Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  “Aren’t we Jews?”

  “In a way.”

  “That’s why she died? She wouldn’t go? And Cossacks got her because they hate Jews?”

  “No,” Anna said, rising from the steps to clasp Karel’s shoulder. “Silke made that up because you wouldn’t understand the truth. Mother was murdered. But not by Cossacks. The man killed her before the Cossacks even attacked.”

  “What man?”

  “The one who led us there. The actor. Some Bohemian man. She was seeing him. They had a romance. Everyone knew that. When war started and Father wanted to leave, the actor went into a rage. It was he who did it. Not the Russians. The actor stabbed her one night and ran off.”

  Karel looked sick to his stomach, like he couldn’t fully believe what Anna said. “You’re lying,” he said, but she didn’t respond to the accusation. All she needed to do was set her lips in a line and wait for him to come back around. It was obvious he believed her.

  “Did we bury her before we left?” Karel asked.

  “Yes. She’s buried in a church courtyard there. Don’t you remember? The three handfuls of dirt on the coffin?”

  “No.”

  “You were there, Karel.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I don’t remember.”

  “Such a little boy. So pathetic. We wanted to bawl like you, but it was difficult for us. We knew what had gone on. You understood nothing. That’s why we let you go on like a baby.”

  Karel left the cellar as soon as she finished the telling. He stomped up the steps and out through the kitchen to the back door and was gone. Anna stayed awhile under the floorboards, moved deeper in the cellar, where it was dark, and sat on a crate. She didn’t understand why she said those things. She didn’t know any better than Karel about their mother or what happened in Galizien. Those rumors she passed on were just what Theresa said. Anna didn’t know them as fact. She sat on a crate and looked at her shoes. They were ugly shoes. She hated them. The straps torn at the stitches. The shine worn off. She saw her legs and hated them too. Her skinny legs, bowed a little. The way her knees knobbed out wider than her shins. That was why she stayed under a quilt so much, even when it was hot, so she didn’t have to see her legs.

  Anna stayed in the attic even more the next week. She felt bad about what she said. That Karel had bawled. That he was a baby. Silke and Theresa teased Karel too much about that. Anna should have known better. She laid under a quilt on the sofa and felt her legs hurt. That was right, she thought. That was what she deserved.

  Karel and his friends were at a lot of SOSA meetings that month, the nights Emil Braun spoke. It never hurt to have the buddings of a crowd stirring when Emil rose to bellow “Oyez! Oyez!” to silence the old-timers. He passed around a tattered copy of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and claimed he knew its author, Alexander Berkman, personally, grinning across the cigar-smoky room, his back to the pink-armed barkeeps, the balding top of his head in the mirror.

  “If we want to see real progress in action, we got to knock Tom Dennison and his stooges out. What we got now’s a government that’s protector for corporate and monopoly interests only. Along with that comes a toilsome life, poor health, broken families, hunger, disease. Trust me. All government will be shown to be useless in the end, and only we can do the showing.”

  Karel tried following what Braun said, he did, but watching the amassed coalition of immigrants at a meeting was more interesting to him—being an immigrant himself. The kind of folks Karel met on the boat over and in the Bowery. Undesirables compelled to move on down the line again and again. From Rīga to Warszawa, from Danzig to Leipzig, from Wiesbaden to Le Havre, to the Lower East Side, to Montréal, to Chicago, to smaller cities in the Midwest if they couldn’t afford to ride all the way to San Francisco. Foreignness showed in the denim jacket a tenement hopper wore, in the sickly sparse mustache he grew, in the military hat he filched off a dead soldier somewhere along the way in Europe. Most people didn’t want these types around. They caused trouble. There was trouble enough already. But Karel paid attention to them. How they sang “The Internationale” and quoted Proudhon and wore red shirts to honor Garibaldi. How they fought sometimes in the alleyway after meetings and spread rumors about who among them was plotting to kill a politician. They sounded insane. That was why Karel liked them. They weren’t afraid of doing something drastic.

  Meetings were crowded those months. The approaching municipal election had everyone worked up. It wasn’t always clear to Karel how a vote in Omaha had anything to do with massacres in Serbia or the liberty of sand-whipped Bedouins in Arabia, but he went along with an idea when he saw Emil Braun do the same. What did it bother Karel to sing an anthem, to raise fists and stamp feet? “Yeah! We’ll show them what’s what!” What did it bother him to shout, to hooray and hurrah, his mouth full of frankfurters and sauerkraut? Emil showed him hospitality, after all. Emil was the guy who introduced him to baseball players. Karel owed him this much at least.

  When he wasn’t in school or at a meeting, Karel was down at Rourke Park to help out the Omaha Baseball Club as a shag boy, running down balls in the outfield afternoons before supper. He liked to stretch his legs after sitting in a school desk all day. To get in the sun and feel his hair lighten. Karel felt important, catching fly balls during batting practice. This was different than when he played with boys his own age. The baseball spinning high in the air. A grown man hit that ball and Karel caught it. His ears were trained to diagnose how hard a ball was struck and how far it would fly, so he moved quickly to the spot it would land, knowing instantly if he should rush in or lope back, and whether a fly would hook or slice away, as if the most natural thing in the world, into the cradle of his glove stretched open.

  Karel kept the ball Josh Joseph had given him in his back pocket, even during practice with the men’s club. Some of the players asked Karel why he carried it, seeing the orb bulge his pocket, but Karel wouldn’t tell why the ball was important to him. These men were rivals with the ball club from the Northside. They wouldn’t like how Karel carried around a baseball gifted by a Negro hurler, even if Josh Joseph was the greatest Omaha had ever seen and was remembered on both Northside and Southside. Josh was seen either as hero or villain—depending on where the person doing the remembering had grown up. And, of course, anybody in Omaha who cared a whit about baseball knew what happened to Josh Joseph after he shipped off to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. How he lost both legs, how he became a shoeshine boy, scuttling along the walkways outside downtown banks—how all his athletic talent was blown away in a single mortar blast. Josh Joseph was more famous for what he didn’t become than for what he did.

  Most of the time the ballplayers didn’t care what Karel had to say. They weren’t there to find out what he knew. He was there to listen to them, how it should be, as they joked and discussed points of anatomy, a woman’s or their own. The ballplayers told stories about nasty acts they’d pulled as boys and even nastier ones pulled as men. Bill and Ducky Sutez. Jap Marceau, the third bagger. Ralph Snyder, the pitcher. Jimmie Collins, who managed and played some first base when he felt like it. They were fine men.

  Karel earned an invitation to join them at a saloon one evening after practice, a notorious little dive over on the other side of Deer Park, up in Gibson, where stockyard workers drank. A saloon where factions from rival political machines held bare-knuckle boxing matches on Saturday nights, out back, where creosote-soaked ropes were squared into the dust to make a ring. Karel knew he shouldn’t go with the ballplayers to the Purple Pig, not after his father had caught him in a saloon once already. Things were fine between him and Herr Miihlstein then, they left each other alone, and Karel wanted to keep it that way. Coming home with beer on his breath might mean he couldn’t play ball anymore, and that wouldn’t be worth it. Karel had a remarkable talent on his hands. That was why fortune brought him to Omaha. He knew this.

  He went along anyway. The ballplayers hooked his arms and pulled him in that dir
ection. They said he had to come. That it wouldn’t be the same without him. So he walked with them to the Purple Pig, a few blocks down Thirteenth, along the park. It wasn’t all that far, not in a group, leather equipment bags strapped over their backs. Not in how they talked loud and joked and laughed, and how people in Deer Park smiled when they recognized them, the Southsiders, because people in that neighborhood were proud of their team. This showed in how the ballplayers took over the bar. The guys who’d taken up residence on the bar stools didn’t mind making way for these guys. Why, they were probably thirsty, working up a lather out in the sun, getting ready to play. The ballplayers were well known all over this neighborhood. A few of them had played in the B leagues before having to quit and find real jobs. Of course, certain benefits came along with playing for the local team. Maybe Ralph didn’t have to work so hard at the quarry job team organizers found him, or at the stockyard job where Jap mostly sat in a shaded warehouse all day, resting up for a game, or had a catch with the owner’s boy, sure. The ballplayers got to throw a little weight around in neighborhood saloons, at least in season. “Go on,” a rummy might say. “Take my seat. I was only keeping it warm.” And the men did. They bellied up and ordered draught beer. First round on the house. Karel along with them. Just a boy, thirteen, but Karel wouldn’t be a boy much longer. He sat at the bar and took his freebie and drank the top off. He listened to the men boast in this dark low-ceilinged saloon, a little shack in Gibson with congested gaslights that gave off more smoke than light.

  “It’s good you came,” Bill Sutez told him. “We got a present for you.”

  Karel laughed it off at first. He wasn’t really listening. Light-headed from the beer. Blood rushing through his ears because he was in a saloon with the brothers Sutez and Jap Marceau. The best the Southside had to offer in the way of baseball players. And they got Karel a beer because he was one of them. They circled around him, said, “It’s the truth, kid! Here!” And handed over a package wrapped in tissue paper. “Go on. Tear it apart. Nothing to be scared of.” Ducky put his arm around Karel and shouted in his ear, “It’s a present, dummy! Open it!”

  Karel put his glass on the bar and tore the tissue in two. Out fell a set of wool clothes, pinstriped and white, with a black-brimmed cap. He recognized it immediately but didn’t quite believe. It was the uniform of the Southside.

  “That’s for all you done to help the team,” Jimmie Collins said. He was the manager and was compelled to speech making on occasions like this. “You’re a member as far as we’re concerned. Now you are.”

  Sure, Karel thought. He was around all the time. He practiced. He went to the tavern. Karel was one of them.

  “Well. What do you think?”

  “Yeah. Say something, kid.”

  Ducky held the jersey to Karel’s chest. “It’ll fit,” he said.

  “Goddamn,” Karel said. “Let me have that.”

  He jumped from his stool and right there at the bar ripped his shirt over his head so he could try on and button up his jersey. The men cracking up in laughter, saying, “I guess he likes it.” Karel dropped his pants so he could get the rest on then tucked the jersey into the knee-highs. “This is great,” Karel said. “I mean it.” Fastening the rest of the buttons so it spelled OMAHA across his chest. Then “Another round.” “A toast.” They had Karel climb up to the bar top from a stool and raised their glasses to him. The men were so happy for Karel, to see him in their uniform, the baggy hat on his head, the pinstriped whites all crisp and fit, maybe a little tight, tucked into black socks. Karel looked sharp. He smiled back at his compatriots, his teammates. Bill and Ducky and Jap and Ralph and Claude Nethaway. Their hair combed back in a paste made with sweat and dust from the infield. Muzzles black with stubble and grease.

  Karel was in a saloon because he belonged there. He too was swarthy. His hair black, hand-swept off his forehead. His broad shoulders stretching a uniform, his tanned skin and palms swelled thick from the beating they took catching fly balls.

  He was late to supper that night. That was unavoidable. Usually he cut it close, with rushing up from the field, but going to the saloon put a kink in things. Supper began without him. Karel heard from behind the kitchen door. Forks and knives working in the dining room. Before they noticed him, he lingered to take in the aromas—broth reducing with a wisp of steam above it, fresh bread cooling, a skillet browned by meat. Maria wasn’t in the habit of setting a plate for those who didn’t bother showing up on time, but she let Karel eat in the kitchen. There was some gravy left. She spooned it over bread for him, pulled an apple from a box where she kept them. Karel ate with his hands, standing at the counter in his new Southside uniform.

  “You stink like beer,” Maria said, her eyebrows raised as she dunked a saucepan in soapy water at the sink. “You drink with the ballplayers?” He nodded. “Well. What do I care?” Maria said. “This doesn’t surprise me. The age you are. Boys always want to drink beer. Beer doesn’t bother me. So you work it out with your father.”

  “I’m not going to tell him.” Karel sopped the last bit of gravy with his bread and stuffed it in his mouth.

  “Ah. I see.” Maria took his plate and put it in the sink. “And he isn’t going to notice? Sure. You bet.”

  The girls were at the table when Karel went by, leaned back in their chairs to talk and digest. Karel wanted to rush by them to the stairs, but there wasn’t much chance of that.

  “What in the world?” “Look at him!”

  “Where did you get baseball clothes?” Theresa asked. “Let me see you,” Silke said. The two older ones cornered him at the stairwell. They took his hat to examine it, felt along the pinstripes of his shirt to see if they were sewed on or were a print. Grabbed the bundle of clothes he’d worn out of the house that morning and tossed them out of the way.

  “Look at you,” Anna said. “Did you make the team after all?”

  Of course they would notice him in that baseball uniform. Of course they would notice there was beer on his breath.

  “Little brother,” Theresa laughed. “Didn’t you learn your lesson the first time?”

  “Piss off,” he told her, then leapt up the first three steps to get away. The girls chased him, Theresa and Silke on his heels, Anna pulling up the rear. What did Karel think? His sisters would just let him come home in a getup like that and not pester him?

  “Where did you get that outfit?” Silke asked. “Did you buy it?”

  “They were a gift.”

  “From who?”

  “The team.”

  “What team?”

  “Omaha!” Theresa shouted. “It says right on the front.”

  “The Southsiders,” Karel corrected. “I’m part of the team. A real ballplayer.”

  “No, you’re not,” Theresa teased him. “The clothes don’t make the man. The boy!”

  “There’s this.” Karel plucked his baseball from the back pocket of his new pants. “I got this from a guy. He gave it to me, from his own hand. Said if I wanted to be a ballplayer I needed to carry a ball with me everywhere. I’m a real ballplayer. It’s a hell of a lot better than cleaning streetcars all day.”

  The girls gasped. “Klutz! Don’t be cruel!”

  Karel went red as they laughed at him. He couldn’t convince them of anything. “Josh gave me this ball. The Southsiders gave me this uniform. They took me out for a beer. How’s that for you? Does that sound like a real ballplayer or not?”

  That was a dumb thing to say and he knew it. Their father was there in the attic, as he almost always was. Tinkering away while he munched his dinner, his back turned to them. Herr Miihlstein ate sardines most nights, a slice of bread with hard cheese and mustard. Food he could eat with one hand while he worked. “What are you shouting about?” he asked, finally disturbed by the commotion. He talked over his shoulder as he painted a music box. The same music box he painted over and over, one textured by the overlaying designs he made. Miihlstein set the music box on his worktable and
screwed shut the lids to his jars of paint.

  “What’s the hubbub?” he asked, walking to the staircase. He liked when they teased each other, smiled at them with pride, so long as they were laughing. As a matter of fact, on the occasions he happened to look up from his table, Miihlstein seemed to like having kids around.

  “Someone tell me what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t want to have to guess.”

  Anna spit it out first. “Karel drank beer.”

  Miihlstein glanced over to his son and nodded his head, like he wasn’t all that surprised. None of them were. With how much Karel was gone all the time, this was no shock.

  “And the costume? Where’s it come from?”

  “I was telling them,” Karel said. He’d backed to the stairs to run off if he needed to. But he didn’t need to. He stood his ground and told them, “These were gifts.”

  “The ball too? Or is it stolen?”

  “The ball? Look at it,” he barked, the outrage back in him all at once. “There’s stains all over it. It’s old. Who would I steal something like this from?”

  “I don’t know.” Miihlstein turned half away from his kids. He straightened his tie and snugged it under the brass clip. “Who gave it to you?”

  “Josh,” Karel answered. “He’s a friend of Emil Braun.”

  Karel couldn’t help himself. It was the beer working him over, or maybe that he didn’t care what his father thought. He was thirteen, after all, his self-assurance budding, becoming arrogance. Drinking with the ballplayers, wearing the uniform home. Now uttering the name Emil Braun. Karel wasn’t helping himself at all. He was about to explain who Josh was, the great Negro hurler, but stopped himself there at least.

  “Well,” Miihlstein deliberated. He picked his shoes off the floor, walked over to the sofa. “Given the origin of these items. Emil Braun, you say. I want them returned. They’ll bring trouble. You’ll see. Whether they’re stolen or not.”