by John Jakes
Paul and Joe Junior stuffed themselves with sausages, homemade bread, and beer from an unmarked keg. It was dark, bitter brew; definitely not Crown’s. Who had paid for the beer and food?
“We have a couple of patrons among the rich,” Joe Junior said. “You won’t ever find them at these affairs, but they make their presence known in other ways.”
Benno and some others shoved wooden boxes together to improvise a platform. Three speakers addressed the crowd of people sitting or lying in a great semicircle on the grass. The first man, from Poland, had such a thick accent Paul could scarcely understand him. The second, introduced as Mr. Parkin-Lloyd, “one of our leading socialist comrades from England,” tried to explain and embellish some theories of the writer Karl Marx, whom Joe Junior had mentioned. Paul knew nothing about this Marx and found the Englishman boring.
Benno took the platform as the final speaker. He started with a denunciation of the fair. “They’re puttin’ on this thing, this circus, to show off what capitalists make from the sweat of workers. You think they’re celebrating the great American democracy? Okay, tell me—opening day, how many niggers was invited to sit on the stage with the U.S. President? Not a damn one, that’s how many. How many darkies helped plan that fair? Not a one. They’re free people but the white oligarchy, it locked ’em out. Something else. They got a building in Jackson Park, I read about it, I wouldn’t ever go look at it except maybe to spit on it—there’s gold all over the doorway. Yes! For decoration! So much gold, it’d feed and clothe hundreds! That building, that whole fair, cost millions. And there’s more out of work every day with this panic the rich bankers started. It’s a rotten disgrace.”
He called for “propaganda of the deed” to demonstrate their “solidarity.” He called bombs and pistols “the best friends we got.” He shouted for “retribution” and “violent overthrow of the system” and, chillingly, “the heads of the plutocrats.”
“They squeezed blood out of us for years, okay, we take theirs!” He flung his arms straight up over his head. “Right in the streets of Chicago!”
He let his arms fall to his sides.
“Comrades—I thank you.”
Benno received the loudest ovation of the day.
He jumped down from the boxes and startled Paul by coming straight over to him. “Okay, what y’think? Are you hearing a message?”
“I hear it, Herr Strauss. I don’t know if I like it so much.” Benno scowled but Paul wouldn’t retreat; this man was speaking hate against Paul’s family. He screwed up his nerve and finished, “I don’t know if I like the idea of taking blood in the streets.”
“How else you think we’re gonna win?” Joe Junior drifted up to them. “Hey, Joey, get busy. This one’s backbone ain’t stiff enough yet.”
Benno’s huge paw slammed down on Paul’s shoulder. “Get clear on this, kid. You can’t stand around saying maybe it’s this way today, maybe that way tomorrow. Got to choose. Sooner or later in the class war, everybody’s got to choose.”
“Take sides against my uncle, is that what you mean?”
Benno stared at him. “Yeah.”
“You don’t like my uncle very much.”
Benno’s first response was a shrug. “Like ain’t got nothing to do with it. Truth is, I don’t think Joe Crown’s a bad man deep down. He wouldn’t rob his mother of her last crust of bread. But he cares a lot more for property than the rights of us workingmen. Also, he’s stubborn, like most Dutchmen. A bad combination.” Benno formed a huge fist under Paul’s nose. “Makes him like a rock about certain things. We got a national union. A national program—”
“Which Pop opposes one hundred percent,” said Joe Junior.
“Right, right. Could be trouble; we come pretty close to it two, three times already. What I’m saying, kid—you can’t sit on the fence. You only find one kind there, yellowbellies.”
His hand clamped on Paul’s shoulder. The thick strong fingers hurt.
“You got to choose your side, absolutely. If you don’t learn nothing else today, learn that.”
21
Joe Crown
HE SAW THE RED dirt road winding south. He heard the jingle of bits; the creak of horse furniture. The column moved through the hot morning with a strange dreamy grace.
He saw the wooden sign stuck in the ground at the roadside. Crudely cut, like an arrow, it pointed ahead.
HELL FIVE MILES
COME ON YANKS!
The column kept moving. Dust rose up, but the hooves of the horses at walk made so faint a sound, it was like a murmur in the blood. Leading the patrol, Captain Ehrlich was laughing and chatting as though at a picnic.
Turn back. Don’t go down this road, I know what’s waiting.
No one heard him. Or, if they heard him, paid no attention.
The column was passing through thick woods pierced by golden shafts of summer sun full of slow-swirling dust.
Suddenly an old Negro in ragged clothes stepped from a stand of myrtle at the roadside. Sidearms were whipped out of holsters. Captain Ehrlich raised his hand. “Hold fire, I don’t see a weapon.”
The old black man snatched off a crushed straw hat. “That’s right, Cap’n, nothin’ to hurt you. I’m Erasmus, your friend. Sign back there, it mean what it say. They’s bad people up ahead.”
“Soldiers?”
“Some. Mos’ly old men, boys from ’round here. But they blood-mad to kill some of you Yankees. They got plenty of guns. Don’ go on, turn back. It be bad for you when night fall.”
He heard the old man’s plea clearly. Saw Captain Ehrlich in profile, full of stern courage. “Thank you, Mr. Erasmus, but we have orders to advance. We’ll be watchful.”
Listen to him, Ehrlich. I know what’s waiting. Don’t go down the road!
“Don’t. Don’t …”
“Sir? Are you all right?”
“Uh? What’s that?”
“You cried out something fierce.”
Drenched in sweat, shivering in darkness, he didn’t know where he was.
Then he felt the stiff plush seat under his legs. Heard the clickety sound of the express speeding on to Cincinnati. Saw streaking past the window the lights of a lonely farmstead. The conductor was a black bulk looming against the dim lantern that swayed above the door to the vestibule.
“Cried out? I’m sorry. Bad dream.”
The conductor grunted and went on.
Joe leaned his forehead against the glass, joyfully realizing he was on the southbound train. Awake, and not imprisoned in the familiar dream of the road in northern Mississippi. A dream that had gripped him for years and wouldn’t let go.
Joe Crown owned a large block of shares in a textile factory at Millington, a small town in the sand hills of South Carolina formerly known as Company Shops when railroad maintenance work was done there. He also owned a winter estate in South Carolina. It was of substantial size, located on a dirt road six miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and an hour’s horseback ride south of Charleston. Some Yankee carpetbagger had built it after the war, and named it Royalton. When Joe bought it he rechristened it Chimneys. He’d ridden through the entire war with the Union cavalry, all the way down to Savannah and up again through the Carolinas, where General Judson Kilpatrick and his horse soldiers laid waste to great swaths of land. “I named it Chimneys,” Joe said about the winter place, “because we left little else standing in that beautiful state when we passed through.”
He couldn’t have been more grateful to be taking one of his business trips, temporarily free of the turmoil in Chicago, where the papers were full of news of solid companies collapsing, share prices still tumbling. If he admitted it, he was also glad to be free of the situation in his own household. Paul was settling in well, doing all right in school or at least not reporting that he wasn’t. Carl had taken to him, and Fritzi had lost her heart. But Joe Junior seemed colder, more embittered about all the things Joe stood for, than ever before. As if merely by existing, being himself, Joe was an offense
to his oldest boy.
It was the influence of that damnable Benno, he was sure. Reinforced by the privation sweeping the country along with the panic. The last newspaper he’d read before leaving contained a long, grim article about “suicides among the despairing poor.”
Joe couldn’t help contrasting his nephew with Joe Junior. Whenever he did, he was washed with guilt, because he found his son wanting. Sitting by himself in the darkened car, he was drawn into the past, to a virulent, explosive quarrel two years ago. The quarrel that seemed to create the permanent gulf between father and son.
Even now he shuddered to recall it. The shouting. The accusations—all brought on when Joe Junior came home with a letter of dismissal from his third school, an expensive private academy. There were high standards for pupils from the Crown house; high expectations. Joe Junior had been unable to fulfill them and, later, aware of this, he’d openly flaunted them by courting failure. The letter he brought home put the match to the fuse; the explosion came after fifteen minutes of acrimony behind tightly closed doors and windows in the airless study. Joe Crown had done something rare then. Lost his temper completely. Responded to some sneer, some shout from his distraught son, by striking him across the face with his open palm. Striking him so hard the white marks of his fingers showed like stigmata for five or ten seconds …
Suffused with shame, guilt, he’d whispered an apology. Not for the harsh things he’d said about Joe Junior’s failure, but for the blow. A decent and responsible father didn’t strike in anger.
The apology seemed to do no good. Joe Junior’s eyes were like blue flints. Nothing had been the same between them since that night.
The train arrived in the hilly city he had left in 1871 with his wife of two years. After many earnest talks, he had convinced Ilsa that it was smart for him to quit Imbrey’s in Cincinnati. The old breweries were family owned, leaving little room for a newcomer to advance. And the Chicago fire of ’71 suddenly threw the whole commercial scene of that growing city into chaos. Joe sensed an opportunity. Ilsa finally agreed that he should seize it.
Since ’71 they’d returned to Cincinnati only for short visits with Ilsa’s relatives, most of whom were elderly. Joe Crown loved the old city on the Ohio. Loved the splendid Roebling bridge that now connected it to Kentucky. But Cincinnati never would, never could match or even compete with the rude burly giant on Lake Michigan. That was home.
He had about two hours before the connecting train to Columbia and Charleston departed. He decided to walk awhile. The war memories were gripping him strongly again, as they did from time to time, always with little or no warning. A vigorous stroll might help him throw off the spell of the past.
Outside the depot a dreary rain was starting to fall. Joe nearly stumbled over a young man, twenty or so, sitting cross-legged against a pillar with a cap held out. Joe’s face darkened at the sight of the beggar’s dirty blue blouse. A Union infantry blouse. On the left breast hung three medals, cheap tinplate things, resembling no medals he’d ever seen. Probably bought at some novelty shop.
“You’re too young to have worn that coat.”
“It was my uncle’s,” the beggar whined. Here was one of those spiritual cripples who refused to stand up and help themselves. So far as Joe could see the fellow was perfectly sound and whole. “Forty-second Ohio Infantry, Brigadier James A. Garfield—”
“You disgrace the uniform by begging in it. Take off the blouse, I’ll buy it.”
“What the devil—?”
“Here’s five dollars.” Joe flung bills into the out-stretched cap. “Now take it off and give it to me, before I cane you with this stick.”
The beggar slid the money into his pants pocket. He tottered to his feet, muttering, “Crazy damned Dutchman.” But he quickly rid himself of the garment, which Joe rolled up under his arm.
In a saloon across from the depot he ordered an Imbrey’s lager. He blew off some of the head, tasted, smacked his lips.
“Still as good as ever,” he said to the barkeep.
Reaching down to the floor, he passed the uniform to the man, together with a dollar. “Get rid of this for me, please. Don’t ask questions, just burn it.”
Joe stood very straight at the bar, one shoe with a gray spat on the brass rail, and let the heaviness of memory, the pull of that incredible holy war of thirty years ago, possess him once again.
It was a phenomenon he couldn’t explain to others. Not to Ilsa, and certainly not to the children. Only men who had fought in the war could understand.
A heavy gloom settled on him. Although he knew the probable consequences, he was powerless to push it back. He didn’t like delays, or changes in routine. But this one, like similar ones in past years, was inevitable.
He walked back to the depot through the drizzle, reclaimed his grip, and exchanged his South Carolina ticket for another that would take him to Tennessee.
22
Paul
ON A SATURDAY MORNING in early June, Paul went to the exposition alone.
A week of school remained. At the end of it, he supposed, Mrs. Petigru would send home a letter to his aunt and uncle, to say he would be held over. Until now he’d been pretending all was well. He hadn’t even told Cousin Joe about his troubles.
Uncle Joe was still traveling in the South. He had telegraphed Aunt Ilsa to say that it might be as much as two weeks before he returned. Some kind of expansion at the textile mill was being planned. He had to attend meetings with architects and contractors.
Paul asked his aunt’s permission to go to the fair because he had a dollar fifty cents saved from the small sums she paid for chores around the house. He’d pondered for a week before making the decision to go. He hadn’t forgotten Juliette Vanderhoff; by wintertime he must have ice skates. Carl had gone with him to A. G. Spalding’s store one day after school. Skates were currently off the shelves because it was summer, but a helpful clerk said a fine pair of racers—crucible steel heel and toe plates, steel runners polished and nickel-plated, straps of russet leather—would cost two dollars twenty-five cents. Paul felt sure he could earn that much by the first freeze. He would see the fair while he had the chance.
He took a crowded yellow and red tram to the Fifty-seventh Street entrance, and from there walked a few blocks south to the Buffalo Bill encampment. He stood outside for a while, running his hand up and down the rough wood of the palisade. He could hear the morning performance in progress. Wheels creaking, hoofs pounding, Indians war-whooping, revolvers blasting—and spectators clapping, whistling, stamping. With a shake of his head he turned away, wondering if he’d ever see the show.
He walked briskly to the booths at the Sixty-third Street entrance, bought his ticket and passed through the turnstile. He wandered in and out of the splendid white buildings without any special plan, simply letting one exhibit after another surprise and enthrall him. In the Agriculture Building he marveled at a cheese weighing twenty-two thousand pounds. In the Mines and Mining Building he saw the world’s largest gold nugget, 344.78 ounces, according to the sign.
Joe Junior had informed him that, among hundreds of dull pictures and sculptures, there were some spicy ones hanging in the mammoth Fine Arts Building and its two annexes, so he went there next. In room after room, the walls were crammed from floor to ceiling with framed canvases. And Joe Junior was right, there were nudes. Standing nudes, reclining nudes, large nudes, small nudes, nudes observed from the front and from the rear. There were plump buttocks and large breasts with rosy nipples. In every one of the paintings, the most intimate area was hidden by the model’s hand, a drape, some grape leaves.
Paul’s face grew flushed and he got an erection from looking at the pictures. In front of the most voluptuous ones, he stared fixedly until he could imagine the face of Miss Juliette Vanderhoff. The guards gave him disapproving looks—there were no other unescorted young people in the galleries—and a matron who passed by as he was creating another fantasy muttered something about “corru
pting our youth.”
Leaving the building, he decided he would buy a bit of lunch, a glass of beer, and headed for the Midway. He avoided the exotic offerings of the Persian Coffee House, the Chinese Tea Garden, the French Cider Press, and chose instead a café with no national allegiances, near the west end. He took a small outdoor table for two, under a striped umbrella. The table stood next to a low picket fence separating the café from the street.
The sun was hot, filtering through airborne dust with a fierce white glare. Paul sat in shadow, glancing into the passing crowds between bites of sausage. His head started to throb. He knuckled his eye, blinked several times. When he opened his eyes, he started. There was a man standing next to his table on the other side of the fence. A man silhouetted in a corona light. A man sprung from nowhere.
“Can I believe my eyes? The Berlin boy. Taken any art lessons?”
He was speaking German. His hair was longer, hanging over his collar like hair in a religious painting. Everything else was the same. The long, white, starved countenance. The glowing dark eyes behind the gold-wire spectacles with tiny round lenses. The shabby derby, greasy cravat, long duster. The cigarette hovering near his lips, held by yellowed fingers. Where had he come from? Out of the ground? Out of the sky? Paul remembered thinking the first time that his eyes were the eyes of Death.
“What are you doing here, Mr.—?”
“Rhukov.”
“I remember.”
“Permit me to ask the same question of you.” Rhukov stepped over the fence, pulled out the other chair, sat down. “Waiter. Beer.”
After those two words in English, Rhukov returned to German. “You left Berlin. What scared you out, the generals rattling their swords? The distasteful thought of conscription? Or were you lured by Buffalo Bill? Did you decide to chase the cowboy show as a life’s work?”
Rhukov puffed his cigarette, waiting. Paul pushed his plate aside.
“My uncle lives here. He brews beer. I always planned to come to America.” Stretching it there, wasn’t he? But Rhukov made him nervous, defensive, even though he had an inexplicable liking for the odd young man.