Kings of Broken Things Read online

  PRAISE FOR KINGS OF BROKEN THINGS

  “Set during the Red Summer, Kings of Broken Things perfectly encapsulates both the frailty and darkness of the volatile period that saw the end of World War I, the shift from an agrarian to industrial society, heartland baseball, and the brutal lynching of Will Brown that led to the Omaha Race Riot. Powerful and resonant, this book’s relevance, in the context of today’s concerns, cannot be overstated.”

  —Julie Iromuanya, author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

  “A beautifully written novel about an ugly, tumultuous time in history, Kings of Broken Things is an exciting, gritty portrait of a corrupt American city on the edge of self-destruction. It’s a novel that simmers, like Doctorow’s Ragtime, leaning forward always toward its powerful final chapters. Whether writing about violins or baseball or bordellos, Wheeler demonstrates a dazzling talent for bringing history alive, offering breathtaking insights into the hearts and minds of these immigrants and outsiders.”

  —Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola

  “The rhythms of baseball run through the prose of Kings of Broken Things, as the game becomes a gateway into the stories we tell ourselves about America. This is a book that questions those stories and gives itself over to the conflict at the core of them, all told in sentences that skip along like a perfectly struck ground ball.”

  —Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood

  “In this beautifully written debut novel, Ted Wheeler takes us back to a crossroads in American history, a time full of the innocence of our childhood when the joys of simple pleasures were beginning to be tainted by the growing awareness of a darkness at the core of the American Dream. Set in Omaha, the contradictions at the heart of those living in the heartland are tested by the foreboding shadows of racism and hatred that finally explode into a lynching of a black man in downtown while white crowds look on. How could the good people of Nebraska have committed and tolerated such a brutal act? Wheeler’s novel explores the world that created this terrible moment, and the aftermath that continues to punish a city known for having rigid discrimination and oppression to this day. Indeed, this is a novel for our time as we collectively face an uncertain future and ask ourselves how the daily shootings and injustices can be stopped. Wheeler possesses a powerful voice that reminds us that wrong doesn’t become merely historical; it lives forever, no matter how hard we try to erase the memory. Readers will learn from reading this novel, experience empathy, and perhaps read the daily news with greater compassion. I recommend this novel be read and reread.”

  —Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise

  “In this marvelous debut novel, Theodore Wheeler’s clean and unsentimental prose takes us into the rough streets of Omaha’s River Ward at the end of the First World War. Wheeler skillfully wields historical facts and imagination to give life to immigrants and the sons of immigrants as they are swept up in American ways—from baseball and election politics to the tragic lynching of a black man named Will Brown. This is a book whose characters and scenes will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.”

  —Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Theodore Wheeler

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941472 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503941477 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503941465 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503941469 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio

  Cover illustrated by Christina Chung

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  THE OPEN CITY Spring 1917

  Consider Karel Miihlstein. . . .

  Consider Jake Strauss. . . .

  Karel’s shoes were . . .

  Consider Evie Chambers. . . .

  One evening Maria . . .

  A BRAND FROM THE BURNING Winter 1918

  Karel was sore . . .

  After he beat . . .

  Consider Tom Dennison: . . .

  Maybe it seems . . .

  Consider Anna Miihlstein. . . .

  Karel and his . . .

  THE UNINITIATED Spring 1918

  Everyone knew Jake . . .

  Josh Joseph died . . .

  All the election . . .

  Evie didn’t know . . .

  Anna had her . . .

  RED SUMMER Autumn 1919

  Jake had cause . . .

  Anna quit asking . . .

  It wasn’t so . . .

  Something wicked must . . .

  Evie had plenty . . .

  It was in . . .

  Everyone had a . . .

  Jake and Evie . . .

  It was 2 p.m. . . .

  They dragged the . . .

  He came down . . .

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  To the boys who lived on Clandish Street, those who were too young to fight in the war on either side, the world was smaller than the newspapers suggested. Maybe they’d heard the names of generals like Foch or Hindenburg or Pershing, but these names had no bearing on their lives. They worried about the names of ballplayers and boxers instead. These were boys whose only shoes were baseball spikes. Who carried a mitt everywhere, just in case. Who stole packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes to acquire the Ty Cobb card inside, then smoked the cigarettes too, because why not? Life was simple for them, for a while. Pleasant noises came from the homes on their block. A hausfrau singing in Plattdeutsch loud enough to hear from the walkway, the woman proud of how she slipped through her aspirated syllables and spit her t’s. Sweethearts, arm in arm, struggled to find privacy as clans of siblings escaped their houses before the sun set. Dogs let their tongues wag in the heat, bellies bulging in the dirt, full of table scraps, chicken guts, and pork rib bones.

  People watched each other from porches after dinner, their attention caught in particular that summer by a girl with a space around her on the walkway because nobody wanted to come close. Oh? Didn’t you hear? The girl slender and dignified. She clutched her man’s elbow. That’s Doreen, yeah? No, that’s Carla. No, that’s Evelyn. No. That’s that girl Agnes.

  She was a pretty girl, with blond hair and an erect way in her back, prettier than most. This girl walking down the street, her man’s arm around her waist. Don’t you see her? She was raped last week.

  It was remarkable to the boys to see a woman who’d had it done to her like that. A girl shuffling along with her wrists bruised purplish, her skin thin at the bruises, like a rotten tomato under the plant where the good tomatoes grew. A girl who wore elegant dresses. Who put curls in her long, fair hair.

  Everybody had a theory about how these things happened, especially later, when the mob caught one, a black man who did bad things to a girl. They would wonder about it in Omaha for years after the fact. What went through his mind? What was he thinking when the cops handed him over? This one they caught, this Will Brown. They’d wonder i
f his ears worked, if he was able to hear what that mob promised to do to him. They’d never know. No more than fifty people had even heard of him the day he was arrested, but the day after, Will Brown’s name was on the lips of every person in Omaha, after what that girl said he did to her.

  The boys who grew up on Clandish would think an awful lot about the folks who were around those years, the war years, the Red Summer that came after the war. This was the neighborhood they’d claimed, and it would go up in flames. They would be the ones to set it on fire.

  THE OPEN CITY

  Spring 1917

  Consider Karel Miihlstein. In 1917 he was eleven years old, new to Omaha, fresh off the boat when he met the boys in the school yard. He was from Salzburg, he said, but had come from Galizien, over there, where the Eastern Front of the war was being fought. His father repaired musical instruments; his mother had been a famous actress and singer, out in the far reaches of the empire his family fled from. But his mother was dead by then—she’d died back there—and maybe this was why his family had to run from Europe in such a hurry like they did. And, of course, there was the war.

  Karel was an interesting kid. He had talents. His English came off as well as his German. He could run. He was bigger than most boys his age and knew a little violin when pressed to play. But these were inessential skills. That spring Karel got to know the boys on Clandish, so he learned how important it was here to be good at baseball.

  Once the weather turned warm, the boys divvied into teams. They were the oldest in their school, eleven, twelve, thirteen—at the end of boyhood.

  Karel wasn’t the last one picked that year, even though he didn’t have a clue how to play. There were two others who were known to be horrible at baseball, for reasons that couldn’t be helped—one whose rickety legs were being straightened by iron braces and another whose hair was kept shorn to eradicate the bugs that plagued him. So Karel grinned when the captains from one team grabbed his arm and pulled him to their side before it came down to the final pick. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac, boys from his class, were the two who picked him. It wasn’t until then that they asked if he even played.

  “I never held a baseball before,” Karel admitted.

  “You kidding?”

  “Can you throw?”

  It was no use lying. Once they fetched a ball and Karel sort of flipped it sidearm to Alfred, sort of rolled the ball in the school yard gravel, they saw all they needed to see.

  Jimmy Mac slapped his hands to his face. “Oh, Jesus. Why did you send us this one?”

  Karel didn’t know what to do. He pulled his arms into himself, felt his shoulders shrink as panic crept over him.

  “Hold on now,” Alfred said. “That’s bad, but you’re not the worst I seen. Not for a first throw. We’re just going to have to fix you, yeah.”

  “Sure. Don’t worry.” Jimmy Mac dropped his hands to his side and smiled. “We won’t let you down.”

  Workup was played in the school yard that first week of spring. A real game wouldn’t form until the next week, when the captains could be sure where each belonged on the diamond. For the initial days a boy took his shot at every position in turn. They rutted out base paths with the end of a bat, folded felt jackets into squares for first, second, third. Home plate was a cap. The school owned a bat—a stubby red thing with a hook screwed into the handle so it could be hung from a coatrack. The boys could borrow the bat whenever they wanted, so long as they put it back where it belonged. A couple of boys had ball gloves but most didn’t. A boy should get used to cradling a ground ball soft with his hands or to knocking it down with his chest, or if he was chicken, to turning and giving chase as the ball rolled by. A glove wasn’t all that important, not how the boys saw it. The hands were important.

  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.