by John Jakes
“What you doing pushing a laundry wagon?” Jimmy asked. “I thought you worked for that photographer.”
“Not exactly. He’s my friend. He teaches me photography. May I ask—is your employer here? The colonel?”
“Should be coming down those stairs any minute. On his way out.”
As predicted, Colonel Shadow soon appeared, dressed for the street in his sombrero and flowing cravat. Mary clung to his arm. She’d dolled up with big scarlet patches of rouge. The kraut tried to cover up his soaked singlet as he introduced himself.
“Yes, kid, I remember you,” Shadow said pleasantly.
“I would still like a job in the picture business, sir. Would you perhaps—?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Two boys are all I can afford.” He tipped his sombrero and went out. Mary followed, trailing a cloud of toilet water that masked the smells of dirt and sweat around the cash register.
Jimmy balanced the knife point on the ball of his middle finger. “Get rid of one of us, maybe he’ll take you on.”
Lew Kress nearly dropped the gearbox. He was white as a piece of uncooked fish. It delighted Jimmy, who flipped the knife in the air and watched it come down and embed itself in the counter, humming.
The kraut didn’t smile at Jimmy’s little joke, just nodded. “I’ll see you again, Daws.”
“Right. So long.” He pulled the knife out of the counter and cleaned another fingernail.
Paul Crown’s shoulders glistened like sunlit glass as he walked out. He mopped his chin and neck with a blue bandanna, then climbed aboard the wagon and shook the reins over the swaybacked horse. The wagon creaked out of sight. Jimmy reached under his collar and absently fingered the holy medal chain.
Delivery man, huh? Not much of a job. Maybe the best a foreigner could get. But he lived in that fancy house, so why was he reduced to hustling laundry?
It occurred to Jimmy that maybe the kraut didn’t live in the fancy house anymore. Maybe there was a falling-out at home. Whatever the explanation, the kraut struck Jimmy as a straight-ahead guy. A guy with plenty of sand; not easy to push around. This was a considerable concession from someone who had a fierce dislike of Dutchmen generally.
Of course, even if the kraut did land a job with Shadow—which really wasn’t likely, Kress would probably be here forever—it wouldn’t buffalo Jimmy. If the kraut, or anyone, disputed Jimmy’s authority or otherwise troubled him, he’d do what he always did. Hurt them.
Simple as that. He was no chump.
63
Joe Crown
WHEN SUMMER CAME, THE long days and the heat, conversations with Ilsa seemed to grow shorter and cooler. Often there was contention, even if their discussion didn’t begin that way. The first time Joe was fully aware of this, they were sitting alone, she with her darning, he with papers from the brewery, after the children had gone to bed.
“Joe.”
“Yes?”
“Louise took a telephone message this morning.”
Annoyed by the interruption, he tilted his head down and peered over his spectacles. “Is there something unusual about that?”
“It was Paul.”
He sat in stunned silence while she described the message. “He asked that I not tell you he called. Louise said he was polite, but she could hear anger in his voice.”
“Then he shouldn’t have bothered to—”
“Joe, please. I’ve worried myself to exhaustion about him. About both boys. You wonder that Paul’s angry? You banished him like a peasant who dares to disagree with a king.”
He flung his papers on the floor. “That analogy is ridiculous. Let’s be very clear. I don’t wish the boy ill—sickness, anything like that. But I gave him all I had to give, and he repaid it by abetting Joe’s flight from this house. I’m supposed to be grateful? Forgiving? I am sorry, no.”
He rose, stooped to gather the papers. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll work in the study.”
She didn’t reply. Her eyes were on her darning again. He walked out, his face dark as a boiled beet. He deliberately gave the door a good slam.
They lay in bed, not touching. It was two weeks later. All the windows were raised. Again there was no air stirring; summer’s sticky heat imprisoned Chicago.
She said, “Are you awake?”
“I am.”
“You didn’t tell me about the detective report today.”
“The usual. Nothing.”
“Oh dear Lord. I’m so worried. Not a letter, not even a postal card since he left. He might be injured. Even—”
She was unable to finish.
“Ilsa, let me reassure you about one thing. Whatever else he is, our son is a strong, competent young man. I despise his political ideas—the way he was so easily influenced by someone like Benno. But I never for a moment minimize the good character you developed in Joe as he grew up. If he’s silent, it’s because he chooses to be silent, not because he’s come to harm.”
“Then are we wasting our money on the detectives?”
“Yes, I think we are. It’s shamefully expensive to keep them searching week after week. But I’ll do it as long as you want, though I don’t hold out much hope of success.”
“Then cancel the arrangement for a while. I assume we can hire them again.”
“Anytime.”
“All right. Let them go.”
He reached for her hand, tentatively, shyly as a new suitor might. She twined her fingers in his, squeezed, sought his chin with her other hand, kissed him.
It was a brief pause in the upward spiral of tension between them. He hoped it would last. But three nights later, with the temperature still in the eighties at eleven o’clock, the telephone rang downstairs.
Joe Crown knelt in the street. A crowd of neighborhood people surrounded him. Someone had led the sobbing widow away. His landau with top down was tied to a hitching block nearby. He’d sped across town to North Halsted Street in response to the call. He was still wearing his carpet slippers, and his nightshirt was tucked into pants with suspenders. He felt as if he’d put on three fur overcoats; his face streamed with sweat.
A sick bile filled his mouth as he looked at the small nondescript man lying on the wooden sidewalk with his head at a crooked angle. Blackish blood mixed with brain matter was coagulating underneath his skull. Huge flies were darting and buzzing near the blood. Natty in a white summer suit, Dolph Hix stood behind his employer, a sick look on his face.
“There ain’t nothing you can do, Mr. Crown, it was an accident,” said the police patrolman who’d come when a frantic neighborhood boy ran to the precinct to report a man falling off a roof.
Joe stood up slowly, feeling pain in his joints, an ache in his belly. “I’ll pay for his funeral and burial. Everything the best. Someone please tell his wife.”
“I will,” Dolph Hix said. “If she’ll talk to me.”
Joe retreated to the steps of the tenement and sank down with hands pressed to his temples. Dolph Hix had been working the customers at a saloon two blocks farther north. He’d been freely buying Crown beer because the saloon was well run and had a large, steady clientele. The owner presently bought from three breweries, but Joe wanted the saloon as a tied house for Crown’s. The man lying there half covered with someone’s motheaten blanket had apparently enjoyed one free beer too many, stumbled home to his flat, gone up to the roof for relief from the heat, and somehow fallen.
Dolph Hix came over to his employer. “I didn’t see him leave the place, Joe. There are witnesses who say he was blau.” Germans had a whole range of expressions for degrees of intoxication. Dolph Hix wasn’t German, but he’d learned the expressions at the brewery. The most extreme stage, falling-down drunk, was tersely indicated by the word for blue.
“Staggering, then,” Joe said; he wasn’t pleased.
“Yeah, his wife should have kept him away from the roof. I hope you don’t blame me for—”
Joe silenced the sales agent by reaching out to
grip his arm. “No, Dolph, you were only doing your job.”
But he knew someone who would blame him.
“It isn’t my fault,” Joe shouted, in the kitchen two hours later. Ilsa had been waiting up for him; she had brewed a pot of coffee because he said he couldn’t sleep. Her hair was in a long braid, draped over the shoulder of her heavy robe.
He’d explained what happened and said he would pay reparations to the widow—the couple had five children—but it didn’t mollify her. The tragedy ignited her wrath in a way he’d seldom seen. They’d been arguing for fifteen minutes.
“You can’t evade responsibility, Joe. Your employee, Dolph Hix, was buying beer for everyone. You admitted it.” Ilsa looked wan and old, and without warning she began to weep. “That poor man. Just like my papa. Killed by jenes verdammte Zeug!”
That damned stuff, she called his beer. “Ilsa,” he said, in a tone of warning.
“It’s your fault, Joe Crown. God forgive you—you and your awful business that destroys men’s lives.”
She ran out. He stood trembling with the mug of hot coffee in his hands. Suddenly he whirled and threw the mug against the wall, coffee and all.
He’d narrowly missed Ilsa’s plaque with its platitude about a contented household. Coffee ran down the wall beneath it. Shards of crockery lay scattered on the floor, the stove, even the butcher block.
The hell with it, he thought, Louise can clean it up tomorrow. He slept on one of the downstairs sofas that night.
He paid for a fine funeral for the dead man, and for a choice burial plot. He wrote a letter of condolence, never acknowledged. Because the accident had struck Ilsa with such force, he put Dolph Hix and his two junior sales agents into different jobs, traveling for the brewery, checking on the out-of-town agencies. He took away their rolls of cash and forbade them to buy free drinks in saloons.
After a ten-day road trip, Dolph closed Joe’s office door, slumped into the visitor’s chair, and said Bo Stone, one of the junior men, was quitting. Then he said he’d like to do the same thing, but he was loyal. “Loyal and sore. A hell of a combination, Joe.”
At home, Ilsa didn’t speak of the accident again. She didn’t apologize for what she’d said in the kitchen. Forthcoming on any other subject, she maintained her household routines and family conversation with no apparent change. But when Joe tried to tell her of Dolph’s new duties, her response was a steely silence.
After a few weeks he returned Dolph Hix and the remaining assistant to their former positions. He reinstated their expense accounts and then hired two more men as junior sales agents. He didn’t tell Ilsa. Never before had he withheld brewery news as important as this, but he decided it was definitely necessary this time.
64
Joe Junior
HE KEPT WORKING HIS way west. it was his intention to see the Pacific Ocean. There was no one telling him which way he had to go, no one issuing orders except for short periods when he hired on to earn money.
He did carpentry, dug drainage ditches, trekked across the autumn fields of Illinois. He shoveled snow on a street crew in St. Louis during the winter of ’94—’95. He’d always been physically strong, but he was smaller than many young men his age, so he felt compelled to work twice as hard to prove his worth. As he approached his nineteenth birthday in April of 1895, he realized he’d never grow much bigger. Sometimes people termed him a runt good-naturedly. To compensate for his size, he let his beard grow again. He kept beard and mustache trimmed but full. His beard reached his chest.
His skin was darker from all his time outdoors. His hands were powerful and scarred in a couple of places from little accidents with an axe or from a fistfight when someone called him runt derisively. In one altercation on a carpentry job site, his opponent grabbed a piece of two-by-four and smashed him across the face. His broken nose gushed blood, and healed with a crooked little bump in the middle.
Long hours and the agony of strained muscles didn’t bother him; exhaustion helped him sleep, in fact. Helped ease the memories of his family, Rosie, Benno. He thought a lot about Benno’s death. He decided it had been stupid and futile. He wasn’t soured on the cause of the laboring man. To the contrary, he was one of them; their cause was his, despite his father’s efforts to make him feel like a pariah because of it. He still believed walkouts were good weapons. Strikes too. But bombs? Stupid.
It was at night that he missed his home most. Missed his brother and sister, and Paul, and especially his mother. She’d be worried about him. Sometimes he suffered intense guilt over that.
When it came to his father, his emotions were tangled. He harbored bad feelings toward Joe Crown; yet in a strange way he hadn’t expected, he also felt a renewed kinship. Because he was independent now. Following his own plan, not someone else’s. His father had done that as a young man, then failed to understand that his son must do the same thing.
He went west through Missouri to Kansas City as the snow melted and the ground softened and the sun stayed up longer, felt warmer every day. He made enough to get by, and when he’d accumulated a few dollars, he thanked his boss and started west again. He didn’t live comfortably, but he never starved. Occasionally on a Saturday night he even enjoyed a woman. A few moments of heated pleasure, then a tip of the cap, and no looking back. There were no Rosies to remember with a sense of loss and regret.
In Kansas City jobs were scarce. He worked for two weeks as a sandwich man, carrying boards. One day he happened upon a ball field where Negro teams played. He hung over the low board fence for a couple of innings, the only white face visible. He savored the crack of the bat, the cheers from the black folk in the stands. He reveled in the smell of the grass, the dust around the bases. He remembered White Stockings games he’d seen with his father. It made him sad.
He also remembered a conversation about sandwich men. Pop had called them the dregs. And here he was, one of them. It made him laugh.
When the sun set and he took the boards back to the café, the owner asked him as usual for the route he’d followed. The owner was an Irishman who’d emigrated from County Wicklow twenty years before. He’d spoken bitterly of signs that had greeted him in America. No Irish need apply. Joe Junior mentioned that he’d lingered a few minutes near the colored people’s ball field.
“You did that on my time? You dumb little shit, we don’t cater to niggers. We don’t let ’em in the door. You’re fired.”
He heard there was work in Kansas, so he crossed the wide Missouri on a three-cent ferry. A farmer hired him to string barbed wire for several days. Barbed wire had changed the whole agricultural picture on the Western plains, the farmer said. Before barbed wire came along in the 1880s, homesteaders who laid out crop fields and pastures had only hedgerows of Osage orange, or wooden fences that rotted out or broke easily, to keep stray cattle off their land. Barbed wire changed that forever.
The farmer also told him the level of the land in Kansas rose almost thirty-five hundred feet between the Missouri and the Colorado border. Joe Junior was excited about that. If he walked even one mile, he was climbing toward the mountains; the only significant geographic barrier between himself and the legendary California sunshine, the Pacific shore.
Moving west, he passed through forests of oak and hickory, and over a flat plain that was rising invisibly beneath his feet. In the small towns he began to see Indians. Kaw, sometimes called Kansa, and Osage, and Pawnee, wearing ordinary farm clothes and looking singularly peaceful. No one in Kansas feared the savage nomadic Comanche any longer; they were beaten.
The Indians lived in permanent villages. They hunted as well as farmed. They had marvelous deep-chiseled brown faces, and he knew Cousin Paul would have thrilled to see them.
The bluestem prairie (“Once,” a man told him, “the bluestem stood here tall as a walking man—sometimes tall as a man riding horseback.”) gave way to a more desolate landscape of low-growing buffalo grass and weather-stunted cottonwoods straggling along creeks hardly worthy
of the name.
Then came Abilene, Dickinson County, on the east-west railway. Abilene had been a boomtown when the long Texas cattle drives ended there. Now it was a faded, dusty little place, with only a few rundown hotels and saloons open in the section called the Devil’s Addition that had once been a hell-raiser’s paradise. There were a few real cowboys left, but they were old men. He talked to one who sat in a rocker on the porch of the dilapidated Drover’s Hotel on Texas Street, south of the tracks. The old cowboy wore a leather vest and ancient leather chaps over patched jeans. His shirt collar was black with grime. It must have been a year since anyone had trimmed his long, matted gray hair. He had cheap yellow false teeth, which accounted for his name, Ivory.
And he had a fund of spine-chilling stories about night stampedes, and Comanche raids, and the glorious young whores who flocked up and down Texas Street in the old days, tempting a man to Hell with every conceivable variation of sex. Joe Junior listened to him for a whole afternoon. As he rose to go, he mentioned that he needed work.
“That way.” Ivory jerked a thumb in a general westerly direction. “The winter wheat harvest. Plenty of able-bodied young men needed.” Joe Junior thanked him. As he turned to go, the old cowboy’s eyes were already closing.
Leaving Abilene, he traveled into the wheat lands. The hard red winter wheat germinated in the spring and was harvested in the warm months by sweating men who looked small beside their huge machines.
The machines, called headers, traveled slowly through the ripe fields. The header’s revolving reel mechanism swept the grain across a sicklelike mowing blade. The loose heads fell onto a flat collection table, then rode sideways and upward on a moving belt. The stalks dropped off the side, into a wagon whose driver matched his pace to the machine. The header was an enormous, ungainly piece of equipment; so heavy it had to be pushed from behind by a team hitched to a trace bar. But the wagon could go directly to the threshing site; no extra men were needed to gather and stack the wheat in shocks for transportation later, as was necessary with older machines. Joe Junior’s first work on a crew was driving a mule team behind a header.