“Tell me about this Jonesy,” I said to Lillian.
Adam was about to silence her, but she prattled on. “Oh, he’s a gentleman. Real fine clothes and from a good family. He didn’t need no job in a stupid bank, if you ask me, so I doubt he’s feeling the pinch.”
“Was Jonesy here the night you came in with Rose?” I asked, looking at Adam now.
Adam glowered at me. “I dunno,” he said.
“Who’s Rose?” asked Lillian, looking at my brother.
“A girl Adam knows,” I said.
“A friend of Carl’s,” Adam lied.
Leaning back, Lillian stared at my brother, confused. Faith won out over doubt, and her smile returned, lighting up her cupid-like face. “Yeah?” she said, turning to me. “Well, you should bring her by sometime. We could have a good time together! Does she like dancing?”
“No,” I said at the same time Adam said, “Yes.” Lillian looked from Adam to me and back again. Then she sat back and said nothing.
“C’mon, Adam, try to remember,” I said. “Was Jonesy here that night?”
“He was here most nights,” he said reluctantly. “So yeah, he was probably here that night.”
Lillian pursed her lips together as her brows wrinkled. To me, she said, “How come your friend Rose came here with Adam instead of you?”
Adam and I exchanged glances. Obviously, he didn’t want Lillian to know about Rose. When it became clear I wouldn’t lie for him, he turned to Lillian and said, “Rose is my friend. Carl’s trying to help clear my name of that Peterson jewel theft. Rose was wearing the jewels.”
Lillian’s face turned almost as red as her hair. Crossing her arms over her shimmery dress, she stared at Adam through narrowed eyes. She’d figured it out.
“I’m sorry,” he said without looking at her. With a huff, she stood and walked away.
“Now see what you’ve done,” Adam said to me. “She was a good girl.”
“I thought you liked Rose!” I said, exasperated.
“I did like Rose. But her parents weren’t going to let us see each other,” he said sadly. Looking over his shoulder at Lillian’s retreating figure, he let out a sigh.
“Where’s this Jonesy guy anyway?” I asked. There was no time for sympathy, even if I’d been in the mood to give it. “If he’s in trouble with the law, maybe he thought about taking Rose’s jewels.”
Adam shook his head slowly. “Carl, stop trying to be the police. You can’t—”
“Just tell me his name—Jonesy what?”
Adam sighed again. “Reginald Jones. Everybody calls him Jonesy. He worked at Portland Bank. He’s probably long gone by now.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I said. Portland Bank—hadn’t Rose Peterson said her brother worked there? Was that just a coincidence?
“Nobody’s seen him for a few days,” said Adam.
“Since the robbery?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
The band struck up a fast number and I saw a dashing fellow in crisp gray trousers and slicked-back hair ask Lillian to dance. Adam followed my gaze, looking morosely at the girl I’d made him lose.
“C’mon,” he said after a few seconds watching the couple dance. “Let’s get out of here.”
We walked home in silence. Adam jammed his hands in his pockets and kept his head down. I kicked at stones along the way, wondering when I’d get a chance to track down this Reginald Jones fellow, and if Adam would care. A hundred speeches passed through my mind. I wanted to ask him what had happened to our plan to go back East together and how he could muck it up without feeling bad. I wanted to ask him why he no longer felt the need to look out for himself, and why I had to do it for him. I wanted to tell him how disappointed Ma would be in him.
But I said nothing. If I was to get my brother back, it would be through deeds, not words. Clearing his name, I decided, would turn things around and make him take a fresh look at his life, make him think good things were possible again. It would get him back to that crossroads where he could choose better things for himself.
As we neared our street, I found something new to worry about—sneaking Adam back into the house without waking up Pete.
Sneaking around, lying, tracking down clues—it all came back to Adam. I looked over at him. His face was glum, his shoulders hunched. Pity washed over me. If only he hadn’t gone to speakeasies, run with bad crowds, and met Rose. But how could meeting a sweet gal like Rose lead to trouble? How could he have known? Because of something inside him, he must have been ready to take chances instead of playing it safe. Because of something inside him, he had decided to stop trying to be good.
When we turned the corner for home, I picked up the strong smell of smoke in the air. Looking up, I saw a glow in the distance. At first, I thought there might be a fire. If so, there would be firefighters and policemen around—not a good crowd for Adam to wander into.
“Hold on,” I said to Adam, putting my arm out in front of him. Adam, however, wanted to see what was happening. Picking up his pace, he moved ahead of me until he stopped just a block from our house. Next to an old oak tree with a thick trunk that obscured the walkway, he stood transfixed.
Ghosts, white-robed and swaying, stood chanting in front of Pete’s house. Their voices created an ominous hum, a murmuring hiss like a swarm of bees ready to attack. They bunched together, a white blur of luminous spirits.
But they weren’t spirits. They were something worse—men who didn’t want to be seen or known, dressed head to toe in white sheets. Pointed hoods hid their faces, and through round holes cut in their masks and hoods, their eyes appeared as glowing coals. They stood in two rows in front of Pete’s house, which was lit by flames leaping up a burning cross.
One of the men, who had a special emblem on his robe, stepped forward. “Adam Matuski,” he called out in a deep, clear voice, “come out and take your punishment like a man.”
Fear licked up my spine like the flames on the cross. My hands grew clammy. I couldn’t swallow. My eyes widening, I pulled my brother behind the tree and out of eyesight. Stupefied by the sight, he didn’t resist.
“Who are they?” I whispered to Adam.
“The Klan,” he whispered back. “They’re members of the Ku Klux Klan. They must’ve read that article in the paper about me. Oh, jeez, Carl.”
His voice was high and shaky. I’d never heard him sound so afraid, and that rocked me to my core, but I couldn’t blame him. There was something dreadful about a group of men hidden behind costumes—they could do anything, and nobody could hold them to account because you wouldn’t be able to say who did it. That had to be the reason for their robes—so they could do horrible things and nobody would ever put a name to a face.
To my horror, the front door of the house opened and Pete stepped out. I wanted to shout for him to go back in where it was safe, but instead I just watched as he walked to the edge of the step and stared back at the crowd. His hair stuck out like pieces of rough hay, and his shirt was unbuttoned, but he tightly gripped a coal shovel in his right hand.
“Get out of here or I’ll call the police!” he yelled, waving the shovel. Several of the Klansmen laughed, and I found myself lunging forward to help Uncle Pete. But Adam pulled me back.
“Are you crazy?” he hissed at me.
“But Pete. . .”
“If Pete can’t handle them, we’re not going to be able to do much either.”
Another robed man stepped toward the burning cross. Pointing his right hand at the house, he yelled, “Go ahead and call the police. That’s what we want—the police to arrest your thieving nephew!” A rumble of support came from the crowd.
Pete stood silent for a moment, and in that moment, I was deathly afraid for him. What if they tore him to pieces before our very eyes? What if I was too scared to help?
God, how I wanted that cross to stop burning! I wanted to run up, find a bucket of water, and extinguish the flames. The cross seemed like a brand, sear
ing into the night sky our “sin” for all the neighbors to see—that we were Catholics, with a foreign-sounding last name. I wanted the clouds to open and a flooding rain to pummel the earth, dousing the flames. Wasn’t that what happened in the Bible stories we’d heard about in school? Why couldn’t it happen now?
Without a word, Pete pulled himself up. For a second, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, before opening them again. His lips pressed together in a thin line, and he strode down the steps toward the cross with such forcefulness that a few Klansmen actually moved back.
He swung the shovel hard toward the burning posts of the cross, knocking them to the earth, then quickly shoveled sod and dirt until the cross fire was out. I wanted to cheer. A few Klansmen came near, and he swung the shovel at them, forcing them back. Sweating, he leaned on the shovel and wiped his brow.
“Get out of here—all of you!” he yelled in a ferocious voice. He waved the shovel wildly toward the crowd, and his voice was part growl, part speech. He shouted something in Polish I’d never heard before, something that sounded like a curse. “Robert and John and yes, you, Jeffrey. I know who you are, you cowards. Adam’s not here. And even if he was, I’d make you get him over my dead body.”
When he lunged again toward the crowd, those in the first row fell back.
“Go on!” Pete said.
A hush descended over the mob, forced back by Pete’s ferocity. Finally, the lead Klansman spoke.
“We’ll be back, Pete. Mark my words. We’ll be back. You make sure that boy gives himself up. He’s a disgrace to the city!”
The crowd trooped off into the night, away from us and away from the house. No longer menacing, their retreating figures looked silly, like children in costumes. I could breathe again.
“I can’t go back,” Adam whispered to me.
“I can sneak you in,” I said. “Besides, you heard Pete—he won’t give you up!” For all that had happened, this realization was a happy and unexpected one. Pete had bucked the Ku Klux Klan to protect Adam. I’d been wrong about Pete. He wasn’t as warm or welcoming as our mother had been. But he cared about us.
“Naw,” Adam said, glancing up the street, where the last of the Klansmen walked away. “That was cause Pete was cornered. He thinks I should give myself up to the police.”
Whirling around to face Adam, I grabbed his arm. “Pete’s talked to you about this?”
Adam looked down at the ground. “Yeah, just after it happened.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said no good comes when you run from the law.”
I didn’t know what to say or do. I’d just witnessed a terrible exhibition of raw power, of men taking the law into their own hands. How could Pete be sure that Adam would receive fair treatment if the authorities took him in? Officer Miller was no friend of ours. Why assume other officers would be fair?
“C’mon,” I said at last, “let’s at least talk to him.”
Adam pulled away and backed off. “No. You go on home. I’ll get a message to you. . . tomorrow. I’ll find a place to stay. Don’t worry about me!”
Then he disappeared into the night, his swift footsteps echoing in the distance.
Chapter Eleven
Icontinued to worry about Adam. He was my brother, and I’d added to his troubles. Just as he’d warned, the attention from the newspaper article had brought danger, not aid.
I snuck back home that night, creeping in the back door. I took off my shoes and tiptoed up to my room, closing the door behind me slowly enough to keep the hinge from creaking and the latch from clicking. I kept the light off as I undressed and fell onto my bed.
I knew I must have slept, because time passed and I didn’t remember how it did. When I awoke, I heard Pete stirring downstairs. But I could tell from the light under my door that it was past dawn. Hurrying as if I had a deadline to meet, I went to the bathroom and washed up, then dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen.
It was a gray day and the kitchen was bathed in a milky light. From somewhere far away, I heard the full-throated toot of a ship’s horn. Much closer, old Thomas’s horse-bells jingled as he made his way through the Portland streets, his last rounds of the season.
Pete stood at the stove, frying some eggs. “You hungry?” he asked without turning.
“I guess,” I said, slipping into a seat at the table.
For a few more seconds, he cooked in silence. Then he turned toward me, with two fried eggs perched on the end of a spatula. I took that as my cue to help and scooted up to grab plates and forks. When I set them on the table, he delivered the eggs to my plate, then pulled a piece of toast from the oven and placed it beside the eggs.
After I dove into my meal, he cooked his own and sat down across from me. He looked tired, even haggard. Dark circles colored the underside of his eyes, and his skin had a pasty, unhealthy hue to it. His eyes were red and watery, and his hair was as disheveled as it had been when he’d confronted the Klan. Even his moustache twisted this way and that, hairs sticking out like pieces of straw.
I wanted to tell him how proud I was when he stood up to the Klansmen. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him know I’d seen it.
“You not going in today?” I asked softly.
He looked up. “Going in late,” he said.
“I. . . I thought I had a dream last night,” I said. “I mean, I thought I heard something. . .”
Pete gave me a quick sour smile. “Just some hooligans making trouble. I set ’em straight.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I bet you did, Uncle Pete.” And I smiled.
He smiled back.
Before work that day, I scanned the day’s newspaper. There was no mention of the Klan gathering on our street—no tale of the outrageous burning cross.
There were stories about the School Question, though. In one, the “exalted Cyclops” of the Portland Klan argued that children who didn’t go to public schools had to be taught a “uniform outlook on all national and patriotic questions.” Bolsheviks had already “infiltrated” the education of Ukrainian citizens in Toronto, Canada, and that sort of nonsense had to be stopped at the border. Everybody knows, this “Cyclops” said, that Catholics are just waiting for the Pope to tell them what to do to take over here in America.
It was a bunch of manure, and I was furious that the “Cyclops” didn’t give his name to the reporter. I wasn’t sure who I was madder at—the Klansman who hid behind the white sheet of nothingness, or the reporter who let him get away with it.
I felt better, though, when I saw another article in which Archbishop Curley of Baltimore—my Baltimore!—declared that the Oregon School Law, if passed, would follow the very same Karl Marx principles people like Officer Miller accused people like me of supporting. It amounted to “state socialism,” the archbishop said. I wished I could show Miller the story.
After reading the newspaper, I hurried through my route, did a slap-dash job repairing a broken back step for Pete, and told him I was going out to meet a friend. In reality, I was going downtown to find out what I could about Reginald Jones—the “Jonesy” fellow Adam and Lillian knew.
My first stop was the Portland Bank, a big red-brick building with gilt-lettering on the windows and frosted panes on the front doors—the locked front doors.
The downtown bank was open only until three-thirty each day, it turned out, and it was nearly an hour and a half past that now. Gazing through the window, I tried to figure out what to do next.
Chances were that nobody at the bank would tell me much about Jonesy. Chances were they’d be embarrassed to talk about a worker who’d gotten into trouble.
But if it had been a lawbreaking offense, the newspaper might have written it up. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to the paper before now? I’d delivered it for months!
Taking a deep breath, I rushed off toward the Telegram building. On our “tour” of the newsroom, Gus had mentioned something called a “morgue”—a place where they kept old newspaper art
icles. If something had been written about a crime Jonesy committed, I might find it there.
Hours later, darkness had fallen and I was still in that dusty room, surrounded by old newspapers. After some hesitation, I’d talked my way in, saying I was working on something for Briggs. If anyone checked with him, he might vouch for me. And if he didn’t, I might have what I need before getting kicked out. I pored through every paper for the previous month and had started on the month before that when a long shadow obscured my light. Vincent Briggs stood in the doorway, cigar in hand.
“I thought I recognized you,” he said. “What are you up to, son?”
After his article, I trusted him, maybe more than I did anyone else. So I told him about Jonesy, and about my other theories. “I thought I’d find something in the morgue,” I concluded.
“And you haven’t turned anything up?”
“No, sir.”
He scratched his head, leaving a tuft of hair standing out at an odd angle above his right ear. Then he absent-mindedly puffed on the cigar, finally crossing his arms and holding his chin with his cigar-laden hand.
“Could be the bank wanted to hush it up,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Could be they don’t want their customers to know they had a bad apple among the bunch.” He looked at me and smiled. “Say, thanks, son, you’re becoming a regular tipster,” he said, turning and leaving.
I took that to mean he’d look into the story, so I leaned back and closed the paper I was reading, then rubbed my weary eyes. At least with Vincent Briggs looking into the Jonesy story, I could move on to another suspect—the Peterson brother.
Somehow, I had to check out the pawnshops and jewelry stores in the area where Bernard Peterson lived and worked. If Bernard tried to pawn the jewels, I needed to know, just to make sure Officer Miller and his pals didn’t ignore the information.
Picking up my cap and shrugging into my jacket, I left for home.
Pete was sitting at the kitchen table when I got home, along with about five other men, all of them smoking and talking. One of them was Lester. When Pete heard the front door open, he looked up and scooted his chair back.
The Case Against My Brother Page 10