by Steve Cash
Yes, I understood. I was still dulled and numb, but I understood. My mama and papa were gone. It was the most sure thing I had ever known or understood. Then something struck me, a question as much about fate as about fact.
“Why were you there?”
“Zis is my business,” he said without hesitating. “I go there, not to that place, but beyond there, to Central City. I sell the things to the miners that the miners need, some they know they need, some they don’t. So, I rejoice with them, I invoke the spirit of Yahweh, we sing, we dance, and poof! they find out they need these things. Simple, sweet. Zis is good. Then I return and do the same thing again. I was returning when the train came, Zianno. I don’t know why I was there, except I am on business.”
He started to rise, then knelt down again and with his huge fingers spread my eyes open and searched them thoroughly. Then he straightened up, adjusted the small, round cap on the back of his head, and said, “Let’s have a look at zis arm.”
When he untied the knot on the sling and unwrapped the bandages, he gasped and said, “Great Yahweh!”
I looked down at my arm. There were no cuts, gashes, stitches, nothing; only a few faint red lines marred my smooth, twelve-year-old skin. I moved my fingers. I stretched my arm out straight and opened and closed my fist. I had total movement and strength. Nothing was wrong. It was as if nothing had ever happened.
The big man looked at me closely, up and down, as if I had appeared from nowhere. Then he unwrapped the blanket and said firmly, “Stand up, kid.”
I did and I was unsteady at first, but in a moment I felt fine.
“I have heard of zis,” he said.
“Heard of what?”
“Zis thing, zis trick, zis gift of Yahweh.”
I didn’t know what he was saying. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was that he had found me, taken care of me, and I was physically healed. I was a million things inside, mostly sad and lost, but unasked and unannounced, this man, this stranger, had saved me.
“The old, old rabbis from Germany told stories, stories of wondrous children who lived in mountains by the sea.” He was talking to me, but his eyes were remembering long-forgotten men and places. “What are your people, Zianno? What were your mama and papa?”
“Basque,” I said. “Sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
“My mama was telling me on the train we were more, or different, or older. She was telling me just before—”
He cut me off and said, “Never mind. We will not talk of zis now. We will talk later. Now we rest. Tomorrow, we start our journey and we will talk on our journey like many women at once.”
“But—”
“No,” he said. “There is only sleep now.”
He kicked dirt on the fire to douse it and eventually settled down in his blankets. I did the same and lay there sleepless for a time. Then I said, hoping he was still awake, “Where are we going . . . Solomon?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered, “St. Louis, kid . . . St. Louis.”
The next day we were on our way, sitting on the bench of his wagon, the Solomon J. Birnbaum Overland Commodities Co., being pulled by Otto and his stablemate Greta. We mainly followed the railroad tracks, but occasionally Solomon had his own trails and shortcuts. It was a long journey that is a story in itself and on that journey we talked about many things. I never once thanked him for saving me and he never asked. Strangers never do.
2
EGURALDI
(WEATHER)
Weather. We talk about it all the time; the mess, the beauty, the dread, the joy, past, present, future, the common event, and always the uncommon. We talk about it, think about it, worry about it, and take it for granted. We journey toward it, through it, around it, away. It has power over us, but we are powerless, except for our flimsy attempts at shelter. It rains, we run. Weather is power because it is unknown . . . unpredictable. It is a force that influences me greatly. The power of Weather and . . . the Weatherman.
W e arrived in St. Louis in the late summer of 1881. The last four days of our journey had been in a constant, steady rain. We were wet and miserable and the mules were stubborn and feisty. Still, we went out of our way to meet a friend of Solomon’s in Washington, Missouri, who had a makeshift ferry. We somehow got the mules and wagon on board. In the rain, we made our way down the last stretch of the Missouri River and around the bend into the Mississippi, docking in the dark somewhere in south St. Louis. When I asked why we had gone to so much trouble, Solomon just said, “Zis is good business.”
He had many strange routines concerning business, especially when it came to arrivals and departures. Solomon had anxious creditors at every stop. He was a fair man and always paid his debts eventually, but his ideas, appetites, and love for all games of chance came first.
We made our way to a boardinghouse Solomon was well acquainted with. The house seemed huge to me at the time, but really was only ten or twelve rooms. The landlady was Mrs. Bennings, an Irish woman with black hair pulled back in a bun, sky blue eyes, creamy white skin, and a figure Solomon described as “ripe as a great melon.” I never saw a Mr. Bennings, nor was he ever discussed, and courtesy was her strong point.
“Good evening, Mr. Birnbaum. And what might you be doin’ out on a night when all right-thinkin’ persons are safe and warm inside somewheres?”
Solomon shook the rain from his great black coat. I just stood there, dripping silently. He put his hands together as if in prayer and made a full bow from the waist.
“Please, call me Solomon, Mrs. Bennings. It is good to see your bright face again and on such a dark night as zis.”
“And yours too, sir. Will you be needin’ one room or two, seein’ how you sprouted a son since I seen you last?”
She glanced over at me and gave me a look that had more questions in it than anything else.
“No, Mrs. Bennings,” Solomon said, “zis is not my son. Zis is my . . .” He paused and looked at her and she at him, ready for this latest explanation of himself. “Zis is my silent partner, Zianno Zezen.”
“Well, then, you’ll be needin’ two, won’t you, sir?”
“That is correct, Mrs. Bennings, that is correct. Partners need privacy. Zis is good business.”
“It is, it surely is, Mr. Birnbaum.” She was smiling to herself and turning to get room keys and towels. She stopped and looked at me.
“Do you ever speak, child?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, then, what do you say?”
“Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Bennings.”
She laughed out loud and sneaked a look back at Solomon. Her laugh stopped abruptly and she said, “Do you still have them stinkin’ mules and that damned old wagon, Solomon?”
He was already at the door, halfway out. “That I do, Mrs. Bennings, that I do,” he said.
“Well, then, put ’em where you usually do.”
He made another short bow and, with a wink, said, “That I will. That I will.”
We settled into our life at the boardinghouse. Every morning, we had breakfast with Mrs. Bennings and she made sure I always had enough to eat and was properly clothed. No one asked her to do these things. She just took it upon herself to do them. Some mornings I could smell whiskey still lingering on her breath, the same whiskey I smelled on Solomon’s. They spoke little in the mornings and I was quiet myself, so nothing was ever said about these things.
The rest of the day was spent in the busy streets of St. Louis. Solomon and I in the wagon, the mules in front, crisscrossing south side to north side, over to midtown, back to the river; all in pursuit of “business.” Some days, it was simple bartering; some days, gambling on fights, dice, cards, horses, baseball. The world turned and Solomon gambled. Some days we would just watch the river traffic, the coming and going of the big barges and pleasure boats. Solomon would say, “Zis is where the money will be, Z. On the water, you watch.”
He left me alone a lot, n
ot out of negligence, but just because that’s the way it was for Solomon. Aloneness, not loneliness, was a natural and pleasant state for him. Many times while he was doing “business,” I wandered through St. Louis. I found our old neighborhood once and ended up playing baseball with a few kids I had known. I told them all that we had moved and never mentioned what had happened. I played with Mama’s glove and kept Papa’s baseball in my trouser pocket. I always kept it with me just like he told me. I tried not to think about Mama and Papa too much. I didn’t know how. Every time I thought of them, I thought of them as living and talking and laughing. I couldn’t think of them as dead. It didn’t make sense and what they told me didn’t make sense—“Find Umla-Meq . . . find Sailor . . . we are the Dreams.” It didn’t make sense, but their voices were still living within me and, somehow, I would do what they asked of me. I always had.
Solomon and I became best friends. He never tried to be a papa to me and I never tried to be a son. We were equals, silent partners. There were other children around, gangs of them, especially in the south side, but I preferred Solomon’s company. He told me stories and taught me to love books. He told me jokes most twelve-year-olds would never hear. He taught me simple mechanics and went on at great lengths about exotic religious rituals. He pointed out the different dialects and accents that we heard everywhere in St. Louis. He taught me all the games of chance and what to listen for when making a deal—any deal. And he never mentioned the train wreck or the curious way my arm had healed afterward, except once.
Fall had turned to winter and it hit hard. Off and on for six weeks, the whole south side was frozen in. A fever had spread street to street, house to house. Nearly everyone came down with it, including Solomon and Mrs. Bennings. I wasn’t sick yet, but I was worried that if I got sick we were in trouble, because there would be no one to do the chores and tend to the mules. Solomon called me to his bed and he said, “You will not get zis, Zianno. You will not get zis fever.”
I said, “What do you mean? How could I not?”
“No, no. Listen to me,” he said, “remember your arm?”
“Yes,” I said, but it was really more like remembering a dream.
“Well, listen to Solomon. Your kind does not get sick. Ever. The old rabbis knew. They knew . . .”
Then he trailed off and went to sleep, but Solomon knew something. He knew something I didn’t. Later, when he got well, I tried to talk about what he had said, but he waved me off and seemed uncomfortable with it. He just said, “Zis is not good business, not now.”
I was different and I felt it, though I didn’t know why. Mama had said I was—we were—different and I felt more that way every day. Not just because I was Basque and didn’t look Italian or English or black or German or Chinese. And not because of my small size and quiet ways. My dreams had changed. They were deeper, richer, farther away. When I woke, I felt less in this world than another and sometimes this world became a dream. And I was alone. I felt alone with this difference.
Then I met the “Weatherman.”
It was March. A fierce, cold wind still blew out of Canada and was freezing the Midwest. In St. Louis, solid ice spread out a quarter of a mile from the riverbank into the Mississippi. All major trade virtually stopped. Solomon and I still made our rounds, but not as often. He hated the cold and so did his mules. And he hated missing his other “business,” his daily card games and gambling.
A friend of his told him of a poker game in which Solomon might be able to play mainly because he was German. It was held each day in the back room of one of the saloons favored by the new beer barons of St. Louis. In fact, the friend told him, Solomon looked quite a bit like one of the Lemp brothers, one of the players who would surely be there with lots of money in his pockets. But he would have to trim his beard, take off his little Jewish cap, and keep his opinions to a minimum. Solomon thought this to be a minor inconvenience in order to do “good business.” And with Mrs. Bennings’s help in the trimming and tailoring, he was physically transformed into a man he thought had the look and figure of a beer baron. He turned this way and that in front of the mirror, admiring the change.
“Not bad, eh, Mrs. Bennings?”
“Not bad at all, sir, but I’ve got to ask. What will you be playin’ with? Them fat old fellas got more in their pocket than you got on your whole person.”
He looked at her sharply, then back to the mirror. “I have enough to begin. After a few hands, zis will not be a problem.” He turned and looked to me as he was lighting a cigar. He said, “Zianno?”
I just said, “You look the part, Solomon.”
We took the wagon and mules to the address he had been given. The sky was dark, even though it was just after noon, and a hard wind was blowing. Ice still covered most of the streets and the mules were slower than usual.
Solomon wanted to be let off in the alley leading to the back room, probably so no one would see the mules and the wagon. As he stepped down and took his first few treacherous steps on the ice, I heard a voice, a boy’s voice from somewhere in the alley, say, “There he is. There’s Lemp.”
I looked around and saw no one but Solomon. The boy thought Solomon was the beer baron, loaded with money, arriving for his daily poker game. Solomon didn’t even look up. He was still concerned with the ice. Suddenly there were three of them, then five, then six. Half of them were about my size and age, but the others were bigger and older, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Before Solomon could do or say anything, they had him pinned against the brick wall of the saloon. They were yelling and shouting at him to stand still and when Solomon did try to speak, one of the older ones pulled out a baseball bat and swung it hard against Solomon’s legs. The smaller ones were tearing at his pockets, looking for money.
This all happened in half a minute. Then one of the older ones glanced back over his shoulder into the darkness of the alley and said, “Ray, he ain’t got but a few bucks. Should we do him, anyway?”
I knew what that meant and, without thinking, jumped out of the wagon. I was scared and mad. I didn’t know what to do. I reached in my trouser pocket and grabbed hold of Papa’s baseball. I pulled it out and held it up, ready to throw at the first boy that moved . . .
Then a strange and magical thing happened.
“Get away from him now,” I said. “Turn around and get away from him.”
Everything went silent, except for the wind, which was still howling around us. They all looked at me bewildered, entranced, as if some great clock had reached the hour and they were waiting for it to chime. But what clock? And for what reason? I didn’t have a clue. Then, without a word, they let go of Solomon, the one boy dropped his bat, and they turned and walked away, puzzled as to why they were even there in the first place.
I watched them leave. I was still filled with rage, but somehow calm. Solomon was slumped against the wall, moaning. I went over to him and asked if he was all right. Before he could speak, I heard something move in the darkness, back in the alley where the boy with the bat had glanced. At first, I couldn’t see anything, then a shape appeared. It was another boy, one who looked just like me or at least enough like me that we could have been somehow related. He walked over to me and stared in my eyes, searching for something. Then he looked at my hand holding Papa’s baseball.
“You are Meq,” he said.
I said, “What? Who are you? Why did they do that? Do you know who this is? This is Solomon J. Birnbaum, that’s who.”
The boy looked at Solomon, then back to me. He was listening, but not so much to what I said as to how I said it. He came a step closer.
“How long?” he said.
“How long what?”
I looked at Solomon. He was hurt, I could tell, but he wasn’t saying anything. He was just staring back and forth between the boy and me.
“You don’t know, do you?” the boy said.
“Look, I know you know those punks—you tell them they got the wrong man and they’d better . . . they’d better w
atch out.”
He laughed to himself, a strange laugh for a child, almost bitter. He took two or three steps backward, still looking at me until he was out of the alley and in front of the wagon and mules. Then he took off running. Fast. He literally ran like the wind; fluid, compact, graceful, like no boy I’d ever seen, and he was on ice.
Solomon finally spoke. He said, “Great Yahweh.”
I helped Solomon into the wagon and I grabbed the reins and drove us back to the boardinghouse. Solomon’s legs weren’t broken, but he was badly bruised. Mrs. Bennings and I helped him into bed and I could tell she had seen and touched the results of violence before. She was gentle and efficient and hardly spoke a word until later, when she asked me what had happened. I was confused, mad, even a little guilty for some reason, and I told her everything, even about the other boy, the one who looked like me.
“Well, don’t that beat the devil? I never heard such a thing. And them boys just walked away like that, peaceful and all?”
“Yes,” I said, “they did.”
“Well, then let’s just let it lie, eh, child? Best we tend to Mr. Birnbaum and get him standin’ on them long old legs of his.”
I agreed with her and tried to “let it lie,” but I couldn’t. I thought about it all that night and the rest of the week. Even my dreams were no refuge. They were filled with strange faces, animals, and voices. They all merged and separated, changing, dancing like images seen through a fire on the wall of a cave.
