He grunted and turned his attention back to his work. The molten lead in the melting pot was nearly exhausted. I hung a fresh ingot from the hook, then sat down and started typing.
“Where’s your hat?” Mr. Weiss asked a few minutes later.
“It fell into the river.”
He eyed me keenly. “And whose clothes are those?”
“My roommate’s.”
He didn’t look convinced. Even with my shirttails hanging out and the necktie crooked, it was easy to see that the clothes were tailored and finely made. Still, he let it go and got back to work.
By lunchtime, I felt weak and famished. While typing the last article, the lettered keys doubled before my eyes, then blurred into blocky nonsense that I might have mistaken for English if not for the Ѣ and П and Ѳ and more strewn among the familiar Latin alphabet. I made so many mistakes that I was forced to melt down the error-filled slugs and retype them with excruciating slowness, digging my teeth into my inner cheek until the letters became Yiddish once more. Mr. Weiss watched me with an eagle eye, and came over when I was finished to check my work.
He stooped over the metal tray containing the letterpress blocks and studied them closely, tapping to make sure that I had wedged each block firmly in place. “Good.”
Across the room, I spotted Mr. Lewin with two other newsmen whose names I couldn’t place. I caught his eye as I neared and nodded. He smiled back in greeting.
Once the other newsmen had left, I went over.
“I have more news, Mr. Lewin,” I said, stopping in front of him. “A boy was found dead at a kosher processing plant down at the Yards. The police also called it an accident, but I don’t think it was. I’m having a friend involved in labor look into it.”
“A processing plant.” He mulled it over. “You’ll want to be careful with that. Men in that industry didn’t get where they were by being polite.”
“I know.”
“Still, I’m glad to see you’re continuing to follow leads. I can tell you’re putting in hard work. That will take you far in the world.”
Something about his words put a bad taste in my mouth.
“I’m not doing this to get ahead,” I said. “I’m doing it for Yakov and the boys who disappeared.”
“I’m sure you’ll do them justice.” Mr. Lewin gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
As he walked off, it occurred to me that in the course of a single night, my mission had become extremely more complicated. This wasn’t just about giving Yakov a voice anymore or shedding light on the incompetence and indifference that his death had revealed to me. It was about avenging him, which, like preparing the dead, must be accomplished in silence and secret.
* * *
I returned from the deli to find Raizel standing at my workstation, studying the Linotype machine.
“I was expecting something a little more outdated,” she said when I came over after bringing the newsmen their sandwiches. “There can’t be that many people interested in challah recipes?”
“You’d be surprised.”
After my father had died, I had spent weeks trying to put his death into words. I wrote my mother letter after letter, reading them over and ripping them up unsent, before I finally worked up the courage to tell her. Telling Raizel about the dybbuk felt much like the same. I had rehearsed the confession in my head all morning, only to find that for now silence was the best answer.
“Did you find anything?” I asked as she sat at the machine’s chair. Across the room, Mr. Weiss scowled.
“I did,” she said with a nod. I expected her to boast, but her expression was grim. “You know the Stockyard bosses? Greedy bastards who make their living on slaughter, who leave their workers standing in filth and guts for hours each day. They mix rotten meat with the fresh and butcher diseased cattle.”
“Raizel, I don’t need a derasha,” I said, earning a humorless look for comparing her enthusiastic explanation to a sermon. She was almost as bad as Frankie. “I already know how workers are treated down in Packingtown. Just tell me what you found.”
“Fine,” she said curtly. “I’ll get to the point.”
“Thank you.”
“Five years ago, a new boss came to town. His name is Katz. He began by dealing in kosher meat, but he’s moved on to the larger market. From what I’ve heard, he’s as cruel and selfish as the rest. That boy you mentioned, the one they found dead, he was found in his factory’s waste pit.” Her voice was as blunt and hard as the blow of a sledgehammer, and stunned me just the same. “It wasn’t blood on him, it was everything else. Guts, shit, urine. He was fourteen. Jewish. An immigrant from Russia. He was found... He was disrobed. The official story is that he fell in and tore his clothes off in a panic, but do you really think someone drowning in liquid filth would spend the time to remove their shirt, their suspenders, their pants, their underwear?”
Shock and horror choked me. I struggled to answer, but I couldn’t find what to say. Didn’t she know she was breaking all the rules?
In our community, there were things you talked about. There were things you never talked about. There were things you and the people around you pretended not to know, because just to acknowledge that they existed meant they could get into your homes, into your beds, under your skin.
It had always been this way, even back in Romania.
Here was what I had witnessed during my year in the Levee: girls no older than my sisters, weeping in the alleys outside brothels. A child bought for three dollars. A street urchin with filthy dungarees and eyes the wounded blue of fresh bruises, guided by the hand into a public toilet by a much older gentleman.
These things were not spoken about on Maxwell Street. But even things without names existed.
Raizel leveled her chin and regarded me through narrowed eyes. Her look alone dared me to say something, anything. Tell her it couldn’t be true. That these things didn’t happen to people like us.
“I... I’ve heard about that,” I said at last, self-conscious of how hushed my voice had become. I couldn’t raise it above a mutter. I could hardly even bring myself to look at her, as though just talking about something so terrible might cause it to rub off on me and stain. “Not him personally, of course. Happening, I mean. At the chevra kadisha, the volunteers who prepare women... A twelve-year-old girl...”
I couldn’t bring myself to say the rest. My eyes burned just at the thought of it.
“On Mondays and Thursdays, Yakov’s final stop ended at the Stockyards.” I drew in a shaky breath. “The train’s water boiler would be refilled there. He’d have to wait.”
And maybe when he had been waiting, he had caught Mr. Katz’s interest. The man could have invited him to the Fair.
Just the thought that something might have happened to Yakov, that something might have been done to him, made me sick to my stomach. No wonder he had possessed me. Such a violation required ruthless justice.
I shivered at the recollection of his killer’s fingers stroking my throat.
You gave me my true name. My purpose.
“But Yakov was eighteen,” I added quickly. “If someone tried to—to attack him, he’d have been strong enough to fight back. And besides, he was fully clothed.”
“Perhaps he heard something he shouldn’t have,” Raizel said flatly. “Something dangerous enough to have him killed.”
“He bought a gun.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How do you know this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“While I was cleaning his room yesterday, I found the bullets and the receipt from the shop.”
Raizel gave it some thought. “Why buy a gun, if not for vengeance? It checks out.”
“But what about Aaron Holtz?”
“Maybe after the Whitechapel Club led nowhere, he decided to search for another lead. He knows more people in meatpac
king than I do, so the news could have reached him sooner.”
“I know that Josef Loew worked at a tannery in the Stockyards. But Moishe Walden—”
“—works as a courier. If you go around town delivering letters in Yiddish, what are the chances of coming across someone like Katz?”
“It’d only be a matter of time...” I murmured.
She nodded, her sepia-brown eyes burning with intensity. “Alter, I think we need to pay a visit to Mr. Katz.”
27
After assuring Mr. Weiss that I would arrive at six o’clock sharp on Monday morning to finish my tasks and stay even later in the day, he grudgingly permitted me to leave at three thirty instead of five. I met Raizel at the nearby station so we could take a train to the Union Stockyards.
Raizel was dressed in black and Schloss green, her collar secured with a paste brooch meant to resemble amethyst. As we waited for the train to arrive, she caught me staring at her blouse and lifted her eyebrows. “What?”
I averted my gaze, embarrassed by what she must be thinking. Why did it make me so uneasy to look her in the eye, as though she might see the truth about who I was? About what Frankie and I had done.
“You shouldn’t wear that shade of green,” I said under my breath.
“Oh, so who elected you the Minister of Fashion?”
“It has arsenic in it.”
“Did—did you say arsenic?” she sputtered.
“In the dye. My father wouldn’t produce clothes in that shade because of it.”
She looked back ahead, her face turning rather green itself. “I’m still making payments on it and the skirt that goes with it. I was going to wear them to this year’s Yom Kippur Ball.”
“This year’s what?” I choked.
“It’s an event put on by Chicago’s chapter of the Pioneers of Liberty.” She leveled her chin, challenging me with her steadfast gaze. “You’re welcome to come along, too, if you’d rather not spend your entire day in shul.”
I sputtered for a response. Yom Kippur was our Day of Atonement, spent in fasting and prayer. It was the holiest date of the Jewish calendar, when our fate for the new year was sealed in the Book of Life.
“I don’t even...” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why would you have a party on Yom Kippur? Don’t you care about tradition?”
“Who does tradition benefit?” Her eyes seared into me. “Tradition would have me up in the women’s gallery. It would silence me.”
Her words took me aback. Ever since leaving Frankie’s crew, I had tried to escape my homesickness and loneliness by becoming a part of Maxwell Street’s community. Returning to tradition had been inevitable. Just joining a minyan for evening services or listening to the chazzan’s chanting was like stepping back into my childhood home. It didn’t matter if it was a mosquito-infested shul broiling in Chicago’s muggy summer heat; if I closed my eyes, I was back in Piatra Neamţ again.
All this time, I had taken my participation for granted. But for Raizel, it was different. For her, tradition was a shackle.
“I mean, just think about it,” she said sharply. “The whole idea of needing to atone is ridiculous when we have done nothing wrong. What exactly do you have to atone for, Alter?”
“My father.” I spoke without thinking, not even realizing what I said until the words left my mouth. The confession didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore, as though in shouldering this possession, I had exchanged some of Yakov’s past for my own.
Raizel fell silent, the anger draining from her face. “But Mrs. Brenner told me he died of typhus...”
“He did.” I released a shaky breath. “It crept up slowly, and I didn’t notice until it was too late. Not that it would have done any good. There was only one doctor, and he refused to get close to my father. So, I was the one who emptied my father’s chamber pot, who brought him his meals, who helped him wash. For how much time I spent in the sick bay, you would think I’d have caught something. Many people got sick on that journey, and at least six others died. But not me.”
“Alter, you can’t possibly blame yourself for your father’s sickness,” Raizel exclaimed. “Not that. Not typhus.”
“That’s not what I blame myself for.”
“Then what?”
“I... I began to despise him. My own father. It repulsed me to go in there and see him that way. He was so kind, he’d give a beggar the coat off his back. He treated everyone like mishpachah. But...that man in the sick bay, that thing, it barely even looked like him. And all night and all day, he would call to me. Croak and pant like an animal. Demanding. Water. Food. He shat himself, and I had to wipe it off him. I couldn’t take it anymore. He stunk. He disgusted me. The night it happened, I ignored him. I refused to get up when he called my name, and after a while, I just couldn’t be there. I couldn’t do it.”
A wretched laugh escaped me. I wiped at my eyes, expecting tears. My hand came back dry. When I drew in a breath, I caught a whiff of the ocean breeze.
“I told him things I shouldn’t have. Terrible things, so ugly. I told him I wished he would just die already, how much I hated him, and how could he be so stupid to bring us here? So, so stupid. Couldn’t he see it? Couldn’t he see that this was what happened to people who go to strange places, places where they have no right being? And he took it all in, silent and docile, like a child. Like a martyr. I left the room. Left him there alone, lying in his own waste, thirsty. I wandered. I don’t know where I went. Those hours are gone. I just wandered. When I returned at dawn, they were already wrapping up his body.”
“Alter, he was dying. You couldn’t have stopped it.”
“That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that, my father... When they threw his body into the ocean, I thought I saw the sheet move. And I heard him call to me. I think he was still alive.”
“You can’t possibly know that,” Raizel said, just when I thought she wouldn’t respond. I opened my eyes to find her staring at me with the saddest smile.
“But it’s possible.”
“Is it, Alter? I took a ship, too. I still remember how noisy it was up on deck. Even if he had shouted, I’d doubt you’d have been able to hear him over the wind and the roar of waves.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. I felt vaguely stunned, as if she had struck me from a blind spot. Was it possible that I hadn’t heard my father at all? Could I have only imagined it?
“Alter, I think anyone could have done what you did,” Raizel said softly. “Everyone has a breaking point. And he was sick.”
“I just don’t understand. Why him? Why him?” I looked up at her. “He was such a good man. And he died of sickness, when all those years ago, it should have been me who died of sickness. Don’t you understand? The one who got typhus, the one they threw overboard, it should have been me.”
“Listen to me, Alter.” Her sepia-brown eyes searched mine. “There is no reason why your father died, but maybe, just maybe there’s a reason you survived.”
* * *
In time, the Stockyards’ gate towered before us, all ivory limestone and rising turrets, as grand as any wall in the White City. I had visited the Stockyards only once before. Back then, the gate had been unadorned but for a stone steer’s head. Now, American flags hung from the gate’s cornices in honor of the World’s Fair. Gilded federal eagles held wooden shields emblazoned in red, white, and blue.
But even the festive display and large welcome sign couldn’t distract from the cloying stench of melted hooves and decay. Past the gate, the Yards was a labyrinth of brick walls the color of spoiled meat, smoke-guttering flues, and rickety wooden ramps crammed within two square kilometers. Pens contained thousands of pigs and cattle, and as Raizel and I headed deeper into the complex, the air grew muggy with their earthy animal odors. Even worse smells wafted from the waterway that cradled the Yards’ southern edge, a fester
ing stew of blood and guts that bubbled like a cauldron.
It wasn’t just slaughterhouses and meatpacking factories that occupied the Yards’ four hundred acres. There were fertilizer plants, hide tanners, glue factories, and brush makers. There were dozens of saloons and grub houses, and no doubt more than a few brothels and opium dens nestled among the other buildings like cavities studding rotten teeth. It was a tiny city of its own, nicknamed Packingtown by Chicago’s residents.
“Ugh.” Raizel scowled in disgust, pressing her handkerchief over her face. “This odor—”
“It’s the smell of industry,” I said to annoy her.
She cast me a withering look. “More like the stench of capitalism.”
At this hour, the Yards swarmed with workers. Men drove swine and cattle, while others hauled massive blocks of ice for cold storage or dragged handcarts loaded with goods. Just as numerous were the vermin, a plague of flies and mosquitos that stirred through the sweltering July air.
Katz’s packing plant was located in the northern end of the Stockyards. With its high brick walls and the barbed-wire livestock pens surrounding it, it seemed as impenetrable as any fortress. Smoke wafted from its towering chimneys.
Approaching the wrought-iron gates, we came across the relics of a strike. Broken plywood signs were scattered in the dirt like grave markers, their smeared slogans written in Yiddish, German, and English.
“Does this happen often?” I asked.
Raizel nodded. “This one’s been going on and off since Governor Altgeld pardoned the rest of the Haymarket activists back in June. They never should have been convicted in the first place. All these people want is to make enough to take care of their families, and to not have to live with their boss’s boot on their back.”
As we reached the gates, Raizel’s mouth pressed into a tight line. It was common knowledge back in the Levee that the Stockyards meatpackers and the vice district’s brothel lords had Chicago’s police department and politicians in their pockets. Votes were bought and campaigns were fixed with dirty money. Anyone who threw a wrench into the gears of the city’s seedy underbelly was apt to end up at the bottom of Lake Michigan. For someone so active in the labor movement, Raizel surely knew the risk we were taking just by coming here.
The City Beautiful Page 18
