Mags shook her head and told him how lucky she was to have a well-established husband whose boss took no unseemly interest in her. Our baby will never starve, she said.
George McCallum pulled up the rented wagon loaded with chemical bins. What baby? he asked.
Why, our baby, she said, smiling and patting her belly. While cars honked and horses whipped into speed dashed around them, George, being the kind of man he was, embraced her there in the street and wept.
Remembering that day and telling her daughter, Sara Kate, about it years later, Mags would say if it wasn’t for the war, life would have gone on from there like a happy dream. But she didn’t mean the war across the sea. She meant the one waged in chaos and blood on the streets of East St. Louis.
IV
War, even a war fought on the other side of the world, intensifies life on the home front. Every dawn brings anxiety, an expectation of no one knows what. The hours that follow are spent in heightened awareness, that sharp mental state in which every gesture, every word may harbor a clue of what comes next. Significance is attached to routine events if only to dispel the constant, fretful waiting for sirens, for telegrams, for howls in the night, for betrayals, for pronouncement, for orders, for release. After such a day, sleep is either rock solid or agitated by spidered dreams. At first light, suspense begins again.
For Mags, pregnancy exaggerated everything. One day she was lighthearted, celebrating her news with George, the next she was heavy with anxious anticipation, imagining all the things that could go wrong when a woman is in such a condition at such a time. The morning St. Louis held its draft registration, she awoke to the sounds of church bells, train whistles, brass bands, cannon shot calling all men to the registry. A terror filled her that never quite left, even after George was rejected due to the miracle of her pregnancy, while so many of the able-bodied Negro men she knew were snatched up quick as you please and eager they were too for the job of soldier. George said they wanted to prove they were as brave and patriotic as white men.
The Army needs cooks and ditch diggers as much as pilots and sharpshooters, he said. So there they are, lining up for the chance to face cannon with a dishrag in their hands.
He spit off the porch railing, grumbling that none of them remembered the Spanish War, so why should anyone remember the Indian Wars? What happened both times was bound to occur again.
Remind me, George, what happened then, Mags said with her gaze averted, embarrassed by her ignorance.
Oh, well, darlin’, of course they put the colored men at the front wherever the fightin’ was the most hopeless and let the enemy use up their ammunition on ’em. Like them buffalo soldiers comin’ up Kettle Hill over to San Juan. Nothin’ but fodder they were. Then the white boys rode over the dead and dying to fair advantage.
Mags worried that if the war got worse, they might start taking anybody they could find, including those with dependent wives and children. For sure, they’d start with the Negro fathers and exhaust them before the whites were chosen. That was the way things always went when there was a hard, dangerous job to do, wasn’t it?
In the month of May, there was trouble—big, ugly trouble. Rumor had it that black men and white women had fraternized at a union meeting of workers badgering Aluminum Ore Company and American Steel. Soon enough, a mob of white men gathered downtown looking for Negroes to rob of life and treasure. No one much cared if the local boys beat up a few blacks, but when they set to destroying buildings, the authorities were called in. Peace was restored, but it was a shaky one.
June came and went. It was hot. Mags was six months along, showing now, confined to Fishbein’s Funeral Home at the insistence of George McCallum. He did not want her on the streets, especially their street, because there was more than one kind of heat, he told her, and both of them together made fire. He didn’t have to say more. She knew what he meant. She didn’t have to go so far as the curb in front of Fishbein’s to feel the burn. When she swept the front porch, the eyes across the street were on her, Polish eyes, German eyes, all of ’em blazing eyes, cutting into her back like brands. Men and boys jabbered in words she could not understand, but their message was clear, spitting sparks of hate into the scorched air as June melted into July.
Like the calm before a storm, business got quiet around the same time. It wasn’t, George said, that people stopped dyin’ or all the Negroes had packed up and moved away. Thanks to the war jobs, the town was bustin’ at the seams. People lived on top of one another. Everyone you met had a new-arrived relative or two stickin’ out of their side pocket. There were more coloreds in East St. Louis than there ever were. But folk were taking care of their dead in the old way, in the country way, rather than come to Fishbein’s, where things just didn’t feel right that close to the color line. Everyone on both sides of that line waited for something awful to happen, for the match to strike the tinderbox, for the fire to start, and then as it had to, as it was destined to, it did.
For the rest of her life Mags wondered what would have happened if she’d gone with George to the train station that day. She’d been cooped up so long without much to do, she was about to tear her hair. She tried everything she could to get him to take her. She cajoled, she pouted, she pushed out her belly and stroked the baby while peeping up at him with her big eyes pleading. Nothing worked. In the end, she would never be able to say if that was a good thing or a bad one. It wasn’t an hour after he was gone that the trouble started.
She sat between two open windows to catch a summer’s breeze when the noise of glass shattering distracted her from her sewing. She got up slowly, with care, in the way of women heavy with child, one hand upon a table, the other at the small of her back, and lumbered over to a window where she saw them, the mob, the white mob, twenty or thirty men with sleeves rolled up and brickbats and clubs and knives, big ones that dripped something red, in their hands. They were at the top of Fishbein’s street, advancing, steadily, with ruinous purpose, breaking everything they passed, yelling in that rough, piercing language she did not know. They seemed headed for Fishbein’s particularly. She screamed.
The man upstairs ran down from the second floor to the parlor, Magnus Bailey and Miss Minnie quick behind him. Minnie grabbed Mags by the hand and pulled her away from the window, then all of them hurried down into the basement, where a single dressed and painted corpse awaited transport to Georgia for burial. The big black fancy man, the small redheaded young woman, and the pregnant country one stood in front of Mr. Fishbein, trying to ignore the defeat in his slumped shoulders, the helplessness of his haunted features. He was their leader. They looked to him for instruction, for wisdom, a plan, anything. They held their breath as he looked back at them from his sad eyes and shook his head. I do not know, he said. I do not know. His lips trembled. He took his daughter’s hand and placed it inside the palm of Magnus Bailey. Save her, he said. Take her across the river to where is safe. I cannot.
The mob had not yet reached the funeral home, but the noise of them grew louder. Magnus moved toward the bulkhead door, pulling Minerva Fishbein roughly down the passage to their escape and grabbing onto Mags along the way. She wrested from his grasp.
No! I’m waitin’ on George.
Bailey grabbed at her again. Fishbein’s daughter reached out and held on to her skirt.
No! Mags twisted, wrapped her arms around a support beam that stood in the middle of the preparation room. I will not go.
Above them, a tumult began. The crashes of furniture. The voices of intruders. Cries for blood. The locked door to the basement rattled, then something rammed into it.
Suit yourself, Bailey said. With Minnie Fishbein behind him, he raced through the corridor to the bulkhead door, flung it open. The two climbed up the stairs. Without so much as a glance behind them, they disappeared into the warren of alleyways beyond George’s little patch of backyard grass where herbs grew heedless as wildflowers in a mead
ow, ignorant of their post at the gateway to death.
Three thumps landed hard against the basement door. It cracked.
Mr. Fishbein went to the bulkhead, closed and bolted it. He put a hand on Mags’s elbow. His breath was heavy in her ear. We must hide, he said. Murmuring unintelligible encouragements as one might to a child or a pet, he guided her to a storage room, where coffins of varying sizes and quality were stacked. Quilts were draped between the coffins to protect the wood from scratch and stain. Here, he said, here we will wait for George. He took her to a middle row of adult coffins and lifted the bottom quilt from a stack three coffins high. See? Is like a tent, he said in his strange accent that continued to lilt supportively though there was a tremor in it. We will pretend we are in the woods on a camping expedition. Yes?
She nodded.
The only thing Mags was sure of was that Fishbein was not murderous and that the men upstairs certainly were. She ducked under the quilt and knelt beside him to await her fate, to await her baby’s fate, to wait for George. While she waited, she prayed continuously, begging Jesus to save them all, even the mad Jew beside her.
Mayhem broke out around them. The basement door split open. There were cheers. Boots ran down the stairs. A rank odor of sweat and blood and rage strong enough to obliterate the usual scent of chemicals and decay seeped through the coffin-room door. Fishbein put his arm around Mags and held her close. They shook against each other in fear. In the next room, orders were shouted. There were shrieks, bellows, the hurling of cabinets to the floor. Men burst into their sanctuary, banged on coffin lids with their bats, and left quickly. These men wanted flesh to rip. Finding none, they ran off. After a time, the house grew quiet. The two fugitives remained huddled together in the close dark, motionless, afraid to breathe. At last, Fishbein said, I think we can maybe leave.
He held up the quilt, and using his body as a steadying post, Mags drew herself up. She felt faint and leaned against the wall. Fishbein got up and began to bob from the waist, up and down to as low as his knees, muttering in a language with harsh sounds and mournful rhythms. Tears fell to his jaw, beading there while soft, deep moans escaped from his throat. Having never seen a Jew pray before, she thought he might be having some kind of a fit. She reached out to touch him, to try to help, when suddenly he stopped. Taking a handkerchief from his pants pocket, he wiped his face, blew his nose, and groaned.
Oy, mine Gott, he said. Mine Gott. Now we must wait. Yes? Now we must wait. For news of your husband and for news of my little girl.
They left the coffin room. They picked their way through the debris of the workroom, leaning on each other, weak from the sights they saw. Absolute carnage had been wreaked upon the place. The poor boy waiting to go home to Georgia had been ripped from his box, his clothes torn off, his body mutilated as if his violators thought a boy could die twice. When she saw him, Mags sank to her knees. Mr. Fishbein lifted her up. Things were no better on the first floor or in the living quarters on the second. The devastation could not have been worse had a bomb gone off. When the smoke and smell of gunshot came to them through the broken places, they realized they had been lucky.
Whatever control of emotion Mags had managed that day out of the need to survive melted. No, no, no, she wept, as she paced through the parlor over sharp bits of debris that cut into the thin soles of her shoes. Fishbein watched her helplessly. He trembled and slapped his hands against his cheeks in a slow, steady rhythm.
What is happening? Mags asked the walls, the smoke blowing through the ruined house. Guns went off not too far away. Oh, George, where are you? Where?
Fishbein moaned and swayed and slapped his cheeks.
There was an explosion somewhere nearby. The sound shattered the jagged glass that remained in the windows of the first floor. Screams came to them. Not the screams of the terrified but the screams of the tortured, the kind of screams that pierce the ears like needles, rip the spine, and rattle teeth.
Hearing them, Fishbein returned to himself. He took Mags to the bedroom off the kitchen. The covers of her marriage bed were full of shards. He tore the linens off. He turned the mattress and sat her on its edge and begged her to lie down, to rest. That he did this in his own tongue made no difference. She understood him and complied. She lay on her back, stared at the ceiling while holding her belly.
What is happening? she asked again.
A pogrom, Fishbein said.
What is a pogrom?
A festival of evil.
She shuddered. Her mouth was very dry. It was difficult to speak. She coughed. Fishbein left the room and returned with water in a teacup. She drank.
What do we do?
What we are doing. We hide. We wait. They will go forwards, they will not come back. This is what we must believe and hope. To pray also wouldn’t hurt.
He lay in bed beside her. She reached out a hand, and he took it.
I will protect you with mine own life, he said.
Why would you do that? she asked, mystified by the idea that a white man would endanger himself for her. For George?
Yes, for George. Of course, for George. But more than him and more than you and more than the child you carry, I will do it for mine dead.
Mags was confounded. His dead? Those who stopped at Fishbein Funeral Home on their way to the cold ground? For them? It made no sense. So she asked, What dead?
He exhaled in the weary sigh of a man who lays down a burden he has carried too long. He muttered in cadences that rose and fell as if he were deciding whether to bend and take the burden up again. Nu, he muttered, but to whom it was impossible to tell. Nu, I shall tell, why not? There may be no more chances. Here is a good woman with child, who is much beloved. Who better to absolve me?
Mags listened, perplexed. Finally, he clapped his free hand over the one that held hers as if shaking it.
Once, he said, I have a wife whom I love.
Miss Minnie’s mother?
He pushed out his lower lip and shrugged.
My little girl is the child of storm and fire. If she has a mother, Sonya is it. But before that, Sonya is my wife. We married under a chuppah when I am twenty and she is sixteen. I met her the month before we were to marry. Until the wedding, we are not together for even a few minutes alone. From the first, I adore her. She is a miracle of intelligence, of delicacy in form and spirit. It is another miracle that I am matched with her. I am a nothing, an apprentice jeweler to my father, dependent entirely upon his fortunes and with none of my own. Her father is a goldsmith, so our match makes sense somewhere in the universe but hardly to mine own mind. I spend the month of our engagement in astonishment that I, a boy who prays only when he must, who lives in a world without challenge to his soul, protected from every evil either through his ignorance or by the walls of our neighborhood, have somehow won such favor from the Divine that this marvel is given to me. To me! I have such respect for her that when our wedding night comes, I can do no more than kiss her hands. Rather than spoil her and win only her disgust, I cut my hand to stain the sheets so the old women who comes later to inspect them find virgin blood. In the end, it is she who guides me through the gates of pleasure where we stay locked together, a holy treasure nestled in a strongbox, far away from all the world.
He paused, resting in the most pleasant place of his history. The wind had changed direction. The clouds of smoke were thinner now, though an odor that stung the eyes lingered within them. It was the odor of burning flesh. The sound of gunshot was less frequent, and the screams as well. With that smell in the air, the relative quiet eased neither’s anxiety. Mags pressed Fishbein’s hand to tell him to continue. To lie there waiting for whatever might come next was excruciating. The distraction of his voice was her sole relief. The sensibilities he described and the words he chose to describe them were exotic, nearly incomprehensible to her except for the love in them. The love she understood. He continued
.
If only we could have stayed in that moment, in that box. If only the world does not visit us on an afternoon when I am not at home. That day, my father sends me to the central post office to inquire about the delivery of an order for display cards. He prefers a certain type of card, collapsible, designed of wood and velvet, which can only be obtained from the capital. It is the only card he would use. He goes to travel the next week to trade in Riga and is anxious about their delivery, and nu, I must go. When I say good-bye to Sonya that day, it is with the usual reluctance. Even though I do not expect to be apart from her for more than a handful of hours, I hate to leave her on any day and at that time. She is like you, with child. We had three years of bliss together before the child is coming. In that time, my mother often complains that there are no grandchildren from us. Once, thank Gott not in Sonya’s presence, she dares to remind me that if together we cannot fulfill the obligation to be fruitful and multiply, our law permits and even encourages divorce. I am enraged by her suggestion. I berate her without mercy. I am ashame to say it is the only time in my life I almost strike a woman, and my own mother! You know the Ten Commandments, Mags McCallum? Of course you do. Honor thy father and mother is the fifth of these. The first four commandments deal with what we must do for Gott, the fifth is the first that tells us what we must do for each other. This is how important it is to honor thy father and mother. But on the day my mother proposes to me I abandon Sonya, I discover I can hate her who bore me. We continues, all of us, to live together although I nurse a hot seed of resentment towards my mother from that day on and often wish her ill. When finally Sonya is with child, my mother dotes on her, but for me it is too little, too late. In the time since, I often thought perhaps the hardness of my heart is why the Holy One, blessed be He, punishes me. But this is selfish, isn’t it? To think that a world of suffering rains down on a multitude because of my sin. Yes, pure selfishness.
Marching to Zion Page 5
