by Bill Albert
Rebecca’s father was a Moth who had flown west towards the setting sun. I had not expected to find him or a daughter of Division Street in Wallace, Idaho.
5
“America, Hyman. Hooray America! Hooray! If they had told me before I would have said Phooey! May God strike me dead! I would have said it, just like that. Gold in the streets? Of course not gold in the streets. Even a soft-hearted yeshiva bucher from Berdichev, which was me before I was an American with papers, even that yeshiva bucher wouldn’t believe the story for fairies about gold in the streets. No! Opportunity! Opportunity, Hyman Budnitsky. I’m telling you straight from the horse, that’s what there is right here in America. Better than gold and,” he winked at me, “it makes you not so crazy foolish also. If you work hard like the ox, if you are clever like a frog . . .”
“Fox, father, ‘clever like a fox.’”
“Fox, frog, whatever . . . You can be anyone you want to be, do anything you want to do. Look at me!”
I looked. Saul Levinsky, now Samuel Smith, no ox, no frog or fox or even a horse, but rather one of those little stocky dogs with bandy legs used for ratting. Short and powerful with a too-thick neck, a too-big head and a too-fleshy nose. Not like a thin, black Division Street Jew tailor at all, except for the up and down accent. He was sandy-haired and had sandy-gray eyes that danced when he looked at you. And he was always smiling, like he had life by the tails of a coat he had made himself. He was obviously enjoying the ride.
After my trouble with the O’Malleys, Rebecca appointed herself as my protector. She wouldn’t leave my side. She also wouldn’t stop talking. Every time there was a break between classes or a recess she would corner me. She told me about the teachers; who was nice and who wasn’t, who was strict, who was easy. She told me stories about the other kids too, what they got up to, what their fathers did, how their mothers dressed.
“Those O’Malleys, well their father is a terrible drunkard. You know, Hyman, I’ve seen him falling-down drunk in the middle of Cedar Street. Can you imagine that? Right there in the dirt in front of everybody. Although,” she said, putting a confidential whisper in her voice, “you mustn’t tell anyone I told you so because my father doesn’t allow me to go anywhere near Cedar Street. If he knew, well, I don’t know what! All those saloons and hurdy-gurdies, it simply isn’t right for a respectable young lady to be seen there. Of course, there are no respectable ladies there, but just going to look isn’t going to do any harm, is it? And their mother has to take in washing. The poor woman looks simply dreadful too. Hair all thin and wispy and hanging every which way and her clothes, well her clothes. There’s an older sister, Maggie O’Malley, but she doesn’t come to school now. I’ve heard she actually works in Cedar Street, actually works there, down by the river, if you catch my meaning, Hyman. Yes? Used to be a miner, Mr. O’Malley did, but he had an accident or something like that and now he drinks all the time, which I suppose is why those two poor boys are the way they are, although I think it’s because of that red hair and, of course, being Irish, which never helped anyone very much, did it?”
On and on and on she went. It was as if she had been stranded on a desert island for years. A girl Robinson Crusoe waiting for someone to talk to and then I washed up, chased by the savages, and she had her Boy Friday, mute and trapped.
About a week after we met she insisted I come home to meet her father.
“I’ve told him everything about you, Hyman. About how very clever you are in school, how you live with that big ugly woman up on the hill and about Buffalo Bill, and . . .”
She hadn’t given me the space to tell her much more about myself than I was an orphan and had had to leave the Wild West with Benny. Rebecca didn’t approve of Benny, which only goes to show she had good sense buried somewhere in among all that quick and endless talking.
She told me how she and her father were going to make their fortune and one day live in a big house with a wide front porch and servants. It was only a matter of time. She was going to be a teacher and marry an engineer. He would have blond hair and not wear a beard, and it didn’t matter if he wasn’t Jewish, because we lived in America. She wasn’t going to be fussy about the color of his eyes because that wasn’t important. She would have two children, a boy and a girl, and her father would live with them in the big house. I was forced to learn all about the plans for her life as we climbed the dark, narrow stairs to the room where they lived above her father’s shop on Pine Street, right off Sixth.
“Yes, my boy, Opportunity, that’s what’s out here in America. Sure, no civilization, but what did civilization ever do for a poor man? In New York they have themselves civilization. Of course. Big opera houses, theaters, museums, parks, libraries, and, I hear, also fine universities and colleges. For a poor man? Phooey! For a poor man on Rivington Street, never! If you starve yourself, starve your family till the bones show through the skin, then maybe you can make a crust in New York. A miserable crust. Even a man like me, a hard-working man with a good trade. Piecework I had to do in a sweatshop, like a greenhorn. Piecework! Me, Saul Levinsky! It’s those Germans. You know who I’m talking? So hoity and so toity because they got here first, because they have the trade wrapped up in their pockets and all the time looking down through their noses at us.”
He clenched his fists in front of my face. “So they squeeze and squeeze till there’s no more of to squeeze—a dry sack is all they leave.”
I had to travel more than 2,000 miles to Wallace for the other side of the story I had heard so many times from my father and his brothers. Straight from the moth’s mouth so to speak.
He poked himself hard in the chest with his thumb.
“Saul Levinsky wasn’t going to be made a dry sack, no sir. Or my darling little Rebecca. I didn’t come all those difficult cold miles from Berdichev to be a dry sack in Rivington Street, a dry sack for the Germans! Jews? Are they Jews? Phooey! With their carriages and silk top hats, with their trayf food and fancy temples—temples, not synagogues, mind you—temples that look like churches with men and women mixed up together and they don’t even keep the Sabbath. Sunday! No, they’re goyim. No, they’re worse than goyim, worse because they’re Jews!”
He stopped suddenly, looked at me with different eyes and then laughed and banged his open palm on the table.
“What am I talking here? A little half-pint pisher like you, not even wet behind the ears, what do you care about crazy talk from old Sam Smith, huh?”
“Father,” Rebecca said primly, “Hyman is a very well-educated boy. He might not be able to talk, but he understands everything. He’s the best student in the class even though he’s two years younger than everyone else and he knows Greek and Latin, don’t you, Hyman?”
“That so?” said Sam Smith, widening his smile. “A regular scholar? Why not? So Mr. Regular Scholar, please to sit.”
He pulled out a chair at the simple wooden table. I sat. He stood over me with his hands on his hips.
“If you’re such a scholar, have you by any possible chance ever heard of a Mr. M. Alexander?” he asked.
I hadn’t.
“A Mr. Charles Himrod? No? Haven’t heard of him either? Jews, Hyman, yes, Jews and both mayors of the capital of the great state of Idaho too. Of Boise I’m talking. Sure, Boise. Can you imagine that? Jewish mayors. Mr. H. L. Frank? That’s right, a mayor too. Butte, Montana. Mr. Samuel Friendly?” he nodded smugly. “Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Henry Blackman, Heppner, Oregon, Mr. Wolf Londoner, Denver, Colorado, Mr. S. Star, mayor of Deadwood in the south of Dakota and more, Hyman, my young scholar, many more. Like I said, here in America there is Opportunity!”
Rebecca brought us three cups of weak tea. Her father sat down, poured some into a saucer and blew to cool it.
“Father!”
A hand was held up to silence her.
“So,” he smiled, “there you are.”
He sipped tea from t
he saucer.
“Budnitsky? Hyman Budnitsky?”
I nodded. Little did he know I was a mayor too, the Meyer of New York.
“Hyman Budnitsky, feh!” he exclaimed. “You should excuse me, Hyman, but, feh! Feh! You think you’ll get anywhere in this America with that name? Never in almost a million years! Maybe in a New York or a Chicago, maybe Budnitsky there, but not Budnitsky here. Here you want to be Harry Brown or maybe Harold Brown. How does that sound to you? A good American name, Harold Brown.”
“Father, please. Don’t go on so.”
“Just giving advice to our young landsman, Rebecca. Advice is free, isn’t that so? Blackman, Friendly, Star, Alexander. Mayors, Hyman, important men, respected in their cities, Gentile cities, of course. You don’t think they came here with those names, do you? A Jew called Friendly? Of course not, but does it matter?” He snapped his fingers. “No, not this much it doesn’t, because here everyone is new made.”
Saul/Sam Levinsky/Smith didn’t realize how true that was for me already in my short life. I thanked him for the advice, but Hyman Budnitsky was just fine, I wrote.
“Whatever you want, Hyman. But you think on what Sam Smith he’s telling you, which is nothing but for your own good, young as you are. Which reminds me, Rebecca, she tells me you live with a Gentile lady up on the hill? Is that right, Hyman, a Gentile lady?’
“Father!”
“Rebecca! You know, Hyman, I can say this to you because a scholar you may be, with Greek and Latin too, but you’re not a man yet. Am I right? Twelve years old is still not a man of duty. So I as a Jewish man, I can say to you that it isn’t right a young Jewish boy like you living with goyim.”
Why was he so anxious that I change my name and at the same time so anxious I stay Jewish? I started to write a reply but he covered my hand with his.
“I know,” he said. “You will say how that she’s a good woman. Of course, she’s a good woman! Who else takes a crippled orphan? A heart as big as a horse and a cart together she has, of this there is nothing to make questions. But Jew and Gentile, Hyman? Just when a boy needs instruction, needs guidance. No, I will have to talk man-to-man with your good Gentile lady.”
I begged him not to, wrote that I was only there temporarily, until she and her husband could fix me up somewhere with a family. He smiled and patted my hand.
“Why didn’t you say? Fix you up, sure fix you up. Why didn’t I think? I’ll write my cousin Mr. Moses Coleman,” he tapped his finger at the side of this nose, “which was upon a time once Cohen, in Spokane, where they have a proper community, with a proper rabbi, where they know fixing up like this for the lost children. Then maybe I can talk to your Gentile lady, Hyman. What do you think to that idea?”
I couldn’t stop my shoulders falling. Lost children! A proper community! I knew what that would mean. And as much as I missed my mother, especially at nights when Benny wasn’t there on the mattress with me, I didn’t want to go back to where I had already been. I knew all about that.
Every day after that I thought about the terrible letter coming from Spokane, a letter I just knew was filled with dark drawing rooms, sweet flowers, and rabbis. I decided that meeting Rebecca’s father, Mr. Hooray America, hadn’t been such a great idea after all.
6
McParland the Cobra walks around the table reading the first few pages I’ve written. He walks slowly, favoring his right leg, not like a cobra, more like a tired old man. After a couple of minutes he stops and takes off his glasses. He lifts the papers up, sort of points them at me and then throws them on the table.
“Orchard, Abraham. The other stuff here isn’t important for us. Stick to Harry Orchard and the troubles and then maybe we got somewhere to go from. Harry and the Federation. You give us that, boy.”
I haven’t told him about school or the O’Malleys or Rebecca Smith or her father, just how Benny and I got to Wallace and how I met Harry at Aunt May’s. McParland wants me to skip to when they blew up the Bunker Hill and Sullivan and what Harry did and I will tell him about that right now. But that’s just the story for him and his friend Charlie. It’s not the whole, the true story like McParland says he wants. That’s what I’m telling here.
It was a couple of weeks after we got to Wallace that I first met up with Harry Orchard. He had dropped by to talk about the Hercules, a prospect hole above Burke near Sunset Peak, in which Aunt May and Al had a big stake. He wanted to find out if they had made any progress with the digging. It wasn’t that he had his stake by then, having lost it in a poker game some time before, it’s just that he always had the itch that maybe he had lost more than he bargained for, which of course he had, although there was no glimmer of that back in ‘98, three years before Gus Paulsen stuck his pick into the mound of silver which made them all, except for Harry, rich beyond wishing.
“Breathe easy, Harry,” Al told him. “We ain’t got nothin but rocks and sweat from that darned hole.”
“Al Hutton! “Aunt May boomed in her cautionary don’t-say-ain’t-shout voice.
“Sorry, my dear,” he said meekly, giving Harry half a shrugged smile and starting up his throat clucking.
Harry didn’t notice. The way his stocky body relaxed you could see that he was relieved by Al’s news. Then he saw the two of us standing to one side in the kitchen and in his widest back-slapping voice he announced what a fine pair of young boys we were and asked Aunt May if maybe we wanted to work for him on Saturday.
“Come up after school too, if they have the mind to. Al could give ‘em a ride on the engine. Lot to do in the yard, stackin and loadin, you know. Could go out with me on the wagon deliverin. Of course, way things are, tough as they are, can’t pay them all that . . .”
Aunt May held up a big hand like to stop a charging bull.
“Just wait up, Harry Orchard. These here boys aren’t working for anybody during the week. Where’s your sense, though I don’t have to ask too close about that, do I? They have their schoolwork to be doing and their chores around here.”
“Just thought it might be a help to ya, May, if they was earning, is all I’m sayin.”
“What’s that, Harry? Fixing to do me a favor are you? Determined not to be a villain for a change, is that it?”
She always liked to sneak in that half-Shakespeare stuff, even though most times no one else cottoned on to it. Aunt May gave a big laugh at Harry, so hard her chins wobbled. There was no laughing in her eyes though.
“Be the first time you’ve done a favor for anybody around here, except maybe those damn poker players up the Canyon who you seem so all-fired anxious to give your money away to.”
“That ain’t fair, May. You tell her it ain’t fair, Al.”
Al smiled, sucked on his cold pipe and shook his head. I never saw him go up against May and he wasn’t about to start for Harry Orchard.
“What happened to that sixteenth part in the Hercules if it wasn’t the cards, Harry?” asked Aunt May. “You answer me that.”
“Just bad luck is all. May. Ya know that. Bad luck can find anyone.”
“I don’t know any such thing. Harry, and that old bad luck sure seems to be finding you more than most. Like you got a special magnet for it.”
“I’ll get her back, ya wait and see on that.”
‘I’ll wait, Harry. And so will you. Most likely until Hell freezes over and old Caliban makes daisy chains.”
Harry shrugged it off, Caliban and all, and tried again.
“They could come up Saturdays. Sure. Al could bring ‘em on the 5:15. Have ‘em back for supper. How about that?”
Aunt May eyed Harry like she was measuring him for something cold and heavy. Then she shook her head.
“Don’t think so, Harry. Little Hy, he’s too young and too little for that kind of work, and Benjamin, well I’ve got other plans for Benjamin right here in Wallace. Anyway, don’t want either
of these boys gallivanting up there in the Canyon on their own in among all those damn dance halls and cribs, what with you knowing them all by their first name.”
Harry’s round cheeks swelled out with blustery indignation. He smacked a hand to his barrel chest somewhere near where he must have reckoned to find his heart.
“Now, May, on my honor, ya know I wouldn’t . . .”
“Ah, Aunt May,” Benny complained. “I can work good. The man’s right, we could be bringin in some money for ya and Uncle Al.”
“Enough of that, Benjamin Shorter! Not another word on it! Living here with me and Al you’ll do what you’re told. And as for you, Harry Orchard, your honor wouldn’t buy half a mule’s breakfast.”
Al laughed and Harry looked hurt, but came back a few seconds later with a broad grin.
