Henry, his eyes sparkling, danced his son around the room, singing, “Shteht oif shteht oif, l’avoidas haBoiray.” Wakeup, wake up, to do the work of the Creator.
Nialie watched without expression, frightened for both of them.
Three
September 1916. Solomon, seventeen years old now, short for his age, wiry, his skin burnt nut-brown by the prairie sun, was perched on the corral fence behind the Queen Victoria Hotel with Bernard and Morrie. Plump Bernard, who parted his hair in the middle and already owned a three-piece grey serge suit and a homburg and spats, sucked on a caramel. Morrie, whittling away on a chunk of wood as usual, was apprehensive as Solomon had joined them on the fence for once, familiar as he was with Solomon’s need to bring Bernard to the boil. Slapping at flies, squinting against the sun, the Gursky brothers were waiting for the sale to start. Aaron had bought a snorting, restive herd of wild mustangs from Hardy, overpaying again, and now hoped to sell to the farmers, most of whom were already in debt to him at the store. By this juncture the Gurskys had moved into town, living above
A. GURSKY & SONS
GENERAL MERCHANTS
Importers of Stable and Fancy
DRY GOODS
Sole Distributors of
DR. COLBY’S celebrated ANTI-COSTIVE
and TONIC PILLS, unequalled in the
Promotion of Regular Evacuation.
Cajoling, sweaty, Aaron bantered with the farmers at the corral, laughing too hard at their inane jokes. The farmers feigning indifference, most of them waiting for sundown when the jumpy Jew’s prices would drop.
No sooner did Aaron cut a deal on a horse, realizing a small profit, than he would invite the buyer into the hotel bar for a ceremonial drink. The farmer would not order a beer like Aaron, but would spit on the sawdust-covered floor, wink at the bartender, and demand a double shot of the hard stuff, saying, “Both of my boys have already enlisted, but I suppose yours will be staying put.”
Then a breathless Aaron would zip out to the corral again, counting the shiny rumps of the remaining horses, calculating likely losses in his head, mingling with the other farmers, thrusting gifts of coloured hair ribbons at their wives and children. Panicky at sundown, he would drop prices drastically.
Solomon prodded Bernard with his elbow. “Now that you’re such a man of affairs, a student of correspondence courses, what do you make of all this?”
“Whatever I make of it is strictly my own business.”
“Why can’t we be like the three musketeers,” Morrie asked, “all for one and one for all? The Gursky brothers.”
“Well,” Solomon said, “I’ll tell you what I think. The bar’s turning over a bigger profit than Paw is sucking up to that bunch of farmers. What Paw ought to do is buy the hotel and sell drinks and let somebody else worry about the horses.”
And then Solomon, terrifying Morrie, jumped down from the fence right into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one.
Bernard didn’t credit most of his brother’s tales about his trek to the Polar Sea with their grandfather. But whatever had really happened out there, Solomon had returned blessed with a certain grace, an inner stillness. And watching him now, at ease with the wild mustangs, Bernard grasped that had he been the one to jump into the corral, probably stumbling in the dust, they would have smelled his fear and reared up on their hind legs, snorting, looking to take a chomp out of him. Bernard understood for the first time that he was a coarse, tubby little man with wet fishy eyes, and that he would have to scratch and bite and cheat to get what he wanted out of life, which was plenty, but that Solomon would sit, expecting the world to come to him, and he would be served. He watched Solomon crossing that corral, he watched choking on envy and hatred, and yet, for all that, he yearned for Solomon’s approval. Then Solomon spoiled it by pausing to taunt him, calling back, “Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Go straight to hell.”
“Aw, you two,” Morrie groaned. “Hey, you’re crying.”
“I am not. He’s going to shtupp Minnie Pryzack now.”
Minnie, comfortably ensconced in the Queen Victoria Hotel for years, was only seventeen when she first went west, working the first-class carriages on the train from Winnipeg to the coast and back again.
“He’s going to shtupp Minnie and then he’s going to join the poker game.”
“They’d never let him play in the big autumn game. Besides, he’s busted.”
“I wasn’t afraid of jumping into the corral, but then you would have had to come after and you could have been hurt. Is he really broke?”
“They cleaned him out last Thursday.”
Aaron, sprawled at the kitchen table, smelling of manure, his ears and nose clogged with dust, his back aching, counted out his money twice, calculating that he had turned a profit of fifty-five dollars, provided two of the farmers honoured their notes.
Morrie stooped to remove his father’s boots and then brought him a glass of lemon tea and a bowl of stewed prunes.
“Paw,” Bernard said, “if you ask me, you work too hard for too little.”
“You’re a good boy,” Aaron said. “Morrie too.”
RATHER THAN RISK throwing everything into the pot in the heat of the game, Solomon gave Minnie his valise, as well as his railroad ticket out and five ten-dollar bills, which would see him through, if things turned out badly. Then he drifted through the kitchen of the Queen Victoria Hotel, climbed the back stairs to the third floor, and rapped three long, two short, and one long on the attic door.
McGraw shot the bolts. “You can’t play. Not tonight.”
Solomon didn’t budge.
“It’s different rules tonight, kid. You know that.”
Not including Solomon, there were five of them gathered together for the big autumn game, the betting soaring so high it could only be risked once a year. McGraw, the owner of the hotel and the blacksmith’s shop, a recent acquisition; George Kouri, the Lebanese, who had owned the five-and-ten-cent store and a shop that sold buggies and wagons; Ingram, Sifton’s man, who dealt railroad land to the Slavs in their sheepskin coats; Charley Lin, who had owned the laundry and the butchershop, but since last autumn’s big game only a couple of bedbug-ridden rooming houses; and Kozochar, the barber and fire chief. A side table was stacked with cold cuts, potato salad, and bottles of whisky and vodka. There were two cots in an adjoining room, in case anybody needed to take a nap or wanted to send down for one of the girls, maybe changing his luck.
Last year’s big game had ended acrimoniously after forty-eight hours, one of Charley Lin’s rooming houses, the blacksmith’s shop, two cow pastures, six heifers, three Polish whores and one Indian one and $4,500 changing hands. The men involved in the big game enjoyed the status it conferred on them by dint of the enormity of their winnings or losses. The game, a curse on the wives, had once been broken up by three of them marching on the tables. Since then it convened at a different place every year. The basement of Kouri’s five-and-ten. The back room in the fire station. And this year the attic of the Queen Victoria Hotel. Weeks before the men sat down to the table, the game was the subject of speculation in town, and was denounced from the pulpit by the Reverend Ezekiel Shipley, who blamed it all on the harlots of the town.
McGraw was adamant. “It just wouldn’t be right to deal you in,” he said.
McGraw had been against allowing Solomon into the weekly game in the first place. He was hardly a man of substance, like the rest of them, but merely a snooty kid. Besides McGraw liked Aaron, a dummy maybe, but an honest and hardworking Jew. Kouri had been indifferent, but Ingram was also opposed and Kozochar dead against it. “It would be like taking candy from a baby.”