Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  “I know who it is. Do you think I can’t smell a rat?”

  Braun said he knew what they’d been up to, the three he used to call his boys.

  “Why couldn’t you stick with me?” He smacked the door frame. “This wouldn’t of happened. Boys out rioting, destroying government, but for nothing. Less than nothing. To ruin another man. To ruin a working man.”

  Karel didn’t argue. He only asked that they open the door a foot more so he could squeeze in out of the hallway before a real rat got him. Braun said, sadly, that letting him in would be impossible.

  “This is your friend’s fault, isn’t it? That Jakob Strauss who took aim on Emil Braun.” Braun pressed his face to the opening. “Was it a lynching, Karel? Did you lynch a man?”

  “Jake left a long time ago,” Karel explained.

  “Oh, don’t believe it for a second. That Prussian. He’s got something to do with it. He’s at the heart of this evil. I promise you.”

  Karel remembered then. He’d seen Jake outside the courthouse.

  “Leave us alone, son. Leave us in peace. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do for you. I tried. You know I tried. But now it’s too late. There’s no room here for your struggle.”

  There was nowhere else to go. If he wouldn’t go to the Eigler house, if he wouldn’t turn himself in to the police, then nowhere. Karel hopped the fence at Rourke Park and laid flat in the outfield grass. Rain fell in his eyes, which was just as well. The turf had wilted in the heat and needed rain. Down there on the Southside, not far from where the boys’ mob started to march. Doughboys made patrols. They shined truck lights into yards and parks looking for hooligans. The curfew must be enforced. The lights played over Karel. If he moved, they’d see him.

  He didn’t care. They could take him away. They could send him back to Europe if that’s what they’d do. It felt better to give himself up, even just dreaming, because he was young and alone and didn’t understand why he did the things he did, why he’d been a part of what happened, and if maybe he’d be better off locked up somewhere. Karel didn’t want to think about having to run from the police or hiding from soldiers. The whiskey he drank hours before had worn off and he felt sick to his stomach. Karel wondered if they’d hold him responsible for what happened. A man was killed. He didn’t know if there would be trouble for that, if any one person out of all of them would be accountable. Why shouldn’t it be him? he wondered.

  He felt the weight of Will Brown’s body on his hands. Will Brown had still been alive then, for another minute. Karel had never felt the weight of a man. He’d believed he could put his hands up and pass off the black like it was nothing. But the man was heavy, more than Karel could hold. The others took over to do what they all said they were going to do. Karel ran the other way. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry right away either. Oh, he said to himself. That was all. The animal fury drained from him all at once, like his heart lost its rhythm, having the man, that Will Brown, crash into him. He crawled out to the ledge and waited for others to join him. Nobody did. They all went down the back stairs, and by the time Karel regained his senses enough to look in, the way was blocked, the offices in flames.

  Karel stood to heave his baseball as hard as he could into the dark. He didn’t deserve to keep a baseball once owned by Josh Joseph. He threw and stumbled forward from the effort. No sound returned for a long time, then tunk as the ball hit the wood of the backstop on the fly. The report echoed off the houses around there. Standing, Karel waited for a searchlight to find him, a headlight, even a porch light from one of the houses to turn on. No eyes peeked out window shades, though. The noise was gone.

  He laid down, the grass wet underneath him. He dreamed about the first time he hit a home run. How his bat crushed into the ball and sent it sailing. What he remembered, the feeling, was how his hands echoed back after he made contact. When he watched a teammate hit, the swing looked like a smooth motion, an uninterrupted arc. But it wasn’t really. There was a moment when the hitter’s clout was questioned, the bat knocked faintly off path by the ball. This isn’t something that can be seen. You can only feel the vibration when it’s you up there hitting. The slight knocking back. Like the skip of a heartbeat.

  Once the ball was off in the air, his heart came back to its rhythm. He had to run, didn’t he? That was how the game was played.

  Herr Miihlstein found Karel at the field. Karel never would have guessed it would be his father who snuck over the fence into the grandstand then crawled down to a dugout. Whispering around, tripping over himself in unfamiliar terrain. “Karel,” he called. “Where are you?” Karel could stay in the outfield on his belly and his father wouldn’t find him. He could observe the man bumble and claim no relation, not even proximity. Herr Miihlstein was about to give up, to search elsewhere or be arrested, perhaps, an obvious foreigner flouting the curfew. But then he bent to the ground near the pitching mound. Miihlstein picked up something and held it into the bleeding light of a streetlamp across the block. The ball Karel had thrown. His father found it.

  Once Karel’s shoes hit the clay and sand of the infield, Miihlstein turned to see what the noise was. When he saw, he rushed to clutch his son by the arms.

  It surprised Karel how his father was still larger than he was.

  “It’s you,” Miihlstein said. “I promised your sisters you would be here, my Karel. I’m so happy you are. What a lucky man I am.”

  “How did you find the field?” Karel asked. His father laughed. Of course he knew how to find Rourke Park.

  “Come, come. Let me rest here in this shelter. It’s raining, you know.”

  They went to the dugout.

  “I owe you,” Miihlstein said, sighing as he sat on the bench. “Was it last year I promised to tell you about her? Or longer than that? Your mother. You were upset about her.”

  “Don’t,” Karel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  Miihlstein was baffled and came to stand by Karel at the screen. “This is yours,” he said. He handed the baseball to Karel.

  Karel took the ball—Josh’s ball. Scuff marks on it, grass stains. The ball smelled like smoke, like the fire inside the courthouse.

  Miihlstein pulled Karel along by his arms toward home. Soldiers stopped them three times along the way to ask where they’d been and where they were going. Each time Miihlstein explained how they were lost and just trying to get back to the house where they lived. Each time the soldier struggled with Miihlstein’s accent but finally said, “Fine. You’re okay. Go home.”

  Epilogue

  She paged through the dailies while breakfast cooked. She read about the riot, the army coming in, the mayor whisked out of the city, barely alive after being hung from a light pole. There was a photo on the front page of the World-Herald of rioters mugging with the charred remains of Will Brown. She bent close to the print and studied the faces to see if anyone she knew was in the lynch mob. Maybe she searched for his face, to see if that was why Jake Strauss was at her door at sunrise, distraught, smoky and exhausted, his face waxen and cinder specked, lately born from the riot. She let him in. Took him by the hand and pulled through the door and held him.

  It rained that morning. A quiet but heavy rain, no wind. She waited while Jake slept and thought about what happened. She watched the coffee boil up brown in its pot. The smell didn’t wash out of the air for a long time despite the rain. She sat there smelling the smoke from the courthouse turn stale and hoped a cool wind would rush along the river to sweep the damning air away. She looked out the windows. Kids snuck from door to door to sell postcards of the hanging.

  She’d led him to the bathtub after he was inside. She sat on the tub edge and plugged the drain. She drew fresh water and stood to let him hug his chest to her thighs, his head to her womb. She undressed him. She tossed his jacket out the doorway and unbuttoned his shirt, pulled off his smoky clothes, held his hand as he stepped into the wat
er. She soaked a cloth to wet his arms and neck. She poured powder in the water and swirled with her hands to make it bubble. A sleeve of her nightgown soaked to the elbow.

  It calmed him to lie in the bathtub, in the steam, his body weightless underwater. She lifted his foot and washed the backs of his legs. She savored him. They didn’t need to say anything. It was fine if his eyes shuttered and closed, if his breathing slowed.

  He pulled her to the water when she washed his chest, like asking, one hand on her wrist, the other on her elbow. She went behind the divider to undress, naked when she returned to slip into the water with him. The wake her body made spilled over the sides to the floor.

  He took her face between his hands and kissed her. Her face cradled. His fingers brushing her skin. He caressed the pouch of her chin before they kissed again.

  He was falling asleep in the water. His eyes closed, holding to her as he slid on the porcelain. She said they should get out of the bath. They did. She said they should dry off and go to bed, and they did. They moved to the bed and swept off the covers. She laid in the curve of his body, letting him hold her. He buried his nose in her hair and breathed it.

  She read about the lynching in the newspaper and knew she had to leave. She couldn’t live in this city. She had to get far away from any place where people knew her.

  She came to wake him when the food was ready. Watched him in that big bed that nearly took up the whole room. Evie knew he was pretending to sleep. She watched from the doorway until he rolled over and looked back at her.

  “Spell it out for me,” she said. “Tell me where we’ll go. What we’ll do once we get there. Is it San Francisco? Is that where we’re going? I’m going to have a shop there. What will you do? Will you lay bricks? Will you dig?”

  He tried to keep his mouth shut and be happier for it. The way he pinched his lips tight and rolled away and closed his eyes again, like he could take back being awake. But she was on the bed next to him. There was breakfast. She would listen. She said, “Tell me.” There was nothing else he could do.

  Within the month Evie and Jake were off on a train headed west. She worked night and day to arrange things. She packed up what she had—the wire dummy, the cutting table, all her tools and the bolts of cloth, the jewels and sequins and feathers, the half-finished garments that would have to find an owner in another city, every penny of money she’d saved—and she figured out what they could do somewhere besides Omaha.

  They found a small city out west called Beaufort. There were jobs for Jake. Farmwork around the countryside. They’d meant to go all the way to San Francisco, but on the train he heard about the unions there, the IWW, and that scared him off. He just wanted to farm some. It didn’t have to be his own farm, and was probably better if it wasn’t. The biggest farms he ever saw were in California. However much help he could provide was good enough for an orange grove owner, or the overseer of a spinach-green valley, they could always use more. Jake a day laborer; Evie with a shop in town at the back of a little house, a two-story with a fence and a matching carriage garage, where the car was parked, once they bought a car. Jake collected garden tools in there. Forks and hoes and hand clippers and a five-tine cultivator and a machete. He kept a garden behind the house. Strung lines for green beans and tomatoes and chili peppers, pimentos, poblanos, and most of what they ate came from that garden. He learned to cook what grew here and was good to eat.

  A quiet kind of life. Even though Jake was still young, and would be young for a long time yet, he felt like they’d earned this, Evie and him, after everything they’d gone through to get here.

  And even though Evie sometimes could agree with Jake, that maybe they’d earned a quiet life, there always remained what they saw happen in Omaha when they lived there, so Evie knew they deserved nothing. Nobody did. As far as Evie was concerned, it was shameful to live like they did in Beaufort. Happy. Smiling to strangers on the walkway. Making friends. Shameful. To make money. Her own money. To design and sew and have customers with the means to pay cash for the extravagant things they wanted. That kind of quietness of mind, that kind of life, had a way of erasing a black mark from a person. After all those years Evie knew about this. Evie felt bad. She was embarrassed. It changed a person to see how things really were. Made her feel different about herself.

  Every once in a while she’d get to talking to a black person—on a side street in Beaufort or at the back door of her nice house, painted lime green, with a second story where the nursery was, her shop in the parlor—and it would come up how Evie was from Omaha. “Oh, missus. I heard about there.”

  She felt disgraced. That they could just do that to a person, in Omaha, and lots of other places. That some rowdy boys could start trouble outside the courthouse anytime they wanted and nothing could put a stop to it, because a man with no power was the target, a man who couldn’t escape how he was marked. His body broken from working stockyards. His skin. It was easy to see why Will Brown had been picked out by the police, by the mob. Knowing all this made Evie sick, even if she never let this show in her face. She was ashamed. Even if she didn’t say so, it was a disgrace on them all.

  It isn’t like Jake forgot all about those things. The riot. The lynching. But he didn’t like to talk about his ramshackle days down on the River Ward. He kept a garden and tuned up a Model T in his spare time. He loved his woman, they were married, they had a little bit of money, and then a boy and then a girl, both children with his blond hair and coarse Prussian skin. Jake had his woman. He had his kids. So what else was there to talk about?

  Sometimes people, white people, if they found out Jake Strauss was from Omaha, they asked what he thought about the burning of the courthouse, the stringing up of Mayor Smith.

  “Oh, sure. Just one of those things.”

  Sometimes Jake came across somebody from Omaha. “Did you know Tom Dennison?” that person would always ask. “I mean personally. Did you ever meet him?” And Jake would tell the truth, at least partway. “I knew Tom. Worked for him for a little while.”

  Then it could only follow: “You think Tom Dennison had anything to do with that riot?”

  “Well,” Jake would say, “the way I see it.” He’d hesitate, but would tell them. “Of course he did. There’s no other way all that happens without Tom Dennison having a hand in it.”

  The machine was still strong after the riot and would be for another decade. Those days, Tom Dennison had his hands in everything—everything except the mayor’s office during Ed Smith’s solitary three-year term. Tom had something to do with the newspaper coverage that year, in 1919, how they played up every detail of those twenty white women that were raped in Omaha and the hundreds more around the county and the lynchings from coast to coast. The Red Summer. Tom always had a hand in the papers. At least half those rapes weren’t committed by black men at all. Whether those were Tom’s men in blackface or not, who could say? But it wouldn’t surprise anybody to find out that they had been. Tom and his men did all they could to discredit the rule of law under the Smith administration. So Tom had something to do with the state of agitation. He had something to do with the riot. How the taxis ran all night, rushing downtown whoever wanted in on the action. The machine controlled the taxi firms. Tom had something to do with all the liquor passed around the crowd. He ran the liquor syndicate. And the boys’ dorming house. People wondered about that later. How a boy could find work if he stuck around a dorming house long enough, not moving boxes or cleaning out a house after the old lady living there died, but breaking windows. Going to demonstrations to cheer on a man who said bad things about the trouble black workers were causing. There was a different tin to things then. It was a fixed game. Machine lieutenants knew who a misfit was and recruited him. Fed him. Gave him a bed to sleep on. It was Tom Dennison who set this all up. Everybody knew that. Tom’s men organized things. Maybe he didn’t know how upside down the whole city would get. How could he have? Tom thought he was just like anybody else who was trying to ri
de out a spell of bad luck. He was desperate. Thinking it would be just one more concession, one more of his own personal rules he’d have to break, then that would set his world right again.

  Maybe Tom Dennison didn’t lynch that man, Will Brown, not with his own hands. And he didn’t. But you couldn’t say he wasn’t involved. You couldn’t say Tom had nothing to do with the riot, nothing to do with the lynching. Who’d believe you? You’d be wrong.

  He didn’t have to give an order to riot. He didn’t have to order the mob to smash out the courthouse windows and dump gasoline inside. He didn’t have to tell them to put a noose around the mayor’s neck. He didn’t have to tell them anything.

  The men who ran things may not have caused the riots, but they certainly benefitted. Cowboy Jim Dahlman would win reelection in 1921 and remain in office until he died in 1930. Tom Dennison would enjoy his position of power another ten years before retiring. He would die in a San Diego hospital, in 1934, after driving his car off the road.

  The boys on Clandish wondered about these years as they grew older—the war years, the riot year—and how their city wasn’t so splendid as they thought it was when they were young.

  The boys took jobs when they were old enough to get them. Some in Jobbers Canyon warehouses, some in South Omaha stockyards. A few finished high school; even fewer went to college, became lawyers and insurance executives and city administrators. Some moved far away. Most of the boys on Clandish stayed close. They had kids of their own who went to battle in Europe in what seemed like only a short time later. Sons who died on the beaches of Normandy.

  Those boys thought of what happened to Will Brown. Will Brown, who was buried in a potters’ field at Forest Lawn Cemetery. They knew so little about him. There wasn’t much of an effort to know more. Men like Will Brown just sort of disappeared those days. It was easy. A poor man might carry a state certificate in his billfold to prove he did in fact exist. He might only have one photograph of himself, alone in that billfold because nobody else would want it. A man like Will Brown. Who was he supposed to give a photo to? Even for a man like Will Brown, who was lynched, whose name was in all three local dailies and the New York Times, the situation was only marginally different. They had his photo in the newspapers. A reporter must have found it in a drawer in his place after the cops dragged him out. Unless it was his mug shot. Will Brown in his overalls. In a denim shirt and what passed for his good hat, one that had a solid brim at least. A man with no family around. With no friends who could stand up to defend the man as a man. Nobody to eulogize him. No funeral. No words at his burial unless the grave digger said something. Unless the grave digger spat on his grave, which was more likely. Nobody thought speaking on Will Brown’s behalf was worthwhile, the boys guessed. They didn’t know. Sure, the boys thought a lot about Will Brown, but they didn’t know him. To them, he was unknowable.