Castle Garden

By Bill Albert

This tale of a young Jewish runaway’s adventures across America is “a rip-roaring saga about the waning days of the Old West” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“When we first meet Meyer Liebermann, he’s sitting in an Idaho jail, accused of murder. Meyer, a mute, begins to write out his life story. It begins in New York in 1887 where, as the adopted son of a prosperous Jewish family, he consistently disappoints his parents. After running away from home, he is assaulted on the street and left mute by his assailants, only to be nursed back to health by the Indians of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Soon he’s on the road with his new family, earning his keep by writing letters for Buffalo Bill. . . . This is a western novel with the most unique protagonist one is ever likely to encounter. Meyer is funny, self-aware, courageous, compassionate, and in his own fashion, tough as nails. He survives a harsh land via his wits and his single skill—letter writing—which proves to be every bit as useful (and a hell of a lot more interesting) than a quick draw and a sharp aim. Western fans expecting standard ‘six-gun justice’ will be pleasantly surprised.” —Booklist
 
“From the show-business antics of Calamity Jane to the strike-breaking violence at the Colorado and Idaho coal mines, Meyer watches America changing . . . this yarn is a keeper.” —Publishers Weekly
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497623194

Bill Albert

William (Bill) Albert is Senior Vice President and Global Head of Customer Development at Mach49, a growth incubator for global businesses. Prior to joining Mach49, Bill was Executive Director of the Bentley University User Experience Center (UXC) for almost 13 years. Also, he was Director of User Experience at Fidelity Investments, Senior User Interface Researcher at Lycos, and Post-Doctoral Researcher at Nissan Cambridge Basic Research. He has more than twenty years of experience in user experience research, design, and strategy. Bill has published and presented his research at more than 50 national and international conferences, and published in many peer-reviewed academic journals within the fields of User Experience, Usability, and Human-Computer Interaction. In 2010 he co-authored (with Tom Tullis and Donna Tedesco), “Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale Online User Experience Studies,” published by Elsevier/Morgan Kauffman.

Book preview

Castle Garden

Bill Albert

For Gill

I love children, bring them all!

—Buffalo Bill Cody

I don’t want to sit down!

—Big Bill Haywood

You just watch my smoke, because I’m going to do things!

—May Arkwright Hutton

Contents

PART I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

PART II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

PART III

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

PART IV

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Other Endings

PART I

1

When my mother saw the Statue of Liberty her waters broke. I was born a short time later at Castle Garden in the city of New York. I am a genuine American and that’s maybe the most important part of my story. But, the old man sitting across the table does not want to hear about my mother or about Castle Garden. No, he wants a particular story of his own devising. He’s been trying to pry it out of me for the last hour, giving less than easy hints here and there, walking me around it in wide, sweeping circles so I can see the outlines clear enough, but not so I can get a tight grip on the details. If I could, I might figure out precisely what story he needs to hear and then I would gladly tell it to him. I mean to say, who wants to be caught up in prison for want of the appropriate story? And stories are cheap, cheap as dirt. Everybody’s got at least one. Me? I have as many or as few as needs be. Damn good ones too, and a whole lot more exciting, not to say a whole lot more true to real life, than those you find in the Dimes.

Stories? Sure thing. It’s because I’m a good listener, although good doesn’t really capture the full reach of it. You see, listening is what I do best. In fact, I’m well known in parts of the West as one regular Jim Dandy listener. A full-time professional if you will. Some say it’s a special gift, and they could be right, but I wasn’t always a listener, good or otherwise, nor did I especially want to be one before a busted-up throat left me no choice, as well as no words you could actually hear.

First off it hit me awful hard when I had to concede to that silence, but after some tough times it ripened up in me what was needed to get by in my new life. Of course, there is a big jump between the needing and the being able, especially as anything out of the ordinary can put a scare into people. A hump, a limp, being short an arm or leg, spluttering through a harelip or being dumb, and some folks will cross over the road. If you can’t talk they reckon you can’t hear, so they shout at you. Some figure you for just plain stupid, so they talk real slow and wave their hands. But over the years I’ve learned how to get by all that nonsense and help others—the road-crossers, the shouters, the slow talkers, and the hand wavers—get by it too.

I must have the knack to get people to trust me despite my crumpled throat and my grunts. I can’t say exactly what that knack is and why it draws stories and their tellers to me. Maybe it’s because I don’t give them any competition. Maybe there are just lots of people who need to be listened to and not enough folks around to oblige. Maybe they see me as nothing but a small, big-eyed kid passing through, someone who couldn’t possibly do them any harm even if he wanted to. No matter. Some of that, could be all of it, has helped me make a passable living one way or the other.

Sometimes I think I’m kind of a mirror in which people can see themselves as they want to be seen. OK, I gotta admit right off it wasn’t me who came up with such a fancy notion, it was George Kyner, who ran a newspaper back in Victor. He reckoned he was a poet, the way a lot of people do. Anyway, he said I was a mirror for people’s stories and I kinda liked the idea. What it’s meant is that I’ve heard a lot of stories—sometimes I think too many. Hard luck stories—betrayals, disappointments, false hopes, and broken hearts. Heroic stories, amusing stories, and downright ribald ones, stories about undying love and stories which staggered under the weight of moral instruction. Stories about gunfighters, Indian wars, cattle stampedes, mine disasters, train wrecks, cold-blooded murder, and unexpected fortune. Stories about strikes, riots, and never-ending injustice. True stories, half-true stories, stretchers, and real outsized whoppers. In my short life I’ve listened to all kinds of stories, but now I’m being asked to tell an extra special one, personally tailored, not store-bought. It just goes to show that as far as stories are concerned, no matter how many you’ve listened to, how many you remember, you will never hear them all. But then this is America, and isn’t America the land of endlessly new stories? How could there ever be a limit to them here in God’s Own Country?

It’s not that I haven’t been trying to get it right for the old bastard, but I’m not having much luck and unless I do, I might never get out of this cold pile of stones they call the Idaho State Penitentiary.

Now, we don’t have to be hard on you, boy. We don’t want to be hard on you. What we need to know is who put you up to it. We know it wasn’t you did it on your own or even with that Orchard fella, who wants to call himself Hogan. We know that for sure. It’s just the names we need. Those that wanted it done. Those that planned it. Those that paid for it. So, let’s us start from the beginning. Wadda you say, son? You just take up your pencil there and get on with the telling.

He’s a gray-haired, stout fellow, well dressed, with a heavy gold watch chain across his belly. Gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose, and on his lapel a white stickpin with a picture of a deer’s head. Irish by the sound of him. Hasn’t told me his name. Must be about seventy. Walks with a slight limp. He runs a finger under his big walrus mustache, lifting first one side then the other like he’s giving his lips some air. He leans forward across the table and offers me a concerned, fatherly stare. His eyes are milky and ice-cold and I can smell the whisky on him.

Only a boy really, he says after a moment and then shakes his head. Infernal schemes hatched by the Devil and put in the hands of innocent children.

A child? Gee fizz! I know I’m kinda small and scrawny and my face has yet to feel a razor, but I’m nearly eighteen and been paying my own way for years.

The old man smiles, reaches across and pats my hand. Brown blotches on the back of his, the palm damp and slippery as stones in a winter pond.

Come on now, son, he croons softly. We can talk, you can talk to me.

He looks over at the pencil and the wad of writing paper I have threaded on a string tied to my belt. He coughs.

You know what I mean, son? It’ll do you good to tell me all about it. Write it all down. Confession is what I’m talking about. Cleanses the soul, it does. Confession will make you rest easy. You see, son, sins are nothing but baggage you’ll be holding for the Devil; they only serve to weigh you down. You know that, don’tcha?

I do and more. I know that his low soft voice full of Jesus and his singing at me offers nothing but bad cards and worse pain.

All my listener’s life people have tried to hijack my cache of stories. Most times I’ve surrendered them, apparently without a struggle, preferring to tell the hijackers what they think I might have heard. Because, trusted as I might be, silent as I might be, a listener is always a secret agent in the unnoticed corner of somebody’s room. It’s the likes of this old man who know that and also think they know how to extract the secrets they’re after. But young as I am, I’m no greener at this particular game.

There’s no sin too big to be forgiven, son. Not a sin too terrible in the eyes of the Lord. That is, if you confess them. You know the story of David and Bathsheba?

Everyone knows that story. But he’s more likely than not to have his own angle on it. I’ve learned that even the good old stories can be told differently and it’s only in the telling that you find out what the teller wants you to know, whether he knows that or not. The old man doesn’t need it, but I give him an encouraging look all the same. He settles right in.

Well, son, Bathsheba was just about the most beautiful woman there had ever been. Skin like ivory, hair like the night, eyes, well, eyes to light up fires with, fires of sin. Wife of Uriah the Hittite she was, but David, well David you see he coveted her, lusted after her, and he was the king. He ordered that she be brought to him and then he forced her to lay with him, to commit fornication, to commit Adultery!

He paused, staring hard at me and at all that old-time sinning he was seeing so clear.

Well, soon enough David found out that she was with his child. So, he had Joab, his number-one general, put Uriah right out there in the front of the battle so he might be killed, which, of course, he was. Then David he ups and marries Bathsheba. All those commandments broken, son, one right after the other, Covetousness, Adultery, Murder! Well, the Lord, He was mighty angry, powerful angry He was, and He told David that was no way to be carrying on, especially after all He’d done for him. You know, making him king of Israel and giving him the strength to kill Goliath and such like. David prayed and fasted and after a time God forgave him his sins, terrible as they were, and He will forgive you yours, that is if you come to Him and ask for His Divine forgiveness. Come to him in Christ’s name, son. That’s where you’ve got to look for salvation. Look to Christ our Redeemer to wash away all your sins in His holy tears! He doesn’t turn away from anyone, even a murderer.

I might have guessed, a flint-nosed Bible banger. Boy oh boy, is he talking to the wrong person. But he can’t know that. After all, he thinks my name is Herbert Brown, which it isn’t, although it is as much my name as any I’ve had.

Even if I tell him what he wants, what then? I spill it out and there won’t be a shining light from on high or a big heavenly chorus droning on about the Lord and Salvation. No tears of sweet Jesus. No sir, none of that stuff. I’ll be out of this warm office and back to the ice-cold six-by-eight cell, three tiers up on Death Row, the shit-bucket smell rising in the damp air and the too-close attentions of Montana Jim Naylor, the baddest bad man there is, or ever was, or is ever likely to be. At least according to Montana Jim.

He’s big and carelessly put together, shoulders sagging at different angles away from his thick neck. When they put me in with him, his pockmarked face lit up. Montana Jim sure thought it was Christmas come around again only a week or so after it had been.

What has ol’ Jim done to deserve this here? he asked in reverential awe, looking me up and down.

Now don’t go eatin it up all at once, Jim! shouted someone from another cell.

Leave some of that young sweetness for the rest of us! called another.

There was a lot of yelling and tin cups banging on the bars.

It didn’t worry me though. I got my way out of worse corners before. Six years of surviving in the West has taught me that if I didn’t want someone’s unnatural attentions I had to move fast and keep my back to the wall. Buffalo Bill said that if you’re not mean enough or tough enough, then when it comes down to it you got to be quick with your mouth or quick on your feet. In a cell, quite naturally, running was impossible. Quick with my mouth was out as well. So, I grabbed my pencil and started to write with a fury.

Unfortunately, the increasingly blank look on his face told me Montana Jim was not what you would call a literary gent. I smiled, pointed to my dented throat and my mouth and shook my head.

His heavy brows scrunched up.

So? he grunted impatiently. Don’t make me no nevermind if ya’s dumb. Don’t wanna be talkin at ya anyways.

He barked a laugh and made a grab for me. I slipped sideways and began to draw as I moved. I drew the figure of a woman—giving her big breasts and big thighs and, of course, no clothes. I shoved the picture at the amorously advancing Montana Jim. He growled, shook his head like a mad old grizzly, but he stopped. I had his attention. Then I drew a house with a lantern by the front door and a boy, pointing between it and me. He looked at me, then stabbed a thick finger at the woman. I added a coin and arrows to show the transaction. He nodded. Then I grabbed my crotch and moaned as best I could, screwing up my face real good just so he would know for sure what I was trying to tell him.

Montana Jim gathered in the news real slow and then grunted a little less impatiently. He had a long stare at the drawing of the woman. I held it out to him. Without looking at me he snatched it with a swipe of his heavy paw, put it on his bunk, and climbed up to keep his new friend company. After that he sort of lost interest in me.

The man on the other side of the table is a different sack of beans entirely. No Montana Jim, but a clever black-coated gambler. He’s trying to bluff me into folding my cards. I’ve seen his kind before. Weaving spells, making promises, saying anything to make you jump, to get you just where he wants you. But if you could really see, well then, there’d be nothing there, not a damn thing except the empty words pushing at you.

You know we got you and Orchard, don’t you, boy? Got you sure as there’s a tomorrow. Folks here in Idaho don’t take kindly to having their ex-governor blown up in his own front yard in what should be the safe bosom of his family. Most likely if the sheriff hadn’t got you away from Caldwell in a hurry you’d have been swinging from a cottonwood right now. As it is, the judge and jury here in Boise’s probably going to hang you anyway. But just maybe you and me, we can do something about that.

I don’t move. I already told him, like I told the sheriff, that I haven’t killed anybody. It didn’t make any difference though. They arrested me all the same. Handcuffs and leg irons, like I was one of the Youngers or Jesse James. A night in the Caldwell jail, then a closed carriage with armed guards all the way to Boise and the State Penitentiary. By rights I should stay in jail until my trial, but because this case was special they said I’d have to be put somewhere more secure. For my own safety they said. More like to scare hell out of me. Why else did they deck me out in rough prison stripes and stick me on Death Row? All part of the Irishman’s plan. I see that, but seeing it is not doing me any good. Like a cat on a greased board, I’m sliding and sliding.

It’s that damn Harry Orchard! That miserable pig-eyed bastard! I should have known when I went looking for him I was only looking for trouble. When I saw him that day, standing in the street near the Saratoga Hotel, I should have known I had found that trouble, but by then it was already too late. Since I first ran into him up in Wallace in ‘98, Harry Orchard has been my Jonah, my own personal demon, my spirit nightmare made flesh. I’ll be going along just fine and dandy and then he appears out of nowhere, grinning, back-slapping, and smelling of disaster. He’s tied me into a good one this time and no mistake.

Listen, son, the old man says. Let me tell you another story, a story closer to you and closer to right now. It’s about a fella went by the name of Daniel Kelly, called him Kelly the Bum, we did. You ever hear tell of this particular Kelly?

I shake my head. Is there ever an Irishman without a story? An Irish story without a Kelly?

He gets up and walks over to the fireplace. He stares a long time into the flames and then bends over carefully, picks up a small log, and puts it on top of the fire. The wood pops and sparks. Outside it’s snowing. Big flakes floating down, filling up the narrow yard and covering the stone walls. It looks soft and peaceful.

Like the everlasting fires of Perdition, he intones, the flames reflecting off his eyeglasses.

Kelly the Bum, he says, turning from the fire to look out the window. "Back in Pennsylvania it was, about twenty-five years ago now. There was this gang of murderous cutthroats terrorizing the coal fields, called themselves the Ancient Order of Hibernians. You heard tell of them?

Some called them the Molly Maguires. That sound more familiar, son?

I look up at the old man, give him a bewildered smile and shake my head.

Who hasn’t heard the story of the Mollies, especially if they lived for any time in a mining camp? It seemed everybody knew one of those who had escaped from the gallows and run out West—Mike Doyle, Bill Gavin, or Friday O’Donnell—had met them in some camp or other and heard the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. How good union men were sold out by a dirty Pinkerton spy. How nineteen of them were hanged, each going up the gallows’ steps with a red rose stuck proud in his lapel. How the last one, Jack Kehoe, had swung for five minutes before he choked to death with his tongue bit half off. Sure, I’d heard about the Molly Maguires but, like with old King David, I figure it’s better to admit nothing, let the old man play out his hand and take me for a baby-faced greenhorn.

Kelly was one of the worst. But bad as he was, guilty as he was, because he saw the Light, decided to follow our Lord Jesus Christ, went with the State and named the others, he got off. Even got himself a reward.

He gives me a meaningful stare. I’m studying the snow flakes.

The Inner Circle, boy. The Inner Circle. That’s what we want. Haywood and Moyer and those others in the Federation central office over in Denver. Pettibone, he’s another. You give them to me, tell me how they put you and Orchard up to the murdering and maybe we can do something for you. You don’t want to swing for them, do you? Harry Orchard sure doesn’t. No sir. Already told us enough to convict you, he has. How you helped him put the bomb near to the gate. How you . . .

I grab my pencil and begin to write how I never did anything wrong, that Harry Orchard’s probably the biggest damn liar this side of the Rockies and the other side if the truth were known, that I’m only a poor dumb . . . The old man lays his moist hand on mine and shakes his head.

You see those buildings out there, son? he says, pointing to the two high sandstone-faced cellblocks outside. They’re full of men who ‘never.’ Never did this and never did that. Never did anything wrong. None of them. It’s always the same story, son, always the same. The cells are full to the brim with innocent men, just like you.

Who is this damned old Irishman anyway? Some kind of detective for sure. A Pinkerton? A Baldwin-Felts? At least now I know the precise story he wants to hear. Do I tell it for him? Tell it the way he wants it told? Cheap as dirt stories are, I know that, but if I tell this one it’s going to come hurtfully expensive. Expensive for me, expensive for Big Bill and expensive for the others as well.

2

The Irishman told me to think about King David and Kelly the Bum and Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer and about my everlasting soul. I was to contemplate my fate and pray to my Saviour for redemption. Think of Jesus, he said. He would visit with me tomorrow, he said. After that a guard came and led me down the outside stairs and back across the yard to the cellblock. It was muffled quiet outside and our footprints were the first ones to be cut into the new snow.

Now I wait outside the tall iron-bar gate into the cellblock while my guard talks to the turnkey. It’s freezing and the prison clothes are stiff, rough against my skin. I suppose I should be thankful they didn’t shave my head like they do to real convicts. I rub my hands together and stomp my feet. The handcuffs are pinching at my wrists. The guards look over at me then turn away and talk some more. That’s fine. I can wait to see Montana Jim.

Coming into the cellblock out of the clean snow is a shock. So much iron and everything painted copper green. Gates, the cell doors, stairs, handrails, even the high wall facing the three tiers of cells—all copper green. Why should I care about the color when I’ve just been told I might be hanged? Necktied, topped, stretched. I saw it once, in Leadville. They said this Swedish boy had attacked a little girl and almost killed her. He never made it to the jail. Bouncing at the end of the rope, feet twitching, smelling of shit, piss running out the legs of his pants, head all collapsed to one side. Is that me? And for what? Knowing Harry Orchard? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

The gallery echoes with loud voices, coughing, boots banging on the iron stairs and catwalks. More than a hundred men stacked up on top of each other, two to a cell. But it’s not the noise that rushes at me so much as the heavy stench of all those shit buckets. Even after we take them down in the morning and empty the contents into the sluice, the stink doesn’t go away. It’s seeped into the walls, our clothes and, along with hundreds of bedbugs, into the bedding. I thought I’d got myself used to every kind of bad smell there was. Just goes to show how easy it is to be wrong about the true fullness of your own experience.

The guards have finished talking. One of them motions me to follow him though the gate. It clangs closed behind us.

Hands, he says harshly.

It’s the first thing he’s said to me since we left the warden’s office. My open-faced listener’s charm doesn’t beguile everyone.

I hold out my hands and he unlocks the handcuffs. They’ve left red welts around my wrists. He pushes me up the stairs ahead of him.

The fronts of the cells are made of flat pieces of iron woven into a tight lattice of four-inch squares all but shutting out the light. You can’t see the faces from the catwalk, only fingers pushed through bars and the occasional eye pressed up close for a better look. There are no prisoners here. Just iron cages stuffed to busting with eyeballs and fingers.

We arrive at cell number Thirty-seven. The guard unlocks the door and slides it open. I hesitate.

In, he barks.

I go in and the door is closed behind me. The cell feels smaller, but it smells about the same. Montana Jim is lying on the top bunk staring at the ceiling and popping bedbugs between his fingers.

Ugh is all I get as a welcome.

He doesn’t have a lot of small talk to be working on. I can live with that. Anyway he has already told me his story. A predictably disjointed tale of an unfair partner and an unfaithful woman, predictably resolved with an axe. The one thing I do remember clearly is his insistence that, contrary to what they said at his trial, the axe was sharp. Razor sharp, he kept saying. Montana Jim obviously feels that being accused of keeping a blunt axe is an affront to him as a real man.

Suddenly I have to pee something fierce. I turn sideways and shuffle past the bunk to get at the bucket in the far corner. I lift off the tin lid, unbutton and don’t look too close at what’s in there as I start to relieve myself. I’m in midstream when Montana Jim bellows from above me.

I’ll be tied! A damned Christ killer!

Sweet Mother! I grab myself, choke off the flow and try to get everything back into my pants, but it’s too late. The curse of Abraham descending on me again. Oh God! I’m in for it now. Montana Jim’s probably never seen a Jew this close before and I reckon he’s about to get himself that one true religion.

Ever since I discovered to my disgust that all men are not circumcised, I’ve done my best to shield myself from unfriendly Gentile eyes. I mean, that’s about the only thing about me that is too obviously Jewish. Otherwise I look kind of ordinary—a tad dark-skinned and my nose is more impressive than the rest of my face, but my hair is brown and straight and I’ve got muddy-green eyes—like the bottom of a pond, my mother used to say. A Jew, sure, but not so as you’d notice with my pants on and my name changed. Anyway, it didn’t take me long to figure out that in the West Jews are not real popular, at least with the farmers, the ranchers, the miners, or the storekeepers. That doesn’t leave a lot of other folks to be popular with. You see, some say Jews are big Eastern bankers sucking the lifeblood of the working man, like they took the blood of Christ. If you’re like me, clearly not rich or a banker, well then, you’re probably a foreign Socialist agitator or just a simple Christ killer, a murderer of children who uses their virgin blood to make the Passover matzos. That’s good enough for most people to be getting on with. Like the song I heard once about the Jew’s daughter.

She pinned a napkin round his neck

She pinned it with a pin

And then she called for a tin basin

To catch his life blood in

I wonder if Montana Jim has heard that song. Maybe so. He is off his bunk now, towering over me, his big hands opening and closing on the axe he’d love to have in his hand.

I back away from him, but one step and I’m up against the hard bricks. I reach for my pencil. His big paw slams it away. No more pictures for Montana Jim.

Christ killer, he says again, savoring the words. In here with ol’ Jim. A pox-ridden Christ killer at that. Might as well have put in a Chink or even a Nigger. Know what we do to Christ killers? Huh? Do ya?

Whatever the details, he looks as if he’s about to save me the trouble of telling the Irishman his story and the state of Idaho the expense of a hanging. He lunges and I duck, throwing myself forward through his legs. I grab hold of the cell door and start moaning and squeaking for all I’m worth. All the time Jim is yelling and shouting about how he’s going to kill him a Christ killer.

Just smile and enjoy it! a sympathetic soul yells from a nearby cell.

Give him one for me, Jim, another prisoner shouts.

They think he’s giving me a prairie wedding!

I feel his hand on my ankle, pulling at me. I hang on to the bars. The tin cups start their clattering roar once again. A hand on the other ankle. He’s tugging and I’m holding. My arms are going to pop out of their sockets.

Jew bastard! he screams. Teach you . . .

Shit! Something smashes hard against my fingers and I let go. Montana Jim shoots backwards and I land on top of him. I hear the bucket go over, clanking on the floor and then warm liquid is soaking into my pants legs. The cell door slides open with a crash.

What have we got us here?

I look up. It’s one of the guards holding a long wooden club.

Ya boys sure are makin a heck of a lot of noise, ain’t ya? Can’t have that in a respectable place like this, can we now? Ya’ll be disturbin the other guests. I’m surprised at ya, Jim, nice, well-mannered gent how ya are.

Two more guards arrive. They’ve also got clubs.

I think one of my fingers is broken. At least it’s on my left hand.

I manage to find my pencil under Jim’s bunk. Irishman, I write on a piece of my paper and push it to one of the guards.

The old man can have the story he wants, any way he wants it.

3

It’s like when you’re working down a mine. If there’s a fistfight no one asks who started it. Both men get their walking tickets and that’s that. Here, unfortunately, it’s not walking tickets. Here solitary is what you get.

Montana Jim spat and cursed when the guards clubbed him and dragged him down the metal stairs. Called me a damned Christ killer again and again. Leading such a sheltered life, he probably hasn’t heard of a Sheeny or a Hebe or even a Yid. Said he’d tear me into little pieces. By then he was at the bottom of the stairs and I couldn’t hear the rest, especially as the other prisoners were banging their cups and shouting to beat the band.

I’m delighted to be where I am. So it’s a little dark. Well, to be honest it’s pitch black and also more than cold and I’ve got to lie on the cement floor with only a thin blanket. But at least here I’ll be safe from Montana Jim’s unnatural lusts and his Jew hate.

All the way over here I kept pointing at the paper with Irishman written on it. I moaned and showed the guard my finger. He didn’t seem impressed. He told me I wasn’t in no position to tell him what he had or hadn’t to do. Then just to make it nailed-down clear he told me to shut my whining Jew mouth or I’d have more than a busted finger to worry about. I guess being a prison guard is not a particularly uplifting job, in the spiritual sense that is. He shoved me hard in the back and told me to keep moving.

We walked out of the cellblock. It was dark and windy and the snow had frosted hard and crunched under foot. The sound of voices from the cellblock drifted off in the gusts of cold air. I was taken over to an old one-story building close to the prison wall. The wall is made out of the same light-colored stone as the cellblock and is about twenty feet high. On each corner there is a fancy round turret like you’d find on one of those old-time castles in Europe. Iron walkways run along the top of the wall. There weren’t any guards walking there. Probably inside the turrets out of the wind, figuring it was too damn cold for anyone to want to escape.

The solitary block has a riveted iron door and no windows. Inside we passed through a barred cage entry and then into a narrow corridor with heavy wooden doors along each side. The guard unlocked one and pushed me inside.

No talkin now, boy, he laughed, ’lessen you want a bucket of water tipped up over ya.

The door closed, a key turned and I was left in the dark.

I felt around the cell until my foot hit a bucket. It was empty. A small blessing. The cell is about five by six and I can’t reach the ceiling. It smells like piss, it’s damp and ass-biting cold. The blanket is no help at all.

Should I bang on the door and demand the guard get the Irishman? My middle finger is throbbing and hurts like sin, but if I make a fuss I reckon I’ll just get myself wet. I’ll have to wait until morning, that’s all there is to it. I can last out one night. The Irishman said he’d be back for my story. What’s he going to do when he finds out I’m not only a killer, but a Christ killer?

I pull the blanket up under my chin and try to find a comfortable spot against the hard wall.

So I tell the Irishman what he wants to hear, and then if they don’t hang me, which they might do no matter what the Irishman says, I’ve got the rest of my life in here with the likes of Montana Jim kicking the tar out of my hide for nailing up the gentle Jesus. It would be better to let them hang me and get it over with, because there’s no way I’m going to last out in this prison.

It’s all down to a story, one I’ve got to tell but can’t afford to.

I’ve learned that if you keep at it high and hard you can generally story yourself into the clear with most people after a time. Not with this Irishman though. There are other stories I could tell him, but even if I did manage to find a whole wagonload more out there, ones that might even string him along and keep me warm, after a while I’d simply run out of them. Stands to reason, that does. Even for me. Even in America.

4

It’s unnaturally quiet in the solitary block, like someone was holding their breath waiting to scream. Every half hour or so there are footsteps in the corridor, the spy hole is flipped back and I see a small circle of light.

I can’t remember ever being this shivering cold. My feet and hands, my broken finger, my ears and nose, all numb as the stone. Heard this tale once about a mountain man who was stuck somewheres up in the Rockies in the dead of winter. Well, it got so damn cold and his teeth got to chattering so hard that he bit the end of his tongue clean off. Half-Tongue McWaters they called him. That’s a true story, at least that’s what I’ve been told. So, I’m biting down on the edge of the blanket to stop my teeth chattering. Even if my tongue doesn’t do a lot for me but wet my lips and taste my food, I don’t want be known as Half-Tongue Something-or-Other.

Damn stories are the story of my life. How I got myself locked up in a cell in the Idaho State Penitentiary charged with murdering an ex-governor, someone I never even laid eyes on, is one damn story I would dearly like to understand. I mean, how do you get close to the end of your own story from where you started out? For me this is a specially difficult question because I started out a long way from Idaho and even farther from a life in which I could ever imagine being on such intimate terms with Montana Jim Naylor.

Like I said, I came into this world at Castle Garden, an enormous circular building put up many years before my arrival to protect New York Harbor from the British. Then it was called the Southwest Battery, later on it became Fort Clinton and later still, when they turned it into a concert hall, it finally became Castle Garden. It’s had its name changed almost as many times as I have. Some years on, the concert hall was transformed into the Office of the Commissioner of Immigration. Then it could protect the entire country from something far worse than the British—immigrants. It’s still there, at the edge of Battery Park. Now it’s the Aquarium, a home for yet other strange fish.

I was born at Castle Garden in 1887, a few months after President Cleveland unveiled the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island and a few months before they hanged the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago. Of course, I didn’t know about that particular unveiling or that particular hanging at the time. In fact, I didn’t know about the circumstances of my birth until eleven years later. It was at that time, in 1898, when all the assumptions, expectations, and the careful plans for my young life got pushed aside. It’s also when I found out about the Haymarket Martyrs.

Until then I was Meyer Liebermann, a gifted child with a wonderful future—If only he would apply himself with more diligence. If only Meyer would be more careful with his work. If only he would pay more attention in class. That’s what my teachers said about me at the Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys. Fifty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue is where it was and, for all I know, where it still is. A school full of gifted children with well-paid-for futures.

So what about the assumptions, the expectations, the plans? There was an endless succession of them. The most fundamental was that since I was a Liebermann, I would succeed. How could it be otherwise? My father decreed it. My mother announced it. My relatives applauded it. I would graduate from Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys and then attend Sachs Collegiate Institute. There, with more rigorous tutoring in Greek and Latin, in Mathematics and Science, I would be made ready for Harvard or some other appropriate university. After that I would have a profession. My father had decided it would be the law. Lawyers, he said, always made a good living no matter what the state of trade. Could an American life be mapped out more clearly?

I lived with my mother, father, and grandfather, Isadore Liebermann, in a big house on Eighth Avenue on the west side of Central Park. Uncles, aunts, and cousins lived next door or around the corner. On Saturdays we went to the Temple Emanu-El. In the summers we migrated to Deal Beach in New Jersey, where we had a rambling gingerbread house with curly spires and a wide wooden porch overlooking the ocean. Uncles, aunts, and cousins continued to live next door or around the corner. It was a settled, comfortable life and I knew exactly what to expect.

That’s not to say there weren’t edges that chaffed against the comfort. School was a rough edge. The lessons were endless and incomprehensible. I did try, but declensions, Latin and Greek words, and mathematical equations seemed to slip away from me like sand through a net. With great effort I managed to survive, but survival wasn’t enough. Didn’t my cousins excel at schoolwork? What was wrong with me? I was a disappointment to my teachers and to my parents, especially to my father. He was another rough edge in my life.

You want to be a Liebermann? Do you? Then you must learn to act like a Liebermann!

I rarely saw my father for talks except when I was going to be punished. The disciplinary meetings took place in his study, a room darkened by thick curtains and lined from floor to ceiling with books. There must have been a thousand or more—brown ones, red ones, yellow ones, black ones. I had never seen my father read a book. My grandfather, on the other hand, was always reading, and at this particular meeting he sat in the far corner, muttering to himself, his thick index finger patiently tracking the words across the page.

What do you expect, Meyer, if you don’t work hard in this life? How do you think we got where we are today? My father swept his arm in an expansive arc describing the room, the books, and the whole of our tidy, ordered world. Hard work is the only answer. No one gave our life to us on a silver plate the way it is being given to you.

At the mention of silver plates my grandfather looked up over the top of his book, his finger pressed down stiff and firm, marking the extent of his progress.

Ha! That boy, what does he think, you just put your bowl on the table and all by itself it fills up with the chicken soup? Is that what he thinks? Ha!

At least two or three times a week my grandfather speared me with that question. The answer was always the same.

No, sir.

Father, please, my father said. I wish you wouldn’t . . .

Ha! snorted the old man and went back to his reading.

Father was always respectful to him, but grandfather’s old-world manners and old-world dictums embarrassed and annoyed him. After all, Nathan Liebermann was a modern man and a hundred percenter; one hundred percent American that is.

So, what is it? Just look at this report. This isn’t a report, it’s a, it’s a . . . an embarrassment for me and for you too, Meyer.

Exasperated, he threw the piece of paper on the desk. I looked down at the floor.

It’s just that I don’t like the Greek and Latin, Father. I don’t see . . .

He doesn’t like the Greek and the Latin! my grandfather cried as if in severe pain. He doesn’t like the Greek and the Latin? Am I hearing this? All that money, Nathan, for what? So, he can decide not to like?

It’s all right, Father, it’s all right. Just let me talk to the boy.

So, talk, go ahead talk. I’ve got better things to do anyway. The Greek and the Latin! Ha!

Meyer, don’t you think getting a good education is important? Is that it? Don’t you think a lawyer has to know his Greek and Latin?

My father always spoke to me in questions for which there were never any satisfactory answers. I was just ten years old, what did I know about being a lawyer?

No, but . . .

What will you be in this world without an education?

But you didn’t have to study Greek and Latin! I cried in despair.

So spoiled! crowed Grandfather with delight. So spoiled! I tell you, Nathan, the razor strop is what Mr. No-Greek and No-Latin there wants, the strop across his backside.

My grandfather never really liked me very much. Most boys I knew had grandfathers who pampered them, told them stories, bragged about them, protected them. All I ever got from Isadore Liebermann was fault-finding and sour remarks.

My father stood up and began to pace. He was a barrel-chested man with stubby legs and when not shielded behind his desk he looked much less imposing. As he paced, his large head wobbled back and forth with agitation.

Of course I didn’t study Greek and Latin, he said.