by Bill Albert
What we did find was Aunt May and while I wouldn’t want to say anything against her, she was not anywhere near to what I had planned out for my adventure in the West.
May Arkwright Hutton was the biggest woman I’ve ever seen. Almost six feet tall, she carried herself shoulder-back upright with a sort of bounce in her step that belied her two hundred and fifty pounds. With a turned-up pig nose, fat-sunk eyes and a few sets of double chins, some would call her ugly. But I never thought of her that way and most that knew her didn’t either. She was more like an elemental force of nature, an earthquake, a twister, a typhoon. She swept down on life, flaunting herself for what she was, not backing up for what people thought she should be. She wore fancy hats stuck with feathers, and puffed out dresses which made her look taller and fatter. That was fine with Aunt May. More than that she spoke her mind wherever and whenever and to whoever. Fearless she was. Fearsome too. I reckon for sure that old Hamlet didn’t have her in mind when he said all that stuff about frailty and women. Maybe in Denmark it was like that, but not in Wallace, Idaho.
She and her husband Al lived in a cramped two-room cabin high up on the side of a hill overlooking Wallace from the south. There was a long, wobbly, broken-backed run of wooden stairs leading up to it. Al, who was the engineer on the Coeur d’Alenes Railway and Navigation Company train, which went up Canyon Creek to Burke, reckoned that to live there it helped if you were a few parts mountain goat. More important for helping me live there, was getting around Aunt May.
“And you, Little Hy,” she said in her loud rumbly voice, “what are we going to do with you? Benjamin here, well being as he’s Elise’s boy we’re blood tied, but you, who the Devil do you belong to?”
She had me dead terrified, towering over me, a reddened, fat hand clamped to my shoulder. Once again I saw an orphanage full of Henry Street kids all shouting and jostling each other—and me.
“Just like you and me, May, when we was small,” Al said quietly. “Poor little fella there he ain’t got nobody, don’t belong to nobody.”
The way he said it brought tears to my eyes, but not Aunt May’s; they just lit up another notch.
“Don’t you give me that, Al Hutton! And don’t you say ‘ain’t’! You know how it sounds so damned ignorant.”
Al looked away sheepishly and made a funny clucking noise in his throat.
“Damn it to Hell and back,” Aunt May boomed, “I’m no brood sow! No sir. Can’t be spending my time raising other people’s cast-off kiddies. I have my own life. I’ve got the Cause, got the mine. Not going to wet-nurse any snot-nosed . . .”
“Now May, now May, don’t go making an unholy show of yourself. Ain’t no one . . . I mean to say, no one is asking all that. Besides he’s only a little tiddler. All this way he’s come, can’t throw him back just like that, can we?”
Aunt May snorted, released my shoulder and sat down heavily in a chair which gave out a sharp-pinched creak like all its joints were going to pop.
“Can’t he stay on, Aunt May?” pleaded Benny. “Please! He don’t have nowhere else to go and I promised him. All the way out from Iowa I promised him. Please, Aunt May.”
Benny’s sudden discovery of loyalty was touching, but I knew enough by then to ask myself why, although I didn’t know enough to work out the answer.
I almost had my mind made up to tell the truth about who I was, being so frightened and miserable with Aunt May not wanting me, though I can’t say I wanted her either. What I wanted was my mother. I forgot about being adopted and being such a terrible disappointment as a Liebermann, forgot about the money I stole and the Pinkertons. I was remembering only the good things about my New York life as I stood in that cabin with its poor people’s catalogue furniture, poor people’s smells, and Aunt May glaring at me like I was nothing but a bother to her.
“Ya wouldn’t regret taking him in, Aunt May,” said Benny. “He might be small and damaged-like but he’s a real hard worker. I seen him.”
“Work?” she shouted, turning on him furiously. “We’ll see about that! Twelve-year-olds have school to go to first, Benjamin Shorter! And fifteen-year-olds too if they knows what’s good for them. That’s flat.”
“Does that mean he can stay on?” Benny asked.
Aunt May looked from Benny to me and then over to Al, who was sucking on his pipe and studying the swirl of patterns in the wooden floor. He did that studying quite a lot of the time, especially when Aunt May was on the warpath. Like they say, a heavy wife makes a light husband and Al was that in spades.
“You sure are one damn soft touch, Al Hutton. Always have been as well.”
It wasn’t only Al who was a soft touch. Aunt May might have snorted and growled like a lion but it didn’t mean more than the noise of it. I saw that pretty quick, what with her spitting fire one minute and telling me stories the next. Aunt May knew a whole parcel of good Western stories and when she took me in she got someone who was on his way to becoming a number-one champion listener. I think maybe she saw that right off and that was why she decided to let me stay. A person as powerful as Aunt May can tear up most ordinary listeners quicker than a machine drill through chalk.
What the Huttons, which meant what Aunt May, finally settled on was that I could stay with them until they found me a “proper home with good folks.” For my part, I decided to hold off on the truth for a while to see what turned up for me in Wallace.
4
What turned up for me right away was school, and trapped behind my desk the Wild West soon looked real fine and the real West not so good at all. When they found out I could read and write and count better than any thirteen-or fourteen-year-old they pushed me straight into the eighth grade. No Greek and no Latin was better than the Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys, but the children were a lot rougher. I couldn’t see a doctor or a lawyer among them, which only meant they weren’t so refined in their bullying. In other respects the school was not at all what I had imagined it would be.
I had pictured a log cabin or maybe a rough clapboard shack with a potbellied stove and a school mistress in a long dress swinging a hand bell to call in the barefoot kids from the yard. I had pictured just about anything but the Wallace school, a large two-story brick building with high-ceiling classrooms. Wide stone stairs led into an entrance hall, where along the sides on fluted wooden pedestals were busts of Milton, Homer, Shakespeare, and a few other famous people I didn’t know. There were paintings of landscapes on the walls. The rooms were heated with steam radiators just like in New York. There was almost nothing Western about the school that I could see, except where it was.
Benny, who could add and subtract pretty good but who couldn’t read or write, was put in the same class even though he was almost two years older. He wasn’t happy with how things were turning out. Aunt May wouldn’t see it any other way.
“It’s the most important thing a young person can have,” she said. “Without an education, Benjamin, life just grinds you up. But when you have a proper education you can stand up to life and spit right in its eye. Reading and writing, Benjamin Shorter, reading and writing! You just come here with me.”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him across the room to a rough-made shelf on the far wall overstuffed with beat-up books.
She yanked out a slim volume and shoved it into Benny’s face.
“See this? Yes? Henry George.”
She picked out another book.
“And this one? Abigail Scott Duniway. And this one, Horace Greeley? And here is William Shakespeare. And this is Pilgrim’s Progress. And there’s more, lots more.”
Benny looked terrified, like all those people were about to leap straight out from between the tattered covers and do something awful to him. Of course, it wasn’t them he needed to worry about, it was Aunt May.
She must have read all of those books, probably more than once. In her every grain she was a self-made woma
n. Even the way she spoke, well, it didn’t sound natural sometimes, like a schoolboy conjugating a Latin verb or an immigrant pausing an extra long second to make sure of getting the word right. And she did get it right, at least most of the time, although even without the “ain’t’s,” the double negatives, and other bad grammar, she still sounded rough tongued and Western. I guess no matter how hard she tried, there was just no way Aunt May could remake herself clean through.
“Without an education, Benjamin, you’ll never discover the treasures locked up in here. You’ll also never learn more than what passes by the end of your damn nose.”
Just like Huck Finn’s Miss Watson she sounded, although not being skinny or an old maid and, of course, Miss Watson would never had said “damn” all the time the way Aunt May did.
“But, Aunt May . . .” Benny complained, just like Huck Finn.
“But nothing, young man. Damn it to Hell, if I had had the chance for proper schooling, my life would have been a damn sight easier than it has been. And you look at Little Hy here. Reads and writes better than most grown people I know. Smart as a whip he is, even though he doesn’t talk.”
It was the same at school. When someone didn’t do their homework or couldn’t answer a question in the classroom, I was held up as the shining example. The student who always did his homework right to the end, the boy who could always answer the questions. This was invariably followed by the teacher saying, “. . . and he can’t speak a single word.”
What made things worse was when she discovered “Little Victories” in the Reader. I was just made, remade, or maybe unmade, for that damn story. I quickly grew to despise brave little Hugh, who had lost a leg and his mother who told him such misfortunes strengthen the mind, that exercising one’s soul in bearing pain pleased God and other such morally bloated nonsense.
“And, class, Hyman, like Hugh, has become a better scholar for his misfortune.”
I sat at the side and when called I wrote on one of the blackboards which ran around all four walls of the classroom or on my slate. For once I could communicate easily and I was thankful for that. I was head of the class, a class of older kids, and I should have felt good about it, but I didn’t. Who runs away from home, goes West, like the man said, who does that just to be stuck in a dumb school room with McGuffey’s Reader, Eaton’s Arithmetic, The Blue-Black Speller, and Murry’s Grammar, doing dumb boring lessons with a bunch of dumb, hayseed, no-account kids. It was a sizeable step backward for me.
Being such an exemplary student also didn’t make me greatly popular with the other kids. I hid New York as best I could, played mumblety-peg, shinny and leap-frog, prisoner’s base and crack the whip, swapped marbles and tried to tell them stories about the Wild West. But the kids didn’t have the patience to read the stories, especially as Benny was there to tell it straight out, and his stories were better than mine, lying just about purple like he always did. I was relegated to less than a Mr. Hennessy to his ever-talkative Mr. Dooley.
Of course, Benny hated school worse than I did. He got teased for having to start with the Primer, while I was immediately put on McGuffey’s Fifth. He also soaked up more than his fair share of strap oil for being insolent and getting so much wrong in the lessons. His experience and common sense was a considerable drawback when confronted with the Readers, mainly because of them being so all-mighty stuck on righteous lessons.
When he complained, Aunt May would bang her fist on the Primer and tell him she was going to teach him to read and that was that.
I helped him with his writing and more or less did his homework for him. That and the fact that we slept together on a lumpy straw mattress behind the curtain in Aunt May’s kitchen made it so he couldn’t not be my friend. And I needed him to be, for life was damn tough in Wallace, a lot tougher than in the Wild West. My feet had barely touched the ground before it got painful tough for me.
On the second day it happened. I was expecting it, although that didn’t help me much when it came in the form of two big redheaded kids with squinty eyes, Tim O’Malley and his twin brother Tom. The only thing different about them was the distribution of pimples on their faces, but it didn’t help me distinguish them as I could never remember which pimples belonged to which O’Malley.
“Bet he pisses in his pants,” taunted one, as they cornered me.
“Yeah, a real sawed-off pisser if I ever seen one,” agreed the other.
They weren’t real clever, but then they didn’t have to be. One O’Malley took a step and gave me a hard push on the chest. I crashed backwards into the wall.
“Wanna make somethin of it, Jewboy?” he asked, a wide smirk scrunching up the pimples on his checks.
On hearing that, some kids standing nearby began to taunt me with a rhyme I was to hear almost daily at school.
The rose is red
The violet is blue
Hold your nose
Here comes the Jew.
I tried to get away, but the other brother blocked me, leaning his log-like arm against the wall. On the far side of the arm the chanting kids were starting to crowd around, eyes all breathless and bright as they watched and joined in the chorus.
The rose is red
The violet is blue . . .
“Clever-clever dick ain’t worth shit outcheer, Jewboy.”
“Fuckin Buffalo Bill neither.”
“Yeah, fuckin Buffalo Bill.”
So much for the Great Scout, I thought, as they began to take turns punching me. Not hard punches, but the O’Malleys were after humiliation, not real identifiable injury to my body. I twisted and ducked but fat, freckly knuckles found my stomach, my shoulder, chest and back. Thump, thump, thump. I heard it almost as if it were happening to someone else.
The rose is red
The violet is blue
Give a cheer
There goes the Jew.
As I cowered there in the dirt, arms raised trying to fend off the blows, I looked up and caught a glimpse of Benny in the crowd of kids and behind him one of the hills surrounding Wallace, all black stumps, scrub, and a few skinny pines the loggers had missed. Funny how you notice stuff like that at times like that. I guess the hills and trees were solidly reassuring, which is more than I can say for Benny. I appealed to him with my eyes, but he just stared and chanted the Jew rhymes along with the others.
“Wouldn’t have done no good, Mouse. Too many of ‘em, too big for me they were. Shit yes! See the size of them fists? I could see they wasn’t really hurtin ya none anyways. If the odds they’re stacked against ya like that it don’t do to go against ‘em. Play possum like ya done is the best policy to do.”
Maybe he was right. After a couple of minutes of punching the O’Malleys lost interest in me. I didn’t fight back and I didn’t yell. What fun was that for two healthy boys?
“Like beatin on a dead dog,” one of them said in disgust, scratching at his face.
“Like a dead dog for sure,” his brother agreed.
They both spat on the ground right next to me, and then hitching their pants they walked off side by side.
After that the other kids more or less ignored me, except for the Jew insults, some rhyming, some not. I could shine all I wanted in the classroom, but outside I was invisible. You had to be stand-up tough to count in Wallace and I wasn’t. That was OK with me. I told myself that if no one wanted to talk to me at least it saved the daily struggle to be understood.
Even Benny kept his distance at school. He said it was so no one would know I was helping him with his schoolwork, but I knew it was because of the O’Malleys.
“Always find the ones that matter, Mouse, the top ones, the push that counts for somethin. Ya don’t wanna go agin them like ya done. Stay close to ‘em is what ya wants. Close so they don’t hardly see ya. Wait and watch.”
Benny was at his game again, but to me the O’Malleys
didn’t seem a very promising bet. Stupid playground thugs was what I figured them for, but I figured wrong. They were the leaders of a gang, a push as they called it, of kids in Wallace who worked the Cedar Street district and the mining towns up Canyon Creek. They ran errands and rolled drunks. That was just the kind of schooling that Benny could appreciate.
For me school was just school. It would have been completely unbearable if it hadn’t been for Rebecca Smith. She was fourteen years old, small, serious and dark, with eyes so big they looked like they’d been stuck on the wrong face.
After the crowd of taunting kids had wandered off she was left standing there staring down at me and shaking her head. As I got to my feet and brushed the dirt off she announced, “You mustn’t pay any mind to those children, Hyman Budnitsky. They are ignorant sheep and don’t know any better. As for those two boys, well they are nothing but horrible bullies.”
Being beaten up leaves you little choice about whether or not to pay attention to whoever is beating you up. However, since she was the only one who showed any interest in my welfare, I smiled at her.
“They always bully the new boys. So ignorant, so terribly ignorant. My father says that people in the West do things like that because there is no real civilization out here. He is a very civilized man, my father.”
She had a thin, raspy voice and spoke so quickly it made her sound breathless. But she had more than enough breath to tell me her entire life story before we arrived back at the classroom.
“We’re from New York, you see, my mother died there after I was born and my father didn’t like the city. ‘The same as the shtetl, only bigger,’ he said. So when business became awful in ‘93, he decided we should go West and see America. He said New York was not the real America. How could it be when it was so full of greenhorns and foreigners and poor people? ‘Anywhere we go, for a good tailor there’ll always be a job, Rebecca.’ That’s what he said. He borrowed some money from my uncle, that is my mother’s brother, who had made a big success in New York, and went to Spokane where he worked for Uncle Mendle’s cousin. Uncle Mendle, that’s my mother’s brother, which makes his cousin my mother’s cousin, doesn’t it? Anyway my father worked for this cousin, Moses Coleman, who is also a tailor, before coming to set up his own business in Wallace. He makes very fine suits, my father does, he would be very pleased to meet you. I’m sure he would, Hyman. He might be only a tailor, but my father is a very wise man, very learned like I said. He studied at a yeshiva in the Old Country, you know what I mean, don’t you? I can tell you this, can’t I? You being a Jew, I can tell you and you won’t laugh. But he’s a modern man now, thoroughly modern, not a shtetl Jew at all. Smith? Well, my father said that the painted bird might be beautiful but, well you know what happens to painted birds or Levinskys, even in America, so we became Smith. ‘All real Americans are called Smith or Jones.’ That’s what he said, but he still talks funny foreign, if you know what I mean, and everyone calls him Schmidt, not Smith, even though his shingle reads S., which is for Saul, if you really want to know, although he calls himself Samuel, which he thinks is also more American, because of Uncle Sam, Smith. So that’s him, ‘S. Smith Fine Tailor for Refined Gentlemen.’”
