Fishbein fell silent. The rat-a-tat-tat of gunshot replaced his voice as the only sound in the room. It sounded even farther away than before. Mags forced herself to believe it came from a direction that was not the rail station where George had gone on Fishbein’s errand. She imagined her husband holed-up, safe, waiting for things to die down or the police to arrive before he came to her. This image began to fade as soon as she achieved it. She knew what kind of man her George was and knew he was trying with everything he had to get home that very minute. She saw him face mortal danger at every turn, desperate with fear for her, for the baby. A shivering sweat went through her. Fishbein took off his jacket and covered her as best he could. Though her teeth chattered, Mags managed to ask Fishbein to continue his story. Listening to him speak was better than lying there terrorized by images of George hurt or worse.
Yes. Of course. I am saying good-bye to Sonya, no? Yes. She is beautiful as ever, her eyes sparkle. She teases me, I recall. She said, You are so afraid to leave me even for half a day? Such a clever man my husband is! You finds me out! Yes, I shall run away with the butcher’s boy as soon as you turn a corner. Her time is close, very close, but it’s not our way to mention fears about such things or the angels and demons who listen to every human word might bring our fears to life. So I smile and kiss her and goes my way.
I don’t get so far. Not ten blocks from our neighborhood, I am beset upon by thugs. They tear my pockets and pull the hair from my head. They hit me with clubs, and I am unconscious in the street. When I awake, night is fallen. At first, I don’t know where it is I am or what happens to me. I stumble about. There are sounds in the night, a clamor of chaos and cruelty, but I am drunk with confusion. I cannot determine what it is going on. Suddenly, I realize. It is a pogrom. A pogrom. The one no one thinks will come to our city, because the goyim they are so friendly, we think they love us. From the capital of our province, newspapers incite hatred against the Jews for a long time, but that is the capital. In our quiet town, a place people come to vacation, to take the waters and listen to concerts, people are genteel, we think, or too content, too lazy to read, to act. But a pogrom it is. And I know what means a pogrom. I must gets home.
What can I tell you? Without the grace of Gott, nothing is easy. It takes me until the dawn’s light to get home. Or what is left of home. I find there a shambles. First the murderers and then the looters have come. Like here, everything is smashed, destroyed, or if it is of value, it is taken away. My father is hung from a rafter, with his pants pulled off, and my mother is in the corner of the kitchen with her skirts up, her body stained with the refuse of her pots, which are strewn all over. She bleeds from every orifice and from her chest. You know, a son—especially a guilty, angry son—should never see such things, but it is not the worst sight for me. The worst is my Sonya, with her skirts also up and her breasts exposed, and her belly, her belly rent in two, as if she is a fish they have gutted, and my child, a boy, a little boy, lying next to her, strangled by the cord that keeps him attached to her forever, in life and in death. Count them. There are four. These are my dead. For whose sake I shall protect you, Mags McCallum, with my life.
He stopped, finished with speaking for now. Immediately, he wondered whether he should have spoken at all. His own heart was queerly relieved yet innervated, unexpectedly so. Mags wiped tears from her eyes with one hand, pressed his with her other, and her chest and belly heaved. Fishbein was appalled by his own insensitivity. In setting down his burden, he had handed her one to carry. He struck his breast three times with his free hand while petitioning her clemency.
Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, he said. As I tell you, I am a stupid, selfish man. I see my unhappy tale gives you fresh heartache. Believe me, I will let no one harm you as my Sonya was. The mystics teach us that under the eye of Gott, all opposites achieve balance. I am sure, I am confident this very room is the place where today the Holy One, blessed be He, will create perfect harmony out of turmoil. On one side of the scale is the murder of my loved ones. Nu? On the other is your safety. My suffering assures your future joy. Why not? Is there a reason on Gott’s green earth why this should not be so?
In spite of herself, Mags’s heart swelled with hope. Yes, she said, why not?
Quiet can be as strong a bond between two people as a thousand heartfelt words. After several silent minutes, she felt comfortable enough to ask a question that on any other day would not cross her lips for its assumption of intimacy, but this question nagged at her.
And Miss Minnie? If she’s not your wife’s child, where did she come from?
Ah! My little girl. She is a foundling, of course. When I goes home that day to find, well, you know what, I spend the first nights alone with my dead. I take my father down from where he is hung, and I wash and wrap him in a sheet. My mother and my wife and child, I also wash and bind. I find candles and lights them and mourn by them without cease. The world around me does not exist. The czar’s army can storm into our house and I would not hear them approach. Yet on the fourth day, I am staring at my child, my boy, whose tiny body has grown stiff, whose tiny face peeking out of his shroud I watch turn blue, then black while I weep over him. For four days, I am imagining for him the life he will never know, and suddenly, I hear him cry. Can you know what a shock that is? I jump up. The cry sounds again only now I hear it comes from behind me. I turn and there, in the doorway, is another child, a red-headed girl child of maybe three or four years, and she is naked, covered in blood. She is crying in my doorway, first in little bleats like a lamb led to slaughter and then when she sees she gets my attention, louder and louder in the wails of a woman. I take her in. In the weeks that follow, I cannot find who she is or from where she comes. I decide she is sent from Gott to be mine. For me, she is a reason to live. For her, I am life itself.
Time went by, he told her, and he realized he could not continue to live in his town, amid the destruction there and his memories. As it happened, the looters had not got everything after all. His father took a certain jacket on his trips. In its hems his mother stitched the jewels he would carry to trade that they might be safe on the road and in the common houses where he slept. For the trip he was to make to Riga days after his murder, his father wanted only his best stock. The hems of his jacket were full of precious stones. The looters did not think to steal that worn jacket, which gave Fishbein a fortune to stake out a new life. He left the Black Sea behind him. After a time, he and his little girl found themselves in America. He looked things over and disliked the similarities between Saint Petersburg and New York. He traveled up and down the Great River looking for a home, and settled in East St. Louis.
But why here?
We are here when Minerva grows tired and announces she wishes to go no farther.
And why this business?
Fishbein smiled an odd smile, a smile with anguish in it.
I prefer the company of the dead to that of the living, he said. It is where my heart lays.
The second night of the riots, they tried to sleep lying side by side. Each woke a dozen times, half a breath after sleep claimed them, either from the bloody chaos outside or from the nightmares that rim exhaustion. It was hard to tell which was which. Just after first light, there was a commotion at the front door, one neither distant nor imaginary. Mags gasped. Mr. Fishbein leapt up to stand in front of her, a human shield, holding a weapon in each raised hand. From out of nowhere Mags could determine, he’d produced a ten-inch butcher’s knife and a chair leg with a great nail sticking out of its carved haunch.
Under the bed, he whispered to her, under the bed. Please.
She moved to roll off the bed to hide beneath it when Magnus Bailey appeared at the doorway.
The man’s face was slick with sweat, his fine clothes torn and foul. River mud covered his boots to his ankles.
Before Fishbein could ask, he said, Miss Minnie is safe. I put her in a good place ’crost
river. I need water. Have you got water? They gave it to him, and he told them what was what in the world outside.
It started when some white men drove through the colored town and shot some boys just standin’ in the street, talkin’ ’bout their own business, he said, who knows why. The police came in an unmarked car, all of ’em totin’ rifles pointin’ out the windows the way they do. There’s colored folk had armed themselves by then. Not knowin’ who was in the car, they opened fire afore they’d get shot themselves. It was the police wound up dead. Next thing you know, thousands of white men are in the streets, screamin’ for vengeance, raidin’ the colored homes, burnin’ and killin’ any poor black man, woman, or child they find.
Bailey buried his head in his hands for a moment, remembering. Mags noticed that his hands trembled against his face. When he took them away, he wrung them together. He kept wringing them throughout his report, except when he balled a fist and smacked his palm, either for emphasis or to achieve control, she could not tell which.
The things I saw last night, the things I saw. Them little houses and stores south of city hall? Burnt down to the ground. And while they’re burnin’, whole families runnin’ out of ’em. Oh, those poor babies! Gettin’ shot by white men loungin’ around with their backs against walls, calm as you please, just waitin’ for targets to come out of a house afire. They’d shoot a body down, then pick ’em up and toss ’em back in to burn alive. Cut the fire hoses, too. The soldiers got called in, but they don’t do nothin’ but march around in their tight columns more concerned with protectin’ themselves than restorin’ the peace. I don’t expect they know what to do. It is the Apocalypse.
By the free bridge and even by the Eads, there’s a stream of people hurryin’ acrost with whatever they can carry, colored folk meanin’ to find rescue over there in Missouri. There must be ten thousand of ’em and where are they going to go? Who’s goin’ to have ’em? It’s quite a sight. The orange sky, the smoke, the fire trucks with no hoses and trucks with soldiers racin’ around not knowin’ where to go or what to do once they get there, the people leavin’, the dead burnin’ or hung from the lampposts and set on fire while they’re still twitchin’ with life.
For a moment, Bailey’s throat closed, he could not speak. He smacked his palm with a balled-up fist twice. Then he spoke in a rush of words as if anxious to get his story out and over with so that he could begin to digest it.
It’s the unions, mostly, he said. They out to kill Negroes, calling ’em the ones who drive down wages for everybody, foreigners and native boys alike. Truth don’t seem to matter to any of ’em. They’re out for blood. There’s white gals on the loose, pointin’ out women and children for their men to take down and if the men’s too slow, they’re doin’ it themselves. I saw a colored gang or two on the way over here. They’re beatin’ back the whites, and they don’t care if they’re fightin’ murderers or bystanders or their neighbors from two blocks over. So if you ask me, things gonna go from bad to plain evil on our side as well. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some.
George? Do you know where George is?
No, ma’am. I don’t. But that’s one man I’m not worried about. He’ll turn up, I’m sure. He’s a smart man, your George. He wouldn’a rode straight into hell without a backward look. We’ll find him. Don’t you worry. More likely, he’ll find you.
Mags wanted to say, Yes! He would! He’d ride straight into hell at high noon to get to me! He would in a heartbeat! But if he’d done that, he’d have been home before Magnus Bailey crawled back. So she didn’t say it, in fear that the saying might curse herself and George and the baby altogether. Each hour that passed without her husband turning up brought her closer to despair.
Two days later, it was all over. An eerie peace settled over East St. Louis while officials and newsmen sorted out a version of the truth. Whole blocks smoldered while people searched for the missing and dead. Mr. Fishbein went to the stockyards, where recovered corpses lay under tarps awaiting identification. He went with little hope of finding George, even if George were dead. There were thirty-nine dead Negroes lined up on the ground, but hundreds of colored men and women were unaccounted-for. There was no way to tell if those lost souls were burnt beyond recognition of ever having been human to begin with, if their mangled bodies had been tossed in the river, or if they were alive but had fled. Thirty-nine was a pitiful number out of so many, but George McCallum was among them. How he died exactly was uncertain. There were ligatures around his neck, and his lower body had been burned. Although the cart he’d ridden to the railways was never found, the horse that pulled it returned to the barn of his owner a week later, three-legged lame. The liveryman put him down.
Magnus Bailey offered, but it was Mr. Fishbein who broke the news to George McCallum’s widow. He did the best he could to break it gently. He went to Miss Emily’s, where he had installed her until the funeral home could achieve proper repair. Miss Emily was glad to have her. Her establishment had escaped the carnage, but most of her other boarders were either out of work, unable to pay, or had moved on in the days just after the riots.
Fishbein sat in the parlor where the wedding had been, his walking stick between his legs. His hands rested on its knob and his chin on his hands as he muttered to himself, trying to find the words required. I should say I am so very sorry, he muttered. No, she’ll know right away. First I should tell her she looks so well and ask for the baby. Oh, dear me, I shall have to smile, then, won’t I? Oy. Mine Gott, can I do that? And it was while he was practicing a stupid, pleasant smile that would fool no one that Mags came in with Miss Emily at her elbow, saw him, and shrieked. Luckily, Miss Emily kept her from falling hard to the floor in grief, protecting her unborn child from any harm.
The Widow McCallum had her child in her bed at Miss Emily’s. Chesty and Miss Emily performed as midwives. For them, bringing into the world little Sara Kate, named for George’s mama, who had passed decades before, was a great holiday. For the widow, it was an unfathomable sadness.
Look at that little face, Chesty cooed at her. Just like her daddy. Ain’t it a miracle?
And it was true; Sara Kate had the same sharp nose, the same dark caramel skin, the same small black eyes. Only her mouth, plump and pouting, was her own. Otherwise, George McCallum was stamped all over her, down to her quiet, steely temperament. Even as an infant, the child rarely cried. Her small fist with its long, thin fingers gripped whatever it could with uncommon strength. All of which broke her mother’s heart.
Take her away, please, I can’t look at her, Mags said whenever they brought the child to her. The women tried to change her mind, telling her she was just tired from the birth, and once the healing and the pain was over and done, she’d come to want the baby at her teat. They put the girl directly on her mama’s chest. Look at her, they said, look how cunnin’ she is. Mags pushed her off.
She’s like him, just like him, and that makes her a plague to me, she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and her voice was flat cold. Why would he visit me like this? As a tiny, squirmin’, helpless little thing? I don’t want her. I don’t want her.
A few months later when her blood settled, Mags warmed up to the child, but by then it was too late. The damage was done. Sara Kate grew up reserved, suspicious always, looking without respite for a love that could fill the deep loneliness she felt from the cradle on.
MARCHING THRU
EMANUEL’S GROUND
The Road to Memphis, 1918–1924
V
No matter what she went through later on in life, and there was plenty, Aurora Mae always said that one of the strangest sights she ever saw was the caravan that brought Mags Preacher McCallum and little Sara Kate home to the family colony at the old plantation south of St. Louis. It was getting on in the day. The light had begun to fade. Aurora Mae rocked on the porch of the big house, watching shadows gambol at the edge of the dark wood. She was wr
apped in a quilt, as the air got crisp that time of year soon as the sun made a fare-thee-well. All at once, before she saw or heard a thing, the three mongrel dogs that kept her company took off and yelped down the road with hell on their heels. She knew those three well enough to get to her feet and watch for whatever approached. The big house, where the Stanton siblings lived, was set at the top of a hill bordered by cultivated fruit trees and, beyond them, dense thicket on three sides. The Stanton home was the vanguard of the family colony and its first line of both welcome and defense.
Horace, you best come quick, she called out to her brother. And bring the shotgun. I don’t know what-all this is a-comin’.
On the bottom road, churning up an enormous amount of dust, was a covered mule-drawn cart, a gypsy caravan. From each end of its cab, long poles crowned by flickering lanterns swayed back and forth casting yellow beams of quivering light. The mules’ fittings were of wildly colored wool braided with leather from which flowed a rainbow’s worth of streamers. A more sedate ornament, the tall black plume of a funeral cortege, fluttered at their polls. Driving the team of two was a big black man in a striped suit and tall beaver hat, a man who looked somewhat familiar, and beside him sat a young, redheaded white woman in a long heavy coat. She wore a pale-blue feather boa around her neck. Two such humans together was a strange enough sight in those parts in that time, with or without their remarkable conveyance. The mules walked up the lawn and stopped twenty or so feet away from the front porch. Now that it was close by, Aurora Mae realized who was come for a visit. Her brother descended the porch stairs to shake the hand of Magnus Bailey, who’d already disembarked from the wagon to assist Miss Minnie. Aurora Mae waved them toward her and moved to enter the house to get a pitcher of sweet tea ready, as the two looked severely parched, when it occurred that the dogs were still barking. She looked back to the road. Another vehicle approached, a motorcar.
Marching to Zion Page 6