Homeland

by John Jakes

  Straining on tiptoe while she held his arm for balance, Rosie still wasn’t interested. The gondola passed; the delivery boy’s eyes touched Joe Junior’s and slid on, without recognition.

  “There’s Pop,” Rosie cried suddenly, “there, on the next car.” She jumped up and down, pointing. Behind the gondola with the crane came one with stakes along the sides to hold a load of rails. Tabor Jablonec and three other marshals were sitting on top of the rails. Tabor wore overalls. His tin badge was pinned to the bib.

  “Oh God, Joey, he’s all right. Pop. Papa! Over here.” She yelled and waved. Tabor spied her as the car rolled through the crossing. He waved. He blew on his fist and polished his badge for her.

  The last two gondolas went by, laden with crossties and kegs of spikes; and finally the caboose. Joe Junior felt an enormous relief.

  Then, about half a block south, the wheels of the locomotive shrieked and grated on the rails and threw off sparks. The work train jerked and stopped. Rosie squeezed his hand so hard he thought she might break his little finger.

  “What’s wrong, is anything wrong?”

  Through drifting dust, he saw another big knot of people flowing onto the tracks down about Fiftieth Street, blocking the train. “They’re all around the engine, they aren’t moving.”

  Both of them heard a Guard officer yell, “Out of the way or I’ll give the order to shoot.” Someone threw a green bottle that arced high and splintered against the forehead of a guardsman sitting on the cab roof. Blood spurted. The soldier fell backward and tumbled off the side of the cab. Joe and Rosie heard shouts and curses, as if the mob was attacking the wounded man.

  People began to pound on the locomotive, the sides of the cars. Someone fired a round. Several guns went off, quick, smacking sounds, like giant firecrackers. Joe Junior flung his arm around Rosie, drew her close to protect her even as he silently cursed Tabor’s stupidity. She beat his chest with her fist. Tears welled from her eyes. “Why’d he get mixed up in this, why?”

  A dozen more rounds were fired. A man cried, “They’re shooting innocent people!” A woman screamed.

  “They hit Jebbie, they shot my boy!”

  The mob went wild.

  Men and women who had been harassing the marshals and guardsmen with nothing worse than oaths and a few sticks, grabbed at the nearest legs and yanked. Guardsmen fought to keep from falling off. The bravest in the mob tried to board the train. Joe Junior’s heart hammered. People were shoving, shouting, screaming; rocks and bottles were flying again, and there were more of those firecracker noises.

  “Rosie, come on, this isn’t safe.” He tugged her waist. The deputy marshals formed lines on both sides of the first two gondolas. Arms extended, teeth gritted against their own fear, they fired into the crowd.

  People fell; there was more screaming. On the locomotive and back on the caboose, guardsmen were yelling orders no one could hear. One, and then several, and then all of them opened fire off both sides of the train, creating a deadly crossfire. Joe Junior saw at least three men fall, and two women.

  Rosie tore away from him, shoving and kicking her way through the panicked mob. She was hysterical, screaming as though Tabor could hear her. “Pop, Pop, get down, hide yourself.”

  He ran after her. A man tried to gouge his eye with a thumb, for no apparent reason. Joe Junior seized the man’s shirt, kicked him in the crotch, threw him out of the way. People were going crazy. Rosie was going crazy, her screams clear and shrill among all the others.

  He jumped up on a broken crate beside the tracks, just long enough to spy Tabor Jablonec. Tabor was still on his feet on the gondola, white with fright. He discharged his pistol into the crowd while bullets from his own partisans buzzed around him. Joe Junior ran on, trying to catch Rosie. Just then he saw Tabor rise on the toes of his dusty shoes with a startled expression. Tabor dropped his revolver and seized his chest. Under his hand, in the middle of his overall bib, blood spread. He pitched off the stalled train, hit the gravel and rolled.

  “Oh, Pop, oh my God, oh Jesus in heaven,” Rosie screamed as she fought her way to the crumpled body. She knelt and dragged her father’s head up into her lap.

  Joe Junior reached her. She was weeping and frantically stroking Tabor’s face. “Oh God, oh Jesus Christ, Papa, why did you have to get mixed up with the bastards?”

  “Rosie,” Joe Junior said, ducking down again as bullets buzzed. He touched the sweat-soaked back of her blouse. She ignored him, rubbing her father’s arms and legs, as if trying to put life back into him.

  He smelled the waste of Tabor’s body then; Tabor’s eyes were already closed.

  “Rosie, he’s dead, leave him. We’ll find a wagon and come back and—”

  “I won’t,” she screamed. A bullet buzzed between them. Joe Junior flinched and averted his head but she didn’t seem to notice. Desperate, he crouched down and struggled to get his arms under the vile-smelling corpse of Tabor Jablonec.

  She realized what he was doing. “No!”

  “Rosie, come on, we’ve got to get away.”

  The shout, its force, pierced her hysteria. She staggered along beside him as he half walked, half ran with Tabor’s body in his arms. He went north, to Forty-ninth, away from the popping guns, the screams and lamentations of the wounded and bereaved. A block east on Forty-ninth he laid Tabor in the hot shade on the west side of a livery barn.

  Rosie dropped to her knees again. Joe Junior stared at his palms. Bloody. Tabor’s blood had leaked all over his shirt and even stained the white ribbon. Rosie’s empty hand sought his.

  “Why did he get mixed up with them, Joey?”

  Joe Junior shook his head, his big blue eyes burning. “He shouldn’t have done it. He should have known he was on the wrong side.”

  Losing control again, she leaped at him, scratching his face.

  “Shut up, God damn you, I can say it, you can’t, not you or nobody else. Get away from me with your damn preaching!”

  “Rosie, I’m sorry. You need help to move him—”

  “I don’t need nothing from you. You and your loony ideas about right and wrong—who cares? Who gives a shit? Right and wrong don’t buy shoes and clothes. You’re just like he was that way, you’ll never have two nickels to your name either. You’ll probably get killed too. Get away.”

  “Rosie, I just want to help with—”

  “Get away. Stay away. God damn you, leave me alone, I don’t ever want to see you!”

  He stared into her wild hate-filled eyes. He started to speak, but saw it was hopeless.

  He walked away quickly, around the corner to the front of the livery, and in through the wide front door. On a chair tilted against the side of a stall, the stable hand sat reading a ten-cent Deadwood Dick novel.

  “Come outside, hurry up. There’s a girl whose father’s been shot. She needs help.”

  The stable hand, a burly boy of fifteen with a humped back, gave him a dubious look. But he ran outside and around the corner anyway. Joe heard him exclaim, “Oh, miss—Lordy. How bad’s he hurt?”

  “He’s dead, open your eyes, look at him!”

  Joe Junior walked rapidly toward the east. Distantly, perhaps at the Fiftieth Street crossing, a single shot resounded. Then silence. Street dust drifted in the noonday light. The dust made his hair white as an old man’s.

  He doused his head and bathed his hands in a street trough for horses. He pulled his shirttail out for a towel. He didn’t know whether to discard the bloodied shirt or keep it on. Either way he’d attract attention. He kept his shirt.

  He walked all the way to Michigan and Twentieth, taking close to an hour. He knew that if he tried to board a car looking as he did, he’d be thrown off, or arrested. As it was, a hardware merchant saw him coming, dodged into his store and began cranking his telephone. A few blocks later, a foot patrolman stopped him. Joe Junior darted past, giving no explanation, and outran the patrolman only because he was middle-aged, with a sizable load of fat.

/>   He crept into the warm, still house by the back way. In the kitchen Louise Volzenheim was shelling peas. She nearly fainted at the sight of him.

  “Master Joe, what is all that blood?”

  “There was an accident, my girl’s father was killed. It’s his blood.”

  Louise couldn’t speak, it was too horrifying. With a numb feeling he climbed the stairs in the silent house. He ran water in the bathtub and soaked, cleaning the dried blood off his hands and arms.

  He couldn’t save his shirt. But he untied the blood-spotted white ribbon and carefully laid it on his bureau.

  The moment his mother came home, he told her.

  She clasped him to her breast and rocked him back and forth. “Joey, Joey, it could be you lying dead.”

  “But it isn’t, it’s Rosie’s father. The dirty scabs killed him, and more besides. Ten, twenty, I don’t know how many.”

  “We must send flowers for the poor man’s funeral, it’s the least we can do.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, feeling a curious sense of completion, a deadness. Rosie’s screamed words of banishment would be in his head forever. “I won’t be going to the funeral myself. I may never see her again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mama, just let it go. Please?”

  He told the story again at supper. His father insisted, after stating that he’d be docked two days’ pay. One for the actual hours missed, the second for the act of truancy. Joe Junior was too exhausted to be angry.

  Fritzi was agog as she listened to him. Carl too. Paul sat with both hands in his lap, saying nothing. At the end, Joe Junior could feel himself shaking a little. He glanced down at his palms. They were cleansed of blood, yet he saw stains. Always would …

  “Joseph,” his father said, smoothing a palm down over the point of his fine silver imperial, as if that way he could also smooth out some inner turmoil, “I hardly know where to begin to express my feelings about this matter.”

  Joe Junior’s blue eyes seemed to enlarge, burning again.

  “I am deeply shaken by the risk you took. I could have lost a beloved son. I suppose it was noble of you to try to aid that young woman. But she endangered herself recklessly, and you also. I am sorry for her father, though I never met him, or the young woman either. At least he died on the right side of the quarrel.”

  Joe Junior clenched his fists under the table. A vein in front of his left ear stood up in relief. His father saw. In a gentler voice, he said:

  “I withdraw what I said a while ago. I won’t dock your pay. You were wrong to leave work without permission, but I think you have absorbed enough punishment for one day.”

  Ilsa murmured, “Oh, thank you, Joe.”

  Joe Crown folded his napkin. “Please go to bed, son. Try to rest, put it out of your mind.”

  “I never will, Pop. Not as long as I live.”

  “That’s rather theatrical.”

  “It’s how I feel,” Joe Junior said.

  Their gazes locked. Redder in the cheeks, his voice low and strained, Joe Crown said, “You’ll excuse me, I have work.” He walked out of the dining room buttoning his coat.

  “Come to my room later,” Joe Junior whispered to Paul as they left the table a few minutes afterward.

  “Rosie’s through with me,” Joe Junior said, closing the door behind Paul.

  “That’s bad, I am very sorry.”

  He tried to shrug it away. “I knew there wasn’t any future with her, she told me often enough. She’s after someone who can throw barrels of money at her.”

  There was a bleak silence, then Paul said softly, “They are terrible men, those soldiers and deputies.”

  “Murderers. Nobody in the crowd had anything but rocks and sticks.” He walked to the bureau, and from the second drawer he pulled the bloody ribbon. “This is his blood on here.”

  “Martyr’s blood,” Paul said.

  “That’s right.” Joe Junior rummaged through another drawer, and produced his clasp knife. He made a loop of the ribbon, and cut it in two.

  “Here.”

  Paul laid the piece of stained ribbon on his left palm, and touched it with his right index finger. “Damn them. Damn them to hell.” His eyes were full of glistening tears. For the first time that day, Joe Junior smiled.

  48

  Joe Crown

  SOMETIMES, YEARS LATER, IF he was in a dark mood, or hunting for simple answers, he would look back and blame Stead. William T. Stead, the English reformer, and his book, If Christ Came to Chicago, which Ilsa was reading that fateful Sunday night.

  Of course, Stead was only the match. Joe’s increasingly short temper was the fuse; his temper, and a mounting sense of pressure, encirclement. Events of that hot week of July 1894 were the powder that exploded and led to devastating consequences in the family.

  It was a curious and unsettling Sunday to begin with. There was young Joe’s brush with death at the level crossing; the papers reported fourteen fatalities and many more injured. The father of the Bohemian girl from Pullman was one of the dead.

  All Sunday morning young Joe moved about the house silently with a strange blank look on his face. The boy was obviously feeling shock, and pain, so Joe said nothing provocative, hoping to promote a swift healing process. He did notice that Paul shadowed Joe Junior almost continually throughout the morning. They seemed inseparable.

  Although Paul had failed to accomplish his mission in Little Cheyenne, Joe Crown realized he could hardly blame his nephew, given the attack by hooligans. And Paul was clearly a hero to his younger cousins. At Sunday dinner, Fritzi several times lauded Paul’s “bravery.” It seemed to embarrass him, and cause him to eat faster than ever. An hour later, Joe Crown walked by the open doors of the sitting room and heard Carl whistling and exclaiming over the story, which Paul was evidently retelling at Carl’s request.

  In the afternoon, Joe Junior left, saying he needed to walk. He was dressed more neatly than usual, and he advised his mother that he might be gone until supper. This wasn’t his typical behavior. Joe supposed the shooting had chastened him. The change, though precipitated by a tragedy, was not unwelcome.

  Paul and Carl went outside to play ball, giving him a chance to catch up on the newspapers. Every paper carried similar headlines.

  THIRSTY FOR BLOOD!

  Frenzied Mob Bent on Death

  and Destruction!

  Anarchy Is Rampant!

  Mobs Apply the Torch!—Flames Make Havoc!

  Unparalleled Scenes of

  Riot, Terror and Pillage!

  He crushed the paper and flung it aside. The chaos and bloodshed were inspired by reds and their chief agent, Debs, there was no doubt in his mind. The Debs boycott menaced the orderly progress of commerce, and physically threatened all decent people who only wanted to get on with their daily lives. The troops ought to crack down harder; fill the jails with the strikers if necessary. He’d permit no such breakdown of discipline at Crown’s.

  His reaction to events in the city set him on edge. By the time he went to bed he was in a foul mood.

  The house was again unbearably hot, and so was he. His nightshirt was white muslin with pearl buttons down the front, and collar and cuffs trimmed with piping of claret-colored silk. Though it was a lightweight garment, meant for summer, he felt as if he were wearing three fur over-coats.

  Ilsa was worse off. Her muslin gown, cut in the Mother Hubbard style with enormous full-length balloon sleeves, had tight wristbands and a high collar trimmed with fine torchon lace. Ilsa was lying with her head against the bolster, reading. He noticed that it was Stead’s book, which he’d written after his investigations of vice in the city. Published in February, the book had sold thousands of copies, and continued to sell. The mere sight of it was enough to make Joe crosser.

  There was no breeze in the bedroom, only a soggy stickiness to the air. Uncomfortable and sweaty, he climbed into bed next to his wife. A moth flew frant
ically around the electric lamp at the bedside. In the clear globe, the filament blazed blindingly.

  He pulled up the starched sheet. A few seconds later he kicked it off. He dragged the hem of his nightshirt up to where it just barely covered his private parts. From a side table he snatched a paper fan imprinted with the brewery’s name and the Crown device. He fanned himself furiously. Ilsa gave him a worried glance and turned a page.

  A moment later she said, “Here is something you might find interesting.”

  “Nothing written or spoken by that sanctimonious meddler interests me.”

  “My dear, you mustn’t close your mind. Mr. Stead expresses some quite unexpected opinions on saloons.”

  “Oh?” he said, more sarcastically than he intended. “Does he want to blow them up instead of just padlocking them?”

  “You’re unfair. You haven’t read so much as one word of—”

  “Nor do I intend to. Will you please turn off the light so I can go to sleep?”

  In her own way Ilsa was quite as stubborn as her husband. She propped the book on her stomach. “Not until I read you a paragraph from the chapter entitled ‘Whisky and Politics.’ Mr. Stead clearly distinguishes between family saloons and those he terms indecent.”

  “Ilsa, I’m not interested in the views of a man who condemns the way I make my living.”

  “Wait, he doesn’t condemn—”

  “I refuse to listen. Good night.”

  He rolled over, away from her.

  He lay there tense for about a minute. Then came a dreaded signal; Ilsa closing the book with a gunshot snap.

  “And I will not be hectored and dismissed like some servant, Joe Crown.”

  Something in him leaped like a racehorse at the bell. Something in him was eager to quarrel. He rolled back toward her. “Damn it to hell, woman—”

  The argument, steadily more heated and incoherent, lasted twenty minutes. She fell asleep crying. He fell asleep on his right side, his back to her, scrupulously avoiding any contact as he lay there rigid with anger.