As the boys moved around once they were older, they’d see other towns that had lynchings. Towns that had a certain prominent tree on the square, a hanging tree. A point of pride in these towns, maybe, a sign that read 33 Men Hanged Here. A stranger traveling through might think about what it did to a person to walk by that tree every day, to have a tree like that in your hometown. White or black or red or whatever. Just walking by that tree and knowing what was done there and what the purpose of that tree was, at least according to the people who ran that town. A tree that would outlive everybody.
Will Brown came from Cairo, Illinois, an island of a city at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. This was in the papers. How he’d lived there a long while. He’d probably been there when Froggie James was lynched in Cairo a decade earlier. He’d have been there when they chased Froggie to a residential neighborhood and pulled him from the shed he was hiding in and burned him alive in an alley. Maybe Will Brown walked those streets to get to work. Maybe he went by that very alley sometimes. Where there were fire stains on the pavement and the eaves of houses.
Like there were bullet holes that marked the stone facade of the courthouse in Omaha.
The neighborhoods of the River Ward would be demolished piece by piece, Clandish in particular, until there wasn’t even a Clandish Street anymore, no tenements, just more rail yard with a bridge overhead to let cars go over without seeing. The maps amended, Clandish deleted from the index. Growing up, the boys thought they really came from somewhere, but it would become clear they came from nowhere. Some of them were around to see the big buildings downtown razed to the ground too. The old Gothic post office, the Bee Building, city hall, the Hotel Fontenelle, Jobbers Canyon itself. These monuments of their youth, that had once been of primal importance, held no importance. Only the courthouse remained. The courthouse, where the riot had been, where a man had been lynched, was the only monument that survived.
Both Jimmy Mac and Alfred hung around Clandish for a while, the same as ever. Sure, a guy like Joe Meinhof or Milt Hoffman could just disappear, and they both did—caught a train the evening of September 28, as a matter of fact, the riot still boiling, and were out of Omaha before any arrests were made, never to be seen or heard from again.
It wasn’t so easy for a boy like Jimmy McHenry. Jimmy had his picture in the World-Herald, that famous photograph of folks posing with the burned remains of Will Brown. Jimmy right up front, grinning large and proud. His cheeks all red from liquor. Surrounded by folks from all walks of life. Businessmen wearing the gaudy rings of their fraternal order; housewives with felt flowers on their hats and big ebony buttons on their pea coats; jug-eared mill workers; pissed-off men in trench coats; a guy in a tuxedo and bow tie; an Irish kid beside himself with self-importance. Jimmy couldn’t walk away from that. A picture of him in the paper, one that was reprinted on thousands of postcards sent all over the country. And what people wrote on the back of these postcards: See what folks in Omaha had going? A cookout at the courthouse. All OK here now. Maybe Jimmy didn’t know what he was getting into. How, as a result of that photograph, police were able to track him down. All the boys (all girls, women, and men, for that matter) who took part in the riot had to worry about being identified. It was a simple thing when it came to Jimmy Mac. His face in the paper. Still, even if he was identified as being present at the lynching, it was a more difficult matter to prove he was a party to the lynching. The county attorney declined to press charges, because he couldn’t prove Jimmy did anything other than pose for a photo, and plenty of folks did that. It wasn’t illegal to do so. Two weeks later a firefighter came forward and said he recognized Jimmy as one of the boys who stole a ladder from a fire engine as the courthouse burned. But the next day an anonymous donor sent a check to replace all equipment that was damaged in the riot, and suddenly the fireman wasn’t so sure after all that Jimmy was the boy who took a ladder. Jimmy was off the hook so far as the county attorney was concerned, but he still had to face his mother. He didn’t foresee his poor mother having to think about her son front and center at a lynching, and dumb enough to get photographed to boot. And then Mrs. McHenry being the subject of whispers at mass. The target of sidelong glances every day for months on the street. All because her boy had his picture in the papers. What a shame.
For Alfred Braun things were a bit different. He wasn’t in the photograph of the lynching, for one thing, so he didn’t have that to live down. Not in such a specific way.
After the riot Alfred reconciled with his father. After months of living in the dorming house, he apologized for everything. Said he was sorry for getting mixed up with that bunch of fascists in the Dennison machine, for what happened at the Santa Philomena, and how the Interrace Game was besmirched by a rotten play. Alfred was sorry for the courthouse, for Will Brown. He bawled his eyes out on the hallway side of the door to the Braun tenement room. Emil wouldn’t let him in, as he hadn’t let Karel in either. But Alfred didn’t slink off elsewhere, as Karel had. Alfred collapsed against the door and howled about how sorry he was until Emil couldn’t take it anymore. “Come here, my boy! What am I saying? Get inside! Get inside before the rats get you for good!”
Emil Braun was rejuvenated a degree after that. He stumbled along with a cane but was upright and moving at least. An improvement over being stuck in bed like he’d been the previous sixteen months. Braun needed Alfred’s help to get around. So they stood together in the cellars of Southside taverns that hung the black flag of anarchy, so Emil could speechify on the misdeeds of Omaha’s King Gambler and reminisce about the greatness of Josh Joseph, Braun’s friend, the best there was from a time when even a slaughterhouse floor worker knew how to respect the game.
None of the Brauns starved during the lean years to come, nor during the even leaner ones after that. Alfred was killed in 1927, in Seattle, Washington, when a riot-busting cop’s baton cracked his skull. Alfred Braun was decried in the Post-Intelligencer as a common thug, which he probably was. Most anyone who’d known him in Omaha agreed that this was right.
The Miihlsteins stayed on Clandish awhile. Silke and Theresa married and had kids, as Jake once predicted, and moved to further-out subdivisions and new kit houses that came mail order from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog and arrived on a railcar to be assembled.
Anna lived in the sanitarium until she was eighteen. Over the course of those three years, her health improved greatly. She grew some but would always be small, always a little knock-kneed and fragile. But at least when she lived at the sanitarium she received some proper schooling, in between meals and absorption sessions out on the lawn in the lounging chairs. The girls there asked Anna about the riot when it happened. “That’s where you’re from?” “Yeah. Four blocks from my house!” Some of them treated her with respect after, girls Anna tried to keep clear of from the start. But her friends, Mina and Kate, they understood Anna and her temperament more after news of the riot reached them. They felt sorry about what happened, but not just that. They conveyed something more. Understanding, commiseration. “Did you hear from your brother?” Tears in Kate’s eyes as she asked, Anna shirking half a turn to sit taller and brush her dark hair back. Of course Anna hadn’t heard from Karel. She didn’t have to answer that question. “I’m so sorry,” Mina said. “You should write him and tell him what you think. Tell him it’s an abomination to have that happen.”
Mina and Kate were good friends. Anna always believed these girls were the real reason she was cured at the sanitarium.
Anna did so well over those three years at the home that she went off to a Lutheran college in Kansas upon her release and later took a job in Kansas City as an actuary at a life insurance company and made a career out of that. Kind of funny really, to the people on Clandish who heard where Anna wound up and what she did to make a living.
There isn’t much more to say about Karel Miihlstein. For how much pride the other boys on Clandish invested in Karel and his talent for baseball, he was a disappointm
ent in the end to many of the boys, those who’d believed one day Karel Miihlstein would be as well known as Ty Cobb or Cy Young or Tris Speaker.
Karel didn’t talk much to the other boys after the riot. He was the quietest and strangest person they knew, through the end of their schooling. Karel still played ball those years, even though he severed ties with the South Omaha ball club and played only for a high school squad. Once he was sixteen, he signed a contract with a pro team and moved to Minnesota to play ball all summer and worked a job in a timber mill the rest of the time. Eight years later the boys on Clandish heard about him. His name showed up in a box score in the newspaper. KMhstn rf. That had to be him. He played four innings for the Detroit Tigers at the end of a season, in Yankee Stadium, had one turn at bat, in which he made an out.
His father had gone back to Vienna by then. Nobody could guess if Herr Miihlstein would have cared or not that his boy made it, at least briefly, to the big leagues.
A week after the riot, Karel had moved back in with his family. Silke, Theresa, Maria Eigler, and Herr Miihlstein. They picked up the damage. Almost every day they removed rubble from Clandish, like pretty much everyone did. Like this was the new life here.
The US Army sent in trucks once martial law was lifted. (Tom Dennison sent trucks too. Whatever that’s worth.) Soldiers and members of the state militia were there to help, but for the most part it was people who lived on the River Ward who were left to put things back together. People like Maria Eigler, like Ignatz and Ingo Kleinhardt’s widow and the Miihlsteins.
Maria kept Karel hidden in the attic for three days after the riot so he wasn’t grabbed by the authorities. If Karel had been taken in for questioning, if there was some witness or informant who could finger him, like had happened with Jimmy Mac, it was possible that Karel would be deported without even being convicted of a crime. Something a native-born boy didn’t have to worry about. With Karel’s involvement in the South Omaha Social Anarchists, people knew about that, his actions on the night of the riot were clear violations of the Sedition Act. Boy or not, he could have been stockaded inside an outbound steamer by the end of the week. So Maria didn’t ask if Karel was involved, or what he was doing during the riot, or why he’d been hiding on the dark ballfield when Miihlstein found him. That was his privilege. If he was able to keep his mouth shut he could shed the indecency of what he’d done. Anyway, he had to squeeze his shaking hands together to keep them still when Miihlstein brought him home, and that told all. Nobody had to guess if he’d been up to bad things. And if it was worse than throwing a brick through a window, folks didn’t want to know about it.
The police never bothered Karel. He was never brought in front of a grand jury like some boys were—like happened with William Francis, who rode a white Arabian horse and raised a noose to urge on the mob party—so Karel helped out. He pushed a wheelbarrow. He scooped up debris with a broad-mouthed shovel. He was even at the courthouse when militiamen hooked chains to a flipped-over, burned-out police Model A and hoisted the vehicle to a flatbed truck. Maria was mad about that—Karel close to soldiers, at the scene of a notorious crime. She wanted him to stay home. But Karel didn’t worry. If they hadn’t grabbed him yet, he figured they never would.
The four remaining Miihlsteins swept up glass. Washed at gasoline stains on the walkways with buckets of soapy water. Which was futile. They rested on the Eigler porch like they’d done so many times before. Watching their neighbors. Little boys stomping around with nobody minding them so long as they stayed out of the way. Folks were pretty tired of boys causing trouble just then, but these boys—five, six, seven years old—they couldn’t help themselves. They paraded around in damaged hats they found laying around, a homburg made soggy and caved in from the rain. They wrestled and took bricks from the rubble piles, lifted the bricks over their heads to show how strong they were. These imps. These kings of broken things.
After a few days of clearing debris, Maria saw an opportunity to have the junk in her cellar trucked off for free. She wasn’t the only one with the idea. Broken chairs with the upholstery torn found their way into government trucks as property damaged in the riot. Sacks of clothes that had been moldering in some damp cellar corner. Bent bicycle wheels, automobile tires with rubber that wouldn’t take another patch. The streets were clear enough, the people of Clandish must have figured, so they turned to their junk rooms.
Maria sent Karel and Herr Miihlstein down to pluck out the worst of her collection and carry it to the end of the block. An empty keg of beer and crates of dry bottles—evidence of how she’d flouted the state prohibition—dried flower stems, watercolor paintings left by Anna. A pony Anna bent out of scrap wire, a wood elephant, a June bug of orange yarn, stacks of journals with poetry written in girly script. There were August Eigler’s army uniforms from the Civil War. Root vegetables that were too dry to be eaten. “Get rid of it all,” Maria shouted down the steps. “What do I care? Most of that I forgot about a long time ago.”
Karel found the instrument case where the dagger was. He’d put it right back where he first found it, August Eigler’s dagger, that Karel had held up impotently to Ignatz two years before. He opened the case. For some reason he thought the dagger would be gone, that Anna would have snagged it for herself when nobody was looking, but the dagger was right where he left it. Black gum on its blade, the handle holding together, tucked next to the violin. Karel reached into the case, but this time cradled the violin in his hands. A violin without strings, the fingerboard loose with the blond of its wood showing where the stain had faded. He’d never asked Maria about the violin, because he didn’t really care who it belonged to. If it was August Eigler’s, or Maria’s, or hidden in the cellar by the deceased luthier who lived here before the Miihlsteins. Karel was sure the violin would crumble in his hands if he picked it up. He grabbed the violin and it didn’t crumble. He held it up to the light from a window and saw an inscription on its back, one so faint it hardly showed, the sprucewood was beaten so badly. It read Treue der Union and Theodor Bruggemann and 1st Nebraska Volunteer Infantry. This violin hadn’t belonged to August Eigler. Karel had no idea who this other man could be. A deeper mystery.
Karel waited for Herr Miihlstein to come down then showed him the violin.
“What’s this?” Miihlstein asked. “This can’t be one of mine, is it?”
“No. I found it here.” Karel pointed to the case, empty except for the dagger and bow.
“Well,” Miihlstein said. His eyes lit up behind the lenses of his glasses. He lifted the violin, as Karel had done, lowered himself by bending at the knees so he could hold it above his head. “Can we save this one? Shall we take it to my table?”
Karel shrugged. He didn’t know the first thing about that.
“It isn’t so nice. The vintage is poor. Maybe I could make it sing again. Maybe not.” Miihlstein put the instrument to his side, held it only by the neck, and it didn’t fall apart. “Bring it up,” he said. “I’ll ask Maria if she knows anything. If the violin has some importance, I’ll fix it.”
Karel took the violin with both hands, shuffled it across the cellar to where the case was, and laid it to rest in the velvet. Closed the lid and twisted shut the brass clasps.
“What was it about her?” Karel asked.
Herr Miihlstein breathed in when Karel said this. “What is what?”
“My mother. You were going to tell me.”
“Yes. I was, I was. I was going to tell you, but you made me stop. And now you want to start again.” Miihlstein laughed in his flat way. He went to the steps to sit and wiped his hands on his trousers, then brushed at the filth that had rubbed off on the fabric. “I don’t like being down here,” he said.
“You like the attic.”
“It’s nice up there, yeah. You know that.”
“What were you going to tell me?”
“Oh,” Miihlstein sighed. “I’ve been wanting to tell you a long time. Your mother. They called her the Swallow. A v
ile thing to call a woman. She hated they called her that. Sometimes she didn’t mind, if it was a joke. She played along. I did too. Like I didn’t care.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I shouldn’t say that. I’m going to tell you what a wonderful woman she was. Because you heard some bad things. That’s why. Sometimes your sisters get excited about these things, the stories about your mother. They were old enough to hear what people said. Bad stories for them to know. I want to tell you her best qualities. What she smelled like when she cared what she smelled like. Lilacs. That’s what she smelled like.”
Miihlstein told what her voice was like first thing in the morning over breakfast. Nearly a whisper, as light as smoke. These her best qualities. How she stayed out late when possible. How she wore her hair up when younger, down as she aged. That she once played Cleopatra and kept the brass armband she wore for the role. She wore the armband until she was too fat. It was like their wedding band. Miihlstein had made the armband for the production, one of his first jobs, and stole it from wardrobe to give her once the show closed, because he knew she loved the prop. Like Cleopatra would have loved it.
Kings of Broken Things Page 31
