Rather than the simple, somber rendition that Frederick had so admired, this time William Henry Harris let loose a swaggering, finger-snappin’ stomp. His hands were a blur as the melody raced ahead, skipping and weaving through jazzy bass lines and strange harmonies. Notes flew from the piano at a ferocious clip, scattering in all directions. It was “The Star-Spangled Banner,” all right—red, white, and drenched in the blues. When he finished, William Henry Harris stood up and quickly left the stage.
In the surprised silence that followed, Jette saw her chance. She climbed onto the stage and faced the crowded room.
“My husband came to this country and fell in love,” she began. “He adored this place. He loved the ideas that this nation was built upon. Tolerance. Opportunity. And, more than anything, freedom. He loved them so much that he was prepared to sacrifice his life for them.” Jette looked around the room. “We made this place our home. Our children were born on this soil. This is my country,” she declared. “And I am a good American.”
A low murmur spread around the room.
“I am as thankful as anyone for this victory,” Jette continued. “I am grateful that the war is won. But my children’s hearts have been broken.” She paused. “When I march through the town I mean no disrespect, to my dead husband or to anyone else. I am frightened, that is all. I am frightened that there will be more wars. More good men will die. And if that happens, then Frederick’s death will have been for nothing. That is why I march.” She looked at the faces in front of her. “I know many of you disagree with me. That is your right. But I beg you, in the name of the freedoms that my husband died for—let me say what I have to say.”
With that, Jette turned and left the stage.
It was a tremendous performance. And, astonishingly, it worked.
We Midwesterners are a reasonable lot. If you argue your corner, you’ll get a fair hearing. And so it was: the citizens of Beatrice listened to Jette, considered the merits of her argument, and they decided that perhaps she had a point. The following morning, when she appeared outside the courthouse dressed in black, people bowed their heads as she passed, only now they did so as a sign of respect, not disgust. Even if people weren’t exactly
happy
about her protest, they recognized her right to make her feelings known.
As she marched, my grandmother—that reluctant American—was shining a small light on our country’s freedoms.
FIFTEEN
Winter wrapped the countryside in its cold embrace. Snow came in the first week of December, but still Jette appeared each morning for her lonely vigil at the courthouse, her black uniform stark against the glistening white of the town’s deserted streets.
But something far more ominous than snow rode in on the cold fronts that swept across the country that winter. A deadly strain of influenza was spreading, hastened over continents by the troops returning home. It was the war’s final shake of its monstrous fist. Death came quickly, victims dying in agony as blood seeped darkly from their noses, ears, and mouths. Their lungs filled with treacherous liquid, drowning them from within. Men returned home from the war, pleased to have survived, and then dropped dead, felled by a more lethal foe. In the end, the pandemic killed more people than all the bullets and bombs and poison gas combined.
The first reports of the disease came from Fort Riley in Kansas, only a few hundred miles away, but in its rush to devastation, the deadly virus passed Beatrice by. The townsfolk monitored the horror in the newspaper and took no chances. Strangers were no longer welcome. Every time a child coughed, Dr. Becker was hastily summoned. Rosa no longer had to concoct fictional illnesses—now there was a genuine reason for her to worry. She became convinced that she would be the first to perish. She took to walking everywhere with a thick scarf tied over her face and obsessively monitored her own symptoms, or lack of them. Most of all, she worried about who would look after Mr. Jim when she died.
Inevitably, death finally came to our little town, and when it did, it brushed close enough to my family to make me wonder how different our own story might have been.
After the war Johann Kliever had resumed his prizefighting career, traveling across the state and beyond to clobber the life out of unsuspecting opponents for cash. A day after his return from a bout in southern Illinois, he fell ill. He writhed on his bed, blind with delirium. Anna held his hand, but she did not call the doctor. She knew that there was nothing to be done. The disease spared nobody, and inviting Becker into their home would merely hasten its spread across the town. She wiped her husband’s brow and waited sadly for the end.
Kliever was still an ox of a man, and immensely strong. He fought the virus with the same ferocity that he dispensed with those foolish enough to clamber into the prize ring with him. Astonishingly, he was still alive a week after the disease had risen up to claim him. After ten days, the fever relinquished its grip, and he slowly began to recover. As his huge body lay limp on the bed, Anna began to wonder whether she might dare to hope.
But hope is for fools. That night, as she lay next to her sleeping husband, the virus lay siege for a second time. Anna’s life slipped away as Kliever slept on, too weak to be roused by her fevered cries. By the following morning her screams had stopped.
The deaths of Frederick and Anna drew their sons closer together. Both Joseph and Stefan had discovered that the world was not the perfect place that they had once imagined it to be. It was knowledge that neither of them could ever escape. They weren’t ready or able to talk about the pain of their loss, but each knew that the other understood. Their bond of shared grief was all the stronger for never being put into words. Those deep, inarticulate ties gave the boys comfort and strength. Alone, either might have collapsed beneath the weight of his grief, but together they propped each other up and staggered on toward the future.
The old games that had so absorbed them in the past were long forgotten. Instead they discovered new distractions. Sometimes Stefan borrowed one of his father’s shotguns, and the boys would trudge up to Tillman’s Wood and shoot at animals. They never killed anything, but that didn’t matter. The heft of the gun in their arms, the sharp recoil against their shoulders, the whiff of cordite in the air—that was what was important. Their wayward bullets ripped through the undergrowth and splintered old tree trunks. Joseph and Stefan found comfort in those small trails of destruction. They were imposing a measure of control over the chaos that had overturned their lives. The deafening ring of gunshots in their ears obliterated their loss, at least for a while.
Jette was devastated by Anna’s death. First she had lost her husband, now her best friend. She felt increasingly lonely and remote. There was nobody left but the children, and without them she feared that she would float away. Each morning she looked out the window at the naked boughs of the young apple tree she had planted in Frederick’s memory. It occurred to her that it was time to put down some roots of her own.
While Frederick was alive, it had been easy for Jette to despise the Nick-Nack. But his death demanded a rewriting of what had gone before. Every note he had sung still echoed in the old bricks. The place became a memorial to him, and Jette threw all her energies into honoring his legacy. She began to book more bands, and made plans for the future. But history conspired against her: in January of 1919, Missouri was one of five states to ratify the United States Congress’s bill outlawing the sale of alcohol. Those five votes were enough to ensure that the ban on liquor would become law exactly twelve months later.
The last year of the Nick-Nack’s life was an extended good-bye party. People drank as if every evening would be their last. Business had never been better. Polk and Jette struggled to cope with the extra workload, so Joseph began to help when he could, sweeping floors, clearing tables, and washing glasses. The customers were kind to him. They slipped small coins into his pocket and pressed crumpled cigarettes on him with a benign wink. Joseph began to understand that the tavern traded in more than simply drink. Other commodities were also on offer: companionship, community, and the comfort of ritual. He became familiar with the nightly rhythms of hope and despair, as the world slowly collapsed around the men who drank there. They wept, fought, slept, and stared longingly at his mother, before stumbling out into the darkness at the end of each night.
Joseph was proud to call himself a workingman. He devised a small ritual: at the end of every week, Jette gave him a dollar bill, thanking him for his hard work. Joseph put the money in his pocket, relishing the touch of the paper beneath his fingers. Then he pulled the note out again and gravely handed it back, his contribution to household expenses. It was this transaction, the responsibility and sacrifice of it, that gave him the most pleasure of all.
Meanwhile, there was music everywhere. The Nick-Nack was reveling in a marvelous swan song. Just about anyone who walked through the door with an instrument under his arm could secure a night’s work. There were brass ensembles, string quartets, an endless procession of guitars and fiddles. William Henry Harris still played regularly, his elegant fingers weaving syncopated spells to bewitch the listening crowds.
Joseph enjoyed the bands, but it was the singers he remembered the most. A woman came from Quincy, Illinois, squeezed into a tight satin dress, a slash of scarlet across her mouth. She winked and hollered her way through a honky-tonk repertoire of old bordello songs, bursting with lewd innuendo. She had the saddest eyes Joseph had ever seen. There was a huge ogre of a man, nearly seven feet tall with a long black beard down to his chest, who carried his double bass onto the stage as if it were a child’s violin. He glared furiously at the audience, and then began to croon plaintive love songs in a screeching falsetto, accompanying himself with occasional low percussive thwacks on the bass strings. Identical twins from Moberly hunched over their banjos and sang mournful songs of longing and regret. The long necks of their instruments pointed away from each other, slender horns on a double-headed beast.
During these performances, Joseph moved among the tables, delivering fresh drinks and picking up empty glasses, but always listening to the music. One night, four men dressed in brightly colored jackets walked quietly onto the stage. There was no band to accompany them. They huddled closely together, almost turned in on themselves, paying no attention to the audience. Then, without warning, the air was filled with delicious sound. Their four voices merged to form a perfect chord, brilliant with promise. Joseph stood, his tray limp in his hand. It was the sound he had been waiting for his whole life.
Once they had the audience’s attention, the quartet launched into “You’re the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Adeline.” The lead singer sang the main line while his three companions wove intricate patterns back and forth around the melody. They swooped and rumbled, creating layered confections of a cappella harmony, cross-pollinations of sweet notes and tones. Their voices would stack up with exquisite precision for a dazzling instant; then they would move on, tearing down the edifice they had just created and constructing another of equal wonder in its place. For an hour they sang folk songs, spirituals, and ballads. Joseph listened, spellbound. Frederick used to call the human voice God’s first instrument, and here it was in all its unadorned beauty, four times over. Their last note, a big, fat sunbeam of harmony that refracted through the room in warm shafts of beauty, rang out for several beats too long, the singers reluctant to bring the music to an end.
Joseph never forgot that night. The shadow it cast would be a long one.
A
mid all the elegiac revelry at the Nick-Nack, Prohibition was drawing nearer. On January 16, 1920, the tavern would close its doors for good. Jette gazed at the calendar like a condemned prisoner staring up at the glinting blade of a guillotine. She watched helplessly as the months passed, too paralyzed by the impending calamity to come up with an alternative plan.
Around that time, new neighbors arrived in the house next door. Like Jette’s own lopsided family, the Leftkemeyers were missing a parent. There were just two of them, a short, serious-looking man, and his daughter, who was about Joseph’s age. Martin Leftkemeyer had come to Beatrice to run the town’s bank. Every day he wore the same three-piece suit and pristine brown homburg. Joseph watched him as he trotted down the steps of his house on his way to work. Amid the town’s farmers and laborers he seemed more like an exotic bird of paradise than a bank manager.
The bank occupied a large building on Main Street, just opposite the tavern, but Martin Leftkemeyer never came in for a drink. Instead he went home every night to eat a quiet supper with his daughter. This allowed everyone else to gossip about him freely, but the lack of any ascertainable facts meant that people resorted to idle speculation, not all of it generous.
Jette listened to these rumors and kept her own counsel. She had knocked on the Leftkemeyers’ front door a few days after their arrival, a basket of freshly baked
roggenbrot
under her arm. She had stayed as long as she could, trawling indiscreetly for information.
“What a tragedy,” she said when she returned home. “The poor man could barely look me in the eye. Wouldn’t smile. So serious. His wife died in the influenza epidemic. He’s come here from Kansas City to start a new life.” She was silent for a moment, as she contemplated the impossibility of her ever attempting a similar escape trick. She was rooted here now, and she knew it.
Joseph, though, wanted to hear about the daughter.
“She’s a skinny thing, that’s all I can tell you. She sat the whole time with her hands folded neatly on her lap and didn’t open her mouth once.”
“Is she pretty?” asked Joseph. He knew the answer to this already, but wanted to hear it from someone else.
“Pretty?” sniffed Jette. “I didn’t notice.”
Joseph hid his disappointment. He had been unable to take his eyes off the girl next door. She offered a fragile allure that was quite alien to him. Thanks to all that German food, most of the females in Beatrice had lost their gamine figures by adolescence. But there was almost nothing to Joseph’s new neighbor. He was bewitched by the graceful contours of her slender arms. Every day she wore a different color of ribbon in her hair. Joseph had already begun to lie awake at night and think about those ribbons.
“What’s her name?” he asked, staring at his fingernails.
“The girl? She’s called Cora.”
Cora!
Joseph began to loiter at the living room window for hours, hoping for a glimpse of Cora Leftkemeyer. During the day she was a cyclone of domestic industry, forever hanging out washing in the yard, sweeping the back porch, or cleaning windows. Every afternoon she put on her bonnet and walked to the shops with a wicker basket on her arm, returning a little while later with groceries for dinner.
More than anything, Cora loved to spend time planting and tending her vegetable garden. In this she was always meticulous and methodical. Joseph watched with interest as she carefully staked out the perimeter of the area with string and tall poles. She spent hours turning over the soil with a pitchfork that probably weighed as much as she did. She planted seeds in precisely measured lines, smoothing over each tiny hole with the back of her trowel. At the end of each furrow was a stick with a yellow piece of paper pinned to it—a reminder, Joseph supposed, of what she had planted. She watered every morning and evening. She often sang as she worked. Sometimes she simply wandered up and down the neat lines of topsoil with her hands on her hips, a look of quiet satisfaction on her lovely face. By the time she had finished her work, her cheeks were often smudged with soil. Joseph had never been so enchanted.
Every evening after dinner, Cora and her father walked arm in arm around the neighborhood. Neither talked as they made their way up and down the streets of the town. Joseph dreamed that one day it would be
his
arm that Cora took before setting out on her stroll.
There was a certain purity to my father’s adoration. He was still young enough to be awed by the intoxicating force of his own passion. Everything was brilliantly illuminated by his ardor. Each beer-stained table he wiped, each glass he collected and washed, each sweep of the broom across the Nick-Nack’s dirty floor—it was all for Cora. He tripped happily through his days, his heart a large, silent incubator of innocent devotion.