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Baltic Place

Motor City Breakdown

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By Ed Staskus

   Antanas Kairis was two years older than me, sure of himself, and quick on the uptake. He was even quicker when things took a twist. I met him at a party at a small mansion on Magnolia Dr. in University Circle, around the corner from the Music Settlement. Dalia and Algis Nasvytis, who were near my age and who I knew through the community, lived there with their younger sister, Julia, and their parents. It was two weeks before Christmas.

   They threw their house open occasionally, clearing the big room in the back for kids, teenagers, and young adults to dance to records. The grown-ups mingled, smoking and drinking and chatting. The house was brick, two stories with a front facing slate roof and gables and windows galore. Mid-December was cold and it had snowed for days. All lit up the house sparkled in the frosty night.

   Antanas was from Boston and had come to Cleveland, Ohio, to see his girlfriend, who was from Dearborn, Michigan. When I called him Antanas he said, “Call me Andy.” His girlfriend Aida was blonde and beautiful and visiting friends. She didn’t know our hosts, but her friends did, and she knew Andy.

   I didn’t know I was standing next to him until Aida sauntered off to dance with another boy. “What do you know, I drive all day, and she slips off with somebody else,” he grumbled, grinning devilishly. It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I was wall flowering more than dancing. At least he had a girl to complain about. The field I was playing was empty. I didn’t often strike up conversations with strangers. Andy was more silver-tongued than me, by far.

   He wanted a cigarette. We went out on the back terrace and he lit up. He offered me one but I didn’t smoke. He did most of the talking. By the time we went back inside it seemed like we were fast friends. I didn’t see much of him the rest of the night. He had eyes only for Aida. He clapped me on the back when I was leaving with my ride, saying he hoped we would meet again. I said sure, even though I didn’t expect to ever see him again.

   I don’t know how Andy got my phone number but two months later I found myself on the phone with him. He was driving to Dearborn to see Aida the next weekend and wanted to know if I wanted to go along. I cleared it with my parents, even though they didn’t know him or his family. It was enough for them that he was Lithuanian. He picked me up the next Friday morning. When he arrived he looked like he had driven all night.

   He was driving an almost new hardtop GTO 428. GTO stands for Grand Turismo Omologato. It was red, what Pontiac called Montero Red. It was a cool car inside a hot color. It had street cred, and more. I waved goodbye and jumped in. When we got to the corner of our street, he asked me if I minded driving. I said I didn’t mind and drove all the way to Dearborn while he slept. Dearborn was one hundred and seventy miles away. We made it in record time in the smooth as silk muscle car. The engine had a throaty sound and handled like doing simple arithmetic.

   Henry Ford was born on a farm in Dearborn and later built an estate there. He pioneered the mass production of automobiles and his world headquarters was based there. He forged the River Rouge Complex there, the largest factory of his industrial empire. He had a reconstructed historic village and museum built nearby, immortalizing his youth. The back lot was planted with sunflowers and his favorite crop, which were soybeans. The crops were never harvested.

   There were lots of Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians in Dearborn. If there were any African Americans, I didn’t see them. “Negroes can’t get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than reporters do to a fire,” said Orville Hubbard, the mayor of Dearborn for thirty two years. “As far as I am concerned, it is against the law for a Negro to live in my town.” 

   The Michigan Civil Rights Commission found him guilty of posting racist newspaper clippings on City Hall bulletin boards. However, he never saw jail time. He was an equal opportunity bigot. He complained that “the Jews own this country” and that the Irish “are even more corrupt than the Dagos.” When Middle Easterners started moving into Dearborn after the Six-Day War he said “the Syrians are even worse than the niggers.” In 1970 his son John Jay Hubbard ran for mayor against him but got beaten to a pulp. The unofficial slogan of the town was “The Sun Never Sets on a Negro in Dearborn.”

   We got to Aida’s house without too much trouble, except for stopping at several gas stations to ask for directions. Her parents had reservations about Andy but brushed me off as a harmless sidekick. They agreed to let us sleep in their furnished basement that night and Saturday night and made supper. It was cold beet soup with black rye bread and kugelis. I wasn’t surprised it wasn’t burgers and fries. They were true blue Baltic folks.

   We went out on the town, visiting the Automotive Hall of Fame. We went to the Henry Ford Museum and rode in a Model-T. We went to the Fairlane and sat in an old bus. We went to the movies and saw “In the Heat of the Night.” We stopped at a tavern with a neon sign in the window saying “EATS.” Andy explained I was with him and they let me in. We had burgers and fries. Andy had a beer. Aida and I had cans of Sprite.

   On the way back Andy and Aida rolled around in the back seat making out. We were at a stop light minding our own business, waiting for the green light, when a car pulling up next to us got too close and broke off the GTO’s sideview mirror. There wasn’t one to begin with on the passenger side which meant now we didn’t have any. The young woman driving the white Chevy Corvair looked at me, looking chagrined. She put the car in park and got out. I noticed her compact car didn’t had side mirrors from the get-go. The Corvair is on most lists of “The Ten Most Questionable Cars of All Time.” 

   I was standing beside the driver’s door looking at the broken mirror lying in the road when I noticed Andy bolting out of the back seat and making a beeline to who-knows-where. He hit the pavement running and disappeared down a side street. When the police appeared, I pointed to the broken mirror and explained what happened. Aida and I stood next to the GTO while they went about their business. They wrote a ticket and gave it to the guilty girl. She drove away in her Corvair waving goodbye.

   “We’ve called your parents and they’ll be here to pick you up soon,” one of the policemen told Aida. She looked stricken. 

   “Are your parents strict?” I asked. She nodded yes.

   “What about me?” I asked one of the policemen.

   “You’re coming with us,” the policeman said.

   “Where are we going?”

   “You’re going to jail,” he said.

   “Why? I didn’t do anything.”

   “This is a stolen car,” he said.

   The city hall, the police station, and the district court were all in a row on Michigan Ave. I was taken to the police station, photographed and fingerprinted. They put me in a holding tank. It smelled bad, like a toilet with a dead rat in it. A man in a suit showed up and took my statement. 

   “I didn’t steal that car,” I said. “Find Andy. He’ll tell you.”

   “We already found him.”

   “And?”

   “He said you stole the car.”

   “What! That’s not true. Why did he run away if he didn’t steal it? I didn’t steal anything. He did all the stealing, the rat.”

   “Have you ever been to Massachusetts.”

   “No, except once a couple of years ago when there was a Boy Scout Jamboree there.”

   “All right, sit tight,” he said.

   I sat tight that night and the next night and the night after that until my court appearance on Monday. I was stuffed into a cell with three other men, two of them there for drunk and disorderly and one of them, an African American, for being in Dearborn after the sun went down. He called us honkies every so often. After a while we ignored him.

   “I don’t trust anyone that hasn’t been to jail at least once in their life,” the movie director John Waters once declared. “You should have been, or something’s the matter with you.” I was in jail for the first time in my life, working on my trustability.

   I was suspicious of the two drunks and slept with one eye open. My fears were put to rest the next day when they sobered up. They built Ford Mustangs at River Rouge. The complex included ninety three buildings with nearly sixteen million square feet of factory floor space. It had its own docks on the dredged-our Rouge River, one hundred miles of interior railroad track, a private electricity plant, and an integrated steel mill. It was able to turn raw materials into complete cars all within its own space. 

   “You leave your brain at the door,” one of the men said. “Just bring your body, because they don’t need any other part. It’s a good thing, otherwise I would lose my mind. They tell you what to do and how to do it. No thinking allowed.”

   “Hey, there ain’t a lot of variety in the paint shop either,” the other one complained. “You clip on the color hose, bleed out the old color, and squirt. Clip, bleed, squirt, clip, bleed, squirt, stop and scratch your nose. Only now the bosses have taken away the time to scratch my nose.” 

   “Yeah, the line speed used to be forty-some cars an hour twenty years ago but now it’s working its way up to a hundred cars. A lot of the time I have to get into the car and do my job sitting on base metal. I was always going home with black and blue marks on the back of my legs. I made a padded apron to wear backwards so I would be more comfortable.”

   “I was a two-bolt man for a while,” the painter said. “There were two bolts and I put in one and secured it. Then I put in the other one and secured it. They came pretty fast, so it was time after time all of the time. I always had a sore shoulder. It just wears you down in your bones.”

   A rolling rack of paperback books came by and I grabbed a couple of Perry Mason mysteries. We were fed morning, noon, and night. I took naps whenever I wanted to. Being behind bars was better than it was cracked up to be. By Monday morning I had gained a pound or two, was working on my jailbird tan, and was well rested.

   On the way to the courtroom I saw Andy in another group and jumped him, only to be separated from him by force of arms. I spit out curses, calling him a dirty liar. He gave me the finger and that ended our so-called friendship on the spot. In the courtroom I saw my father, who had taken the day off and driven to Dearborn. He was poker-faced. When my turn came a police detective and an assistant district attorney talked to the judge. When they were done the judge crooked his finger at me to approach the bench.

   “Your friend has admitted stealing the car in Boston to go joyriding and so we are dropping all charges against you,” he said.

   “He’s not my friend,” I said.

   “In any case, you’re free to go.”

   Automobile theft was rampant all over the country, with almost a million of them going missing every year. Michigan was one of the states that led the way. My case was open and shut, thank God. Stealing cars was a trap door to prison. I left with my father, who wasn’t at all happy, but was happy I had been sprung loose.

   “I still can’t believe another Lithuanian would do that to me, especially lying about stealing the car,” I said on our way back to Cleveland.

   My father brushed my naivete aside. “In Lithuania, whenever anyone is driving, they are cautious of people on the side of the road trying to flag them down, trying to get them to pull over,” he said. “Those are usually up to no good.” The only time anybody had to stop, he said, no questions asked, was when a Russian in a uniform told them to stop.

   The Russians had their clamps on Lithuania in those years. They didn’t care whose car you stole, as long as it wasn’t one of their cars. When that happened they got their commie private eye kits out and went looking for the thieves. When they got their ma it was payback time.

   “More often than not it’s a trick to get you out of your car so that a second man can either steal what’s in it or drive off with it,” my father continued. “Everybody knows that if you absolutely must leave your car, let’s say you are involved in an accident, be sure to turn off the ignition, take the keys, and lock the car. Lithuanians are not all saints, believe me.”

   He was from the homeland. He knew the score better than me. He tapped out a Pall Mall, lit it, and drove in silence while he smoked.

   “What do you think the moral of your lost weekend might be?” he asked ten minutes later while stubbing out his cigarette.

   I looked at the pivoting globe compass and the small painted statue of St. Christopher on top of the dashboard, wiggling slightly on their magnetic bases. Even though the compass told him what direction he was going, my father was terrible with directions, often getting lost. He didn’t like asking for them, in any case, and relied on St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. Unfortunately, St. Christopher never said a word about anything.

   I couldn’t think what the moral of my weekend in Motor City might or might not be. I was sure there was going to be some kind of sermon. He surprised me, though, tempering sternness with advice.

   “Trust everybody, but always cut the cards.” He was a very good bridge player. He knew when to bid and when to pass. “Be careful when somebody calls himself your friend, no matter whether he’s Lithuanian, or not. You never lose when you lose a false friend.”

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Dancing in Circles

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By Ed Staskus

   When the Juventus Folk Dance Festival showed up towards the end of June, I didn’t brush off my dancing shoes or brush up on my steps. I never had many steps to begin with, even though I had once been in the game. I had done some stepping with a minor league folk dancing group who practiced at the Lithuanian Catholic church in North Collinwood, near where my family lived. I grew up in a household with one bathroom which everybody wanted to use at the same time in the morning. I picked up most of my ad lib two-steps waiting for my turn. In the end, which wasn’t long coming, I was kicked out of the minor league group. Being clumsy isn’t especially a problem bunny hopping by yourself, but it can be in a group of twenty-or-more in close quarters going in circles and branching out in all directions.

   Something on the order of three hundred dancers from five countries cut the rug at the show in the Berkman Hall Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. “They represent every region of Lithuania,” said Ingrida Bublys, the Honorary Consul of Lithuania for Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. The event was sold-out and sponsored by the dance group known as Svyturys, which means Beacon. The Beacon has been lighting the way in Cleveland for twenty years.

   Although Lithuania has been around for ages, Lithuanian folk dancing has only been around for an age. It got started in the late nineteenth century during the National Awakening, when the country was under the thumb of Moscow. The native language and native writing were proscribed, but the Czar turned a blind eye to busting moves, so long as the busting didn’t have anything to do with treason and dynamite. The first Lithuanian folk dance, known as Suktinis, was performed in St. Petersburg in 1903. Suktinis means winding or twisting. The first down home dance festival was held in Kaunas, then the capital of the country, in 1937. There were 448 dancers hoofing it, most of them going around and around.

   Lithuanian folk dances are usually one of two kinds. There are sokiai, which are ordinary dances, and there are rateliai, which are ring dances. Sokiai are often accompanied by instrumental music and sometimes by songs. One of the most popular dances is called Malunelis, which means windmill. Ring dances are more-or-less walked, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, sometimes in a slow trot. The secret is in the center of the ring for anybody who knows where to look. The movements are simple and usually repeated over and over. They take the form of circles and double circles, as well as rows, bridges, and chains. The circles transform into lines and snakes as the dancing progresses. The dancers sometimes break up into pairs. The high stepping that follows is usually of foreign origin, like the Polish polka.

   Raganaites, which means the Dance of the Little Witches, is performed by young girls wielding straw brooms. They pretend to ride them. They twirl them, do some mock jousting with them, and try not to poke anybody’s eye out. A witch taking time off from her cauldron must be at least a hundred years old and have memorized the 7,892 spells in the Great Book of Magic before being allowed to do the dance. But the rules are always waived for Lithuanian kids.

   If an honest-to-goodness witch ever threatened me by saying she planned on dancing on my grave, I would tell her, “Be my guest. Even though I’m the grandson of landed farmers, I plan on being buried at sea.” 

   Before there was Svyturys there was Grandinele, which means Little Chain, and before there was Grandinele there were six refugees who in 1948 performed at the Slovak Cultural Gardens. It was One World Day. Nearly 40,000 Lithuanians landed in the United States after World War Two. Four thousand of them landed in Cleveland, joining the 10,000-some who already lived in the northern Ohio city. Even though the Lithuanian Cultural Garden was officially dedicated in 1936, the garden was only big enough on its lower level to hold the bust of Jonas Basanavicius, a freedom fighter who never gave up fighting tyranny. Over time a middle and upper level were created. The upper level is where the Fountain of Birute is. She was a priestess in the Temple of the God of Thunder. In her day the Russians stayed away from the Baltics. Even the Golden Horde was known to warn freebooters, “Beware the Lithuanians.” The Grand Dukes weren’t anybody the Russians wanted to mess with. They kept to their dachas, which were dry except for cupboards full of vodka. There were lightning rods on the roofs.

   My sister Rita was a dancer in Grandinele, the by-then acclaimed folk dancing group, in the mid-1970s. My brother Rick was not in any dancing group. He was smooth with the spoken word, but had two left feet like me, except I could tell my two feet apart, while he couldn’t. He was banned for fear of kicking up his heels in too many directions. Rita danced in Grandinele for almost five years. During that time, she toured Argentina, France, and Germany with the group. “We danced in front of large audiences,” she said. “Before I went I had no idea there were so many Lithuanians in South America.” The group wasn’t allowed to perform in Lithuania, which was behind the Iron Curtain at the time. The Kremlin didn’t let anybody beat feet in Eastern Europe.

   Grandinele was formed by Luidas and Alexandra Sagys in 1953. The dancers were mostly high school and college students. They rehearsed twice a week at a YMCA in Cleveland Heights. A second group composed of tadpoles was formed in 1973, to teach them the basics and get them ready for the limelight. They didn’t perform in front of the public, but they performed in front of Luidas and Alexandra, which could be even more unnerving.

   “He was strict but creative,” Rita said. “Not everybody in the community liked him making up his own folk dances, which were almost like ballets with a story. She was strict and could be mean.” Alexandra was the group’s business manager. She took care of the costumes. Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of her, unless they wanted to risk being dressed up like Raggedy Ann.

   Luidas Sagys had been a professional dancer with the National Folk Dance Ensemble in Lithuania before World War Two. He fled the country after the Red Army came back in 1944. They seemed to always be coming back, even though the Baltics were sick of them. The apparatchik’s thought Lithuania was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their revolutionary ideals were long gone and not coming back. They had turned into rats. Their reasoning was that since the Nemunas River rises in central Belarus and flows through Lithuania, it was Russian water and wherever it went the land was part of Mother Russia. They have applied the same reasoning to the flow of the Dnieper River, which rises near Smolensk before flowing through Ukraine to the Black Sea. Ukraine is still living with the consequences of Moscow’s crazy reasoning.

   When Luidas Sagys formed Grandinele he could shake a leg with the best of them. In 1963 he directed the Second American and Canadian Folk Dance Festival. He looked authentic as could be whenever he donned indigenous garb and got into the act. Even though his culture and imagination were the genesis of his art, the art of him was his body in motion for all to see. He ran the Folk Dance Festival in Cleveland for many years. He liked to wear bow ties and sported a puckish grin when he wasn’t working on new choreography. When he was done, he liked to have a drink or two.

   My wife and I were by chance in Toronto when the XI North American Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival was staged there in 2000. The quadrennial festival, known as the Sokiu Svente, which means Dancing Celebration, was first staged in Chicago in 1957. We found tickets at the last minute and hurriedly got our bottoms in place. We sat in the cheap seats of the big auditorium. We didn’t mind since the view was better, anyway. Zilvitis, a musical ensemble from Lithuania, accompanied the performance of 1,600 dancers.

   The show was a swirl of color and action. A couple of thousand dancers dressed in the red, green, and yellow colors of Lithuania is a lot to look at in the space of a few hours, not to mention the mass maneuvering and the music. The performers and jam-packed audience were more Lithuanians than I had ever seen in one place. On top of that most of them were speaking the natal tongue. I grew up with the lingo and was able to keep up.

  One of the dance groups at the show was Malunas, which means to mill. Back in the day, before they did much dancing, most Lithuanians were either peasants or farmers. There were grindstones far and wide. Baltimore was the dance group’s homestead. They had been performing up and down the East Coast for nearly thirty years. They have appeared on PBS-TV and at presidential inauguration festivities. Toronto was their fifth Sokiu Sevente.

   A tradition at every Sokiu Svente during the rehearsal before the big show is for every group to wear a distinguishing practice outfit. When silk-screened t-shirts became popular in the 1970s, groups began to design and wear custom t-shirts. They came up with their own silk-screened identities. After the last practice groups trade identities, which become mementoes. In Toronto, Malunas came up with a new idea. They were inspired by the Grateful Dead shirts of the 1992 and 1996 Lithuanian Olympic Basketball teams. One of their own, Michelle Dulys, dreamed up a design of skeletons as dancers rather than basketball players. The t-shirts were a knockout. The ones not exchanged were sold fast, faster than we could buy one. We watched the last skeleton sauntering off from the concession stand.

   The Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival Institute was formed soon after the Sokiu Svente became a going concern to liaison with dance groups worldwide. The institute hosts a week-long training course at Camp Dainava, in southeastern Michigan. Although it is an educational, recreational, and cultural summer camp for children and young adults, the name of the camp derives either from the past tense of the word sing, from a village in the middle of nowhere back in the homeland, or from a Lithuanian liqueur of the same name, made with grain spirits and fruit juices. The booze has a vibrant red color and a complex, sour-like flavor. Even though Lithuanians are ranked among the top ten barflies in the world, it is forbidden on all 226 acres of the campground.

   The two-and-a-half-hour divertissement that was the Juventas Festival started with a parade and a song. There was some speech-making. There was a violin, a couple of wind instruments, and a drummer, while an accordion led the way. There were costumes galore and faux torches. There was circle dancing. There was pairs dancing. The pairs dancing got fast and lively. There was more singing. Before every part of the show a young man and a young woman in civilian clothes explained, in both English and Lithuanian, what was coming up. A group of kids did their own version of a circle dance. Not one of them got dizzy and fell over. There was a courtship dance, the young men and women taking their wooden shoes off and going at the romance barefoot. Whenever the top guns came back, everybody sat up. They were good as gold. They had it going.

   In the end all the dancers somehow squeezed themselves onto all the parts of the stage. There was waving and rhythmic clapping. There were loads of smiles. A half dozen men lifted a half dozen women up on their shoulders and did an impromptu circle dance. It was a wrap.

   Most of June in Cleveland had been dry, so much so that lawns were going yellow. But it had rained a few days earlier. The smoke from the Canadian forest fires that had made the sky hazy gray for more than a week had gone somewhere else. Driving home everything smelled fresh and clean. The dancing had been traditional but not hidebound. It had been fresh and alive.

   Life can often be more like wrestling than dancing. Many people believe living has meaning only in the struggle. That’s just the way things are. But nobody can wrestle all day and all night. “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing,” said James Brown, the boogaloo man known as Soul Brother No. 1. What he didn’t say was that, in a way, it’s like going to church. Nobody bends a knee in the sanctuary to find trouble. They go there and the dance hall to lose it.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Never Look Back

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By Ed Staskus

   The new-style lightning war that started in 1939 won the Third Reich most of Europe and substantial parts of Russia. Five years later the Red Army was poised to take revenge on its enemy. When the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front tried to weather the storm and fight out of encirclements, the Russians did what the Germans would have done, fed armor into the attack, maintaining mobility, forcing the issue deep into rear areas, faster than the enemy could respond. Their M4A2 Sherman tanks, built by the United States, could be replaced when destroyed faster than German factories could take a breath and say, “Gute trauer!”

   “The Russians came very quickly,” said Angele Jurgelaityte. “We listened to the radio every day. We could hear booming in the distance, which was their bombs and cannons. The Germans were all over the roads. The Russians were to the north and the east of us. Everybody knew they were coming.”

   The angel-face of her aunt’s family, the family Angele was staying with near Alvitas, Lithuania, didn’t know, but everybody else in the Baltics knew the Red Army was coming back and there was going to be hell to pay. “Everybody was worried and unhappy.” Most Lithuanians sided with the Germans. There were centuries of bitterness smoldering between Vilnius and the Muscovites.

   It was in the summer of 1944 that Soviet forces went on the offensive. The Germans were pushed back on a shifting front. Armored tank columns from both sides advanced on Vilkaviskis, four miles away from where Angele was. If it wasn’t for land mines she could have walked there in an hour. The Russian 33rd Army entered the town a few days later and then secured the rail depot at Marijampole. The Third Panzer Army mounted a counterattack, but after several grim tank battles was finally forced to retreat to Kybartai, rolling back to a last-ditch defensive line defending the Baltics. Neither the Germans nor the Russians listened to a single Lithuanian who said the land wasn’t their land to begin with.

   “It was one day in the afternoon that a lady, a teacher, who was one of my aunt’s friends, with two kids, a small boy and a small girl, came to our farm from Vilnius,” Angele said. The woman and Angele’s aunt, Ona Kreivenas, had studied and graduated together from a teacher’s college. She was in a horse drawn wagon with her children and what chattels and valuables she could pack and carry. She had come from the big city in a rush. She told them there was Russian armor hiding on the nearby farm tracks.

   The next morning Ona, Angele, and the children, Mindaugas, Carmen, Ramute, and the toddler Gema, loaded their wagon with clothes, blankets, and food. They hitched two horses to the wagon and tied a cow to the back. “We took milk with us when we left, for baby Gema, and hoped we would find more when we were gone.” They took whatever they could shoulder. They left their buggy and let the riding horse, the rest of the cows, and all the pigs and chickens loose. Ona’s friend followed behind them.

   “We let all the animals go. What could we do? The Russians would have just stolen all of them.”

   Ona took all her money and what jewelry she possessed with her in a handbag that she could keep close to the vest. She filled a trunk with her sewing machine, china, vases, artifacts, and family heirlooms. They lugged it behind the barn, where the remains of months of potatoes thrown down to feed the pigs were piled up.

   They cleared a space, dug a four-foot deep hole, and buried the trunk. They threw potato scraps back over the overturned ground. When they were done, they left in two wagons, two women, seven children, and a cow on the move, suddenly homeless in their own home.

   “We moved back about fifteen miles.”

   They went southwest towards East Prussia. “We stopped at a big farm. When we got there, there were already hundreds of people in the fields, with their wagons, and their families. The farmer there slaughtered and cut pigs up for us. All the women made food. Everybody was talking about the war, about what to do.”

   There was heavy fighting between German and Soviet troops in the Baltics. As the fighting raged, more than 130,000 Latvians escaped to Sweden and Germany. In total, the country lost almost 20% of its population during the war, either dead or gone. The Great Escape in Estonia started in the summer and continued through the fall. It is estimated 80,000 Estonians fled from the Red Army to anywhere else. Almost a 100,000 Lithuanians joined them, clogging the roads to Poland, Prussia, and Germany.

   Ona crept back to her farm during the week the Panzer divisions were holding their own. The countryside was nearly deserted. She discovered the trunk they had buried underneath the pile of potato scraps behind the barn had been dug up and was gone. “There was just a big hole. The Russians took it. They used metal sticks to poke into the ground. Her sewing machine was gone, all gone, everything gone.”

   They slept rough, out of doors, like everybody else. “We slept on blankets on the ground. When it rained, we slept under the wagon and stretched a tarp out to keep the water away.” Every day it got darker. Over the course of September, the length of the day in Lithuania rapidly decreases. By the end of the month the daylight is two hours less than it was at the start of the month.

   Their encampment stretched out for six weeks. They dug latrines and filled barrels with water. They picked apples off trees and blueberries from bushes. They took especial care of their horses. They greased the axles of their wagons, making sure the grease bucket was always full of animal fat and tar, and making sure they had a spare axle. Without one a broken axle would be a disaster, bringing them to a standstill.

   The children played games whenever they had idle time. “We played the ring game,” Angele said. “We all sat in a circle and passed around a pretend ring, like a twig or a pebble. Sometimes we passed it, but other times we didn’t. We just pretended to give it to who was next to us. One of us was it, like in tag, who had to guess who had the ring. If they were right, they got a prize, like a pencil. If they were wrong, they had to sing a song or do a dance in the middle of the circle.”

   When they finally left, they left in the early evening. They had heard over the radio that morning that the Russians had come closer. They spent the day packing and preparing. It was now or never. “Most of us left, although some stayed. Some of the farmers wanted their land back. They didn’t want to leave.” It was all they had. It was all they had ever known. They were loath to give it up. “My aunt had to go, no matter what. The farm didn’t matter. Her husband had already been taken by the Communists. She knew they would take her, too, if they caught her, send her away to Siberia, and her children would be left behind, orphans.”

   It rained that day and the rest of the night. “The road was crowded on both sides. There were thousands of wagons, wagon after wagon, all going one way. There wasn’t a single car or truck, just horses. We knew the Germans were somewhere ahead of us and the Russians somewhere behind us, but we didn’t see any soldiers anywhere, at all.”

   Ona was at the reins of the two-horse team, her seven-year-old daughter Ramute beside her holding the three-year-old Gema, and Carmen, Mindaugas, and Angele walking. Most of the refugees were walking, their wagons jam-packed with possessions and provisions. Their friend from Vilnius with her two small children stayed in line behind them.

   Before the war, Lithuania’s population was almost 3 million. After the war it was closer to 2 million. Some Lithuanians ended up dead. Many were deported. Others ran for their lives. The displaced were forced to make new lives in different countries all around the world, whatever country they could get to, whatever country would take them, whatever country they could sneak into.

   When the second Soviet invasion of the 1940s happened, some Lithuanians tried to flee across the Baltic Sea to the Nordic countries, but only a few were successful. Patrol boats apprehended them, and they ended up hauled off to labor camps. Most fled west, while others went south to Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans.

   “On the way we met my uncle on the road, Uncle Jankauskas and his family.” Her uncle’s wagon fell into line with them. The progression of wagons stretched as far as the eye could see, ahead and behind. They soon crossed into East Prussia. There were no guards. They had all fled. The borderland was a mess.

   “I was so sad leaving Lithuania,” Angele said.

   Russian warplanes strafed and bombed the column of evacuees several times. The Red Air Force was bombing and strafing at will, both German Army and refugee columns alike. Forest and brush on both sides of the road were set on fire. There was smoke in the sky day and night. Wagons and carts slowly wended their way around rain-filled craters.

   “It was all just wagons. They knew we were refugees They dropped bombs and shot their machine guns. I don’t know why they did that. Whenever we heard airplanes, we all ran and jumped into ditches beside the road. I was afraid, but somehow I knew I wouldn’t be hurt by them.”

   What was called the Baltic Gap had grown so menacing to the Reich that Adolf Hitler moved his headquarters from Berchtesgaden to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The German situation on the Eastern Front was desperate. The fighting was hard and bitter. It was a fight to the finish. The hinterland was torn up, abandoned and forlorn.

   “Most of the people on farms had run away. We would go into their houses and find dried fruit, pickles, mushrooms, pork, and wine.” They ransacked barns, pantries, and root cellars. “We took all the food we could find, all of it. It rained most of the time, it was cold, and we walked and walked. Everybody was hungry.”

   The rain and asphalt track were hurtful to their cow. The animal was careful as could be on the poor traction of the wet road, stepping timidly with its rear feet spread wide. It was compensating by walking with an arched back. They finally had to do something. They knew the long miles and pavement weren’t good for it. They thought she might be going lame. Angele’s uncle looked at the cow’s hooves and saw lesions. An ulcer was forming on one hoof.

   “Mindaugas and I found a family that hadn’t run away. We went to their farmhouse and sold the cow to them.” They gave the money to Ona and she hid it on her person with the rest of her money. She had plans for it.

   One cold night when they stopped to rest her uncle said, “Kids, jump up and down to warm yourselves up.” When Angele stopped jumping, he grasped her under the armpits. “He grabbed me. We were jumping up and down and he dropped me by accident.” She broke her wrist. “It hurt bad, but there were no doctors to help me.” When they got to a town with a railroad station, there weren’t any doctors there, either. The smart and the skilled had already left. Everybody else was hoping against hope. Angele’s wrist had to take care of itself.

   After the New Year the German population of East Prussia, most of whom had not yet cut and run, began to evacuate as the Red Army rapidly advanced. Within weeks it turned into helter-skelter flight as more than two million of the two-and-half million men women children of the enclave bolted into the Polish Corridor heading for Germany. The winter weather was bad, the roads were caving in, and the civil authorities were overwhelmed. There was panic and quagmire and many thousands died, some caught in combat, others swept away in the chaos.

   But before that happened, Ona Kreivenas had already sold their wagon and horses and everything they couldn’t carry and managed against the odds to get passage on a train going to Berlin. The Prussian Eastern Railway connected Danzig and Konigsberg to Berlin. A month later, the last week of January 1945, the last train to Berlin ran the rails. There was no traffic on the line after that.

   “The train was completely full. The corridors were full, too.” They stood in a tight group in the corridor. The passenger cars were red and had ten large windows on both sides. They were pressed against one of the windows. Some of the windows were smashed and the passageway was as cold as the outside. “We had a pillow for Gema, who slept on the floor, but we stood that night and the next day.”

   The twin locomotives pulling the long line of passenger cars and baggage cars and a caboose were in camouflage livery. On their front was painted the Hoheitsadler, an eagle, Germany’s traditional symbol of national sovereignty, holding a swastika in its talons. By the time they crossed Poland and entered Germany, the talons and swastika were obscured by coal soot.

   Lehrter Bahnhof was the Berlin terminus, adjacent to Hamburger Bahnhof, built in the late 19th century just outside of what was then Berlin’s boundary on the Spree River.  It was built in the French neo-Renaissance style, the façade covered in glazed tiles. The station had long been known as a “palace among stations.” But it had been severely damaged by Allied strategic bombing and was near to being a shambles.

   When they finally got off the train in Berlin, tired and stiff from standing, they were met on the platform by Bishop Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Vincentas Brizgys had been the assistant to Juozapas Skvireckas, the archbishop of Kaunas. During the summer of 1944 he and the archbishop and more than two hundred other Lithuanian priests fled the country with several retreating German army divisions. Ona had somehow located him by telephone, and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg and carrying a basket of hot buns.

   “He gave one to each of us. I was so happy,” Angele said.

   She was 16-years old, somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Seven years later, and a  continent away, she gave birth to me, followed quickly by my brother and sister. In the meantime, hope for the future was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

   The Third Reich’s war economy was on the verge of collapse. The whole country was a sinking ship. There was a shortage of bread sausage cabbage beer, and everything else. When they looked around, the buns the bishop had brought were the only cheer they could see. There wasn’t going to be any traditional roast goose this holiday season.

   Angele looked at the four children and her aunt. She glanced up and down the platform. Their friend from Vilnius and her uncle were long gone, lost in the fog of war. Bishop Brizgys led them out of the station into the city. The Red Army numbering over four million men was massing on the Vistula River and along the East Prussian border. Their superiority was ten to one in infantry and twenty to one in artillery and planes. Berlin and its three million residents were already a wreck, the day and night Allied bombing taking a monstrous toll.

   The early afternoon was a gray haze. There was smoke in the sky. It was darkness at noon. She looked at the rubble in the street. When she looked ahead, she knew in her teenaged bones it was going to be a grown-up bare-bones winter on German soil.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

No Place Like Home

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By Ed Staskus

   Sigitas Kazlauskas didn’t know J. Edgar Hoover from the man in the moon. He didn’t necessarily want to make his acquaintance, either. He wanted to go home, even though he knew he didn’t have nearly the funds for the passage. The passage was across the Atlantic Ocean and over the North Sea. His home was far away in Lithuania. He didn’t know the Justice Department man was going to be his ticket back.

   Sigitas was living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919, where it was Thanksgiving week. He had left home in late 1914, dodging forced conscription into the Russian Army. He knew being drafted meant the meat grinder. He also knew his socialist views were hazardous to his health. The Czar didn’t brook his kind of man. He made his way to the United States on a tramp steamer. He was living in Dope Town, a neighborhood west of East 9thSt. and north of Superior Ave. Suicide Pier on the Cuyahoga River was down one end of the street and the town dump was down the other end of the street. Lake Erie was on the north side and Little Poland was on the south side. 

   None of his friends called him Sigitas. Everybody called him Dave. When he asked why, they laughed and said, “David and Goliath, like in the Bible.” They didn’t bother with his surname since they weren’t his kith and kin. They were Eastern Europeans like him who had ended up in Cleveland for the same reason as him, which was opportunity. His opportunity had come and gone, which was why he was living in Dope Town. It was the only place he could afford a furnished room. The wrist a Cleveland policeman had broken with a truncheon during the May Day Riot six months earlier hadn’t helped, making him unemployable for three months and draining his savings.

   Since then, he had been living on bread and homemade beer. When the beer was ready he called his Polish friends, “Hey Polska, come get your right piwo.” He was well-known for his beer, attracting friends who were as friendly with his brew as they were with him, maybe more. They sang, “In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.” He was hoping somebody would invite him to their turkey feast on the big day. He needed a square meal with his suds.

   Cleveland was going strong in 1919. It was the fifth largest city in the country. Iron and steel dominated the economy. Foundries and machine shops were everywhere. Skyscrapers were being built. The population was nearing one million. A third of the population was foreign born, working in the steel plants and garment factories. They worked long hours for low pay, but it was better than where they had come from, where they worked longer hours for even less pay.

   More than a quarter million Lithuanians left the Russian controlled Baltics between 1900 and 1914. When World War One broke out all immigration from Europe to the United States was brought to a stop. The new labor force that came into being was from the American South. There had been fewer than 10,000 Negroes in Cleveland in 1910. Ten years later there were nearly 40,000. There was enough work for everybody, though. Commercial construction was booming. The problem Sigitas had wasn’t finding work. The problem he had was keeping the work he found.

   He was a socialist, which was his problem. He believed in social ownership of the means of production. He didn’t believe in private ownership of it. The word socialism comes from the Latin word “sociare” which means to share. The modern use of the word was coined by the London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. The First International was founded in 1864 in Great Britain. After that it was off to the races. The Second International was founded in 1889. Anarchists were banned as a practical matter. Socialists didn’t want bomb throwers in their ranks, if only because bombs can be unpredictable about who they blow up.

   The May Day Riot in Cleveland on May 1, 1919 pitted trade unionists and socialists against police and military troops. The city was bursting at the seams with blue-collar foreign-born laborers. The activist Charles Ruthenberg got it into his head to organize a mass demonstration on Public Square on International Workers’ Day. He had run for mayor on the Socialist Party ticket two years earlier, polling nearly a third of the vote. He was well-known among the disaffected. He marched at the head of the assembly.

   Sigitas and his friends heeded the call. They joined the more than 30,000 men and women who showed up for the demonstration. They marched from Acme Hall on Upper Prospect to Lower Prospect to Public Square. The marchers wore red shirts and waved red flags. A parallel procession of army veterans in full uniform clashed with the socialists. Fights broke out and the police were called, who then quickly called for reinforcements and mounted forces. Harry Davis, the city’s mayor, called for the National Guard, who mustered in front of a beer hall before going into action with fixed bayonets. Tanks led the way, even though the socialists were unarmed. When Sigitas’s wrist was broken, a lady standing beside him used the 8 inch ivory hatpin holding her hat to her hair bun to stab the policeman in the chest. It was how Sigitas managed to break loose and not get arrested. 

   Several marchers were killed, nearly a hundred were injured, and many hundreds more were arrested. The Socialist Party headquarters at Acme Hall was ransacked by a “loyalist” mob. The next day all of Cleveland’s newspapers blamed the marchers for the riot, labelling them as “foreign agitators” even though most of them were native-born or naturalized citizens. The fourth estate demanded their deportation. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 later restricted immigration of “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, whether they were socialists, or not.

   It was at Thanksgiving dinner with his friend Teodor Wojcik and his family that his friend hatched a plan about how to get Sigitas out of the United States and back to Europe. Agnieszka was Teodor’s wife. They had two children and were moving up in the world. Teodor went by Teddy and Agnieszka went by Agnes. They weren’t socialists, but didn’t argue with Sigitas about it. They believed the United States was a free country where everyone was free to believe what they wanted. They weren’t silly enough, however, to say so in public.

   “There’s a man at the Justice Bureau who is heading up the new Radical Division,” Teddy said. “He’s already gone after the Negroes.” J. Edgar Hoover was the new man. He was after what he called “terroristic and similar classes.” He was a District man born and bred. He was a law and order man schooled in bigotry. “Something must be done to the editors of Negro publications as they are beyond doubt exciting the darkie elements of this country to riot,” he said in the summer when white soldiers and sailors rioted in the District, killing more than a dozen men and women, after a rumor spread that a Negro man had raped a white woman. The rumor was false. The Negro deaths were real.

   J. Edgar Hoover turned his attention to anarchists and communists at the end of summer. He got busy sending the notorious Emma Goldman back to Russia. He helped engineer the arrest of more than a thousand radicals in early November, with the intent of deporting them. “The Communist Party is a menace,” he said. He meant to send them all back to where they had come from.

   “What does this new man have to do with me?” Sigitas asked.

   Agnes brought a plate of paczek to the table. They were deep-fried pastries filled with jam, caramel, and chocolate. The outer layer was sprinkled with powdered sugar and dried orange bits. They drank coffee the Polish way, which was strong with full-fat cream.

   “What you have to do is forget about socialism and become a communist,” Teddy said. “Join the Communist Party. Volunteer for the dirty work. Become a firebrand. Make yourself known to the Radical Division. Make enough trouble and you should be on a boat on your way back to Lithuania in no time. It won’t cost you a penny for the fare and they will feed you during the voyage, too, so by the time you get home you’ll be back to your old self.”

   “They won’t shoot me?”

   “Probably not.”

   “They won’t throw me in jail?”

   “They probably will for a month-or-so, but they don’t want to keep anarchists and communists in jail. They don’t want them here. They want to send them somewhere else, anywhere else, which will be easy enough in your case since you were never naturalized.” Sigitas had never forgotten Lithuania and had never become a full-fledged American.

   Becoming an official communist was easy as pie. Charles Ruthenberg had split from the socialists after the May Day Riot and joined several splinter groups to form Cleveland’s Communist Party. They allied with the Communist Party of America. The woman who had saved him during the May Day Riot was a close associate of Charles Ruthenberg’s. She put in a good word for him. He was brought into the circle of fellow travelers. He was given a revolver but no bullets. He gave the gun back. J. Edgar Hoover’s Radical Division had numerous informers and inside men. They put Sigitas on their list soon enough. He didn’t have to wait long for the Palmer Raids.

   Seven months earlier the anarchist Carlo Valdinoci had put a bomb on the doorstep of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in Washington, D. C. When the bomb went off no one inside the house was hurt, although the anarchist mishandled the explosive and blew himself up, as well as the front of the house. Across the street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were sleeping the blast shook them out of bed. The attack was coordinated with  attacks in eight other cities on judges, politicians, and policemen. The Attorney General had his eye on the White House. He got to work hyping the Red Scare. He put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of identifying and arresting as many socialists, anarchists, and communists as he could and deporting them as fast as he could.

   The first raids in December filled a freighter dubbed the “Red Ark.” It sailed out of New York City bound for Russia. Its passengers were foreigners and suspected radicals. A month later the Justice Department went big. A series of further raids netted 3,000 men and women in 30 towns and cities in 23 states. Search warrants and habeas corpus were an afterthought. Sigitas was one of the communists swept up in the net.

   Once everybody was locked up in holding facilities, J. Edgar Hoover admitted there had been “clear cases of brutality” during the round-up. His admission was beside the point. His point-of-view was guilty until proven innocent. Not everybody agreed. “We appear to be attempting to repress a political party,” said the U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District. “By such methods, we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” A. Mitchell Palmer answered that he couldn’t arrest radicals one by one to treat an “epidemic” and claimed fidelity to constitutional principles. The Constitution didn’t necessarily see it that way, but it was just a piece of paper.

   Sigitas knew it was all hot air. He knew letting the cat out of the bag was easier than getting it back in. After he was arrested he couldn’t wait to be frog-marched onto a boat bound for the Old World. The New World wasn’t for him anymore. There was too much capitalism and double-dealing.

   He had been rousted out of bed in his furnished room in the middle of the night by two uniformed Flying Squad men and a Justice Bureau man. “Are you the Hoover men?” he asked. “The only Hoover here is the vacuum cleaner kind,” one of the policemen said. “We’re here to get you into the bag. You got one minute to throw some clothes on.” A minute later he was in the back seat of their Buick Touring squad car.

   More than a week passed before Teddy was allowed to visit Sigitas at the Champlain Avenue Police Headquarters, The complex of offices, jail cells, and courtrooms was overdue for replacement. A new Central Station was already on the drawing boards. “The moment the new station at E. 21st St. and Payne Ave. opens for business, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime, rats, and malodors which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines,” is what the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.

   “How are you doing?” Teddy asked. “They do anything bad to you?”

   “No, except the food is terrible, which is bad enough. There’s no beer, either.”

   “They tell you what is going to happen?”

   “They are taking me to New York City on the train tomorrow. They made it sound like I will be on a boat soon after that.”

   “That’s what you want, right?”

   “That’s what I want, yes. I want to go home.”

   “Home isn’t just a place, Dave” Teddy said. “It’s a feeling. It’s where the heart is.”

   “There’s no place like home,” Sigitas said. “That’s where I feel the best. It’s my second chance.”

   “You’re taking a chance,” Teddy said. “The Russians are gone now, sure, but the new Lithuania doesn’t like socialists any more than they do here. Socialism is no good. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

   “Capitalism is no good, either,” Sigitas said. “Sooner or later all the money has been sucked up by the tycoons.”

   “Good luck,” Teddy said.

   The next day Sigitas was taken to the New York Central depot. He was handcuffed to a police detective who rode with him the full day it took to get to Grand Central Station. A day later, in a courtroom deciding his fate, was the only time he ever saw J. Edgar Hoover, who was sitting with the prosecutors, but never said a word. 

   He was younger than Sigitas had imagined him, maybe in his mid-20s. His short hair was shaved even closer at the temples. Sigitas was five foot eight and trim. J. Edgar Hoover was slightly shorter and just as trim. He was a lifetime District man and a Freemason, although Sigitas didn’t know that, or anything else about the man. He looked him in the face repeatedly, but the Radical Division man never made eye contact with him. He left before the proceeding was over. He knew what the verdict was going to be before it was announced. 

   A week later Sigitas was on board a refitted troop carrier. It was a leaky old tub. It took twenty eight days to get to Finland. The deportees were assigned cabins in pairs. Sentries stood at the cabin doors day and night. Sentries patrolled the deck for the one hour every day they were allowed to walk in the outside air. Once they got to Finland everybody was taken to a special train, guarded by U. S. Marines and Finnish White Guards. They were put thirty men to an unheated boxcar fitted with benches, tables, and beds. Each boxcar had seven boxes of army rations, which included bully-beef and hard bread. They were taken to Terijoki, about two miles from the Russian border. Most of the men were being dumped into Russia like so much garbage. Sigitas was the only deportee going to Lithuania. The Russians dumped him out like garbage, too.

   He took a train from St. Petersburg to Riga, Latvia, and from there he hitched a ride on a sugar beet truck across the border to Lithuania. Sigitas walked the fourteen miles to the farmlands outside of Kursenai. It felt good to stretch his legs. He found his family home without a problem, as though he had never left. “Labas, mamyte,” he said when he stepped through the front door and saw his mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. After the kissing and crying, after he had sat his mother back down, and his brothers and sisters were peppering him with questions, he knew he had made the right decision in returning to the Old World.

   The worst feeling in the world is homesickness. Sigitas felt like a new man. He had shed all his theories on board the troop carrier. He could no longer determine which political way was the more bad way. Ideologies were full of lies. “Eik i velnius” was all he had to say about the matter. If he had still been in the New World it would have come out of his mouth as “Go to hell.” Lithuania was a free country again after more than one hundred years. The Russians were good and gone, except when they weren’t. They were grabby and unpredictable

   Sigitas worked on the family farm for twenty years. He harvested hay starting on St. John’s Day. He raised his own pigs and brewed his own beer. He always had enough to eat and drink, at least until before the Russians came back in force in 1944. The politics of the 20th century caught up to him. The Russians weren’t school style idealogues. They were barrel of a gun idealogues. Either you believed in them, or else. He fought them first with the Territorial Defense Forces and later with the Forest Brothers. They engaged the Russians in guerilla warfare in the woodlands surrounding their homes. Sigitas Kazlauskas was shot and killed in the Dainava Forest in late January of 1945. His body was abandoned on the battlefield and decomposed in the spring. He slowly sank into the bloom until there was nothing left of him.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A torpedo waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Tailor Made

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By Ed Staskus

   My uncle Justinas was a short man with a long face and a bald dome fringed with tufts of gray hair. He lived in Marijampole, which is in southern Lithuania. Whenever anybody in our family visited the motherland they stayed at his house, even though his house didn’t have an indoor bathroom or running water. He was always in hot water, though. Everybody loved Justinas. That was the problem. At least, that was the way his wife saw it.

   “He’s always coming home with bobby pins in his hair,” his wife Janina complained.

   Plenty of women liked him. He was silver-tongued. They wore their best dresses whenever visiting. Even Rasa Jurgelaityte, his niece, looked swank when she dropped by, clad in a bluish-purple shag sweater, sitting at the table drinking strong tea in the afternoon. There wasn’t anything untoward about it. Justinas had an Andy Kaufman meets Roger Moore vibe about him.

   When he moved from Gizai to Marijampole fewer than 20,000 people lived there. It was a small town. More than forty years later about 40,000 people lived there. It was still a small town. He always wore a sports coat or an old suit jacket. When the weather was bad he wore a herringbone newsboy cap. He was good working with his hands, deft and quick. His face was wrinkled, he could look gnomish slightly hunched over, but he was usually on the uptake.

   Nobody ever told him how young he looked, so he never heard how old he was. He was born a year after World War One ended, on a family farm near the border with East Prussia, one of eleven children, six of whom survived infancy. He was a cavalryman in the Lithuanian Army when World War Two broke out. “He was so handsome in his uniform,” my mother said. In the end, however, his war lasted only a few days after the Red Army in 1940 sent a half million troops and three thousand tanks into the Baltic states. It was Goliath vs. David, except David didn’t have a nearly big enough slingshot.

   He trained as a tailor when he was a teenager. He went back to that line of work after his horse was shot dead. “What did I ever do to you?” the horse wanted to ask the Russian who shot him. After the war, and all during the annexation, he took in or let out seats and waists, replaced zippers, buttons, and liners, and made custom pants and jackets. He got married and raised four children. The Russians controlled the money supply, however, and he was hard-pressed getting ahead, at least in any straightforward way.

   Justinas played the accordion like any minute was a good time for a good time. He couldn’t read music, not that it mattered. He knew what it was supposed to sound like. Squeezebox skills back then were passed on generation to generation, one-on-one. He belted out songs, too, even though his voice was thin and scratchy.  He could be the life of the party. He wasn’t planning on going to the grave with any music left inside of him.

   He was in good spirits most of the time, which was surprising. Until 1990, when the Soviet Union finally got the boot, Lithuania was a gray country, surly Russians and unhappy Lithuanians in the grip of the Russians. Even the post-war reconstruction looked miserable. There were busts and statues of Lenin everywhere. The tyrant didn’t look remotely happy in a single one of them. Justinas was happy enough to be alive, somehow staying on the sunny side of the street behind Lenin’s sour Iron Curtain.

    No matter how affable he could be, if you messed with his private Idaho museum or his pigeons, you would get yours, for sure. He dropped the hammer on the occasional black rat and red fox in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a neighbor’s cat mauled one of his favorite birds, Justinas got his shotgun and hunted the cat down. He shot it pointblank in the street where he found it. The neighbor never said anything about it, either to him or the police. The rest of the neighborhood warned their cats about the madman in their midst.

   My uncle’s home was a small two-story house. It was painted green. It backed up to railroad tracks. They had an electric stove, but no basement or furnace. They heated the house with a fireplace and a Franklin-style stove. They burned coal and dried turf. Justinas said the stove could burn anything with hardly any smell. His driveway and the road in front of the house were hard-packed dirt. The road was slightly higher than the surrounding terrain but there were no side ditches for rainwater to flow to. Whenever it stormed the pathway turned into a quagmire. When it was dry, except for an occasional man-eating pothole, it was like driving on rock bed.

   Justinas owned a four-door early-1970s Lada, manufactured by Fiat in collaboration with the Soviet Union. It was black. Everybody’s Lada’s were black. It had heavy-duty steel body panels and cheap components. It rode like a tank on the bumpy roads. It was a manual four-speed with slightly elevated ground clearance. It was made to be worked on by its owners, which is what my uncle did. The Lada was not a hot car but it ran hot. He changed the oil once a month. He replaced the muffler and the drum brakes when he had to. He installed a rack on the top and kept the outside of the car reasonably clean, although the inside was a dump. It wasn’t filthy dirty, just trashy, like a teenager owned it. 

   Justinas pumped his gasoline from child-sized pumps set on cinder blocks with fifteen-foot long snaky hoses. The concrete islands at their neighborhood gas station were unusually wide. The station looked like it had been built before the beginning of time. Motorists pulled in willy-nilly. They tried to ignore the long lines for fuel.

   Lithuanians are keen on wolves, bears, and moose. According to legend, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt an iron wolf told him to create Vilnius and make the city his capital. The bear is a symbol of Samogitia, one of the country’s regions, and is part of the coat of arms of Siauliai, another region. The Lazdijai region features a moose as its hero, although when it shows up uninvited townsfolk stay behind closed doors. Birds don’t take a back seat. Everybody likes the cuckoo because its call is said to sweep away the last bits and pieces of winter. The pigeon, which is called balandis, gets its own month, which is April, or balanzio menuo.

    There was a barn-like garage behind Justinas’s house. He kept his old sewing machines and tailoring goods on the ground floor. Upstairs, up a ladder, he kept a coop of rock pigeons. Even though they can always find their way home, even when released blindfolded from no matter where, navigating by the earth’s magnetic fields, and even though they had carried messages across battlefields for armies during both world wars, Justinas never let his pigeons go anywhere without him. They weren’t prisoners, exactly, but they were there to stay.

   He loved his birds and they loved him. He fed them as well as he fed himself. He and his friends bred and traded them. Thieves sometimes tried to steal the pigeons, so there was a padlock fixed to the garage door. He kept a dog on a long leash chained to a stake in front of the garage, just in case. The dog was ready to bite whenever strangers approached.

   Behind the garage was a chicken wire enclosure brimming with white rabbits. My uncle raised them for the family’s dinner table. When the time came he would catch and pin one of the rabbits to the ground, put a stick across its neck, step on one side of the stick, quickly step on the other side of it, and pull the rabbit upward by its hind legs, breaking its neck. After cutting off its head he hung it upside down to clean it. Janina seasoned and cooked the bunnies, frying and braising them and mixing them into stews.

   His private Idaho museum was on the second floor of their house. Nobody had ever stolen anything from it, but God pity the fool who tried. Justinas might have committed murder in the event. The door was never locked, but you had to be invited to get in. He never gave anything in his museum away, either, not even to his own children, although he traded with his friends, just like he traded his birds with them.

   There was a glass case filled with gold and silver coins, military medals, and men’s pocket watches. There were framed pictures of Catholic saints, Lithuanian kings and politicians, and British luxury liners on the walls. He had carved figures, including an eagle, talons and wings outstretched and its head thrust forward. He had a restored Victrola with a new needle, new springs, new crank and motor, and a burnt orange sound horn. There were a dozen clocks, which were his prized possessions. They were grandfather wood wall clocks with pendulums and chimes. Every one of them was set to a random time of day. They all worked whenever he wanted them to work.

   Two smaller rooms adjoined the museum on the second floor. They were bedrooms where his four children had grown up. Both of the rooms had pint-sized windows. The rooms were stuffy, filled with dust motes and memories.

   Justinas and Janina were always accusing each other of having extra-marital affairs. She made great-tasting potato pancakes morning, noon, and night. One day while they were having a pancake lunch with two neighborhood widows in the living room, since there wasn’t a dining room, she told her husband to go outside for a minute. 

   “Oh, my God, he’s such a womanizer, always chasing women,” she said out of the blue. The two widows didn’t know what to say. She was in her late 60s and he was in his early 70s. He never talked about his wife, but she talked about him constantly. Somebody said she was the one having all the affairs. Nobody knew what to believe.

   When he walked back into the living room he was smiling. “What were you talking about?” he asked innocently enough. He wasn’t planning on living a century-or-more and giving up all the things that make you want to live that long. He believed it was best to die in the prime of life at a ripe old age.

   Justinas had a water well operated by a wheel pulley in the backyard. There was a red plastic bucket to get water and bring it into the house. Whenever anybody wanted to brush their teeth or wash their face, they took from the bucket. The outhouse was beside the garage. Everybody called it the little house. They kept cut-up scraps of Russian newspapers on a ledge inside the side door of the little house. Whenever relatives were visiting Janina gave them a vessel to keep beside their bed in case they needed to go in the middle of the night and didn’t want to go outside. Everybody made sure to not drink too much too late into the evening.

   They didn’t have a tub, either. They went to a nearby public bath to take showers once a week. Once when my sister was visiting she declared the outhouse was more than enough. She wasn’t going to any public bathhouse. Justinas told her he had a lady friend who had a bathtub. When they got there, it was full of turnips. The lady took them all out, but the water never warmed up above tepid. She took a bath anyway, since it was better than nothing.

   Even when Justinas retired from tailoring he was always out doing something, up to something. ”I have responsibilities,” he would say. It was never clear what those responsibilities were, although he stayed busy fulfilling them.

   My uncle Sigitas and his wife Terese had a pig farm near Gizai, near where my mother’s side of the family had originally come from. Terese worked for the Russians in a building supplies warehouse. She smiled politely and stole them blind. Nobody knew what my younger uncle Juozukas did. He had a truck and could fix anything, including stoves and electric circuits. He never got up in the morning at the same time and never went to work to the same place.

   He had patched together a kiosk and attached it to the side of his house. The hand-painted sign said, “Odds and Ends.” He and his wife sold soft drinks, chocolate bars, gum, and cigarettes. On the first of every month he had to pay off the local Lithuanian mobsters. They demanded a cut of everything, including gum. It was like Spanky and Our Gang.

   Everybody in Lithuania complained about everything and they especially complained about money. It was easier and more prudent to never ask anybody what they did. “This and that,” is what many of them said. They were always going to Poland and across the Baltic Sea to Sweden and bringing back clothes, food, prescription drugs, as well as cigarettes and more cigarettes. They smuggled contraband goods across borders without declaring anything, traversing forests and crossing rivers on the sly. Whenever they bootlegged cars or trucks they drove the long way around at night with the headlights off.

   After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the resumption of Lithuania, we collected financing from family members and sent enough to Justinas and Janina so they could get an indoor bathroom built and running water installed. The lady of the house absolutely wanted a toilet and faucets. She was more than happy when she got the funds. She even stopped complaining about her supposedly over-sexed husband for a while.

   When Justinas found out about the proposed toilet he said thanks, but no thanks. He said he had grown up and lived his whole life without the modern convenience. “What was good for my father is good for me,” he said. He wasn’t hidebound but wasn’t going to change anything more than he had to after all the years of his life. “I was coming down the ladder from the coop just now carrying a drink in one hand and a pigeon in the other hand,” he told anybody who asked about his reasons. “Don’t try that when you get to be my age.” His explanations were often elliptical.

   He was swimming upstream with Janina about the plumbing. She eventually got what she wanted. Over time, given Lithuania’s long and cold winters, he learned to like the indoor bathroom more than his wife or anybody else. He was an old dog who had sussed out a new trick. He never gave up visiting his lady friends, though. He didn’t forget how to make hot water.

Photograph by Rita Staskus. Juozukas Jurgelaitis, Justinas Jurgelaitis, and Rasa Jurgelaityte, 1994.

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.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of first-person street level stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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A Crying of Lot 49 Production

Baltic Place

Fried Eggs on Toast

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By Ed Staskus

   The first language I spoke was Lithuanian and until I started meeting other kids on the street it was the only language I spoke. All my Baltic friends in Sudbury, Ontario, were other small change in the same boat. We brushed up on our language skills while their Old World parents visited my Old World parents. When spring broke early my second year of life, I started meeting other children, boys and girls living on the block of nine houses on our dead-end street. 

   They all spoke English and most of them spoke French., too. We spoke English on the street, which was how I picked up enough of it to get by. French was for talking about cooking, girls, and fashion. We didn’t know anything about those things, so we stuck to English.

   My friend and arch-enemy Regina Bagdonaite, who I called Lele, lived a block away. She and I played together, burning up the pavement, except for those times that she saw me dragging my favorite red blanket behind me. When she tried to take it away and I resisted, starting a tug of war, she resorted to biting me on the arm. It was then squabbling and pushing started in earnest, all hell breaking loose.

   Lele didn’t begin learning English until the first day she went to school. “All my friends were Lithuanian during my childhood in Sudbury,” she said. “When I started kindergarten, I didn’t speak a word of English. Many people over my lifetime had a chuckle when I told them I was born in Canada, but English is my second language.”

   Time is money is the watchword in the grown-up world, but time is candy is what works for many children. The young lady who lived next door to my parents had a daughter my age and they visited some afternoons. She always brought candy and while our mothers talked, Diana and I sat at the kitchen table with a paper bag full of candy between us. Whenever one of us was ready for another piece, we jiggled the table like crazy before making a grab for the bag.

   My parents, who were an immigrant couple, bought a house as soon as they could, the same as every other Lithuanian who ended up in Sudbury. They had three children inside of five years. They didn’t have a TV, but they had a telephone and a radio, as well as a washing machine and a fridge. They knew their neighbors, but all their close friends were other post-war DP’s, most of them working in the nickel mines. Sudbury was a municipality, but it was a company town first and foremost.

   By 1950 it had long been associated with mining, smelting, and a broken-down landscape. The environment was said to be comparable to that of the moon. Decades of mining and smokestacks had acidified more than 7,000 lakes inside a circle of 10,000 square miles. 

   “I never liked Sudbury,” my mother said. “All the trees were dried up and dead. It was god-forsaken as far as the eye could see.” More than 50,000 acres of the hinterland were barren. Nothing grew there. Another 200,000 acres were semi-barren. There was erosion everywhere. It wasn’t a wasteland, but it was a wasteland. All anyone had to do was walk up a rocky promontory and look around.

   As early as the 1920s “The Hub of the North” was open roasting more than twice as much rock ore as any other smelting location in North America. The result was poisoned crops far and wide. The aftermath made it one of the worst environments in Ontario. It blackened the native pink granite, turning the rose and white quartz black. 

   “My husband worked two weeks during the day and two weeks during the night,” my mother said. “He walked to work, except when it was too cold. Then whoever had a car would pick him and others up. In the morning he left at seven in the morning and got home at seven at night. When he worked nights, he got home at seven in the morning. The kids and I would wait by the window for him to get back.”

   Sudbury lies within a gigantic basin. It is the third-largest impact crater on Earth. It was created about 200 million years ago when an enormous asteroid rocketed through the atmosphere and hit the ground with a blast. World-class copper and nickel deposits are found there and mined extensively.

   The city’s reputation as a rocky badlands was known far and wide by the time my parents, Angele and Vytas, got married in 1949 and bought their house on Stanley Street a year later. Despite the industrial blight of the past half-century, there was a growing working-class population. They were a part of that population. The newlyweds were two of the wartime displaced willing to take whatever work was offered in return for getting out of the Old World.

   “All our friends, the Zizai, Simkai, Bagdonai, all had children,” my mother said. “Since our living room was a little bigger than most, they often came over on Saturday nights. The men played bridge while we made dinner. The kids ran around. We drank and danced. We put the kids away and talked all night.”

   Whoever had the opportunity to get married got married as fast as they could. There wasn’t an overabundance of eligible women in Sudbury. Henry and Maryte Zizys saw each other three times before they got hitched. The Simkai and Bagdonai stretched it out for a few months. The married men drank at home. The single men drank in bars, usually with other single men.

   The early Lithuanians who went to the New World weren’t Lithuanians, since the country didn’t exist at the time. It had once been its own realm but had since been taken over and was part of the Russian state. Many who fled to the United States were mistakenly documented as Polish, since the Russians had banned the Lithuanian language in the homeland and scores of them spoke Polish as a second language.

   The first Lithuanians in Canada were men who fought in the British Army against the Americans in the War of 1812. For the next 130 years most of those who left the Baltics and went to Canada did so for economic reasons. After World War Two they fled toil and trouble after the Soviet Union reincorporated Lithuania into its evil empire. 

   “All of us hated the Russians for what they did” my mother said. They deported hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to Siberian labor camps during and after the war. Sometimes they had their conniving reasons. Other times the reason was slaphappy. The neighbors might have complained about you. The new Communist mayor might have taken a dislike to you. A cross-eyed apparatchik might have thought you were somebody else. It didn’t matter, because if you ended up in a boxcar going east, your future was over.

   The house Vytas and Angele moved into was on a new extension of Stanley Street north of Poplar Street. It wasn’t in any of the city’s touted neighborhoods, but Donovan was nearby, and so was Little Britain. Downtown was less than two miles to the east. Stanley Street started at Elm Street where there was a drug store, a tobacconist, five-and-dime, fruit market, bakery and butcher shop, restaurants, a liquor store, and the Regent movie theater. The streetcars were being replaced by busses and the tracks asphalted over. The other end of Stanley Street dead-ended at a sheer rock face on top of which were railroad tracks. The Canadian Pacific ran day and night hauling ore. When the train wailed, we wailed right back.

   My mother and her friends shopped on Elm Street. When I was still a toddler, I rode in a baby carriage. After my brother and sister were born, they rode in the carriage. I didn’t fit anymore, having become a third wheel. I was unhappy about it.

   “I told him he was a big boy now and had to walk to help his brother and sister, but he still didn’t like it,” my mother said. “He made a sour face.”

   My father spread topsoil in the front yard of our new house and threw down grass seed. The backyard was forty feet deep but sandy and grass wouldn’t grow there. He built a fence around it to discourage us from climbing the rocky hill over which the railroad tracks curved west. 

   Even though children imitate their elders, they don’t always listen to them. “We always told the kids they weren’t allowed to climb the rock hills,” my mother said. “One day I couldn’t find Edvardas. He wasn’t in the house or in the yard or anywhere on our part of the street. I called and called for him. When he didn’t answer, all I could do was wait outside. When he finally came home, he had pebbles in his pockets. Where have you been? I asked him. I was angry.”

   “I was looking for gold, mama,” I said, handing my mother pebbles that had a glint of sparkle to them. “I found some and brought them back for you.”

   Our house on Stanley Street was ten blocks from the vast open pits on the other side of Big Nickel Mine Drive. Logging and farming were what men had worked at through the middle of the 19th century, but after 1885 big copper and nickel deposits were discovered in the basin. The impact of decades of roasting ore on open wood fires killed most of the trees not being logged for the fires, except poplar and birch, which dotted the city and our street.

   “We had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a nice living room,” my mother said. “Upstairs was a half bath and two rooms. We rented those rooms. We usually rented to women or a couple who were new to Sudbury. Where they took a bath, I don’t know. We charged $11.00 a week for a room and saved all the money we got. Right before we left for America, my husband was able to buy a used car.”

   When Bruno and Ingrid Hauck came to Sudbury from Germany, they rented a room for several years. “She watched the kids sometimes, so Vytas and I could go to the Regency to see a movie,” my mother said. They saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” My friends and I saw “Lady and the Tramp” and fell in love with the movies.

   When I was four years old my parents had a New Year’s Eve party at our house, inviting all their friends. A few minutes before the magic moment my mother cut her eye adjusting the elastic strap of a party hat under her chin while sliding it up over the front of her face. “I had to lay down and didn’t see New Year’s Day,” she said, disappointed.

   When she woke up my father and Rimas Bagdonas, her dancing partner in the local Lithuanian folk dancing group, were washing the night’s dishes. Rimas worked in the mines, and wrote plays in his spare time, staging them in the hall of the nearby French Catholic church hall. “I was just in my twenties, but in one of Rimas’s plays I was the mother of a dying partisan,” my mother said. “I made myself cry by thinking about the time I cut my eye.” We all went to church  once a month when the visiting Lithuanian priest made his rounds. It cost ten cents to sit in a pew. My brother, sister, and I sat for free. Piety and silence were mandatory.

   September through November are cold, December through February are freezing cold, and March into mid-May are still cold in Sudbury. The first snow by and large falls in October, but it can show up as early as September. The season’s last snow comes and goes in April, although May sometimes experiences a late icy shower. There are never any flurries in June, July, or August. 

   My father knew how to ice skate and taught us on an improvised rink in the front yard. He hosed water out on the lawn on bitter cold days where it started freezing in minutes. When it was frozen hard as rock, we laced up our skates and went skating. Whenever all the kids on the block joined in it got pell-mell fast. My two friends from across the street and I entertained ourselves with our figure 8s.

   In the 1950s in Sudbury sulfur dioxide was an opaque, cloud-like formation across the horizon as seen from a distance. There was lead, arsenic, and God knows what else in it. The ground-level pollution wasn’t as bad, more of a gray haze, but was worse on some days than others. When it got worse, my father built an igloo for us to play in.

   It snows a hundred and more inches in Sudbury. After the streets and sidewalks are cleared there is plenty of building material. He formed blocks 4 inches high and 6 inches thick. When there were enough blocks to start, he made a circle leaving space for a door. After he stacked them, he used loose snow like cement, packing it in. He put a board across the top of the igloo door and another at the top of the dome for support. Halfway up were small windows and around the top several air holes. As long as there was daylight there were daylong Eskimos in the igloo.

   Our furnace in the basement ran on coal. It was delivered once a week by truck, the coal man filling up the bin in the basement down a chute. Every morning my father shoveled coal into it, lit the fire, and stoked the coal. At night either my mother or he banked the furnace, salvaging unburned coal and putting the ashes in bags. They saved some in a container on the front porch for the steps whenever they got iced over.

   My mother told us to never go in the basement. She didn’t invent a Babadook lurking down there, but she didn’t want us in the basement messing around. One day I started down the stairs to see what it was my dad did there every morning. I tripped over my own feet and tumbled the rest of the way down. I was back on my feet in a second, ran up the stairs and into the kitchen, and started to bawl, even though I was unhurt.

   The furnace heated a boiler that created steam delivered by pipes to radiators throughout the house. We were forbidden to stand on the pipes or scale the radiators. It was the basement all over again. “I didn’t have to worry about Richardas and Rita, they were too small, but Edvardas was always trying to climb up on the radiator in the living room,” my mother said. “I told him he was going to fall off and one Sunday night, while I was cooking, he fell off and broke his collarbone, although he didn’t cry when it happened. He seemed more surprised than anything else.”

   For the rest of the next week, my arm in a sling, my mother fed me my favorite food every morning, fried eggs on toast. I was the envy of my sidekicks, the two Canadian boys across the street from whom I had learned most of my English. After finishing their porridge, they ran over to our back porch and watched me through our kitchen window go one-handed at my sunny side up breakfast.

   I saluted my pals with my fork before getting back to business.

Photograph by Rimas Bagdonas.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Mystery Street

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By Ed Staskus

   I was ten years old the first time I saw a dead man. It was the morning of Holy Saturday. The sky was low and thick with clouds. It looked like it might rain any minute. My best friend Feliksas, a Lithuanian kid like me who everybody called Felix, and I had walked to the VFW hall behind the Gulf gas station at the corner of Coronado Ave. and St. Clair Ave.  It was a log cabin-like building with dusty windows. We didn’t have anything in mind except seeing the sights and messing around. We liked to slip behind the steering wheels of unlocked cars waiting to be repaired in the lot next to the gas station and pretend adventures on dangerous roads.

   When Felix noticed flashing lights on St. Clair Ave. we went around the corner to the front of the gas station. There were two black and white Cleveland Police Department prowl cars and an ambulance there. We called their rotating lights gumball machines. We called the sirens growlers. The black and white ambulance was a Ford station wagon that was both a police car and an ambulance. A policeman was standing around doing nothing while another one kept the crawling traffic on the other side of the street on the move. The traffic on our side was filtering down side streets. The ambulance men were standing beside their black and white station wagon smoking cigarettes.

   We stood to the side of a cluster of grown-ups who were tossing glances at the dead man on the ground. Nobody was saying much. We stepped closer to the man until we were standing over him. We looked down at him. He was lying on his back, partly on the sidewalk and partly in the street. He was wearing a white shirt and a plaid jacket. One of his shoes was missing. The other one was a tasseled loafer. One of his front teeth was cracked from when his face hit the concrete going down.

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob were going lifeless. Flies were buzzing around him. We  jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Felix asked

   “Getting bumped off is the only help for being alive,” the dead man said in a low tone of voice.

    Felix stepped up to the stone-faced policeman doing nothing. “That man is trying to say something,” he said.

   “That man is dead,” the policeman said. “Leave him alone.”

   “Who is he?” I asked. I had never seen him in our neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

   “No, not us. He spun the big wheel and lost.”

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

   There was a dark green car parked between the gas pumps and the station. It had white wall tires. We went over to look at it. The windshield was smashed, like somebody had thrown a rock through it. We looked inside. There was dried blood on the front seat. When I looked up I saw ‘Happy Motoring!’ stenciled on the plate glass windows of the station. We turned back to the street.

   “Tell them not to bury me in the Glenville Cemetery,” the dead man said.

   Glenville Cemetery was a graveyard next to the New York Central railroad tracks not far away. It lay in a triangle of land between St. Clair Ave. and Shaw Ave.  We could walk there down E. 129th St. in ten minutes. We always passed it on our way to the Shaw Hayden Theater where we went to see  monster movie matinees.

   “Too many Jews,” the dead man said. “And now they’re burying niggers there.”

   What does it matter, I thought, even though I didn’t know very much about Jews or niggers. I didn’t know much about graveyards, either.  I always wondered what my father meant  when he said he had to work the graveyard shift. How much work do the dead need done for them? I had never been to a funeral, except for two funerals at St. George Catholic Church, where I was training to be an altar boy. I had sat in a back pew those two times and observed the goings-on as part of my training. I dozed off during the second service.

   I noticed the knot of grown-ups was gone. The stone-faced policeman and the ambulance men were still standing around waiting for something. The other policeman was standing on the corner waiting for the traffic light to change, except there weren’t any more cars. There wasn’t anybody in sight. There wasn’t a single person going into a single store even though it was shopping day. St. Clair Ave. was usually busy with women shopping at the A & P and all the other stores. Nobody seemed to be going home with a ham for Easter. Where was everybody? 

   A young woman came running down the street, pushed past the policemen, and threw herself on top of the dead man. Her hair rolled down her shoulders. The curls of her hair smelled like wet ashes. She started to cry, quietly rubbing the tears off her face with the sleeve of her dress.

   The dead man wiggled a forefinger and motioned for me to come closer.

   “Do a pal a favor, kid,” he said. “I don’t want her to cry over me and I don’t want her asking me for anything. Get her off me and help her home. It’s just around the corner. I was on my way there when I got mine.”

   The two ambulance men lifted her off him, got her steady on her feet, and Felix and I helped her back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor of a two story brick building on Dedman Ct. a block away on the other side of Lancelot Ave. It looked like nobody lived there. Most of the windows and the front door were broken. The roof was partly caved in. The lawn was choked with weeds.

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Felix asked.

   “No, my boyfriend disappeared two years ago, on the second day of 1959. I heard he joined the merchant marine, hauling ore on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest boat on the Great Lakes. “Whoever that is lying on the cement over there looks like he’s got a free pass to the graveyard down the street.”

   “He asked us to make sure he wasn’t buried there.”

   “I don’t know why. He always said he was Italian, but he was half Jewish and half Negro, too.” 

   She turned to Felix. “Isn’t your name Feliksas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means lucky?”

   “No, I didn’t know, nobody ever told me. How do you know my name?”

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, trying to not hear their own hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Felix’s eyes got wide. I was getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your boyfriend’s name?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it was Frankie Paramo, but I’m not sure anymore. I’m starting to forget what he looked like.” She leaned against a shadow. Her face was going limpid. “May he rest in peace,” she said. Her voice was a thin lament. We went down the front walk to the sidewalk. When we turned to wave goodbye she wasn’t there anymore, like she had never existed.

   The gas station was in front of us before we knew it. I felt torpid and restless at the same time. The dead man was where we had left him. We took a step over to where he was. He looked up at the sky and said, “Life, what did you ever do for me? It’s my turn now. I’m not going to do anything for you anymore.”

   His words were muffled. His eyes were like dull marbles. Felix yawned like he was nervous. When we glanced at the dead man again he was blurry like there was an eclipse of wet moths around him flapping their wings. A dog barked monotonously in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. Not everybody saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Felix said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. I had heard my father tell my mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make our family home worthless. I didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. I knew worthless meant bad. 

   Uncle Gediminas was an middle-aged undersized man with an old man’s turkey neck. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted one, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always staring down his kids,” Felix said. “All his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

   The street was full of echoes, even though the few people on the street weren’t saying anything. It felt like somebody was following us. We looked everywhere but couldn’t spot anybody.

   “Do you want to wait for him to die?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead.”:

   “Not dead enough,” said a man walking past. His hair was shiny with Brylcreem and he was wearing a bowling alley shirt. He spit in the gutter before crossing St. Clair Ave.

   “Let’s wait,” I said to Felix.” I don’t want to just sneak away.”

   “You found out I’m not long for this world?” the dead man said. “I’ve known that for a while now, since the beginning. I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not here. You kids should go home where you belong.”

   “Is your name Frankie?” Felix asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Do you believe in Heaven?”

   “I believe in Hell.”

   The sky got dark. It started to rain. It was a steady rain. The ground got full of worms. The dead man started to melt. When he started melting there was no stopping him. Five minutes later he had come undone and was a pile of mud. One of the policemen stepped up to him. “There’s no sense in getting worked up about it. Call off the pathologist. Call the fire department instead. They can hose him down the drain. It will save the taxpayers the trouble of an autopsy and a burial.”

   We were soaking wet after a minute of rain. We got chilled and goosebumps popped up on our arms and legs. Felix ran home down Coronado Ave. and I ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten darker, none of the houses were lit up. They were all shade and shape. We lived in a side-by-side Polish double that my parents bought on the cheap with my father’s sister and her family when they had emigrated to the United States.

   Our front door was locked. I ran to the back door. It was locked. I knocked but nobody came to the door. I kicked at it but still nobody came to let me in. I went into the backyard to the tornado doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. I pulled on the handle. The doors were locked.

   A German widow lived next door to us. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be one hundred years old and her solitude would be full-fledged. I ran to her house. She was sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of her basement. A small storage room was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. 

   Her memory was on the fritz. She wrote notes and Scotch taped pictures in her pad. There were pictures of my father, mother, brother, sister, and me, and our names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

   “My stomach is shriveled up from hunger,” she said, even though she had enough food stored in the basement to last a year. She often forgot to eat. My parents checked up on her every few days.

   “Where is everybody?” I asked.

   “Your family is all in the house. They are watching the TV. They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they wouldn’t listen.”

   “Can I borrow the key to get into our basement?”

   She had it in a pocket of her apron. She handed it to me. I unlocked the doors and swung them open. The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where our father told us we had to go whenever there was a tornado. He told us about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   I ran up the stairs to our kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. My  brother and sister were arguing on the living room floor while my parents watched the weatherman on the TV. We had an old Zenith. The only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. I couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

   “Where have you been?” my mother demanded. “You’re all wet. Go change your clothes before you catch your death of cold. And don’t touch the Easter ham. That’s for tomorrow.”

   “I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “The house was dark and locked up.”

   “What do you mean dark and locked up? Your father and I went grocery shopping but got back an hour ago. It was so busy out there. What with this gloom in the middle of the day, the house has been lit up since we got home.”

   My brother, sister, and I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Our sister slept in a corner. Our parents slept in the back bedroom. They needed privacy by night. There was a bathroom and a linen closet. I dried off with a bath towel. I changed my clothes and sat on my bed looking out on Bartfield Ave. All the houses on the street were suddenly bright in new sunshine. The police cars and ambulance in front of the Gulf gas station were gone. The pile of mud that had been the dead man was gone. A firemen had a hose on the ground, where he had flattened it, and was rolling it up to put back on the pumper. 

   I ran up the street and found Felix on his way to meet me. We got our bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through the village of Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shoreline. The sun made the mist in the air sparkle and bent the light. We sat on the edge of an overhang on a steep bank of the lake and watched a rainbow hover in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth.

Photograph by Fred Lyon.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Knife in the Water

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By Ed Staskus

   The Prussians called the town Memel. We called it Klaipeda but only among ourselves. The Prussians were in charge. They had been in charge for hundreds of years so we didn’t argue with them. They lived in the town. We lived on the flatlands outside of town, although some called it the bogs. They had built a railway station of yellow brick not long ago. The town was spreading out. None of us ever rode on the trains. We worked on the docks. The port was on the mouth of the Neman River and was the gateway onto the Baltic Sea.

   The Curonian Spit shielded the harbor from storms. Dunes soaked up wind and waves. The Neringa Fortress had been built 15 years earlier to protect the harbor from marauders. A hospital was established to treat sailors with infectious diseases. It was the last resort for ailing seadogs. Most of them died there.

   We spent our days loading grain and lumber for export. After work we stopped in at the taverns and bawdy houses up and down Heydekrug Strasse. It was mostly us single men. It was a bad neighborhood to be living in if you had good intentions. We stayed in shabby boarding houses, two men to a closet of a room, during the week and only went home on weekends. We walked home on Sunday mornings and walked back to town early Monday mornings.

   It was on a Friday night in the middle of summer that I first laid eyes on Ignas Radzvilas. He was known as the Pig Sticker. Everybody knew all about him. He was rumored to have killed two or three men in knife fights. It was the same night that Dominykas Norkus left town and never came back. It was the last time any of us ever saw the back of his head, his hair shiny with fear.

   I was smoking outside of Grazina Kleiza’s paleistuve, leaning against a brick kiln, when I saw Ignas Radzvilas come marching up the street. His face was set in stone and he was dressed in black like an undertaker. His belt buckle was silver. I couldn’t see where he kept his knife. I knew it had to be somewhere handy, but couldn’t spot it. I thought, maybe it’s up his sleeve, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Ignas Radzvilas didn’t hide his reputation. He wore it on his sleeve for all to see.

   Grazina Kleiza was part Lithuanian and part Tatar. She traced her ancestry to Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who brought more than ten thousand Tatars back from a campaign in the Ukraine in the early 15th century to serve him as mounted fighters. They were small dark men who knew how to raise hell. Grazina Kleiza’s eyes were the color of water. She wore lace-up boots and her hair loose. Nobody knew what kept her dress in place. A red light burned at the front of her business building, which looked more like a warehouse than a pleasure house. It was as much about loaded dice on the gluckshaus board and cheap moonshine as it was about anything else. Her place was in the shadow of the ruined Klaipeda Castle. The castle was where the dead went to cast shadows.

   Ignas Radzvilas walked past me without seeming to notice I was there. I could tell he had something on his mind. I tossed my cigarette aside and followed him through the door. What he had in mind was Grazina Kleiza. She had once been his girl. What he didn’t know was that she was another man’s girl now, not that it mattered even if he had known. Dominykas Norkus could have been a Polish prince and it wouldn’t have mattered.

   When I went through the door behind him, the door bumped him on the backside. He reached behind him without looking and swung the door back into my face. I reached for the knife I kept in the lining of my vest. “Don’t,” he said, slapping the knife out of my hand and brushing me aside like I didn’t matter anymore than a bug.

   Grazina Kleiza was dancing a polka with Dominykas Norkus. An old bag wearing a magpie feather hat was on a piano and a skeleton of a man was on an accordion. We all made the sign of the cross when walking past the piano. The woman believed wearing magpie feathers was a sign of fearlessness. We knew it was a sign of witchcraft. Dominykas was known as the Brakeman. He worked for the Prussians. Nobody ever insulted him to his face since he was the best man with a knife in our neighborhood. When the Pig Sticker walked up to the Brakeman and took Grazina Kleiza’s arm, pulling her away, the dancing and music stopped. The piano player turned on her stool and scowled..

   “I’m all done hating you,” he said to Grazina. “Saying goodbye is like dying a little. When I said farewell to you I died a lot. Pasiklydau ta diena. It was a mistake.” The couples on the dance floor near them moved away, shuffling their feet and staying quiet. The talk at the bar drifted off. One man made a quick grab for more krupnickas. 

   “I’m looking for the man I hear is the best with a knife in these parts,” Ignas Radzvilas said, looking straight at Dominykas Norkus. “I am probably not as skilled as him, but I’d like to find out what I’ve got.” He didn’t say anything about love and hate, but everybody knew what he was talking about. In the next instant everybody saw the knife in his hand, although nobody knew where it came from. We couldn’t take our eyes off it.

   The Brakeman had a smoldering butt at his side held between his thumb and forefinger. It burned down and he let it fall to the plank floor. We thought he was going to fill his hand with his blade any minute, but one minute after another passed and his hand stayed empty.

   “Do you know I’m talking to you?” Ignas Radzvilas said, stepping closer to Dominykas Norkus. If it was a question, the Brakeman didn’t have an answer. The Pig Sticker’s breath was sour in his face. The deaf geezer in the corner, the corner that was reserved for him, was listening closely like everybody else.

   Grazina Kleiza stepped up to her man. She reached for where he kept his knife and put it into his empty hand. “This is what you’ve been looking for,” she said and stepped aside. He looked at the knife in his hand like he had never seen it before. Was he playing the fool to buy time? The knife slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a thud, playing dead. The air went out of the room.

   “I thought you were a man, not a yellow dog,” Ignas Radzvilas said.

   Grazina Kleiza wrapped herself around the Pig Sticker’s arm. “Forget him,” she said. “He’s got a white liver.” They walked arm and arm to the back and through a private door. We watched them stroll to the room of the rising sun. When we turned back to Dominykas Norkus, he was gone. The window behind where he had been standing was wide open.

   We all hated him from that moment on. He hadn’t just let us down. He had betrayed us. The skeleton pumped up his accordion and the magpie hat began banging on her piano keys. The drinkers went back to their drinks, pounding the bar for doubles. On the dance floor the polka dancing was frenzied, like everybody was trying to burn something off.

   I got overheated dancing with one girl after another until I finally had enough. I shrugged the last girl off me and went outside. I stopped at the well for a cool drink. The water tasted hot. The dirt street and the clean sky were the same as they had always been, but everything was different. I heard a horse snort softly. It was asleep on its feet at the front of the gate into Klaipeda Castle. 

   Somebody almost knocked me over. “Stay out of my way, half-wit,” Dominykas  Norkus said walking towards his horse. I stayed out of his way. He wasn’t worth the trouble. I watched him riding away until I saw Ignas Radzvilas and Grazina Kleiza come out a side door. I followed them past the brick kiln down the street toward Wilhelm Strasse. The moon lit my way. They were talking in low voices. She laughed and he gave her a pat on the behind.

   Later, when I got back to the bawdy house, everybody’s spirits were low. What dancing was still going on was laggard. The piano player was slumped over her keyboard. A group of men were playing cards, trying to make out who had the more crooked cards. When Grazina Kleiza came in through the door she was crying. She looked over her shoulder like she was being followed by a ghost.

   The ghost was Ignas Radzvilas. His face was the washed out color of dried mud. He stumbled onto the dance floor and fell down on his side. We rolled him over and when we did our hands came away wet with blood. “You’re looking at a man doomed to hell,” he said and groaned.

   “What happened?” everybody asked Grazina.

   She said Ignas Radzvilas and she were walking past the Church of St. Jacob when they saw somebody coming towards them from the far side of the bell tower. “I couldn’t tell who it was,” Grazina said. The Pig Sticker waited for the stranger. 

   “Oh, it’s you, the nobody,’ he said, his thumbs hooked on his belt buckle.

   “He was young, I could tell that, but his face was hidden by the darkness,” Grazina Kleixa said. “He said to Ignas, ‘I hear you’re looking for a fight.’ He walked right up to my man and before I knew it he stuck him with a knife, just below the heart there. A Jew ragman was passing in a wagon. We got him into it and brought him here. I didn’t want him to die in the street.”

   Everybody could tell Ignas Radzvilas was dying. He was going fast. The knife must have cut into his lungs. There was a bloody froth bubbling on his lips. He asked Grazina to cover his face. When he took his last breath her handkerchief went limp. It was stained a bright red. A handful  of flies began buzzing around him. Somebody said we should send for the police. “Don’t be a damned fool,” somebody else said. Somebody with one eye said Grazina Kleiza must have done it. That man was even more of a damned fool. I couldn’t take what they were saying since I knew they were wrong.

   “Look at her,” I said, stepping up beside her. She was trembling. “Does she look steady enough to kill a man. Her heart was his to take. She didn’t want to stop his heart from beating. Whoever killed the Pig Sticker must have been a real knife fighter since he didn’t want to get into a real knife fight. Those kinds of bona fide men only want to cut you. They will do anything to take you by surprise and finish you off before you even know what is going on.” 

   A stranded Argentine sailor killing time in town lifted his glass and saluted my little speech. He went by the name of Jorge Borges, although we called him Luis. As soon as I finished we heard the sound of horses. When we looked we saw the police coming, even though none of us had hailed them. Maybe the Jew ragman told them what had happened. It didn’t take long for everybody to be gone in all directions through the back doors and windows. The only one who stayed behind was the deaf man in his corner. He had fallen asleep, stuck in a dream that was stuck in a labyrinth.

   I walked back to my boarding house, slow and easy. I was in no hurry.  The town was quiet the same as a dark forest in the middle of the night. The moon had slipped behind a cloud. When I got to the front stairs I stopped before going up to my room. I pulled out my knife. It wasn’t a big knife but it had a stabbing tip and a sharp edge. I gave it a close look-over by the light of a stick match, rinsing it in a cistern at the corner of the house. I dried it on my sleeve, making sure there wasn’t the least smudge of blood on it.

Image by Gustav Klimt.

A version of this story appeared in Cowbell Literary Magazine.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up Cold War shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

King of the Cowboys

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By Ed Staskus

   I was three years and some months old before I got my first good look at Sudbury. I didn’t know it had started life as a railroad outpost in the later nineteenth century before rapidly expanding when vast mineral resources were discovered. I didn’t know what it had grown up to be seventy years later. I knew it was springtime on our street. When I looked around, I thought it was the best place in the world, a place where everything was new. 

   My brother had been born in the fall, and had been crying at night lately, keeping us all awake. My father was a miner, working day shifts for two weeks and then night shifts for two weeks. He was one of the explosives men, setting black powder charges a mile down. He needed his nerves to be rock solid. He needed to sleep like a baby. He didn’t need crying rattling around in his brain.

   At first, my mother thought it was a passing thing. When it didn’t pass, she took to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, with my brother on the floor beside her in a small rocking cradle. Whenever he started crying, she reached down and rocked him, settling him down. She didn’t get much sleep, although my father and I got all the shuteye we needed.

   One day, when my father was at work, and my mother had an appointment with the family doctor to check my brother’s tonsils, my godfather Joe Dzenkaitis showed up to babysit me for the afternoon. He was on the night shift in the nickel mines and had time to kill. He showed up on a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle.

   “I borrowed it from my neighbor,” he explained.

   Most of the Lithuanian immigrants who came hat in hand to Sudbury in the late 1940s and early 1950s worked in the mines. They got out of the black hole that Europe was for them after World War Two and ended up in another black hole. Most of them were saving every penny they could so they wouldn’t have to work in the mines a minute more than they had to. Many of them had clawed enough cash together to buy their own homes, but didn’t own a car, a motorcycle, or even a bicycle.

   The Vincent had a black tank and a black frame. The chrome pipes were nickel chrome steel. The nickel came from Sudbury. The city south of North Bay in Ontario sat on top of a big hole in the ground overflowing with ore. Some people called it the ‘Valley.’ Others called it the ‘Basin.’ Still others simply called it ‘Paydirt.’ An asteroid smashed into the spot in Canada hundreds of millions of years ago with a cargo of vital metals. Nickel took the blue ribbon.

   During the Korean War, which had ended the year before, nickel was regulated. Whenever there was combat anywhere in the world Sudbury boomed. Nickel was vital for making modern man-killing warfare. When the fighting stopped Sudbury went back to scuffling. It wasn’t boom or bust, but it was a one-basket economy, so it was boom or bust.

   After World War Two the open pits were almost exhausted and new underground mines were being dug. Nickel was being used for more and more civilian purposes. Technologically advanced smelters started seeing the light of day. While Sudbury slowly progressed from being one of the most polluted cities in North America, cleaning itself up, I was just getting my legs under me. My friends and I played on the outcroppings behind our house all the time and never noticed the ever-present haze of ash and smoke. We played Man on the Moon. 

   Astronauts from the United States played Man on the Moon on the rocky wastelands surrounding Sudbury in 1971. They were part of the Apollo 16 mission. More American astronauts trained outside of town a year later, for Apollo 17, for the moon landing in December of 1972. They were practicing for the real thing.

   When I was born in 1951, I didn’t see much of my hometown at first. I was homesick for my old home, which had been warm and fluid. After I was squeezed out into the real world I saw a lot of my crib and the kitchen. It was lively when my parents and their friends had kitchen parties at our house. I only spoke Lithuanian until the spring of 1954, when I started meeting kids my own age on the street. They all spoke English and French although none of them spoke French among themselves. English was their language on the street. They said French was for talking to girls and their parents.

   The Vincent my godfather was riding was plenty fast enough, but it wasn’t the Black Lightning, which was the racing version of the Black Shadow. Every steel part on the Lightning that could be remade in aluminum had been remade in aluminum. Everything not essential was removed, reducing the weight by almost a hundred pounds. It had a single racing seat and rear footrests. In 1948 Rollie Free broke the motorcycle land speed record riding a Black Lightning on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He did it wearing a bathing suit, laying like a swimmer flat on his stomach, his legs dangling off the back end, and hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. When he came to a stop, he was coated tip-to-toe with sand and salt.

   I sat on the motorcycle behind my godfather, who I called Uncle Joe. I couldn’t get my arms around him and had to hang tight to his shirt. He burped the bike down Stanley Street to Elm Street and took a left towards downtown.  My friends and I had been to an arcade and ridden Roy Roger’s horse Trigger, but none of us had ever been on a real motorcycle. Roy was “King of the Cowboys.” He was from Ohio, where my family was going to end up in a few years. The only cowboys I ever saw in Cleveland, Ohio rode ponies in parades.

   We lived on a new stretch of Stanley Street. Houses were being built as fast as could be because Sudbury was the most congested city in Canada. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported there were “42,410 people jammed into 9,450 units.” More than a third of the housing was officially designated as “overcrowded.”

   We glided past the Regent Theatre where my parents went to see movies on weekends. My father learned to speak English in Lithuania, but my mother had lived on an out-of-the-way family farm of pigs and sugar beets near the East Prussian border. The native lingo was all she knew. The movies were a way for her to learn English. A twin bill was showing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

   The movie house was operated by Herbert Sutherland. By the time I was old enough to go see movies it was home to a colony of rats. It got so it was hard to tell if somebody was screaming because of the monsters on the screen or because of a rat biting their ankles. Herb Sutherland found several homeless cats and invited them to make his theater their home. The city sent him a letter saying, “We do not feel the use of cats is sufficient to eliminate the menace.” He threw the hired guns out and set out poison, making the problem disappear. 

   We went past the new Sudbury Arena which had replaced the old Palace Rink the year I was born. Uncle Joe rode carefully, watching for mud, threading the needle. The Junction Creek overflowed its banks every year, flooding the northern and central parts of Sudbury. We rode around the General Hospital where I was born. Outside the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes we stopped for ice cream cones. I peeked over my shoulder for spirits, saintly or otherwise.

  Frederic Romanet du Caillaud, known as the Count of Sudbury, had a six-foot tall 1500-pound bronze statue of the Virgin Mary erected at the mouth of the grotto in 1907. “Queen of the Gauls” was inscribed on the statue. At first, an Italian family by the name of Drago took care of it, wiping off grime and bird shit every spring and autumn. In the 1950s the Rosary Club was formed. Omer Naqult. a local barber and devout Catholic, watched over the pilgrimage site.

   One year earlier almost 10,000 people had gathered at the site, coming from all the various parishes of the Sault-Ste-Marie diocese. New lighting was installed to light up the shrine at night. At the start of the next summer more than 10,000 residents of Sudbury took part in the procession of Corpus Christi that ended up at the grotto. My parents were not able to go to the parade, no matter how devoted to Catholicism they were, so I didn’t know anything about it at the time.

   The statue was an inch or two shorter than Uncle Joe, who wore his hair wavy and was strong as an ox. He could bend nails with his fingers. He and his wife Brone didn’t have any kids, but I saw plenty of them, anyway. My parents had a good-sized living room, and our house was where card playing, dancing, and drinking booze took place on many weekends. There was always a spread of Baltic foodstuffs.

   We set off for Ramsey Lake. Before there ever was a Sudbury the natives called the lake Bitimagamasing, which means “water that lies on the side of the hill.” Everybody agreed Ramsey was easier to pronounce and that is what everybody called it. Everybody also agreed the lake was dead as a doornail. Sewage from Minnow Lake drained into Ramsey Lake. Open roast emissions had been going on for so long and led to so much pollution that the lake, which had few water flow outlets, had given up the ghost. Even though it was still the largest lake in the world located entirely within the boundaries of a single city, it was a shell of its former self.

   There weren’t many fish in the lake. By the 1950s, despite three decades of persistent stocking, angling was still bad. Besides the pollution, fishermen had long since been dynamiting for fish, wiping out some species like bass. When Lands and Forest biologist R. E. Whitefield went survey netting, it took him four full days to catch five pike and one yellow perch. Lake trout were re-stocked in 1952, but when they disappeared, that was the end of stocking for the next twenty-five years.

   Before my father showed up to sweep her off her feet, my mother’s Canadian boyfriend often took her out on the lake in his speedboat, until the day he started showing off, racing and zig zagging, and she fell off the back of it without him noticing. An evil-looking northern pike watched her bob up to the surface. By the time her boyfriend thought to look for her she was floating on her back waiting for him, hoping the weight of her wet clothes wouldn’t drag her under.    

   The lake is named after William Ramsey, who was the chief of a surveillance party in the late 1800s and got into the weeds in heavy fog. After finding himself he named it Lost Lake. Others more civic minded decided it would be better to name it after him but misspelled his name, calling it Lake Ramsay. Forty years later somebody noticed the mistake and corrected the spelling.

   When we got to the lake, I begged Uncle Joe to let me go swimming, but there was a greasy purple substance on the surface of the water as far out as we could see. “It’s probably some poisonous waste, or something Inco is up to,” he said. I had no idea what Inco was, but I had heard “What are you up to?” from my mother often enough to know it couldn’t be anything good. We went for a walk instead. When I got tired my godfather carried me sitting on his shoulders, my hands gripping his thick head of hair.

   It was an early fall day and trees were starting to change color. There weren’t many of them, but the yellows and reds got me going and I begged my uncle to take me to a forest. He said there weren’t any, but finally relented when I wouldn’t leave it alone. We rolled slowly out of town on the Vincent. Uncle Joe flat-hatted across the hinterland.

   It turned out my godfather was right. There were hardly any trees anywhere, at all. The first thing to happen to them was the Great Chicago Fire in the 1870s. Lumber camps popped up all over Ontario providing wood for the American city’s reconstruction. Then the ore discoveries and smelting got going, the fires releasing sulfur, which combined with water forms sulfuric acid, leading to acid rain. Saplings struggling to reforest the landscape didn’t have a chance and died by the millions. The hinterland of Sudbury looked like a wasteland by the 1940s.

   Our street in the city had trees and grass and gardens but the only vegetation I saw outside the city was wild blueberry patches and paper birch. What other trees there were, were giving it their best shot against long odds. They were like the crippled kid on Pine Street we sometimes played with, although never for long. He couldn’t hop, skip, or run. He couldn’t keep up with us. He sat under a tree watching.

   When my godfather checked his watch, he suddenly said we had to go. We raced back to Sudbury, to Stanley Street, to our house. My father wasn’t home from work, yet. Neither was my mother.

   “When she asks you what we did today, just tell her we went sightseeing, OK?” Uncle Joe said.

   “OK,” I said.

   After my mother came home, I told her we had a great time, and while she and my godfather had coffee on the front porch, I watched my baby brother crawl around in the back yard. He was making progress, gurgling rather than crying. Our street dead-ended in a dark face of pitted rock. I was forbidden to climb it because it was steep, even though I had already gone up and down it many times with my friends. Sometimes rules are just a moot point.

   When my friends ran into our front yard after dinner and asked me where I had been all day, I told them all about it, all the places I had been to, and how Sudbury was bigger, better, and more exciting than I had ever imagined. After that, Stanley Street was our world, but we couldn’t wait to see more of the world. We ran up and down the street that evening pretending to be riding motorcycles. The sunset was a gleaming red and orange. We were spent and sat down on a big rock watching night happen. When my mother put me to bed, saying I looked tired, I slept like the rock of ages.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Baltic Place

Breaking the Waves

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By Ed Staskus

   Even if it is a 500-foot long 12-thousand-ton carrier like the Marine Flasher, sailing the North Sea in late fall is sailing those waters at the wrong time of the year. Daytime temperatures average cold-and-worse and it is gloomy and foggy. There are about seven hours of daylight. If it’s not raining, it will start raining soon. Sometimes it is so foggy that ships have to slow down to less than 5 knots with horns blaring non-stop. Windy skies and strong swells make plowing through the cold water like trying to plow through month-old mashed potatoes.

   “I was on the boat for nine days and I was sick for nine days,” said Angele Jurgelaitis about her crossing from Hamburg, Germany, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Marine Flasher, converted from a troop ship to hauling DP’s. Not only were big waves breaking over the sides of the ship, in the aftermath of the war, hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons had been disposed of by being dumped in the North Sea.

   “The ocean didn’t leave a good impression on me. Whenever we threw up, we called it ‘Going to Riga.’” What they meant was that the water flows north, so when they threw up over the side, the vomit went north up the Baltic Sea past Poland and Lithuania to the mouth of the Daugava River, where Riga the capital of Latvia is.

   The Marine Flasher was built at the Kaiser Shipyard in Vancouver, Washington. She was launched for the United States Maritime Commission in May 1945. The ship sailed to San Francisco, Okinawa, Korea and returned to Seattle. The next year it sailed to New York City and from there to Bremen. For the next three years she ferried refugees from Europe to North America, by way of Canada and New York City, and then went back to Germany.

   Angele shoved off from the Old World for good on November 17, 1948. The next day ration scales for IRO refugees became uniform in the British, French, and American zones. It didn’t matter to her anymore. She ate better on the boat, no matter the seasickness, than she had in a long time.

   “There was a canteen on board, and we all got two dollars a day,” she said. “The food was very good. I didn’t think about IRO. We ate well.”

   There were widespread food shortages in Germany following the end of the war. The supply of food was impacted by the prolonged warfare, including the destruction of farmland, silos and barns, livestock, and machinery. Many Germans were forced to live on less than 1,500 calories a day. The average adult calorie intake in the United States at the time was more than 3,000 and in the overseas U.S. Army it was more than 4,000. 

   The civilian population suffered hard times during the severe winter of 1946, exacerbated by shortages of fuel for heating. Displaced persons got somewhat more generous rations, supplied by the Army, the UN, and relief agencies, but even they averaged less than 2,000 calories a day.

   There were 535 refugees bound for Canada on board the Marine Flasher. There were almost 3,000 more bound for the United States, men, women, children, and baby carriages. They steamed into Halifax the afternoon of November 26 and spent the night on the boat. It tied up at Pier 21. Angele hadn’t been able to get into the United States, but she had been able to get to the next best place, Canada.

   She wasn’t stuck behind the Iron Curtain, she wasn’t stuck in Nuremberg, and two days later she boarded a train for Montreal. It took all day and all night and part of the next day to get there, but she wasn’t stuck going nowhere.

   “It was almost 30 hours, but the train was comfortable, with beds,” she said. When they arrived, everybody designated as a nanny or a domestic was segregated. “Those who already had sponsors left. The rest of us, about a hundred of us, boarded busses and they took us to a camp.” They were housed two to a room and interviewed. “They wanted to know what we had been doing in Germany.” They had to fill out one triplicate form after another. 

   One of her roommates at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg had emigrated to Canada a few months earlier. She was working and living in London, Ontario. It is in southwestern Ontario, just north of Lake Erie. The city is a hub for education and healthcare. There are parks and greenways where it lays along the Thames River. It was a military center during the first and second wars, but the wars were finally over.

   “My roommate Ele wrote me that I should ask to go to London, or second best, Toronto,” Angele said. “I started thinking I would join her in London. When I filled out the forms that they gave me I wrote down where she was and that I wanted to go there.”

   Three days later she was presented with a Canadian visitor visa and found out where she was going. She knew she was on the list for the Lapalme family. She hoped she wasn’t going there. An official gave her their address in Sudbury, Ontario. They were Florence and J. A. Lapalme, a prominent family in the mining town. They were known as “’The Largest Family in Sudbury.’ Their children numbered fourteen, although Angele would only be responsible for five of them. Since she had worked in the Children’s Ward at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, she was seen as the kind of nanny capable of caring for multiple boys and girls.

   “They were so young,” she said. “The youngest was 9 months and the oldest was only 7 years old.” Francois was the youngest, Aline the oldest, Gilles Muriel and Marcel in the middle.

   The domestic woman who cleaned and helped in the kitchen was Lucille Pharand. She worked in several big houses. Lucille was well known as a hard worker. She was built like a fireplug. In the spring of 1949, she and her husband Leo built a house in in the new town of Minnow Lake, three miles from Sudbury. The first few years there was no indoor water and there were no sewer lines to the house. Leo drove to the nearby lake every day with a neighbor, carrying a tub and pails, where they collected water for dishes, laundry, and bathing. They got their drinking water from a well a couple of houses away. In time they gave the Lapalme’s a run for their money, making a large family for themselves. They were known as ‘The Second Largest Family in Sudbury.’

   “I asked again to go to London , but again they said no,” Angele said. “They said nobody was going there.” She wasn’t sure if it was true or if they were just telling her that. In the end not a single refugee went to London or Toronto.

   She didn’t complain. There wasn’t anybody to explain and complain to, anyway, nobody who was going to change the destination that had been determined for her. If you were a European refugee, you were going somewhere where there was work. Men punched a clock mining ore, cutting down trees, and laying roads. Women knuckled down cleaning, cooking, and caring.

   Angele had struck up a friendship on the Marine Flasher with two other Lithuanian women, Inga and Laime, who were young like her. Laime in Lithuanian means happy. They had their hearts set on going to Alberta. They told her there were many rich men there. 

   When the train reached Sudbury, Angele and six other women, all Russians, and a man, another Russian, got off the train. Everybody else, including Inga and Laime, went on to Alberta and British Columbia. Angele was the only Lithuanian on the train platform, more than four thousand miles and several languages from her home.

   “There was no one to understand how unhappy I was,” she said.

   The end of World War Two saw the movement of people all over the world from one place to another. Between January 1946 and December 1953 over 750,000 refugees went to Canada. In June 1947 the federal government authorized the entry of 5,000 non-sponsored DP’s. Two years later the number rose to 45,000. Ottawa established five mobile immigration teams composed of security, medical, and labor officials. They were sent to Austria and Germany to select refugees deemed acceptable for emigration to Canada. 

   Displaced people from the Baltic countries were ranked high on the list. They had been in UN-run camps after their countries, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were caught in the middle of the Russian and German battle zones. Their small countries had become independent after World War One, then occupied by the Russians in 1940, then invaded by Germany in 1941, and in 1944 taken over again by the Russians. In the space of 25 years, they had gone from enslaved by tyrants to enslaved by tyrants

   “When we got off the train there were two men waiting for us,” Angele said. They helped the eight refugees sort themselves out and get to where they were going. One of them told her she was lucky to be going where she was going.

   The Lapalme’s introduced themselves and their children, arranged her living quarters, and quieted her fears about there being no other Lithuanians in Sudbury. They explained there were, and the next day Dr. Valaitis, a Lithuanian doctor and friend of the family, drove to the Laplame home and sat down with her, telling her there were many other Lithuanians in town.

   “Some of them have been here more than two years,” he said. “They make a good living working in the mines.” He gave her the names and phone numbers of several, told her about the Polish church they shared for services, and the local hall where they staged dances and folk performances.

   “The kids I had to care for were so small,” Angele said. She was just 20 years old. Just outside of two years later she gave birth to me, followed quickly by my brother and sister. By 1958 we were living in Cleveland, Ohio, starting from scratch again.

   “They spoke French among themselves and English to me.” She spoke to them more in gestures and pantomime than not. Angele spoke Lithuanian, German, some Russian, but less English. “When Vytas and I were together in Nuremberg he encouraged me to learn English, but I didn’t want to. Whenever I saw him coming with his grammar book I ran away.”

   Vytas Staskevicius was a young Lithuanian man from Siauliai she had left behind in Nuremberg, but who she was waiting for, waiting for him to come to Canada and join her. He had fled the Baltics in 1944, like her, and been displaced in Germany, like her, for more than four years.

   She started taking English classes in Sudbury right away. She wrote her man often, at night, pages and pages in cursive, in their native language. “The Lapalme’s have been good to me They are Catholics and go to church every day, seven days a week. They have a food warehouse, which is their business. We eat very well, so it’s not bad in that respect.”

   Florence was J. A. Laplame’s second wife. He placed ads in newspapers and hired her, a young out-of-town woman, to watch and care for his children after his first wife died. He had seven children, some of them teenagers, some not. It wasn’t long before one thing led to another and he proposed to her. He was nearly thirty years her elder, but she accepted, and over the next decade gave birth to seven children, bringing the family up to record-breaking speed in their part of the world.

   “Florence does the cooking,” Angele wrote. “She has a part-time woman named Lucille who helps with the cleaning and cooking, but Florence does the main cooking. There are usually eleven or twelve of us at the dinner table. She is in the basement every night doing laundry, too. I don’t clean or cook. My job is to watch the children.”

   Whenever Florence was ready to deliver another baby, since her husband had several business interests and was often out of town, Florence usually drove herself to St. Joseph’s Hospital. “If it was a close call, she called a taxi,” Angele said.

   Roger Lapalme, grown-up and the only one of the family who had gone farther than high school, sat next to Angele at the dinner table whenever he was at home. “Roger liked me.” He was barking up the wrong tree. He took her motor-boating on Lake Ramsey until the day he got too enthusiastic at the helm and she fell off the boat. She told him it was enough of that. “Roger was handsome and a lawyer, but I finally told him I already had a boyfriend,” Angele said. 

   One of the LaPalme girls had suffered a nervous breakdown. When her boyfriend, who she expected to marry, killed someone in a car crash, she broke down. She told her father her life was over and went to work in the nickel mines. She was rarely at the house. When she was she slept all day.

   Vytas had a sponsor, an uncle who lived in Boston, but delayed sailing to the United States. He procrastinated about going to Australia with a friend of his who thought they could make passage there. He was determined to go to Canada. J. A Lapalme promised Angele he would give him a helping hand.

   “The year is ending soon,” she wrote her Baltic boyfriend biding his time in Germany. “I have been here more than three weeks. When can you come?” She knew the sailing season wasn’t going to be for several more months. Her man had to break the waves. She knew it wasn’t going to be soon enough. “Be a good boy and write me often,” she wrote him at the start of the new year.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.