All posts by Edward Staskus

Edward Staskus is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Lakewood, Ohio. His crime thrillers "Cross Walk" and "Bomb City" can be found on Amazon.
Baltic Place

Beware the Lithuanians

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By Ed Staskus

   Before the Battle of Blue Water was fought in the fall of 1363 the Russians had been under the thumb of Mongolia’s Golden Horde for more than a century. The Mongols invaded and conquered most of what is now Russia in the mid-1200s. They devastated the lands of the Kievan Rus. They cut down everyone in their way and sacked both Kiev and Chernigov, two of the largest cities. From then on the Russians paid bribes in gold and silver to the Golden Horde to keep them at bay. 

   After the Mongol Empire was divided into four Khanates, Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan established his capital at Sarai on the Volga River.  It was near enough to the principalities of the Russians to keep them under control and close enough, whenever the need arose, to speedily get back to Mongolia, which was  across the treeless steppe of what is now Kazakhstan.

   The Mongols were known in Europe as Hell’s Horsemen. They could ride up to eighty miles a day if they had to. Their horses were short, stocky, and shaggy. They were never stabled, even during Mongolia’s brutal winters when temperatures dropped to thirty below zero. 

   “They are not very great in stature, but exceedingly strong, and maintained with little provender,” a 13th century Italian missionary priest said about the horses. Deadly accurate composite bows and innovative tactics won them battle after battle. By the time Genghis Khan and his sons were done the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in the world, then or now. It covered more than nine million square miles from Hungary in the west to China in the east.

   In the middle of the 14th century the Golden Horde was preparing to move against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was the largest sovereign state in Europe, being the lands of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, as well as parts of Poland and Russia. The Mongols weren’t trying to bite off more than they could chew. They had already overrun Asia and the Middle East. Only the Turkish Mamluks had ever defeated them. When they invaded Europe Batu Khan inflicted a crushing defeat on King Béla IV’s Hungarian army, which had the best cavalry on the continent. The Mongols burned the city of Pest and seized control of the Hungarian plain. The Golden Horde wasn’t overly concerned about the Lithuanians.

   Kochubey, the strongman of the Golden Horde in southern Russia, was sitting on his horse at the top of a knoll looking westward in the spring of 1363. He had a small group of his commanders with him, as well as two mercenary Russian warlords. They had overrun Poland six years earlier, destroying Lublin. They were feeling their oats. The Golden Horde had meant to engage the Lithuanians the year before, but the weather had been bad, wet and soggy. It didn’t suit the Mongol horses. The recent spring had been dry and the summer promised to be a good one for campaigning. Kochubey was eager to be on the move. He had dynastic issues with his brothers, who were trying to kill him, if he didn’t kill them first. He needed to be at war somewhere. It was what he did best.

   Before the group broke up, their commitment and decisions made, the two Russians rode up to Kochubey. They had fought the Lithuanians before. One of the warlords leaned over his horse and said, “Beware the Lithuanians.” Kochubey snorted at the warning and puffed himself up. “The Lithuanians need to beware of us.” He wheeled his horse around and rode away. The Russians watched him go. They were hard men, but knew better than say anything more to their overlord. He was a harder man than them.

   Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania didn’t give a damn how dangerous the Mongols thought they were. He knew that ever since their empire had been split after the death of Genghis Khan they had been plagued by internal discord. The Golden Horde was in the middle of multiple succession disputes. They were fracturing into separate domains. The  resulting disorder was having a ruinous effect on their fighting men. It was a golden opportunity for Grand Duke Algirdas to expand  his southern territories. He wasn’t like the Russians who were content to pay tribute in return for an uneasy peace. If the Mongols wanted to come to him, all the better. He would make it easy for them by marching to the Don River near where they were. He would wait there while putting together his plan of action.

   The Lithuanian forces were made up of lightly armored knights on fast horses, foot soldiers armed with swords and spears, and crossbow men. They were disciplined and determined. They were not under any illusions. They knew the Golden Horde, despite its problems, was a formidable force. Mongols were merciless on the field of battle. They took few prisoners. They had proven that at Samarkand and Bukhara. There would be blood. The Baltic men were confident it would be the blood of Mongol men.

   Ianiunas was a crossbowman man. He was from western Lithuania, from near the Curonian Spit. For hundreds of years the Curonian Spit had been the location of a pagan trading center. The Teutonic Knights took it over in the 13th century, building a castle at Memel. It was where Ianiunas trained on the crossbow.  He joined Grand Duke Algirdas’s forces after getting sick and tired of the Order of Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem trying to convert him to Christianity. He was a pagan. He wasn’t going to convert to the White Christ, now or ever. He was going to live and die by the light of his own gods.

   Grand Duke Algirdas hadn’t converted, either. He worshiped the thunder god Perkunas. He was pagan to the core, like Ianiunas, even though he allowed Orthodox Christians living in Vilnius to build a church where the city’s gallows had once stood. It was the Grand Duke’s own private joke. He was a pagan, but he was a politician, too. He appointed Orthodox officials in the Slavic territories of Lithuania. He married one Orthodox princess after another. He didn’t need a weathercock to know which way the wind was blowing. 

   He was willing to bend but he wasn’t going to break. He and his brother Kestutis wanted the Teutonic Knights out of Lithuania. They were Germans. They were a threat to the throne. He had led Lithuanian and Slavic armies against them. During  the Uprising of the Night of Yury in 1345 one of the leaders of a provincial rebellion told the Grand Duke he had been elected king of the rebels. He was a peasant farmer. He informed the Grand Duke that if he followed him into battle the Germans would be driven away. Grand Duke Algirdas didn’t wet nurse the man. He cut his head off right away. A peasant farmer pretending to be a king was as much a threat as the Teutonic Knights.

   It was a sunny day in October when the Lithuanians engaged the Golden Horde. Grand Duke Algirdas moved his forces west and crossed the Dnieper River towards Podolia. The Mongols met the Lithuanians on the banks of a river near present-day Torhovytsia in southern Ukraine. The town was then known as Sinie Vody, or Blue Water. 

   The Lithuanians organized themselves into six groups arranged in a half circle. The Mongols began the battle with a barrage of arrows from their horsemen into both sides of the Lithuanian formation. The Lithuanians darkened the sky with bolts from their crossbows. Arrows from composite bows like what the Golden Horde fought with fly at 250 feet a second. Bolts from a crossbow fly at 350 feet a second. The leather armor many Mongols wore offered some protection from the bolts, at least until they didn’t. 

   A row of pikemen with shields protected the crossbowmen, as did a row of pavises. The crossbowmen fired from behind their wall. Every man had two men behind him loading crossbows and rotating them from the back to the front. They held firm, ignoring Mongolian feints. Ianiunas killed one Mongol after another until he ran out of bolts. When he did he unsheathed his sword and joined the foot soldiers.

   The Lithuanians moved forward with pikes, lances, and spears, breaking the front line of the Mongol army. The men of the Naugardukas attacked the disorganized flanks of the Golden Horde with fresh crossbows. The liegemen of Karijotas Gediminas, the son of the former Grand Duke Gediminas, moved in for the kill. The Mongols weren’t able to maintain their formation and broke into a retreat which became a rout. The field of battle became a killing field, the soil wet with blood. 

   At the end of the day Grand Duke Algirdas achieved an open and shut victory. Without meaning to, the nascent threat to European Christendom had been forestalled by a pagan. The victory secured Kiev and the northern Black Sea lands for the Lithuanians. The Grand Duchy gained access to the Black Sea. Grand Duke Algirdas left his son Vladimir in charge. Vladimir became a bitter rival to the Grand Duchy of Moscow on the day he assumed power. From that day on there was no love lost between the Lithuanians and the Russians.

   Ianiunas went home to his wife and children. He had a farmstead on the banks of the Nemunas River in the south of Lithuania. It was on the edge of an impenetrable forest. A fort had been built in nearby Alytus to protect against Crusader raids seeking cattle, slaves, and conversions. When he left the battlefield he walked while an ox pulled a two-wheeled tumbrel filled to the gills with spoils. It took him a month to get home. He got there in the middle of November in the middle of a snowstorm. He got hot kisses from his wife and fierce hugs from his children before they dug into the loot he had brought back. His favorite hound sniffed him up down and sideways before becoming his favorite hound again. The neighbors came over for tales of war told over a barrel of honey wine. Everybody got drunk as skunks.

   Three years later Ianiunas celebrated the marriage of his eldest daughter to an immigrant  Mongol by the name of Chagatai. He had fought on the losing side at the Battle of Blue Water. The train wreck that was the Golden Horde was hemorrhaging its own. Many of them went seeking refuge in faraway places, including Lithuania. Nearly fifty thousand Mongols migrated to the Grand Duchy in the 14th century. Their first settlements were near Grodno and Trakai. 

   The first thing they did was learn the Lithuanian language and where to pay their taxes. The Grand Duke didn’t in fact care what language they spoke, but he cared a great deal about taxes. They were permitted to build mosques, most of them being Muslims. They were allowed to marry Lithuanian women and raise Muslim children. In return, they were required to serve in the Grand Duchy’s soldiery. They had to provide their own weapons and horses. They patrolled borders and defended  towns and castles from attacks. 

   When it came to warfare they rode with own kind. Although they admitted the power of bolts, they had grown up learning to stand on the back of a galloping horse and hit a moving target with their composite bows. Their weapon was made of wood, sinew, and laminated horn. It was what steppe warriors had been using for a thousand years. They carried two or three bows and multiple quivers holding hundreds of arrows. The arrowheads were hardened by plunging them into brine after heating them until they were red hot. The Mongols were adept at firing their arrows at the split second all four of their horse’s hooves were off the ground, affording them a split second of stillness.

   Chagatai put his bows and arrows away the day of his wedding. By the time the spousal ceremony, the dinner of roasted wild boar, and the revelry were over, almost everybody’s feet were off the ground, except for Ianiunas and Chagatai. They stood on a grassy spot on the edge of a pond next to the family house. Ianiunas’s favorite hound had flopped down and was napping at his feet. Chagatai looked at the hound.

   “I will have many dogs,” he said.

   “Dogs are useful animals and good companions,” Ianiunas said.

   “They are loyal, too.”

   “Yes, dogs are the only creatures on this earth who will never betray you.”

   Chagatai was of the same mind. The two men stood next to each other gazing at star clusters in the inky sky. When Ianiunas’s hound started growling in his sleep and suddenly farted, both their faces creased up. Chagatai leaned down and patted the hound’s flank, who rolled over onto his feet and shook himself. The three of them watched for shooting stars but there weren’t any, until suddenly there was one. It was gone in the blink of an eye. They went back to the family house for whatever karvojus cake and honey wine was still to be had.     

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Not Fade Away

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By Ed Staskus

   I hadn’t been to a funeral in several years, but when we got the news that my wife’s uncle Romas Bublys had died, we made a point of going. Even though I am not a faithful churchgoer, I go to church for weddings and funerals. When grieving, obsequies are a way to create connection and acceptance about something beyond our control, and a way to begin moving forward. The ritual inspires catharsis, helping everybody, especially the immediate family, feel better. 

   Even if you didn’t know the deceased very well, going to a funeral to support a friend or a family can be the best reason of all. Funerals are one of the few times when saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean “I apologize.” It means “I understand.” It means you understand it is a difficult time. We are all in our own boat but everybody is in the same ocean.

   The requiem mass was at the Church of Gesu in University Hts. next to the campus of John Carroll University. Romas was a life-long devout Catholic. The church is a Jesuit church, one of only 60-some in the United States, and the university is a Jesuit school. Jesuit parishes are guided by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, encouraging adherents to ponder their experiences and search for God’s presence in their lives. 

   I didn’t know Romas Bublys well. Even though we both lived in northeastern Ohio, we travelled in different circles. I might have met him face-to-face and spoken to him for the first time the day I got married in the Lithuanian church on the east side of Cleveland. Some of his daughters, my wife’s cousins, and nieces were in our wedding party. I knew them slightly, although I knew their mother, Ingrid, well enough through her undying work in the ethnic community.

   Romas was born in Taurage, Lithuania in 1936. The small city is on the Jura River not far from the Baltic Sea. Most of it was destroyed by fire in 1836 and again during World War One. After the war it was rapidly rebuilt, industrializing with new up-to-date factories. A revolt against the national authorities broke out there in 1927 but was suppressed. His family fled the country when the Red Army invaded in 1944. Romas was six years old. After five years of treading water in displaced person camps, the family emigrated to the United States.

   The funeral wasn’t standing room only, but it was close. There were 400-some mourners in attendance, almost filling the large church. There was a line snaking out the door to get inside when we got there. While we inched forward more cars crept into the parking lot and more people got in line. Even though I assumed most of everybody at the service was Lithuanian American like me, most of them were strangers to me.

   Romas grew up in Detroit before relocating to Cleveland, Ohio. He served in the US Army with the 82ndAirborne Division. He earned a master’s degree from Cleveland State University and an MBA from Baldwin Wallace University. He went to work for TRW. It was a systems and  aerospace company. They built spacecraft, including the Pioneer series. His professional life revolved around engineering.

   The Church of Gesu is spacious and almost regal. It isn’t new, built in 1958,  but it looks new. The superstructure is steel so there are no interior pillars. By the time we got in we were lucky to find a pew in the back. We sat with my brother-in-law’s family. The service was conducted by Fr. Lukas Leniauskas, the son of somebody I grew up with. He was 20 years old when he left Cleveland and went to Lithuania where he entered the Jesuit Novitiate. He professed perpetual vows two years later and was ordained a priest in 2015.

   Romas’s eldest daughter gave the eulogy. I wasn’t sure if she ever got to the end of it, or not. She choked up and seemed to cut it short. She said her father loved to travel and read. He was proud of his children. He believed in faith, family, and the homeland. He loved life. He was wise and funny, a family man as well as a businessman. She said their father taught the five children in the family how to be successful. “One thing he always said was dress for success. He never wore blue jeans.” The burly man in the pew in front of us was wearing a blazer with gilt buttons and blue jeans. He didn’t seem to take her remark the wrong way.

   Romas was big on keeping Lithuania alive in the hearts of his compatriots who had emigrated to the New World. He was on the National Board of Directors of the Lithuanian American Community. He was the Director of the Lithuanian Club in Cleveland and its Chairman for six terms. He didn’t sit on the sidelines. He got involved and stayed involved.

   Two more of Romas’s daughters spoke. A cellist played “Ave Maria.” There is a hymn sung at many Protestant funerals called “The Day Thou Gave Us Lord is Ended.” It wasn’t sung at the Jesuit church, although the sense of it hung in the air. Romas had a good voice and had performed with the Cleveland Male Octet. He would have done the song justice.

   The service ended with a homily and prayer of commendation. Two men guided the coffin from one end of the nave to the other end and into the narthex. They were accompanied by the priest, a cross-bearer, and the altar girls. In my day it was a boy’s club. One of the girls swung a thurible burning incense. She swung it forward and back in time with her steps. What I could smell of the smoke was pungent.

   I had been an altar boy and served at many funerals at St. George Catholic Church. The funerals were usually on Thursday and Friday afternoons. After the final blessing we always finished with a recessional, no matter how few or how many were in attendance. If there were many people, and I had my hands on the thurible, whenever I saw a friend of mine in a pew, as I passed by, I swung my thurible sideways so my friend would get a good whiff of the smoke. My passing was always marked by coughing in the pews. 

   When Romas’s coffin came to rest in the narthex, two unformed US Army servicemen draped an American flag over it. One of them saluted, holding the salute for several minutes. The other one said a few words. When they were done they ceremoniously folded the flag. The funeral was over when they were done.

   Everybody was invited to the parish hall in the basement. I exchanged small talk with some grown-ups and bantered talk with my brother-in-law’s kids until I noticed a man I thought I recognized. I stepped over to his table where he was alone. He was Arunas Bielinis, somebody from the east side ethnic crowd back in the day. He had made a career as a lawyer, so after we established our bona fines, he asked me twenty questions about myself. He told me his friend Kestutis Susinskas and he used to borrow books from me when we were teenagers. “We liked that you were always reading books by James Michener and Leon Uris,” he said. “I’m not sure we returned all of them to you.” I told him it was water under the bridge.

   The Lithuanian Club catered the food and drink. Vic Stankus, a long-time local dentist, and long-time friend of Romas Bublys, was eating when something went down wrong. He started choking. A man stepped up and applied the Heimlich maneuver. Standing behind the dentist he placed a fist slightly above Vic’s navel. Grasping his fist with the other hand he shoved his fist inward and upward. The deadly morsel stuck in Vic’s throat went pop and flew out of his mouth. 

   Romas wasn’t going to be buried in the All Souls Cemetery in Chardon, where many of Cleveland’s Lithuanians are buried. My father is buried there. My mother is going to be buried there. Anatanas Smetona, the President of Lithuania during the inter-war years, is buried there. Romas was going to be buried in Luksai, not far from where he was born. A year removed from passing away, his relatives will visit him, spending the day, cleaning his grave, and leaving flowers.

   The 31st of October is Halloween. The 1st of November is All Saint’s Day. The 2nd of November is All Souls Day, or Velines, in Lithuania. It has nothing to do with trick or treating. It has everything to do with not fade away. It is the Day of the Dead. Shops and schools close on the first day of November for a couple of days. Everybody heads to their cemeteries to visit those who have given up the ghost. 

   All Souls Day, also called Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, is a day of remembrance. Families visit gravesites, lighting candles on the tombs of loved ones, and soliciting for their well-being. Many cemeteries become a sea of candles at night. It is one of the most important holidays on the Lithuanian calendar. Some people pray for those they suspect are in purgatory and try to win indulgences for them.

   Velines is a Catholic observance, even though some Lithuanians who get into the spirit of it on that day are not Catholic or even identify as the same. “Vėlinės has overflowed the banks of the church,” is how one churchman has described it. All Souls Day got started in the year 933 at Cluny Abbey in France when Pope Gregory V proclaimed November 2nd as a day to pray for the departed. Lithuanians were pagans at the time and didn’t pay any attention to the news bulletin. They had their own Day of the Dead. They called it Liges. It wasn’t just one day, either. It lasted three days and nights as soon as all the crops were harvested. Life is for the living and the living need bread.

   Lithuanians were the last Europeans to abandon paganism. The cemeteries of Kernave, the one-time pagan capital of Lithuania, had always been bereft of crosses. The Grand Duchy finally gave up and accepted Christianity near the end of the fourteenth century. During the centuries they were holding out, families gathered food and gathered in their boneyards in mid-autumn. Wine and honey mead were sprinkled on graves. It was a flock together as well as an observance. Romas had always enjoyed his cocktail hour. Although a modern man, he might have approved of some ancient pagan practices, although he wasn’t the kind of man to waste a drop of distilled spirits.

   Fresh farm eggs painted red and black were left on graves as good luck charms for next year’s crops. Tables were set up. Black bread and black pudding were served. Whatever was left over was given to the poor in return for their prayers. When the three days of Liges were over, branches were culled and thrown into a bonfire while everyone sang songs for the souls of the departed. They drank whatever wine and honey mead was left over.

   Returning to one’s birthplace to spend eternity is a promised land kind of return. When Romas Bublys went back to where it all started, he was rounding a circle that is not often unbroken. Very few are afforded a resting place that is the same place where they came to life. Promised lands lie on the other side of wilderness lands.

   After the post-funeral gathering at the Church of Gesu, when I thought about memory and remembrance, about what is between the saints and the deep blue sea, I thought if there is a promised land for me on the other side of time, I will probably be the last to know. I won’t mind as long as there is a candle to light my way.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Saving Ernest Hemingway

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Frank Domscheit pulled Ernest Hemingway out of the de Havilland Rapide, the day it crashed and caught fire, he didn’t know who the man in the airplane was, although he knew who Ernest Hemingway was. He had read one of his books before the war and liked it. It was about bullfighting. The man he pulled out of the airplane was covered in blood and babbling. Frank beat out the flames on the man’s arms and hands. He pulled him away from the airplane as fast as he could. The man was big and heavy but able to stumble forward with his help.

   Frank was in the Upper Nile lands of Uganda the last week of January 1954 tending to the wife of an Egyptian businessman, getting her ready to fly back to Cairo, when Ernest Hemingway’s airplane crashed and caught fire. It was more bad luck for the writer. It was his second airplane crash in two days. The Cessna 180 he and his wife had been on the day before, sightseeing the wilds surrounding the Great Rift Valley and Murchison Falls, encountered a large flock of birds. The pilot dove to avoid them but clipped an abandoned telegraph line, lost control, and crashed. Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife, suffered two cracked ribs, and Ernest Hemingway’s head got banged hard. Roy Marsh, the pilot, was unhurt. 

   They couldn’t send a distress call. Their on-board radio was broken. They walked away from the airplane where it was wedged in scrub trees. They walked to the Victoria Nile River. When night came they built a fire. They had some apples and biscuits. They had bottles of Carlsberg beer and  a bottle of Scotch that survived the crash. The men drank warm beer while Mary eased the pain of her cracked ribs with whiskey. Elephants trumpeted and hippos snorted at the waterline.

   “We held our breath while an elephant twelve paces away from us was silhouetted in the moonlight, listening to my wife’s snores,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   The British Colonial Administration sent search planes. They found the Cessna 180 soon enough. “One wheel of the undercarriage was broken, but otherwise the plane appeared little damaged,” said Capt. R. C. Jude, the pilot of the British Overseas Airways Corporation plane that circled the crash three miles below Murchison Falls. “The chap did a neat job getting her down.” When a ground rescue team reached the airplane, however, they discovered the Hemingway’s and their pilot were not there. 

   Uganda was more than 2,000 miles from where Frank Domscheit lived and worked in Cairo. He wasn’t an Egyptian. He was a Prussian Lithuanian. He had settled in Cairo after deserting the Afrika Corps. During World War Two the Afrika Corps was the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. There were some Italian armored and infantry divisions, as well. The Germans were highly skilled at desert tactics and noted for their esprit de corps. The Italians didn’t want to be in North Africa, surrendering whenever they could. When the British Eighth Army broke through the Axis defense lines and minefields at El Alamein, forcing General Erwin Rommel to withdraw, the war ended for Frank. The Afrika Corp went west, retreating to Tunisia. Frank went east, escaping to northern Egypt. 

   His family were fish merchants south of Klaipeda in Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea. They were herring wholesalers. He had been conscripted by the German Army in 1940, ending up as an ambulance driver. He served during the assault on France until France fell. After that he stayed in Paris. It might have been the best year of his life. He shipped out to North Africa in September 1941. The next year was the worst year of his life.

   Soldiers desert for many reasons, including home sickness, harsh conditions, and fear of combat. Frank deserted because he was sick of the day-to-day bloodshed. He didn’t know enough about why the war had started or why it was still going on. He didn’t disagree with German military policies or the leadership of his superiors. But he wasn’t invested in the war like they were. He didn’t care anymore. It seemed like a pointless struggle. He was sick of stitching some men up and burying the rest of them.

   When Ernest Hemingway, his wife, and their pilot were reconnoitering the morning after the crash, the writer spotted a launch on the river. “We had seen mirages when the sun got high, and at the sight of the launch, I thought, I must check my eyesight,” he said. “I called Mary and told her it looked like a launch was coming up the river. She looked and said it was.”

   The launch was the SS Murchison, the same boat that had been used in the 1951 movie “The African Queen.” It was piloted by Edwiges Abreo, a Goan from the west coast of India. “It was an excellent launch, fairly old-fashioned in lines,” Ernest Hemingway said. The captain told them it would cost one hundred shillings per person for the rescue. The writer paid the captain and they set off downriver to Butiaba on Lake Albert.

   When they got to Butiaba they disembarked and sat down under a silky oak tree to keep the sun off them. They waited for another airplane to arrive and take them to Nairobi for medical attention. It was a little-used airstrip. It was very hot and humid. When a de Havilland Rapide arrived they boarded it with their pilot and a policeman. They were near the end of the runway, a few seconds from liftoff, when the airplane hit an anthill, lost its balance, and crashed. The fuel tank exploded and they were engulfed in flames.

   Frank was watching the take-off from a thatched-roof hut. His Egyptian patient was napping in a folding canvas chair. She had fallen off a horse while on safari and hurt her head. When she didn’t improve, but rather got worse, Frank was eventually sent for. He was a neurologist, some said among the best in Egypt. He had studied medicine at Cairo University, starting before the war ended. He spoke German, Lithuanian, and English. He learned to speak Arabic. He became a doctor and trained at the Qasr El-Eyni Hospital. He was going to take his patient there for treatment.

   When he saw the airplane crash and explode he leapt to his feet and ran towards it. By the time he got to the airplane the policeman had gotten out, the bush pilot was dragging Mary Hemingway out through a broken front window, but Ernest Hemingway was trapped. The doors were jammed. He was banging on a side window with his head, trying to break it and get out that way. Frank could see that he would never get through the window frame, being too large of a man. He found a stick, jimmied the door with it, and when the door popped open, quickly frog marched Ernest Hemingway to safety. 

   He sat him down on the dry Nile mud. The writer had a scalp wound and burns up and down his arms. A part of his face was scorched. Frank found out later he had suffered a crushed vertebra and damage to his liver, spleen, and kidney. Their passports, all their money and clothes, and three pairs of the writer’s glasses were lost in the fire.

   He removed the rings on Ernest Hemingway’s fingers. He carefully cut away his shirt. He cooled his burns with water and covered them loosely with gauze. He checked him for shock, but his skin wasn’t clammy and his pulse was good. He thought the man might be in his 60s, although he seemed strong enough. He later found out he was in his 50s. His eyes were glassy. He was disoriented. There was something wrong.

   “How is your head?” Frank asked.

   “My head hurts,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   “You might have a concussion.”

   “I probably do.”

   “Have you had one before?”

   “I’ve had half-a-dozen, maybe more. I  tore my shoulder and banged my head yesterday when we went down at the falls. My head hasn’t killed me yet. I’m a writer. I need my head on straight. My luck is still good.”

   What he didn’t know was his luck was running out fast. It wasn’t ever going to be as good as it had been. His luck was getting worse and worse.

   “Do you have a headache?’

   “Yes.”

   “Are you dizzy at all?”

   “Yes.”

   “I want you to look to the right of the sun.”

   The African sky was clear and the sun was high. When Ernest Hemingway looked in the direction Frank indicated, he quickly looked away.

   “Are you sensitive to the light?”

   “Yes.”

    “Let me stand you up for a second.”

   “All right.”

   “How’s your balance?”

   “Not very good.”

   “That’s fine, let’s sit you down again.”

   “I need a drink.”

   “That would be a bad idea.”

   “My father was never the same after those two plane crashes,” Patrick Hemingway said. “When he visited me in Shimoni afterwards the atmosphere was bad.”  Patrick was Ernest Hemingway’s second son. Shimoni was a small village on Kenya’s south coast, popular with divers and fishermen.

   “It was like King Lear. He would shout, ‘What’s going on here? Aren’t I king?’” Ernest Hemingway had been a heavy drinker most of his life. He was drinking heavier in Shimoni. “I sympathized with his problems but you have to show some restraint. The last few weeks in Africa, he lost all restraint. I finally had enough. We never saw each other again.”

   The policeman who had been on the de Havilland Rapide stepped up and stopped beside Frank. He was a native. His black face was shiny with sweat. There was blood on his shirt.

    “How is he?”

   “He’s got some burns that need to be treated as soon as possible. I think he’s got a concussion. He needs to be examined in a hospital.”

   “Are you a doctor?”

   “Yes.”

   “He’s a famous writer,” the policeman said.

   “That’s what he said, that he’s a writer. I once read one of his books.”

    “I don’t read anything. I don’t know how to read.”

   A dark green Land River pulled up beside them. Two British Colonial Police Officers stepped out. Uganda was a British protectorate. They were wearing khaki jackets and short pants, black knee-high boots, black Sam Browne belts, and shiny billed black caps.

   “Is he fit enough to travel?”

   “Yes,” Frank said. “But he needs a hospital.”  

   One of the policemen led Ernest Hemingway to the Land Rover. Frank walked beside the writer, offering his arm in support. The native policeman helped Mary Hemingway into the back seat next to her husband. They were both quiet. They looked very tired.

   “I liked your book about Spain, about the bullfighting,” Frank said.

   “Thank you but I’m not getting into the ring with Tolstoy,” Ernest Hemingway said. “I love bullfighting, have for a long time. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is always in danger of death.”

   The Land Rover took them to Masindi, which was on the road from Murchison Falls towards Entebbe. They stayed at the Masindi Hotel, the oldest hotel in Uganda. That night the bar ran short of gin while Ernest Hemingway entertained a pack of reporters with tales about his near death. “I’ve never felt better,” he said. “It’s just a bump on the head.” When they got to Entebbe he was admitted to a hospital where he stayed for several weeks. His head was leaking cerebral fluid. Doctors told him he had fractured his skull.

   Three months later Frank got a hand-written letter from Ernest Hemingway thanking him for his help. He opened it while having lunch at the Tahrir Café opposite the Egyptian Museum. He had a bowl of koshary, which was vermicelli, fried rice, and brown lentils topped with garlic vinegar. He read the letter while he was eating.

   “I want to thank you for your help, even though I can’t write letters much on account of right arm which was burned to the bone third degree and it cramps up on me. Fingers burned and left hand third degree too, so can’t type and can’t get any work done. The big trouble is inside where right kidney was ruptured and liver and spleen injured. I am weak from so much internal bleeding. Being a good boy and trying to rest.”

   Seven months later Frank was at the Tahrir Café again reading the International Herald Tribune when he saw a news item about Ernest Hemingway. He had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize cited “The Old Man and the Sea.”  As it turned out, it was his last novel. He never wrote another book.

   Frank bought a copy of the book and read it. He didn’t like it. It seemed solemn and maudlin. The old man was a Christ-like fisherman. The book was full of Christian symbolism. It was about redemption, as if there were such a thing. The only parts of the book he liked were the parts about Joe DiMaggio. Baseball players weren’t symbols. They were like the bullfighters in the other book he had read.

   He had seen the flesh and blood of Ernest Hemingway in Africa. The only sense of it in “The Old Man and the Sea” was the sharks who devoured the marlin the old man had landed. The book didn’t feel true to him. The writer had once been able to take the bull by the horns. He had been a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. The writing was clear-headed and hard-eyed. Frank wondered if the man’s concussions had made him sentimental. He wondered if his pen had dried up.

   When he had been talking to Ernest Hemingway in Butiaba, leaning into the Land Rover, he heard him say, “I never knew a morning all my years in Africa when I woke up and was not happy. I’m always happy to be alive, but I’m not happy about anything else anymore.”

   It was a broken-hearted thing to say. It ached of loneliness. Frank had never gone back to Lithuania, even though he was lonely for it. He couldn’t go even if he wanted to. The Iron Curtain was securely in place. Eight years after helping save the writer, when Frank read about him again in the International Herald Tribune, he read that Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide. He wasn’t surprised. Committing suicide is braving death, although there is rarely anything brave about it.  It is a desperate act. 

   “There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide,” is what Ernest Hemingway said. It was a desperate man’s way of escaping ills that had no remedy. There were no more i’s to dot or t’s to cross.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Paperback Yoga

One Way or Another

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By Ed Staskus

   When I was taking yoga classes I learned much about the practice, from the thinking side of it to the action side of it. It learned yoga wasn’t any one thing but many things. It was a melting pot of ways and means. The core of it was simple enough, but the branches bore investigation, from meditation to headstand, no matter how exasperating the branches might be.

    I wasn’t able to do headstand for a long time, except against a wall, until one day I was doing it, no problem. After that I flipped wrong side up at the drop of a hat. I went from hating it to loving it. When a woman toppled out of the pose and crashed into me in a class, I thought, man, what an amateur! I changed my tune when I almost killed myself trying to get a grip on handstand. I never did get the hang of it.

   When it came to the doing of yoga the instructors were all different, all sincere, all good coaches with good intentions. They demonstrated the nuts and bolts of poses. They explained the idea behind them. They helped with adjustments. They encouraged us, which was a good thing, if encouragement was what you needed. Hope and encouragement are two of the best things you can give another person. For my part, lack of encouragement has never been a problem. I am irascible enough to not care too much about sticks and carrots. I mind my own business and keep in mind what Ezra Pound said, which was, “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

   One element of studio classes always bothered me, however, which was the catch phrases the instructors used. Some lingo like drishti, bandhi, and chaturanga was helpful to know. Everything seemed to revolve around down dog and tadasana, making it easy to jump to attention when hearing those words. Lift your leg, open your chest, and bring your feet together were sensible and understandable. Most of the new age cliches, however, got under my skin.

   “Love yourself” was one of the new age cliches. I understand living in your own skin but always thought loving yourself was either narcissism or some kind of mental disorder reserved for celebrities. I sometimes thought being a celebrity might be fun because, if I was boring somebody they would naturally think it was their own fault, they being nobody’s.

   “Inhale the future, exhale the past” was another one. Breathing is breathing. It’s not a trick or a metaphor. It’s a fact of life. Breathing consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep, running a 10K or while doing Chair Yoga, is staying alive. Not breathing for a couple of minutes is losing life’s good luck charm. As for me, whenever I feel blue I go for a walk in the Cleveland Metroparks where the breathing is free and easy.

   What did exhaling the past mean? Exhaling the past would mean puffing away everything you have learned and know. The past informs the present. The past is gone, sure, but it isn’t going anywhere. As for inhaling the future, who can wait that long? When I was on the yoga mat scuffling to keep up, I had to gulp air right now, not in the future. Besides, instructors were always saying, “Be in the present.” Today was yesterday and is going to be tomorrow soon. Every asana, which is what the poses are called, was always right now. Breathing right now is what matters, never mind the past or the future.

   “Letting go is the hardest asana” was hard to take. Nobody who has ever taken a Bikram Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga class can possibly believe this. Bikram in a sweatbox is a torture chamber and Ashtanga is simply torture. After finishing those classes letting go isn’t hard. It is the easiest most wonderful thing in the world to breathe a sigh of relief. I have seen men and women letting go at Bikram Yoga studios and never coming back. What is so hard about letting go and kicking back on the sofa with a cold one after sweating out a gallon of life’s salt water?

   “Release the toxins” was a shopworn chesnut. Hearing it always reminded me of “Release the hounds.” What if I released my toxins and they started attacking others, for God’s sake? The instructors never explained the mechanics of it, except for saying nonsense like toxins come out in perspiration. There is no such thing as toxins that come out in sweat. Anyway, if I knew how to release them, assuming I was keeping toxins prisoner in my own body, I would do so without anybody having to cajole me. 

   The maxim that dazzled and perplexed the most was “It’s all yoga.” It was like saying, “It is what it is.” When I asked what it meant all I got was well-meaning mush that implied yoga was woven into the fabric of life. The life of the Mafia or the Taliban? The life of Nazis and Commies? The zany cesspool of the NRA and MAGA? There are many monsters running rampant who think they are gods and yoga is unquestionably not in their DNA. The nut cases who spill blood at schools and shopping centers with their AR-15’s don’t have a drop of yoga blood in them. They could use it but eschew it in favor of their dark fantasies.

   Even yoga isn’t exactly yoga nowadays. It might have been in the Old World, but much of it in the New World is a hodgepodge of calisthenics, jazzercize, and core work. Some studio owners don’t even bother paying lip service to the ethical and spiritual side of the practice anymore. They have bought in to the capitalist side of yoga by endlessly promoting teacher training, which costs thousands of dollars. Bikram Yoga teacher training, lasting nine weeks, cost ten thousand dollars before Bikram Choudhury fled the country, leaving behind charges of mischief behind closed doors. 

   There are practices like Naked Yoga and We’re Stoned Yoga that have as much to do with yoga as the Three Stooges have to do with Schrodinger’s cat. “Now you see it, now you don’t,” is what the cat says. Better to sleep it off than try to figure it out, although figuring it out isn’t difficult. “A child of five would understand this,” Groucho Marx once said. “Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

   Many yoga masters, like Greg Gumucio and John Friend, oozing sincerity have been the most insincere yogis ever, opting for sex and dollars. They are always banging on Heaven’s door with news of their next Ponzi scheme, except they don’t call them schemes. They call them something like conscious surrender. It is a showboat they sail on the open river, a fishing line leading back to what they are really all about. Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters, especially when the leaders tell you their sole aim in life is to help you. 

   When I looked around the west side of the North Shore it was the haves who were enjoying “It’s all yoga” the most. Those in Rocky River had the time and energy levels. Next door to Rocky River in Lakewood, where I lived, they enjoyed some of “It’s all yoga.” The problem was their income levels didn’t match up, so they didn’t have the same time or energy. The city of Cleveland, where yoga isn’t a halo except for scattered gentrified islands, it wasn’t all yoga, at all. The streets are meaner there and there isn’t the time or money to kid yourself that classes are necessary.

   It was when the head honcho at the yoga studio I went to in Rocky River started trying to convince me I should deepen my practice by taking teacher training that I stopped taking classes there. I was in my late 50s with a bad hip and skeptical about more than a few of the claims of yoga. I wasn’t teacher material, far from it. I was more anarchist than love your neighbor. They didn’t seem to be enlightened enough to see that. I wasn’t grist for the mill, either. I didn’t have the readies teacher training would require just lying around waiting for something to happen.

   I don’t take classes anymore. I practice at home by myself almost every day. There’s nothing complicated about yoga once a few basics have been mastered. It’s easier than grafting plants or installing a garbage disposal. It has lots of benefits to it, like staying in shape and finding some peace of mind. When I get on the mat at home, I get to be me, not what somebody else is telling me I should be, using buzz words that mix up being grounded with pie on the sky.

   That’s the best thing about the practice, the freedom of it, at least once I broke free of the conceits and capitalism of yoga studios.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Vera Nyberg

Not Dead Enough

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By Ed Staskus

   Vera Nyberg was in the middle of a zigzag dream when her cell phone rang. She kept it on the nightstand when sleeping. She let it ring, gathering her senses. Laying on her back she finally pawed for it and held it up over her head so she wouldn’t have to move her head. She saw it was 5:45 in the morning. It was the department. She took the call.

   “It’s my day off,” she said. “This better be good.”

   “Look out your front window,” the man on the other end of the line said. It was Dave Campbell. He was the boss of the Criminal Investigations Unit. He was her boss.

   Her back bedroom faced onto Crest Ln., which was more-or-less an alley. Her front bedroom, which was empty since she hadn’t done anything to it since moving in except paint it, faced onto Riverside Dr. The street overlooked the Rocky River Metropark valley.

   Vera got up and trudged to the front bedroom. One of her cats had been sleeping with her. The other one was sleeping in the front bedroom on one of the windowsills. She went to the open window and looked down. The cat yawned, stretched, and jumped away. What she saw was the street blocked in both directions by Ford Explorer Police Interceptors. Red and blue lights were flashing. There were an ambulance, a rescue truck, and a utility truck, as well. The utility truck had probably come from Station No. 1 on Madison Ave, but the other two vehicles, she thought, must have come from Station No. 2, which was around the corner on Detroit Rd. She had slept through whatever was going on.

   There are more than twelve thousand houses and buildings in Lakewood’s five-square mile footprint on the south shore of Lake Erie. The Fire Department has three stations. The lay of the land means their response times are very good. Vera hadn’t heard any sirens. She had gone out with a friend to the Alley Cat Oyster Bar in the Flats and been the worse for wear when she finally fell into bed. She swam downstream all the night.

   She couldn’t tell what the excitement was about. There were no civilian cars in the street. It couldn’t have been an accident. If it had been a simple  accident she wasn’t likely to be involved, anyway. There wasn’t anybody sprawled out and oozing blood on the asphalt. Two police officers were leaning  over the safety railing on top of the Jersey barrier that bordered the valley side of the street, from where Riverway Ave. dead ended to the corner of West Clifton Blvd. Maybe somebody had fallen into the valley. It was a long way down the cliffside, more than a hundred and fifty feet down.

   “Did somebody fall into the valley?”

   “Go take a look at what we’ve got and get back to me.”

   “All right,” she said, perplexed, She pulled on sweatpants and a light sweater. It was unseasonably cool for the first week of July. She slipped her identification card into her pocket, just in case. She stepped out her front door.

   When she walked into the street sunrise was in full swing. A police officer taking field notes looked her up and down.

   “Rough night Vera?” he asked.

   “It was a very good night,” she said. “It’s a rough morning.”

   “What there is to see is right over there,” the police officer said, leading her to the safety railing.

   She saw a rope tied to the safety railing. When she looked over the railing she saw a man hanging by the neck at the other end of the rope. He was wearing tan cargo shorts and a Cowboy Carter t-shirt. He wasn’t wearing shoes. There wasn’t much else to see. There wasn’t a sign of life to him.

   “The medical examiner should be here in about half an hour,” the police officer said.

   “Who called this in?”

   “Your neighbor one house over.”

   Tim Doyle lived in a large cottage-style house with his wife. They shared their house with two shaggy dogs. He was a professional photographer. He wore his graying hair long and tied back in a ponytail. His wife Colleen was a fine gardener and his business manager. Tim was an early riser.

   “I went across the street to get some shots of the fog on the river,” he said. “I like the half-light early in the morning. I didn’t notice the hanging man at first. I was standing there at the barrier when a turkey buzzard flew over me.” The birds nested in the cliffside. “They’re ugly birds but beautiful in flight. I got a good shot of him. He dove and was coming back up when I saw the man hanging there. I couldn’t see his face too well, but I think I recognize the t-shirt.”

   “We’re going to get him up and wait for the medical examiner,” Vera said. “Are you willing to take a look at him then?”

   “I’ll be on my front porch. I need a cup of coffee.”

   The hanged man was less than three feet down from the edge, although the rope looked longer. Vera saw it wasn’t taut and wondered why. Two firemen began pulling him up by his armpits but stopped. “He’s stuck on something,” one of them said. Vera saw the back of the man’s belt was caught on a small stump jutting out from the cliffside. One of the firemen carefully stretched down and freed the belt from the stump  They pulled him up and laid him down in the street. Vera borrowed a pair of nitrile gloves and began looking the man over. The heels of his bare feet were scuffed and bloody. He was fit but thick around the middle. There was still some color in his face. She thought whatever happened must have happened just before sunrise. There wasn’t anything in his pockets. 

   The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner arrived in twenty minutes. He  was in his late 30s, like her, but lanky and tall. He was six and a half feet tall. Vera was five and a half feet tall. She was always looking up at the underside of his bony chin. His name was Isaac but whenever she saw him she thought of Ichabod Crane. She called him Ichabod, but only out of the man’s earshot.

   He began by crouching over the hanged man and examining his neck. After a minute he frowned. He looked up at Vera.

   “He didn’t die by hanging,” he said. “Ligature marks from hanging typically appear as a groove or furrow encircling the neck, obliquely positioned above the thyroid cartilage and discontinuous at the point of suspension. There are almost no ligature marks and there is no groove.”

   Vera got the gist, ignoring the jargon.

   “So what did he die of?”

   “I’ll show you what I think killed him.”

   He reached into his evidence bag and pulled out a pair of tweezers. He pushed the tweezers up one of the man’s nostrils and extracted a crumb of green fabric.

   “I think he was smothered, probably by a green shaggy pillow,” he said, probing the other nostril. He was still probing it when the man sneezed. Vera jumped back like she had stepped on a snake and the medical examiner almost fell over.

   “What’s going on?” the man groaned.

   “He’s not dead,” Vera said.

   “Apparently not,” the medical examiner said, recovering his poise and checking the man’s vital signs. He checked his pulse. He checked his respiratory rate. He checked his doll’s eye reflex, moving his head gently back and forth and observing his eye movements.

   “He’s definitely alive and seems to be all right, but let’s get him to Fairview as soon as possible,” he said. The Cleveland Clinic Hospital in Fairview Park was five minutes away.

   “Wait,” Vera said.

   She waved across the street at Tim Doyle, who put his coffee cup down and joined them. He looked down at the man.   

   “That’s Bill,” he said. “He lives in that house there.” He pointed to a large house next to another large house on the opposite corner. Both houses faced the valley. “He lives with a partner. His name is Walter, although I call him Wally. He doesn’t like it, but that’s what I call him. He and Bill haven’t been getting along lately.”

   “How do you know that?”

   “I’ve heard the fights in their backyard the past two months. All the neighbors have. Wally’s been in a foul mood lately.”

   “Keep him right here,” Vera said to the medical examiner, pointing at Bill. “When you see me coming back put something over his face.”

   “He needs to go to Fairview the sooner the better.”

   “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

   Vera crossed Franklin Ave., walked to the second house down, and went up the front steps. The house had an old-fashioned slate roof. It had recently been spruced up with shiplap siding. An oak tree kept the house shaded. There were two large, glazed pots of scarlet geraniums flanking the front door. One of them was knocked over. Loose flower petals on the ground looked like spots of dried blood. The blinds in every window were drawn. She rang the doorbell. A man dressed like Jimmy Buffett answered the door. There were two suitcases and a carry-on at his feet. What she could see of the indoors looked dim and gloomy. 

   “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

   “Where to?” Vera asked.

   “The airport.”

   “I’m not your Uber,” Vera said, showing him her identification card.  “Are you Wally?”

   “I’m Walter,” the man said.

   “Before you leave for the airport, I wonder if you would come with me for a minute.”  It wasn’t a request. A police officer had come with her. He was standing behind her.

   “I’m already running late for my flight.”

   “This will only take a minute.”

   They went down the steps when Vera suddenly said, “I forgot something, be right back.” She made a sign the police officer understood and beelined up the steps and into the living room. In the living room she saw two green shaggy pillows on a sofa. Back outside they walked to where Bill was. The medical examiner had covered him with an evidence sheet. He quickly peeked under the sheet and put a forefinger to his lips, signaling Bill to be quiet.

   When they got to the evidence sheet Vera said to Walter, “We discovered a man hanging from the safety rail this morning and we’ve been made aware he lived in the house you also occupy. Would you mind taking a look at the man and see if you can identify him.”

   “Is he dead?” Walter asked.

   Vera didn’t answer. The medical examiner uncovered the face of the man. Walter looked at him and said, “My God, it’s Bill, what happened to him?”

   Bill opened his eyes and said, “You’re what happened to me.”

   Walter was dumbstruck. His face went white. His eyes got big as a tree frog’s. “You can’t be alive. I killed you twice.”

   “I’m not dead enough for you?” Bill asked. “Why did you do it?”

   Walter’s face changed. It got dark. “I loved you for twenty years but you were dumping me for a younger man,” he said. “Where was I going to live? How was I going to live? I took all your money I could get my hands on and I was going somewhere warm and sunny where nobody would ever find me. I hate you. I wish I could kill you again.”

   Vera stepped in front of Walter, told him he was being arrested for attempted murder, and began reading him his rights. Halfway through her recital Walter bolted, dodged two police officers, and ran down Riverside Dr. towards West Clifton Blvd.

   “Oh, for God’s sake, he’s got the brains of a paper cup,” Vera said. “Go get him before he hurts himself.”

   While she waited for Walter to be caught and brought back, the ambulance took Bill to the Cleveland Clinic, the rescue and utility trucks drove off, and all but one of the Police Interceptors left. The medical examiner came over and stood next to Vera, looked down at the top of her head, and said, “Next time make sure they’re dead for real before calling me first thing in the morning.”

   “That’s on me,” Vera said.

   “And stop calling me Ichabod,” he said. “I’m not a schoolmaster, and when it comes to headless horsemen, I’m the one with bone saws, not the other way around.”

Image by Joan Miro.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Crackerjack in the Kitchen

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By Ed Staskus

   “I see you’ve made it back,” Michelle said. She was sporting retro eyeglasses and handcrafted rings on nearly every finger of every hand. Waiting tables, delivering three, four, and five plates at a time, is all hands on deck kind of work.

   “I want to try the pad Thai this time, after seeing the folks next to us digging into it the last time we were here,” Vera said.

   “That’s one of Emily’s best, definitely,” Michelle said. “Would you like to start with a drink?” She was one of three servers on the floor the mid-September evening Frank and Vera Glass were there for dinner. It was busy but nobody had to wait long for liquids and solids. The place was The Mill in New Glasgow on Prince Edward Island.

   “What is a good mixed drink?” Vera asked, running her eyes up and down the menu.

   “Everything is good, but Kim can mix up anything if we don’t have it on the list.”

   “What is Straight Shine?”

   “Shine.”

   “Like moonshine?”

   “Just like that. It’s our island-made moonshine.”

   “Like Ole Smoky in a mason jar?” Frank asked.

   “Not the same, it’s more like a margarita,” Michelle said.

   “That’s a step in the right direction.”

   “My God, I should moonshine,” Vera said. “My grandfather used to make his own vodka at home. All his friends from Lithuania, who escaped during the war, would come over on Sunday afternoons after church, drinking the rest of the day, yakking it up and singing their old country songs all night. I’ll try it, for sure”

   “Not for me,” Frank said, “I’ll have a pint, something IPA.”

   The Mill is in a two-story Dutch Colonial-like blue building built in 1896. It served as a community center and later as a courthouse, among its many incarnations. It was converted to a restaurant in the 1990s by the Larkin’s, nearby poultry farmers who are the largest turkey growers in the province.

   “We used to have a guy in shipping where I worked, in the warehouse, from West Virginia, who brought back moonshine every time he went home for a visit,” Frank said. Vera sipped her Straight Shine. “He always said you could tell it was good if you put a match to it and the flame burned blue. That meant it was good to go and wouldn’t make you go blind.”

   Michelle walked up and lit the tea candle on their table.

   “How is it?”

   “It looks good to me,” Vera said. “What I mean is, it tastes good.”

   When the Larkin’s transitioned out of the dining room business, The Mill stayed where it was when chef Emily Wells took over, putting her fusion-style stamp on the dining room. Diners soon put their stamp of approval on the fare.

   Vera ordered the stir-fried garlic ginger cilantro rice noodle fettucine pad Thai with lobster and Frank ordered the special, which was curry sweet potato soup, baby back ribs with mac and cheese, and dessert. It was East meets West meets Italy. Fusion cooking is the art of mixing ingredients and preparation styles from different cultures into a distinctive plate of tastiness.

   The window Frank and Vera were sitting at had gone dark by the time they finished their dinners, although Vera was still coming around the bend. She was a slow eater and her plate had been stacked. A quarter-moon in a cloudless sky reflected a milky light on the Clyde River below them in the hollow. Frank leaned back in his chair as Vera lifted a final forkful to her mouth.

   “Since we both ordered something new to us, why don’t we try something new for dessert, too?” Frank said.

   They had eaten at The Mill several times and usually ordered coffee and carrot cake after dinner, since the carrot cake was just about the best they had eaten anywhere.

   “It’s better than my mom’s, and she’s a pro,” Vera said.

   Vera’s mother was a freelance pastry chef in Cleveland, Ohio, providing sundry restaurants with sweet treats. During the holidays she made website-ordered Russian Napoleon cakes, shipping them frozen solid all around the country by Fed-Ex next-day air.

   “How about the chocolate cake that couple from Boston told us about?” Vera asked.

   “When we’re here we drive around the island,” the husband from Boston said. “We’ve eaten at a lot of restaurants but overall this is our absolute favorite. What’s so great about it? The unique combination of flavors and menu options, for one, and there’s not a deep fryer in the kitchen, for another thing. They’re dedicated to local sourcing, which means super fresh food and vegetables. Make sure to try the chocolate cake even if you’re full. It melts in your mouth.”

   He added that the portion was large, too, enough to share. Unlike some restaurants with a glowing reputation on Prince Edward Island, in the meantime serving prison camp portions at penthouse prices, The Mill gets it done with a square deal, even though it has as much, if not more, in the culinary arts to crow about.

   “Do you bake the chocolate cake here?” Vera asked.

   “Our baker does,” Michelle said.

   They ordered  a slice of the chocolate cake and two coffees. Michelle stopped at their table. She asked them how they liked the cake.

   “It’s totally delicious, the dark chocolate, if you want to let the baker know,” Frank said. A few minutes later a strapping youngster with disheveled hair walked up to their table. She said she was the baker and her name was Anna. She looked like she was maybe a sweet sixteen teenager.

   “You made this?” Frank asked, pointing to the half-eaten slice of cake he was sharing with his wife.

   “Yeah,” Anna said, wiping her hands on her apron.

   “Do you make the carrot cake, too?”

   “Yeah.”

   “This cake is what chocolate cake should taste like, up-to-the-minute,” “era said. “They can be boring, the same thing over and over again. This is definitely a bomb cake, in more ways than one.”

   “You seem awfully young to be making something this good,”  Frank said.

   “Yeah,” Anna said, shrugging and smiling.

   “How old are you?”

   ““I was 15 years old when I first started cooking here two years ago.. I came in to work one day, I was bussing tables, and my boss said, you’re scaring everybody out there. You have to go into the kitchen. From that point on I’ve worked in the kitchen.”

   “Scaring everybody?” 

   “Yeah, they said my personality was too big.”

   “Too big?” 

   “I was just barely fifteen. How scary could I be? I guess I can be scary sometimes. Nothing’s really changed.”

   “I told her when she worked out front that she was scaring the customers with her huge personality,” Kim, the mixologist, said “Now that she’s in the kitchen she can still be scary, I’ll teel you. She’s come up with nicknames for all of us. We won’t talk about that, though. It can get gross.”

   “What did you guys eat?” Anna asked..

   “She had the Thai and I had the special,” Frank said. “We often have the big seafood chowder bowl, the unofficial one.” 

   “Ahhh,” Anna said.

   “I’ve heard you have a name for it in the kitchen.”

   “We have a nickname for it.”

   “That would be Big Ass Bowl?”

   “Yeah.”

   “I always taste orange in the soup,” Vera said.

   “Yeah, there are orange peels, marinated, and bay leaves, that we take out right before service. We make our own fish broth.”

   The restaurant, brainchild of Emily Wells, who was named one of Canada’s top chefs by the Matador Network in 2016, serves local food made with global flair. She works in an adaptive vein, adapting her recipes to what’s in place and on time. “We’re buying local lettuce, local tomatoes,” Emily said. “A huge chunk of it is seafood since it’s seafood season.” A graduate of the first class at the Culinary Institute of Canada, she cut her teeth in kitchens in Ontario and later made a name for herself at The Dunes in Brackley Beach.

   “I’ve been at it for thirty-five years,” she said.

   “Oh, I’ve got mussels on the stove, back in a minute,” Anna said, striding out of the dining room.

   “I thought Emily was making the desserts, or they were buying them from some high-end bakery,” Vera said.

   “If that teenager is the pastry chef, all I can say is, she’s totally up to speed,”  Frank said.

   “Do you make all the desserts?” Vera asked when Anna came back to their table.

   “Yeah, I’m a line cook and the baker.”

   “My mother is a pastry chef. You’re darned good.”

   “How did you learn to bake so well?” Frank asked.

   “Emily taught me. I‘m a quick study. I learned a lot from my grandmother, too I used to spend all my time with her when I was a kid. She taught me how to pickle and bake.”

   Not everybody is good with pastry, not by any means. Not even celebrity chefs. “I make no bones about it,” says Michael Symon, chef, author, and restaurateur. “I have no understanding of pastry whatsoever.”

   “Honestly, I hate to say this,” Anna said, “but my aunt makes an even better carrot cake than I do.”

   “You’re early on to be nearly as good as your aunt,” Frank said.

   “Most of our staff is young,” Anna said. “Everybody in the kitchen is under 20, except Andrea and Emily. We have a 19-year-old, another 17-year-old, and a 13-year-old, who I   is my sister. Luke, our other prep, has three younger brothers who work here.”

   “It’s like the family line on the line,” Frank said..

   If you are under sixteen in the province of Prince Edward Island and want to work, you must have permission from your parents, must work only between 7 AM and 11 PM, and not work in an environment that is harmful to your health, safety, or moral development, among other things. If you are over sixteen, those limits don’t apply.

   Sometimes known as the Million-Acre Farm, farming is king on the island. Farming for a living is hard work. You probably don’t need a gym membership. There are some advantages. You are your own boss, you can go to work in boots and a t-shirt, and you eat like a king.

   “I started as a dishwasher,” Anna said.

   Working the dish pit means long hours on your feet, getting wet a lot, and ending the day smelling like food and soap. It’s not markedly different than farming, except farming is at the head of the line and washing dishes is at the end of the line.

   “The kids are great,” Kim said. “Ours is a teaching kitchen, so they get an education, and get paid. They all have a great work ethic. The little hostess, she’s fifteen, a crackerjack like Anna. It’s good to see that they want to work. I’ve worked in other places, and it’s like pulling teeth, all standing around. Here, they’re eager to learn and do.”

   “A lot of people, their idea of baking is buying a ready-made mix and throwing in an egg,” Vera said. “I make carrot cake at home, but it’s just carrots and stuff. One of our cats likes a piece now and then. Yours is both simple and complex. It’s subtle, really fine,”

   “The main spices we use are ginger, cloves, and cinnamon, and a bit of all-spice, and that’s about it.”

   “The cake isn’t heavy, which is what I like.”

   “There’s pineapple in it, too.”

   “The frosting is terrific.”

   “I was supposed to whip up more frosting yesterday, but I couldn’t come to work,” Anna said. “I decided my cat must have died.”

   “Oh, my gosh, that’s too bad!”  Vera said. “What happened to make you decide that?”

   “She was an outdoor cat. I had her since I was six, I came home one day and asked, where’s my cat, but nobody had seen her for days. It’s been a month now. I sat outside yesterday in my lawn chair until it got dark, hoping she would come back but she never did. I’m pretty sure she got eaten by a coyote.”

   After paying the bill, Frank and Vera lingered outside at the rail on the front deck. The band that had been playing in the upstairs loft was in the parking lot, still hooting it up. The night air was damp but brisk. The moon hovered in the inky sky. Across the street lights glowed over the bay doors of the New Glasgow Volunteer Fire Department.

   “That girl might be one of the best 17-year-old pastry chefs no one has ever heard of,” ” Frank said.

   “Between the known and the unknown, what else is there?” Vera said.

   “That moonshine seems to have gone to your head,” Frank said.

   “Ha, ha, ha. Anyway, she’s got a big smile, big energy, and some big cake talent. Somebody will hear about her, sooner or later.”

    There’s always a ‘Surprise Inside’ every box of Cracker Jack, Frank thought.

   They walked to the end of the deck leading to the side lot. Fluorescent lights blazed in the windows of the kitchen. Dishes clattered in sinks, the kitchen staff having a gab fest as they cleaned up. They heard high-spirited laughter, which followed them down the steps and a stretch of parking lot gravel to their car. A red fox chasing a brown rabbit ran past them into the bushes. 

   “You know how they say you are what you eat,” Frank said.

   “Of course.”

   “This is as good a place to be what you eat as any.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Head Over Heels

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By Ed Staskus

   It was wetter than not wet the front end of summer and too muddy to ride the single tracks in the Rocky River valley. It rained nine days the first two weeks of July. Instead of the single tracks, I rode my Specialized on the all-purpose trail and left my Schwinn hanging in the garage. The Schwinn was outfitted for dirt, with front shocks and a low stem. The Specialized was outfitted with road tires, knobby on the outside and smooth rolling on the flat side, making for better going on asphalt.

   It made for even faster going down Hogsback Lane, which is the entryway off Riverside Dr. into the valley. It is laid down on a steep shale hill. It’s about a half mile to the bottom. When the shale slumps and slides, the two-lane surface crumbles, and it becomes vital to keep your eyes glued to the road. Hunched over the handlebars I could hit 40 MPH downhill, no problem, unless I feathered the brakes, which I usually did, lessening the chances of flying over the handlebars. That would have been a misadventure.

   I rode alone most of the time, especially that summer because my brother Rick, with whom I occasionally rode, was getting married. He said he didn’t have much time to get on his bike anymore. “I’ve got a lot going on,” he explained. He had been married once before, but it only lasted two months before his bride hit the road.

   “I don’t want him racing that crazy hill and crashing,” his fiancée Amy said. She didn’t want a train wreck walking down the aisle with her. She and Rick had met earlier in the year on a blind date. One whirlwind after another led to the one-way street they were on.

   “You be careful, too” my wife said, watching me hitching up in the backyard.

   The summer of 1995 was hot, in the high 80s when it wasn’t in the high 90s. I could have ridden the single tracks, since they had dried up going into August, but I stayed on the all-purpose trails. Towards the end of one week, after getting home from work, I rode twelve miles out, almost all the way to Berea. It was on the way back that I passed a man wearing a red helmet. Inside a few minutes the red helmet was behind me, drafting, but when I slowed down for a car at the crossroads to the entrance of Little Met, he slipped past me when the car paused to let us go by. The trail went up a long hill. I finally caught up at the top.

   He tucked in behind me and we rode to where the trail zigzagged through some curves  where he got sloppy. He tried to pass two women on roller blades, except on an inside-out curve, and when another bike came up on the other side, he had to slalom wide onto the grass. He had to loop back.

   “That was a good pace,” he said before I peeled away to go home, while he kept going his own way. Pedaling up Hogsback Lane is a long slog, which is what I did, shifting into lower gears. By the time I got close to the crest I was on the verge of stalling. When I made it to flat land I sucked air, returning to the land of the living.

   The next weekend Rick had an appointment for a haircut at Planet 10, on W. 9th St. and wanted to ride there. We rode through Ohio City to Church St. He pointed out an old church whose rectory had been converted into a recording studio. “That’s where we’re having our reception,” he said. Amy was a sometime actress and sometime singer. She had the looks and the voice. She made a living doing nails, since nailing roles in Cleveland wasn’t a paying proposition. Her showbiz earnings were her drinking money.

   Rick was Roman Catholic and of Lithuanian stock, like me, but they were getting married in an Episcopalian church instead of the ethnic church where we had grown up. Even though Amy was an atheist, her well-off grandmother wasn’t and wanted her to be married in a house of God. Amy didn’t like the old Lithuanian church in North Collinwood, so it was going to be someplace else.

   We went south on W. 25th St., crossed the bridge to Jacobs Field, and rode to the Warehouse District. The bride-to-be was still all right with Rick riding city streets, but not any farther into the near east side, which I often did, to Cleveland Hts. through the ghetto along Cedar Rd. She quashed that by stamping her foot. “I don’t want him getting killed by any porch monkey,” she said.

   Rick pushed his bike into Planet 10’s lobby and I rode away. After zigzagging around downtown, on my way home, stopping at a narrow strip of grass near the Hope Memorial Bridge, squeezing a drink from my water bottle, I saw a black woman with shopping bags easing herself down to a patch of grass at the side of an RTA sign. She looked up at me and smiled. One of her teeth was chipped. She was probably going back to the ghetto where she would make plans to ambush Rick if he ever rode his bike past her house.

   I was standing outside my garage when Rick and Amy pulled up in her baby blue Ford Tempo. His bike was sticking out of the trunk. The trunk was bungee cord shut. “Jerry screwed up Rick’s appointment,” she complained. “He’s so unprofessional.” She jabbed the air with a finger. She was angry. She reminded me of Jayne Mansfield in the movie “The Wayward Bus.”

   Planet Ten was owned and operated by a gay man named Jerry who was a junkie. He lived near Gordon Square where he could score smack in the blink of an eye. He was up-and-down on any given day. He was good with clippers and shears, though, when he was on the up-and-up.

   It was mid-week before I rode back into the valley and got on the dirt trails that branch off from the horse stables at Puritas Rd. They were dry where they were level, but they weren’t level over much. I had to ford a stream where a tree had fallen. I jumped some baby stumps and went sideways once. When I got home I got the hose and sprayed cold water on myself. It was a hot day and I had gotten hot.

   My wife and I drove to Amy’s bridal shower that weekend, which was at her best friend’s house in Avon Lake. Wendy was a big-faced woman married to a ruddy-faced man who was a barge pilot on the Mississippi River. It was a very steamy that day, even though it was just barely August. I was sitting on a leather sofa in the air-conditioned family room when I noticed a small dog on the coffee table. I couldn’t tell if it was a dog dead asleep or a dead dog who had been stuffed. When I reached for whatever the thing was, it snapped at my fingers.

   “You better watch out,” Wendy said. “He’s blind, so he bites at everything.”

   I went for a spin after we got home. Twilight was turning to dusk by the time I got back. Snapper, our Maine Coon cat, came running out of the neighbor’s backyard. Just when I was ready to close the garage door, Rick pulled into the driveway. Snapper ran the other way. He didn’t trust my brother. I had gotten to not exactly trusting him anymore, either. He was always explaining something or other.

   “Can I borrow your lawn mower?” he asked.

   “All right, but bring it back.”

   He was notorious for never returning borrowed tools. He had Kate, Amy’s three-year-old daughter, with him. I picked her up, held her upside down, and spun her by her heels in circles. When we were done we talked about a nickname for her, finally settling on Skate.

   “It rhymes with Kate,” I said. She waved goodbye through the window of the car as Rick pulled out with the lawn mower. If the child hadn’t been with him I wouldn’t have lent him the mower. That was probably why he brought her along. He was shrewd that way.

   By mid-August cumulus clouds were dotting the sky and the weather was surprisingly cooler. I rode my Schwinn down Hogsback Lane and got off the all-purpose trail at Mastick Woods, veering onto the dirt track there. I rode the track and then double-backed on the horse trail. As I did, I noticed somebody was coming up. When he went by I saw he was wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet and was on a Trek. He was riding fast, and even though I followed him as best I could, I couldn’t catch him until he suddenly slowed down. I saw why when he pulled up. Horses were coming around a bend. We waited as the nags cantered past.

   The baseball cap turned to the right and rode into the trees toward the river and the single tracks on the bank. I followed him, bumping over ruts and logs and through underbrush, but soon lost sight of him. He pushed up the hill running along Big Met, then down, and as he came into the clear jumped onto the trail. He had gone around and was riding faster than before. We sped through a thicket, then across a baseball field where he widened the gap by jumping a wood guardrail, something I couldn’t do, even if I tried as hard as I could. It would have ended badly. I went around. It went well enough.

   I thought I might catch the baseball cap on the Detroit Rd. climb out of the valley, except he climbed so fast I lost more ground. I finally caught up to him where he was waiting at a red light. “I wasn’t planning on doing much today, but it ended up being a fun ride,” he said. “I saw the Vytis decal on your fender.” There was a red decal of the Lithuanian coat of arms on my rear X-Blade fender. 

   “Not many people know what that is.”

   “I know my Baltic heroes,” he said, waving goodbye.

   JoJo was Amy’s friend who had arranged the blind date when Amy had been on the prowl after her latest divorce. She was promised she could be the maid of honor if the date led to anything. She was a travel agent. Amy gave her a cash down payment for a Cancun honeymoon. But then the travel agency called and said they were getting anxious about the down payment, since they hadn’t received it, yet. When Rick telephoned JoJo she said she hadn’t gotten any cash, but when Amy overheard that she rushed to the phone. There was a heated argument and JoJo somehow found the money. The honeymoon was back on. JoJo as bridesmaid was off.

   The next day Rick called. “Are you going riding?” he asked.

   “I’m just going out the door,” I said.

   “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I need some fresh air.”

    I was working out the kinks in my lower back when Rick rode up the driveway.

   “Amy’s sick,” he said.

   “What’s wrong with her?”

   “Cramps,” he said. “I think it’s nerves.”

   “Let’s go,” I said.

   The sky was overcast and gusts from the southwest pushed us around as we rode on the rim of the valley. We glided down and rode single tracks. The ruts were bad but we rode fast enough. My back wheel went in wrong directions a few times. Rick held back. He didn’t want to face plant.

   “A little out of control there,” he said when we crossed over to a horse path and relaxed.

   “Maybe a little,” I said.

   “I want to make it to the altar in one piece,” he said.

   “Getting married is risky business,” I said. “Take a look at you and Amy. You were married once and it only lasted two months. Amy’s been married twice. She’s got a kid by one of the husbands and another kid by a free agent. You might want to throw caution to the wind between now and the wedding day.”

   “I don’t think so,” he said, shooting me an aggrieved look. 

   “Then keep your eyes wide open before the wedding and half-shut afterwards.”

   Leaving the valley Rick suddenly braked ahead of me. I got tangled up in his back tire and went over the handlebars. I skinned my knee, but we were going too slow for much else to happen. “Crash test dummies,” a watching crow squawked. It took me longer to put my derailleur chain, which had fallen off, back on than it did to get over my injuries. The chain was trapped against the frame. I had to loosen the rear wheel. I cleaned my greasy hands on some of last year’s fallen leaves.

   The morning of the wedding, while my wife went shopping for a gift, I sped down into the valley. I felt good, but a strong crosswind was blowing and I got tired. The bike felt sloppy, too. Going home I pushed hard because I didn’t want to be late for the ceremony. When I finally got home I found out I had been riding on a nearly flat back tire.

   The wedding went off without a hitch, but during the reception, when my wife was congratulating him, Rick made the shape of a handgun with his hand, with his index finger pressed to his temple. The next day I drove to his house with the gift we had forgotten to bring to the reception. Amy was lounging in the living room in a thick white bathrobe, poring over Cancun brochures. Skate was in her pajama’s watching SpongeBob Squarepants.

   “How’s the new life?’

   “Couldn’t be better.”

   By the beginning of October the valley was starting to glow with maple red. One Sunday morning my wife and I had breakfast down the street at the Borderline Café and went for a walk together on the horse trails behind South Mastick. That night, while we were watching a movie on TV, Rick called.

   “I won’t be able to ride anymore.”

   “Amy?” 

   “No, it’s my shoulder.”

   I had noticed how he couldn’t lift his right arm above his head without trying hard. “After any ride,” he said, “any ride at all, potholes or no potholes, my shoulder is in a lot of pain. I’ve been taking Celebrex, but my doctor told me it’s rubbing bone on bone. There’s almost no cartilage left. He said sometime in the next couple of years, depending on how fast the rest of it goes, I’ll need a replacement shoulder.”

   “Oh, man!” I exclaimed.

   The last Saturday of the month was the last day of the year I rode in the valley. It was getting too wet and cold. I was adjusting the strap on my helmet when some neighborhood boys and girls came walking up with rakes, brooms, and a wagon. They asked if they could rake our yard for $5.00. They started pushing wet leaves into piles. The biggest of the girls walked up to me.

   “Mister, can I ask you something?” she said.

   “Sure,” I said.

   “That small boy,” she said pointing to a small boy. “He’s having an emergency.”

   I rang the doorbell for my wife. She came outside, saying she would take care of the boy, who was doing a potty dance, and supervise the raking. “Go before it gets dark,” she said. It was getting dark earlier and earlier. It would soon be dark the minute I got off work at 5 PM.

   I cut across a field where Hogsback Lane intersects with the Valley Parkway and rode onto a single track. It was littered with slapdash. A flock of Canadian geese went by overhead. They honked at me. I came around a quick bend and the branches of a fallen tree on the side of the track jabbed at my face. I swerved to the left and pulled on the brakes, jumping off the bike when the tree I was going to run into became the tree I ran into. I landed on my feet. The bike was good to go when I picked it up, thank God.

   On the way home I rode on the road, instead of the trail, hugging the shoulder’s white line. A man in a Ford F-150 pick-up leaned on his horn behind me, and when he went past, tried to shrug me off the road, giving me his middle finger for good measure. Some people are sons of bitches. There’s no getting around it. At home I hosed off the Schwinn and hung it up in the garage. I checked the tires. They looked good, although I knew hanging upside down in the garage all winter long the air would slowly seep out of them.

   When you ride with somebody you’ve got to wait until they’re as ready as you are. When you ride by yourself you can go whenever your bike is ready. Nobody wants to be alone, but sometimes you just need to be left alone. I did yoga at home that winter to give my lower back a helping hand. I went to classes sometimes even though I couldn’t abide the pie in the sky talk. I had an indoor bike and pedaled on it. I would have to pump up my road bike tires the coming April before going back into the valley. When I did, I would keep my eyes on the road ahead, not looking back, feeling for the smell of springtime after a long winter.

   I never did ride with Rick again, even though he and Amy didn’t work out. They got divorced and she drank herself to death. Another blind date got him married a third time to a stiff-necked school teacher whose husband had left her. She didn’t like my looks. She didn’t want me to be a part of their happy family. I didn’t mind. One of her grown-up sons was a gun nut and the other one was white bread. Leaving them alone to grind their teeth was for the best. I slapped on a shaggy dog smile whenever I saw them and left it at that.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

X Marks the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   As many times as I met Matt X. Sysack was as many times I didn’t meet his father Russell X. Sysack. Matt was my brother-in-law’s best friend. They met during their freshman year at St Ignatius High School on Cleveland’s near west side. My wife and I and my brother-in-law and Matt often went out together to weekend breakfasts, to shows, and to haunted houses. We went to honky-tonks to listen to the rock and roll band my brother-in-law played lead guitar for. After the two young men finished college and started on career tracks, they decided to not be too serious about life, at least not just yet. They decided to be fun guys while there was still some fun to be had.

   Neither of them lived on their own at the time. When they bought motorcycles they kept them in our garage. When they bought a Jet Ski together they kept it and its trailer in our garage. They launched the Jet Ski from Eddy’s Boat Harbor in the Rocky River Metropark a couple of minutes from our garage. We called the Metropark by its local name, which was the Valley. There was a bait shop at Eddy’s that sold ice cream. I had a cone one day while I watched the Sunday sailors launch their craft.

   It was only a couple thousand feet down the river to Lake Erie and fun riding the waves, except when they ran out of gas a half-mile out on the lake. When they did they discovered there wasn’t a paddle on board. A Good Samaritan in a power boat threw them a towline and got them safely to shore. It wasn’t long after that before they stopped cranking the throttle on the craft’s impeller. 

   Both Matt and my brother-in-law eventually sold their motorcycles and their Jet Ski and mothballed fun and games for the foreseeable future. “Hustle it up” is what they said. They put their noses to the grindstone. Matt’s father, Russell, always had his nose to the grindstone. He was a hard-working man with a family to support. At the same time, he never put his irreverent sense of fun away. He wasn’t going over the hill anytime soon. He knew over the hill meant picking up speed on the other side.

   Russell X. Sysack was born in Cleveland and went to John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in University Hts. After graduation he became co-owner and manager of the family business, Sysack Sign Co., in Old Brooklyn on Cleveland’s near west side. He sported a Waylon Jennings beard and overalls at work. The work he did was hand-painted signs, from small displays to big-size displays. When Russell’s father Harry X., who opened the business in 1940, punched the time clock for the last time, Russell took over. Over the years the Sysack Sign Co. gave the high life to innumerable storefronts.

   Russell mixed business with pleasure. He was a libertarian and provocateur, more in your face than subtle. He was outspoken. He was subtle as a sledgehammer. His signs were everywhere around northeastern Ohio. In the meantime, he had his own op-ed billboard at the front of his sign shop. It was across the street from a public library. His work for others expressed what their goods and services were about. His personal billboard was where he expressed himself. It was where he expressed himself In 2002 when he compared Martin Luther King, Jr. to Osama bin Laden. The comparison let the terrorist play his own tune; it insulted Martin Luther King, Jr. The billboard was set on fire one night. The Cleveland Police wrote up an incident report and filed it. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones led a protest march. 

   “Mr. Sysack has said that over the years he’s been sued and received bomb threats because of his signs,” the Sun Press reported. Russell explained his resilience by saying “I take the right of free speech very seriously.” Stephanie Tubbs Jones wasn’t having any of it. “The right to free speech is limited,” she said. Nobody is allowed to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater, she added. The First Amendment doesn’t protect words “that incite people to violence.”

   The community was divided. “Those signs were the highlight of my day when I was stuck in traffic on W. 25thSt.,” Anna Namoose said. For some, his words were signposts. “I love his truthfulness,” Dale Bush said. “Sorry if the truth hurts.” Some were perplexed. “Every time I see his signs I’m struck with the same thought,” ‘Silent Dot’ said. “Sir, what do you think happens next? Do you think that someone driving by will stop and read your sign and go ‘Holy cow!’ this guy with the sign is a genius. I’m going to drive to the State House to speak my mind right now!” Others were outraged. “I hope your racist business closes,” Monica Green said. Some took an art school approach. “This is a special kind of batshit insane outsider art,” Adam Ohio said.

   One man, at least, took a philosophical approach. “Russell Sysack has been in our consciousness since the ’80s,” Tim Ferris said. “He really got going on issues in the ’90s when Mayor Mike White began compromising the public interest. He might be extreme, but he’s necessary. He forces us to think back towards a middle position. By temperament, perhaps by training, he’s a cartoonist, and it’s his purpose to distort and amplify so as to reveal or enlighten. We shouldn’t take cartoons too literally. Those who do, do so with the intent of silencing him. We also need to realize that we can’t look for good taste when it comes to addressing outrageous or extreme abuses. He speaks to big problems, and he uses strong talk.”

   He posted his strong talk on his personal billboard year after year and appeared regularly on local mouth-foam talk radio. His targets were Martin Luther King, Jr., the city’s African American mayors, and Black History Month. Politicians weren’t his favorite creatures. If they were Democrats, so much the worse for them. He celebrated Edward Kennedy’s death on his personal billboard, despite the Massachusetts senator being still very much alive. Public education and the Catholic church were targets of his ire. Anything new-fashioned was fair game. He compared environmentalists to Nazis. “The only way to make the earth green and stop global warming is for all humans to die” was what one sign said.

   The near west side sign man worked in the “Simon Sez” tradition even though he worked outside of the tradition.  Buddy Simon was the sign man on the near east side of town. He hung a “Simon Sez” sign outside his Carnegie Ave. shop every week for more than 30 years. They were usually wry and funny observations about the way we live today. He kept his nose out of race, religion, and politics. He stayed on the Mr. Rogers side of the street. Nobody ever set any of his signs on fire. 

   Russell X. Sysack was more of a soapbox man than Buddy Simon, although his soapboxing was more diatribe than not. He was a worried man singing a worried song. He was worried about how the present was going to affect the future. He stood by Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

   Splashing his op-ed sign on the street where everybody could see it, he wasn’t holding back.  He said he standing up for the taxpayer and the small businessman. He told anybody who would listen he was a defender of the American way of life, by which he meant capitalism. He said he was a patriot. He was met with threats, vandalism, and litigation. There were widespread complaints of racism. “I’m just expressing my opinion,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city’s morning newspaper. 

   In this corner, still undefeated, it was Russell X. Sysack’s long-held opinions and beliefs. He didn’t need a referee. He gave as good as he got, even though his facts weren’t always reliable. Free speech advocates argued he was entitled to his own opinion. His detractors said he wasn’t entitled to his own facts. “Opinion has caused more trouble on this earth than plagues and earthquakes,” said the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire. The trouble with opinion is, more often than not, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinion. The White House under the thumb of a latter-day rabblerouser testifies to the trouble that can ensue.

   In retirement, Russell X. Sysack became a crossing guard for the Parma schools, working the streets in his neighborhood. He helped children cross the street safely. His presence made parents feel easy in their minds about their children walking to school. He reminded drivers in no uncertain terms of the presence of underage pedestrians. Nobody was ever run down on his watch. Pity the fool who tried to barrel down the road at 21 MPH.

   After he stepped aside from the sign company his sister Nancy took over the business, She lived in a house attached to the back of the sign shop. She was a chip off the old block. She kept up the family practice of posting the Sysack point of view on the op-ed billboard in front of their building. One of them had to do with migrants.

   “The head of DHS is a Communist & a Treasonist. On May 11th he will open the southern border. No illegal will be refused entry. US troops will transport them to every city in the US. They went to Panama to organize this invasion using NGO’s & the cartels with taxpayer money. 8 million will enter this country by year’s end from 150 countries. China has warships in the Bahamas. The plan is to overwhelm our system, crash our economy, and create a national emergency. There will be a fundamental change of our country into Communism. What are u going to do about this invasion?” 

   As it happened, nobody did anything because there were no Chinese warships in the Bahamas and no US troops were escorting anybody anywhere. The secret messages and conspiracies went up in smoke. The invasion was a nonstarter. Nancy went back to the drawing board.

   Her “Ugly Ugly Ugly” sign ruffled more than one feather in 2017.  It featured a woman’s wide open Rolling Stones-like mouth outlined in bright red lipstick. It said “All Women Are Beautiful Until They Open Their Mouth” and listed some women the sign maker considered loudmouths. It was in the tradition of bad taste making more millionaires than good taste.

   “The sign suggests women only have, or their mouths in particular, only have one purpose, and I find that greatly offensive,” said Christopher Demchak, one of the organizers of a demonstration. “Particularly in this political climate and particularly when young children and families are driving by.” The protestors were hoping a demonstration would influence the sign company to stop posting offensive content. They didn’t know who they were going up against.

   “We don’t want to cover up this message and stop somebody’s voice, since this was a woman who put this message out, interestingly enough,” said Christen DuVernay, the other organizer. “But, we do want to provide alternative messages for young girls in the community to say ‘your voice does matter.'” 

   President Barack Obama became the dartboard for Nancy’s darts when he was elected. “Now that red-necked and facist America elected Obama on a campaign of change, will blacks show their gratitude & change? Hell no. Will Jesse Jackson & Rev. Al stop being racists? Hell no. Will blacks stop using slavery as an excuse? Hell no.”

   When Russell invoked the First Amendment one of the things he meant was, if you can guarantee never offending anybody, you don’t need the amendment. It doesn’t guarantee you the right to be heard, though. Nobody has to read or listen to anything you have to say. All media has an on-off switch, even billboards, Look the other way if it rubs you the wrong way. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the message blows.

   Russell X. Sysack died in 2009. He was in his mid-60s. He had run whatever race he was running. Wherever he has ended up, with the stand-up saints or the fallen angels, he is undoubtedly making his idiosyncratic voice heard, loud and clear.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

All in the Family

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   By Ed Staskus

   Matt Poska twisted around in his seat, glaring at and swatting his brother’s hand off his shoulder. “Keep your hands off me” he said. “Who the hell do you think you are? You touch me again, there’s going to be trouble.” He couldn’t have been more to the point, although he didn’t necessarily want there to be a fight. He wanted his brother, however, to know exactly how he felt. Matt hadn’t trusted him for a long time and now disliked him on top of it. He knew having finally sold their mother’s house that push was coming to shove. The sooner the better, he thought.

   Ignoring Matt, his brother extended a warm salesman’s smile and a firm hand to the attorney on the other side of the big desk. “Call me Ray,” Raimondas said. He shook hands with the attorney. Ray’s new teeth glistened like Chiclets. His thinning hair was combed straight back.

   “You’ve got a nice tan for this time of year,” the attorney said. His hair was streaked with gray, his skin was grayish, and he was wearing a dark suit that might have been gray. A blizzard was blowing in from Lake Erie. The attorney’s back was to the window. Matt glanced through the window at snow whirling in the cold.

   “The wife and I just got back from two weeks in Jamaica,” Ray said. “We had a great time, great place.”

   “How’s the new car?” Ruta asked, shooting a venomous glance at her brother.

   “Couldn’t be better, drives like a charm, no problems.”

   “Just so I am clear about this, you three are related, brothers and sisters?” the attorney asked.

   “We used to be related,” Matt said.

   Their mother Irena’s problems began the day after their father’s funeral. She lost her appetite and couldn’t sleep. She had been married for sixty four years. She met her husband-to-be in Germany in a refugee camp after World War Two. They met again after both of them emigrated to the same small mining town in Canada. There had been no future for them in Europe. There were good-paying jobs in the Sudbury Basin. They got married in 1949 and were able to get into the United States in the late 1950s. It was where they raised their three children. They had been hard-working and by and large happy.

   Irena fell down in the kitchen in the middle of the night two years after her husband died. She had been thirsty and looking for something cold in the fridge. She fractured her right leg and lay on the ceramic tile floor until Ruta found her in the morning. She spent ten days at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, two weeks recuperating at the Welsh Home in Rocky River, and a month of physical therapy at home.

   A year later she was back on her feet. She and Ruta visited relations in Toronto. She drove some of the way there and back on the New York Thruway. But the next year she had a mini-stroke and never drove again. Ray’s son Tyler convinced her to give up her Ford Taurus, telling her it was unsafe for her to be on the road. “You shouldn’t be driving,” Ray piped in. She signed it over to Tyler, but was sorry to see it gone. The car had represented independence, whether she drove it or not.  After it was gone she rarely left the house.

   Tyler immediately sold the Ford Taurus, even though it was more new than not. He bought a Toyota 4Runner. “This is more like it, not like that granny mobile,” he told his girlfriend. She didn’t like it when he told her to keep her dog out of the SUV, especially when he called her dog a mutt.

   When Irena caught Covid-19 she spent three weeks at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon. She was never the same after she got home. She had been in good health all her life, having grown up on a farm in Lithuania, but she was in her 90s. She craved salt, even though she had high blood pressure. Ray indulged her craving for it.

   “Stop bringing her those salted nuts,” Matt told his brother every time he saw a bowl of them in the house. “Are you trying to kill her?” He was exasperated. He threw the nuts away, but they always came back, along with bags of Malley’s chocolates and bottles of Gatorade.

   When she died the cause of death was listed as natural causes. Her last week was spent talking with ghosts during her wakeful hours and lost in dreams the rest of the time. Broken mirrors littered her memories. The real world no longer meant anything to her. Her greatest desire was to join her husband. Her last day was spent shutting down. She was tired and died of old age.

   Matt, Ray, and Ruta were in Saul Ammon’s legal office in the Marlowe Building on Detroit Ave. in downtown Lakewood, Ohio. Matt and Ruta both lived in Lakewood. Their mother had lived further west in well-heeled Rocky River. Their brother Ray lived in a new development in Sheffield Lake, even further west. They had sold their mother’s house, but Ray hadn’t lived up to their mother’s will. He had given Matt and Ruta half of what the will spelled out. He told them he was the trustee and had power of attorney and was doing what he thought best.

   “You mean best for you, like stealing all of mom’s savings and CD’s,” Ruta said. She was seething.

   Ray shrugged it off like it was something everybody did. He was never going to give his siblings access to their mother’s financial records. He wasn’t going to give them any of the nearly two hundred thousand dollars he had realized on the sly in the past two years. He wanted it to be understood he had his reasons, but he wasn’t going to talk about them. They didn’t need to know anything, although he wanted everybody to know he was honest as the day was long. 

   “Mom said she wanted to pay me for everything I was doing for her.”

   “You’re saying she paid you so much in two years that on the day she passed away she had less than nine thousand dollars left in the bank,” Ruta said. “She wasn’t a fool and I’m not a fool, either. Where are all her savings? If she hadn’t died she would have found out she was a pauper. How was she going to pay her bills?”

   “I have to take care of Tyler.”

   Ray’s son Tyler was a part-time drug dealer and a full-time party boy. He wasn’t able to stay out of jail or hold down a steady job. He had been fired from one job after another for thievery and lack of effort. Ray had been paying Tyler’s rent and bills for almost a year.

   “I took care of mom 24/7,” Ray said.

   “You are a liar,” Ruta said. “I was at her house every day. When she broke her leg I lived with her for a month. When she got a stroke I lived with her for another month. When she got the Covid I lived with her again. All I ever saw you do was run in, make her the same ham and cheese sandwich day after day, make sure she had taken her medications, and run out. You never stayed more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

   “How about all the times I took her to see doctors?”

   “I took her most of the time.”

   “I did everything for mom but nobody appreciates it. Matt didn’t do anything.”

   “Let’s stop arguing and get down to business,” Matt said. “I’m not going to go after you for what you did with mom’s Third Federal accounts. Our lawyer has told us it would be costly and time consuming. I don’t want it preying on my mind for however many years it might take.”

   Ruta didn’t say anything. Matt had asked her to sit tight until they wrapped up getting their share of the proceeds from the sale of their mother’s house. She had agreed, although she hadn’t told him she had talked to the Lakewood Law Department about elder abuse. She was going to someday make Ray pay for what he had done.

   Ray had been a problem for a long time. In the 1980s he fell deep in debt to a bookie who worked out of a back room at the Mentor Diner. Day after day none of his horses paid off. His bookie kept a strict ledger and got impatient. When Ray got married to a rich girl from Columbus their wedding reception was a gala. At the end of the day they had collected nearly forty two thousand dollars. Ray paid his bookie the thirty nine thousand dollars he owed him but neglected to tell his wife about it. When she started shopping for a house, planning the down payment, he had to spill the beans. They had been married fifty eight days on that day. She left him on the fifty ninth day and went home to Columbus. He never saw her again. The divorce was certified by mail.

   He dated several women after that, each one of them breaking it off with him after a year-or-so. He finally married Anita, a Jayne Mansfield with a family, who were two children by two passing boyfriends. They had a third child, who was Tyler. Anita was a beautician and a part-time actress. She was also an alcoholic. Three years after they divorced she drank herself to death. Ray married a woman named Karen soon afterwards. They both believed greed was good and lived the good life together.

   Ray put his greed to work when it dawned on him his mother had dementia and was dying. Her trustee was a second cousin who had long worked for Jones Day, one of the biggest law firms in the United States. Ray’s wife had a nephew who was an ambulance chaser in Pittsburgh. He drew up new trustee paperwork. Irena signed the documents without knowing what she was signing. The ambulance chaser also drew up new power of attorney paperwork. Irena signed those documents, too. Ray became the trustee and got power of attorney into his hands.

   He took the new power of attorney paperwork to a hair salon. Ray knew the manager from his marriage to Anita. He asked her to witness the document. She did, and so did a customer they asked, in return for a bottle of shampoo. Ray was pleased with his work that day, although he didn’t know his sister Ruta got her hair done at that same salon. One day, in passing, the manager told her about Ray and the documents. Ruta wrangled affidavits from her and the customer.

   “We have got two separate affidavits that swear you got their signatures on the power of attorney documents fraudulently,” Matt said. “They say mom was never present for them to witness her signature.”

   The lawyer pushed the two affidavits across his desk. Ray didn’t look at them. He looked at Matt.

   “What do you want?” he asked. 

   “You used your power of attorney to empty mom’s accounts at Third Federal but I don’t want to drive myself crazy over that,” Matt said. “What I want is, I want you to pay us the full amount that Ruta and I are due from the sale of the house, like it says in mom’s will.”

   “And if I don’t?”

   “If you don’t I will leave this office, go to City Hall, and file a criminal complaint with the Clerk of Court.” 

   “Can we make a deal?” Ray asked.

   “I’m not selling any alibis,” Matt said.

   “Remember me? I’m your brother.”    

   “I’ve got better things to do than remember you. Save your breath to cool your soup.”

   “Give me a break.”

   “No,” Matt said. “The banks are open right now. We’ll wait one hour. Bring certified checks. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll go straight to City Hall.”

   “You know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ray said, beside himself. “This is just a rip-off. I need that money. Tyler needs it, too. Karen might divorce me if she finds out about this, do you know that? Is that what you want? You want to see me homeless? The two of you, you’re both evil.”

   “Is that so?” Matt said. He knew Ray’s talk was horseradish.

   Ray shot Matt a dirty look. He was the kind of mother’s son who got mad when anybody didn’t believe whatever he was saying. Ray believed everything he conjured up, no matter what. He couldn’t distinguish between truth and lies anymore and so he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong anymore. To be on the safe side, whenever he caught himself telling the truth, he reflexively told an untruth to keep his hand in. 

   It was a few minutes short of an hour when Ray returned and tossed two certified checks down on the lawyer’s desk. Matt slid one over to his sister.

   “You know we’re never going to see each other again after this,” Ray said, vexed and angry. Everybody’s got plans until you get hit in the face, he thought to himself bitterly.

   “That doesn’t make any difference anymore,” Matt said. “Go away and stay away.”

   “I can’t believe he would do that to mom,” Ruta said when Ray was gone. “Everything about this is too bad, really bad, but I don’t think he’s ever going to change. He’ll just find somebody else to fleece and blame whoever is handy.”

   “You’re probably right,” Matt said. “At least the joker has left the building,”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Flesh and Blood

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BETWEEN THE WARS.jpeg

By Ed Staskus

   The day Angele Jurgelaitis knocked on her aunt’s door in the spring of 1944 the sky was clear and sunny. Ona Kreivenas lived on a farm near Alvitas, where she taught grade school and had a family on her hands. There were four children, Mindaugas, Carman, Ramute, and the youngest, Gema. None of them were older than Angele. Even Mindaugas, the eldest, was three years younger than their sixteen year-old cousin from Gizai.

   Gizai is twelve miles from Alvitas, which is a village on a lake of the same name. It is on a main road. Angele had walked there. There was a parish church built of stone, an elementary school, more than thirty houses, a general store, neighboring farmsteads, and almost four hundred inhabitants. None of them knew what was coming, although they all knew.

   When Ona came to the front door she was by herself. She had been deprived of her husband. He had been transported to Siberia by the Russians. “He was a police chief,” Angele said about her uncle, Jonas Kreivenas. “The Russians took him. He didn’t do anything bad. It didn’t matter, they just took him away.”

   Ona had since then become austere. “She was pretty, like a doll, but I was afraid of her. She could be very mean. I broke a dish one day and was scared to death of what she would say when she found out.” Her aunt welcomed the teenaged girl, who she had been half-expecting, if not warmly, at least with a measure of relief.

   Angele had spent the day walking to her aunt’s house from her family’s farm, where she had decided she could no longer live with the stepmother her father had married two months before, six months after her mother’s death from pneumonia. She left three older brothers and a sister behind. Ona put her to work caring for her young children, among other things.

   The Russians initiated arrests and deportations in 1940, after the Red Army occupied Lithuania and the adjacent Baltic countries. The Russians targeted government officials, nationalists, the well-to-do, Catholics, policemen, and everyone else they dubbed an “anti-Soviet element.” If you were a party member, you were going to prosper. If you weren’t, a Siberian slave labor camp might be in the cards.             

   “I had a friend not far from our farm whose father was a blacksmith, who couldn’t even read or write. When the Russians came they threw out the mayor in the town where they lived and made the blacksmith the mayor because he was a communist. Everyone high up, they threw out.”

   Mass arrests began a year later on the night of June 13, 1941. when NKVD men fanned out across the country, scooping up men and women and entire families, carrying them to Vilnius. Jonas Kreivenas was among the first arrested. Nearly twenty thousand Lithuanians were forced into the boxcars of trains on June 19th  and railroaded to the far end of Russia. Three days later the Wehrmacht invaded Lithuania, the Luftwaffe catching the Soviet air force unaware on the ground and destroying it. By mid-week the Germans had swept all resistance aside. The Russians were out. The Germans were in. 

   “The Germans weren’t good, but life was better for us. At least they didn’t deport us. Most of us hated the Russians.”

   A puppet Lithuanian government was put in place. It soon became clear that the German occupiers held all the power. Lithuanian Jews began to bear the brunt of the occupation. They were forced to wear yellow stars and their money and property was taken away. Worse was in store.

   Before Jonas Kreivenas was deported by the Russians he had gotten everything he needed to build an indoor bathroom, lumber, tiles, fixtures, a sink, toilet, and a bathtub. It was going to be his summer project. When World War Two ended the second floor was still torn up and the bathroom was still not a bathroom, but by that time nobody was living in the house.

   The house was brick instead of clapboard or notched logs, fitted with large front windows, four rooms on the ground floor, a kitchen and dining room and two bedrooms. “My aunt lived on a farm that was bigger and much nicer than my father’s. It wasn’t primitive.” Her father had been a landless peasant until the Land Reform of 1922 when large Polish owned estates were confiscated and redistributed to farmhands and soldiers.

   “Everyone where we lived had either a big farm or a small farm, although almost everyone had small farms. My aunt had a large farm. She sometimes had men come and do work, but I still ended up having to work much harder than I ever did at my family’s farm.”

   There was a cellar where dried, pickled, and canned food and barrels of  apples were kept in the winter. There were chickens, cows, two work horses, another horse for a buggy, and many pigs. “She had a herd of them. She had one of them slaughtered whenever we needed food.” Angele had to feed the pigs while they lived and fattened. “We kept a pot in the kitchen where I boiled potatoes for the pigs every day. I had to bring all the water in from the well, not just for the pigs, but for everything.”

   In the summer of 1941, within days of the Red Army’s collapse, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into Lithuania, their mission being to exterminate Jews. Synagogues were set on fire and thousands of Jews killed in the streets. The German authorities claimed rioting was a menace to public order and rounded up the country’s Jews, isolating them in ghettos to “protect them.”  

   By the middle of summer Angele was still working hard but tired of being a hired hand. “I was young, and I had a lot of energy. I didn’t get tired. I watched the kids. I loved Gema the most. Carman was my best friend. Ramute cried too much. She bent her own fingers backwards until they hurt and then started crying, saying that her hand hurt. I had to work all the time.”

   She worked from before sunup to sundown. “I was the cook and made soup every day. I made the beds and I had to work all around the farm.” She washed dishes and put them away. She washed clothes by hand and hung them on a line outside to dry. She washed the children, too, keeping them spic and span.

   “I was her sister’s daughter, but I was her house maid.”

   She made the fire that had to get going every day. Mindaugas was a strong boy and helped as much as he could. Carman helped, too. Ramute was unwilling to do much and Gema was too small to do anything. Ona went to town to teach school every day, although in the summer she worked in the fields. 

   Angele put feed and water out for the chickens. She gathered eggs early and often. She collected them twice a day, so they stayed clean. Twice a day also kept the chickens from eating them. She herded cows to their milking stalls. She wore knee-high boots when walking knee-deep in pig mire. She put pebbles in the manger with the oats so the horses wouldn’t eat too fast. She mended fences the best she could when the pigs and cows bumped into them.

   One day she was on the second floor and overheard through an open window her aunt talking to a man in the front yard about next spring’s seeding.

   “I have a servant, but she’s still young, and only so good to me,” Ona said.

   Angele realized her aunt was talking about her, about her being more of a servant and less of a niece. “I promised myself from that moment that when I grew up I would never be anyone’s servant, that no one would ever say that about me again.”

   One day she and her father were sitting together in the yard of the family farm in Gizai. The dusk was gathering. “My father always called me Aneluke.” He told her his plans for the future. “Aneluke, when I die, I am going to leave the farm to you.”

   Her aunt had talked to her about vocational classes at a nearby farm school, where she could learn animal husbandry, vegetable production, and seasonal planning. But after working on her father’s farm, and then working on her aunt’s farm, she had made up her mind farming wasn’t in her blood. “I didn’t like animals, and I hated the ground, the earth. I was never going to grow up to be a farmer.” She was sixteen years old. She didn’t say anything to her father about the vocational classes, but she told her aunt no.

   When Angele’s grandfather died, Ona and her children went to Gizai for the funeral, but Angele had to stay behind and watch both Gemas and the house. “I was so unhappy,” she said. She thought about her future, even though in the here and now a war going on all around them. She thought about meeting boys. She thought about changing her name.

   “I never liked my name. My father understood. That’s why he called me Aneluke.”

   Her youngest brother didn’t like his name, either. Even though he been christened Mindaugas, after the legendary king, he changed it. When he told everybody far and wide, young and old, that his new name was Jozukas, everybody went along with him and he became Jozukas from then on.

   She made friends with a boy she met at a dinner at a neighboring farm. They sat next to each other and talked. “I liked him, but one day Mindaugas and I were going to town in the buggy when I saw him on the road. He was on a bike and a girl was walking beside him, walking towards us. They were holding hands. After that, I didn’t like him at all.”

   Her aunt decided to bring electricity to the farm. Although electricity was available in the cities, voltage drops over distance often made rural electrification too costly or simply impossible. When farmers had the chance to tap into a network they often jumped at the chance. She arranged for the work to be done, making plans through her relations. They found an electrician to do the work for her. “My aunt sent me to Vilkaviskis to pick him up, the electrician from Kaunas, who was coming on the train.”

   Until 1941 Vilkaviskis had a large Jewish community. That summer SS death squads, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries, killed more than three thousand Jews. It was virtually every single one of them in the town. In 1943 many Jewish ghettos in Lithuania were demolished and the still living were transferred to concentration camps. When the war ended almost none of them were alive anymore. The genocide rate in the country, where anti-Semitism had been endemic for generations, was more than 90%, the highest in Europe.

   Vilkaviskis, on the banks of the Seimina River, is eight miles west of Alvitas. After Angele hitched up the horse to their buggy, it took her and her cousin Mindaugas several hours to get there. They skirted the ruins of the Jewish quarter. That night they slept in the wagon and the next morning set off for home, taking the electrician with them.

   “He was hard to understand,” she said. Lithuanians from different regions of the country have accents and dialects and often have their own way of saying things. “There was a man from Zemaitija once, we could hardly understand anything he was saying. They drop the endings of their words.”

   There was a severe shortage of sugar throughout Europe, disrupted by worldwide conflict and blockade. The German military needed it to support its armed forces and its war effort at home. Sugar beet planting in Poland and the Baltics was ramped up. In 1942 more than 20% of Lithuanian farmers, the most ever, cultivated sugar beets. Production was expected to increase by 25% in 1943. Potatoes were in high demand. Grain was in high demand. The Third Reich paid in Reichsmarks, better money in Europe than anybody else’s.

   Ona Kreivenas invested her bounty from sugar beets into electrification. “The electrician put in wires and lights. The black box was in the kitchen.” The children were warned to never touch it. “We didn’t have to use oil lamps anymore. We were so happy.”

   Carman, Ramute, and Angele slept in the dining room, an improvised bedroom in the four-room house. To the left of the foyer was the kitchen and to the right was the dining room. Ona had the large bedroom and Mindaugas the small one. Gema slept with Ona. At the back of the house stairs led to the root cellar.

   “We read books at night until Ona told us lights out. She was a strict mother. We had to turn the light off right away. She knew when we did because she had a blinking light in her room which told her when the lights had been turned off. We pretended being quiet until we knew she was asleep and then turned the light back on so we could read some more. After we got tired of reading we turned the light off and talked until we finally fell asleep.”

   In March 1943 the Germans closed the Academy of Education and all Lithuanian schools of higher education. Ona taught grade school and wasn’t affected. She continued going to work. Everybody was uneasy. The war on the Eastern Front wasn’t going well for the Wehrmacht. They were losing the ability to mount offensive operations.

   “I couldn’t go to school because I had to work so much. I finished six grades and I wanted to learn, so my aunt found a tutor for me. I went to her house, studying high school.” She wanted to be somebody other than a maid or a farmhand.

   Two months later in May the Gestapo shut down Lithuania’s local electorates. In September the last Jews in the ghetto of Vilnius were dragged out of their homes. Those who could work were sent to labor camps. The rest were shot and buried in pits they were forced to dig themselves beforehand,

   When the new year of 1944 came, news was broadcast that Antanas Smetona, the first and last president of independent Lithuania, who had fled his home and country in 1940, had died in a house fire in Cleveland, Ohio. His death closed the chapter on the interwar years, when Lithuania had been free and independent.

   “We had a radio and listened to the news every day. We knew it was bad for the Germans all that spring and summer. We knew the Russians were coming back.” Everybody was worried and scared about the return of the Red Army. “We all knew something bad was going to happen.”

   In early August 1944, the Wehrmacht was driven out of most of Lithuania by Soviet forces and Russian hegemony was re-established. They were the same days that marked the Battle of Normandy in the west, which soon led to French liberation and the invasion of what was left of the Third Reich.

   “When the Russians came it all happened in one day. In the morning we got our wagon, the horses, the four children, and a cow. We needed the cow to give milk for Gema. We left as fast as we could.” They and hundreds of other families camped at a large farm a few miles from the East Prussian border, biding their time. When the Red Army again pushed west in September, and the remnants of the Wehrmacht forces fled before them, the refugees crossed the frontier.

   “We got across the border into East Prussia at night. It was a wet cold night. There wasn’t a single border guard. Nobody else in my family, none of my brothers or my sister, nobody, made it out before the border was closed by the Russians.”

   She was free in Germany for the moment, and would stay for four years, in and out of DP camps until finally securing a Canadian work visa, but her kinsmen and friends and the rest of the country stayed under the  thumb of Moscow for the next nearly fifty years. She never saw her parents again and by the time she saw her brothers and sister again, after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, they had all grown old and their own children had all grown up.

Photograph by Antanas Sutkus.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

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A Crying of Lot 49 Publication