by Bill Albert
“Had this here letter today, Little Hy, from a Mr. Smith down in Wallace. You know him? A tailor he says he is. Well it’s damn strange what he writes here about you being a Jew and all. No, I don’t mean to say that’s strange you being a Jew, which of course I knew all along, what with you being called Hyman Budnitsky wasn’t much else you could be, was there? What is strange is him saying how it isn’t right you living here with what he calls,” she searched the letter, “’Gentile people.’ What the hell is that supposed to mean? Gentile people? Not right?! My left knee it’s not right! You know how it never made any difference to me or to Al for that matter seeing how we don’t hold with what other people say about Jews being this or Jews being that. Just people that’s all. Anyway, he says here how he’s written about you to some Jewish people in Spokane and wants to pay a call on me to talk about, about . . . let’s see what he says here.”
She held the letter at arm’s length, drawing a bead on it.
“’. . . about the most unfortunate and unsatisfactory situation as now exists.’”
It was Rebecca’s thin, raspy voice, word-crowded and unmistakable.
“Sounds more like some damn lawyer than a damn tailor,” Aunt May said gruffly. “And what the hell kind of a Jew calls himself Smith? Answer me that!”
I couldn’t, of course.
13
“Spokane, Missus, that’s what I been telling at you. For the boy, a nice Jewish home in Spokane at Washington.”
“I heard you, Mr. Smith,” returned an increasingly exasperated Aunt May. “And we’re not saying no and we’re not saying yes. Don’t know how we can say one way or the other as he doesn’t rightly belong to us.”
“That’s it, Missus, that’s it!” Sam Smith yelled, jumping from his chair with excitement. He got halfway across the room, but even his excitement couldn’t push him any closer to where Aunt May sat, trying hard and without much success not to glower at him.
Stopped in the center of the room, Sam Smith raised his short arms and dropped them to his sides with a slap. He then turned and pointed a stubby finger at me.
“Belong, Missus, belong! Jews belong, Jews belong with Jews, is how I sees it. That’s how for to belong. Gentiles with Gentiles, Jews with Jews, not all mixed around like this.”
“Man might have somethin there, May. You know it . . .”
“Al Hutton!”
Al pulled his head in turtle-quick and fussed with his pipe.
“What about pricking and bleeding?” she asked with offhand bluster. “Diseases and weapons and winters and summers and tickling and laughing and poisoning and dying. What about all of that, Mr. Smith?”
She rocked back in her chair, arms crossed and waited for a reply.
Rebecca and her father had arrived on a Sunday afternoon about a week after his letter. I pleaded with Aunt May to ignore him, told her he was just some crazy old meddler, but she got it in her head that if she didn’t talk to him he would go to the authorities in Wallace. She didn’t want that and neither did I. Authorities just couldn’t help but lead straight back to those hound-dog Pinkertons. The only thing to do was to have tea with Mr. Samuel Smith and try to smooth things out.
“Don’t worry, Hyman,” Rebecca assured me at school on the Friday before. “Father has lots of ideas but they usually run off in innumerable directions simultaneously and half the time nothing comes of them.”
There followed a rapid-fire, long-word-filled recounting of Sam Smith’s ideas and how they got sidetracked, not that any of her telling convinced me, especially as he had actually sent the letter to his cousin, Moses Coleman, a letter which Rebecca had written herself.
“What was I supposed to do, Hyman? He asked me to do it and after all, he is my father, my flesh and blood. You think you’re more important than him?”
I had no answer for that, just like Sam Smith had none for Aunt May’s restaged ramblings from The Merchant of Venice, which I recognized only because my father, the Liebermann father back in New York, was always quoting it, although why I never understood. Anyway, in the cabin above Wallace, Aunt May’s clever thrust found nothing but empty air and didn’t slow the little tailor down for more than a couple of heartbeats.
“You see. Missus, the boy has what, twelve years? You know what it means to have twelve years for a Jewish boy? I’ll tell you it in one single word—bar mitzvah!”
Bar mitzvah! Stuffy Saturday afternoons in the back room at Temple Emanu-El with the rabbi blowing onion breath and incomprehensible Hebrew in my face. When I was in the mood to add up the pluses and minuses of my new life, not having to go through with the bar mitzvah and all its endless preparations was definitely a very big plus. Luckily Aunt May didn’t think much to it either.
“What kinda bar?” she growled, not being all that sharp a listener at best and when she was angry not much of a listener at all. “What’s this about a damn bar? Now look here, Schmidt . . .”
“Smith! Samuel . . .”
“Smith! Smith! Smith!” She rattled at him rising out of her chair like an angry nightmare.
He held his ground.
“Now, May, now May,” Al coaxed from the safety of his armchair.
“Dad!” cried out Rebecca in justified alarm, for Aunt May was now standing toe to toe with Smith in the middle of the room, almost squaring off they were.
“I’m not having this boy going running around any bars!” she bellowed, conveniently forgetting my part-time job at the Grand. “I don’t give a damn what kinda things you people do!”
“Mitzvah, Missus!” he squeaked up at her. “I’m telling you mitzvah! Bar mitzvah!”
“Don’t care what the hell kind of bar it is!”
I tried the hardest I knew, but the sight of the two of them going at it made it so there was no way in this world I could hold down my gaspy laugh and sure as Monday morning up she came with a rush.
“Hahhh! Siithth! Hahhh! Siithth! Hahhh! Siithth! Hahhh!” Over and over and over, noisier and noisier. Once it was out there was no getting back. It scared me until I didn’t know whether I was laughing or crying.
Well, my deranged hullabaloo stopped the both of them stone dead.
“You see?” said Sam Smith, taking the opportunity to step back out of May’s reach. “Look at this boy. I ask you Missus, what kind of way is this?” He shook his head from side to side and threw in a couple of “tsks” to help things along. “Gentile maybe it is, but not for Jewish. No, not for Jewish.”
Aunt May’s face reddened a notch or two worse than usual and her chins started rippling and bouncing up and down something terrible.
“GENTILE?” Aunt May bellowed so loud as to make the windows shake all the way down the hill in Wallace. “You think this is how Gentiles behave?”
“A ceremony!” I heard Rebecca shout thinly above the din. “Please, Mrs. Hutton, a bar mitzvah is a ceremony, that’s all. A Jewish ceremony.”
“A what?” Aunt May asked suspiciously, her voice sliding down a few notches.
“A ceremony, that’s all it is.”
“Of course, Missus,” added Sam Smith, in his most assured Hooray-America voice. “Like I been here trying to tell you, a wonderful ceremony!
“When a boy has thirteen years he becomes a man,” Sam Smith explained to a still huffing Aunt May. “Which is why a Jewish home is what he needs and quick he needs it. All that instruction to get into him, you see, before the bar mitzvah. To become a man of duty he must have proper instruction. The prayers, reading the Torah, the six hundred commandments. Six hundred, Missus! How’s he going to learn all that in a house with Gentiles? From such a house how will he be able to stand up in the synagogue to take on the duties of to be a man?”
Aunt May looked down at him and snorted, “To be a man, huh?”
That was all she had to say about me and bar mitzvahs.
Later that evening we sat nex
t to the kitchen range, me on the floor, Aunt May in her big rocker. Benny was out back chopping wood and Al was at one of his lodge meetings, Oddfellows, Masons, or some such nonsense.
“Maybe it’ll be for the best . . . your best interest so to speak, Little Hy,” she told me. “I mean, Al and I said that we’d look after you until we could find you a proper home. And that Mr. Smith, he’s probably right about you being a Jew, I mean to say, of course, you are a Jew and about those instructions and all.”
She was having a tough time saying what she wanted to, which was damn unusual for a woman who was so hard-rock definite about everything that came her way.
“You’ll see,” she said patting me on the head, the first and I think the last time she ever did that, “you’ll get on just fine with those Jewish people in Spokane, Little Hy, just fine and dandy you will.”
14
Sunset Buffalo Dreamer said that your fate was written in signs and in your spirit dreams if only you could make sense of them, and maybe that’s true, but I couldn’t make any sense of me going to Spokane, signs or no signs, dreams or no dreams. I had had nothing but the briefest taste of genuine Western life. That life was nowhere near perfect right then, but once I got stuck back to being a little Jewish kid my life would go nowhere at all. The way Jews are with relations and connections, they might even trace me back to New York, then what would happen? But, what could I do? Everyone seemed flinty fixed on my “best interests” and those interests added up to shipping me out to the Jews of Spokane.
Despite the set-to between Aunt May and Sam Smith, they managed to smooth out their differences after a fashion and most of it got settled and wrapped up pretty tight within a few days. They were just waiting on the letter from Spokane to fix the last details, and Spokane was only six hours by the Union Pacific from the depot in Wallace.
“Shit no, Mouse. I ain’t about to do that now I got myself fixed up here so damn sweet like I done.”
I had to try, even though I didn’t really think Benny would run away with me. Not only did he have the O’Malley Gang, but there was the Grand with its delivery-boy tips and its delivery-boy naked women. I couldn’t compete with all of that.
I knew my time of freedom was running down fast. Then it ran out altogether.
I was leaning on my broom listening to a succession of stories about miners’ suicides, one teller reaching farther out to top the last with some bizarre twist on grim reaping. The last tale was something to do with swallowing black powder and sticking a fuse down the throat. One man put in that maybe the old boy who did it just had a touch of bind-up and was trying to shift his load. That had them all slapping their legs, stamping their feet and laughing fit to bust and Miss April yelling over all the ruckus not to make such an unholy fuss or they’d find themselves out in the street.
“He himself is going! . . . Coming!” proclaimed Sam Smith, stumbling into the Grand waving a piece of paper over his head and silencing the men around the stove. “Mr. Moses Coleman in his own person is coming you to collect, Hyman. What do you think for that, my boy?”
I thought black powder and a very short fuse—for Samuel Smith.
“In ten days he’s here, see, yourself you can read.”
He shoved the letter under my nose and tapped on it with his thick finger. The date had been underlined. May 1st. Mr. Moses Coleman himself in his own person coming to collect “that Budnitsky boy.”
“Can’t say I won’t be sorry to see you go, Little Hy. No, can’t say that at all. Real sorry, but . . .”
“Ain’t gonna be so bad, Mouse. Ya’ll be with all them rich Jews, givin ya everythin you need and . . . Say, maybe I’ll come out and pay a visit once ya gets yerself fixed up.”
“Cabin like this ain’t the place for a wounded little tiddler like you, son. Think on it, in Spokane you’ll have you a big house there with your own room, not two cranky old folks like May and me . . .”
“And you must write to me every week telling me all about school there and what it’s like living in Spokane and, yes, what my cousins, second cousins that is, what they are really like, what the school is like, what kind of clothes they wear, the parties . . . Oh, yes, and Hyman . . .”
“A real man you’ll be, Hyman, in a synagogue with a minyan. Imagine it! You know what they say? ‘Nine wise men don’t make a minyan, but ten tailors do.’”
Ten Commandments, ten plagues of Egypt, ten days of penitence, ten generations from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, ten tests of faith, ten Jewish tailors from Spokane, and ten days left in Wallace. Everybody was saying their good-byes to Hyman Budnitsky.
It was only Al’s good-bye which saved me.
Seeing as how it would probably be my last chance, he asked me and Benny if we wanted to ride up the Canyon on the morning run to Burke. Strictly it wasn’t allowed for kids to be up with the engineer in the locomotive, but no one said anything seeing as it was Al Hutton.
I liked being on Al’s engine with its shiny polished brass, oil smell, and steam, and us getting to pull the whistle, ring the bell and tap on the dials, but if given the choice I would not have picked Canyon Creek for my last ride. It was a gloomy and cold place, the mountainsides stripped of all but a few skinny pines and the walls of the canyon so tall and narrow that in the winter you saw the sun for only a couple of hours a day and even then it didn’t do much in the way of warming. At the end of April there was still a good cover of snow on the ground.
What made the Canyon worse was how jammed up and crowded-in it felt—the mines, the mills, and the towns climbing the sides of the canyon and hanging over the river, the road, and the two railway grades that ran the twisty seven miles from Wallace, past Gem and Black Bear, to Burke. They weren’t much in the way of towns either, mostly shacks built high up on terraces made of mine tailings and logs, with dingy rooming houses and saloons below on the narrow strips of flat land. Tough-looking, heavy men hung around with their hands in their pockets staring blankly at the train. No one seemed too happy about life up in the canyon.
As you got farther up the canyon it closed in more and more, and by the time you got to Burke it was so tight the buildings pushed right up against the tracks. When the train came through there was lots of whistle blowing and bell ringing. People hopped onto the wooden sidewalks, and store owners had to pull in their awnings or get them scraped away. One of Al’s constant fears was that he would run over someone who staggered out of a saloon too drunk to hear the whistle or too blind with rotgut whisky to see the train.
That day Al’s fireman was Bert Fry, a big, quiet man, with soft rounded shoulders, who along with a bone-shaking stammer had a harelip, not at all well hidden under his mustache. He was forever smiling, winking, and nodding his head at me like we shared a secret. I didn’t see any secret, only that Benny had told me a person with a harelip was bad luck. I had had more than my share of that and wasn’t in the chase for any more. Then I remembered that Charlie Pinto Face had explained to me that the Lakota believed a harelip was powerful medicine, just like they reckoned a crazy person had been touched by the Great Spirit, so I was studying Bert Fry, trying to weigh it all up as we pulled into the depot at Burke.
It was about ten o’clock in the morning, generally a dead quiet time with the miners either at work or sleeping off the previous evening. However, that day we were met at the depot by what looked like a huge Fourth of July crowd, only when you measured it up you could see straight off there weren’t any women or kids and for all those men packed shoulder to shoulder on the platform it was too damn quiet to mean anything like a celebration. On top of that, every other face was masked with a red or blue bandanna. Dime-novel desperadoes, maybe a couple of hundred of them.
The brakes squealed metal as Al came into the depot. I could see he was trying to figure out what was going on, but he didn’t look frightened, only a little confused. Bert spluttered something but it got lost in his mu
stache, the brakes, and a rush of steam from the engine.
Before we came to a stop five or six masked men leaped up into the cab of the engine and were leveling rifles and revolvers at us. Even with half his face covered, right off I recognized friendly fat Harry Orchard. No spirit dream, no sign, and surely not something I could blame on Bert Fry’s harelip.
15
They called Al’s train the “Dynamite Express.” Just like the masked men, the “Dynamite Express” was straight out of the Dimes. I was scared to trembling, but not too scared to see that. No Buffalo-Bill-Wild-West-Show play-acting. No sir, the real Wild West had finally come to pay me a call. Right in the nick of time it had too, before I was captured by Moses Coleman and the Jews of Spokane.
Al and Bert raised their arms high and Benny and I followed.
“Hey now,” said one of the men. “Don’t go all like that on us, Al Button. We ain’t no Jesse James! Ain’t out to do you no harm.”
“Sure, Al,” chimed in Harry, “no harm. Say, hi up there, boys.”
“What’s all them guns and masks for?” asked Al, still holding up his arms.
“Can’t take no chances is why,” the first man replied. “Besides, better for y’all, ain’t it? Forced to take us, wasn’t ya? Didn’t know who we was because of these here. Ain’t that right?”
“Sure,” said Al unsurely and didn’t ask any more questions.
They wanted to put Benny and me off the train, said it wouldn’t be safe for us, but Al said it wouldn’t be safe for him with May if he came home without us. The men laughed and that sort of loosened things up a touch.
By that time the brakeman and the conductor had been brought up to the cab and orders were given to hook up as many cars as there were in the yards at Burke. Half a dozen boxcars and a couple of flats were added to the baggage car and the two coaches. There was a lot of yelling outside as the men from the platform began to climb aboard the train.