THE WHITE BRIDGE...SAMPLE CHAPTER 1

__________________________________________________________________________CHAPTER 1

Outside, snow drifted on the iron tracks of a westbound train. A band of strangers traveled inside to the same destination, but their journey had been very different. Cramped in the same compartment of that train, there was not enough space, or air to breathe. For some, the trip was the more oppressive with regular shaking from the splitting of rails. It had taken its toll, even in the more secure straw-backed seats that saw three women knitting there.
Alma and Louise wore bonnets, and had starched blouses with identical ruffled sleeves. Their hands worked the yarn in their laps. The ladies were akin to the Quakers whom they often imitated. Their stock had traveled the same parts of Indiana, but wound up on the outskirts of the pacifist colonies. The third woman seated, Geraldine, was also the youngest. She slouched against the window, watching the whirl of trees and thorns slip away. For some reason, she was talking to herself.

Meanwhile, in the same quarters, a poor man talked to his sleepy-eyed son. The child, no more than thirteen was huddled under a bundle of blankets and news wrappings. His father rocked as if in prayer--the sway gave it away that there was a Jew aboard the train. The sawdust and mud on his black coat meant he had earned his living as a peddler. But riding on the Chicago, Cincinnati & Louisville Railroad in 1927, the shortest route between Cincinnati and Chicago, at 284 miles, he had crossed the frozen watersheds in between. He rode the mountain railroad through Indiana like a king.
The train ride had made the father talkative, the more so as his sleepy eyed companion kept drifting off to sleep. The boy liked to watch the trees go by, or to hear the sound of the train whistle. His father said the sound was like a shofar, the ram’s horn blown on the Day of Atonement. On a checkerboard table swaying on sometimes tenuous rail, his black bread fell into the aisles.
“Kiss it up to heaven” the father said.
The child obeyed, putting the loaf back on the table. His father did not mind the stares of the blue eyed riders. They did not appear to like the smell of borscht or the herring that he had miraculously saved for this occasion.
The father had relished the dinner with his son. He was taking the boy all the way to Chicago to see the fights—to see that Jewish boy, Beryl Rasofsky, take on an Italian, or maybe an Irishman, for the amateur title—the Golden Gloves title of champion. His idols were Lew Tendler and Benny Leonard, two Jewish fighters, who were the best in the nation. A lot of fighters were Jews.
“Joshua, this is holy land. The King of the heavyweights, King Levinsky, yah, he is a Jew. Jackie Finkelstein, what do you think?’
The boy opened one eye and rustled the pages of the news.
“A Jew?” he asked, knowing the answer, but not knowing why that mattered.
“Finkelstein, of course, a Jew,” his father said, loudly.
Alma and Louise shifted their gaze. They had been joined by three men and a lone woman who crouched above them. They turned toward the offensive word…”Jew.”
A balding, thin man with hidden eyes now commanded the ladies. When he smiled, the creases of his cheeks seemed very heavy. He was a person, dark and predatory. Only his shoes were white, and his words not harsh. The man, David Stevenson, was the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He had two associates with him. They swore ‘Boss” was the greatest man who ever lived. They were the twins; both named Earl.
Earl number 1 told the story about how mom was groggy from the anesthesia the midwife administered when they were born. First, she brought him in for the naming, and mom named him Earl. Then she brought in Earl Number 2, and asked mom to give him a name.
“Earl, I told you girl, how stupid can you be? I already said his name be Earl.”
“Later, they both agreed to name both of us Earl because nobody could tell us apart, anyway.”
The ladies forced a polite smile. The troubled, whispering Geraldine removed her white bonnet, and breathed the panicked, stale air. Earl thought they were a goodly, goodly lot. Sometimes, he repeated himself that way to speak for his less talkative brother, Number 2. But Stevenson paid attention elsewhere.
“Then there was the time...”
“Earl, my apologies--that’s apologies with lots of G’s. I’ve heard those ditties before. About this and that gal named after the Model T. The one about Flivver, the bird, knocked up-- can you guess how that occurred? I mean where the bump and grind happened to take place, glory be?”
“Aw, boss. I was going not to tell that one,” said Earl Number 1.
“Says you,”
“I was not going to tell that one,” said Earl number 2.
Stevenson paused to mull their different responses.
“Anyway, Marge and I need to do go over some things. Business, you know, it’s screwy. Those contracts, Earl, they just don’t slip and slide their way to completion. We do them on a tight schedule like an assembly line, like a Flivver, a Model T, don’t we, Mrs. Oberholtzer?” he said, as his secretary’s face reddened.

It wasn’t what he said, but the menace in his tone that bothered her. A young woman had eavesdropped on their conversation. She did not like the stiff, insincere way the man leaned over her. It was cheap and tawdry; designed to humiliate his secretary, she thought.
The observer liked to study the way of men. She sat cross legged on a lounge chair and jotted down her observations with a pencil. Her dress was modern, a loose fitting black outfit. If it were very important, she may have been able to straighten the angle to hide what nature would not let stay hidden. Only the flapper snug fitting sequined cloche hat defined the era and covered most of her curly red hair.
Ginger Lee Smythe wrote what she saw and heard-- descriptions and key phrases.—“the eyes gaze down her blouse—smell of powder-some kind of grease for hair slick, though he has hardly any.” And the eyes are the window of truth, she thought. Mentally, she turned her attention to the incongruities. Truth had a young woman with a dopey face. “Sits a slouching, (got it) she’s carrying with child!” she wrote.
It was what she knew intuitively, how to study clues and how to observe. Eighteen years and already a graduate of Chicago University, she wanted to tell the story of her times. She would be a Nellie Bly, that daredevil lady reporter at the turn of the century. Nellie worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. She started the way all women reporters did--the fashion news, advice to the lovelorn, the sob sister blues. They needed to do something special; though now Ginger Lee was only a cub reporter for The Chicago Daily News.
She ignored the ladies—briefly observed Geraldine. She thought that one had an odd expression. Her hair seemed haphazard and unkempt. When Geraldine stared back, Ginger Lee quickly turned away. She spied the clearest blue eyes she had ever seen. It was the boy who crouched under the seat to escape her penetration. Just a beautiful boy, she thought without hesitation. The boy blushed and turned away from her, back to his father’s conversation.
The man talked as if his son and he were the only two people on the train. Ginger Lee walked down the aisle to get a better look at him; his blue eyes shone hope and bright life. She heard that the boy was named Joshua, and that he was from Cincinnati. Would anyone suspect her stock had come over on a steamer in steerage?
“Hi, Joshua,” she mouthed, when their eyes finally met.
The boy looked up sheepishly, but slumped down again with a gasp. His father beamed while pushing the bread toward her.
“Come, come join us for bread. Shayna maidal, beautiful lady, honor us at our table. This is my son, Joshua. Joshua say hello to the pretty lady.”
“Hello,” he said, his ears reddening, his face already flushed.
Ginger Lee turned away. She did not want to embarrass the boy further. Nor did she like the indelicate way the father was offering his food to her. She was trained to see the bushy hairs above the knuckles on his fingers.
“Essen, you know Yiddish?” he asked.
It was a rhetorical question posed too loudly that caused the ladies with their bulging eyes to turn in his direction. Now it was time for Ginger Lee to blush. The answer was not fully established to her about the entire history of the Smythe’s or the Coopers or the Hewitt’s that seemed to intermingle with her strange blood.
“Not even a bissel?”
“Don’t know, Popsie,” she said, suddenly taking the loaf of bread and giggling as she chewed a large piece, whole.

Ginger Lee Smythe was going to make a name for herself and never be a proper society lady. Even the great resources of her father from city titles to the electric street car company would not change her own fortune. She thought she was like a tuning fork for others—their thoughts and feelings. She would find in every human story that blade of grass that kept their self-respect. She would be the gatekeeper of the rules—to see what was underneath—the dirty crimes that always seemed to undermine their inherent glory.
If she were an heiress, it would not be her mother’s kind. She would not use a motor car or even the new city omnibus, but join the downtrodden by leather shoes, an army marching in the mud and forgotten street car tracks. Yes, an heiress of the streets, of the trains, second-class--that would be where she would be. One day, she would break out of the girls’ pool to become that voice of light that saw and conquered the dark.

From the lazy rear, the new-fangled sounds of The Jazz Age piped through a phonograph in the conductor’s car. The ladies, as one, looked up to see Ginger Lee slouched over from the old man’s humor. He was flirting, and she liked the attention. When she laughed, it came from deep inside—a not altogether lady-like high pitched cry.
Ginger Lee saw the ladies staring at her, and was apologetic. She tried to mime her apology for what she couldn’t control: the tapping of her feet, the slight shifting sway of her dress, the way “her bobbed hair must have looked—dumb and curled,” she wrote, singing along with the phonograph.
“ Oh ain't she sweet ... see her coming down the street
Now I ask you very confidentially ain't she sweet?
Ain't she nice .. look her over once or twice
Now I ask you very confidentially ain't she nice? “
When she saw the ladies eyes staring at her hem, she wished she could smooth her dress below her knees, but sang:
“Just cast an eye ... in her direction.
Oh me oh my ... ain't that perfection? “
Geraldine, the young woman by the window, had put on the white bonnet again, and strained her neck past her friends for a better view. She could not decide if she liked the song, or if it were time to scream, or take her medication.

“I repeat ... don't you think that's kind of neat?
And I ask you very confidentially ... ain't she sweet? “
“Hi,” Ginger said, waving a schmear of black bread back toward them, but the three heads turned away in the snotty air. The pale lights were dimming as the train came to Galesburg and within five hours or so to the stockyards and into the St. Lou’s tracks of the Chicago Union Station. Joshua’s father pulled out from his great waistcoat a piece of paper with two black engines criss crossing the bright, independent faces of hopeful prairie men and women. It was a $1,000 bond payable in U.S. gold coin.
“This is your college money, Joshua. Don’t tell your mother. It is real, listen, boy, this is important. The bond is for the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad. I am a real honest to goodness mensche on the big four railroad line,” he said. Realizing his son was sleeping, he wiped the straw and the mud from his giant black coat.
Meanwhile, Alma, Louise and Geraldine went back to their knitting. They were poker faced; their serious purpose did not change expression. It could be thought their hands were serving the unity that was being woven. But it was not yarn, but chord that was the object of their affection. In their laps, they held the red, white, and blue colored twine and laid that strange rope into a big ‘C’. Geraldine was the most intense; she brought one end of the loop parallel to the other to create a sidewise, ‘S’.

“Good,” she said.

In the center, her chiffon bonnet to her shoulder, Louise held the object above her by the lead chord in a long strand as if it were going to be tied to something when the task was done. She held the original “C” and wrapped the end of the thing around the loop several times from the bottom near her nimble fingers.
“Good,” she said, again.

“The way of the Lord is good,” said Alma.
“The Lord,” said Geraldine, not able to sit still.

Geraldine began fidgeting in a corner of her straw covered seat, and hunched down by the window. She seemed agitated and spoke about her displeasure in a monotone. She had worn, but then removed the white bonnet for another covering. That one was also white, but had a pointed hood. When it covered her face, her identity though hidden, was now understood.

She whispered as she held both Alma and Louise’s hands, and she poked the end of the chords through the top of the “S” loop. With some dexterity, she had made a ‘V’ shaped object which she pulled through the coil. Geraldine had just made a knot which held the ends of the chords securely. It was a perfect hangman’s, or in this case, hang woman’s noose.
“Very good,” the girls whispered, as if their throats were parched together, and their words too heavy to bear alone.

Those were the whispering women, a special squad of skirted soldiers—their job to spread the word --it was said that in twelve hours, they could go forth to each corner of the State, fanning the fires of gossip about which citizens needed to be corrected. Whose business had to be torched—whose body burned—the answer spread by the poisoning brigade?
In their night costumes, they would be more specters than spectators-- more than they seemed. They were part of that secret society weaving mayhem and terror in masks and hoods. Roused by patriotic fervor, those were the heart of the Indiana Klan-- clean, sober as steel and the rod, or the ropes that could kill. Suddenly, they would drop the pretense of yarn to darn the masks that smashed the breweries and the stills. To put on their glory suits and join three million’s minion strong, marching in white hoods-- burning crosses, criss-crossing Indiana and fanning into the countryside like gargoyles.
Drifting in and out of sleep, Joshua heard low moaning, and shrieks that he thought was a train whistle. He admired the strength of the engine—the power of steel and the churning, roaring wheels hugging miles of American track. He would imagine another track—that one with red cinders. He would race other boys, and run faster than any other boy ever would. He would be a champion like Jackie Fields or like this new ghetto fighter they were going to see—this Beryl Rasofsky, the boy everyone knew as—Barney Ross. Barney Ross was his hero because his father said he loved him.
For the ladies, after dinner was a lazy time. The train made them bob and weave, but they held steady to the little white pamphlets they were reading. When they got to the part about the Pledge of Allegiance, Geraldine produced a tiny flag of the forty-eight states and followed instructions. Alma and Louise enjoyed their perfect salute - the right arm extended out and upward. Until then, they could have passed for gentility - that American quality of rugged, pioneer spirit, attractive as the resources that brought their forebears west.

It was simply American—the Good Book and the American flag—the Pledge said slowly like a chant. From down their compartment toward the Pullman sleepers, past the clang of metal and the screeching between railway cars, they heard the beginnings of muffled screams. Then, footsteps scuffled down the aisles, a woman being dragged by her hair. When the vestibule filled like water that overflowed into the aisles, the little triple ladies curled inside each other like a barnyard of baby owls.
“Blood,” said the ticket collector. The train rocked him into the overhang.
The word sent shivers into the cars and into the heart- like daggers of the daughters of the masked society—the collector had found horror--a tear-stained pillow, awash with human blood. The Grand Dragon and the lady, Marjorie Oberholtzer, were running into the flesh of living history like a scar along the last car of the caboose.
“Blood,” said the conductor again, as if it were the next station, a point of disembarkation between Galesburg and the big city. But when the train moved around another mountainous bend, all traces of the demon and his desires had perished in a desperate leap forward and a last sideward lunge. Earl and Earl went over the top, too, though whom, or who went first is open to conjecture. Both wanted to help their boss hold Mrs. Oberholtzer hostage a little while longer.
Then, even the triumvirate of ladies, Alma and Louise, and the horrified Geraldine came forward, still with their right arms raised for the Pledge, thrusting forward toward the screeching wheels with the shame of what they were observing—the horror of rape, of scandal, the stained blood they had kept as souvenirs—the fragments of bullets, the dry red earth, the branches of trees, pieces of flesh, the burnings, the floggings, the whisperings of their poison in the foul air, and the strands of chord that they used to hang a body in a summer breeze. With the mournful train whistle and the sounds from iron and scowling track, the ladies began a reverie of railing at the rails of the last car, their arms outstretched. They took the pledge with one voice, holding the flag and hanging noose under a sweet gathering gazette of evening stars.
Ginger Lee ran behind them, at first a car away, she burst two three steps at a time. She could smell a story—a murder happening. Her pencil waving, she needed something to write on, but the words she heard she already knew by heart. Alma and Louise, whispering, but Geraldine finally happy to be screaming,
“I pledge allegiance to the flag, And the Republic for which it stands; One Nation indivisible, With Liberty and Justice For all, “and their voices, gaining strength from the powerful words, rose ever higher into the evening of an American sky. The ladies were whooping and weeping into their bonnets, but sang the words of the hymn without even a trace of bloody irony.
“My country tis of thee, sweet land of Liberty, of thee we sing.”