Karel stood back to watch near the schoolhouse. A redbrick building with a bell that was surrounded on all sides by flat ground. From what his father had told him to expect, the school on Clandish was what Karel supposed all the Middle West should look like: a large building with a Stars and Stripes snapping from the top of a flagpole, straight rows of desks and inkwells visible through the ground-floor windows.
The sun was warm on Karel’s skin those afternoons, when kids shed their jackets as soon as they stormed out over the threshold of the schoolhouse door. Still, Karel would have been warmer if he’d moved like the other boys, chasing the ball, swinging lumber off shoulders, over heads, lining up to cover the school yard flats and urging each other to hustle in high-pitched barks. Karel followed their moves. Boys crouched half to the ground, hands on knees, socks pulled high. One threw the ball and another caught. Karel didn’t like the idea of playing a position so close to the action. The catcher in particular risked his teeth, squatting where the bat was swung. Out in the field would be better, Karel figured, where he could stretch his legs, hunt the ball, and be expected to catch it only on occasion, but he was afraid to voice his assumptions, to stake claim to a job he might fail at.
The two who’d picked him were skilled ballplayers. Karel tracked their movements. Jimmy Mac was redheaded and skinny, with long arms to pluck the ball from the air. He ran, reckless and daring, squared liners up to his face to see the ball coming, the protecting mitt just in front of his nose. He did better in the outfield. Alfred was shorter, dark and compact, and was more comfortable patrolling the infield, where it was a credit to be close to the ground.
After a while these two pulled Karel from the schoolhouse wall to teach him how to field. “Bend your knees,” they told him. “Reach for the ground. Pick grass if it helps.” They bossed him around until he could drop into a fielder’s stance on his own and bounce from his hips, where his muscle was, and not look like an idiot doing it. Then they rolled a ball to Karel and made him bat it back with his hands. Harder each time. The three of them in a triangle, in defensive stance, slapping the ball back and forth.
After a while the boys said that was enough. It was getting dark.
Karel thanked Alfred and Jimmy Mac for showing him how to play. They said not to worry. They hadn’t really taught him anything yet. And it was true. Karel would learn much more about baseball—he’d be the best of them by the time he was finished.
“You live with Missus Maria, yeah?” Alfred asked.
“Sure he does,” Jimmy said. “I seen him before. You got all sisters, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s fine. They’re pretty.”
Karel didn’t like to talk about his sisters. The elder pair teased him a lot and were too old to care about anyway. But Karel’s other sister, Anna, was only a year older than him. He protected her.
“Don’t you think they’re pretty? Your sisters?” Alfred sucked on the pit of a cherry. He kept fruit in his pockets, stolen from the market, like lots of kids did.
If Karel was going to make friends with any of the boys, he could do worse than Alfred Braun and Jimmy McHenry. Sure, Jimmy was measly faced, Irish, and Karel had been warned against trusting the Irish. Then there was Alfred, who had wide hips and a big rump that ballooned his trousers in back. He never wore a belt, because he didn’t need one. Alfred didn’t have baby fat on his cheeks either, a strange thing for a stout boy, like all his mass should erode to his feet. “You’re turning conical is all,” Jimmy sometimes teased, cinching his own narrow shoulders to mimic Alfred’s form. “A walking, talking dunce cap. That’s what you are.”
Neither Jimmy nor Alfred came from model families. This made Karel feel better about the boys. Like he was one of them.
They had questions for Karel now that he was on their team. What work his father did and why his sister Anna was pulled from school. How Karel lived in New York City for a year after he came over, saw the Statue of Liberty, and went to the Polo Grounds once, but only because he and his father took the wrong Ninth Avenue El transfer and ended up in Harlem by mistake, and not necessarily to see Christy Mathewson and the Giants play. Even though he didn’t know who the ace hurler Christy Mathewson was, the boys respected Karel once he told how he’d escaped from the war in Europe. He and his father and his sisters had run halfway across the continent to board an American ocean liner in Bremerhaven. There was fighting where he lived before that.
“Is that why you haven’t got a mom?” Jimmy asked. “Did she die in the war?”
“Yeah,” Karel admitted. “She was killed.”
He felt himself toughen, saying that, staring past those boys into the street. He hadn’t been able to say it before. It was his mother who Karel took after. She’d had a round face and big cheeks and strong shoulders, like Karel did. He didn’t really remember her—his sisters told him these things. That’s how he knew anything, secondhand. He had to accept what his sisters said—how his mother was beautiful, and cruel sometimes if she felt like it, and how she was killed, in Austria-Hungary, in northernmost Galizien among the Carpathian Mountains, by Tsarist Russian soldiers? by a Serb assassin? by a stray bullet? Karel knew nothing about that. His sisters wouldn’t tell. He didn’t want to know how it happened anyway, not as a boy. She was his mother. She’d smiled at him, tucked him into bed, then lifted him from his blankets in the morning and fed him sugary bits torn from a marzipan pastry. He remembered that, didn’t he? That was all he had of her.
The other boys looked at Karel different once they knew how he’d ended up in Omaha.
Consider that two years had passed since Karel and his family fled Central Europe. Tsar Nicholas sent Cossacks to fight in the Carpathians, and that was bad news. That was why Karel and his family had to run. Cossacks had it out for Jews, and Herr Miihlstein had lost enough of his small family already during the early days of the war. The remaining Miihlsteins were lucky to get out so easy and still have enough money to find a place in New York for a while. Then a job at the Musik Verein in Omaha came open when the man who’d held it died of consumption. Miihlstein took the job, dragged his children across a continent for a second time, and rented the attic where the deceased had formerly lived. Things would be easier this way, since that was where all the deceased’s work was left, what was Miihlstein’s work now. And, needless to say, Frau Eigler was looking to fill the room.
Karel and his family were a bit different than the rest of the boys and their families.