On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch

by Shelter Somerset

  He no longer felt anything. The dizzy confusion and despair that had whirled around his mind yesterday while he stumbled down the twelve flights of stairs (after dozens of frantic failed attempts to get the elevator to work) to find his beloved dead on the sidewalk had left him. He was too numb to feel anything other than stunned nothingness.

  The other two boarders, the Scottish man Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Raincliff from Indiana, also attended the wake, their faces drawn and uncertain. And there were the laborers hired to raise the interior of the van Werckhovens’ drugstore. In under a week, they had already grown to respect their overseer. “A man none too averse to gettin’ his mitts dirty,” one of the men had said in a heavy Irish drawl. Death jarred all of them, yet few had had the pleasure to truly know the New Yorker.

  Mr. Pilkvist came in from the bakery and set a large tray of pastries on the coffee table next to the ceramic coffeepot. Tory barely compelled himself to gaze through the steam rising from the hot water bath in which his mother had set the pot. Beyond the mist lay the body of Joseph van Werckhoven, a man whose eyes he had never seen before a week ago.

  Now he grieved for him as if he were his widower.

  Too numb to cry like the women, Tory stood and watched the goings-on as he would a stage play. Even a few of the rugged workmen shed a straggling tear or two from red downcast eyes. But not him. No, for Tory, the stubborn tears failed to come.

  Objects, fluctuations in shadows, subtle sounds of conversation or sobs—they were mere echoes from faraway places. Nothing remained tangible to him. The wake went on and on, an endless chain of nothingness, until the last of the laborers left for home while muttering about what would become of the new store, and Mrs. Pilkvist cried into the last of her clean hankies.

  The next day, Tory traveled in the hansom with his parents, tailing the wagon driven by the railroad agents transporting Joseph’s body to the train depot. Earlier that morning, Tory had overhead his father telling his mother that he had sent a telegram to Joseph’s family in New York informing them of the calamity. Only a slight wonder about what they might think had skimmed across his mind. None of it was happening.

  Clair Schuster had expressed distress that her factory job would not permit her time off for a final farewell. Mrs. Pilkvist’s sobs had increased since yesterday. She insisted they had failed their handsome and promising boarder. He had arrived in Chicago a lively, energetic man, and a week later they were sending him home in a pine box.

  At the station, Tory watched, numb and wordless, as the porters lifted the casket from the wagon onto the baggage car that would carry Joseph’s body back to New York City. By tomorrow afternoon, his family would be receiving the casket along with his personal belongings at Grand Central Depot.

  No one had mentioned the quarrel from Thursday. Resentments still simmered, but what did any of it matter now? Only the slightest regret for having threatened to oust Joseph eked from his father’s crystal-blue eyes. No one had asked why Tory had gone to see Joseph or why Joseph had taken him to the top floor. It would’ve made sense that Joseph might want to show off the building in which his family was leasing space. The event had happened, unraveling like an abrasive burlap sack.

  The porters slid the casket against the far wall of the car, silent and reverent. With a rumbling and final thud, they secured the door shut. It was then that Tory noticed a transformation in himself. His soundless shock was mutating into something new. His throat caught and his eyes burned. Sheer sorrow welled up inside him. He bit down on his anguish. His father, especially, would deplore such an outpouring of grief from his son. Surely his father already suspected that he and Joseph had become lovers.

  When they returned home from the train depot, Tory descended from the hired hansom and scurried off without uttering a word. He did not want his parents to detect the tears that singed his eyes. Away from the spread of the city, he came to the Chicago River, half a mile from his home, and stood along the bank. With a sudden tremble, he fell to his knees and sobbed into his palms.

  The cold breeze coming from the north chilled the tears dribbling through his fingers. Released of the pressure that had been building inside him since that horrible Thursday evening, he slowly raised his face and stood gazing into the water. The river, too murky for him to see his reflection, drifted past with muddy indifference. Downriver, grain elevators and factories mushroomed around Chicago’s downtown. Already a dozen bridges crossed the river from the near west side. North of the city, the sprawl had leaped west across the river and out of sight, beyond West Town. The Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad tracks paralleled the river along the west bank and veered sharply westward, heading off to a world only glimpsed in dime novels and travel guides. He remembered seeing farms dot the horizon as a boy, where his eyes now traced the tracks. One of his favorite lines from Walt Whitman weaved through his mind:

  But I do not undertake to define thee, hardly to comprehend thee,

  I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now,

  I merely thee ejaculate!

  He supposed it was impossible to find that kind of love again. Wasn’t that why men like Whitman wrote poetry, because of love’s utter unattainability? Tory’s kind of love existed only in romantic fiction and within the confines of idyllic and cloaked verses. Death’s snatch had made sure of that.

  Why did Joseph allow it to happen? And so soon after their meeting? Their love had only begun to bloom. Another shudder of sobs overtook Tory. His shoulders grew heavy and tossed him forward, as if the city behind him had knocked him down. Weakened, he wiped his throbbing eyes with the back of his hand and inhaled the nippy air, thick with smoke from the factories abutting the coal yards upriver on Goose Island.

  Through his damp eyelashes, he watched the red sun set over the western sprawl of the city, a ball of fire descending into oozing expanse. The river transformed to a brownish red, like molten lava. He stepped back. Even the illusion of fire upset him.

  He turned his back to the river and faced the heaving city. He could hear its incessant growling. A conglomeration of horses’ hooves, steam engines, trains, hammers, saws, thumping, grinding, churning, and wielding. The buildings, like a collage of steeples and prisms, stretched upward and outward. He had always observed the ever-expanding city with a spirit of awe. The buildings now transformed into Cyclopes, lurking man-eating giants seeking to devour whatever lay in their paths.

  As the days passed, Tory’s melancholy gripped him like the mitts of the city. His mother, who usually pestered him to do one thing or another, left him be. She seemed to sense his need to languish alone with his grief. His father, less empathetic, grew restless with his gloominess.

  “Stop this sulking,” Mr. Pilkvist said one night two weeks after they had seen Joseph’s body off at the train depot. They were in the bakery preparing for Easter, and the kitchen, a mess, like always before a holiday, smoldered with activity. Flour dusted his father’s face, white like a ghost. “You only knew the man a week. He couldn’t have been more than an acquaintance to you.”

  “Pappa, please, I don’t wish to discuss it.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Torsten. You become too attached to people and things, like those silly pigeons. I saw you yesterday, feeding them. I told you, I don’t want those pests coming around here. And I see you sometimes clinging to that stuffed bear. Where did you get that silly thing?”

  The one item left from Joseph van Werckhoven’s short juncture in Tory’s life—the stuffed bear he’d won playing Pitch Out at the carnival on Taylor Street. Joseph had given it to Tory as a gesture to salute their burgeoning friendship, yet it had far greater implications. Tory had suspected that even then. Only later that same night, after Joseph had stepped into his room, had Joseph proven him right. Clinging to the bear whenever he moped in his bedroom, Tory almost heard the merry sounds from their antics at the carnival. Had all that actually happened only three weeks ago? A few times, he had even carried the prized bear with him to the breakfast
table, forgetting he still clung to it until his mother commented on it.

  “It’s a toy bear, Pappa. There’s nothing for you to worry over.”

  “A boy your age shouldn’t want toys.”

  “I’m not a boy, Pappa.”

  “Then why do you act like one? I fear I lose you to the clouds one day.” His father kneaded into the vetebröd dough. “You always off in daydreams.”

  “You know how the springtime sometimes affects me.”

  Mr. Pilkvist revealed a rare smile. “Ah, I do remember springtime from my youth. When I your age, I must admit, I’d get lightheaded too. I would stroll along the Osterdal River and make necklaces out of the yellow daffodils growing along the bank. And in the woods, my brother and me, we pick lingonberries for your grandmother to make jam, but most times they’d be eaten before we carry them home.” He chuckled. “She yell at us, but we know she smile inside. Then, after I meet your mother, we would pick berries together. That is how we first court. We walk for hours in the cool woods and use picking berries for excuse to talk and be together.”

  He fell into silent rumination. But his father’s distant memories failed to move Tory. His own life stretched ahead of him, as empty as his father’s reminiscences. His father’s past meant little to him at that moment. It only reinforced his loss. A loss no one would ever understand. He clenched the gooey dough with white knuckles while the loneliness engulfed him.

  Snapping to, Mr. Pilkvist sharpened his expression to its usual solemnity. “Listen to what I say, Torsten. Keep your feet planted on the ground, ja?”

  Tory placed the dough for bullarna in a large bowl to rise and shuffled over to the cooled semlorna, which he topped with powdered sugar. He stored the last of the semlorna in the display case and draped his smock over the counter. “Unless you need me for more chores,” he said to his father, “I’d like to turn in for the night.”

  Mr. Pilkvist sighed. “Ja, you can go. But I will need you bright and early tomorrow for the rush of customers. They will be demanding and impatient for Easter week.”

  Stoop-shouldered, Tory slumped upstairs to his bedroom like he had for the past fortnight. There, he lay on his bed, cradling the stuffed bear with the short curly wool against his cheek. No more tears came. Tapped dry, he sighed. In the course of days, the calamity of Joseph’s death hardened into ugly acceptance.

  The house harbored an eerie emptiness. Clair Schuster had left a week ago for the women’s hotel. Mr. Abner T. Raincliff had departed two days before. Although three new boarders had already claimed the vacated rooms, including the one once occupied by Joseph, they all worked long hours for the same accounting firm and rarely made an appearance at the house except at the breakfast table. Mrs. Pilkvist had a difficult time concealing her angst that they rarely took supper or cake and coffee in the parlor with them. Tory could have cared less.

  Only the Scottish boarder, Mr. Dunlop, remained, quiet enough that Tory seldom remembered him. Yet the past few days, Tory suspected Mr. Dunlop was eyeing him from under his brow whenever taking a meal together or passing each other in the hallways. Was that how chronically shy men found their way out of their shells? With furtive glances? Encased in his own sorrows, Tory cared little for Mr. Dunlop’s hidden issues.

  Clinging to his bear, he stared out the window. Workers dressed in their black leather aprons, boys no older than fourteen, were lighting the gas lanterns along the visible stretch of Dearborn. Only downtown glowed with the electric streetlights. Soon, the entire city would be ablaze with electricity, Tory speculated, but unaccompanied by the usual enthusiasm he experienced whenever he contemplated the city’s rousing future.

  He was about to prepare for bed when he heard a light tap on his door. Curious, he set his bear atop his pillow and opened the door a crack. Mr. Dunlop stood on the other side, his brown eyes wide with self-consciousness, a soft mustache of perspiration above his thin upper lip.

  “Yes?” Tory asked, perplexed. “May I help you with something? Do you need anything?”

  Mr. Dunlop, shoulders against his ears, said in a hushed thick Scottish accent, “I… I wanted to… to express my condolences for… for the loss of Mr. van Werckhoven.” And with those words, he turned and disappeared before Tory could fully open the door and respond. Fast and quiet, the boarder concealed himself behind his door to his room down the hall.

  Tory stared after him. Had it taken two whole weeks of mental torture for him to muster the courage to utter those simple words? The depth of his and Joseph’s relationship perhaps had not been lost on the man from Scotland. The quiet ones seemed to possess the keenest insight.

  Tory, heavy-lipped and pondering, sat on the edge of his bed. A minor ease lifted his malaise. What had forced it? Someone appreciating the magnitude of his loss? Mr. Dunlop’s sympathies might have only nudged aside his grief, yet it was a beginning.

  Chapter 6

  THE crack of the bat striking the baseball resounded in Tory’s ears. He had hit the ball dead center on the barrel of the Louisville Slugger, and he knew the moment it connected with the ash wood that he had hit a two-run homer. He tore past the bases with his standard lightning speed, almost passing the runner in front of him. The cheers of his comrades followed him around the diamond like music.

  His teammates greeted him at home plate with back slaps and applause. Tory basked in their praise. Their weekly baseball games had become scarcer now that his friends were married with babies. Since Tory was the only one among them single, they often tried to set him up with their sisters and cousins and the flood of newly arrived girls from rural parts of the Midwest. His mother still dreamed he’d meet a nice Swedish girl. Tory held no interest in girls of any nationality. The more he refused his friends’ attempts to play matchmaker, the more they lost interest in him. Their adult lives took them down different paths.

  His time with his chums was contracting, much like the vacant land surrounding the ballpark. Their schooldays long past, their favorite pastime lacked the force to unite them. As they played, Tory divined that this might be one of his last ball games with his friends.

  At least for the moment, the heat of competition elbowed aside the differences in their lifestyles. They played the remaining five innings, after which Tory said farewell and headed home for his Saturday afternoon bath.

  A month had passed since Joseph’s death. Time had softened the pain, but it still lingered like an itchy scab on an old wound. He swore at times he still smelled Joseph’s lavender cologne, but then he noticed the spring flowers popping out in planter boxes hanging from the windows of the row houses. Joseph had lived with the Pilkvists for too short a time to have left remnants of himself behind. Other than the stuffed bear, nothing physical remained of the New Yorker ever having entered Tory’s life. The thought both comforted and troubled him.

  The sharp sting of regret and grief pierced his mind. He realized his time with Joseph was a once in a lifetime love. Joseph’s ghastly fall had taken part of Tory down with him, along with his hopes and dreams.

  But the harsh truth made his fate tolerable. He accepted his destiny. No changing the course of the future—he would live the life of a bachelor.

  Somber thoughts followed him into the tub. Refreshed and clean after his bath, he longed to immerse himself in the company of others. Being around his baseball friends in the warm spring air had made him crave more of the camaraderie that sometimes chased away his glumness.

  He splashed limewater on his chest, dressed in a crisp white shirt, gray pinstripe suit, blue cravat, and felt derby, and then jumped on the electric streetcar to go from State Street to the 35th Street cabaret secretly known as a watering hole for men like him. Love was not his aim—he knew that was far from his grasp at a place like the cabaret. He wanted only company, affection, the fleeting kind that might lessen his grief and loneliness, like the way some used alcohol.

  The instant Tory stepped inside the cabaret, the usual stares burned holes into him. He disliked the scen
e, yet he knew of no other place like it in Chicago. Many of the young men, both Negroes and whites, came for “business.” They congregated at the bar and the small standing tables, some selling, others buying. The regulars recognized him as one who seldom interacted with the locals, especially those known as “renters.” A few of the renters dressed as women, which Tory found both entertaining and distasteful. The older men from out of town ogled him. They often mistook him for a renter. He avoided eye contact to communicate his disinterest.

  A player piano rolled out tunes in the corner. Some of his favorites, “Oh, Dem Old Golden Slippers” and “American Patrol,” lightened his mood. The cabaret, less crowded than usual for a Monday evening, ebbed and flowed with a sluggish apathy. Since it was the day after Easter, most of the regulars who often stopped by after work for drinks had likely remained at home with their wives and children. Not many out-of-towners had scheduled trips away from their families during the holiday.

  The two bouncers appeared more relaxed than usual. Tory never learned if they were like the men who patronized the cabaret. They seemed disinterested in the goings-on, their eyes always narrowed with vigilance.

  A boy of about fifteen, the cabaret owners’ youngest son, served drinks behind the bar. With a thin cigar clenched between yellowing crooked teeth, he poured and poured, his face lined with labor. The slightest spill of the liquor and his father, Mr. Levitzki, the stony-faced proprietor with the cannon-like voice, who roamed the cabaret like a grizzly bear, would slap the back of his head. The father’s temper was enough for Tory to want to leave the place, but there was no establishment as safe when looking for companionship.

  Tory found an empty bench against the far wall. He kept his derby on, for it gave him the extra furtiveness he liked while at the cabaret. With his hands balled in his lap, he peered around under the short brim, taking note of anyone who resembled a gentleman. Weekdays were often more rowdy than weekends. During the week, drunken construction and railroad workers would come in to make “dates” with some of the younger men. The owners tolerated the flood of teamsters until their pockets came up empty. Afterward, Mr. Levitzki would give a subtle sign—two fingers tickling under his chin—and the bouncers would dispatch to their duties and herd the rowdies like cattle and toss them out the door.