. The Kreske tow goes to Cincinnati, and there’s a load of phosphate I can push back here.”

  “Can you repair the Hellor in time?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think, Cal?”

  “Up to you and Wooster Morgan. You make nice with him, he might let me use his equipment. Even then . . .” He gave a noncommittal shrug.

  “Truman Waters go crawling to anyone?” Gertie said. “That I’d like to see.”

  The door opened again, and a kid rushed inside. I recognized him. John Kelly, one of the kids who’d spoken to us from the tracks earlier that day.

  “Gertie,” he said, out of breath. “Baby’s coming, and Ma’s having real trouble.”

 
; “Did she send you?”

  He shook his head. “Granny. She thinks we need a doctor.” He glanced over and saw me. “Hey, Buck.”

  “You two know each other?” Gertie asked.

  “Met this afternoon,” John Kelly said.

  “You.” Gertie drilled me with her eyes. “Come with us.” She stood up and said to everyone else, “Don’t eat me into bankruptcy. Flo!” she called toward the kitchen. “I’m leaving. Mrs. Goldstein’s in labor.”

  Flo stepped through the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on an apron. “You don’t know anything about delivering babies, Gertie.”

  “Not knowing something never stopped her before,” I heard Tru say under his breath.

  “We’ll be back when things are good at the Goldsteins’.” Gertie marched out the door with John Kelly and me trying to keep up.

  We didn’t go with her to John Kelly’s house. At the end of the street, she ordered, “You two go to Dr. Weinstein. You know where he lives, Shlomo?”

  “Yeah, over on State. But Ma says we can’t afford no doctor, Gertie.”

  “You let me worry about that. You just make sure he comes.”

  “Shlomo?” I asked after we’d parted ways with Gertie. “I thought your name was John Kelly.”

  “That’s just my nickname.”

  “Nickname? Mook and Chili are nicknames.”

  “It’s complicated. I’ll explain later. Come on.” He began to run.

  John Kelly—across my whole life I’ve never thought of him as Shlomo Goldstein—pounded on the door of a house on State Street, which was opened eventually by a thin woman. Although it was near dark and she looked bone-tired, she managed to ask with great patience, “What is it, boys?”

  “My ma’s having a baby and it ain’t going so good.”

  “Your ma?”

  “Rosie Goldstein on Third Street.”

  “What is it, Esther?” A man, looking even more tired than the woman, stepped into view at her back.

  “This boy’s mother is having a baby, Simon, and he says there’s some difficulty.”

  A pair of spectacles were perched at the end of the man’s narrow nose. He looked over his glasses, appraising me and John Kelly. “Who’s with her now?”

  “My granny and my big sister.”

  “No midwife?”

  “Just them. But Gertie’s on her way. She told us to fetch you.”

  “Gertie Hellmann? Why didn’t you say? Mother, get my bag.”

  * * *

  THE GOLDSTEINS LIVED in the upper of a ramshackle duplex with a black waterline two feet up the outside walls.

  “That?” John Kelly said, when I asked. “Flood. Happens almost every spring on the Flats.”

  I could hear the tortured cries of Mrs. Goldstein as soon as we entered the house. Two woman greeted us, the downstairs neighbors, who were spinster sisters, Eva and Bella Cohen. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Weinstein,” Eva said. “We offered help but something’s not right.”

  “Stand aside, good ladies,” the doctor said and mounted the stairs.

  “You boys,” Bella said. “Stay down here. Your sister, Emma, is inside, Shlomo. We’ll fix you something to eat.”

  The Cohen sisters fed us rice pudding, me and John Kelly and his little sister, Emma. I’d never tasted it before and it was quite good, but not good enough to distract us from the cries coming from above. Even when I was wounded and spent time in a field hospital in France years later, I never heard screams like those that came from John Kelly’s mother as she struggled to give birth that long July night on the West Side Flats of Saint Paul. They went on for hours, and Bella eventually sang Emma to sleep on the ratty sofa and covered her with a knitted afghan and told John Kelly and me that we should try to get some rest. But John Kelly couldn’t sleep. He watched the ceiling as if he expected at any moment the baby would drop right through it.

  “Do you have a deck of cards, Miss Cohen?” I finally asked.

  “Yes, Buck,” Eva replied. “I’ll get it.”

  I said to John Kelly, “You know Crazy Eights?”

  “Sure. Don’t everybody?”

  So, we played Crazy Eights well into the early hours of the next morning, when the woman’s screaming finally stopped and another kind of screaming began, higher and weaker.

  Bella Cohen, who’d been rocking in a chair, nodding off occasionally, clasped her hands dramatically and said, “The baby is here.”

  John Kelly threw down his cards, leapt to his feet, and ran up the stairs outside the Cohens’ flat. I thanked the sisters for their kindness and followed him up. At the top of the landing, I encountered Gertie, who looked as pale as the rice pudding we’d eaten. In her arms she held a bundle of sheets, which had probably been white once but were now deeply mottled with ruby-colored stains.

  “A boy,” she said.

  I stared at the sheets, speechless. I had no idea about childbirth, and what I saw in Gertie’s arms terrified me. “She’s dead?”

  Gertie shook her head and smiled wanly. “No, Buck, just a very difficult delivery. What’s called a breech birth. The baby was turned all wrong.”

  “Is it always that . . . that noisy? And messy?”

  “Not always, I think.”

  “Have you seen a lot of babies born?”

  “Honestly, Buck? This was my first.”

  “I hope I never see it.” I was still staring at the bloodied sheets.

  “It’s a boy,” Gertie said, looking over my shoulder at the Cohen sisters, who’d come up the stairs behind me.

  The sisters laughed and said something to each other in a language I would come to learn was Yiddish. “The sheets,” Eva said. “Let us take care of the washing.”

  “Thank you,” Gertie said, and gave them over. “One more thing, Buck. Shlomo has newspapers to deliver. Would you go with him? It’s been a rough night for his family, and I expect he might appreciate the company.”

  I said I would, and Gertie thanked me and went back into the Goldsteins’ flat. A few minutes later, John Kelly came out looking like somebody had just lifted a piano off his chest.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll be late delivering my papers.”

  “Mind if I come?”

  “You’re a mensch,” he said and threw his arm over my shoulder as if we’d always been the best of friends.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  THERE WERE NO streetlights on the Flats, but our way was lit by moon glow. We crossed an arched, stone bridge over the Mississippi. Below us, the river was rippled with silver, but in the distance, it tunneled black into the vast dark of night. We made our way along empty streets that ran between the imposing buildings of downtown Saint Paul. I’d visited Saint Louis many years before, which I remembered was also full of looming architecture, but I’d been a resident of Lincoln School for a long time, outside a one-horse town you could practically spit across, and I found the endless, empty corridors of the city unnerving.

  There was a lot to be absorbed that night, and we were quiet as we walked. But finally I asked a question that had been nibbling at me the whole time we’d sat with the Cohen sisters.

  “Where’s your dad, John Kelly?”

  “He’s a junk dealer. Off all the time collecting stuff. I see him once a month or so, when he comes back to sell. He’s in South Dakota right now.”

  “Who takes care of things while he’s gone?”

  “We all pull together, but Pop says I’m the man of the house. What about you? Where are your folks?”

  “Dead. Long time ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do you call yourself John Kelly?”

  “Safer. Easier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cops, most of ’em, are Irish. They find out you’re Jewish, they’re liable to give you grief. Hell, maybe even kill you. Just look at Gertie.”

  “Her face, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Cops did that.”

  “Why?”

  “Like
I said, they find out you’re Jewish, their billy clubs come right out. Way I understand it, Gertie tried to help some poor schlub the cops were trying to beat to death, and they did the same to her.”

  We went up an alley and came to a loading dock, nearly empty now, that ran along the back of a building. A bull of a man stood alone there, chewing on the stub of a cigar.

  “Where the hell you been, kid?” he snapped.

  “Hard night,” John Kelly said, trying to sound tough.

  The man threw a bundle of newspapers tied with twine at John Kelly’s feet. “You get those papers out fast, see. I don’t want no complaints.”

  “Ever had any complaints from my customers?”

  “Don’t crack wise with me, kid. I’ll bounce your ass all over town.”

  “All right, all right,” John Kelly said.

  He lifted the paper bundle by the twine and we wove through downtown, then up a long, steep hill, and finally entered an area near the cathedral, where great houses rose, the biggest I’d ever seen. Streetlamps burned brightly on every corner, and under one of them, John Kelly paused, pulled out a jackknife, and cut the twine. He tried to gather the papers under one arm, but it was hopeless.

  “I got a canvas bag at home makes carrying these a lot easier. So rattled tonight I forgot it.”

  “Give me half,” I said.

  We did his route together, tramping up one street and down the next, the houses all white columns, gingerbread trim, fancy shutters, and ornate wrought-iron fences, everything screaming wealth, and I thought about the world as I knew it then. There seemed to me two kinds of people—those with and those without. Those with were like the Brickmans, who’d got everything they had by stealing from those without. Were all the people sleeping in the great houses on Cathedral Hill like the Brickmans? If so, I decided I’d rather be one of those without.

  We’d delivered the last paper, and there was a faint suggestion of light in the eastern sky, when a gruff voice hailed us. We stopped under a streetlamp and a big cop strolled out of the shadows of an overarching elm.