Charlie Pfister and Joe Meinhof were the middlemen in the operation. Half-brothers, they argued throughout the day, over the work, over what tools belonged to whom, over anything. Meinhof had a neat fop of hair he kept parted and oiled, with the sides of his head shaved, a style Jake hadn’t seen before. His face was pinched with nervousness. It made Meinhof conspicuous, his eyebrows arching wrinkles into his forehead, a dimple in his chin. Charlie was more at ease. He had a thick mustache and a way of angling his ear when he couldn’t hear what was said.
At the end of the day their crew and the others packed outside the foreman’s office in the hotel basement to disrobe and scrub off their daily grime, bent double still, this time in a washtub. The foreman set out sponges and paper-wrapped bars of hotel soap, then collected the work clothes in a wicker hamper for the laundry. All the while, Charlie and Joe Meinhof bragged about what went down in social clubs nearby, near fanatical now that the shift was over and they could celebrate. “There’s girls, Jake.” “And beer!” “You have to come.” Once outside the steel door, Meinhof reached up and put his arm around Jake to pull him down Clandish.
Jake ate at Mecklenburg’s with the other men nearly every night once he was drawing a wage. “I was here before,” he told them, hunched over the bar. “Got tricked out of my last dollar.”
Which was true. This was the same place from his first night.
Things had worked out well enough for Jake, but thinking of how he lost the family money made his stomach shrink, and he didn’t want to feel that way.
The first time Jake saw the Eigler house he worried he had the wrong address. The homes at this far end of Clandish were too nice, the avenue too residential. The street was paved and washed. Houses were made of brick and stucco and occupied by only one family. The foreman wrote this address on a scrap of paper and sent Jake here. Maria Eigler, the landlady, led him upstairs. His room was on the second floor overlooking Clandish, and was oversized, with an armoire. He didn’t have to share with anyone. The only other tenants were a family who lived in the dormer, the Miihlsteins. All but the boy had glasses with mangled steel frames. The girls wore their hair long over the padded shoulders of their dresses. Silke, seventeen, was vibrant and kept her back straight and blushed dolorously when Jake looked at her. Theresa, fifteen, her hair combed off her forehead, was more outgoing. She laughed a lot, a silly kerfuffle that was contagious.
The Miihlstein boy was square and unexceptional among his sisters, Jake thought. Karel walked around shoeless when Jake moved in—strangely, since they weren’t that poor. Jake didn’t worry. From what Maria said, their mother had apparently died on the boat to America. Karel was allowed to be a little strange then, even though Jake wasn’t sure this story was true. There were rumors about every foreigner that could either be believed or not.
Some evenings Jake skipped Mecklenburg’s and ate supper at the Eigler house. Maria’s dining room was full of wonders. Wainscoting went around the walls to keep the plaster from denting; bookshelves stuck out to catch the feet of Jake’s chair; the hard-used furniture; a lamp in the corner; charms and oddities she collected; a darkening portrait of her late husband, August Eigler, a railroad man in the railroad’s first days here. Jake thought there was something generous and noble in the way Maria and the Miihlstein kids gabbered to each other and passed food around a crowded table. The dining room warm with steam. Silke and Theresa across from him giggling. Karel squeaking his chair, spilling milk, telling of stray cats he knew. When supper ended, Maria spread a stack of newspapers over the table. She cross-referenced with an atlas to see where positions on the Western Front had switched. Karel asked Silke to point on the map where they’d lived in Galizien, but the girls were weird about it. Each of them selected different spots on the map, within Austria-Hungary and beyond, where each was born, and disputed which village in Galizien they’d lived the last few years. It was confusing. The boy demanded to know where Maria was born too—the custom for those who were countrymen, as all but Jake were Austrian. Maria and the Miihlsteins were of opposite ends of the empire, but all had been to Vienna. Maria urged the Miihlsteins to tell stories about Viennese pl?tze and the aroma of real coffee as it could only be savored in Wien, and told how she was homesick, Maria interrupting the kids along the way until she realized how much things had changed in a relatively short amount of time, from when she was born and then left, until the others did the same. Anna, the frail one, changed the subject. “Where are you from, Jake?”
“My town isn’t on this map,” he said, then he pointed out the north-facing bay window. They were perplexed by what they saw. An overgrown cottonwood, an outhouse that had been converted into a toolshed, a tiny bungalow squeezed in along the alley. “That way, six hours upriver by horse,” he explained. “It’s called Jackson County.”
Jake pointed to Danzig on the map when he finished joking, because he knew Jackson County wasn’t what Anna meant when she asked him where he was from. “My dad is from around here,” Jake explained. “South a ways from Danzig, in Kreis Schwetz.” The kids were pleased at what Jake showed them. Silke explained. “We’ve never lived with a Prussian before,” she told him.
“You still haven’t,” Jake insisted. “I’ve never been to Prussia. I was born in Nebraska.”
“It’s the same thing,” Karel said, but Theresa cut him off.
“Don’t argue. If he says he isn’t from there, who are you to disagree? He isn’t.”
Maria mounted a stool in the parlor to watch families promenade home from social clubs. An alcohol lamp hissed beside her as she puffed smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette out the window and gossiped about neighbors. Who worked what job, who the odd ones were, whose faults were well known, which boys were troublemakers. There was something of an old farm woman in Maria that Jake observed. How her hair was pulled tight in a bun and had paled more orange than gray with age, but was thinning, her forehead elongating, her features moving closer to center. It was a sort of skepticism that affected itself in Maria, a weariness in her face.
She rolled cigarettes to keep her hands busy. Tins of them were all over the house. Jake liked the way sweet Virginia tobacco smelled when she scooped it up with papers, the wood and cherry of it, the robust spirits of dried leaves before they burned.
“Where’s your dad?” Jake asked the kids.
“Upstairs,” Silke said, folding the newspaper to put it away.